Karl Popper’s, ‘Open Society and Its Enemies’ remains one of the most compelling defences of open discourse as a civilisational mechanism of error correction.
For Popper, Truth is never possessed in its entirety. It can only be understood through a logical process of criticism, disagreement, and the continual testing of ideas. A society that is capable of correcting its mistakes entirely depends upon the freedom to question prevailing assumptions and to expose falsehood through reasoned debate.
It is therefore entirely regrettable that one of the more insidious realities of our age is that certain individuals and institutions invoke the language of the open society while inverting its essential principles. Under the banner of tolerance, safety, equity or consensus, group-think, they have deliberately narrowed the range of permissible inquiry and badly damaged the very processes through which truth is discovered.
Popper understood that certainty is the enemy of progress. Indeed, a civilisation that loses its capacity for honest discourse loses its principal means of self-correction.
Once criticism is treated as heresy and dissent as a threat rather than a necessity, the foundations of the open society begin to crumble from within.
beg you to read Popper. To read
@DavidDeutschOxf. To listen to and absorb the work of
@ToKTeacher @naval @ConjectureInst and the many other great critical rationalists.
We ought to understand the great peril we face.