The Popper Principle

I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.

I was first exposed to Popper in my first year in university, in an introductory course to epistemology, and I liked him right away. I've carried Refutability and the Paradox of Tolerance with me ever since.

By the way David Deutsch could be reasonably said to be Popper's biggest fan. If you're interested in Deutsch and Popper you could do worse than picking up "The Beginning of Infinity" to get acquainted with both, it's a great book.

Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.

The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.

It has never worked, and it never will.

I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash.

Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosopher Kings is given inside of a conditional---the condition being: those leaders must be True Philosophers; where True Philosophers know the Good and thus know (in a nearly omniscient-like way) what is best for everyone (and act accordingly). It is left wide open whether such True Philosophers even exist, thus it is left wide open whether such a social organization would ever work in reality.

Plato's other political dialogues, like Statesman and The Laws, are much much less utopian and "authoritarian" and deal with very practical political issues. It would be weird to be an authoritarian utopist and then go and write dialogues like those.

In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance, formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be honest.