Civilization is a fragile thing. It is precious, for without it, life is not worth living and kindliness and decency are impossible. On what then is it based and how may it be built? Before those questions may be answered we have to think a little more about what it is not. We have also to think about the many cheap imitations it has and how they may be recognized and the genuine object discerned among the forgeries and the frauds.
Visitors to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin were impressed by the order and by the apparent cultural richness. They, for the most part, did not see the underlying unease and the threat of naked barbaric force. Those who might have seen it, often chose to ignore it, dazzled as they were by the, seemingly virile, energetic and renewed young Germany which was the public face of the Third Reich. Few people understood how skeletons can be so much more easily hidden in secret cupboards by a tyrannical regime than by an Open Society.
Legally and state approved gangsterism was not only to be found in the Third Reich. Hundreds of other regimes have used the same tactics of mass delusion manipulated into frenzied support for and adulation of a leader. They have also, to some degree or another, had their agencies of state repression and of terror with secrecy and the ability of frightened people to turn a blind eye to torture, to lies held out as truth and enlightenment, and to massive military build up.
One other such regime, from the same era, was the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. Hitler may have proclaimed Nationalism while Stalin claimed to be a Marxist. The labels are just that, labels. They meant nothing, just as similar labels today mean nothing, except the front for the power of a dictator. The end result is the same.
So many of the intellectuals in the thirties and the forties, were dazzled by the rhetoric of Communism. They visited Moscow in their, carefully selected and carefully orchestrated, hordes. They came away burbling about a paradise where everyone was equal and where everyone was happy. Sadly they were not permitted to attend the trials and the prison camps to which the state consigned many of its most loyal and most idealistic supporters. The show trials brought amazing confessions of spying and sabotage by many of the foremost of the revolutionaries. The world, for the most part, swallowed all this without so much as a hiccup. The world chose instead to believe the biased and blinkered reports of intellectuals such as G.B.Shaw. It did not think to use its own common sense to understand that all was not well in the Russian Empire. Nor did it protest until too late when clearer sighted men like George Orwell, who had seen the Communist Party's cynical undermining of other parties of the left for what it was, and gave warning. A warning about a craving and a ruthless climb to power.
It seems so very simple. A tyranny, while it lasts, and thank the Lord they do not last for ever, can use all the power of state, all the apparatus of mass communication and of mass control, with all the self delusion that frail humans are capable of, to give an appearance of unity, of order and even of, happiness. The Open Society, however has none of these dubious advantages. It cannot force its citizens to be content. It cannot persuade its citizens that it is always right. Nor can it even force them, nor convince them, nor fool them, into being law abiding.
The citizens of the Open society, being human, all too human, are bound to be discontented; they are bound to whinge. The citizens of the Open Society cannot be persuaded into doing anything the government wants because in the Open Society all sorts of flowers of opinion will bloom and all sorts of argumentative music and cacaphony will fill the air. The Open Society has no Doctor Goebbels, nor would it want one. He would be more likely to be laughed out of the debating chamber rather than be made Minister of Public Enlightenment, while inside the chamber the arguments would go on. Long Live the Arguments. How refreshing to hear about the contrast between British journalists and their American colleagues. Whereas one stands up respectfully for the president the former loll in their chairs then ask difficult and inconvenient questions which their American counterparts seems incapable of even thinking about.
J.S.Mill, that great Victorian upholder of liberty said. "If all the world but one were of one opinion the world would have no more the right to silence that one, than he, had he the power, would have the right to silence the world." So freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly are essential to the Open Society. Without these no free society can exist. But there is more. These alone do not guarantee that a society of freedom can for long exist.
