In Defence of Karl Popper
Wrongly categorised with Herbert Marcuse and George Soros, Popper's philosophy, on the whole, offers one of the best defences against Wokeism whilst keeping us grounded in reality.
What is the problem with our society today?
Some people say it is that we are living in a society void of meaning, that is excessively moral relativist, individualist, and without any binding principles. They blame liberalism for creating a system of atomised individuals without common purpose. This is the view of the Postliberals and nationalists of various varieties.
Keith Woods in his video ‘The Idea that Shaped the Modern World', called Karl Popper the chief ideologue of the modern globalist order, on the basis of him opposing the ‘strong gods’ of strong moral conviction, historicism, teleology, and essentialism, and in doing so attacking the underpinning of traditional Western thought. This is also the argument of R. R. Reno in his book ‘The Return of the Strong Gods’, who Woods heavily cites throughout the video.
In addition, the fact that George Soros names his project the ‘Open Society Foundations’ and cites Popper as the foundational influence, as well as the fact that leftists have used Popper’s ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ to justify censorship and deplatforming, has given him a very bad rep on the Right.
But I would argue that people confuse the people who appropriate Popper to the man himself, who on the contrary to being a pioneer of Wokeism, actually offers numerous philosophical methods by which to fight it. He also provides a means by which to distinguish the ‘scientific’ and the conspiratorial, on both the left and right.
What is the Problem with Modern Society?
Here I will be expanding on some points I made in my article ‘The Two Types of Individualism’, so it may be worth checking that one out as well.
I do not believe that modern Western society is broken because it has no meaning or is too relativistic, like the Postliberals do.
In fact it’s the opposite, we have allowed fundamentalist notions of ‘natural rights’ and there being a ‘right side of history’ to drive our society. Wokeism is an ideology that is not relativist, but absolutist: Traditional Western culture is inherently oppressive to all who aren’t non-trans, straight White men, this oppression is all pervasive across all aspects of the society and is intersectional in character, and constant activism and deconstruction is needed to overcome it. With this, comes a fanatical certainty that ‘the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice’, to quote one of their most important canonized saints, Martin Luther King.
The 1776 Commission for education that was Trump’s response to Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, whilst smeared in liberal media as being a ‘far-right educational project’, actually presents an essentially leftist interpretation of American history, with John C. Calhoun strangely being responsible for Marxism and Wokeism.
The Claremont Institute, instrumental behind the 1776 Commission, see Calhoun as the forerunner to modern Wokeness due to his moral relativism. This could not be further from the truth. In actual fact it is the fanatical devotion to natural right, that their founder Harry V. Jaffa personified, that is far more akin to Woke, whereas Calhoun had a much more realist assessment of national tradition and human inequality.
This is where my essential defence of Karl Popper comes in. Popper was very different from these rights-focused, radical Enlightenment philosophers. He falls into what I like to call the ‘centre-right tradition’ of the Enlightenment, personified by figures like Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, who both advocated pluralism and representative government, but also had a deeply realistic view of human beings and the dangers of abstract principles, and recognised the inevitability of human inequality and hierarchy.
Just like how Burke saw the tyranny of the French Revolution, Popper saw how both the communist and Nazi regimes had both been built on this devotion to an absolutist set of principles. In response to this, he emphasised the importance of militantly defending a pluralist society.
And contrary to those who quote him, I am fairly certain that Popper would have been anti-Woke, given many of his critiques of totalitarianism seem eerily familiar. One cannot be certain of course, and my reading of him will be different to other people, but the fact he was scathing of communism as well as fascism makes me inclined towards the view he had no qualms ‘punching left’.
In this essay I will discuss two aspects of Popper’s thought: his political theory and philosophy of science, and how both of these elements interlink with each other to create a very powerful opposition to Wokeism. This is not simply rehashed IDW liberalism, but an unanswerable challenge for the totalitarian Woke monopoly on discourse. I will argue that the problem with modern society is not that it is excessively individualistic or materialist, but rather that the residues of Platonism and its historicism have been reborn in the glare of the rainbow flag.
Karl Popper’s Political Philosophy
Critique of Plato and Classical Philosophy
In ‘The Open Society and It’s Enemies’, Karl Popper is scathing of Plato. He sees him as the forerunner of totalitarian belief systems, attributing to him three destructive elements in Western political thought, holism, essentialism, and historicism.
Holism is the belief that society is a full organism, and not made up of its component parts. Essentialism is view there is an ideal version of everything (Theory of Forms) and all versions of each ‘category’ are imperfect versions of an ‘ideal form’, historicism is that history has a beginning and an end point, and is closely linked with the idea of teleology.
Now, I will say first off that I disagree with Popper’s critique of essentialism. Whilst Plato’s ‘Theory of Forms’ had an anti-materialist, spiritual element, the way Aristotle adapted it was a bedrock of common sense. Gay marriage and transgenderism shows what happens when a society completely forgets the notion of essentialism and categories, leading to one thinking a previously attractive woman cutting her breasts off to be ‘trans’ is nothing innately wrong, as there is no universal standard of a category by which things are judged. We don’t have any reference to judge what a man and what a woman is without an adherence to the essentialist bedrock of Western philosophy. I will say that the opposition to essentialism is the biggest flaw in Popper’s philosophy and why he is sometimes lumped in with the Woke worldview.
Popper’s criticism of ‘holism’ is somewhat accurate but my view is more nuanced. It is true than an excessively holistic view of society, personified by Plato’s Republic, carries with it a totalitarian sense of utopian social engineering. However, society is also not just a collection of individuals (the core falsehood behind Social Contract Theory), and human beings are inherently social.
However, Popper is correct in critiquing historicism. The Woke are ultra-historicist. They believe in an ultra-Whiggish version of history where those advocating the most extreme interpretation of ‘natural minority rights’ are forever on the ‘right side of history’, and history is a progression from backwardsness and ‘bigotry’ towards enlightenment and ‘equity’. It acknowledges that there might be a few bumps in the road (hence their fear of ‘fascism’), but quoting Martin Luther King, they are convinced that the ‘arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’.
We are very far from a society of atomised individuals with no sense of belonging or ‘telos’. The Woke provide this to us, they provide both holism with group identity, as well as historicism.
The only link between Wokeism and Karl Popper’s philosophy is being anti-essentialist. This is a major connection, but I would attribute the anti-essentialist attitudes more to left-wing postmodern philosophers, who embraced deconstruction and subversion of the previously established notion of truth, with far more vigour, whereas Popper was more interested in understanding the roots of totalitarianism, in which he included left-wing totalitarianism.
Paradox of Tolerance
One of the most well known terms attributed to Popper is called the ‘Paradox of Tolerance’, even though he didn’t use the exact phrase. The exact quote from ‘Open Society and It’s Enemies’ is ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’
Now this has become one of the most relentlessly abused ideas by the Woke left, legitimising their silencing of those they deem ‘fascists’. They view ‘intolerance’ as ‘hatred and discrimination’ towards ‘historically marginalised groups’.
But Popper was a staunch anti-communist as well as an anti-fascist. He understood very well that the left could be as totalitarian as the right, and although he died before Wokeness manifested in its current form, I believe he would have no problem identifying Woke activists as an intolerant group that was eroding tolerance.
What has happened here, is a deliberate confusion of Karl Popper’s ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ with Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘Repressive Tolerance’. I have discussed this before, but I will explain it in detail here.
Marcuse, one of the most influential figures of the Frankfurt School that Chris Rufo talks about in ‘America’s Cultural Revolution’, believed that tolerance of right-wing opinions was inherently ‘repressive’ towards ‘historically marginalised groups’. He therefore explicitly advocated a double-standard, where those views that are in favour of lifting up the marginalised are given free speech, whereas those on the side of the ‘oppressor’ should be silenced and attacked. It is word for word what the Woke believe.
However, Popper is a figure with broader appeal without Marxist links, so like the Woke deconstructivists always do, they deliberately mix up the two notions. They ignore that Popper was an anti-communist and focus entirely on him being an anti-Nazi, forget that his critique was totalitarianism not fascism explicitly, and that according to his maxim of the ‘Paradox of Tolerance’, it would be themselves, that hold steadfast to the principle of no-platforming and ‘no-debate’, that should not be tolerated.
Sure, if an explicitly anti-democratic far-right party was gaining traction, that disrupted speakers and stopped open debate, for instance Islamist movements that dominate debate in countries like Indonesia, Popper would advocate repressing that. But he was not talking about populist movements or even explicit White advocacy which operate within a pluralistic system, such as Jared Taylor has sought to do.
George Soros, who is the chief modern day propagator of the so called ‘Open Society’, seems to have, either deliberately or mistakenly, mixed up Popper and Marcuse. This is why he funds NGOs that are deliberately committed to the repression of free speech. It is people like Soros being allowed to propagate their anti-pluralistic ideas freely, and infiltrate institutions unchecked, that is the true ‘Paradox of Tolerance’.
Liberal free speech and pluralism did nothing to stop Wokeism infiltrating it’s institutions. The doors were left wide open, the classical liberals giving the Woke activists freedom to undertake the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’ by giving them free speech they would never allow in return. To quote Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’: ‘When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles’, something that perfectly displays the relationship between the classical liberal and the Woke.
The Paradox can also be seen on social media, where mass campaigns by Woke were able to successfully get most platforms to ban ‘hate speech’ when they were losing the minds of the young in the Anti-SJW Era, and re-establish their hegemony over them in terms of public opinion. On Substack, that still survives as a free speech platform, it required major resistance and standing of ground from its leaders, to endure the wave of bad press coverage that the ‘anti-fascists’ gave Substack. Substack and X are holding firm, but it is coming at a personal cost to them, as these toxic, insidious forces build momentum on their own platforms, them given the right to free speech that they relish in denying others.
This is why you can’t debate your way out of Woke, what Academic Agent calls ‘James Lindsey’s Debate Club Theory of History’, because they don’t want a debate, they want you censored.
Popper gives us the justification to crack down on these corrosive, anti-pluralist forces like Media Matters, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation League, Check My Ads, Hope Not Hate, and Stop Funding Hate. Because these forces are a fundamental threat to a free society, who will abuse a regime of free speech absolutism to infiltrate institutions and kick down the ladder, they require repression if free speech is to be maintained.
It should be those they call ‘anti-fascists’ and ‘anti-racists’ that are debanked, censored on social media, purged from roles in universities, and lose their jobs. Student activists who aggressively do counter-protests to speakers they disagree with on campus cannot be tolerated if a pluralistic campus environment is to be maintained, and need to be subjected to severe penalties and possible expulsion. The organisers of the protests against Proposition 8, the people who got Brendan Eich publicly humiliated and fired from a company he founded, should have been the ones with their lives and careers destroyed, not Eich.
And it’s this dynamic that forces like the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Free Speech Union (FSU) don’t understand. There is a limited Overton Window and window of discourse, and there are no neutral institutions. Either an establishment takes a harsh, uncompromising line towards intolerant left-wing groups, or those groups will take it over. It is impossible to equally defend the rights of Antifa and the rights of conservatives and gender critical feminists whom Antifa does everything in its power to beat into silence, embracing slogans like ‘make fascists scared again’. Because groups like Antifa reject the right to free speech and will do everything it can to insidiously undermine it, what the odious, evil Mark Bray proudly admits.
People like Bray deserve to be treated like Neo-Nazis are today, humiliated, ostracised, and totally banished from polite society, setting an example to all like him, that his corrosive, poisonous beliefs have no place in public discourse. Substack and X should censor all anti-free speech voices, to make sure they remain marginal; for as the SJWs smugly remind us: it works. Doxxing, one of their most repugnant tactics, should be a criminal offense.
The modern day figure who most personifies the kind of centre-right classical liberalism that Popper represented is Chris Rufo. His actions as head of New College Florida show a strong commitment to ‘Defensive Pluralism’, and ‘zero tolerance to the intolerant’. Rufo shares many of the assumptions of the Intellectual Dark Web, something that I disagree with him on, but what he differs in that he has ‘teeth’, and is willing to aggressively defend his values of free speech being a good thing.
Now, just to make something clear before people say this is just a justification for authoritarianism. Left-wingers, even those with Woke opinions, who do not counter-protest speakers, do not advocate for deplatforming, have a Voltaire-like notion of free speech, and are willing to participate in free and fair elections, should not be repressed. People like Karl Popper drew a key distinction between Democratic Socialists, even those with anti-capitalist views, and communists, on this basis: Democratic Socialists believe in pluralism and elections, and the right of people to reject their ideology. If they take power, it is not ‘one vote, one time’, they give people the opportunity to change their minds and vote them out.
This is what separates Clement Attlee from Lenin. The 1945 Labour government was very radical, probably the most left-wing government in Europe, but when they lost power in 1951, they left office, and did not question the validity of the result or people’s freedom to reject socialism.
However, another centre-left hero would not pass the litmus test: Martin Luther King. There were more moderate Civil Rights Leaders; like Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin (his pro-LGBT views not withstanding) as Eric Kaufmann notes, but King was not one of them. He relished in intimidation and holding Whites to ransom with a maxim of ‘no debate’. It was the same with the student protests on university campuses in the 1960s, that were not dealt with with sufficient force, and should have been treated far more harshly than they were. The 68 radicals should have never been able to get tenured positions in universities, unless they sincerely denounced their former beliefs and did their time for any laws they broke.
One does not need to be a communist to be a leftist that fails Popper’s maxim. As Eric Kaufmann said, it was the explicitly anti-communist left, figures like Lyndon B. Johnson, that pioneered Wokeness. The lack of vigilance against the non-communist, relativist left was one Popper’s weaknesses that I will get to.
Obviously, I would argue that leftists that pretend to have a pluralistic, free-speech absolutist view are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and the experience of the post-war period, and the evolution of the ACLU, should encourage us not to trust them. But it is important to make these distinctions. If every leftist is classed as the same degree of ‘enemy’, there is less weight given to those that really are the most threatening and dangerous.
Karl Popper’s Philosophy of Science
I now will talk about Popper’s method of ‘Empirical Falsification’ and ‘Critical Rationalism’. It is in this that Popper is so useful at exposing obvious pseudoscience like gender ideology, possibly better than any other philosopher. He also allows us to be critical of what the regime calls ‘science’, whilst having a standard by which to filter out the ‘lunatic fringe’ tendencies of the Right (anti-vax, climate change denial, etcetera).
The scientific method had evolved over the course of Western history. It was pioneered by Aristotle, who mostly focused on observation rather than experimentation. In medieval England, Roger Bacon started to develop the idea of experimentation, and William of Ockham further refined the inductive method in ‘Ockham’s Razor’. The ‘inductive method’ in its modern form waspioneered by Francis Bacon.
But, a reliance on induction has problems. David Hume made the point that inductive reasoning could not positively verify anything, but simply provide the best theory based on the evidence available. Charles Sanders Pierce further refined this by terming the notion of ‘abductive reasoning’ which retained the sceptical Humean approach of induction not positively verifying anything.
However, as Friedrich Hayek noted, science took a wrong turn in the 19th century with the belief that it could be applied to everything. Auguste Comte created Positivism, which was the idea that only something that could be ‘verified’ should be considered science. The problem with this however is that one’s understanding of science is constantly changing. Popper gives the analogy that one could only see white swans and ‘verify’ that all swans are white, but yet when a black swan is seen, the idea that all swans are white is falsified.
The 19th century saw all kinds of pseudoscientific disciplines gain prominence, like Homeopathy. In addition, Marx called Marxism a ‘science’, and called his ideology ‘Scientific Socialism'. Freudian psychoanalysis was merely philosophy dressed up as science with no means of falsifying its components. The Nazi’s also considered their views on race ‘scientific’, even though they were very disconnected from a genuine HBD analysis and distorted it to view the Jews as ‘Untermensch’, when if looking at unequal group outcomes impartially, they are higher IQ than average, and therefore more of a 'master race’.
Karl Popper solves this problem with the principle of empirical falsification in the ‘Logic of Scientific Discovery’. Something is only scientific if the theory is allowed to be proven wrong when new evidence becomes available. Pseudoscience fails this test because when it is proven false, the definitions are constantly changed to peddle the same narrative.
An example would be ‘Scientific Socialism’, when the Soviet Union didn’t establish a workers paradise, it did not mean that the idea of abolishing capitalism was proven false, the theory was just adapted to mean; it wasn’t REAL socialism, hence the meme.
Transgenderism is also like this. If gender is a social construct, then transgenderism is meaningless. If gender is an inbuilt psychological state, why all these obviously fake ‘gender identities’? Is ‘non-binary’ suddenly ‘scientific’? By the standards of ‘‘‘gender research’’’, it would appear so. This is why, as admirable as things like the Cass Report are, the transgender extremists have already started saying it is ‘built on transphobic biases’, because ANYTHING that challenges the ideas of Queer Theory; that gender is fluid and that the mutilation of kids should be able to happen without restriction, is ‘transphobic hate’.
Now, there are problems with empirical falsification. Firstly, scientists are human beings with a sense of pride, and will not want a theory that they’ve spent their life advocating to be proven wrong. Secondly, the development of comprehensive theories would be impossible under a strict empirical falsification principle; Darwinian Evolution would have been considered unfalsifiable by the standards of the 19th century, and only was really proven with the discovery of DNA in 1953.
One of Popper’s great intellectual opponents was Thomas Kuhn, who whilst describing the messy process of scientific discovery, carries some blame for the current crisis in science. Kuhn believed, outlining in his book the ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, that there was no single, absolute scientific method that applied across all time. Instead, science progressed in stages called ‘paradigm shifts’. When operating within one scientific methodology, this is called ‘normal science’, but when the methodology no longer can handle such changes in understanding, there is a need for the methodology to be revised.
Kuhn’s description of how science actually operates is more accurate than Popper’s, but it gives a methodological relativism to science which has been dangerous. Pseudoscientific disciplines, like transgenderism, can say they represent a ‘paradigm shift’, making it something close to ‘methodological anarchism’.
This is where Imre Lakatos, a very underrated philosopher of science, refines Popper’s falsification principle. He introduces the concept of the ‘research program’ and ‘Sophisticated Falsificationism’, where if, over time, a scientific theory consistently turns negative results, the theory should be revised. I consider Lakatos’ contributions to be a compliment and clarification of the work of Popper, hence my mentioning him.
When and how a ‘research program’ that should be done is subjective, and this is why there should be room for debate. When people say ‘the science is settled’, they are not practicing science properly. In fact, the only way science can be done properly is if competing theories are put up to scrutiny in an adversarial fashion. People who believe that science is on their side should not be afraid of debate with those they believe to be wrong.
A transgender activist would say to this; well, your belief that there are only two genders is also unfalsifiable, and you won’t allow anything to prove it wrong. They are correct. This is a ‘philosophical question’, not a scientific one. But what is outrageous is that transgender activists cover their normative assumptions in a veneer of scientific respectability, infiltrating scientific institutions, in what the French Republicans have rightfully called ‘one of the greatest medical scandals in history’.
Empirical Falsification can also be used to separate grounded opposition to Wokeism with the conspiratorial obsessed element of the Right, that operate on circular reasoning and won’t accept evidence proving them wrong, therefore not passing the empirical falsification test, which is something I discuss at length in my ‘Factions of the Rightosphere’ article on it. This is partly the reason why I think it so important for the Right to rediscover Popper, because his method provides the means by which Woke ideology posing as ‘science’ can be debunked, whilst still keeping grounded in reality and not going off the conspiracy deep end, what Scott Greer calls the ‘Insane Clown Party’.
However, Popper’s weakness is his anti-essentialism. Because he has no metaphysical grounding for critical rationalism, and sees classical notions like the ‘theory of forms’ and ‘categories’ as proto-totalitarian, he leaves himself vulnerable to postmodern deconstruction, and this is the greatest weakness of Karl Popper’s thought. Whilst he could clearly identify the totalitarianism of Marxism, with its historicist view of history and moral absolutism, but his anti-essentialism was adjacent to postmodernism, which was able to subvert and undermine his empiricism.
Appropriation of ‘Open Society’
Despite Popper’s ideological weaknesses, I do not believe that those who claim the mantle of the ‘Open Society’, namely George Soros, accurately speak for him. On the contrary, they have an incredibly historicist, rights-centric view of the world.
Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Francis Fukuyama I would argue are bigger influences on the worldview that Soros represents, and what an ‘open society’ means to him. Unlike Popper, Soros’ ‘open society’ means a society that is anti-nationalist, globalist, and committed to promoting the beliefs of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ at the expense of other views, and where viewpoints that ‘uplift the oppressed’ (aka, culturally left-wing views) are favoured whereas viewpoints that ‘promote oppression’ (aka, culturally right-wing views) are marginalised, which is exactly what Herbert Marcuse wanted. The support for LGBT extremism also goes completely against empirical falsification, and instead pushes postmodern deconstructivism that is explicitly against the type of strong empiricism that Popper promoted.
Popper’s ‘Open Society’ was a ‘defensive pluralistic’ one, where different lifestyles were permitted, but advocacy for overturning such value pluralism was not. It was one of religious freedom, but where those that wanted to end religious freedom were not free to do so. So for instance, LGBT activists actively pushing for laws cracking down on those of religious belief that don’t give 100% into their demands, would not be tolerated under his ‘Paradox of Tolerance’.
Conclusion
Popper’s critique of historicism, his realist assessment of the human condition and the threat from totalitarianism, his (correctly understood) Paradox of Tolerance, and his critical rationalism and empirical falsification are major additions to Western thought, and all should be used by the Right to counter the insidious totalitarianism that plagues our societies today: Wokeism and the LGBT agenda.
Postliberals think that the problem with the modern society is that is excessively relativistic and atomised. I think part of that critique is stuck in the 1990s. The issue is not that we are relativistic, but that a puritanical absolutism rules us. Karl Popper’s maxim of a ‘defensively pluralistic’ society, where Whites and social conservatives are able to carve out their own spaces, and where what passes as ‘science’ must pass the empirical falsification test, would be a vast improvement over our own, and one we must fight for.
The major flaw with Popper’s philosophy is his anti-essentialism, which undermines a lot of his other views on empiricism and desire for pluralism. Whilst he was aware of the dangers of a moral absolutist left, he didn’t see how moral relativism could morph into a moral absolutism of its own. Whilst being correct on philosophy of science and epistemology, metaphysics is important to ‘ground’ science. The notion of forms and categories is the bedrock of Western civilisation, what allows us to scientifically inquire; because we have a solid starting point with what is instinctive. What Plato and Aristotle was describing with forms was instinctive common sense; only women can give birth, therefore a man can never be a woman. When Popper tears down the classical philosophers, he leaves society vulnerable to deconstructive attacks, which did not seem as much of a totalitarian threat at first, but which when combined with appropriations of his ideas around ‘tolerance’, established the rainbow regime.
And it is on this point that Keith Woods, R. R. Reno, and Notes From the Past are correct. Whilst not a postmodernist himself, Popper did have a moral relativism that left society vulnerable to people with significantly more absolutist beliefs.
But overall, I think that Popper’s philosophy is anti-Woke, and offers us some valuable tools in which to fight it without completely losing touch with reality, chiefly the Paradox of Tolerance and empirical falsification.
The problem with Poper's falsifiability is that it is self-refuting.