I only know of Karl Popper's book The Open Society and its Enemies at second-hand - initially from Popper by Brian Magee (1974); and from references in Popper's autobiography which I read aged nineteen - and in many other places.
I never read the big book itself, because (for most of my adult life) I already knew I would agree with it - and there seemed no point.
The basic idea is that societies must be (like science a century ago) open to dissent, indeed encouraging of all debate; and thereby error can be corrected, and a closer approach to the truth can be discovered.
Yet there can never be a positive formulation of truth, exception provisionally - for further evaluation - so societies must always remain "open".*
The notion was one of a dynamic society; always questing, always critical, always self-correcting; always hypothetical, never dogmatic.
I never revised my positive attitude to the Open Society until after I became a Christian.
However; in the early 2000s I was re-reading Popper's ideas, and became aware that their major supporter was a chap called George Soros+ - who funded specific people (one of whom was a colleague), organizations, publications promoting the Open Society.
What a helpful chap!
GS was supporting the autonomy of civil society, protecting freedom of expression, encouraging a free interaction of arguments... and so on.
(+Yes, that George Soros.)
So, how did Popper's Open Society ideas - apparently formulated specifically to explain why early 20th century totalitarianism was morally wrong and intellectually bankrupt; end-up by seamlessly evolving-into a primary rationalization for a global totalitarianism of greater scope and thoroughness than ever was achieved before?
I think the reason is simple - which is that the Open Society is a godless ideology, a secular and atheistic society, promoted by those who have abandoned their religion; which therefore is all-about means and nothing-about ends.
Indeed, the open Society idea tries to make a virtue of its own deficiencies; by claiming that only a life, society and world based upon process-merely is genuinely good. Goodness has been redefined as process!
Any idea that there is a good that ought to be pursued by various means, is declared totalitarian. It is replaced by the idea that good inheres in the means - good is 'whatever results from the proper process'.
And the 'proper process'? Well...
Articulated as such, the Open Society is now a universal rationalization for the direction and content of official modernity - however that is currently-defined...
Nowadays, justice is whatever results from the legal process (regardless of the corrupt actualities of that process); education is 'whatever-happens' at officially-validated schools and colleges; 'quality' is whatever-emanates-from 'quality-assured' (auditable) management systems...
Democracy is whatever emanates from the actual system of voting (including whatever latest corruptions and disregarding all propaganda and ideological coercion) - and whatever comes from the 'democratically-elected' government is therefore good.
Science is whatever professional and accredited scientists are saying today.
In a nutshell; the Open Society is a philosophical justification for The System is Always Right.
It turns out that - lacking God or any roots in the spiritual - the 'Openness' of an Open Society can be redefined into its opposite.
Why not?
So long as the society - the System - continues to declare itself "open", then it is said to be superior to others that are based-on ideas of truth being separable from process.
If the Open Society is wrong now, is revealed as evil and totalitarian ; then maybe it always was intended thus - maybe it was engineered (under demonic influence) as a stalking horse against God, divine creation and The Good?
That is suggested by the obvious fact that those who adhered to these 'liberal ideas' so very seldom jumped the ship and blew the whistle, when Openness became ever more obviously closed censorship, exclusion of dissent, and micro-control of mass thought and behaviour.
And, because no Good was allowed to be distinguishable from approved-process - because Goodness was held to inhere in The System itself; all this vast apparatus of totalitarian control was routinely deployed against whatever was true, beautiful or virtuous.
(As we may see all around.)
The flaw was always there - when Popper talked of the need to be illiberal in defense of liberal ideas - intolerant of "intolerance"; yet neglected that he had abolished all criteria for knowing the truth or the good. Liberalism was un-rooted, set-adrift, opened to endless redefinitions in light of the expediency of the-current-system protecting itself.
Anyway; the fate of Popper's Open Society over the past century is a case history of the way in which (like Zombies) - ideas and ideals, as well as persons and institutions, can-be (have-already-been) subverted, killed, hollowed-out, and replaced with their opposites.
In other words: an inverted-world, of inverted values: where Open means Closed; freedom means omni-surveillance and micro-control; and where the Open Society is a ruthless, world-wide, oligarchical, piratical-looting dictatorship.
*This links with Poppers 'falsification' idea of science; whereby - supposedly - an hypothesis can never be proved, but can be refuted. Science can demonstrate wrongness, but not rightness. This concept of science is (if taken seriously) a vast negation of knowledge - as science moves from error to error, based on hypothesis that have Not Yet been disproved, but may be at some future point. (It also removes the individual scientist's personal motivations, ability and truthfulness from consideration - because "science" is the process, not the person! In other words, this is writing a blank-cheque for corruption and dishonesty in science.) By Popper's account, this makes science into an 'open society' in miniature - the first such, and the most highly-developed. Yet, science too is now a closed society. While continuing to pay loud and continuous lip-service to the same ideals of a century ago - science now is in actuality a merely branch-office of the totalitarian bureaucracy, like everything else - its role merely to manufacture rationalizations for... whatever the global leadership class currently want to do.
