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The Estate of Miami is against the lockdown:
We offer a summary of an article published in Zurich on 1.4.2021, in the ‘Neue Zurcher Zeitung’, by Professor Michael Esfeld, Prof. of Philosophy at the University of Lausanne, member of the Leopoldina and of the Academic Council of the Liberal Institute.
Karl Popper´s masterpiece
The free world is facing a momentous dilemma: are freedoms negotiable or not? Now is the time to reread Karl Popper and apply his ideas to our naïve present. In our article The Barrington Declaration against the lockdown we addressed this issue that was silenced by the mainstream-media, as well as in other contributions. The following is a contribution to the debate on what is going on around the global economic and social strike.
If the principle is established that everyone has the obligation to prove that their actions do not contribute to the spread of a virus or damage to the climate, everyone is placed under the shadow of general suspicion.
In 1945 Karl Popper’s masterpiece of political philosophy “The Open Society and its Enemies” was published. This book was one of the intellectual foundations of the political course set by Winston Churchill’s speeches in Fulton (Missouri) and Zurich in 1946: the formation of a Western community of states based on freedom and the rule of law, as opposed to the totalitarianism of the Soviet empire. This course shaped politics and society for more than four decades. In 1989, there seemed to be no need for a new course: freedom and the rule of law had prevailed. And this assumption was wrong. The political course is only now being defined, in 2021.
An open society is characterized by the recognition of every human being as a person with inalienable dignity. This gives rise to fundamental rights, which are rights of defense against external interference in one’s own life. The state must be a constitutional state that protects these rights; it does not direct society, but respects the autonomy of individuals to shape their social relations freely.
According to Popper, the intellectual enemies of the open society are those who claim to have knowledge of a certain distinct common good; on the basis of this knowledge, they then seek to direct society towards that good of their choice, considering themselves authorized to dispense with fundamental rights, claiming that the very existence of man would be at stake. However, these enemies of the open society have been exposed by the mass murders, which according to them became inevitable in the 20th century, on the way to the realization of the supposedly distinct common good. These ideas and their political consequences belong to the history of facts.
Freedom and the good
Today, however, we are again faced with the choice between an open society and totalitarianism. The choice of words is not a play on verbal concepts, but very precise: in political science, totalitarianism refers to a form of government in which the state, in the name of a superior ideology, rules in all social relations, without borders or barriers.
Today’s enemies of the open society do the same as those criticized by Popper: they absolutize certain values, such as health or climate protection. For this, an alliance of experts and politicians claim to know how to manage social, family and individual life in order to secure these values. In this way, a higher social good – such as the protection of health and the living conditions of future generations – is being promoted, while individual human dignity and basic rights are being overridden. La pandemia y sus indicios convergentes
The strategy of deception consists in using current problems as an opportunity to construct existential crises: a killer virus that is going around, a climate crisis that would threaten the existence of humanity, etc. The fear provoked in this way is then exploited to gain political acceptance and to set aside the basic values of our coexistence – as in the totalitarianisms that Popper criticizes. After all, it is not bad people who do bad things, but always people with good intentions – who out of conviction for a threatened value that is valued as existentially important – who provoke processes that in the long run can have devastating consequences.
This mechanism strikes at the heart of open society, because it is playing with a well-known problem, that of externalities. What does this mean? One’s freedom ends when it threatens the freedom of others. A person’s actions, including the contracts he or she makes, have an impact on third parties outside these relationships, whose freedom to shape their lives is affected by these actions. And these external factors can be defined as broadly as you like.
The new enemies of the open society are stoking fear of the spread of a supposed plague of the century – taking it for granted that any form of physical contact can contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. Or they stoke fear of a supposed climate catastrophe, assuming, of course, that every action of the individual has an impact on the non-human environment and, therefore, can contribute to climate change. Consequently, everyone is supposed to prove that his or her actions do not unintentionally contribute to the spread of a virus or to climate damage, etc. – the list could be extended indefinitely. In this way, all people are placed under the general suspicion of being able to harm others with everything they do. People can only free themselves from this generalized suspicion by acquiring a certificate exempting them, such as a vaccination passport or a general social passport.
The new philosopher kings
The dilemma we face is, therefore, either an open society, which unconditionally recognizes everyone as a person, or a closed society whose social life is accessed through a certificate, the conditions of which are defined by certain official experts, as Plato’s philosopher-kings once were. Like the latter, whose claims to knowledge were discredited by Popper, their present-day descendants have no knowledge that would entitle them to establish such conditions without arbitrariness.
There are now numerous studies showing that lockdowns make no statistically significant difference in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Open societies have always successfully fought pandemics of comparable magnitude with purely medical means and not with political retaliation. The same is true for many of the conditions that are demanded to supposedly save the climate based on arbitrary definitions of what is supposed to be sustainable in each case. The facts show that CO2 emissions in industrialized countries without energy transition (France, England, USA) have decreased by the same percentage in the last twenty years as in countries with energy transition (Germany). The decisive factor is technological innovation instead of paternalistic state care; again, an open society offers the best conditions for this.
Like the old enemies, the new enemies of the open society come from within. Apparently, some scientists and intellectuals find it difficult to admit that they have no new normative knowledge to guide society. For incumbent politicians, the best thing to do is to do nothing and let people’s lives take their course. This is how the opportunity presents itself, appearing just at the right moment, to reconvert old challenges into new existential crises, stoking fear with pseudoscientific model calculations, designed to lead to catastrophic forecasts. This is how scientists can put themselves in the limelight with political demands to which the supposed state of exception places no legal limits. Through false scientific legitimization, politicians can obtain the power to intervene in people’s lives that they would never have been able to achieve by democratic and constitutional means. They are willingly joined by economic agents who benefit from this policy and can transfer the risks of their enterprises to the taxpayer.
The new state of control
The issue we are reflecting on here is an old one. It is inherent to the State itself, which is limited purely to protection: to effectively protect everyone against violence, it would have to be possible to know the whereabouts of everyone at all times; to effectively protect the health of everyone against virus infection, it would have to be possible to monitor the physical contacts of everyone at every moment. Monitoring can be carried out by the government or by private entities, which is ultimately irrelevant. The underlying issue is the totalitarianism of all-pervasive control, into which even states and liberal social orders can fall, if externalities are allowed to be so arbitrarily defined that in the end everyone, with all their actions, is under general and permanent suspicion of harming others.
This can only be countered by returning to an essential vision of what man is, based on freedom, human dignity and fundamental rights with unconditional validity. This is the foundation of the open society in Popper’s sense. On this basis, externalities can then be limited if they inflict concrete and significant harm on the freedom of others, which would then justify external interventions in people’s behavior. If, on the other hand, this basis is abandoned, great harm will be caused to the vast majority and the benefit will accrue only to the elites of those who benefit from the conditions that regulate access to the closed society.
It is high time that we become aware of the dilemma we are facing. This requires an objective and courageous vision, not one driven by fear.
