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In this episode, we look at the research of Stefan Brunnhuber, trustee of the World Academy of Art and Science and member of the Club of Rome. Central to his research lie the questions: what is an open society? Who are its enemies in the 21st century? And, why are open societies better equipped to face the two major challenges of our day, namely the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence, than any other political system?

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, many believed that history was coming to an end. Free markets and democracies were the new and only game in town. We took them for granted, and did not allow the idea of an open society to evolve any further. That was a mistake.

Now, 35 years later, we are witnessing significant threats to open societies again, both from populist parties within our own borders and from autocratic regimes outside them. We are at a crossroads, with the world population split between liberal democracies and closed, autocratic societies. An all-time low for open societies, at least in modern times. On top of this, up to a third of voters in liberal democracies are sceptical about the achievements of open societies. We are learning that such societies are easy to destroy, but hard to re establish. They can only exist if there are citizens who are actively engaged in upholding the liberal order. Namely, critical, empowered citizens committed to building, supporting and defending the order that enables our freedoms. If there are no such citizens, there is no open society.

So, what exactly is an ‘open society’? The term ‘open society’ was first introduced by the philosopher Karl Popper in 1945. It refers to a societal order of individual freedom that confronted the challenges posed by ‘closed societies’: that is, ones governed by communist, fascist, or other totalitarian regimes. Popper’s core idea was that a combination of individual freedom and responsibility on the one side and critical thinking and critical institutions on the other will enable us to withstand the challenges of totalitarianism and provide a better standard of living for all of us. For Popper, an open society is not defined merely by the absence of authoritarian control. It is not reducible to NATO, EU or G7 membership, or to the principle of global governance. Nor is it simply synonymous with the notions of democracy or free markets. Rather, it is a technical term referring to an order of freedom that allows a sovereign nation state to solve problems in the 20th and 21st centuries. In other words, the open society is an institutional endoskeleton that enables both more freedom on the one hand, and more criticism on the other.

This involves at least six aspects:

• Critical institutionalism: This includes rule of law to guarantee a balance of power, respecting the majority principle but preventing the tyranny of that majority and safeguarding minority rights. Critical institutions, such as anti-trust laws or a constitutional court, provide mechanisms to reduce the misuse of power.
• A specific understanding of democracy: Besides recognising the importance of free and equal elections, Popper believed that humans are prone to error. The crucial determinant of a democratic process, in his view, is not the input (‘who is voting?’) nor the output (‘what are the specific outcomes?’) but, rather, a constitutional mechanism that allows voters to get rid of an incompetent political leader.
• Integrated competitive free markets: Popper’s order of freedom is not realised through the market, nor does it work against the market. Rather, it supports a free and fair competitive market. This includes (1) private property rights and product liability, (2) freedom of contract and labour unions that are able to overcome feudalism, (3) allocative power based on price signals and (4) an international banking system and a capital and currency market that serves as an intermediary for risks, distribution and resources allocation.
• Civic virtues: These include reciprocal tolerance (‘Nobody is 100% wrong’), epistemic humility (‘None of us know enough’), the capacity for self-criticism (‘I can learn from my mistakes’) and respect for human-centred rights, such as individual dignity and self-empowerment.
• Negative utilitarianism: In open societies, we recognise that people have different interests and talents and that there is no such thing as a common good or common wealth. Instead of maximising wealth or happiness for all, the goal is to minimise suffering by ensuring people’s basic needs are met. In other words, open societies have an economic bottom line people should not fall below, but they do not have a ceiling.
• And finally, a diverse, vibrant third, or civil, sector: This includes free press, institutions of research and science and an educational system that aims to unlock everyone’s full potential, so that creativity and curiosity can become a motor of success. A third sector with a diverse array of non-governmental organisations and a free cultural scene that embraces an enlightened multiculturalism and respects basic values and diversity, while also facilitating voluntary activities intended to create a better world.

These aspects represent a process by which a society moves towards more personal freedom and responsibility, and beyond randomness, arbitrariness, and historical inevitability. It is like a web without a weaver, designed to confront and defeat the challenges of totalitarianism by offering a political agenda that provides more economic and social freedom than any of the alternatives.

In the 21st century, both political agendas – open and closed societies – are confronted with the same big challenges: the rise of new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, robotics and synthetic biology, and the impact of serial ecological crises, especially: climate change, pandemics and biodiversity loss. Both the serial crises and new technologies pose threats to freedom and critical thinking, which raises several questions: who can do better? Which political agenda is more equipped to tackle these challenges? Who will win the next race for freedom? There are three factors to consider that will help us to answer these questions, starting with:

1. The parasitic relation: the dependency of digital autocracies on open societies means that supported autocracies do not automatically convert into open societies. But, autocracies are fundamentally, albeit indirectly, dependent on the achievements of open societies to stabilise themselves. That includes the information provided by a free press and investigative journalism; pricing in regulated competitive markets; the knowledge generated by critical debates in the third sector; the emancipatory power of a person-centred education that focuses on self-efficacy and critical thinking; an independent arts and cultural scene; and a system of science and research that is not controlled by a political party or business interests, but instead guided by rigorous methodological criticism. Only open societies can provide this decentralised, human-centred ad hoc and spontaneous knowledge that all these things rely on. My point is that digital autocracies depend on conditions they cannot provide or generate themselves. They are parasitic, surviving only because there are open societies in the first place. That may sound paradoxical, but it is true. To put it differently: imagine a world in which there is no systemic conflict between freedom and coercion and where only digital autocracies exist. A small fraction of the information we have at our disposal would be available. Would that be a richer world?
2. Illusion: coercion and control in a complex world, which suggests that if we recognise that we are living in an era of ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty, we must further acknowledge that none of us know enough. There is no such thing as central, privileged knowledge only available for political elites to govern a country. There is ample evidence that knowledge and information organised in a decentralised, bottom-up way – knowledge that is pluralistic, self organising, orchestrated through critical thinking and individual creativity – will always outperform any top-down decision-making process. It has always been transitory hypotheses, a willingness to keep learning, needed to correct failures, to give critical feedback and the ability to spontaneously adapt to ever-changing environments that make it possible to generate the wisdom needed to survive in a complex world. Individual freedom is therefore a precondition for knowledge and accurate information.

In a nutshell: if we want to know whether we are living in an open society, we must ask how much diversity we are exposed to, how well we tolerate ambivalence, and what opposing ideas and values we are required to integrate. To use an analogy, t is much like a funnel: the higher we go, the larger and wider our society becomes and the more we are able to reconcile opposites. The lower we go, however, the narrower and more homogeneous it becomes, and the more that we will simplify and exclude. In a complex world, the idea of control and coercion from the top is increasingly revealed as an illusion.

1. Finally, the power of individual variance and the evolution of what’s known as ‘cognitive capitalism.’ There is a vast literature on ‘cognitive capitalism’, which describes the relationship between a society’s cognitive abilities and its economic success. The level of spending on education relative to GDP correlates empirically with a society’s growth rate and international competitiveness. According to all these studies, Asia has a higher collective IQ than Europe or the USA. However, AI will sooner or later replace most cognitive abilities and standardised educational curricula, including all the associated jobs. Personal creativity will be the game changer for international competitiveness instead. We can define creativity as tolerance of individual differences and variance. Societies and economies that are able to unlock, support and foster individual creativity instead of mere standardised cognitive abilities will then have a competitive advantage over those that do not or cannot. The data, information and knowledge generated through creativity are further enhanced in societies and economies that critically assess, review and continually adjust this process through an established third sector, and they are ultimately fed back into economic and political decisions. Both creativity and critical feedback will in the future be key to any competitive advantage between different political systems. Societies that ignore the fact that free and trustworthy information leads to more reliable price signals and permits better political and economic decisions quickly become uninvestable. That is why open, human-centric societies will outperform autocratic, collectivist ones. In short: the outcome of the systems clash between open and closed societies has been decided already; we are just not fully aware of it.

We can take this argument one step further; if digital autocracies are in a relationship of dependency on open societies, they will lose the race on AI, competitiveness and individual creativity and remain subject to an illusion of control. Open societies should use this competitive advantage within a multipolar international power game. Whereas bilateralism will always lead to a zero-sum game, open multilateralism can become a positive-sum game. Sustainability issues, the architecture of the international financial market and global digitalisation are challenges that can be better addressed within a multilateral framework.

If we start upgrading our commitment to more personal freedom and critical thinking, open societies will become aware of their preconditions, limits, and potentials. We will learn that closed societies are not intrinsically stronger, but dependent on the knowledge of open societies – even if they misuse and misappropriate it. We will then enter an era where we start redefining the relationship between private property and public goods, where price signals in competitive markets are able to reflect the true costs including negative externalities, where free speech will replace cancel culture, where basic needs are met but there is still space for income and wealth differences, where a strong third sector enables us to steer and scrutinize political decision-making and foster civil engagement, and finally, where new technologies can help us to unleash the full creativity in each and every one of us.

We might then end up in a state where the two political agendas will further converge, where the advantages of fast-track changes and process innovation, characteristic of autocracies, will align with open societies’ cultivation of truth, personal freedom, and critical thinking. We might then be the first generation in human history that can meet the needs of current and future generations, while also respecting our planetary boundaries. An era some scholars call ‘liberalism 2.0’ or a ‘second Enlightenment’. This is the Freedom That Makes Us Who We Are.

That’s all for this episode – thanks for listening. To read more about the initiatives of the World Academy of Art and Science, you can either check out the academy’s website in the shownotes for this episode. Or, read his books The Open Society. A Plea for Freedom and Order in the 21st Century (2019) and Freedom or coercion (2023), available in German only, and accessible both online and in all good bookshops. And, as always, don’t forget to stay subscribed to ResearchPod for more of the latest science!

See you again soon.