Episode #161 ... Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies
32:08 Share

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. Cool that you're enjoying it so far. Full transcripts of every episode at philosophizethis.org. And to support a show like this, go to patreon.com slash philosophizethis. Could never do this without your help. Thank you.

Today's episode is not part of the Creation of Meaning series. Currently working on the next episode there. Wasn't going to have it done by today. And I've committed myself to spending all of my free time this year on the podcast. Just been feeling really grateful for how you guys make my life possible. And I just want to get more out there for you people.

So thank you for your patience. Today's episode is on Karl Popper's landmark work, "The Open Society and Its Enemies." So on September 1st, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, notoriously marking the beginning of the Second World War and marking the beginning of an age where fascism and totalitarianism posed a new level of threat towards Western liberal democracy.

There were a lot of thinkers at the time that were worried about this whole state of affairs, and they decided that the best thing to do would be to take up arms against it. Not to take up arms in the actual war itself, but instead in the war of ideas that was riding shotgun in the Panzer IV tanks trying to take over the world at the time. Now the main objective of these thinkers was that they wanted to make people aware of just how easy it can be to fall under the spell of the stories told by totalitarian and fascist regimes.

They wanted to warn people of how these modes of government might come to pass. They wanted to point to specific examples within society, markers of where you can find the seeds of totalitarianism already planted in our institutions. They warned about populist uprisings. They warned about political dogma. They warned about utopian social engineering that we should

look at with a strong level of skepticism or else we may find ourselves living to see the day when we look back on the days of actual democracy and then write books and articles about what we can do to hopefully one day get it back or at least a version of our democracy back. This was the project of so many thinkers from around this time. But when the philosopher Karl Popper sits down during the war and writes the first version of his work titled "The Open Society and Its Enemies"

he was less interested in diagnosing symptoms of totalitarianism in the present. And I mean, you can understand why. When you got multiple mass murderers trying to take over the world,

Don't really need a doctor to tell you that you got a mild case of fascism going on. What Popper was more interested in doing was looking back at history, looking back and tracing the philosophical roots of this tendency towards totalitarian ideas in Western thought. In other words, the project of this book is to identify on what grounds do people intellectually justify fascism or totalitarianism? Because it's not like anyone who has totalitarian leanings is just a mean person or something.

You know, if only Stalin would have just meditated for five minutes, came back with a better attitude, and then decided about the whole gulag thing, human history would be completely different. If only he had a little chamomile tea to start the day. No, Karl Popper's gonna say that what makes the sales pitch of a totalitarian or fascist regime so easy to get on board with

is because it's often rooted in some of the oldest, most revered political theory in the history of the Western canon. The kind of work that couldn't help but have an enormous influence on the political thought that came after it. And listen, I realize, hardcore listeners of the podcast are going to be wondering, why do we need an episode on totalitarianism? Nobody really wants to go in that direction. And I get it. But this episode isn't about any single one of you listening right now. This is bigger than you.

Honestly, I'm writing this episode here today because I'm a little worried about my phone, of all people. My phone has been sick for quite a while now.

Coming up on two years of my phone sending me these notifications about all the different ways the world's going to end in the next six months or so. It has gone full-blown doomsday prepper phone. And lately, it seems like it's particularly worried about the future of Western democracy, where things have gone wrong, and what we can do to try to preserve it. I realize I could turn notifications off and all of this would be solved. But come on, I'm not going to censor my phone. What kind of friend would I be? And then I'd have nothing to complain about. So everybody wins here.

The open society and its enemies begins with a pretty interesting claim about how we organize politically. To Karl Popper, human civilization is in a period of extreme political transformation, has been for a while. We are transforming slowly from what he calls the closed societies of the past. These are tribal societies, collectivist societies, ones ruled by an adherence to some sort of dogma. We're transitioning from this type of society to what he calls the open societies that are much more common in our present day.

We'll explain more about his vision for an open society a bit later, but for now, let's start with what he spends the majority of the book explaining. Where did Western philosophy go so wrong in its treatment of political theory that it landed us in a world where fascism and totalitarianism are actually a legitimate threat to our modern democracies?

To paint a picture of exactly how it first happened, Popper takes the reader back in time, to what he sees as one of the first, if not the first open society that history had ever seen, to Athens, Greece, right around the time of the birth of Plato.

The culture of Athens at the time was unique in the sense that it was primarily made up of a collection of people who were truly individuals. Individuals immersed in a system of democracy as a means of solving their social and political problems. More than that though, it was unique in the sense that it was a place that held its institutions, values, culture, all of this they were willing to examine under a magnifying glass of scrutiny. They did this in an attempt to be open to better ways of governing that might slowly lead to a better society down the road.

This was a unique way of doing things in the ancient world. Maybe one of the reasons it was so unique, Popper thinks, is because this level of openness definitely comes with a price. What Popper calls "the price you have to pay for being a human being." What he means is, for the individual, living in an open society is undeniably more complicated than living in a closed society. For one thing, in an open society, you go throughout your entire life carrying with you the constant burden of truly being an individual.

There's no class that you're born into. There's no cookie-cutter role that you're assigned at birth. Nobody's going to tell you what it is you have to do that's going to hopefully benefit society as a whole. That's your responsibility to figure out. Another reason it's more complicated is that you have to actually do the work to be an informed citizen.

When you're living in a democracy, you have to be able to make educated decisions about how we should adjust things moving forward. That takes work. And if you're going to take your role as a citizen seriously, that process is going to come with at least a certain level of doubt about where you stand on things. Which leads to another reason Popper thinks an open society is more complicated: the sheer instability caused by a society that's actually willing to change its mind about things. Not like a fascist or a totalitarian society.

There's a direct comparison here to the way you might conduct yourself as an individual person. When you're constantly open to being wrong and improving your understanding about things, the instability of that attitude breeds a certain type of anxiety. Whereas if you're more closed off, you're more tribal, you're more dogmatic in the way you see the world, much more easy to feel confident there because you're closed off from the reality of the true number of options that are available to you out there.

This anxiety and the burden of being an open person, living in an open society, Karl Popper called this the strain of civilization. Karl Popper acknowledges that living with the added pressure of the strain of civilization definitely is harder. It definitely requires more thought and more work. But it's worth it.

The work is worth it, because at least you're somewhat in the driver's seat, as opposed to getting chauffeured around by whatever fascist or totalitarian narrative happens to rule the day. Now, being in open society, what happened to Athens Next is entirely understandable.

People like Socrates come along, questioning values and institutions. Instability creeps its way up through the ranks until eventually people like Socrates are put to death for corrupting the youth and Sparta is occupying Athens after defeating them in the Peloponnesian War. A young Plato would have seen this occupation. He would have seen the highly restrictive, closed society of Sparta. He would have viewed history in a cyclical way, seeing the history of civilization in terms of an ongoing cycle between golden ages and periods of decay and corruption.

Popper thinks all of this would have weighed heavily on Plato's mind when he set out to write one of the most well-known and influential books on political philosophy ever written in the Republic. Popper gives a little more insight into the psychology of Plato and what problems he thought were the most pressing at the time in the realm of political philosophy. Remember, a key component of Plato's philosophy is that there's a hypothetical realm known as the world of forms, where there's an ideal form of everything that conceptually exists.

These forms embody the essence of whatever the thing is that we're talking about. Then outside of this hypothetical realm, in the earthly realm where we live, we see a bunch of flawed, imperfect shadows of the ideal form of anything. It could be a tree, a moose, whatever it is. Now here's the important part for Popper. These imperfect copies, in the sense that they are not the ideal version of whatever essence they possess, these copies are always subject to decay and corruption.

We see this with our bodies. Eventually they start to break down. We see this with economies and downturns and depressions. We see this in basically every TV show that's ever existed. What happens when season 47 comes along? Ross and Rachel, they find Tupac living in Jersey somewhere.

Chandler has an emotional breakdown about it. Phoebe writes a song. Just stop it already. Just stop. Everything dies to Plato. Everything in the earthly realm at least decays and corrodes, including the city-state, including the system of government that tries to maintain it.

Popper thinks that stopping this seemingly inevitable decay was a problem that Plato thought was one of the most important to solve in the political philosophy of his time. So when asking the question, as he did, when asking who should rule the state and how should they rule, Popper thinks this is where a big mistake was made that would later go on to reinforce totalitarian thought in the West. The mistake, he thinks, is that Plato approached solving the political problems of his day through the lens of what he calls holism.

Holism is the approach towards an understanding of the world that says that to truly and sufficiently understand something, it is not enough to just understand the constituent parts that make the thing up.

To truly be able to understand some things out there, you have to have an understanding of the thing as a whole. Now, should be said, this is a totally reasonable expectation to have when it comes to understanding some things. For example, to have knowledge of an ecosystem requires a holistic understanding of how everything works together within that ecosystem.

Same thing with any multicellular organism you might want to understand. There are countless examples of this, but Popper's going to say that looking at the state through this holistic lens and then post hoc trying to design a government that prevents this natural process of decay and corruption...

This way of thinking about the state practically guarantees a fascist or totalitarian outcome. And just think of what Plato created for a second. At the helm of the ship is a philosopher king, cultivated since birth and educated to be a philosopher king, well-versed in the ideal essences of things through Plato's world of forms. Rigid class structures, societal roles, infanticide to keep the guardians pure, taken a page right out of the Book of Sparta, propaganda and censorship through his advocacy of noble lies.

One of the big problems here for Karl Popper is that to Plato, the stability of the state transcends any consideration of the individual person. The macro is more important than the micro. The collective whole is more important than any one individual having a problem.

With this way of thinking, naturally comes the attitude that some people are just going to fall through the cracks. Some people are going to suffer because of the structure of society. They may die. They may get zero political representation. But in the end, their sacrifice was worth it because the whole of society was moving along in a stable way. The ends of long-term stability justify the means of momentary human suffering. And if you feel bad about that, don't worry. That's a sacrifice that Plato is willing to make.

And all jokes aside, Popper would want to point out that Plato's designing this system with the best intentions in mind. Once again, he's just trying to stop what seems like one of the biggest issues facing the political philosophy of his time: this seemingly inevitable process of earthly, historical decay.

Now speaking of history, let's move forward in history and talk about a couple dudes that used to talk a lot about history, Hegel and Marx. These are the next two targets in the book for Karl Popper. And if holism and essentialism were the problems when it came to Plato's philosophy, then when it comes to Hegel and Marx, historicism was the main thing that messed with their work.

you can at least understand where people like Hegel and Marx are coming from with their undying faith in historicism. Just to play devil's advocate here, worth asking the question: is collective human behavior within society completely random? Like when we read the history of different groups of people and the way their societies progressed, would you say that their behavior is so chaotic and random that it cannot be predicted whatsoever?

Some people thought that it could. So if it can be predicted in any way, can we look at a large sample size and identify certain patterns? Can those patterns be distilled down into trends? Can those trends be further refined down into laws? Laws of historical development. Laws of human behavior.

With all the success in the physical sciences, and with the emergence at the time of these specialized fields of psychology and the social sciences, it was believed by a pretty substantial group of thinkers that it's not crazy to think that history can be studied like a science experiment, and that from this we can uncover laws of historical development, and even by extrapolating into the future, we can predict where history is inexorably going to end up, and even help coax it along in that direction by structuring our societies in the proper way.

So where was history going? Well, that's easy. The end of history, as it was called. These historicists believe that when you look back at it, history has been progressing through a series of stages. Each generation doing a little better than the generation before it. Each new stage that's brought about corrects some conflict in human affairs that existed in the last stage.

This type of historicist would say that it's not crazy to think that eventually these negations and human conflicts will have generally resolved themselves. This couple thousand years we're currently living in, this is eventually going to be seen as the unavoidable growing pains of the age of civilization. And at that point, we will have reached the end of history, where we can all move on with our lives and transition into an age with an unprecedented level of peace and freedom available to everyone. Just a matter of time before we get there.

Now, if you believe this, wouldn't it be tempting to feel an urge or even a moral obligation to structure our societies in a way that points towards the end of history and moves us in that direction in as painless a way as is possible?

This is the attitude Karl Popper's gonna have a problem with. And he's got a lot of ammunition against it. First of all, Popper would say, "What exactly are these people even referencing when they talk about history?" They use these blanket statements like "the history of humankind." But what does that even mean? There is no comprehensive history of humankind that's available to us. He actually says it beautifully. He says, quote, "What they mean and what they have learned about in school is the history of political power."

There is no history of mankind. There is only an indefinite number of histories, and one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offense against every decent conception of mankind, for

"For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder." What he's saying is that when you look at history through such a narrow lens, and then pretend as though it's the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup that can tell you the future of the entire species,

This is obviously going to be problematic, and it's far from using the scientific method to uncover some laws of historical development. Far from a scientific approach towards solving social and political problems. Popper thinks that the key word we should be looking at in the field of the social sciences is science, not prophecy. I mean, we're not reading the chakras of the earth here. We're trying to figure out how to live together peacefully.

One of the biggest problems here to Popper is that historicism severely limits the number of potential solutions you have at your disposal as a governing body.

When a fascist or a totalitarian government solves problems truly believing that there's some sort of historical destiny that needs to be fulfilled, then they can only consider solutions that correspond with the false narrative they've already decided on about where the country needs to be going. But that's too inflexible to be effective. Imagine being a scientist, believing that the universe has some sort of scientific destiny, and then only running experiments that try to prove the validity of the story that you've already come up with.

Historicism of this type is a delusion to Karl Popper. And this delusion cripples the historicist in a number of different ways they may not even realize. Not the least of which is the complexity of how individual people actually are making decisions. He'd say, "Consider this for a second." People make decisions based on the knowledge that they have available, that humanity has available, at the time.

Now, also consider the fact that the accumulation of knowledge is a progressive endeavor. Meaning, in other words, you don't know what people 50 or 100 years from now will know and be basing their decisions on. How could you possibly claim to know how people are going to react to things that nobody knows about yet in relation to knowledge that nobody has yet? This is a crippling delusion.

Because even if their optimistic, utopian story about the end of history convinces people enough to put them in a position of power, Popper thinks the historicist approach makes them utterly incapable of the humility that's required for dealing with the unintended consequences of their public policy. And it makes sense. These people think they know the future. He says, "The greater the level of holistic change forced upon a society, the greater the degree of unintended consequences that you can expect to see."

To pack together the last couple criticisms, these historicists to Popper essentially become what he calls utopian social engineers. So lost in the haze of their crystal ball, so convinced of the story that will lead us to the end of history, that they can't see what he calls the human factor that's right in front of their eyes. There may be trends in human behavior, Karl Popper admits.

But there can never be laws. Individuals are too unpredictable, too complex. People are not that little dog or that little thimble thing in some game of Monopoly that you're playing. And because of this, whenever you have a society made up of truly free individuals, it makes those individuals a lot more difficult to control. So, not a surprise that in so many totalitarian and fascist regimes, the basic human rights of the individual go out the window in the name of the collective good.

And then through various types of social and legal coercion, through propaganda, through shame, people are molded to fit whatever the totalitarian system dictates rather than the system being molded to fit the needs of the people. Now, I know there must be a lot of totalitarian and fascist dictators out there listening. And don't worry, I'm here to give you guys a voice as well. Who is this Karl Popper guy? Sure has a lot to say about the problems with totalitarianism, but what do you have that's better, buddy? Change my mind about totalitarianism, if you can.

Well, like we said before, he's going to be an advocate for something he called an "open society." But what does that even mean, really? Popper describes an open society at one point as being one that, quote, "sets free the critical powers of man," and one, quote, "in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions." This is going to loosely resemble modern Western liberal democracies. But make no mistake, Popper thinks there's still a lot of stuff we could be doing better in our societies to make them more effectively open.

And the first step in that direction has nothing to do with some abstract political philosophy. The first step for us may be to model our political strategy more in line with the most refined process of trial and error that human beings have ever had access to. That is the scientific method.

Let me explain, because you may remember, a while ago in an earlier episode, we talked briefly about Karl Popper, and we learned back then that he's a guy that's much more famous for his contributions to the fields of epistemology and philosophy of science than he ever was for his contributions in the realm of political theory.

He was a champion of what he called falsification, or the idea that... You know, the classic example that teachers use when talking about this stuff is the statement, Now, what is wrong with that statement as a very rudimentary scientific theory? For hundreds of years, based on the evidence that was available for them to study, European thinkers took this statement that all swans are white to be more or less universally true.

There was no reason to question it. That is, until the 17th century when European explorers came across black swans for the first time. At which point the universe put a little baby powder on its left hand and smacked them across the face with one of the most beautiful examples ever of the problem of induction. In other words, the verifiability of the statement "all swans are white" is impossible to prove because there's no way we will ever have access to every swan that exists, has existed, or will exist.

But the falsifiability of that statement is just one single piece of empirical evidence away. What makes a scientific theory a useful one is not that it can be proven to be true, but that it can be proven to be false in the real world where we're actually conducting experiments.

Put more generally, the goal of science, what makes science so great, is not that we are trying to be objectively right with our theories. The goal of science is to be less wrong, to have a closer approximation of truth than we had yesterday. Well, Karl Popper's gonna say, similar situation going on in the political realm.

The goal of political theory should not be to come up with some sort of utopian society or the ideal state that will never decay like Plato tried to do. No, there's never going to be a day when human conflicts are all resolved and you're just mowing your front lawn and cut off shorts, waving at all your neighbors, smiling. You know, maybe one guy will do that.

But then I'm gonna have a problem with that guy. You see how it works? Point is, we have millions of people that are all trying to coexist here. Problems are going to arise. Solutions are going to be needed. Leaders, no matter how close they are to a philosopher king, leaders are gonna fail. And when they do, the more important question to Popper is how do we want that transition of power to go in our streets? How much social unrest does our system require for us to move on from a leader that's doing a bad job?

See, Karl Popper thinks Plato was asking the wrong question all along. He says Plato's so interested in asking who should rule, and how that person should rule to maintain the stability of the state. The better question, the more realistic question Popper thinks we need to ask, is not who should rule, but instead, quote, "...how is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?" End quote.

This changes the entire feel of the question at hand. All of a sudden, this isn't so much a question of political philosophy anymore. As Popper says, this becomes more of a practical or a technical question to answer. And the answer is that we need an open, democratic society with a strong focus on the individual and freedom.

What people living in a democracy typically call "Election Day," Popper thinks we can also think of as "Judgment Day," where millions of individuals can anonymously show their support or lack of support for whoever is in power at the time. Something completely impossible in most fascist or totalitarian states, where the utopia is always just around the corner whether the unwashed masses recognize it or not. So the citizens, engaged in the democratic process, become the safeguards against violent revolution when leaders are no longer serving the people.

But how do we actually solve any problems in Popper's open society? Because say what you want about totalitarian or fascist countries, but if they're anything, they're usually pretty efficient at making decisions. That'll happen when you have a half dozen people that all agree on things making decisions for the rest of the population. They kind of just shoot for a utopia and ask questions later. But there's a big problem, Popper thinks, when you try to use utopian social engineering to solve big problems.

It's not just that utopian social engineers think that large-scale holistic overhauls are the way to fix social and political problems. What makes a situation even worse is the scope of the goals that they're trying to aim for. Which, if you're being realistic to Popper, start to border on delusion. How can you realistically come up with a plan to implement a utopia of equality across the board? What does your plan look like to create a perfect system of justice?

goes in the direction of romanticism as well. We need to go back to a time when this country was a paradise. People say this kind of stuff. And it really makes you wonder, how, what kind of goals are those?

Someone told me one time that their New Year's resolution is that they want to make a billion dollars and then find some way to transform into a leopard. It's like, slow down, dude. We get it. But set some reasonable goals for yourself, something you can actually take deliberate action on right now. This is what Karl Popper is saying. Just like falsification in our scientific theories, don't aim for some utopian perfection that, as far as we know, may not even be attainable.

Instead, why can't we admit that we're always to some extent going to have conflicts and then ask ourselves what are some concrete problems that we can see right now in the real world that we can take small deliberate actions towards correcting and then chart our progress along the way? Things like poverty, national oppression, disease, unemployment, violence, environmental issues, war, all of these named explicitly by Popper.

In contrast to utopian social engineering, Karl Popper calls this piecemeal social engineering. A system of trial and error mediated by free individuals and the information available to them at the time working towards actually making progress rather than just mistaking movement for progress. He compares it to a physical engineer that'll make small adjustments to a machine and improve how it functions little by little over time, not unlike the refined system of trial and error that we use in the sciences.

So if the role of the individual in a democracy is to vote out bad leaders without social unrest, and if piecemeal social engineering is the method that allows problems to get solved, another question Popper has to answer about his vision of an open society is how, if we don't have a collective fascist or totalitarian vision that we're aiming for,

How are we supposed to decide where to focus our efforts? What social or political problems should we prioritize in an open society? To answer this question, he introduces the idea of negative utilitarianism. Maybe the best place to start is here. Someone could make the case that a good society produces happy individuals that live within it.

Someone could say that the better the society, the happier the people are going to be. When a fascist or a totalitarian regime tries to sell a population on their vision of a utopia, part of that vision always seems to be that the people are going to be happier than they ever have been before. But there's a problem with this line of thinking. Not the least of which is that it requires the totalitarian or fascist group to decide for the individual people what is going to make them a happier person.

But obviously, who is anyone to tell anyone else what's gonna make them happier, let alone force them to do it? At the very least, this is a totally ineffective way to quantify social progress.

He says, quote, Carl Popper has a solution to this, though. He's going to say that just like in the sciences,

Where again, the goal should not be to create theories that can be proven true. We should instead create theories that could potentially be proven false empirically in the political realm. The goal should not be to enact policy that makes the citizens happier. We should instead create policy that focuses on reducing suffering. Because he says, quote, "In my opinion, human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely an appeal for help."

while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway." What he's getting at is that you can sit around and wax poetic for the rest of your life about hypothetical worlds where every citizen of a country is going to be 10% happier if only we make it a reality. But pragmatically, why would you ever actually want to do that? Happiness is an elusive concept in general, and it only becomes more elusive when you try to find a way to quantify and measure it. Whereas suffering to Popper

Suffering is evident. Unnecessary suffering is something most of us want people to experience as little as possible, and every citizen can understand why that is. And because of that, the added benefit politically is that policies that aim to reduce suffering are just far easier to get past than ones that talk about theoretical forms of happiness. He describes it here, quote, "...for new ways of happiness are theoretical, unreal things, about which it may be difficult to form an opinion."

But misery is with us, here and now, and it will be with us for a long time to come. We all know it from experience." Negative utilitarianism calls for us to focus on the stuff we can control, the suffering we see brazenly in our streets, and the imminent problems that face our planet overall. Now, we've talked quite a bit on this show about the problems with democracy.

Who is the average citizen really to be making decisions about who should be making decisions on behalf of everybody? I mean, look, I'm a podcaster. I can barely figure out how to make a living. I am a domesticated animal with a car. That is essentially what I am. You know when you try to plug a USB into something, how one way it doesn't go in, you got to flip it around so that it can actually plug in?

I swear to Christ, there has not been a single time in my entire life I have ever plugged a USB in and it went in the first time. I am a cursed man. And what, I'm supposed to decide how to run the country? Karl Popper would no doubt shake his head very slowly at this. He would hear me. And he'd understand my frustration with democracy. And he'd probably say that no democracy, not even his vision of the open society, can possibly exist for any length of time without some really big mistakes.

But I think he'd also say that the reason democracy is so important to protect is not because it avoids mistakes. The reason democracy is important to protect is that it avoids tyranny. This statement can seem somewhat annoying, because in certain times it comes off as remarkably obvious. But I think what Popper would say is that there are definitely moments in history where everything's fine and this kind of stuff doesn't need to be said. But there are also moments in history, like the beginning of the Second World War, like the fall of the Soviet Union,

And even in less severe times, when your hypochondriac phone is constantly feeding you article after article about how democracy is under siege, there are times like these when we need to be reminded of what makes an open society so much more dynamic, so much more free, so much more considerate of the individual that a closed society ever could be.

And understanding the roots of fascist or totalitarian thought, oftentimes buried in the most seemingly innocuous parts of Western political philosophy, understanding where these things come from might just help us avoid them moving forward. There is no magic eight ball that we can shake up that's going to tell us the future of the human species. And that's okay. Falling under the spell of a utopian vision for the future may remove the strain of civilization for a bit.

But it doesn't remove the suffering of whatever people or groups fall on the wrong side of some historicist or holistic story. To Karl Popper, we owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the rest of our fellow human beings to not fall into lazy thinking and to take on the strain of civilization. Or as he puts it much more beautifully than I ever could, quote, Instead of posing as prophets, we must become makers of our fate. End quote. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.