The two main 20th Century truths – totalitarianism sucks, feedback rocks

Karl Popper

Listening to a recent radio discussion about James Gleick’s book, The Information, a lot of mental tumblers suddenly clicked into place. My four 20th Century intellectual heroes are the economist, Friedrich Hayek, the philosophers Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. I'm just starting to realise that, in their various spheres, they were all saying something remarkably similar: without feedback, there is little chance of happiness, prosperity or enlightenment.

As Popper is the only member of the quartet I haven’t yet discussed on this blog, I’ll start with him. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in London in 1945, the Viennese philosopher argued – brilliantly – that democracies will always ultimately defeat totalitarian regimes because the former are open to criticism from the electorate. Bad governments will eventually be kicked out – and new ideas and better ways of doing things will emerge in much the same way as new scientific theories replace outmoded ones. Fascist and Communist states (i.e. "closed" societies) not only don’t welcome criticism – they actually imprison or murder anyone who refuses to toe the official line. Hence, when things start to go wrong (as they always do) those in control don’t know what’s going wrong (no one dares pass bad news up the line for fear of being punished) and, as they’ve stifled all fresh thinking, would, in any case, have no idea how to put things right.

Dictators fly blind, because they only receive false feedback which tells them they’re always right.

Hayek’s  book, The Road to Serfdom (1942), posits pretty much the same theory, only with a greater emphasis on economic well-being. Centrally-planned economies always fail because they’re denied the endless feedback provided by prices – the most valuable source of information in free markets. If house prices drop in Carlisle, but rise in Torquay, the message to property developers is clear: there’s enough available housing in Carlisle, but not enough in Torquay, so don’t bother building more houses in Carlisle. Contrariwise, if some Communist Party apparatchik has decided to make 50,000 new toasters and ship them to Nampo (in North Korea), there is no feedback to tell him whether that was the right decision or not – because prices are centrally set, and because no one at the local level will be brave enough to send him an email saying “We’ve got 40,000 toasters we can’t shift – what a crap idea that was!” (Well, not unless he wants to find out whether it’s possible to fit a human being into a toaster).

The market provides infinite quantities of feedback – and whenever politicians interfere, they distort the feedback mechanism (e.g. encouraging finance companies to lend stacks of cash to people who’ll never be able to pay it back), and disaster ensues.

When it came to psychic health, Jung – the only non-Viennese in our Fab Four – saw dreams as our primary source of feedback . Our unconscious is forever telling us what we need to do in order to make ourselves happier, more complete, more fully-individuated human beings. Of course, the information is couched in almost entirely symbolic terms, so we need to learn the language of dreams – and that’s where the psychotherapist comes in: he or she gives patients feedback by helping them interpret exactly what their subconscious is trying to tell them.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is harder to pin down, but it rests on the idea that most philosophical problems (or puzzles, as he preferred to see them) arise when the language used by philosophers becomes divorced from language as it's used in the real world – he likened it to skating on frictionless ice: language is no longer performing any real function. (For examples, read almost any paragraph written by Hegel or Sartre.) Give language a context, rather than leave it hovering in metaphysical mid-air, and you get feedback, which, in turn, will dissolve most philosophical conundrums. For instance, Wittgenstein would have dismissed Descartes supposedly undeniable proposition I think therefore I am, on the grounds that a private language is an impossibility. Language has rules. Rules are socially-derived – without other people providing Descartes with feedback on his use of language, there’d have been no reason for the great French philosopher to assume that “cogito”, “ergo” or “sum” meant the same thing to him from one day to the next. (Yes, it’s complex – if you want to blow your mind, dip into the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.)

(An extreme example of the Wittgenstinian method is to be found in the writings of the Oxford philosopher, J.L. Austin, who memorably dismissed all metaphysical speculation as to what is “really real” by pointing out that we know what is real because we know how the word “real” is actually used before philosophers get their metaphysical mitts on it.)

What I think it all boils down to is this: if we deprive ourselves of all the feedback the rest of the world and our own psyche is eagerly trying to supply us with, it all ends in tears.