Sir Karl Popper,
Sir Popper is a philsopher of the 20th century.
His works allow me to arrive at the goal of my personal mission, namly,
open society. Before reading Popper, although I've a very liberal
view of freedom, democracy and its limit but was never really clear
on how the properties of my dream society should look like, what kind
of things at should be the goal of economic and social development.
Open society is a concept the has become my personal goal in life,
it based on a very simple idea that we can't have perfect knowledge
of the truth, hence, once we really accept that, critical thinking
and debate between different ideas, based on our imperfection, become
very natural.
With this, there can't be nationalism, facism, totalitarian
state, religion as absolute power and anything that claim to be perfect
and absolute and all thing are humanly relative. The most interesting
thing for me is that, as the society is a creation of human thought,
and the human thought is imperfect, hence, the society is imperfect
and open for improvement through individual contribution.
It is really an exciting insight for me to link
the individual contribution to the open systems development of the
society. Backing this insight up is the false of logical positivism
outlined in his "the logic of scientific discovery", it
simply states that we can only hypothesis thing and try to improve
it through refutation. We couldn't really say that any particular
theory is an absolute truth, as it is thought possible by logical
positivists-especially those economists I've don't like, we could
only improve it to be nearer and closer to the truth but never reach
it.
Practical insight into how I live my life is heavily
influenced by this idea, I don't really believe that what I know now
is absolute, it requires continue improvement (learning). I find more
and more enjoyment in seeing people proving me wrong or help contribute
the development of my thought. Also it implies that individual contribution
can make a difference as I can contribute to the society through my
strategic participation in the important areas important to the development
of sustainable open society while know the limit of logic that is
formulating strategy -giving it a great relaxing feeling. Lastly,
his attitude that life is actually a process of problem solving is
very much similar to mine own, hence, he did influenced me a lot on
this aspect. The professional problem-solving attitude has give birth
to my interests in many fields including management consulting and
strategy in general.
(The
concept of poen society)
(links for more
information)
