The whole process relies on failure. People have to be willing to accept failure and admit to mistakes, or the process won’t work properly. If we artificially hide information to deny failures — whether it’s done in the name of positive thinking or is simply a manifestation of anti-social self-interest — then the process becomes toxic and corroded, errors fester unnoticed, and catastrophic chain reactions are set in motion.
As long as we live in a world in which there are barriers and profound disincentives to saying, “sorry, I don’t understand,” or “I screwed up,” the economic problems we’ve seen are going to persist — or get worse.
This brings me back to the refrain I’ve used throughout this book: the process of creation and discovery is itself the answer. When it’s ok to love learning for its own sake — rather than assuming education is merely something that goes on a résumé — then we don’t have to worry about how to motivate people to solve unexpected problems, because solving unexpected problems is intrinsically rewarding.
But to be able to solve emerging problems and create new opportunities effectively, we need access to all of the pertinent information. The process doesn’t work if a few organizations artificially maintain their own relevance and control by erecting barriers and witholding information.
My ideal is summed up simply by Karl Popper’s description of an open society as a society that “sets free the critical powers of man.” Popper’s ideas and criticisms were an attempt to infuse the whole public sphere with the spirit of science — not as something that presumes to find out what the truth will always be (which would be an excuse from critical responsibilities — which is perhaps precisely why that attitude is so compelling to some) but rather as a process of constantly testing and refining our assumptions.
More importantly, science means allowing others to test and refine our assumptions as well. This is where my belief in open government comes from: not some vague, principled need to let everyone express their opinion, but rather a process of submitting decisions to scrutiny from more perspectives, to reveal where subjective biases and false assumptions might be affecting the process, to ensure the whole system doesn’t become vulnerable to the intrinsic fallibilities and weaknesses of a few individuals….
[Excerpt from my forthcoming collection of essays, Truth, Will & Relevance.]
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