I'm about 100 pages into Popper now.

Geez, Plato really was a totalitarian, wasn't he? We studied "The Republic" in college (properly translated, according to Popper, this should be "The State"), but glossed over the real implications of his "just" society.

For one thing, we didn't try to comprehend what Plato meant by "justice."

To the modern, liberally raised ear, justice means equal rights before the law. It means the individual is regarded with dignity and should be accorded equal protection for the benefit of the individual, which in turn, benefits society. What Plato meant by justice, according to Popper, is that the individual must surrender his rights to the state, and the good of the state must be protected. A just state is one in which all citizens sacrifice their individualism (Popper says Plato really mean "egoism") to the good of the state.

Justice, for Plato, also meant that each citizen of the state would know his place in society and stay there. In other words, slaves — and Plato totally opposed abolition — should remain slaves, the working class and military class keeps to its business, and the ruling class remains the elite. Each class should share equally in the monetary benefits of the society, within its own class. In other words, the elite class would be more equal than the other classes. Resources would be proportioned out, not rationed out.

Basically, that's the program of the National Socialists.

As somebody raised in a liberal society, it's often been difficult for me to understand how people who didn't share in the spoils of the ruling elite could blindly support the state. Consider, for example, Nestor Baguer, who spied on friends and eventually helped Castro convict them of crimes against the state. Baguer says of locking up one journalist he's known since childhood, "I consider him a friend and I am very sad, but he deserved it because he chose the road of treason." That is the thinking of a person who has surrendered his individual identity to the state.

A moral relativist might argue at this point that we shouldn't judge people of other cultures who see their rights as subservient to the rights of the state. As one of my commenters said one time, "If I grew up in a totalitarian state, I might not want freedom." My knee-jerk response is that "freedom is moral; tyranny is evil" (but usually I'm not that terse). After reading Popper a bit, I see, somewhat, that such a response is inadequate. Popper seems to be making the case that freedom is not a natural right; rather, it is the greater good.

At this point, I have to speak for myself and not for Popper (because I haven't read enough of him yet to know where he's really going on this point). The problem with tyranny is that it cannot exist in a benevolent form. Yes, tyrants and despotic states might have fits of benevolence, but it is not the natural state of non-open societies. Benevolence, if it comes at all, only comes after periods of suppression, and left unchecked, benevolence eventually becomes license for subversion, so dictatorships either fall or return to beheadings and such. And this sort of leads me back to the idea that man is naturally free, because like water seeking its own level, give a man a chance to spout his own political views, he always will. No state can avoid free expression unless it uses jail, torture, behavior modification and murder. Suppression, then, becomes a corrupting influence on the society.

The point of the totalitarian state is to create some sort of utopia. If the corrupting forces (Jews, gays, free thinkers, bloggers, gypsies, tramps and thieves) can be eliminated, then all that makes life hard will be wiped away and the state will be stable and perfect. But suppression and the death cult it creates prevents a well-rounded society, the kind of society needed to create dynamic economies and healthy contributions from citizens.

So, if the goal of the state is to create a stable, peaceful and prosperous society, then the state best suited to meeting those goals is one that is free and open. The state most likely to fail is the totalitarian state.

So while I can acknowledge the right of the Mr. Baguers of the world to believe that the state is more important than his individual identity, I cannot agree that the position is moral or in the best interest of his fellow countrymen. While Mr. Baguer is in Cuba, there were undoubtedly (and still are) a number of such rationalizers in Iraq, and they were willing to die for Saddam Hussein and his version of National Socialism, but it is exactly because such thinking is immoral that our cause in Iraq was moral. Liberation is always moral, because liberty is that system that provides the most benefit to the most people.