Popper's Nightmare

At the Rally of Impossible Professions, held in London on 20 September, Richard Gombrich had occasion to remind us all of the pertinance of Popper's Nightmare. Click the link for a short snippet of this on you-tube

“The holistic planner overlooks the fact that it is easy to centralize power but impossible to centralize all knowledge which is distributed over many individual minds, and whose centralisation would be necessary for the wise wielding of centralised power. But this fact has far-reaching consequences. Unable to ascertain what is in the minds of many individuals, he must try to control and stereotype interests and beliefs by education and propaganda. But this attempt to exercise power over minds must destroy the last possibility of finding out what people really think, for it is clearly incompatible with the free expression of thought, especially of critical thought. Ultimately it must destroy knowledge; and the greater the gain in power, the greater will be the loss of knowledge.” Karl Popper