The core idea is simple: a society committed to openness, free speech, equal legal rights, and individual liberty cannot treat every demand or practice as equally legitimate. It must be prepared to defend the conditions that make tolerance possible. This does not require suppressing private belief or voluntary practice. It does require refusing to allow the institutional or political expansion of systems that reject the open society’s foundational rules.
Popper was writing against the totalitarian movements of fascism and communism that used democratic freedoms to undermine democracy itself. The principle is general: any closed ideology that demands supremacy over liberal norms poses the same structural challenge.
Application to Sharia and Full Female Covering
Sharia, in its classical and many contemporary formulations, is not a private ethical code. It is a comprehensive legal and political system that claims authority over public life, family law, criminal punishment, and the status of women and non-believers. Where it is applied as state or community law, it rejects key liberal principles: equality before the law regardless of sex or belief, freedom to leave the religion, and the priority of individual rights over religious authority.
When Muslim immigrants or community leaders press for the application of Sharia principles inside Western liberal democracies — parallel legal systems, pressure for religious exemptions that override sex equality, or demands that criticism of Islam be treated as illegitimate — they create exactly the situation Popper described. The open society is asked to tolerate practices and claims that, if generalised, would end the open society. Unlimited tolerance of those demands is not neutral; it is a one-way concession.
Full covering of women (niqab or equivalent, leaving only the eyes visible) is a related but distinct issue. In a free country, adults may dress as they choose. Voluntary religious dress is protected. The difficulty arises when the practice is defended or promoted as a non-negotiable religious requirement that must be accommodated in public institutions, schools, workplaces, and official ceremonies, and when criticism of it is branded as bigotry. At that point it ceases to be merely private and becomes a public signal of sex segregation and the subordinate visibility of women.
This collides with the liberal achievement of the twentieth century: the principle that women are full public persons, entitled to equal presence and equal legal status. Celebrating or institutionalising comprehensive female concealment as “empowerment” empties the language of women’s rights of its original meaning. It also creates practical pressure on other Muslim women and girls who do not wish to cover, and on the wider society’s expectation of open-faced interaction in civic life.
Popper’s point is not that immigrants must abandon their religion or that private covering must be banned. It is that a liberal society has both the right and the duty to insist that its public institutions, legal equality, and cultural norms of openness remain intact.
Tolerance does not require accepting the expansion of a parallel legal or social order that rejects the equal status of women and the priority of secular law. When demands for Sharia norms or for the normalisation of female invisibility in public life are treated as beyond criticism, the open society is no longer defending itself. It is negotiating the terms of its own erosion.
Application to Māori Tribal Customs and Ancestry-Based Partnerships
The same principle applies inside New Zealand. A liberal democracy is built on equal citizenship, individual rights, and laws that apply to all regardless of ancestry. Māori culture, language, and history are part of the nation’s inheritance and can be freely practised, celebrated, and taught. Private voluntary association by descent is also legitimate.
The difficulty arises when tribal customs and ancestry-based claims are elevated into constitutional or institutional requirements that create parallel systems of authority, resource allocation, and political power based on bloodline. Co-governance arrangements, race-based decision rights, and the treatment of the Treaty of Waitangi as an ongoing partnership that privileges one ancestral group over equal democratic citizenship move beyond cultural recognition. They introduce a closed principle: political and legal status determined by genealogy rather than by equal membership in the open society.
Unlimited accommodation of these demands risks the same outcome Popper identified. If ancestry becomes a permanent source of differentiated rights and institutional power, the foundational liberal rule — that the state treats citizens as individuals, not as members of ancestral collectives — is eroded from within. Cultural respect does not require constitutional dualism. A free society can honour Māori heritage without accepting permanent political structures that divide the population by descent and place tribal authority alongside, or above, equal democratic law.
Again, the paradox holds: to preserve an open society of equal citizens, there must be limits on the expansion of closed, ancestry-based systems of power. We cannot tolerate the intolerant. To sustain an Open Society we must understand it, know its limits, and defend it.
Our present leaders’ openness without limit is destroying our Open Society: totalitarian thinking and practice are on the march and well advanced in our Parliament, government departments, schools and universities. Our mainstream media are gone.
It is well disguised. It’s not jackboots across the Rhine. Or the Red Guards’ New Long March. It’s the pink-haired mum full of caring and kindness teaching our kids. Or the humble gentleman calling you a bigot or worse for defending the freedom he doesn’t even know he is giving away.
We need words not guns to defend our freedom. We need to use them while we still can.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and leader of the ACT Party. This article was sourced from HERE.
Popper was writing against the totalitarian movements of fascism and communism that used democratic freedoms to undermine democracy itself. The principle is general: any closed ideology that demands supremacy over liberal norms poses the same structural challenge.
Application to Sharia and Full Female Covering
Sharia, in its classical and many contemporary formulations, is not a private ethical code. It is a comprehensive legal and political system that claims authority over public life, family law, criminal punishment, and the status of women and non-believers. Where it is applied as state or community law, it rejects key liberal principles: equality before the law regardless of sex or belief, freedom to leave the religion, and the priority of individual rights over religious authority.
When Muslim immigrants or community leaders press for the application of Sharia principles inside Western liberal democracies — parallel legal systems, pressure for religious exemptions that override sex equality, or demands that criticism of Islam be treated as illegitimate — they create exactly the situation Popper described. The open society is asked to tolerate practices and claims that, if generalised, would end the open society. Unlimited tolerance of those demands is not neutral; it is a one-way concession.
Full covering of women (niqab or equivalent, leaving only the eyes visible) is a related but distinct issue. In a free country, adults may dress as they choose. Voluntary religious dress is protected. The difficulty arises when the practice is defended or promoted as a non-negotiable religious requirement that must be accommodated in public institutions, schools, workplaces, and official ceremonies, and when criticism of it is branded as bigotry. At that point it ceases to be merely private and becomes a public signal of sex segregation and the subordinate visibility of women.
This collides with the liberal achievement of the twentieth century: the principle that women are full public persons, entitled to equal presence and equal legal status. Celebrating or institutionalising comprehensive female concealment as “empowerment” empties the language of women’s rights of its original meaning. It also creates practical pressure on other Muslim women and girls who do not wish to cover, and on the wider society’s expectation of open-faced interaction in civic life.
Popper’s point is not that immigrants must abandon their religion or that private covering must be banned. It is that a liberal society has both the right and the duty to insist that its public institutions, legal equality, and cultural norms of openness remain intact.
Tolerance does not require accepting the expansion of a parallel legal or social order that rejects the equal status of women and the priority of secular law. When demands for Sharia norms or for the normalisation of female invisibility in public life are treated as beyond criticism, the open society is no longer defending itself. It is negotiating the terms of its own erosion.
Application to Māori Tribal Customs and Ancestry-Based Partnerships
The same principle applies inside New Zealand. A liberal democracy is built on equal citizenship, individual rights, and laws that apply to all regardless of ancestry. Māori culture, language, and history are part of the nation’s inheritance and can be freely practised, celebrated, and taught. Private voluntary association by descent is also legitimate.
The difficulty arises when tribal customs and ancestry-based claims are elevated into constitutional or institutional requirements that create parallel systems of authority, resource allocation, and political power based on bloodline. Co-governance arrangements, race-based decision rights, and the treatment of the Treaty of Waitangi as an ongoing partnership that privileges one ancestral group over equal democratic citizenship move beyond cultural recognition. They introduce a closed principle: political and legal status determined by genealogy rather than by equal membership in the open society.
Unlimited accommodation of these demands risks the same outcome Popper identified. If ancestry becomes a permanent source of differentiated rights and institutional power, the foundational liberal rule — that the state treats citizens as individuals, not as members of ancestral collectives — is eroded from within. Cultural respect does not require constitutional dualism. A free society can honour Māori heritage without accepting permanent political structures that divide the population by descent and place tribal authority alongside, or above, equal democratic law.
Again, the paradox holds: to preserve an open society of equal citizens, there must be limits on the expansion of closed, ancestry-based systems of power. We cannot tolerate the intolerant. To sustain an Open Society we must understand it, know its limits, and defend it.
Our present leaders’ openness without limit is destroying our Open Society: totalitarian thinking and practice are on the march and well advanced in our Parliament, government departments, schools and universities. Our mainstream media are gone.
It is well disguised. It’s not jackboots across the Rhine. Or the Red Guards’ New Long March. It’s the pink-haired mum full of caring and kindness teaching our kids. Or the humble gentleman calling you a bigot or worse for defending the freedom he doesn’t even know he is giving away.
We need words not guns to defend our freedom. We need to use them while we still can.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and leader of the ACT Party. This article was sourced from HERE.
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