Institutions

Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other... But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species. It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution, and is still under way. It has included improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Another thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the conditions for anti-rational meme evolution, such as deference to authority, static subcultures and so on. Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking. We should examine and criticize laws, customs and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve. Avoiding such conditions is the essence of Popper’s criterion. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The conditions of ‘fairness’ as conceived in the various social-choice problems are misconceptions analogous to empiricism: they are all about the input to the decision-making process – who participates, and how their opinions are integrated to form the ‘preference of the group’. A rational analysis must concentrate instead on how the rules and institutions contribute to the removal of bad policies and rulers, and to the creation of new options. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The self is the collective term for the creative institutions of consent among the multiple strands of creativity and criticism that constitute a mind. — David Deutsch (source)

For example money, and rules of voluntary transfer of property, are powerful institutions of consent, capable of allowing millions of people who don't know each other, and who would hate each other if they did, to cooperate on projects from which they each individually benefit. — David Deutsch (source)

The self is the collective term for the creative institutions of consent among the multiple strands of creativity and criticism that constitute a mind. — David Deutsch (source)