Emphasis mine: “The belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition.”
It would be truer to say, as A.N. Whitehead has argued in another connection, that on the contrary
“civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometimes solves problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, and social processes which deserve to be called ‘social’ in distinction from the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. Insofar as such processes are capable of producing a useful order which could not have been produced by conscious direction, any attempt to make them subject to such direction would necessarily mean that we restrict what social activity can achieve to the inferior capacity of the individual mind.
-F.A. Hayek (The Counter-Revolution of Science)
No one can know everything or even begin to grasp even a small portion of knowledge necessary to “order” Society. In the beginning of my IT career, I could read a handful of journals and weekly mags in my field at be at least reasonably informed across the entire domain of the industry. Nowadays, decades after I first started, it would be impossible.
So, too, Society as a whole. Yet, there are those that crave power over others, or that are so egotistical to believe that they DO know better than the rest of us, believe they should TAKE those reins of Power and compel others to do their bidding under the simple rubric:
We know what is best for you – just give us a try
And yet in their hubris, they forget how History is replete with others who thought and tried the same things – and failed. Often miserably. And more often, didn’t care who they killed in the process.
Progressives always, contra our Founders, wish to aggregate Power into their own hands and at as high a level as possible. They are no different than the other tyrants in History or the present.
