I thought the guy was anti-capitalist all around. What's this about?
While the concept of a ‘spontaneous order’ harks back to Hume and Smith, it was Friedrich von Hayek, the doyen of modern day libertarians, who coined the term. Taking his cue from Adam Smith, Hayek used the ‘spontenous order’ idea as a stick with which to beat into submission all ideas in favour of economic planning (socialist planning in particular) and all arguments in favour of an activist state. Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state. If we hardly understand our own preferences and capabilities, how on earth can we hope to aggregate the knowledge of what people want and what societies can produce within some central agency; however well meaning that agency might be? All attempts to centralise this infinite, and unknowable, quantity of knowledge will, inevitably, end up in serfdom. The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices. E.g. whenever the price of balloons goes up, this signals to balloon makers that ‘society’ wants more balloons. Thus they produce more, without any agency or ministry telling them to do so; without any need to concentrate in some building or server all information about people’s balloon preferences, or about the technology of producing balloons. As for Hayek’s intense dislike of the state, trades unions, municipalities, indeed any collective agency, the reason is that he believed that (a) such bodies interfere with the price signals (e.g. through ‘distorting’ taxes) that are society’s only chance to coordinate its activities well and efficiently; and (b) aggregating profoundly local knowledge was the first step toward collectivising decision making for the benefit of the decision makers and at great cost to everyone else.
this guy works at valve. Sounds like spontaneous order due to the patronage of someone who had capital and vision.
The vast majority of what gets discussed under the label "anarchy" - of whatever variety - is just building castles in the air. Any sentence that begins with "In a _______ society" makes me nervous. I've written many such sentences myself but nowadays I try to only use them in characterizing and answering someone else's argument. A rigorous view of the social order should be able to stand on its own without needing to invoke a counterfactual social order to draw contrasts.
Cause-and-effect in the social order is devilishly difficult to establish. In most cases, we have no choice but to admit that we have no idea how things will work out differently if even one variable is changed, let alone many variables.
Rather than speaking of "anarchy", I think we do well to be as specific as possible about the changes we would like to see. Freeing up of specific markets (and precisely what we mean by "freeing") can probably express the majority of the changes we would like to see: freeing the market in money production, freeing the market in financial certification and financial trading, and so on. As Big-Hairy-Audacious-Goals, we would even like to see the market in law freed up, the market in security services and even regional defense services. We understand that things will have to change quite a bit before people will even be able to comprehend at the most basic level how such a world is possible and why all of us - except the Elites - will benefit from these changes.
Some other specific things that we would like to see are political disaggregation (secession), revival of common law principles - such as habeas corpus (contra PATRIOT Act), performance bonds, jury nullification, and so on - and a revival of the concept of patriotism, the general sense of distrust of government and loyalty towards one's community.
But it is my belief that there is a prerequisite to any of this happening. And that is that we need a moral awakening. We need a revival in the popular consciousness that morals matter, in the most general sense. And part and parcel of this reawakening is tackling the juvenile conception of morality as obedience-to-commands, whether divine or Earthly. Until people begin to see that morality is something entirely separate from obedience to commands and that upright (virtuous) living - in at least the most basic sense - is an indispensable component of happiness, no real, lasting changes can occur. But if history is any guide, nothing short of cataclysm will get the wider public to rethink their basic moral stance.
Clayton -
@ Malachi
I don't understand, what's wrong with their organizational structure?
Half-Life is a great game...
But everytime you call Gabe fat, he destroys of a copy of Episode 3.
@ Clayton -
I disagree with you about the inefficacy of saying "In an X society", as we can perform basic comparisons such as "With tariff N in land X, good P will be higher in price than in land Y, which enforces no such tariff or any for that matter". This is an uncontroversial statement I would think. But you're right however, that when largescale changes in the political economy take place such as patent abolition or removal of all regulations, we can't know what kind of institutions are going to emerge. Many of these manipulations of political economy are built off of each other or cancel each other out, creating unique institutions only in combination or struggle with each other, but we can know which types aren't going to emerge, which is really all the "In an X society"-people are trying to do. If they're trying to do more, they're painting pictures. Is that what you were saying in the first place?
Secondly, left- and right- anarchism are ultimately distinguished by a major characteristic: property norms. They could live in peaceful adjacency of the leftists are willing to respect that and not attack out of jealousy or justice for the oppressed workers, but that is another area of anarchy which we can make a priori statements about.
On a somewhat unrelated note, it seems that the character of the people more than anything will define the shape of society, whether they be under autocratic rule or truly free. A group of truly free people whose values are only those of consumerism, short-sightedness, libertinism and unoriginality will have their society quickly degenerate into a smoldering pile of hot fecal. There are certain things which theories of political economy and economics just cannot touch, like the integrity of a people and the quality of their culture.
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger