presentation copyright ©1997, 1998 by Barry and Deborah Brownstein Individualism, Rationality, Innovation and Spontaneous Orders

The Contribution of All To The Spontaneous Order is Important “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide…that...no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”- Emerson “We are all Michelangelos.”- Tom Peters “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” - Jerry Garcia

The End of the Job and the Rise of Networks “organizations will be critically important in the world, but as organizers, not employers.” “the needs of a postindustrial society are for people who can be independent, entrepreneurial producers…creative people with initiative, self- starters, people who know how to take responsibility, exercise judgment, make decisions for themselves.” ‘workers need to develop a mindset…that is more of an external vendor than a traditional employee.”

A Common Misunderstanding - The Individual Vs. Society.…”the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on) the assumption of the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.”-Hayek “Every being in nature has its existence so connected with other beings that if set apart from them it would instantly perish.”- Emerson

True And False Individualism “ is a product of an acute consciousness of the limitations of the individual mind which induces an attitude of humility toward the impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know” “ is the product of an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason and of a consequent contempt for anything which has not been consciously designed by it or is not fully intelligible to it.”

True and False Individualism an “antirationalistic approach, which regards man not as highly rational and intelligent but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process “… “leads to the conclusion that social processes can be made to serve human ends only if they are subjected to the control of individual human reason, and thus lead directly to socialism…”

Advantages of ‘True Individualism’ “a system under which bad men can do least harm” “a social system which does not depend on its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they are.” “makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity” allows for voluntary collaboration of individuals “freedom to all instead of restricting it…to the “good and the wise.”

Advantages Continued uses dispersed knowledge encourages and values humility and receptiveness to new ideas allows for redundant pathways instead of a centralized filter allows for faster innovation since discovery is a decentralized process of trial and error “if left free, men will often achieve more than individual human reason could design or foresee.”

What Are Some Problems With Coercion? “From the awareness of the limitations of individual knowledge and from the fact that no person or small group of persons can know all that is known to somebody” “(the need) to find a set of institutions by which man could be induced, by his own choice and from motives which determined his ordinary conduct, to contribute as much as possible to the needs of all others; and their discovery was that the system of private property did provide such inducements to a much greater extent than had yet been understood.” the ability to coerce corrupts

A Cautionary Note “… Society is greater than the individual only so far as as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the power of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”

“....while it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.” A Cautionary Note Part ll