Individualism and Spontaneous Orders Econ 640, 2006, by Barry Brownstein

Belief To Explore:  Whether an individual exploring and serving his own ends serves society or conflicts with society?  “Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.” - Hayek

Emerson Does Not Ask Us To Rely On Our Ego but Instead Our “Self”  Judges yourself and others in an endless narrative; What about Me?; Stories it defends; Blames; Outer- comparisons; Hack.  “Because dependency runs so deep in most organizations, employees often have to be encouraged to exercise initiative and explore new areas of competency.” Wheatley

Potential Genius in All, But the Tapestry of your Life is Never Clear  “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  “Greatness lives in each of us - but only in proportion to the degree we don’t concern ourselves with it.”- Terry Warner  “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.” - Emerson

Authentic vs. Inauthentic  Focused on inner attributes –”Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”; “None but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”  Live responsibly from our Self.  Outer attributes- manufactured idea of who we are based on past interpretations, future projections and opinions of others.  Live reactively in order to be acknowledged, rewarded and to blame others.

The Contribution of All To The Spontaneous Order is Important  “We are all Michelangelos.”- Tom Peters  “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul (Self) which also inspires all men.“ – Emerson  We can neither completely understand or control this Self.  Access to this Self is universal and shared by others (although they may not recognize it).  Thus others have the same potential we do and we must respect this to truly be “Self”- reliant.

Free Agency - The End of the “Job”  “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.”  “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

A Common Misunderstanding - The Individual Apart From 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” - Hayek  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…” - Hayek

Humility  “The fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility toward the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by an individual and are indeed greater that individual minds.” – Hayek  “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” -Suzuki

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.”

Limits on 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, individualism also derives its main practical conclusion: its demand for a strict limitation of all coercive power.”  “Society is greater than the individual only so far 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.” - Hayek

 “.... 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.” – Hayek  The rights we take for granted took thousands of years to develop and be codified. A Cautionary Note