30. Spontaneous Order vs. Intelligent Design

Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone.

-Chuang-tzu (369–286 B.C.)

SOME BELIEVE THAT THE ideal social order can be achieved only by an intelligent designer, while those who disagree contend that a social order evolves spontaneously from those forces of nature that act behind the scene and that conscious effort cannot design. The existence of complex living organisms, economic markets, and language are examples of spontaneous order that no designer could have achieved or imagined. Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species used the term “natural selection” to express the guiding force behind the development of increasingly more complex organisms. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations used “the invisible hand” as a similar metaphor to express the guiding force behind the increased wealth that occurs in a society wherein people act in their own self-interest.

Nature’s regularities appear to follow certain laws of causality that reward or punish each of us following the actions we take. This natural feedback is the “invisible hand” from which complex living structures and highly productive markets evolve.⁵¹ Regardless of the intended goals of social engineers, society will take its course based on the laws of causality that govern the effects of each of our actions. The unrelenting negative feedback we have witnessed following every major scheme engineered by central planners is a warning, that, if unheeded, we can reasonably expect to see the same negative feedback following similar schemes in the future.

Noted evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby describe succinctly the reason why social welfare is harmed by replacing individual decision making with decision making by a central planner:

Significantly, the human mind was intensely selected to evolve mechanisms to evaluate its own welfare, and is so equipped by natural selection to compute and represent its own array of preferences in exquisite and often inarticulable detail. The array of n-dimensional rankings that inhabits our motivational systems is too rich to be communicated to others or represented by them, which is one reason displacing value guided decision making to remote institutions systematically damages social welfare. Under a system of private exchange, this richness need not be communicated or understood by anyone else—its power is harnessed effectively by a simple choice rule built into the human mind: pick the alternative with the highest payoff.⁵²

Every day, six billion human brains are processing information about their outside world, each triggering thousands of emotions and feelings. Through these emotions and feelings we engage the world, make decisions, and act. Emotions are unique to each of us, and while they may be expressed or described, the actual emotional experience cannot be transferred to another. Groups, countries, and companies do not experience emotions, nor can they make decisions—only individuals are capable of that process.⁵³

⁵¹An exhaustive explanation of how a natural feedback system can create biological complexity is made by Richard Dawkins in his masterpiece, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

⁵²Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law,” in Heuristics and the Law, Gerd Gigerenzer and Christoph Engel, eds. Dahlem Workshop Report 94 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

⁵³Methodological individualism is a philosophical method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals. See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), chap. 2: “The Principle of Methodological Individualism,” sect. 4.