Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

8 Lessons From A Capitalist Christmas Trip To The Big City.

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Our family made a brief trip to New York City for a completely capitalist Christmas visit. Here are a few things we learned.

The area around the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree is packed with visitors, as are the streets leading up to the Tree, including Fifth and Sixth Avenues nearby. In previous years, we’ve observed spontaneous order emerge in the crowds. People move slowly and politely and there’s no overwhelming crush. This year, the NYPD had erected barricades, parked their imposing vehicles across walking lanes, and were marching around with their weaponry and shouting through bullhorns. The result was chaos and stress.

Lesson 1: Government intervention and the use of coercive force leads to worse results than an unhampered market in every case.

We shopped Fifth Avenue and received excellent service from the personnel in the retail stores, even though they were crowded and heavily shopped. There was one exception: the storefront for a famous brand where my wife received terrible treatment when asking for an exchange of a damaged item she had purchased at that store. She will no longer shop there – competition provides plenty of alternatives – and the famous brand loses the lifetime value of her future purchase stream.

Lesson 2: The consumer is still boss, and customer service is a critical, 365 X 24 promise that can never be broken.

We shopped Madison Avenue on a Sunday, with a different experience than Fifth Avenue: calmer, quieter, less rushed. We found one European fashion store closed in the French manner. It felt like they were missing a commercial opportunity, and making a sacrifice to some other priority.

Lesson 3: Americans are more committed to capitalism than other nations, which will help us in the long run.

Some of our shopping was from a prepared list of gifts, and some was spontaneous. It was instructive and pleasing to find a few occasions when an idea springing from the individual subjective creativity of a clothes designer resonated with the subjective preferences and tastes of my wife in shopping mode. The designer and the shopper become coupled oscillators, and a mutually beneficial exchange takes place, advancing and enriching the capitalist system.

Lesson 4: Spontaneous Order is all around us.

We went to a supper club, where there was a crooner with a band, offering Christmas songs and what the crooning industry calls “classics”: old songs the crooner knows well and with which the audience is familiar. There were two seatings for supper and two shows. The entire evening was meticulously orchestrated, both in the restaurant and on the bandstand. The audience – people of all ages and from all over the country and the world – enjoyed the whole thing immensely and they’ll talk about it for along time with their friends.

Lesson 5: There is a market for traditional entertainment, if you can identify the right recipe. It has ongoing and lasting appeal, even in the world of streaming and digital hip-hop.

We attended a play on Broadway, written by a Netflix-known screenwriter, with a famous Hollywood star in the leading role. The theater, like most on Broadway, was old and decrepit, and lacking in modern entertainment amenities. Nevertheless, it was full, and the experience on offer was exactly as advertised, neither more nor less.

Lesson 6: High quality branded content sells well, even when the packaging is inferior.

We moved around town via walking and Uber. It all worked extremely smoothly. We incurred some “surge pricing” on Uber, which we were happy to pay, and suggested to our driver that the term be changed to “happy for the privilege pricing” or something more mellifluous. All of our Uber drivers were courteous and expert, and the cars clean and comfortable.

Lesson 7: Private transportation options are the best, because consumers determine both price and value.

We exited via Newark Airport, Terminal C. The TSA experience there is horrendous. We had not been yelled at so much, so loudly and so threateningly since second grade. In addition to the constant yelling by TSA employees, we were shoved, constrained, forcibly re-directed and groped, as well as delayed. The people yelling at us were Americans, too, and they’ll probably buy nice gifts for their family and be perfectly nice at the festive table.

Lesson 8: See Lesson 1. And note that people who accept government employment risk being converted into coercive state robots, even at Christmastime.

Will California Save Democracy?

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There is a robust stream of thinking that Democracy has run its useful course and has failed or is on the way to failure.  And California is one of the states where corruption in government, one of the signs of decay in a democracy, is highly developed. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, in 2014, California ranked #2 in number of corruption convictions and #9 in a survey of political reporters to identify the most corrupt of the 50 states. The combination of those two metrics probably puts California at the top of the political corruption league table.

Happily, it is often the case in our dynamic culture that the most pressing problem generates the most energetic search for innovative answers. California, besides being the epicenter of political corruption, is also a cauldron of new ideas. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we find a cluster of exploratory thinking about new and better forms of democracy.

Here are four ways of solving the problem.

The digitization approach.

Out of Y-Combinator comes a new conceptualization called liquid democracy (it would not be acceptable in Silicon Valley if it did not have a cool-sounding and paradigm shifting name). It’s a little bit hard to describe exactly what liquid democracy is, because Silicon Valley speaks in generalizations (“devise a new model to make the current one redundant”). However, there are some interesting elements to the digital exploration of democracy. One is individual sovereignty, implying a return to the Madisonian idea of “We The People” being sovereign, which was never realized. Equality is cryptographically protected so that everyone’s vote is equal and guaranteed. And voting can take place on mobile devices, which should increase participation. Every issue could be voted on, implying that so-called representative politicians will not be able to usurp the role of the people by pursuing their self-interested political careers while pretending to represent their constituents.

Digital technologies have a tendency to develop spontaneously along pathways of their own, especially when they disintermediate authority. The potential is promising.

The restructuring approach.

A non-digital yet no less disruptive idea is to drastically restructure the traditional political institutions. California has 40 elected State Senators and 80 elected Assembly (lower house) members in the legislature. This number hasn’t changed since the first California Constitution, yet the state population has increased from 100,000 to almost 40 million. The resulting representation ratios are, by a massive degree, the worst in the 50 states. The huge electoral districts demand huge advertising and campaigning budgets, opening up the process to the corruption of special interest money that pays for elections in return for favorable legislation from the winners.

The Neighborhood Legislature concept aims to fix this problem by making electoral districts much smaller – 100 times smaller, in fact. They would be neighborhood-sized, hence the name (although it certainly seems that a Silicon Valley naming squad could do a better job).

This is an interesting idea, in that the political districts would now be focused on very local matters. Parties might not matter any more, or, alternatively, there might be hundreds of parties, like, let’s say, the Lower Chinatown Residents Party. Politics would focus on water supply and the price of electricity and the quality of neighborhood schools and the role of the police, rather than on big money issues like climate change.

Eventually, it seems possible that these locally focused political districts might start the drift away from centralization to effective secession or local independence.  Which leads us right to the next idea in Californian Democracy.

The secession approach.

Tim Draper is a venture capitalist who takes a direct path towards new solutions. He has decided that California is ungovernable. Therefore let’s get rid of California. He proposed to break it into 6 states.  California has a direct democracy option, where so-called “initiatives” like Draper’s can collect public signatures to place them on the statewide ballot during major elections. The so-called Six Californias initiative failed to collect the requisite number of signatures to qualify. So Draper has returned with another initiative, this time to split the state into 3 states.

Many supporters of reform believe that smaller political units are more democratic than larger ones. Centralization magnifies the unrestrained power of rule-making bodies, and decentralization tends to make legislatures more responsive to voters. Mr. Draper’s initiative is a step in this direction, and mirrors a tendency towards secession that we have seen in Britain, Catalonia and elsewhere.

The lawsuit approach.

If all else fails, sue. We are a litigious people, so let’s harness our strength. Citizens For Fair Representation is suing the state on behalf of 21 Northern California rural counties, on the grounds that they are inadequately represented in a so-called representative democracy. 11 of the counties share 1 state senator, whereas Los Angeles County has 11 state senators. The result is one-sided legislation that favors the cities and discriminates against the rural counties. The lawsuit aims at a rebalancing so that individual counties have a fairer access to representation at the state level.

The cradle of the next stage of democracy.

These are just four ideas out of many more that have been hatched in California (seasteading is another one, for example). We can take some encouragement in the fact that, although our incompetent, corrupt, generally stupid and always partisan politicians stand resolutely in the way of progress, there are plenty of idea generators who will attempt to find a path to the system that replaces our failed democracy.

Let You Die; Make You Die. The Fate Of The Individual In Single Payer Healthcare.

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You probably agree that the purpose of health care should be at least to keep you alive, and ideally to improve your health and wellbeing. But the designers of single payer healthcare tell us, in their own words, that this is not the case.

Architecting Single Payer Healthcare

Elsewhere at https://centerforindividualism.org, Brittany Hunter has demonstrated the folly and negative consequences of centrally planned healthcare. She points out that F.A. Hayek predicted how bad Obamacare – not in name but in principle – would be for healthcare consumers.

Today, we can shine an even brighter light on the dangers of single payer healthcare, thanks to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who was a leading architect of the ACA, also known as Obamacare. Today, he is an advisor to President Trump on healthcare policy. He describes himself as a “medical ethicist”.

He is clear-eyed about the most significant consequence of the single-payer healthcare system he advocates: when government is paying, healthcare will be rationed. He wrote a revealing article about how he would propose to administer the rationing system: Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions, published in the authoritative medical science magazine The Lancet (www.thelancet.com Vol 373 January 31, 2009).

The Complete Lives System: Have You Earned A Complete Life?

He proposes an allocation principle he calls the Complete Lives System. Briefly, allocation of scarce healthcare will be prioritized for people between the ages of 15 and 40. Prior to age 15, Dr Emanuel believes that society does not have enough invested in that young life, therefore it’s OK to sacrifice it.

“Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfilment requires a complete life.”

 After age 40, according to Dr. Emanuel, people have an insufficient number of “quality-adjusted life years” to contribute to society, and therefore do not merit further investment of scarce healthcare resources.

Dr. Emanuel states:

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated (figure).

 Grading On The Curve.

The priority curve to which the doctor refers is reproduced below. It is exactly as published in The Lancet article, with the addition of the two explanatory overlay panels in blue.

In simple language, if you are aged less than 15, and medical resources must be rationed, the system will let you die. If you are older than 40, in an emergency where medical resources must be allocated, the system will make you die.

Do You Have A Right To Healthcare? Maybe. If You Are In The Favored Group.

We often hear that “Everyone has a right to healthcare.” “How can you deny people healthcare?” Well, Dr. Emanuel has explained how: we’ll pretend to offer healthcare for everyone, then address the unaffordability of that promise through rationing. Let the young die, make the old die, and reserve healthcare for those years when people are working and paying taxes to the government.

Collectivist Healthcare. Don’t Call Us. We’ll Rank You.

All collectivist promises are like that: unaffordable, and requiring government decisions as to who gets what. Individuals in groups that the government favors will gain disproportionately: in this case, taxpayers who are still paying the government money. Those unfortunate individuals without collective support, including infants who don’t yet pay taxes, and the middle-aged and elderly who are in their declining taxpaying years, will be excluded.

That’s one of the consequences of seeing people not as individuals, each of whom has worth, but as members of collectives, which can be ranked in importance by people like Dr. Emanuel.

Technologists Implement What Social Thinkers Can’t Design.

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There is increasing awareness of and dissatisfaction with the attributes of centralized systems. Centralized systems create what Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously highlighted as fragility, the inability of a system to recover from crisis events.

Our political, legal and economic system is Exhibit A. “Democracy promotes centralization and centralization brings fragility”, according to Morten Arisson. Accordingly, many social thinkers make an effort to conceive of social systems that are not centralized and can avoid the systemic risk of crisis and fragility.

Individual Freedom According To Social Thinkers.

Let’s take just one such concept, simply as an example of social thinkers’ conception of non-centralized systems: anarcho-capitalism. This is a theoretical idea of libertarians for a self-organizing social system without central government, free of the state and its interventions. The core idea is conceptually attractive, although anarcho-capitalism an ugly and tortured sounding term. It is also horribly difficult to define, impossible to project into the real world, and a dead end for innovative thinking. There’s no design there.

The capitalism part intends to mean that free markets based on mutually voluntary exchange will provide the operational norm, and the anarcho part intends to mean that there are no rules centrally imposed by, for example, a government. Sounds good, but none of the social thinkers has ever been able to design a pathway to get to the end-state from where we are now, or a credible description of how the system would work if we ever did get to implement it. It’s idealistic, at best.

Individual Freedom as a Technological System.

In contrast, technologists have not only conceived of non-centralized anti-fragile systems, they’ve designed them and built them and now those systems are operational. Distributed computing provides one example. Software exists in the form of components located on a network of computers with no hierarchy. The software components communicate with each other and co-ordinate their actions by passing messages. They can interact with each other to achieve a common goal. Those interactions can be peer-to-peer, i.e. one software component to another without an intermediating function between the two. There is no central direction.

One of the better known distributed computing systems is the distributed ledger system, often known by the term blockchain. A shared ledger is distributed across multiple sites, and a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is generated by transactions. Each transaction is cryptographically confirmed, verified and time-stamped. A peer-to-peer network enables the transactions, which are replicated across network nodes. There is no administrator or centralized data storage.

Technology Implements, Users Improve.

The technical language can be as opaque as sociological language. However, the point is not that the engineers communicate in this new form of language using words that are strange to the ear. (Just like anarcho-capitalism is strange to the ear.)

No, the point is that the engineers can actually design and build this system that they describe so strangely, and operate it and make it relevant in the real world. Blockchain is famously known as the software on which bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are hosted. It is functional, has attracted multiple users, and is operating as designed. Distributed ledgers are expanding, becoming more robust and finding new applications.

Spontaneous Order – Users Discover New Applications.

And, at the same time, blockchain users are discovering that distributed systems can do more for individual freedom than anarcho-capitalist theory. Finance pioneers are aiming at developing entire financial ecosystems on the blockchain, including lending and borrowing, registration and trading of financial instruments, and payment systems, with the entire system existing independently of banks, both central banks and commercial banks. Political pioneers are designing new political systems that can operate on the blockchain, keeping in touch with constituents continuously, seeking their input on all issues at all times, aiming at replacing representative government and periodic voting with “liquid democracy”. Legal pioneers are replacing bill-by-the-hour interpretive legal services with smart contracts – software rather than lawyers, with automated functionality.

All of these initiatives are early experiments and may or may not work well initially. But they do work. And they’ll be improved by users who identify ways to make them work better. They’ll be refined by marketplace activity. A new world is being created by technology and technologists.

Technology Will Improve Our Civilization More Than Social Thinkers Can.

The social thinkers can think conceptually. But they can’t design and can’t implement. That’s why the next phase of civilizational improvement is in the hands of technologists.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Economic Life

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The science of psychology is providing us with greater and greater understanding of the roles stories we tell ourselves play in shaping our opinions and feelings.

Some people tell themselves  stories about wine.

Take how some individuals feel about wine, for example. An oenophile might be told that one bottle of wine is made by an accomplished winemaker from grapes grown in a favored vineyard in Bordeaux and harvested in an exceptionally good year. Its price is $150. The same oenophile is presented with a second wine and told that it is made from grapes that are nothing special, grown in a nondescript location, and sells for $10. The oenophile blind tastes the two wines side-by-side, and declares how much better the $150 Bordeaux tastes. It is subsequently revealed that the two wines are identical products, only their stories are different.

The oenophile had told himself a story about Bordeaux wines and vineyards and winemakers and high prices. He or she had pieced it together from magazine content and YouTube videos and conversations with peers and reading highly informed wine books. The story had become the oenophile’s dominant narrative for a life of wine appreciation, and determined what she found pleasurable and what she valued. Psychology recognizes this process as normal and valid. Stories provide meaning to our opinions and feelings.

We have a choice of stories to tell ourselves about economics.

Consider these two stories people might tell themselves about economic life.

Capitalism is a rigged economic system in which one class, the capitalists, exploits the working classes and the poor because capital generates both high incomes and expanded wealth, while labor is paid poor wages and excluded from capital returns, and the poor can’t escape the poverty trap. The inequality is getting worse, and there’s no hope for improvement until the government does something about it.

Capitalism is the economic system that’s driven by entrepreneurial innovators competing with each other to serve customers in better and better ways. It produces economic growth, innovation across multiple fronts and a rising standard of living for everyone. Everyone is free to try their best and see what they can achieve; there’s no limit to the growth and prosperity that can be achieved and shared.

The individual who internalizes the first story may feel negatively about economic life – frustrated, demotivated, perhaps angry. Maybe that person won’t try to succeed because they feel that the rigged system will prevent them, so why make the attempt. They may adopt anti-social behavior, and self-limiting work habits. They may feel low self-esteem, and be pessimistic about the future. They may join protest groups and sabotage commerce. Or they may simply drift, letting the world leave them behind, and their opportunities erode.

The individual whose internal narrative is infused with the second story may exhibit an entirely different profile. There can be purpose in their life, because they recognize that they can set goals and select their own means to attain them. They can cultivate their empathy for others’ needs, one of the most moral of all the possible applications of their capabilities, and use that skill in the service of others. They know that their individual contribution can be part of a greater pattern of progress and betterment. They can understand the benefits of learning and experimentation. They can see the positives in embracing and overcoming challenges. They can frame their efforts in the warm long-term view of both personal success and shared success – shared with family and community, and with their peers in a firm, or their partners in a venture.

Be sure to choose your story carefully.

Stories drive us. They shape our feelings and attitudes and motivate our behavior. They are a needed source of cogency and narrative. Choosing which story we believe is an individual act. The choice can make a big difference in our lives.

Will we lock ourselves into enjoying only $150 bottles of wine, and missing out on the simple pleasures of less expensive bottlings? Over a lifetime, that’s a huge opportunity cost. There are lots of other pleasures we might be missing out on if we choose to devote too much of our resources to expensive Bordeaux.

Much more importantly, of course, is the question of what story to choose to tell ourselves about economics. If we pick the wrong one, we condemn ourselves to a lifetime of feeling oppressed, conned, frustrated and powerless. If we pick the right one, we open up a lifetime of opportunity, learning, productivity, goal-achievement and rewarding collaboration and voluntary exchange with others.

It would be wise to use careful consideration of the long term when picking the story you choose to believe.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Yuval Noah Harari is 100% Wrong About Individualism

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Yuval Noah Harari is a currently fashionable author and his book Home Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow has generated some buzz among salon intellectuals.

His subtitle suggest some hubris; he can see the future. Yet this is truly a trivial book claiming a portentous message. The author skates over thin slivers of news headlines, pop technology, biology and historical factlets to arrive at a 100% erroneous conclusion.

The end of individualism?

His portentous message is the end of individualism. The author lays out a proposition that authorities such as churches and kings and governments fooled us into believing that we each have individual identities and that life has individual meaning. Why did they do so? Because they could turn these I-believe-in-myself humans into useful workers in a division of labor economy.

But, according to the author, biology tells us that we do not have individual identity, or free will or an individual self. We are merely bundles and sequences of electrical activity and neuronal responses which are directed by some force or other (he doesn’t tell us what) but certainly not by individual free will. There is no individual. We have been fooled into mis-diagnosing our own consciousness.

And now, the institutions who fooled us are going to change their message. They don’t want us to believe we are individuals any more. Because intelligent, but not conscious, software will be preferred to make all decisions in the future – including telling each of us how to think and what to do. Therefore,  it will be useless (or possibly dangerous) to have humans going around thinking they are individuals with free will.

Professor Harari wants us to believe that our existence is meaningless, just a temporary flurry of electrical and biological activity in a repurposable body unit. He replaces the idea of mind and individual consciousness with the idea of an algorithm. We are all just bundles of algorithms.

The augmented, interconnected individual.

But, despite Professor Harari, we do exist. Existence means something, and we experience existence through consciousness and the individual self. The mistake he makes with technology is to believe it will replace human functions. But it won’t. It will augment them. The individual will feel more interconnected, will enjoy more access to knowledge, and will be able to utilize tools to process that knowledge in new and better ways. This technological augmentation of individual capacity, combined with new levels of interconnectivity between people and knowledge and machines, will certainly change the economy and society. But it will lead to a higher level of thriving for individuals rather than to the eclipse of individual experience. Individualism is not a concept thrust upon us by institutions to make us productive. Individualism is the engine of emergent order, and whatever new order emerges from the new era of interconnectivity and intelligent software, individuals will be central to it.

Professor Harari, like many intellectuals, forgets that all of civilization’s advances are the product of individual human behavior, not of collective human design.

No-one Knows How The Economy Works Any More – Except You.

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“We may know how the economy functioned in the past – but we no longer understand how it functions in the present, not to mention the future.”

That’s according to Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. His point is that economists always look backwards to try to develop their models of how the economy works, and they’re always wrong.

Harari used Marx as his dead wrong economist. Marx predicted that capitalism would collapse based on his analysis of history. It didn’t because the new knowledge we all create every day changes the trajectory of the future. No economist can predict anything.

We don’t have to use dead economists as examples, however. Consider the confusion of the supposed economic experts at the Federal Reserve at the current combination of low unemployment and low inflation, which is not supposed to happen. Their models, looking backwards, predict that low unemployment produces high inflation because employers bid up the cost of scarce labor. Maybe in the past, but not today.

Why is inflation low today? Is it because technology makes everything cheaper, better and faster? Is it because global exchange platforms enable shoppers in Seattle to buy low cost products from China? What does it have to do with unlimited credit creation by Central Banks? There are no experts who know.

One reason they don’t know is that they live in a fantasy world rather than a knowledge world. There is no such thing as the economy. It is not a giant system measured by aggregates like GDP and CPI and the unemployment level. Those statistics are entirely fictitious.

Who does know how the economy works today? You do. The economy is about individuals. Every economic event, every exchange, every buy and every sell and every act of saving and investing is an act of one individual collaborating with another individual. You know how the economy works because you know how much work and effort you put into producing value, and how much that value gets you in exchange with a customer, whether that customer is an employer who pays you for your labor and creativity or a buyer who trades dollars for your hard work and creativity and service. You know how much work and saving it takes to buy a house in your neighborhood, and a car from your local dealer. You know whether you prefer to hang on to the dollars you’ve earned (that’s deflation) or spend them bidding on new goods and services (that’s inflation).

You talk to your neighbors and co-workers and fellow entrepreneurs. Between you, there is knowledge about how the economy works today that no-one else has. To use the language of economics, knowledge is widely distributed and highly decentralized. You own it for your individual part of the world, others for theirs. All the knowledge is discrete. Most of it is subjective. It can’t be rolled up into economic aggregates.

What’s the implication? You operate an individual economy. You make exchanges with others in a similar position. You seek new knowledge in order to be of better service to those others, to drive a better exchange, and to improve your own economy. You do more of what works (i.e. creates value recognized by and paid for by others) and less of what doesn’t (i.e. where others don’t share your valuation).

Don’t listen to the “men of system”, the economists, both dead and alive, who think the economy is a machine they can adjust and regulate. Operate your own economy in the secure confidence that you have knowledge that they don’t.

In Uncertain Times, Be Spontaneous!

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These times are so uncertain

There’s a yearning undefined

And people filled with rage

Don Henley

 

Despite affluence, technological advances and all the pleasures of the 21st century, Americans feel uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Traditional institutions are in decline, and the unlimited new opportunities being opened by technology and innovation are not accompanied by any certainty on how to design the social operating system to keep us together.

People seek a theory to give backbone and solidity to the helter-skelter of change. In 1776 it was separation from the British King. In 1861 it was civil war and emancipation. In 1933 it was the New Deal. In 1964 it was the Great Society.  All of these theories were negative – anti-British rule, anti-slavery, anti-unemployment, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination. And they were all foisted on us top-down by authoritarian politicians.

Now we are entering a new phase, one in which the traditional institutions of top-down authoritarianism and hierarchy will be replaced. By what? That’s a scary question for many, but it doesn’t need to be. The transition opens up endless opportunities for individuals who embrace the new age.

There are three elements.

Self-reliance

Self-reliance is the virtue that built America. It is the value at the heart of free market capitalism, which raised the standard of living in the developed world by 3000% in 200 years, enriching everyone.  It motivates every individual to improve their own circumstances, and to collaborate with others to find mutually beneficial ways to boost productivity.

With self-reliance and a free market economy based on the division of labor, there is opportunity for everyone. Seizing opportunity doesn’t require a superior education or special qualifications. It simply requires individuals to identify that specialized division of labor that renders them best or, at least, advantaged at what they do, and to apply that advantage to serving their fellow men with a better offering than exists today.

Self-reliance is an attitude. With it, every individual can rise and thrive.

Spontaneous Order

Spontaneous order is the form of social organization that emerges when self-reliant individuals employ their best efforts to improve their circumstances. They do so in collaboration with their fellows and peers, and without the restraint of central planning by third parties telling them what to do. The most constraining form of central planning lies in government. Large corporations are typically centrally planned and hierarchically organized. Many other institutions have centralized processes and planning.

Spontaneous order does not mean “unplanned”. It’s the planning of individuals – we all plan, and when our plans mesh together, they produce good outcomes for everyone. Since the future is unknowable, some actions we take as a result of our planning will have better outcomes than others. We discard the failures and improve the successes, and generate economic growth and a rising standard of living.  No government or central planning committee is prescient enough to be able to tell us what will work best. We discover what works best, rather than prescribing it. We adjust, we adapt and we constantly move forward.

The technologies of spontaneous order

Today, we live in a time when technology is advancing the cause of self-reliance and spontaneous order. We can identify at least 4 technologies in the vanguard of this development.

Artificial Intelligence is software that can augment individual human performance. It will make knowledge, processes and tools widely available simply in response to a question.

This augmentation opens up new vistas of potential performance for every individual with access to A.I.

Blockchain technology will empower the individual to lead new initiatives and create new personal revenue streams by working peer-to-peer with others and removing the middleman. Individuals may no longer need the centralized institutions and bureaucracies, such as banks, clearing houses and government authorities that are the only ones deemed sufficiently trustworthy to handle transactions. This breakthrough frees individuals to transform how people and businesses co-operate.

Platform Technologies provide a technology base on which multiple individuals and apps can engage in collaborative computing activities, information exchange, transactions and sharing. Platform technologies are making it easier than ever before for individuals to connect with and share information, knowledge and ideas, and to collaborate with others – including precisely matched partners who provide complementary experiences, additive skills and shared passion. The result is a “shared mind” that generates new innovation, rapid performance improvement, economic growth and new opportunities for all.

Cloud Computing: A large number of these platforms operate “in the cloud” where we can all have on demand access to shared networks, servers, storage, applications and services. Every individual can command as much computing power as they need – and more than anyone in history ever had – just by carrying a smartphone.

With A.I., blockchain, platform and cloud, the individual is empowered and connected to resources as never before. With the application of self-reliance, opportunities are unlimited.

So what’s the plan? Be spontaneous. Exercise self-reliance. Utilize technology. Seize opportunity.

Spontaneous Individuals

Spontaneous Careers

Spontaneous University / Spontaneous Education

Spontaneous Corporations

Spontaneous NPO’s

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