Form Follows Function

Pride before the fall

The Lord above did warn us, to be wary of our pride.
Now stripped of all our glory, we have nowhere else to hide.
We built a mighty tower, to laud our humanity.
Like so much flaming rubble, it shows only our vanity.

Now we fight, to protect our homes,
in godless places, where the evil freely roams.
A new crusade has begun,
At long last, the fight will be won.

Soldiers of the moon, and the earthen hordes,
meeting our knights with bared souls and drawn swords.
Our strength is not from ourselves, lest we applaud.
We fight and win only from the grace of God.

Take no joy in our warrior skill,
For God commanded, “You shalt not kill.”
But fight we must,
Lest our cities be ground to dust.

And to you all, I say “have no fear,”
for though times are dark, God is near.
Do not fear, what may happen this day,
As our bold knights show us, God’s avenging angels are never far away.

There is Order in Disorder -- Don't Over Manage

Spontaneous Order Theory

Adam Smith's vision of a self-correcting social order which requires little direction and control. the importance of spontaneous processes and the impossibility of predicting the future growth of a social order. The whole of his social philosophy may be described as an assault on the exaggerated claims made for 'reason' and a justification for the view that we must adopt an attitude of humility towards natural processes and "submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instant may not be recognizable, and which will..... often appear unintelligible and irrational." In Hayek's opinion, many of the mistakes of rationalist planning stem from attempts to resist the operation of the basic principles of scarcity, supply and demand and so on, and well-established laws of human behavior. A genuine social science, then, would describe how men adjust to certain inevitable laws and stress how little they can, or need to, control their societies.

In his description of a self-regulating system Hayek's major achievement has been to show that the advantages of decentralized decision-making in a market stem from the fact that this is the only device that man has discovered for coping with the universal facts of ignorance and uncertainty. It is because the social world does not consist of physical objects governed by simple laws of causality, but is a 'kaleidic' world inhabited by individuals with minds, whose the inner recesses are inaccessible to the external observer, that knowledge is not 'fixed' and available to a single person or institution

The justification for individual liberty is then largely instrumental in that the case for freedom "rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends."

The word that Hayek uses to describe a spontaneous market order is catallaxy a catallaxy is a network of many firms and households and has no specific purpose of its own: it is that which results naturally from the interaction of firms and households through the exchange process: "the order of the market rests not on common purposes but on reciprocity; that is, on the reconciliation of different purposes for the mutual benefit of the participants."

When Not to Manage