Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

The concept of spontaneous order, self-organization out of chaos, is the underpinning theory of liberty & Free Markets. It was first postulated in 300 BC by Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, and modernized in the 20th Century by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. When you look into the sky and see an elegantly organized flock of birds, all in intricate synchronization, it illustrates the concept of Emergent Order: those individual birds have no leader, there is no grand top-down design. Life is immensely complicated, and like the newest evolution of computer intelligence, we've found that high-granularity, autonomous decision-making is the most successful strategy for solving complex problems. This makes it almost impossible for fields such as economics to claim legitimacy because those theories are often post hoc narratives of how an event supposedly occured, of which there may be many other narratives that are equally likely, a much more difficult propostion than predicting the weather.

Even though those who try and predict the outcome of chaos are doomed to failure, some humans suffer under the delusion that they have godlike prescience and know-better-n-you. In fact, some say they actually talk to God, while others claim to know what is the-most-good-for-the-most-people. Beware these false prophets in whatever trappings they assume, usually socialist, but people looking for certainty in leadership will also fall prey to the deception. The idea of Emergent Order makes us feel uncomfortable because to accept it is to place yourself at the mercy of chance, that there is no fate, and that luck actually controls your life not you. From that vantage point, all the things you do to succeed is simply buying more lottery tickets: your odds go up but there is certainly no guarantee you'll be anything more than a single successful sperm out of 10s of millions that gave it go.