on November 21, 2024
… is from page 73 of F.A. Hayek’s brilliant chapter 3 (“The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization”) of the Definitive Edition (Ronald Hamowy, ed., 2011) of Hayek’s 1960 volume, The Constitution of Liberty:
The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men’s necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims.
DBx: Ponder all that you plan to do today – everything from the mundane, such as eat breakfast, to perhaps the marvelous (say, fly to Paris). How many are the human beings whose efforts today must be exerted and coordinated with each other to make any one of these achievements possible? How many efforts, and how much coordination, are necessary to make your entire day a success? And how many were the past efforts and creativity of humans whose cooperation resulted in the knowledge and infrastructure that contribute no less to your plate of scrambled eggs and sausage than to your jetliner flight across the stormy sea to France?
The surface is easy to see. But this surface vision is misleading. Beneath it and out of sight is an incomprehensibly complex set of human expectations, skills, creativity, and efforts – all coordinated with each other, as well as with you and your plans, chiefly by prices and market signals. It’s too easy for someone to scan the surface and find features of it that he or she dislikes. And it’s equally easy, and oh so gratifying, for that person to demand that these features be changed to better suit his or her tastes and sensibilities. But that surface-scanning person likely has not even a good general idea of why the surface appears as it does, and he or she certainly has no knowledge of all the details and their intricate relationships to each other that make the surface what it is. Nor does he or she, mistaking the surface for the whole, know what will be the bulk of the consequences unleashed by his or her arrogant effort to coercively change those parts of the surface that don’t currently suit that person’s fancy.
