This time from Chapter 2 of his masterful, profound, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
“It would be no exaggeration to say that social theory begins with—and has an object only because of—the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design. In some fields this is now universally accepted. Although there was a time when men believed that even language and morals had been ‘invented’ by some genius of the past, everybody recognizes now that they are the outcome of a process of evolution whose results nobody foresaw or designed. But in other fields many people still treat with suspicion the claim that the patterns of interaction of many men can show an order that is of nobody’s deliberate making; in the economic sphere, in particular, critics still pour uncomprehending ridicule on Adam Smith’s expression of the ‘invisible hand’ by which, in the language of his time, he described how man is led ‘to promote an end which was no part of his intentions’.10 If indignant reformers still complain of the chaos of economic affairs, insinuating a complete absence of order, this is partly because they cannot conceive of an order which is not deliberately made, and partly because to them an order means something aiming at concrete purposes which is, as we shall see, what a spontaneous order cannot do.”
Millions of people, going about their daily lives, working, saving, consuming, making choices, unknowingly form an invisible collective organism that solves the problem of the unknowability of the future for us. The kaledic, dark forces “of time and igorance”, as Keynes aptly described them, should ruin us and destroy society. But they don’t. And they don’t precisely thanks to the unplanned forces that emerge from millions, billions, of people living out their lives according to the rules of voluntary conduct. The right conditions are created, and the crystal grows.
Auburn University economist, and Mises U. lecturer, Roger Garrison, compared the superficially improbably flourishing of macroeconomic activity with the flight of a bumblebee. A bumblebee has no business flying so well, given it’s shape, weight, and wing size. Yet it does. Here is a link to Garrison’s 2004 paper with the analogy:
