Complexity: Liberty vs Power

We live in a sea of unpredictable complexity.

Every one of us is a unique individual in the vast network of human civilization. We each have our own individual wants, passions, needs, and challenges. We each also face the constant challenge of the unknown.

With modern technology, mankind has never been more connected or had more opportunities. Never before have we had greater access to ideas, content, audiences, or marketplaces.

At the same time, we are constantly bombarded with messages of anxiety and concern about the future of complex systems like the economy, the climate, or the fate of humanity.

This bipolar dynamic of today’s complex world is reflected in studies that show that younger generations are both more optimistic and more fearful about the future than those who came before them. In this series, we will focus on complexity and the role of individuals in the intricate networks that make up mankind.

How do we confidently make decisions in the face of the unknown? What is itself knowable about the future? How has mankind overcome these challenges in the past so civilization can flourish? What are the lies we are told that can demoralize us? How can we combat it so that we can flourish as individuals?

These questions have deep relevance to modern life but are themselves as old as civilization itself. At their core are fundamental questions about the dynamics of liberty and order, freedom and control, human thriving, and human despair.

Understanding complex systems can help us better understand many of the greatest challenges that drive many of the greatest concerns young people have today, from economic concerns about the affordability of owning a house, taking control of our health, to better understanding the sort of future you will inherit.

Understanding complexity also helps us better understand many of the very real problems that younger generations will inherit and what can be done to make a better world for us all.

We are all just individuals in a vast and complex network. But more significant than individuals are the ideas that shape the organization of institutions that make up that network.

We do not have to face the future alone. We have the wisdom and guidance of those who came before us at our fingertips. We can choose to be empowered in the face of the challenges that we face, not victims of our circumstances.

Each of us has a role to play in building a better future for all.

To understand society’s challenges, we must first understand the nature of the individual. This may seem obvious, but we’re constantly told to think about complex problems in a way that focuses on the entire system, often at the expense of the individual people who make up society.

Each of us is born with certain talents, abilities, advantages, and skills. Some may be better at learning in a different way than others. Some may run faster, and some may sing better. As we grow, we develop different skills and talents that allow us to shape the world around us in our own unique ways. It is these differences between us that have allowed for the society that we know to develop.

Some of those differences we did not choose. We’re born into different families, into different nations, into different time periods, and into different circumstances. Some were born with more opportunities than others. You may be shorter or taller than a sibling. Your family may be richer or poorer than a friend. An American is born in a nation with greater material abundance than a child born in Nigeria.

There are many loud voices, particularly in the West today, that view this inequality as the source of our problems. You might have been told to check your privilege and to view any advantages you have as a source of deeper systemic injustice. Of course, this is absurd. Inequality is a natural part of life. Imagine the horrors required to, for example, make everyone equally tall. In his short story, Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut depicts such an egalitarian society at its natural conclusion. A dystopian future where an authoritarian regime horrifically suppresses natural talent to achieve a repulsive egalitarian ideal.

The desire for economic equality would be similarly destructive. History has shown that attempts to redistribute wealth equally have resulted in outcomes just as horrific as those described in Vonnegut’s story. Why? Because it prioritizes a larger societal goal, equality, at the expense of individual motivations and behavior. In doing so, it attempts to replace the complex network of human cooperation with the overly simplistic stated goal, equality.

Any attempt to analyze economic outcomes that begins by looking at the wealth society has already created, such as debates about how to distribute that wealth equally, needs to pay attention to what created that wealth in the first place. It replaces the judgments and motivations of individuals in favor of those in power.

In our next video, we’ll examine how individual action creates the complex networks necessary for a wealthier society.

How can a focus on the individual inform us about what is best for society as a whole?

Well we begin by acknowledging the obvious, society is made up of the connections between individuals, the same way that molecules are make up molecules. What makes understanding the complex relationship between humans distinct from studying how hydrogen and oxygen come together to make up water is the ability of mankind to act individually.

As we’ve already discussed, humans have unique characteristics, including unique desires and unique skills. Some may have a higher desire to work than others. Some may have greater skills than others. For the purpose of understanding society, we look at the actions they take, and how we interact with each other.

When individuals act, we apply means in order to achieve an end. Not all means, however, work to achieve a desired end. If you wish to fly, simply jumping off a roof with not achieve your desired goal. We can fly, however, by purchasing a ticket on a plane.

The ability to fly, however, is available to us only because of a countless number of other people contributing to that process. This includes not just the pilot, but the workers who mined the materials necessary to create the materials the plane is built from, other workers who constructed the parts, engineers that created the designs for every part of the plane, and the individuals who sewed together the seats.

Of course, the idea of flying itself required the genius of the Wright brothers who were first able to achieve air travel.

Even still, every person that played a role in the creation of the aircraft was themselves supported by a network of countless individuals whose labor made it possible for them to drink coffee, eat meals, sleep in a bed, live in a house, or travel to their job. This global, complex, interconnected network functions without seamlessly to give you the ability to achieve your desired end: the ability to fly to destination you desire.

It does so without any central planner, and without any special knowledge on your part. How?

Each step in this complex process involves individuals choosing to act. Even better, their action doesn’t have to be a desire for you to be able to fly. Instead, their own incentives — be it a creative desire to master flight, or simply earning a paycheck — is their own incentive to play their role in this complex process.

That same complex process, in some way, is behind all the goods and services available to us.

So if wealth of society is the byproduct of social cooperation between individuals, what are the conditions that create poverty?