In Play
The lesson I have to teach is this:
Leave all creative energies uninhibited.
Merely organize society to act in harmony with
this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove
all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative
know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men
and women will respond to the Invisible Hand.
This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly
simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation
as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical
as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
“I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
A turkey buzzard hangs motionless over the farm.
Leonard Read, back in the 50’s wrote a monologue
as if it were written by a wooden pencil telling the
story of its genealogy to show what-it-takes to make
a pencil and demonstrate how beyond description.
and explanation and because & affect the presence
of a pencil is.
So many factors, so many factories. Can’t put a
finger on the beginnings or point to the progenitor:
infinite causality, this here pencil is an “emerging
phenomenon” as biologists like to say and also
some economists.
It’s like wondering who the first person was to tie
a kerchief around a dog’s neck. Can’t do it. Origins
are uncanny. Mythic. Whatever you decide accounts
for this or that (begets, starts up, initiates): is a fiction.
A big bang? Ok. or say some turtle stirs up the mud,
a butterfly flaps in
me to take a literature course. Say where IT all started
then. In the beginnings. It’s arbitrary. If enough agree:
a convention & convenient.
.
None of you would be entertaining these notions right
be-here-now if it weren’t for a specific bullet in an
envelope in
could get the bullet and put it in your hand: a necessary
& insufficient explanation for the cost of your particular
efficient attention deficit at this moment.
'spontaneous order': the "result of human action,
but not the execution of any human design."
There’s a difference. My design on the one hand. Human
Design on the other hand. Both hands contributing to
emerging and ongoing spontaneous order we call chaos
these days, an invisible handsomeness breaking in like
a thunderbolt, like an immaculate conception, like the
collapse of buildings, banks, flying machines and
credit for college education.
Many economic classic liberals, such as Hayek, have
argued that market economies are creative of a
spontaneous order - "a more efficient allocation of
societal resources than any design could achieve.
The concept of spontaneous order is closely related
with modern game studies. As early as in the 1940s,
historian Johan Huizinga wrote that "in myth and ritual
the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their
origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and
art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the
primeval soil of play".
Following on this in his book The Fatal Conceit, Hayek
notably wrote that "A game is indeed a clear instance of
a process wherein obedience to common rules by elements
pursuing different and even conflicting purposes results in
overall order". (WikiP : “spontaneous order”)
SUSTAINABILITY on the one hand
(call it “the invisible hand”) and then
Sustainability Club on the other hand
(visible hand) and do those 2 sustain
abilities just get along?
“Spontaneous Order” does
its spontaneous orderly thing
regardless of my order me
ordering the constraints I
lay down, the slack I permit,
tweak and twiddle, bail out
and arrest, grant AP credit
or withhold: the system self-
corrects accordingly like
weather & communication:
always state of the art. Can’t
screw IT up—however I adjust,
rationalize, reason, recommend,
rectify, ratchet up for excellence,
confer, condone, collaborate,
calibrate, criticize: perfect as
far as Spontaneous Order is
concerned. Sovereign & Just
Right whether I like it or not,
damnit.
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