J35 - Tracing The Theory

Based on the last journal, you might expect this journal to be dealing with some depressing aspect of human nature and the human experience. And, indeed, I have another journal draft just a page-break away that discusses school shootings that will be forthcoming soon. [I’m also working on a journal that applies the idea of the intellectual division of labor to education (which might end up being a supplemental piece), a journal on “the Singularity” that the AI community anticipates and how the limitations of the human mind shape that debate, and a supplemental post on relationships between teachers and students. I should also write something about humanity and comedy, so as to address Noah’s topic, but I’m awaiting inspiration there.] However, before we get to that, I wanted to trace out my theory of being human. While I believe it is implicit through my work thus far, I want to explicate it a bit and put it in order so that I can properly organize my final product. I’m going to begin clarifying my concepts here in this journal, so it might not comport perfectly to the rest of my past writings.

Here, on this site, I have stressed that what makes human beings different is our reason. I have usually described this reason as man’s ability to imagine, choose, and act rationally for the attainment of ends. I have also said that this reason is inseparably tied to the phenomenon of society, and I have mentioned that the idea of reason throughout the history of thought is one of a relational concept. I want to clarify this here, bring all of these concepts together. I will then proceed to step-by-step trace my theory of being human from this central idea of reason in ever-widening circles to capture the full nature and experience of man (as much as I’m able).

I think that what really distinguishes human beings from all other creatures is our imaginations, our ability to see things unseen, our capacity to invent and design and creatively problem solve. And I think that reason is, perhaps, merely the ability to follow a causal chain out of sight. That is, to abstract from the here-and-now and think through chains of reasoning to foresee the effects of present action, or to see what present action is required to attain certain future effects. To see what is unseen, of course, requires imagination. A dog can know that sitting in response to a command will likely result in a treat. But he does not wonder why. He does not trace the causal chain beyond the present moment. He can’t. One may say that he doesn’t have the context or higher reasoning necessary to understand that we are training him to behave in certain ways so as to be more comfortable having him around, etc., but really he just can’t imagine it. He cannot see what is unseen. Human beings can conceptualize phenomenon beyond our experience and reduce complex phenomenon to simpler relationships that can be subjected to logical manipulation and lead to greater understanding. We can imagine a triangle as an abstract concept, rather than as the triangular shape before us. And, more significantly for economics, man can imagine alternative future states that will bring him different levels of satisfaction. All animals do what they think is best for themselves; that very base rational action is not unique to humans. Deciding what is best for us, that is unique to us. Animals live in the moment and respond to what is seen; humans see what is unseen and act to bring it into sight. So imagination sets us apart. Causal relationships, abstract concepts, true phenomenon...these all exist whether we recognize and understand them or not. But we need imagination to see them, and only we possess this imagination.

The most fundamental and significant manifestation of this imagination-enabled reason is the recognition of the benefits of the division of labor. As I explained in...some journal or another, two elements lead to the formation and maintenance of society: the greater productivity of the division of labor, and the recognition of this fact. The greater productivity of the division of labor is a law of nature and logic, embodied most famously in the Ricardian law of comparative cost, and most completely in Mises’s law of association. But man alone, out of all the creatures on the Earth, recognized this law and took advantage of it. It seems obvious to us, now, to see the benefits of the division of labor. Actually, given the current popular policies of many governments throughout the world, this may not be true. But, even if all humans understood comparative advantage, such understanding would still be a very rare phenomenon. It was a tremendously difficult chain of reasoning to grasp, and perhaps the greatest feat of mankind. It certainly distinguishes us, and has allowed us to further distinguish ourselves, from the other inhabitants of our planet.

The tremendous benefits of the division of labor are realized through the development of a market economy. For the market to function effectively and generate increased wealth for its participants, it requires an atmosphere of relative peace and a respect for property rights. To encourage these elements, other social institutions are developed, such as law and religion and family. Additionally, as the division of labor intensifies and expands, each individual’s role becomes more specialized. The individual becomes one-sided, highly skilled in one task and rather helpless in all the others. He becomes more and more a part of the whole. At the same time, an intensifying and expanding division of labor indicates capital accumulation and advanced production processes, which means that there is an increased amount of wealth available to each individual with which the individual may attain his own subjective ends. That is, man becomes more and more able to express his individuality and shape his environment to suit his preferences and desires better. There’s an interesting tension here that is, in fact, no tension, but it should be explained more in the final product. Additionally, any intensification or expansion of the division of labor beyond the most basic level requires a medium of exchange, and eventually a common commodity money, which makes possible the rational action of man and the universe-altering flourishment of civilization. Therefore, I want my final product to include a discussion of the price system [and, new to this project, a discussion of the structure of production and its significance) and the relationship between economic calculation and human action. 

It cannot be forgotten, in all this talk of reason and imagination and society and markets, what man’s reality is. Man lives in a world of ever-present scarcity. There are simply not enough means to be utilized for the attainment of every end an individual desires. Indeed, the human mind is incapable of even imagining a contrary state of affairs. The purpose of reason, and society, and the market, is to aid man in his struggle against the scarcity he faces. They are all tools for the satisfaction of his wants. But, as is true of all actions of man living in a world of scarcity, every choice necessarily involves a renunciation. To choose some ends, such as the increased material wealth generated by an advanced division of labor, means that some other ends, such as the ability to yield to one’s carnal and violent impulses, must be abandoned. Moreover, while the division of labor and society, over time, yield unmatched benefits for everyone, in the short run there is a temptation to disregard its required norms of conduct and to act outside of the market, i.e., through the use of force, to increase one’s personal wealth and satisfaction at the expense of others. This temptation is also supported by the game-theory dilemma wherein one individual’s disregard of social norms is not enough to really impact the flow of benefits from society, but if everyone disregarded these norms the society would collapse. So, there are choices, difficult choices, that need to be made in order to live in a society, and these choices need to be confronted and reaffirmed daily. Sometimes, the tradeoff is not worth it for the individual, and he descends into a fit of anti-social behavior. This can take the form of just being nasty to the people around you, to hurting people through private crime, to the institution of predatory governments. More fundamentally, this struggle to choose social over anti-social behavior is something that we all go through all the time, and it is significant in that it has effects on other people as well as ourselves. That is, choosing between ice cream and cookies for dessert does contribute to the demands for each product in the market nexus, but for the most part its effect is personal. Choosing between peaceful or violent resolution of a disagreement, on the other hand, can have implications for the entire social fabric which sustains the lives and livelihoods of every human being. An examination of this dilemma and the consequences of the choices made must be included in my theory of being human.

Additionally, while humans are unique in that we shape our environments to suit ourselves better, we are still products of our environment. We start from the world we find ourselves in, and make our valuations and choices and plans based on the data currently available to us. The satisfaction of some wants leads to the development of new wants. The changing environment around us changes the nature of some of our wants. As basic survival becomes more assured, less energy and focus need be paid to finding food and building shelter, leaving more energy for the attainment of higher ends, such as developing medications and inventing new therapies. We find ourselves in a world where, based on the level of capital accumulation we’ve achieved, 16-year-olds cultivate their efforts to obtaining a driver’s license and getting a car. We find ourselves in a world where, based on the advanced division of labor and the material wealth it creates, people are often more concerned with the quality of their relationships than almost anything else. So much of being human is simply adapting to the world we find ourselves in, a product of other men, and our attempt to change it for ourselves. But we ourselves are products of the world we’ve built. I might even argue that we’ve escaped evolution, in that now we turn to technology to equip us to face and conquer whatever environment we find ourselves in. And this world we’ve created, a product of the fact that we shape the world to suit ourselves rather than shape ourselves to suit the world, has in turn shaped us. We have recently, through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, reached a level of cognition and progress and advancement and scholarship and production never before even imagined. And as our environment has changed, so have we. Less effort need be spent on maintaining our physical constitution; the preeminence of the mind is one of the distinguishing characteristic of our age. We now love, because we have that luxury to create such connections with other people. We are a gentler race now, civilized by civilization itself. This phenomenon must be incorporated into a theory of being human.

Finally, I really want to draw in the idea of education. What is education’s purpose, if not to prepare us for our (human) lives? So, I think that the idea of education is very much wrapped up in the question of what do we want to be? What do we want the world to look like, and what role do we want to play in that world, and what must be done to bring this envisioned world into reality? Whatever we teach our kids reflects the vision of the future that we have for them. But, this necessarily puts us into conflict with the vision of the future that they have for themselves. And, furthermore, I think that education is a uniquely human phenomenon and that we can incorporate so much of human nature and human experience into a truly human education. “The method of schooling is its only real content.” What lessons from the market and society and world we’ve built will be incorporate into our education of the next generation of our species, who we’ve essentially built this world for? This is still fuzzy for me, and maybe instead of trying to fit education into my theory of being human piece I should just try to fit some of my theory of being human into my education piece. But, as mentioned above, I’m playing with the idea of how the theory of the intellectual division of labor could apply to education, and I’m thinking about the type of relationships through which education can occur successfully. In other words, I think I see a lot of connections between my theory of being human and my theory of education. Like, the schooling system represents the height of mankind’s conceit in designing the future. But education represents man’s acknowledgements of his shortcomings and his hope for a future that is not only unseen, but which he will never personally see. In that sense, then, I think it might just represent the very essence of humanity. 

So, my final product will pretty much follow the path set forth above, but with more explanation and clarity and development. Hopefully it's clear how each step considered necessarily leads to the next one. The final product will make that integration more obvious. Then, if I am so inclined, I will attempt to briefly show how all the other EMC2 projects are related to this theory of mine. My hope is that I can give my students something to help them understand the world better, and their role in it.

J34 - Plans For Moving Forward

With the completion of this Journal, I will have written and published more than 76,000 words on this website over the past nine months. This sum is undoubtedly more than what was required of me over the course of my entire undergraduate career. This colossal feat, which even someone as prolific as I can be very proud of, along with the fact that the end of the year is bearing down on me with increasing speed, leads me to consider what the rest of the year and the end of this project will look like for me. I have enough base material, I believe, to support a final product, and I have barely enough time, I believe, to complete one if I start right now. So, I want this journal to serve as a look ahead and as a way for me to think through the path ahead of me.

First, I want to list out the limitations on my time that will inhibit my efforts to create a final product. Looking at my law school obligations, I have a number of big research papers (essentially academic journal articles) due this semester, one related to the Court of Appeals, one about Higher Education Law, and one about Judicial Language and Environmentalism. If I sit down and just do them, they shouldn’t take a tremendous amount of time, but it will take some time to find such opportunities. You see, I work best with large blocks of time. So, I could probably bang out the Court of Appeals paper in two 12-hour sessions. But if I only get 3-hour blocks in which to work, it would probably take me far more than eight of them to do the same work. So, for all these papers, and for my final product, I will need some large swaths of free time. This means that whenever these opportunities arise, there will be a lot of competition for them. Additionally, I’m working as a Research Assistant this semester to Professor Bonventre, and so I’ll need to find time to subedit and redline two of his papers this semester, too. It feels like a tremendous amount of work ahead of me, and it is, but I know from experience that it is possible. Still, in considering my plans for the end of the year, these other obligations must be kept in mind if I want to be at all realistic.

Second, I want to explain where I see the rest of my project going for the rest of the year. Because while I’m working on this final product, I still have 16 more journals to write, as well as my supplementary postings (two supplements for every three journals). The EMC2 kids are required to write 50 journals for their projects. Technically, this will be my 57th posting, but only my 34th journal. I’ve relaxed the standardized curriculum for at least my own students, and I’ve taken advantage of this flexibility to pretty much stop doing SDAs in my own project, but journals have always been my own feature of the course, and I would be remiss if I didn’t meet the magic number. Now, I think that the core of my theory has already been sketched out in my 76,000 words, especially since my topic change and the more focused journals which have accompanied it. Reading some of my most recent journals about morality and education, which were so long as to necessarily brush upon numerous other topics, I caught glimpses of an integrated theory present. Which tells me that my Theory of Being Human does exist, but I think it needs a lot of refinement and elucidation and extrapolation. This will be a task for my final product. But, my point is that the core of my theory exists, and therefore work on the final product can begin. But there must be, and is, other issues that can be addressed in my remaining journals. Thus far, my project has focused pretty heavily on reason and economics and the glories of the human mind. I think that, for the remainder of my project, I want to explore the darker, more primal, elements of humanity. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Love is not an entirely rational phenomenon, I think [in the strict sense of the word rational]. And yet it is one the defining experiences of the human life and something that almost everyone strives after. It deserves to be addressed, I think. But yesterday was also a day during which yet another school shooting occurred. For all this talk of reason and man’s ability to build a better world, it is undeniable that we still live in a very troubled world, and that man can easily tend towards depravity as well as sublimity. This, too, must be addressed by any proper theory of being human.

I have written before, in my Journal on Hurricanes and the Function of Prices, of the depression that can often accompany an understanding of economic problems. I wrote there that I have, for the most part, escaped this depression. This is not entirely true. I have not escaped so much as I every day fight it off. Because I, too, better even then my already-cynical economics students, see how society is sweeping towards the abyss. The layman believes that society is engaged in constant, assured, progressive advancement. It is left to the discerning economist (or historian or philosopher) to see the truth: that there is progress, and everywhere a rejection of it. There is Uber, and anti-Uber legislation. There is cryptocurrency, and calls for its banning. There is a right to free speech, and riots on college campuses that make dialogue impossible. There are scientific and philosophic advancements in books and articles published daily, and a shocking lack of interest in them. This is an interesting problem. It’s not exactly that society is finding it difficult to progress; society is blatantly hostile to progress. The reason for this is not all that mysterious, to the discerning economist. I see it, I know how it could be fixed, but I find myself powerless to do so. And I know I’m not alone in this. Mises, in his memoirs, wrote about the hopelessness that overcame so many of the great minds in Europe before World War I as they foresaw the calamity that was coming. Mises himself experienced this despair: “From time to time I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical fruit and point policy in the right direction….I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.”

I have striven, in my academic work, to always maintain a positive attitude. I present the truth, as I see it. I don’t really discuss the theories of others. I operate under certain assumptions that not all of my readers may agree with because I don’t want to muddy my work with quarreling or give my opponents too much space in my own papers. I do answer their claims, of course, but always indirectly, through a positive presentation of my own arguments or a clarification of the issue. Additionally, while it is no secret that I am an anarchist and a student of the Austrian School of Economics, I’ve never tried to explicitly convert any of my students to my view of things. I answer questions honestly, and that can quickly reveal some of my more unpopular views, but I don’t present these views for the purpose of making them my audience’s. I remain committed to always presenting the truth, but in my students and colleagues I only encourage an ability to recognize error. It is my hope that truth will speak for itself, if people can recognize it. It is not my job to obnoxiously force my views on everyone else, much less the people I have influence over. 

I don’t know if this positive attitude is right or wrong, effective or ineffective. I suppose there is still some part of me that believes that people can be good and rational and that there is hope for humanity. Other parts of me believe the opposite. But I don’t know that I could have operated any other way. I made a choice, very explicitly, many years ago, to be positive. I don’t want to spend my time refuting old fallacies and arguing with people. I want to build something better and think progressively. Yes, I, like every other economist, have offered my own refutation of the minimum wage. But, for the most part, I don’t see my work as contributing to a debate, but as contributing to a climb towards something better. And I think that, if it was anything else, I wouldn’t be nearly as prolific and clear-thinking and effective and influential as I am. I think that if I succumbed to the temptation to brawl in the mud with everyone else, I would never make any theoretical advancements. But, more than that, I don’t know that I would be able to escape the intellectual’s depression, discussed above, if every day I dealt only with the ignorance and errors of others. 

So, for the most part, I prefer to talk about the market rather than the government. I prefer to talk about education, rather than schools. I prefer to talk about reason rather than violence. I prefer to talk about ideas rather than the messiness of real life. This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the government, the schools, the violence, or the messiness, that I don’t recognize their significance and see how they influence the issues I’m addressing. I am fully cognizant of the fact that there's always another side to the coin, and I'm often just as familiar with that other side.  I just can’t bring myself to talk about evil all day long instead of good. I think this tendency of mine has been evident throughout my project. And I think that, if I’m going to address the darker parts of humanity, I need to change this habit. I need to consider and discuss the evils of society explicitly. And I’m not exactly looking forward to that, to be honest. But I hope to find a way to do so that manages to maintain some semblance of a positive attitude, or at least keeps me from crying myself to sleep every night. However, I can’t choose positivity over truth. So dark journals lay ahead.

Finally, what will my final product actually be? It’s going to be a writing piece, obviously. I’m actually going to be working on two pieces simultaneously. One I’ve already started, on education. This has been a key issue for me for a very long time, and I’ve done a lot of reading and writing on the subject. EMC2 itself a product of this thinking of mine, and being more involved with the program this year, as well as Jonah’s project, has inspired me to fully elucidate my full philosophy of education. And, depending on if I have time, I’ll try to integrate this philosophy into a narrative of my experience with EMC2. That will be a pretty significant piece. The other piece will, of course, be my theory of being human. As I said above, I believe the core of the theory has already been fleshed out, to be supplemented by the remaining journals, but it requires much refinement and integration. I want this piece to serve as the first part of a book that I might put together over the summer or next year, wherein I apply the theory to various issues and topics. The book might be called Purpose: A Theory of Being Human. Together, I expect the two pieces to exceed 30,000 words, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a way to put the two together into a grander project. I had a flash of insight that this might be possible, but the thought was gone as soon as it came, so I’ll have to wait and see if it returns while I work on the two. Regardless, both of these pieces are extremely important to me, and I hope I can do them justice.

J33 - Manifesto on Humility

*This journal came out much less elegantly than it appeared in my head, but hopefully the delicate point I'm trying to make will still find its way through the verbosity.*

In my last journal, I discussed (somewhat briefly) the importance of humility in the learning process. I explained that to learn anything new requires an implicit admission that one had previously been wrong in his or her understanding of a phenomenon. We all have our theory of the universe and how it works, and learning is a series of revisions to this theory, rendering it more complete and more correct through exposure of our beliefs to the external world and our interactions with the theories of others. This process, of learning, involving a low level of humility as it does, is rather easy for many people and comes to us naturally, as we are frequently exposed to new information and desire to gain more knowledge such that we may apply a more correct understanding of the world in the pursuit of our chosen ends. However, a pattern that I’ve noticed is that the less frequently one revises one’s theory, the harder it is for one to do so. That is, someone who is constantly revising their understanding of the world is obviously quite aware of their ignorance, and are regularly practicing the process of learning. Others, who have reached a level of preeminence in certain fields of knowledge and who have accumulated vast amounts of experience under their belts, are less likely to admit that they are wrong and revise their understandings. Children for example, are constantly learning, because everything is new to them, and they are eager to do so. Older college professors, on the other hand, are rarely learning, and have, in fact, developed a level of hubris that makes learning far more difficult for them. They are almost certain to not admit their mistake in the face of a new, better theory, and throughout history have tried to suppress many of the innovations in their fields because they believed that they couldn’t possibly be wrong.

I also discussed in my last journal a particular way of viewing the various theories of the world that different people hold. There is a tendency in many people to view the world in black and white, in absolutes. Assuming that there is truth in the world, that X does mean X and that the universe is subject to certain laws which are comprehensible, then there is, in theory, one correct and complete theory of everything. Many people believe this much. But then many people go on to assume that there is this one theory (often subconsciously their own), and that all the other theories are simply wrong. This is true, to some extent, but it misses something important. Not all wrong theories are equally wrong. There is a scale, a spectrum, upon which different theories may be ranged and determined to be more correct or less correct, more complete or less complete. It’s not so much that all of these theories are wrong, but that they are all right to different degrees. Viewing the state of knowledge in this way does two things: First, it helps one see that their theory, while seemingly the most correct and complete, may not be totally correct and complete. Being closest to the destination does not at all mean that you’ve reached the destination. There is, therefore, a possibility that one’s understanding might be improved. Second, it allows us to see value in other people’s theories. Just because someone is wrong about something doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything. Indeed, they could be less right than you in their explanation of one phenomenon and more right than you in another phenomenon. Therefore, their arguments should not be discounted outright. 

[Note that no one thinks that they’re wrong in their beliefs. Bring wrong in one’s understanding of the world is extremely unhelpful, and anyone who consciously found themselves in such a position would seek to rectify the situation with haste. And yet, despite this confidence, everyone holds a slightly different theory. This is because everyone has different knowledge and different experiences and different minds. My point, however, is that all of these people live in the world of reality and yet still somehow believe what they believe, even though what they believe is probably wrong, so it seems that there must be something about each of their theories that makes some sort of sense. The ideas of primitive peoples, such as the idea that dancing to the rain god would help the crops grow, may not be reasonable in light of our present state of knowledge, but they were certainly rational in light of the primitive world-view. Similarly, today, there is a basis for every theory, an argument that can be made in support of every proposition. This doesn’t mean that everyone is right or that there is no objective truth, merely that disregarding another person’s conclusions without due consideration seems like a dangerous practice when that person is just as certain in their conclusions as you are in yours. If you think the resolution of some issue upon which many great minds have debated is obvious or “clear,” then you haven’t thought enough about the issue. If there is any disagreement on a subject, then it is not clear, and a conscientious scholar should be mindful of that fact.]

Finally, I also explained in my last journal the process by which knowledge and understanding is advanced, through argumentation and analysis among a community of intellectuals. I define an argument as a defense of a proposition (a truth-claim), using accepted premises to support a more controversial conclusion, and I define analysis as an attack on a proposition, breaking down an argument to examine the efficacy of its defense. I also distinguish between argument, the purpose of which is merely to support a truth-claim, and rhetoric, the purpose of which is to convince another to accept a truth-claim. Rhetoric is a tool which can be successful even if the proposition it advances is wrong, as humans are easily swayed by half-truths told with confidence. Argument, though, is where the real thinking and convincing happens, because it is argument which will determine whether a proposition is true or not. The goal of a research project or scholarly disquisition, therefore, is to build and present an argument, not necessarily to convince others of the correctness of one’s proposition. This is okay because in the scholarly community, at least theoretically, others will be looking for new propositions to contribute to their learning and will, as scholars, be more convinced by argument than by rhetoric. That’s how academia works: everyone advances their own theory, and one walks among them, analyzing each to see which are the most correct. [There is also the consideration of willingness to learn. Rhetoric can certainly be employed to manipulate a crowd, but true learning requires an internal motivation which implies that the student will have come searching for answers, and thus be better served by a strong argument rather than by empty rhetoric.] The task of an intellectual, therefore, in his or her effort to improve the state of knowledge in his or her field, is merely to offer argument and analysis in support of or in criticism of various propositions and theories.

Something that I’d like to discuss here that was not mentioned in my previous journal is the Hayekian idea of the Pretense of Knowledge. “The Pretense of Knowledge” is the name of a speech that Hayek gave when he won the Nobel Prize, which presented and embellished on part of his theory known as the Knowledge Problem. The Knowledge Problem is Hayek’s main argument against socialism. He asserts that central planners would fail utterly at managing the economy because they would be incapable of possessing all of the necessary information. They wouldn’t know what every individual needed or wanted, and they wouldn’t know the best processes for producing all the goods and services, and they wouldn’t know how to innovate at all or adopt new practices developed by others. The market, on the other hand, through market prices, provides an incentive for everyone in the economy to contribute their own individual knowledge to the social nexus of social organization and the prices provide a means of communication for the essentials of this distributed knowledge to be made known to everyone else in the economy. Hayek’s argument, therefore, was essentially that one group of people couldn’t possibly know everything, so we need a market economy to provide a means for all knowledge to be utilized effectively.

[This idea of distributed knowledge employed harmoniously by a free market is best illustrated by the short essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read, where a pencil traces his genealogy as a demonstration that not a single person in the world knows how to make a pencil from scratch.]

But the Pretense of Knowledge, I think, questions even more than this. This speech attacked the intellectuals who thought that they knew enough to fix the problems of the world. “What do we fix?” asks Hayek. “And how?” “And who are you to decide?” He mentions the truth about statistics that escapes almost everyone: statistics tell us nothing about the particular case. All that we know is that this case is a member of a class about which we have some knowledge of the outcomes of the entire class. Furthermore, the only constant in human affairs is the presence of change; therefore, statistics about past human phenomenon really can’t tell us anything certain about the future, even if the statistic in question is 100%. Two recent examples are the Patriots’ Super Bowl win over the Falcons (2017) after going into the third quarter down by 18 points, and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election after some pollsters put his chances of winning at 2%. 

Anyway, Hayek’s main point was to caution his fellow intellectuals about believing that they knew best, not just for themselves but for everyone else. “The curious task of economics,” he said, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” He stressed throughout his life that human beings are not and cannot be omniscient gods, capable of designing a new world out of nothing but their own ideas. Progress emerges, Hayek stressed, out of the cooperation of millions in the division of labor, not through the planning of government bureaucrats, as smart as they may be, because these bureaucrats don’t know everything and there is incredible danger in pretending that they do. 

[In his last book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek even argues that due to the inherent limitations of the human mind, we cannot even be sure that our rational conception of certain systems (like ethics) is correct because the human mind cannot know what it cannot know and cannot see what it has not developed to be able to see (like complex social phenomenon).]

I said in my last journal that people learn by doing, which is a way of saying that people improve through practice, which is a way of saying that people fail before they get better. People learn from failure. Learning is a series of corrections, which implies a series of errors needing correcting. This process is the same for everyone; there is no shame in it. Indeed, the more one fails, the more one knows, and the better they become. In addiction-recovery circles, they say that one must admit that he or she has a problem before they can be helped. In the same way, one must admit that they might not know something in order to learn. One has to want to improve their state of knowledge before they will be able to, and this requires admitting that their current state of knowledge is incomplete or incorrect. This is a struggle for some, especially those who think (and do) know a lot already. It’s a struggle that I encounter with some of my students, who could potentially learn so much and yet are not willing to genuinely admit that they have anything to learn. But there is so much more value in admitting that you’re wrong and growing through correction than there is in clinging stubbornly to a falsehood. That is the true failure.

Without humility, there is no learning. Without learning, there is no progress. It’s okay to not know everything; it means you’re the same as everyone else. And it’s okay to not be the best in everything. You may be right about economics, and wrong about religion. As Hayek demonstrates, we don’t need to know everything. But we should always be aware of the fact that we don’t know everything, and remember the limitations of our knowledge. We should strive to every day stay humble, as increasingly difficult as that will become, because we always have more to learn. We should approach every controversy with questions rather than declarations, and put forward arguments only when we feel that our own truth-claim is better than others or when we have something new to contribute in support of an existing proposition. [I have developed the rare practice of only taking a stance on an issue when I’m able to argue for multiple sides of the debate. If I can’t argue for a position contra to mine, then I don’t understand that position, which disqualifies me from declaring that it is wrong. Therefore, there are many areas of knowledge and issues upon which I often decline to comment because I haven’t thought about them enough to understand all of the sides and thus properly choose one of them.] 

We are, all of us, probably wrong about 90% of the things that we believe. And the areas in which we believe we are most correct (because the truth seems so “clear”) are probably the ones in which we are most likely to be wrong. But, the marvelous thing about being human is that we can always change, and improve our understanding of the world. This learning, however, requires humility. Learning is a natural process, so long as we are willing to participate. We should strive, therefore, to remain humble, no matter how much we come to know, and to always seek improvement of our theories. Let us question ourselves no less rigorously than we question others. This is how we improve ourselves, and enable ourselves to improve the world around us.