To the authoritarian mind, freedom and chaos are synonymous.
– Commentator Ian B, er, yesterday. My guess is that ‘Ian B’ does not stand for Ian Blair, nor is it a pseudonym of Liam Byrne MP.
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Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 16th, 2008 |
 9 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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I don’t guess that being invited to things is a big problem for him?
I’d be more than happy to use the same language with him that I use with my friends at choir practice.
I bet he’s just sooo FUN at parties. Even an iDave cabinet probably couldn’t be this much of a clown college.
You utter utter bastard Humphrey!
Why didn’t you tell me about the Global financial crisis?
We you did say not to put anything to you that I didn’t understand and could not explain in 60 seconds Minister…
Getting back to the quote, IanB has hit the nail squarely on the head.
In fact, the very word “chaos” has altered its meaning over the centuries. In the Greek creation myth, the chaos from which the universe emerged was simply the void (as you would expect). It’s modern usage, tellingly, that has given it connotations of disorder.
To the kind of mind we are talking about, tidiness is a supreme virtue. The political class on the whole are like people who want to play with train sets. We are part of simply part of the set. The ship of state isn’t steered for our benefit. Kids who play with train sets don’t do so for the benefit of the little scale model plastic men waiting on miniature platforms.
Its the same with the push toward ID cards or the regulating of the internet. An world that corresponds to their own conception of orderliness is the goal, sought on the grounds of their own personal aesthetics. Its an end in itself
The Town and Country Planning Acts are a good example.
“If it were not for the Planning Acts there would be strip clubs next to churches” ignores the fact that there are strip clubs next to churches (for example there is one in my home town of Kettering, and I am told this “club” is quite recent). But it is a lot broader matter than this.
Almost all the attractive towns in Britain were built before these Acts, and the vile redevelopment projects that have spoilt so many of them came afterwards – and were the product of extensive “planning”.
Certainly freedom did not create perfect order (or perfect anything), but perfection is not to be expected from human beings (and most people were a lot poorer in the past and could only afford fairly low quality housing), but the results of freedom were better than the results of state power.
If people are allowed to use their own money and their own property (follow their own plans) they will still make mistakes, but these mistakes will not tend to be on a vast scale and will also tend to be corrected over time.
Whereas things such as what the Amercians call “zoning” (living in one area, the only work being in an area far away, shopping in yet a third area ……. and so on) produce “planned chaos”, rather than growing order.
Even government road schemes have unintended consequences – typical of the use of political power.
Build a road outside of town and shops and other business enterprises will follow it – and the centre of the town dies.
“But we need to reduce the pressure of traffic” – the market (i.e. the civil interaction of human beings) did that by things called private “railways”.
Few people made long trips between diffferent cities by road – you got a train to where you wanted to go and then walked (or got a cab or tram or whatever) to what you wanted to see.
So the only traffic there was on town or city roads was of the people and cargo that was supposed to be there – not people or goods “passing through” to other far flung places.
So there were no need for planned “by passes” that tend to gut towns in the way I point out above.
Of course it was government who destroyed the railways.
Not just by its massive “free” road plans, but also by pro union laws (the Acts of 1875 and especially 1906 in the case of Britain) and by an orgy of price controls and other regulations – especially (again in the British case) after the “New Liberals” came in to office in 1906.
And by taking over the railways in both World Wars – and running them into the ground. No pun intended – although it was almost “into the ground” as virtually no investment was made in the periods 1914-18 and 1939-45 and not even much maintainence was done.
“Tony” Benn is fond of saying how well people lived during World War II under planning.
He fails to see that, in so far as people did “live well”, this good eating (and so on) was achieved by the consumption (the eating) of overseas investments and the neglect of domestic investment.
The literal “eating of capital”.
So much for “planning”.
Of course it was government who destroyed the railways.
Not just by its massive “free” road plans, but also by pro union laws (the Acts of 1875 and especially 1906 in the case of Britain) and by an orgy of price controls and other regulations – especially (again in the British case) after the “New Liberals” came in to office in 1906.
And by taking over the railways in both World Wars – and running them into the ground. No pun intended – although it was almost “into the ground” as virtually no investment was made in the periods 1914-18 and 1939-45 and not even much maintainence was done.
“Tony” Benn is fond of saying how well people lived during World War II under planning.
He fails to see that, in so far as people did “live well”, this good eating (and so on) was achieved by the consumption (the eating) of overseas investments and the neglect of domestic investment.
The literal “eating of capital”.
So much for “planning”.
There is a different form of chaos which is what I would usually refer to: mathematical chaos. It’s the bit that makes large systems utterly unpredictable over some reasonably large delta_t and which means the hopes of the tidy sorts are doomed to fail. The world is inherently chaotic. 5 or 10 billion people are inherently chaotic. Science and technology and democracy and culture are inherently chaotic. No matter what you do, you are simply one more force acting with the same chaotic system.
Chaos is the biggest hope we have. Totalitarianism, in whatever guise, cannot deal with reality and is doomed.
It’s only an issue if you happen to be forced to live inside one while you wait for chaos to destroy it. It took 70 years for it to bring down the USSR.
States that are less governed and highly flexible are more likely to last a long time.
This is not to ignore ancient Egypt and China: but they Egypt changed a great deal over time and China was its own little world. And even then, chaos caught up with them now and again.
Dale, I suspect that you’re right, but I have a question for you: Have you ever read Isaac Asimov’s wonderful “Foundation” trilogy?[1] The fundamental premise (or conceit) was that it is possible, through some complicated (and never really explained) mathematical processes the grand sweep of human history (its “future history”) could be modelled and predicted. Not individual events, of course, but historical trends of large populations, sort of (I guess) the way a physicist can predict the aggregate actions of gas molecules in a closed system. Do you think that could be possible, given sufficient advances in mathematics and/or psychology, or do you think human populations really are unavoidably chaotic in the mathematical sense?
[1] Just the original Trilogy, of course. The two sequels and one prequel he wrote many years later are pretty crummy books.