Friday, October 17, 2008
Spontaneous Order on 20/20
Everyone should have watched John Stossel tonight on 20/20. I loved the fact that he used the term "spontaneous order," introducing Friedrich von Hayek's term to the popular culture. Especially since I am going to a conference Nov. 1-4 in Hew Hampshire on spontaneous orders, where I will be presenting. Naturally, I'll be making links to the papers when the conference is over. I try to make the distinction between spontaneous orders as environments and self-organizing emergent systems. In between are what are known as teleological organizations (a distinction I did not make clear in my paper, but will make clear at the conference). If people understood spontaneous orders, neither Obama nor McCain would have stood a chance to get nominated. They probably wouldn't even be in the Senate. Perhaps that's a pipe dream, though, as part of the paper I'm presenting refutes the Marxist interpretation of systems theory. Oh well.
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What is the Marxist interpretation of systems theory? One would think Marxist systems theory would be an oxymoron.
In the one I deal with in my paper, they argue that the economy is the materialist base system out of which the governmental system emerges, out of which the cultural system emerges. I prove that this cannot be the case since economies, governments, and culture are all environments, that nothing can emerge out of an environment. Emergence only occurs in system-entities. They also suggest that the cooperation-competition dialectic will emerge into a cooperation-only dialectic. I then say that this proves they don't understand dialectics, since what will emerge in the synthesis will be something containing both and is no longer the two constituent elements, not just one or the other. I then invoke Nietzsche's idea of continuously-conflicting paradoxical opposites as being creative,and modify Hegel in that light.
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