Once upon a time, among “political experts,” and later among the general public, a thesis was popular about “insufficient legislative framework.” We are a new country, the argument went, we need our own new laws, but there are still too few of them, and that’s why everything is so bad. The question “why then does the Parliament of Great Britain still work?” threw the supporters of this theory into confusion. There was no explaining it. Then the concept of “new conditions” was invented. The world is changing, they said, and legislation must reflect these changes. A careful eye notices three things here. First. For centuries, parliaments and governments have regulated “old” phenomena with unceasing enthusiasm. Trade, prices, and so on. Second. No new conditions, no new phenomena like the internet would have emerged and developed if they could not be regulated, if social institutions (above all, property rights and contracts) had not already existed, allowing this to happen without any state intervention. Third. Right now we see the state trying to regulate the internet and the phenomena it has brought, bitcoin for example. We see that these phenomena appeared and developed without any state, and we see that all regulation is carried out only and exclusively for the purpose of control and preventing the loss of state power. It brings no benefit, no convenience.
So why does the legislative itch not weaken but intensify throughout the world? The “gone-mad printer” is not only our reality, after all. Moreover, let us note that social confrontation, wherever it occurs, revolves around power over the printer. In this sense, revolutionaries are no better than those who dispose of it today.
There are many answers to this question; I will give one, the simplest. It consists in the banal absence of knowledge—knowledge that is quite complex but not so much so as to be accessible only to the chosen. This knowledge could well have been absorbed “within the school curriculum.” Moreover, there is nothing extraordinary in it; on the contrary, these are classical things. I cannot say now about the Greeks, but the Romans definitely knew it; then comes Thomas Aquinas and the corresponding tradition, David Hume, Adam Smith, and so on.
The essence of this knowledge is that the institutions in which we live were not invented but arose. No one invented morality and charity, money, law, courts, and so on. These institutions and many others, whose effects we cannot trace to some known phenomenon, were not the fruit of some brilliant mind who ordered everyone to act in a certain way “for the common good.” All of these are patterns of behavior that people choose by learning from each other. This is a very complex mechanism, and our minds, for many reasons (at least because they are incapable of thinking outside of theory, outside of a pattern), cannot grasp it fully. And all the more so, they cannot manage this mechanism through “laws,” that is, through orders to other people.
This knowledge about the very essence of social processes—knowledge that I repeat is not secret, not sacred, not some crackpot “video from the internet” exposing another conspiracy, but the most thoroughly scientific knowledge there is, which can be drawn from the most diverse sciences, from cybernetics to linguistics (not to mention economics)—is absent from the state education system. And this, generally speaking, is not accidental either.
For a system to exist, people must believe in its usefulness. The overwhelming majority of people believe in the power of laws. They see the problem only in incorrect laws or incorrect enforcers. And this is the main reason for the existence of the system and the consequences that we all enjoy.
You tell them that the “effectiveness” of a law depends directly on how much it coincides with the intentions of those whom it affects; they answer—well, how can that be! We said “stand there, come here!” And look, he stands there and comes here. And you say that laws are not being executed! Oh, they’re being executed all right! Then you say that the point is not that he stands there and comes here, but in the purposes for which this is done. So they banned drugs in the name of public health. All that resulted was the mafia, along with enormous expenses to fight it. The number of drug addicts did not change. The goal was not achieved; on the contrary, enormous damage was incurred. They listen to you, nod in agreement. But at the same time, they think “they didn’t manage it. We will.” Why? Because the belief in the magical power of law is deep-seated here. It makes a huge number of people, with incredible persistence now for almost one hundred and fifty years (since mass democracy ascended), step on the same rake. The mistakes they make only cause the desire to repeat the same thing again, only harder; they affect an ever-growing number of citizens, drawing them into this process, to “fight for their rights,” which leads to even greater mistakes and an even larger number of participants. The system flourishes; it seems not just tolerable but necessary and the only possible one.
And one of the main reasons is ordinary ignorance on those issues that political people undertake to solve. Ignorance that has as its cause the same natural desire of the system to preserve and expand itself. For this purpose, state mass education arose, and it rather quickly “freed itself” from classical education, replacing it with an “engineering approach.” All this is well known and well described. The Bolsheviks even abolished logic (and, let us note, they still don’t really “cover” it to this day).
The most frightening words for the system, understanding which is capable of stopping the crazy political squirrel wheel that is gaining ever greater speed, sound as “social institutions are not the result of our conscious efforts.” If you know that “the earth is round,” you will not be tricked into financing an expedition to its edge. If you know that social institutions are not the result of our conscious efforts, then no one goes anywhere and everyone stays home. The situation at elections of “Tymoshenko against Yanukovych” is no longer possible. Neither Tymoshenko nor Yanukovych are possible, nor the parliament sitting endlessly, nor the Cabinet and National Bank that have lost their minds. Everyone knows that none of this is needed and doesn’t work, and all attempts of these offices to attract attention to themselves are ignored, and the offices themselves die from lack of love. I won’t venture to speak about the state as a whole; perhaps “secret knowledge” will not kill it immediately, but at least the little squirrels will greatly lose enthusiasm in spinning their wheel and will become concerned about alternatives.
Well, if you so want to contribute to some institutions that you consider necessary, then there is one path open to you. You can contribute to institutions only through yourself. For example, support morality and charity by providing assistance to the sick and the poor. Institutions will improve, unnecessary ones will die off, new ones will arise in their place, imperceptibly and gradually. But you are absolutely powerless to cause good by ordering other people about. They will stand there and come here; you can force them to do it, but those consequences that you want to achieve will not arise.
And last. I am by no means proposing to immediately “introduce something into the school curriculum,” nor am I even proposing to “engage in educating the masses.” I simply want to say that we have reliable knowledge that “everything is not so.” And indeed it is not so.