Examples
Markets
Many proponents of laissez-faire economics, such as Friedrich von Hayek, have argued that market economies are creators of spontaneous order - "a more efficient allocation of society's resources than any design can achieve."
[5] This spontaneous order is a higher order than any human mind can design due to the details of the information required. Centralized statistical data cannot convey this information because statistics are created by summaries outside of the details of the situation.[6] In a market economy, the price is the aggregation of information acquired when people are free to use their individual knowledge.[7].
The price then allows everyone to agree on a commodity or its substitutes to make decisions based on more information than they could personally acquire (economic calculation), information not statistically transmittable to a centralized authority. The interference of a central authority on prices will have consequences that they could not foresee, because they do not know all the data in question. Even if all the information could be centralized, such a thing would generate so much expense in processing it that the resources would not be available to take action with respect to it.
This is illustrated in Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand that he proposed in The Wealth of Nations. Thus, in this point of view, acting in freedom, economic actors can process more information - and act on it - than any centralized authority has the possibility, they can then create an efficient society through freedom.
According to Karl Popper, it is a wonderful coincidence that freedom is also the most efficient.
common law
Law precedes the existence of the State, and is an example of spontaneous order. The case of customary law is the most exemplary in this regard since its knowledge does not depend on a central legislator or the knowledge of a few individuals, but must be based on the precedent of previous actions and established expectations.
Roger Scruton explains that customary norms are not part of any plan of action, but rather emerge from social cooperation.
game theory
The concept of spontaneous order is closely related to modern game theory. If there are common rules of the game, everyone can act on them in their own way - even compete "Competition (learning)") - and for their own purposes and thus order is generated because people seek the best for themselves and cooperate in maintaining the rules of the game that allow it; The human being would be a naturally cooperative entity as long as there is reciprocity in the benefit and compliance with the rules of the game. Already in the 1940s, historian Joahn Huizinga wrote that:
Continuing with this idea, in his book Fatal Arrogance, Hayek wrote that:
Transparency
The dotcom and telecommunications bubble in stock prices in the 1990s, which gave rise to a series of corporate scandals in the United States in 2001 - 2003, led many observers to emphasize the importance of "transparency" as a condition for the efficient development of spontaneous order in the financial world. The idea is that a company cannot be a black box into which investors put money in the hope of returns, but they have to be able to see through the box, into the books and records of their company. The transparency policy currently has the facility of being able to use online accounting visible to the client.
Proponents of the broad application of the notion of spontaneous order have argued that the aforementioned corporate scandals could have been avoided through the supposed self-correction of private sector trends. This argument centers on the actions of a private sector body, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which warned against certain practices that distort balance sheets allowing a stock price bubble. Back in 1993, the FASB issued a rule that would have required companies to carry the value of stock options on their books as an expense – a rule that alone could have made a good deal of the still-moderate bubble formation, according to its proponents. However, when the US Congress held hearings and more accountants were called to the carpet, the FASB retracted its initiative.
According to proponents of the spontaneous order, the FASB initiative could have been a good example of spontaneous order in practice, leading to self-regulation in the private sector. Congress's actions to ensure an unregulated period of easy money in some industries, while ensuring a possible burst of the bubble and subsequent scandal, are criticized.
the tao
Tao, as a concept, is an order that unifies man and nature. According to the Tao, the body of men and women reflects nature, so taking care of oneself creates natural order. That is, it gives a longer life, individual prosperity and the closest social circle. For Taoists, disorder is introduced into nature when rulers try to solve everything from outside—the lives of others—through abstract ideas.
As in the other examples, the free order for Taoism - the philosophy that instructs about the tao - comes from human action between lives; in contradiction to the planned disorder that comes from human design towards the lives of others. Thus, Taoism integrates individualism and holism in a naturalistic way.
The anarchy
Anarchists argue that the state is, in fact, an artificial creation of the ruling elite, and that true order would develop spontaneously if involuntary governments were eliminated. In the opinion of anarchists, such a spontaneous order would imply the voluntary association and cooperation of individuals, automatically forming a political model of self-government.[8]
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, "the work of many symbolic interactionists is largely compatible with the anarchist vision, since they share the vision of society as a spontaneous order",[9] that is, as a result of interactions between individuals.[10].
It should be noted that anarchism - a political ideology that advocates anarchy as evolution and social revolution - bases its postulates on a naturalistic interpretation of humans (as they naturally are in freedom or human action) and not a historicist one (humans as they would be, forcing them to a human design), therefore they contrast the negative freedom or voluntary order of anarchy with the social engineering "Social Engineering (political sciences)") of all statist ideologies.
Anarchists argue that anarchy does not imply anomie "Anomie (social sciences)"), or the total absence of norms, but rather an anti-authoritarian society that is based on the spontaneous order arising from the freedom of individuals acting for self-interest in autonomous groups and communities of private law, that is, jurisdiction and voluntary law.[11][12] Much of anarchist concepts are handled under the logic of spontaneous order and behavior. emerging, mainly those of mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action or also those of network structure or polycentricity.
Bribery
The concept of spontaneous order is also reflected in the works of the Slavophile movements in Russia and specifically the works of Dostoevsky. The concept of a social organic manifestation expressed in Russia under the idea of bribery. Sobornost was also used by Tolstoy as a basis for Christian anarchism, and analyzed philosophically by the atheist Albert Camus as a basis for a political ethic foreign to any government or political party.
Lenin also exploited the concept of bribes as a basis for his own reforms. The concept is used to describe the unifying force behind the peasants or their communes in pre-Soviet Russia.
Atheism
Atheists and naturalists "Naturalism (philosophy)") often view spontaneous order as the inherent point of "clockwork" precision of uncultivated ecosystems and the universe itself, as the ultimate example of this phenomenon, while creationists and deists believe that these intricate arrangements could not have arisen accidentally and must have been worked out by a divine consciousness or "clockmaker."
In any case, it is common to associate the theory of spontaneous order and self-organization with the self-regulation of nature and the universe, which would possess in itself all its laws manifested in its habituality and the information is generated and processed by interactive agents (e.g. fractals), therefore without the need for a central computer, divine authority or omnipotent God. Thus in this interpretation of self-organized life, the question would not be whether God exists or not, but rather that it would simply be useless or irrelevant for him to exist (see: Bright, Apatheism).