Most of Life Is Anarchy
The other day, I saw a poster on Facebook showing a quote from Jeff Tucker to the effect that "most of our lives take place under anarchy." (I quote from memory.) This is similar to the question one sees that, since spontaneous social orders appear with great regularity, what the heck do we need government leaders for? Let's examine this idea a bit further and see what is going on. There are many phenomena in the world, life being one of the most notable, that are referred to as self-organizing. (I would prefer saying that they are organized by an inner principle, but no mind, we will use the popular term.) No one has to construct a bacterium: they emerge spontaneously from other bacteria. Let us say someone notices this, and decides it is a lovely thing, all this inner-directed activity, a beautiful anarchy, let us say. But they notice one exception: certain creatures, humans foremost amongst them, have developed brains, organs of top-down control, that direct the a...