“Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.”
– Friedrich Hayek
Austrian thinker and Nobel laureate
In programming, there is a saying that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
The same goes for a society. The more eyeballs that are allowed to look at the accumulated knowledge of mankind and our problems, and the more brains that are allowed to add to that knowledge with their own creativity, the greater the chance that bugs will be fixed.
The most important institutions in culture, economics and technology were not planned centrally but were consequences of cooperation and competition, experiments and trial and error.
The groups that embraced the best solutions – sometimes by coincidence – succeeded, expanded and were imitated, whereas failed experiments were put out of their misery.
When people don’t need permission from a central authority to experiment with new ideas, technologies and business models, but are free to create and compete (even though it might hurt sensitivities and dominant groups), we see greater human progress.
The world is big; the potential number of insights, combinations of ideas and solutions are limitless.
The only way to use all the knowledge and test all ideas is to let everybody have a go, and to give them freedom to cooperate and exchange freely.
Innovation always faces resistance from groups that think they stand to lose from it, be they old political or religious elites, businesses with old technologies, workers with outmoded skills, nostalgic romantics or old folks who feel anxious because people just don’t do things the way they used to.
They have an incentive to stop changes with bans, regulations, monopolies, the burning of boats or the building of walls. And when the rest of us panic about the world we let them have their way.
And this is how every period of openness and innovation in history was ended, except one: the one that we are in right now.
An open world, only if we can keep it !!