The first follow up video to the I Pencil movie is about ORDER. Where does order come from? Yes, order can come from the top down, such as when a ruler, a boss or some authority tells you what to do, when and where. However, absent such an authority, order seems to emerge spontaneously!
We've all witnessed this, if we've ever been at a crowded fair or carnival. People are wandering around apparently ad hoc. However, despite the occasional gentle bumps into each other, people rarely crash hard into one another! They seem to spontaneously get "in line" and head in the same general direction WITHOUT a traffic policeman signalling people where to go!
Sure, it's not as orderly as a military parade, but it's also not like atoms in a gas or liquid, smashing into each other randomly! It's somewhere in between and, above all, it's good enough!
I don't believe this idea about spontaneous order is limited to human behaviour either. I think it's found at the most profound levels of nature—as when atoms come together spontaneously to form molecules, which come together spontaneously to form proteins, which come together spontaneously to form the basic building blocks of organisms.
In the song How Does a Duck know, 1990s Canadian band, Crash Test Dummies, ask, "How come all my body parts so nicely fit together?" Their conjecture is that "Everything seems planned out...everything seems nicely planned out..." but they neglect to say who plans it out and why! Perhaps, they've stumbled upon the notion that even at the macro level, nature spontaneously provides order!
Finally, my favourite instance of this spontaneous order is offered by economists, Walter Williams and Lawrence Reed, is language itself! No matter what some so-called "orthographic committee," academy, royal or otherwise, or even government might think...and some of these people and institutions really believe that they have some control over language, this control is only inside their precious little heads! People will say what they want, when they want!
Richard Feynman once said that nature doesn't care what you call something, it's going to do what it wants to do! People, being a part of nature, and language being a part of people are pretty much the same!
Do watch the video!
And just in case you missed the Crash Test Dummies song in the 90s...CLICK HERE to watch the video on youtube.
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