Throughout history, there has been a persistent myth about modernity. Impressed by our ability to control nature and create progress through engineering, many fall into the trap of thinking that all things can be made better through careful planning, that there's no limit to what can be achieved centrally.
However, most things cannot in fact be made better in this way. The usefulness of central planning is very limited. That's why experiments in extensive central planning always fail. The complexity of our world is simply too great for anyone to fully comprehend, let alone control.
The first mention of this kind of failure can be found in the Bible where the tower of Babel is doomed due to the complexity of the project. No amount of central planning managed to keep the project together, and so it collapsed into chaos.
However, this ancient wisdom has not kept people from trying the same failed project over and over again. The Romans were convinced that they had conquered the world both physically and logistically. Old principles of sound money and balanced budgets were no longer needed, so they started debasing their currency while running up huge debts on extravagant projects. A few hundred years later, the city of Rome lay in ruins.
18th century France is another notable example of this type of delusion. The French king thought it possible to cement the social fabric by creating a vast leisure class to uphold his popularity. To finance this, he let clever economists such as John Law and Richard Cantillon play around with paper money and speculative bubbles. When this charade came to an end, there was revolution, but the first French republic was even more convinced of their ability to suspend the laws of economy than the king had been. France decayed into total madness, opening the way for Napoleon who restored some sanity to the economy at the expense of going to war with just about everybody.
Today, we have all these elements of delusion again on full display, with the Great Reset Hoax as a prime example of hubris. The idea is that we are so modern that we can conquer mother nature herself through clever engineering. A brave new world can be created where diseases and even death are a thing of the past. No desires will be unmet and there's no lack of anything.
What all these delusions have in common is that they assume that centrally controlled computations can replace networks of individuals working together. They assume that all wants and all needs can be known centrally and provided for centrally. However, this can never be know and never be computed, except by the network itself. Lone individuals do not know what they want. The data is not available, even to them. Our needs, wants and desires appear spontaneously as we progress through our daily routines. Life is a real time calculation. No amount of science and computing can ever replace this. Any attempt to create a brave new world is therefore doomed. There is no way to circumnavigate mother nature, no matter how modern and advanced we become.
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