… is from page 96 of Daniel Boorstin’s engaging 1958 volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience:
The Georgia project was not abandoned because its settlers had found America unpromising but, on the contrary, because what its settlers wanted was opportunity – with all its risks – and what they were given was a plan. The opportunities of the New World could not be encompassed by any plan, however selfless or noble, devised by Old World imagination.
Here’s the eternal contrast: Society as an outcome – nearly a stage play – scripted by well-meaning elites (but directed by rogues) versus society as an open-ended process, scripted and directed by no one, ensuring each individual maximum scope to craft his or her own life’s course constrained only by the equal opportunity of each of the countless other individuals to attempt to craft his or her own life’s course.
