Tweet [1]
… is from page 228 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 [2] – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column [3] from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on June 22nd, 2017):
This is a profound truth: The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends. The fatal conceit – fatal to the fecundity of spontaneous order – is the belief that anyone, or any group of savants, is clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems. Who really wants to live in a society where outcomes are “meant,” meaning planned and unsurprising?