In the words of the Nobel Prize winner in Economics Friederich Hayek : "Knowledge never exists in a concentrated or integrated form, but only as the scattered pieces of incomplete and often contradictory knowledge that individuals possess separately."
That means there is always, and should be, a certain level of anarchy. Too much anarchy destroys knowledge; too little can stagnate it, which is another form of destruction .
The side effects of freedom
Freedom has unwanted side effects. But are we willing to pay the tax of lack of freedom in order to avoid these effects? Probably, if we stayed at home, surrounded by cotton wool and doctors who checked our health, life would be much longer and safer. But would we really be alive? There are lives that are not worth living.
Freedom usually creates stress because it opens up a scenario of uncertainty before us. There are people who tolerate uncertainty better than others . The former prefer a greater share of social chaos; the latter less. Interestingly, when there is uncertainty, we become more nationalistic.
Be that as it may, both types of person are necessary so that the whole of society does not blow up (in the first case) or evolve too slowly (in the second).
Societies are complex and evolve very quickly, so the rules always have a certain lag associated with them. On the other hand, very rigid norms do not allow society to develop . However, a certain enforceable order must also be preserved so that the world does not become chaotic. And, at the same time, all the uprisings against public order should not be systematically suffocated on pain that said public order is unjustly perpetuated. It is clear, then, that even the very structure of social norms is contradictory and permanently in tension.
The healthiest societies are those that maintain this tension . And this tension cannot exist without the breach of rules. The rule breakers, in that sense (and in some cases) are heroes that we must venerate, as are those who protect the perfect compliance with them.
According to a new study, relying on data analysis in decision-making could be counterproductive, as it slows down decision-making without guaranteeing more precision. Sometimes, then, intuition is necessary, testing, changing … the risk is that a large part of what has been built can collapse. But if that instinct is unlikely to take great strides forward .
Of course, we must punish those who break the rules. But, sometimes, the punishment cannot be very heavy. At other times, public forgiveness is preferable. Nobody knows very well when one thing or another is appropriate, but that is what it is about. To preserve rule breakers, and also to punish them with more or less reason, because following the rules must also be a behavior that needs to be rewarded, as Joseph Heath points out in his book Rebelling Sells :
In conclusion, what can we say about the imposition of a series of social norms? Is it a tyranny of the majority? Is it a massification or an attempt to subjugate the individual and eliminate his personality or creativity? Absolutely. The counterculture decided that social norms are an imposition and concluded that the entire culture is an authoritarian system. They wanted to draw a parallel between Adolf Hitler and Emily Post, both considering themselves fascists who tried to impose their rules to eliminate individual pleasure. Therefore, rebelling against each and every social norm was the right thing to do.