If I don’t mow the forest line around my meadow, tree saplings appear within weeks. If we don’t use our muscles, they begin to atrophy. If we don’t clean our kitchen after each meal, the space to make another nourishing meal disappears. All around us, order requires maintenance. Our lives are a struggle against entropy.
Earlier this year, my wife lost the rubber sealing ring for her indispensable Oster Versa blender. The Versa, originally marketed as an inexpensive alternative to the Vitamix, is no longer made, and it doesn’t have the same gasket as other Oster blenders.
My searches for the gasket came up empty. Entropy manifested as a single point of failure — until AI tool Perplexity found a small family business, HomeTech Kitchen Centre, in Regina, Saskatchewan, that had the part and could ship it to the United States for a relatively minimal expense.
The blender is happily back in use, making fresh batches of basil salad dressing and other culinary delights.
Without a free market, an otherwise functional machine would have become useless garbage. In F.A. Hayek’s terms, the “extended order” of commercial cooperation resisted entropic waste by matching a highly specific, uncommon need with a rare supply.
But why did that small family-run business in Canada have the part when the original manufacturer had discontinued the model?
Hayek pointed out that knowledge in society is not merely scientific theory but also “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.”
Obsolete blender gaskets would be invisible to a central planning board working from statistical aggregates. There would be little reason to track or store obscure replacement parts for out-of-production appliances, much less to preserve the international channels that let me find a part in Canada.
Guided by local knowledge and market incentives, this small business maintained an inventory of parts because it anticipated what people would need.
As Hayek noted in The Fatal Conceit, in the extended order we “serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing.” HomeTech solved a problem without knowing us or sharing a common goal.
This is a small illustration of one of Hayek’s core teachings. Civilization advances because the market enables us to call on and utilize vastly more knowledge than any human mind could ever possess or direct.
As long as societal institutions help make human cooperation relatively frictionless, modern life continues to help us overcome entropy’s dissolution of order.
Cooperation in markets is easy to overlook precisely because it is so ordinary. The better the market works, the more invisible cooperation becomes, and when benefits become invisible, many people begin to imagine that society can be rearranged by (what are to them) superior intentions.
Hayek explained that a society that allows us to flourish has a price of admission. We must be willing to “stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions – economic, legal, and moral… by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made,” nor, in many instances, understand.
But of course, not everyone is willing to pay Hayek’s price of admission. It breaks my heart to see people express passionate certainty about subjects they have not studied — views that are ahistorical, economically illiterate, and rooted in tribal instincts that hinder human cooperation, leaving millions poorer, hungrier, and more vulnerable to entropy.
Such people often hold beliefs that would be merely comical if the consequences were not tragic. They imagine that their passions should determine how society coordinates human effort, and they are outraged when others do not share their “facts.” Seemingly blind to the reality that their survival depends on strangers with whom they disagree, they see chaos where the extended order has created cooperation. Hayek pointed out that “only in the small groups of primitive society can collaboration between the members rest largely on the circumstance that at any one moment they will know more or less the same particular circumstances.”
They are, in Hayek’s words, “so troubled by some effects of the market order that they overlook how unlikely and even wonderful it is to find such an [extended] order prevailing in the greater part of the modern world.” In this miracle of order, billions of strangers continually produce for one another, while relying on goods and services from people they will never know.
The Fight for Survival
Modern abundance can make entropy feel theoretical, but for most of human history, daily life was unforgiving.
An agrarian family living in 1800 faced entropy far more viscerally than we do today. Sunrise-to-sunset chores were necessary for survival. They had to chop firewood, preserve food, wash and mend clothes, and repair fences. Forged iron equipment needed constant oiling to prevent rust. Houses rotted from the ground up. The vagaries of weather threatened crops, as did insects and other pests. Human and animal muscle did the heavy lifting. Bodies deteriorated; teeth rotted. The weary had no leisure time. No matter how hard they worked, nothing was guaranteed.
The world outside their farm mattered less to their lives than does the world outside our homes today.
Today’s family faces less visceral entropy in daily life, but depends far more on large-scale cooperation in markets. In 1800, there was no electricity, no internet, and no highway system bringing a cornucopia of food to supermarkets. Today, if that cooperation collapsed, entropy would win, and many of us would perish. The extended order insulates us from realizing how powerful entropy is. We are interdependent, not self-sufficient.
Having lived over half of my life in cities and now in my latter decades in a rural area, I know how dependent I am. People who grow up in rural areas have knowledge of how things work and how to repair them that I can’t begin to match. They are remarkably kind to me when I ask for advice.
No Way Back
Hayek’s insights shatter the illusion that we can dismantle the extended order and go to a more primitive, self-reliant, or centrally planned way of living.
The extended order is what enabled billions of human beings to exist in the first place. Hayek was clear: Whatever we “live for, today most live only because of the market order.” Our choice is stark: Hayek taught, “we can be few and savage, or many and civilized.”
We have a duty, Hayek insisted, “unless we truly wish to condemn millions to starvation — to resist the claims of creeds that tend to destroy the basic principles” on which the extended order rests.
We do our duty when we have, in Hayek’s words, “an attitude of humility toward the impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know.”
Today, many have no such humility. Their allegiance is to those they blindly follow and to thoughts running through their minds. Their emotional defenses are so complete that ideas contradicting their passions rarely get through.
Perhaps Hayek’s most chilling warning came in his essay “Individualism: True and False”: “While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.”
That is why humility is not merely a private virtue; collectively it is essential to sustain civilization. We preserve the extended order and hold entropy at bay, not by imagining we can master it, but by respecting the inherited rules, institutions, and habits of cooperation that allow strangers to serve one another.
