[1129] Of spontaneous order at the Malaysian Nature Society

While helping to clear out the ground where Raptor Watch was held last Sunday, I was impressed at how liberalism, classical liberalism, came to life at the Malaysian Nature Society-organized event. It started out when we had lots of stuff that needed to be moved from one spot into a storage room. Not only there were too many things to be moved, they were heavy too. Since there was a Miss Malaysia helping out too, I doubly sure everybody wanted to help out too!

That definitely eliminated the problem of non-participation.

At first, people, including me, picked the things up and carried it all the way from that one spot into the store. The presence of the beautiful Miss Malaysia somehow made the route between the spot and the store crowded. Ah, boys will be boys. The fact that the things were heavy did not make the congestion any easier to shallow, especially for a frail guy like me. We actually had to line up to get to the room.

Suddenly, after awhile, no longer we found ourselves moving to and fro, doing no work as sadistically described by Newtonian physics. Upon discovering that lining up slowed down the process, the line became a human conveyor belt instead; only the things moved as a person passed it to the next and the next to the others up front, right up to the store. The system, from chaos to order, sped things up though it did not become perfect immediately. Each of us was standing too close to each other. So, it took up too many resources; too many persons working in the system. Soon, we spread out, made the processes more efficient and inevitably, forced several individuals into redundancy.

Instead of doing nothing, probably encouraged by the presence of Miss Malaysia, they went to do something else useful by picking up some trash or stamping on the aluminum cans and plastic bottles for recycling purpose. Better yet, some started to feed the human conveyor belt with weird stuff to the point I could only mutter, “what the hell?”

The belt became so efficient that practically anything reasonable that could be carried by a reasonable person could be fed into the reasonable system reasonably. Totally reasonable!

After it all was done, I sat down, smiling. Partly because I was munching some kind of nuts with Miss Malaysia, partly because I understood exactly what had happened; it was spontaneous order; to an extent, an analogy to free market. There were no central command; only free agents doing what they thought would be best at the moment. The system sought efficient equilibrium without a dictator. I was so impressed of the incident that on the way back to Kuala Lumpur, that was all I could think of.

Hayek would have smiled too. Probably, both Salma and Friedrich, too.