Some of the issues relating to the necessity of liberty are tricky, and, generally, far removed from most peoples' purview. For the most part, academia is equally ignorant, though it is the duty and the privilege of academics to pay more attention to issues that we must consider arcane so long as we have not found a way to bring them into the range of "general education."
People are wedded to irresponsible forms of government because of an unfortunate bias in the way they look at the role that knowledge plays in society.
The concept of government, as the leader and thinker, as the Management Board of society, is so popular because politicians and the public share the same one-sided view of knowledge.
In many ways, order is created by the human mind, making use of and producing explicit knowledge. 1 + 1 = 2. If I do x, then y follows.
Therefore, it is presumed, societal order can only be created by using this capacity of the human mind.
What is overlooked is the fact that this capacity of the mind is not what is creating societal order, but its product. The values and manifold other presuppositions on which the human mind works are predicated by the way in which society develops.
And society, to a large extent, develops behind the back of our mind, unnoticed by human reason.
Necessarily so, for something as complex as the human mind and other institutions of human civilisation could only achieve the degree of powerfulness and complexity that characterises them (think of the coordination of billions of views, decisions and signals through prices) because something grander than the abilities of thinking human beings was at work in finding, proposing, testing, sieving, rejecting or accepting them.
Evolutionary selection on the level of groups - not on the level of the individual (mind), but on the level of groups. The difference is important, because group selection has a far broader scope than individual choice, as far as matters are concerned that are required to make a society - initially small hordes, later larger communities, and finally societies comprising millions of people - better adapted to their ever changing, ever challenging environment than another.
In fact, the central problem of modern societies consists in the unfortunate fact that people think they can decide what a good society is - on the level of the individual mind (of a president, politicians or other (opinion) leaders or even voters). Contrary to this assumption, it is complex evolutionary processes such as those going on in markets that produce superior selections of practices and products conducive to a sufficiently adaptive society.
The human mind has developed together with human culture, and it has been only one of the manifold tools the selection process filtered in as viable and useful. Without the help of forms of knowledge (storage and utilisation) quite different from, independent of, and formative to human reasoning, man and his reason could not have survived, let alone developed.
Of these additional, extra-human epistemic types, two are essential for understanding liberty: I call them non-explicit horizontal knowledge and non-explicit vertical knowledge.
Vertical I call the knowledge that has accumulated in the historical "depth" of human experience, the experience of thousands of generations, which we cannot access in a way that makes it amenable to deductive reconstruction - it is only available in coded form, namely in the form of habits, conventions, traditions, principles that we have learned to heed and/or take for granted. Their genesis cannot be reconstructed accurately and in authentic detail. At best, we can account for these with theoretical models of their main features. For instance: how foreign trade authentically began to develop and bring about - by trial and error - practices that would eventually prevail owing to their superior success, is something we can think about in general terms but never replay as they truly unfolded. At any rate, we have the benefit of those billions of experiments that produced great skill and experience of trade in men.
If we ignore vertical knowledge (general rules, principles) or throw it carelessly out of the window, we lose experience, we abandon vital means of orientation in the world - epistemic help that is not the result of the achievement of any single mind.
This is why a free society is a principle-driven society - it respects extremely dense nodes of wisdom that cannot be replaced by explicit reasoning. The libertarian understands that there is such a thing as vertical knowledge.
Now, let's turn to horizontal knowledge, which cannot bring to bear its benefits, unless vertical knowledge is understood, or at least respected.
Horizontal knowledge consists, to begin with, of widely dispersed islands, particles of knowledge, largely directly available to individuals, but only to the respective individual, and no other individual but specifically him or her. However, the full fruit of horizontal knowledge blossoms only if the particles of knowledge of which it consists are related to each other by adequate rules, i.e. vertical knowledge. The result is a game of interaction between the particles of individual knowledge - and only the outcome of this game establishes the final product of horizontal knowledge, which is a "knowledge without a subject," no one has it, but all can use and act on it to their great advantage.
The price system is an example of such horizontal knowledge, whose benefits will not be available to us, unless we respect vertical knowledge, i.e. adhere strictly to certain principles, like the principles that make for free price formation.
So, we have two types of "knowledge without a subject," that is, knowledge that cannot be found in or generated by any human mind, though millions of human minds are or have been involved in contributing to this "knowledge without a subject."
If we ignore this knowledge which is constitutive of a free society, if we glorify explicit knowledge and rely on human reasoning alone, that is if we invite and put into power arbitrariness (the hubris of a human mind or a collective of human minds, such as at work in a government or parliament) we condemn society to a regime of inferior knowledge. We make society a lot dumber than it could and ought to be.
Understanding "knowledge without a subject" as explained here, gives us insight into society as a self-generating order. It helps us appreciate why the individual should be allowed to act on his own knowledge rather than on the knowledge of others, that she should be left alone by an overbearing government, and that government should be confined to protecting the principles and rules that facilitate the game of freedom.
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