John C. Wright has posted a fascinating discussion of how human society works. He points out that we tend to think of human society like a machine. If we want to have a society that runs smoothly, we analyze the problem as an engineer would and try to come up with a carefully engineered solution. And just as our science and technology continues, year by year, to improve, we expect our society to progress, to improve, to get better, as we work the bugs out.

The trouble is, it ain’t so, no how, because we aren’t dealing with impersonal laws of nature; we’re dealing with people. And when people realize that someone is trying to engineer their behavior, they tend to throw a spanner in the works.

Here’s a simple example from present day society. Ten or twenty years ago, someone observed that people tend not to make eye contact in elevators. Everyone gets in the elevator, and they all face the doors and don’t look at each other. Having read this, I kept my eyes open and observed that it was largely true, at least in the elevators I was in. But that was then. Now it’s become a commonplace that everyone behaves this way; and what do I see? Nowadays, people tend to stand with their backs to the walls of the elevator, facing in toward the center. Only those away from the walls face the door.

When people are told how they tend to behave, that makes them self-conscious and they start to behave differently.

A similar pattern occurs in war. It’s famously been said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that’s why they are called the enemy. In any war, the tactics you adopt depend on what you think your enemy is likely to do. There’s no one proper tactic or set of tactics that will serve in all times and places. The engineering model simply doesn’t apply.

And that’s Wright’s point. The problem of having good government and a just society is much more like fighting a war—against venality, corruption, and tyranny, or what Wright terms the Leviathan problem—than it is like engineering a machine. It’s a thought well-worth contemplating.