The private pathology of the public philosophy
5 July 2024 at 03:48
Hayek marvelled at this concert of unknowingness. Like a psychoanalytic symptom, prices condense and communicate fragments of knowledge that are obscure to the conscious mind. The movement of prices effects a change in our "dispositions"βwhat we want, how much of it we want, what and how much we're willing to give up to get itβagain, without our knowing why, or that we even had such a disposition in the first place. Hayek called this a sort of "social mind"βthough, unlike the Freudian mind, he thought it must remain inaccessible. from Hayek, the Accidental Freudian [The New Yorker; ungated]