A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of th… - Friedrich Hayek

The knowledge of facts is widely dispersed. We want to make use of knowledge possessed by millions of individual people, which they can only use if they are fed signals about the general situation. You can't reverse it you can't possibly concentrate this knowledge. The whole order of international cooperation has been built on such a signalling system, where signals tell you about facts which nobody knows concrete in their totality, and I may add such signals you cannot correct - you can not correct signals which inform you about circumstances you don't know.

We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others.

I suggested before that the whole of economic history could be rewritten in terms of this gradual suppression of the primitive in­stincts by what we very mistakenly call “artificial” rules. Of course, they are not in the strict sense artificial. Nobody ever invented them. They were not the result of design. The new manners of conduct were not adopted because anybody thought they were better. They were adopted because somebody who acted on them profited from it and his group gained from it, and so these rules, without anybody under­ standing them—that is very important for the later part of my argu­ment—without anybody understanding in what way they benefited their community, gradually came to be generally accepted.