Lancastory:​ Let the Bastards Plan—We’ll Build Anyway

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BY RYAN LANCASTER
By the time you realize the world is being run by clipboard-wielding technocrats and algorithmic wet blankets, it's already too late. They've bureaucratized your coffee, censored your laughter, and laminated your dignity. And yet—somehow—your favorite bar still opens on Fridays, traffic somehow flows (even if barely), and no one taught your toddler how to talk. Still, she’s already bargaining for Oreos like a back-alley negotiator. That is spontaneous order: the cosmic jazz of civilization. The unscripted miracle of people being left the hell alone—within bounds—to do their thing.

This isn’t utopian fluff. This is the unbridled expression of liberty, like a weed growing wild through the cracks of empire. It’s the backbeat of the West—not the power chords of empires or the symphonies of planners, but the thrum of individuals making decisions without a central godhead whispering in their ears.

I’ll take ordered liberty over ideological chess games. Ordered liberty is the concept that individual freedom should be balanced with a system of laws and rules that prevent chaos and ensure the rights of all. I don’t worship the mob or the market—I trust individuals when restrained adequately from punching each other in the face.  I believe every person has the agency to screw up gloriously or build magnificently. And I trust reality to bite back if your ideas suck.

Zhuangzi

Let’s start in ancient China. Zhuangzi, 4th century BCE, chilling under a tree, dreaming of butterflies, high on metaphysical freedom. He didn’t write white papers—he wrote riddles. But what he gave us was dynamite: wu wei, or non-coercive action. Do without forcing. Govern by not governing. 

Zhuangzi knew that if you want peace, you don’t drop bombs—you drop control. You let the garden grow without jackbooting it into bloom. In the West, we forgot that for a while. Cue Adam Ferguson in 1767. This guy was the philosopher equivalent of a Scottish tavern brawler: blunt, brilliant, and half-drunk. His line? “The result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” That's the intellectual Molotov cocktail lobbed at central planners.

Ferguson was done with the smug Enlightenment engineers. He knew that society isn’t built like IKEA furniture—it’s brewed like whiskey. Time, trial, mistake, repeat. Civilization isn’t made. It emerges. Language, culture, commerce—they’re the bastard children of liberty and chaos. And they’re beautiful. Enter the Austrians, stage right, dropping truth bombs wrapped in academic jargon. Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek—guys who wanted to burn central planning to the ground.

Hayek, in particular, was a prophet with a British accent and the soul of a street hustler. He knew what planners feared: prices. Not just numbers, but signals—encoded wisdom from the masses. When the government sets prices, it’s like playing piano with oven mitts. The melody’s gone. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” wasn’t hyperbole—it was a map to tyranny paved in five-year plans and good intentions. Markets, Hayek argued, are like jazz improv. You can’t script it, but damn does it groove when you trust the players.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith wasn’t a capitalist goblin cackling over coins. The man was a moral philosopher. He understood that when people pursue their self-interest in a system of rules and rights, they often do good without meaning to. The “invisible hand” isn’t Ayn Rand’s pimp ring—it’s the physics of liberty. It's what happens when people act freely and responsibly. But Smith knew it needed a frame. You need a Constitution. You need the law. You need to punch fraud and force in the face, because the free market ain’t a free-for-all. It’s a moral marketplace, not a Mad Max reboot.

Then comes Michael Polanyi in 1941, lobbing another grenade into the ivory tower. In “The Growth of Thought in Society,” he says that knowledge, like markets, emerges from freedom—one hypothesis, one debate at a time. Top-down control kills inquiry. Whether it’s Soviet biology under Lysenko or modern-day government gag orders on dissenting scientists, the message is the same: Central planning distorts truth. Leave people alone to think, and you get real discovery.

Walk through New York City. It’s chaotic, glorious, and completely unscripted. Now fly to Brasília, Brazil—a centrally planned fever dream where streets are shaped like airplane wings and no one knows where the hell to walk. Which one feels alive? Spontaneous order isn’t just an economic idea—it’s an aesthetic. It’s the lifeblood of democracy, too. Political theorist Gus DiZerega says liberal democracy is a spontaneous order: messy, noisy, gloriously inefficient—and the best damn system we’ve got.

And that’s the genius of the U.S. Constitution. It doesn’t impose utopia. It unleashes possibility. It ties Leviathan’s hands just enough to let citizens build something better. Its structure is without strangulation.

​Let’s not romanticize this. Spontaneous orders can be ugly as hell. Slavery, serfdom, caste systems—they arose without a blueprint, too. But don’t confuse how something emerged with whether it should exist. That’s where humanism kicks in: we judge spontaneous systems not by how they form, but whether they honor dignity.

And guess what? Imposed systems usually suck worse. You think the Soviets or the Third Reich were grassroots operations? No—they were centrally-planned death cults with PowerPoint decks.

Michael Polanyi

Today, spontaneous order isn’t just a theory—it’s a damn survival strategy. We’re drowning in mandates, manipulated by algorithms, tranquilized by conformity. Every solution shoved down your throat comes with fine print and a side of surveillance.

But liberty isn’t a glitch in the matrix. It’s the code. It’s the way through. So trust the jazz. Trust the market. Trust the Constitution. Trust the neighbor who built a food pantry before FEMA arrived. Trust the nerds in basements inventing the next big thing. Trust people.

Because freedom isn’t chaos, it’s confidence. In yourself. In each other. In the messy miracle of civilization. Speaking to Esquire in “Beer (or Two) with Chuck Klosterman” (June 2013), Klosterman reflects on the trajectory of modern governance and technology: “Every day we grow closer to a full-on technocratic police state.”

And in that spirit, let’s keep building without asking for permission.

Or, in other words:

• Zhuangzi believed peace comes from freedom, not control—like a garden growing wild, not ruled by force.
• Adam Ferguson said society grows naturally, not by design—more like aging whiskey than following a plan.
• Austrian economists showed markets work best on their own—prices carry knowledge, and central planning leads to failure.
• Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” meant freedom with justice—people doing good by acting freely, as long as fraud gets stopped.
• Michael Polanyi argued science thrives through free ideas, not top-down control—like cities or markets, it needs chaos to grow.
• Spontaneous order built cities and free governments—far better than fake order forced by tech or planning committees.

Hey, welcome to the work cited section! Here's where you'll find all the heavy hitters that inspired the content you've just consumed. Some might think citations are as dull as unbuttered toast, but nothing gets my intellectual juices flowing like a good reference list. Don't get me wrong, just because we've cited a source; doesn't mean we're always going to see eye-to-eye. But that's the beauty of it - it's up to you to chew on the material and come to conclusions. Listen, we've gone to great lengths to ensure these citations are accurate, but let's face it, we're all human. So, give us a holler if you notice any mistakes or suggest more sources. We're always looking to up our game. Ultimately, it's all about pursuing knowledge and truth. ​​​
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• Zhuangzi. The Book of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Martin Palmer and Elizabeth Breuilly. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.​
• Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  
• Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition. Edited by Bruce Caldwell. Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.