By George he's got it! Not that he realises this of course

George Monbiot tells us that the real problem out there is that power is too centralised, too concentrated. The answer therefore is to push everything down to the people:

But this is the less important task. The much bigger change is this: to stop seeking to control people from the centre. At the moment, the political model for almost all parties is to drive change from the top down. They write a manifesto, that they hope to turn into government policy, which may then be subject to a narrow and feeble consultation, which then leads to legislation, which then leads to change. I believe the best antidote to demagoguery is the opposite process: radical trust. To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities to identify their own needs and make their own decisions.

Entirely so, we agree completely. George gives us the analogy of nature:

When you try to control nature from the top down, you find yourself in a constant battle with it. Conservation groups in this country often seek to treat complex living systems as if they were simple ones. Through intensive management – cutting, grazing and burning – they strive to beat nature into submission until it meets their idea of how it should behave. But ecologies, like all complex systems, are highly dynamic and adaptive, evolving (when allowed) in emergent and unpredictable ways.

Eventually, and inevitably, these attempts at control fail. Nature reserves managed this way tend to lose abundance and diversity, and require ever more extreme intervention to meet the irrational demands of their stewards. They also become vulnerable. In all systems, complexity tends to be resilient, while simplicity tends to be fragile. Keeping nature in a state of arrested development in which most of its natural processes and its keystone species (the animals that drive these processes) are missing makes it highly susceptible to climate breakdown and invasive species. But rewilding – allowing dynamic, spontaneous organisation to reassert itself – can result in a sudden flourishing, often in completely unexpected ways, with a great improvement in resilience.

We agree again entirely. That survival of the fittest - without straying into the social Darwinian area of ill repute - depends upon the interactions of all the other inhabitants of the biome. No one plans or even intends - or can do either - that the outcome be one way or another. Rather, all is emergent from what happens to be at hand.

When we come to humans there is a twist, as we are a species that creates its own environment, we’d not have fields or clothes or houses if this were not so. But we face that same problem of complexity which cannot be managed from the centre, as Hayek pointed out in The Pretence of Knowledge. The result is emergent from the voluntary interactions of the inhabitants.

We even have a name for the system which proceeds from this assumption of voluntary interaction creating the world - a market society.

We’re entirely with George Monbiot here, it’s not that society is better when left to emerge in this manner it’s that the only possible manner of gaining one which is stable and resilient is to do it this way. The centre cannot hold us as it were.

Of course, neither George nor anyone else who rails against the current world order is going to agree with us, or even be willing to recognise that they have just recapitulated the neoliberal argument. Yet it is still true - leave us all alone to get on with things as we wish and will, subject only to restriction in those times when our doing so limits the rights of others to do the same, and we’ll end up with the best that can be got.

Smith, Mill, Hayek and Friedman were right, the answer really is power to the people - individually.