Thursday, June 30, 2005

Dynamism

"...Unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices. Some [of them] prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to "stasis," a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority.
On the other side is an emerging coalition in support of "dynamism": an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, [and] dynamists are "the party of life." "
-Viriginia Postrel