Generally accepted concepts are sometimes encapsulated in analogical or metaphorical expressions that folks use unthinkingly. What they recommend could also be true, false, unsure, deceptive, or meaningless. Essentially the most harmful ones look deep or scientific even when they’re meaningless. Specialists within the precise sciences are sometimes keen on them when talking about social, political, or financial issues. “We as a society” is one such expression. I noticed it once more in an announcement on AI by pc scientist Dennis Hassabis, who was attending the World Financial Discussion board’s annual assembly in Davos (a excessive place of sociological mumbo jumbo). Interviewed by the Monetary Occasions, he mentioned (“AI Leaders Clash Over Safety and $100bn Stargate Project,” Monetary Occasions, January 26, 2026):
“There’s much more at stake here than just companies or products,” the Nobel Prize winner mentioned in an interview with the Monetary Occasions. “[It’s] the future of humanity, the human condition and where we want to go as a society.”
A society or a individuals can’t go the place it desires to go. It isn’t some sort of organic organism or anthropomorphic being who decides the place to go and walks there. It has no mind and no legs. The one approach the expression is smart is when, as we simply noticed in south Gaza, many individuals in a society or a gaggle truly stroll towards the identical place as a result of every particular person desires to go there. A society doesn’t assume and doesn’t have opinions or intentions, even when its particular person members do. Friedrich Hayek emphasised this actuality (see The Counter-Revolution of Science [1952], and Quantity 1 of Legislation, Laws, and Liberty [1973]). Fashionable welfare economics and its social-choice successor have proven {that a} society or a individuals do not need preferences (tastes or values) that may be coherently and meaningfully aggregated with out being dictatorial, that’s, with out ignoring some people’ preferences.
Aside from sacrificial lambs (or maybe saints), anyone who has an opinion on the place “we” ought to go “as a society” doesn’t assume that society ought to go the place he himself doesn’t wish to go. Solely frequent preferences integrated in unanimously agreed guidelines or voluntary personal contracts can preside over a non-authoritarian society. The paradigmatic frequent desire of people is that every desires to be free to go the place he desires. Whether or not this suggests some limits on the place a person could go, and what these limits could also be, is the principle query of political philosophy. Two reverse stances are these of James Buchanan (see The Limits of Liberty [1975]) and Anthony de Jasay (The State [1985]).
Many will reply that “we as a society” is only a approach of talking and that it doesn’t matter. Maybe Hassabis simply discovered the expression within the zeitgeist. Maybe some individuals use the collective “we” because the impersonal “on” in French. These innocuous interpretations could also be right in sure instances however methods of talking sometimes categorical beliefs or result in them. It isn’t by happenstance that social organicism and anthropomorphism have been related to authoritarian or totalitarian concepts. I give some examples in my article “The Impossibility of Populism” (The Impartial Assessment, Summer time 2021), together with the eugenicists of the early twentieth century (“in prolonging the lives of the defectives, we are tampering with the function of the social kidneys,” proclaimed Leon J. Cole) and Adolph Hitler, who thought that the “body of the people” might endure from ailments such because the Jews, the Marxists, and the press.
“Society” is the a part of human interplay that constitutes an unregulated or spontaneous order inside which people and their organizations act. Even essentially the most totalitarian rulers, who know the place “we as a society” ought to go, by no means convey it the place they need—besides to the extent that they cater nicely to their very own self-interests.
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The place we wish to go as a society
