Can Freeorder Shape a Prosperous, Self-Governing Society?

In 1970, Leif Smith, then an auditor for Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s graduate seminar at UCLA, sat with a mimeographed copy of Hayek’s not-yet-published Law, Legislation and Liberty manuscript, mulling it over in his mind like a puzzle.

Hayek had articulated two poles of social order: the spontaneous, unplanned, organic patterns that emerge from free interaction and the designed rules, laws, and institutions created intentionally.

Yet Hayek himself noted the lack of a word that captured their balance.

Smith supplied it: Freeorder.

Freeorder is quest-enabling balance among spontaneous and designed orders.

It is not simply the midpoint between chaos and control; it is a dynamic, living balance. It reflects the arrangements that allow people to explore, innovate, and self-govern without choking on bureaucracy or dissolving into disorder.

In Smith’s words, it is “balances among spontaneous and designed orders, balances that serve quests.”

Two Rivers Converge

Imagine two rivers.

One is the River of Design, straight-channeled and engineered, delivering water where we decide it should go. The other is the River of Spontaneity, meandering, fed by mountain springs, finding its own path.

On their own, each river has strengths and weaknesses. Design can irrigate crops, but it can also flood fields when planners miscalculate. Spontaneity nourishes life with variety but can dry up if no one tends its tributaries.

Freeorder is where these rivers merge, neither overpowering the other, their currents meeting in fertile confluence. Here, society gains the stability to build bridges and the adaptability to welcome new tributaries of thought and action.

The Austrian Echo

Smith’s Freeorder builds directly on Hayek’s Austrian economic insight that markets, and by extension societies, are best understood as spontaneous order. No single mind can hold all the knowledge needed to direct an economy. Prices, customs, and norms emerge as “the result of human action, not of human design.”

Yet Hayek was no anarchist. He saw the need for designed frameworks in the form of constitutions, legal systems, and property rights to safeguard the playing field in which spontaneous action could thrive.

Freeorder simply makes the balance explicit. It honors Hayek’s cosmos (grown order) and taxis (made order), while providing a practical philosophy for keeping them in healthy tension. This is Austrian economics with a tuning fork, one that is listening constantly to see if freedom’s note is still ringing clear.

The Taoist Whisper

Lao Tzu would recognize Freeorder. In the Tao Te Ching, the sage advises:

“Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish — do not overdo it.”

The Tao moves in paradox: structure without rigidity, action without forcing. It thrives when leaders create space, not when they script every step.

Freeorder shares this DNA. It does not abolish rules; it treats them like bamboo in that they’re flexible yet strong. It trusts in the self-ordering capacity of people when given both boundaries and room to breathe. Like the Tao, Freeorder is less a machine to operate than a garden to tend.

The Role of Artist-Entrepreneurs: Freeorder’s Gardeners

Smith calls artist-entrepreneurs the “freeorder generators.” They are part craftsman, part improviser. In other words, they are people who marry deliberate design with the openness to let things evolve.

Think of a jazz musician composing on the fly. The chords (designed order) are fixed, but the solo (spontaneous order) emerges moment by moment. The result is music that is both coherent and alive.

In society, artist-entrepreneurs do the same:

• They design tools, products, or institutions with intent.
• They adapt to feedback and circumstance without clinging to the blueprint.
• They bridge disciplines and communities, letting fresh currents flow through otherwise stagnant waters.

Without such gardeners, Freeorder’s rivers risk becoming canals that are straight, predictable, and lifeless. Or swamps that are random, chaotic, and stagnant.

A Story of a Village Without a Map

Picture a small mountain village. For centuries, paths formed where villagers walked, not where a council decreed. These footpaths connected the market, the river, and the temple. They were a spontaneous order, shaped by daily life.

One year, a mayor decided to pave over the paths in a grand geometric pattern. It looked beautiful from above, but on the ground, it disconnected homes from water, farmers from fields. Frustrated, villagers began cutting across lawns, wearing new dirt tracks that ignored the paving.

Years later, a wiser council studied both the old worn paths and the paved lines. They redesigned the village walkways to align with the natural foot traffic while adding modest lighting and drainage. The result was a Freeorder that was structured where needed but adaptive where possible.

The moral? Freeorder is not about imposing a map or leaving the ground unmarked. It’s about letting the map grow from the ground and editing it just enough to serve the people’s quest.

Institutions as Forges, Not Fortresses

Smith’s Explorers Foundation is itself a Freeorder generator. It builds forges, not fortresses.

A fortress is static in terms of possessing walls to keep things in or out. A forge is dynamic in its deployment of heat and tools to shape something new.

Institutions in a Freeorder society must be forges:

• Tool creators for problem-solving.
• Error recognizers willing to scrap a flawed idea.
• Boundary setters that invite innovation rather than stifle it.
• Network builders that leverage voluntary cooperation over top-down command.

A forge doesn’t demand obedience; it offers capability. That distinction is the difference between a self-governing society and one that simply rotates rulers.

Why Freeorder Matters Now

We live in a time when both poles—design and spontaneity—are under stress. Centralized planning often collapses under complexity. Unfettered chaos can erode trust and stability.

Freeorder offers a third way:

• In governance, it means protecting liberty with constitutional guardrails while allowing communities to experiment with local solutions.
• In economics, it means letting market signals drive adaptation while designing institutions that prevent coercion and protect property.
• In culture, it means honoring traditions without freezing them in amber, allowing customs to evolve.

The balance is fragile. Tip too far toward design, and you suffocate initiative. Tip too far toward spontaneity, and you risk disintegration. The art lies in tending both currents at once.

Personal Freeorder: The Microcosm

Freeorder is not only about nations. It’s about how you run your own life.

Ask yourself:

• Do I over-design my days, leaving no space for serendipity?
• Do I let my life drift, avoiding all structure, and wonder why goals slip away?
• Where can I create boundaries that invite play, exploration, and discovery?

A Freeorder life might look like keeping a morning routine (design) but letting the afternoon unfold with spontaneous calls, walks, or reading (spontaneity). It might mean committing to a career direction but leaving room to pivot when new opportunities appear.

Metaphor of the Kite

A kite cannot fly without a string. Let the string go, and it crashes; hold it too tightly, and it never soars.

Freeorder is the perfect tension in the string. It’s the pull that keeps the kite aloft while allowing it to dance with the wind. In society, that tension is the interplay of designed order (the string) and spontaneous order (the wind). Lose the balance, and you lose the flight.

Cultivating a Freeorder Mindset

If you want to see more Freeorder in your world, start with your mindset:

1. Value feedback over perfection; treat every plan as a hypothesis to test.
2. Guard the boundaries that matter. In other words, embrace the notion that freedom requires a few clear, strong rules.
3. Invite the unexpected; design systems that expect change, not resist it.
4. Empower connectors by supporting the artist-entrepreneurs in your community.
5. Balance control with trust—lead like a gardener, not a puppet master.

This is not passive optimism. It’s an active tending. As Lao Tzu might say, “Do nothing, and nothing is left undone”—but only when the doing is in harmony with the flow.

Closing Refrain

Freeorder is not utopian. It assumes mistakes will be made, experiments will fail, and tensions will never disappear. Its genius is in turning those conditions into fuel for adaptation rather than excuses for control.

Whether in a small village, a global economy, or your own daily life, the question is the same:

How will you weave the currents of design and spontaneity so that both serve your quest?

Like a gardener who knows when to plant and when to let wildflowers grow, Freeorder asks you to think not only about what you build, but how you let it live.