Generally accepted concepts are sometimes encapsulated in analogical or metaphorical expressions that individuals use unthinkingly. What they recommend could also be true, false, unsure, deceptive, or meaningless. Probably the most harmful ones look deep or scientific even when they’re meaningless. Specialists within the actual 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 Conflict Over Security and $100bn Stargate Challenge,” Monetary Occasions, January 26, 2026):
“There’s rather more at stake right here than simply firms or merchandise,” the Nobel Prize winner mentioned in an interview with the Monetary Occasions. “[It’s] the way forward for humanity, the human situation and the place we wish to go as a society.”
A society or a individuals can’t go the place it needs to go. It’s not 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 means the expression is smart is when, as we simply noticed in south Gaza, many individuals in a society or a bunch really stroll towards the identical place as a result of every particular person needs to go there. A society doesn’t suppose 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]). Trendy welfare economics and its social-choice successor have proven {that a} society or a individuals should not have 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 suppose that society ought to go the place he himself doesn’t wish to go. Solely frequent preferences integrated in unanimously agreed guidelines or voluntary non-public contracts can preside over a non-authoritarian society. The paradigmatic frequent choice of people is that every needs to be free to go the place he needs. Whether or not this means some limits on the place a person could go, and what these limits could also be, is the primary 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 means 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 appropriate in sure instances however methods of talking usually categorical beliefs or result in them. It’s not 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 Unbiased Overview, Summer season 2021), together with the eugenicists of the early twentieth century (“in prolonging the lives of the defectives, we’re tampering with the perform of the social kidneys,” proclaimed Leon J. Cole) and Adolph Hitler, who thought that the “physique of the individuals” might undergo from illnesses 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 probably the most totalitarian rulers, who know the place “we as a society” ought to go, by no means carry 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
