The Best Self-Help is Free: Incremental Progress

Chapter 5

This is Chapter 5 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

Surrounded by perils as we are, what are we to do? Clearly, the safety of our lives is not just a binary alternative. There are degrees of safety, and some lives in some conditions are safer than others. The life of virtually anyone in a Western country today is much safer and freer from perils than the life of virtually any of his great-grandparents. But how did we get even the prosperity and safety we currently have? Surely, they did not spring up overnight. Indeed, the groundwork for it was laid over the course of centuries. Great scientists, inventors, mathematicians, economists, engineers, architects, doctors, and the people implementing their ideas brought into being better machines, more efficacious cures for diseases, and stabler, freer political and economic systems. The combined contribution of technologies such as the automobile, the airplane, the computer, antibiotics, and the assembly line to our lives cannot be overestimated.

But no one person could have single-handedly developed all of modern civilization. In the brilliant essay, "I, Pencil," Leonard Read shows that no single individual could even have assembled a typical pencil entirely on his own from start to finish without great hardship. But millions of people have made contributions - great or small - to the progress of civilization. More people still work effectively within the framework of systems of human interaction that were either consciously designed or arose spontaneously based on the activities and choices of millions of people. Nobody deliberately initially designed money, markets, or even languages - but these systems have a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Sometimes the idea of a single person will be taken up by others, who will use it in creative and remarkable ways unforeseen by its originator.