Rube Goldberg

There's a fairly entertaining and different kind of essay at Lew Rockwell today about the politics of Rube Goldberg. Link.

Here's an excerpt, setting forth Goldberg's distrust of what Russell Kirk referred to as "defecated rationality" (Kirk, if we recall correctly, borrowed the phrase from Edmund Burke; it's nice to know Hayek also held that type of mental exercise in disdain):

The sheer goofy genius of Goldberg's work also illustrates a Hayekian theme of the error of rationalism detached from reality. Society works not because a single mastermind has preset all the moving parts. It works because people find ways to cooperate through private actions that follow signs and rules that cannot be anticipated but can nonetheless be coordinated. Society and its workings cannot be mapped out and the attempt to do so can create frameable images but not civilizations.