Commonly accepted ideas are often encapsulated in analogical or metaphorical expressions that people use unthinkingly. What they suggest may be true, false, uncertain, misleading, or meaningless. The most dangerous ones look deep or scientific even if they are meaningless. Experts in the exact sciences are often fond of them when speaking about social, political, or economic matters. “We as a society” is one such expression. I saw it again in a statement on AI by computer scientist Dennis Hassabis, who was attending the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos (a high place of sociological mumbo jumbo). Interviewed by the Financial Times, he said (“AI Leaders Clash Over Safety and $100bn Stargate Project,” January 26, 2026):
“There’s much more at stake here than just companies or products,” the Nobel Prize winner said in an interview with the Financial Times. “[It’s] the future of humanity, the human condition and where we want to go as a society.”
A society or a people cannot go where it wants to go. It is not some kind of biological organism or anthropomorphic being who decides where to go and walks there. It has no brain and no legs. The only way the expression makes sense is when, as we just saw in south Gaza, many people in a society or a group actually walk toward the same place because each individual wants to go there. A society does not think and does not have opinions or intentions, even if its individual members do. Friedrich Hayek emphasized this reality (see The Counter-Revolution of Science [1952], and Volume 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty [1973]). Modern welfare economics and its social-choice successor have shown that a society or a people do not have preferences (tastes or values) that can be coherently and meaningfully aggregated without being dictatorial, that is, without ignoring some individuals’ preferences.
Except for sacrificial lambs (or perhaps saints), anybody who has an opinion on where “we” should go “as a society” does not think that society should go where he himself does not want to go. Only common preferences incorporated in unanimously agreed rules or voluntary private contracts can preside over a non-authoritarian society. The paradigmatic common preference of individuals is that each wants to be free to go where he wants. Whether this implies some limits on where an individual may go, and what these limits may be, is the main question of political philosophy. Two opposite stances are those 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 just a way of speaking and that it does not matter. Perhaps Hassabis just found the expression in the zeitgeist. Perhaps some people use the collective “we” as the impersonal “on” in French. These innocuous interpretations may be correct in certain cases but ways of speaking typically express beliefs or lead to them. It is not by happenstance that social organicism and anthropomorphism have been associated with authoritarian or totalitarian ideas. I give some examples in my article “The Impossibility of Populism” (The Independent Review, Summer 2021), including the eugenicists of the early 20th 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” could suffer from diseases such as the Jews, the Marxists, and the press.
“Society” is the part of human interaction that constitutes an unregulated or spontaneous order within which individuals and their organizations act. Even the most totalitarian rulers, who know where “we as a society” should go, never bring it where they want—except to the extent that they cater well to their own self-interests.
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Where we want to go as a society
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Feb 8 2025 at 11:37am
Great points! Using aggregates like “society” or “government” is merely a way to express what the speaker wants without appearing self centered.
Michel Kelly-Gagnon
Feb 8 2025 at 2:42pm
Great piece!
At best, these expressions can sometimes incapsulate the views of a strong majority of individuals within a society on a specific topic at a specific point in time. For example, that “Canada is not interested in becoming the 51st State of the United States of America”.
Obviously, a better formulation would, for instance, be that: “ x% of Canadians do not wish to become American citizens according to a poll by Iposos Reid released on February 7th 2025”.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 8 2025 at 9:03pm
Welcome to EconLog, Michel!
Craig
Feb 8 2025 at 3:46pm
From Mount McKinley
To the Alberta prairies
the Gulf of America
Up to the ice sheets….and then down to the Canal! God bless GrossAmerica
My home sweet home.
You know where I want to go as a society? I want to make Canadians, perhaps the most polite people on the planet, to boo a rendition of the Star Spangled banner at a sporting event. Let’s go there.
Monte
Feb 8 2025 at 6:07pm
Unless you subscribe to Marx’s notion of society (I don’t) as that which “does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” Along with the likes of Durkheim, Rousseau, Polanyi, Mill and others, Marx advocated for the subordination of individual liberty to a collective order. These views have not yet become mainstream, but continue to encroach further within the sphere of influence in Washington.
On a separate note, how did the subject of Canada and the U.S. creep into this conversation? And given the vitriol aimed at the U.S., perhaps someone can help me understand how Canada somehow occupies the moral high ground.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 8 2025 at 9:15pm
Monte: Speaking of “Canada” or “the United States,” as I argue, is at best risky. I think that rightist collectivism (the supremacy of collective choices over individual choices) is as obtainable as leftist collectivism. Trump declared that access to the American market is a privilege, which basically means that whether an American may trade with a Canadian who wants to trade with him must have the permission of the American collective. Trump is not the only one in America or in the world to think this way, of course. But in the (limited) context of the past couple of weeks, it seems that millions of individuals (in the United States and Canada) can claim the moral high ground over the King of America!
Monte
Feb 8 2025 at 10:35pm
I agree, Pierre, but I’m referring to country, not king. What America stands for (or at least, what it stands for in the absence of our leaders) is justice, liberty, and prosperity. And truth be told, the contrast of character between Trump and Trudeau is not that stark.
I think anti-Americanism runs much deeper than its policies or leadership. There seems to be (and probably always has been) a genuine resentment of the American brand beyond our borders, as there is with any world power.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 8 2025 at 11:06pm
Monte: We agree on the fundamentals. But here is a hypothesis: During the past 75 years, most people in the world, or at least most informed people, secretly loved (and envied) America, even when their ideologies and positions obliged them to condemn “American imperialism.” The way things are going with the ignoramuses and imperialists now ruling the country, the situation may be changing: most people, including informed people, will hate America, even if their interests or positions push them to yield and show deference to the bully-in-chief. (By “America,” I mean the historical American ideals and the way people are in America.)
Ron Browning
Feb 9 2025 at 8:33am
One thing that I took away from Mises in “Human Action”, which I repeat to myself now and then is:
All thoughts are individual
All actions are individual, which are always directed toward the future, which is always unknown.
It has helped me consider other people’s statements.
Knut P. Heen
Feb 11 2025 at 10:30am
Well said. The problem is how to fight these ideas. Methodological individualism have not convinced enough people. It is always “we have to do this” or “we have to do that”. I wonder what would happen to the so-called society if we all were bakers. Where would the flour come from?
David Seltzer
Feb 11 2025 at 1:53pm
If we were all bakers, where would flour come from? Sounds like Russell’s Paradox.
David Seltzer
Feb 11 2025 at 2:11pm
Pierre: Really well explained and argued. I suspect the terms “we”, “society”, and the “greater good” emerge from fewer members in families or sports teams. They refer to themselves as we two parents or we twenty-three hockey players on the Montreal Canadiens. The principle of amiable morality. As decentralization happens, those who’ve benefited from amiable associations, may consider society as a team on a broader scope and scale. They may believe society does, in fact, possess anthropomorphic properties.
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