People tend to prefer order in their lives. They like things to be predictable. When they go to the grocery store, they expect to find shelves stocked with food. When they go to work, they expect to be paid according to their agreements with the employers. They expect their internet connections to work, their favorite TV shows to air and their mail to arrive on time. People build their lives around a certain level of predictability.

Everything doesn’t always happen as expected, but you can depend on some level of order, and it is interesting to ponder where it comes from. Some people can’t imagine any sort of order without an authority figure telling people what to do, and they mock the idea of spontaneous order, the principle that orderly results can arise simply from the interactions of a large number individual participants. While embraced by promoters of economic freedom, it is not fundamentally a political theory, but rather an observation of an important facet of nature and society.

Spontaneous order can be observed at many levels throughout nature. Herds, flocks and colonies of living creatures exhibit tremendously complex collective behaviors without the existence of central directors or planners. Even the lowly lichens are arrangements of millions of individual organisms of different species that have no planners, yet they exhibit particular characteristics that are consistent and recognizable. Order emerges rather than random behavior. There is a science of spontaneous order, which goes by the name of complex adaptive systems, that is making great strides in understanding the nature of these phenomena.

It also exists in human societies. People who dislike the idea of spontaneous order often cite examples of things that they believe would not exist without government planning and direction, things such as fire protection and the internet. Fire protection certainly is an important service, and is provided and administered many municipal governments. There are, however, many thousands of local volunteer fire companies around the country that have been effectively providing that service to their communities, some for more than a century. As government adds more and more layers of regulation on those independent fire companies, it becomes much more difficult for them to survive independently. They are becoming less spontaneous and more controlled, more expensive and more of a burden on their communities.

The internet that we know today is an orgy of spontaneous order. While the U.S. government started the nonprofit organization ICAAN to assign domain numbers so that each internet address attached to it has a unique identifier, the development of the world-wide-web is the work of a vast international network of independent vendors, operators, system design engineers, researchers and other organizations who develop standards and operate systems at local and regional levels. The internet became the incredible resource that it has particularly because it was not controlled and directed by a central authority. It is an extremely dynamic, competitive, innovative environment that caters to users and enables a whole cascade of new services.

Spontaneous order does, however, rely on a set of rules of behavior. According to some scientists, the magnificent artistry of a flock of starlings, called a murmuration, is due to as few as seven rules by which the individual birds are guided in near-instantaneous reactions to environmental factors. Human societies also operate according to rules. When the laws of government reflect the actual rules of human cooperation, the respect for the lives, liberty and property of others, society will flourish. When the laws are arbitrary or abusive of individuals, or politicians seek to control, societies will be less than their potentials or, as witnessed in so many cases like Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, will descend into chaos and poverty.

Dan McLaughlin is the author of “Compassion and Truth-Why Good Intentions Don’t Equal Good Results.” Follow him at daniel-mclaughlin.com