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,” Financial Times, 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.
******************************
Where we want to go as a society
