Interesting Essay I, Pencil from Leonard Reed

Leonard Reed’s idea of no one knowing how to create thing as simple as a pen is, is genius. It describes the true nature of modern society. No one would be able to create a pen. Surely not as perfect as the ones we buy at stores. Today’s consumer society enabled every person to have the opportunity to buy products the individual would not know how to produce, and furthermore for a cheap price. A price certainly not corresponding to the hours of work the individual would have to spend on creating the product (as perfect as it is).

Reed perfectly describes the nature of the production of a simple pen. Lead from Ceylon, cedar trees from San Leandro etc. These steps are reinforced by millions of people that even do not know about their contribution. A Brazilian farmer’s coffee will help a miner in Ceylon, truck driver of Koh-I-Noor or others. Leonard Reed does explain this perfectly. Today’s web of work or people is due to globalized communications and infrastructure magically interconnected. But Leonard Reed reasons this connectionism differently.

“I insist that only God could make me,” Reed states. I agree with his argumentation – there is no mastermind, no president of the world telling each individual what to do and yet the resulting opportunities we have are amazing. How can that happen? It surely is not just a coincidence, or even an accident. Reed attributes this to God. Only God can make every individual play their role perfectly, so that person on the other side of the globe can appreciate its contribution.

I would reason this modern phenomenon differently. This trend is something new; something that was not here always. It developed. It did not happen that a magical person, a God, decided to make the world connected from now on, but from a small agricultural communities through Industrial Revolution, a globalized society developed - a society where individuals contribute, but benefit as well. In fact it is an “Invisible Hand at work “ as Reed describes.

Not everything that is occurring, that we have the opportunity to analyze, describe has to have a creator. It has to have a reason! Leibniz, 17^th century revolutionary philosopher, argues that reason is the fundamental property of matter. Indeed, the pens we are using everyday at school have a reason why they are in our hands. We bought them; somebody produced them. But this circle, especially in the production, doesn’t have to have a mastermind controlling every step. Instead every step has a sufficient reason to be made.

We could find parallel in atoms making up the world’s matter. Each step in a production of a pen or other products I will represent by an atom. And yet as chaotic as the kinematics of an atom seem, the result is something stable – something real. Nobody tells each atom what to do. Instead by the circumstances it moves. It moves by a reason! I think that is the same with today’s society. An atom million miles away radiates electromagnetic waves that in a tiny-tiny bit affect the atoms on Earth. I don’t think there is any mastermind. There is only reason, as Leibniz would argue.