Authoritarian movements, both from the left and the right, are on the rise again around the world. In an age where the process of creative destruction takes place faster than ever before, people look for help, for someone to finally make sense of the supposed chaos and bring order back into life. Thus, many have moved to strong leaders in a search for stability, particularly in the West.

As Donald Trump noted in his State of the Union address, some people are even calling for socialism, despite a long history of terrible failure and evil.

"Tonight," he said, "we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country."

Indeed no complex society can be.

One of the 20th century's great thinkers, Friedrich A. von Hayek, always despised such top-down systems of economic planning. Works like his most popular The Road to Serfdom are a strong rebuke to such authoritarian systems, and his concept of the spontaneous order, perhaps the most significant of his many groundbreaking ideas, provides an alternative vision of an order that does not exist when a strongman is in place.

One of his lesser-known essays, "Kinds of Order in Society," which was published in 1981, sheds further light on Hayek's conception of different orders, and explains how the search for security through a big government will always stay fruitless.

In Hayek's opinion, an order of some sort is obviously needed in society:

"A complete absence of an order cannot be seriously maintained."