Opening our interior and external eyes to the greatness and infinitude of the always new invisible hand, we are not able to, neither should we, fall into managerial rationalism. Cartesian reasoning does not capture the qualities, only the number, the quantity, the abstraction of the quantity, and the abstraction of the forms. Mathematics are Cartesian, that which is presented as clear and evident. They are not able to capture the life, colour, relationship, or the value that is a relationship of convenience and a quality of things." Reason is not able to manage qualities. A colour cannot be thought, it cannot be defined. It has to be seen, and if we want to speak about it we have to obey it." Price is a certain numeric expression, but even price is subtle: each price is original, variable, inconstant, a reflection of personal subjective valuations, of lives, of degrees of trust. Prices are also exchange values in precise circumstances. They are puppets manipulated by their owners that are values in use and with regard to those who specify them.

Peter G. Klein explains the essence of Hayek's contributions indicating that he bases his defence of the market not on human rationality, but on human ignorance! "The argument that justifies freedom, or at least its main component, resides in the fact of our ignorance and not in that of our knowledge."

Only by being aware of our enormous personal smallness, and admiring the invisible hand with ignorant astonishment, will we sense the habitual unknown effects of our actions. How many times do we want to do this and we do that; we believe we are teaching and we are learning; we believe we are learning and in fact we are teaching. We believe we are climbing a tree to pick an apple, so-and-so that sees us falls in love with us, and it changes our future and the future. "And it is that, like a sound on silence, science settles and lives on living ignorance. On living ignorance, because the principle of wisdom is knowing how to be ignorant."

Hayek showed special admiration for Dr. Bernard Mandeville, specialist in nerve diseases, for two characteristics of human knowledge that this psychiatrist of the 18th century highlighted: "That we do not know why we do what we do, and that the consequences of our decisions are often very different from what we expected, are the two foundations of that satire about the deceptions of a rationalistic time that was its initial objective."

The principle of "I only know that I do not know anything" from Séneca to the rationalistic and positivist right has a special application. The legislator wants to achieve this and he achieves that, maybe even the opposite. The perverse and unloved effects of rationalistic laws and economic and managerial decisions based on the hyper-rationalism of many executives, are abundant. This understanding of economic interdependence should lead to intellectual and executive humility, knowing that arrogance, no matter how active it is, is not work but un-work. It does not do, it undoes. All managers should take a quick look at the intellectual vices developed by the great philosophers of ethics or of human behaviour.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen to a family, managerial, regional or national economy is to bureaucratise life. To avoid falling into that error, it is necessary to know how to discover in others the especially valuable manager that we all carry deep inside. In addition, it is necessary to have the capacity of human reaction. It would be appropriate to apply the theory of rational expectations of the Nobel Prize for Economy, Robert Lucas, to these facts. For that reason experience is so important in managerial tasks. It is due to that that there is no alternative but to learn by the method of successive approaches, learning from errors and reconverting attitudes with flexibility. Knowing that we never have the truth but, at the most, less error in Popperiano style. All this leads to maybe even changing activity, making the mind more flexible, eliminating manias, without forced rigidities. It means always starting again without a fuss, always beginning again, a new life always being born in the same living person.

That motive power of ignorance is also revealed as important in the uselessness of attempts to control and omniscience. In turn, the subordinate's merely neutral, aseptic and functionary attitude no longer tallies with this open interaction and it has to be returned to the trunk of mementos. Consequently management can no longer pivot on the pure function of I order and I am in charge, and I show my credentials and tell a few home truths to whoever is opposed to my clear and different ideas. Hitler and Stalin surely had clear and different ideas, obvious for them, and they tried to carry them out.

The new style of management is not only that of allowing to do and allowing to pass from the peaks of power, but also, and especially, of being allowed to do, and undertaking all the wealth locked in each new situation with patience and without fear. It is fitting to remember Jean Béranger's judgement: "True victory consists less of triumphing over an interchangeable opponent used as a scapegoat, than of attempting to control one's own instincts and dominate them as far as possible." Commenting on this text Juan Velarde concludes: "In Spain there were not only minor mistakes in these years, but a basic, colossal error that we are very probably going to pay bitterly in the next few years. This is that of defending that it was not urgent to sacrifice in order to control one's own instincts, but on the contrary that it was suitable to give up that and other sacrifices." The strongest is he who knows how to restrain himself, how to resist, not he who attacks. The classics of all times have always claimed that. Many times the manager, to act wisely, will have to have the strength and the nerve to curb, to stop, to rest, to stop running and look at himself inside. On many occasions he will have to sit down with patience and integrity in the shade of solitude. It is the humility of he who allows life to do and does not impose his stereotyped or squared goals, visions and projects on others. Allowing to do. Correcting, but mainly allowing to be corrected. Coordinating and guiding, but allowing to do. To be successful it is better not to rigidly impose our particular impulsive rationalism.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
NEGOCIOS, August 10th 1996