Hayek and Keynes from the Perspective of Natural Cybernetics

This paper attempts to reinterpret the century-long intellectual debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, arguing that their fundamental disagreement is not merely a choice between “market versus state” or “freedom versus intervention,” but rather reflects two different understandings of how civilization itself operates. Hayek emphasizes dispersed knowledge, spontaneous order, and long-term evolutionary dynamics. He argues that market systems can generate natural order through decentralized competition and information exchange without central design. Keynes, by contrast, emphasizes aggregate demand, systemic stagnation, and the necessity of state intervention. He argues that when markets fall into panic and paralysis, external corrective forces are required to restore stability. Both thinkers identify essential dimensions of civilization—evolution and stability—but neither adequately explains why both market systems and state systems repeatedly drift toward instability, crisis, and collapse. This paper argues that the fundamental cause does not lie in institutional design itself, but in the underlying structure of human desire. Human aspirations for power, wealth, fame, and control exhibit an inherently unbounded expansion tendency, forming a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Unregulated markets can be captured by such desires, evolving into monopolies, capital concentration, wealth polarization, and ecological overexploitation. State intervention can likewise be captured, evolving into power expansion, debt accumulation, perpetual stimulus policies, and systemic overreach. Thus, modern economic crises, ecological crises, technological risks, and global governance failures are not isolated phenomena, but different manifestations of the same structural condition: unlimited desire exceeding natural boundaries. To address this, the paper introduces the framework of “Natural Cybernetics” as a post-classical paradigm beyond traditional economics. Natural Cybernetics holds that all systems—from the universe, galaxies, solar systems, and Earth to life, civilization, and economy—are governed by universal principles of self-organization, feedback regulation, and negative feedback stabilization. Based on the “Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology,” the paper proposes two complementary structural chains. The first is the generative chain of “Dao gives rise to One, One to Two, Two to Three, Three to All Things,” describing the emergence of civilization from galaxy to solar system, Earth, Moon, and finally to life and economy. The second is the constraint chain of “Humans follow Earth, Earth follows Heaven, Heaven follows Dao, Dao follows Nature,” meaning that human systems must obey planetary boundaries, Earth must obey solar cycles, the solar system must obey galactic order, and the galaxy ultimately conforms to universal natural law. Within this framework, Hayek represents evolution and Keynes represents stability, while Natural Cybernetics provides the higher-order boundary that constrains both. Civilization governance, therefore, is not a simple choice between market and state, but the simultaneous embedding of both within natural negative feedback constraints. The paper further introduces concepts such as Artificial Wisdom, Universal Operating System (Universal OS), Natural Value Index, and Natural Currency, aiming to establish a governance paradigm that replaces power-centered logic with boundary-centered logic. Its core principle is that wealth must correspond to real labor, energy, and ecological contribution; desire must bear its true cost; and all economic and political actions must remain within natural feedback constraints. The paper concludes that a truly mature civilization is not defined by infinite growth, infinite control, or infinite expansion, but by the ability to