Chaos and order?
The two great forces in nature are chaos and order, it is baked into our existence through our genes at birth, there is the order of copying the two halves of our parents genes and the random chaos of variation that allows for evolution and carries with it the danger of mutation. Chaos is the rolling of the dice that determines the fates of empires and can result in the destruction of the old stale order, or the lose of the traditions that give us comfort and security depending on your point of view. There is no path that pleases both elements, ordered chaos is not possible, letting loose on a Friday night is not a no holds barred festival of freedom rather an ordered release of pressure, with the constrains of social order and intelligence, you can be a little wild but too much and you could be out of a job on Monday if that Christmas party goes very wrong.
However there is fun to be had in the line between order and chaos, bonfire night and Halloween is a traditional time for trouble, lawlessness, rotten eggs and angry neighbours. When I was a teenager, our village erupted into a near civil war of flexible alliances, that included but was not limited to the local firefighters using their water hoses on a raiding party from another village, good times that would be impossible in an age of social media and surveillance, the hangover would now include legal proceedings. We can not even make a mistake in the words we use in public, we have to be our own police and trample over our freedom of expression, we are suppose to be perfect for all time, never being wrong or misguided, thank mercy, there is no record of the stupid things I have said and done during my teenage years.
I guess the only sensible reaction is the new model army of incredibly sensible children that are growing up now, order so tightly restricts their actions that there is no freedom to be truly different, there is a choice between being career orientated or caring about a cause, and as it is the only outlet for their rage, you can understand why they get so angry about it, why would they not be when they do not get to be their strange anti-social chaotic selves in another way. What is certain is that order does not rule forever, chaos will return, whether that is a rejection of technology, the lying down culture (where you lay passively down and refuse to co-operate with society) or the “I do not want a career” movement (can not help but agree with that one, passion over career every time) which with basic income and robots just around the corner could develop into a real movement that values humans instead of making humans produce economic value.
They give me hope because too much order terrifies me, there is no room for the odd and strange in perfect order, whole classes of people can and have disappeared because they did not fit, the Nazis started their extermination with the disabled, mental ill and homeless sections of Germans before they descend further into the madness of order. The drive to control others for their own good is not always bad, parents control their children to protect them, we stop people from harming others and themselves, we section people who can not control their minds, there can be kindness in order, we can make sure people do not slip through the cracks but it has to be done with a high duty of care and limited as much as possible.
Though the temptation is always to go too far to control everything, and the rise of artificial intelligence is at the edge of the kind of central command that Stalin would have had wet dreams about. It is at the cusp of where it could effectively read your mind, imagine the power of being able to identify the trouble makers before they could develop and co-ordinate, it would give the world a perfect police state and the absolute robotic obedience it's citizen would have to display. It gives me hope to see the download pirates, bitcoin rebels, VPN cheats and illegal markets that exists in defiance of the authorities, anything that decentralises power is going to be a necessary counterweight to the monopoly of order that could be unleashed.
The worst of which is the geographical monopoly of the state, we are seeing divide and rule politics at it's most ruthless with the closing of borders across the world, we have never in peacetime been less free than now in our abilities to move around our world. Wherever you are now you are probably stuck there for better or worse, and as the generals know if you want the fiercest battle you cut off your forces from being able to escape, you burn the boats and tell your soldiers that there is only one way out and you are going to have to fight. That is the kind of pressure that countries are building up by blocking the free movement of people, your rebels who have nothing to lose will be forced to fight because they have no line of retreat, and with no escape or freedom it will be to the death.
Yet, the temptation of order is that it is always so close to creating utopia, if only people would do what you told them to do, act in the right way and of course your way is the best way in this logic trap. That is it's flaw, order would be ideal if we were all the same, wanted the same, thought in the same way, and that is just not the truth, it is not even close, people think in remarkably different way, they see and understand the world different. The five major traits of people result in different views of the world, we are physically different, some people have inner visualisation, inner voices, others do not, and it is unimaginable how different live must be with or without them, we are virtual aliens to each other and yet, we think we are the same, that everyone else thinks in the same way that we do.
That is an illusion, the miracle is that we can organise civilisation in the first place, that we need each other enough that we can overlook how different we are, not just out of survival but out of love and the need to be understood by others so that we can understand ourselves. We literally outsource our sense of what is right to the group and in coming to conclusions we seek consensus, an agreement between us whether that is a friend or the whole of society, and we agree on so much that we take for granted that we do not notice it. If you take the ten commandments, everyone basically agree on the sentiments of them, do not kill, steal, have respect for others, but people have killed in their name because of the minor differences in interpretation. That is chaos rearing it's head again, as order bakes in advantages to some and not others, even when the others are the minority, a lack of unity will in the end breakdown the order from inside or out.
Even the great Roman empire was taken down by the barbarians in the end, a thousand year of order torn down in a few generations of chaos, because the order did not benefit everyone. That is only form of order that will last forever is one which allows for the chaos of the individual and everyone, and that could only occur when we no longer need to co-operate together for the good of society, technology reduces that need for joint enterprise, which is why there is a correlation between improvement in technology and personal freedom. Not having to farm all day long just to feed yourself was the start of the freedom that we are still coming to terms with today, the devil makes work for idle hands is absolutely true but it is a good kind of trouble to have. Order gave chaos the freedom to thrive, yet that order came from the chaos of harnessing fire and language, each one of them leapfrog over each other and depending on your age, it will always feel like order or chaos is in the assent.
We have to learn to ride these waves of order and chaos both in our own lives and the background of society as a whole, just knowing that they exist is a good starting point and that it is necessary to counter-balance yourself against those forces. When there is too much chaos in our lives we need time and distance to regain a sense of order and if there is an over abundance of order, you best bring a little chaos back or it is going to find you, we need to challenge order whenever it over reaches, we fight the small battle so it does not escalate too far. The most dangerous fire follow the driest periods of seasons, there has been such a long period of order in the world that chaos was bound to emerge, we can manage it by increasing freedom or trying to impose greater order, and with the amount of laws being pasted and restrictions being imposed both by governments and social opinions, your freedom to be yourself has reduced to dangerously low levels. When you can guess all of someone’s opinions from one opinion you have ordered mindsets occurring, you have sides being formed and soon everyone will have to pick a side, which is the most dangerous aspect of order, you can only be for it or against it, war can only be fought by the forces of order, chaos can not be that organised.
The only way to save the world is by being different, chaotic, in small doses, by supporting those who are strange and difficult, who's view can not be reduced to hundred characters, who are not Instagram friendly and who offend someone, not everyone but at least a few people. That is a sign that the ideas they have are different, non-standard, that they can not be dismissed as that kind of person you never listened to in the first place, it is not orderly, they might be wrong but at least they are trying to think and more importantly they have the freedom to think, that there is a safe space for ideas not just people. As people without ideas are just sheep on the way to the slaughter house, because the greatest order you can have is death, nothing changes in death, it is the final resting point, and I never want the world to rest, I want it to fight for change and evolution, for ideas that raise us all up to levels that we can not even comprehend, that is a future worth having.
