Chaos Is Deeper Than Order
Chaos goes deeper than order — the two are NOT a straightforward pair of complementary opposites, as we always tend to think. Instead of chaos we could talk about randomness — a random number is one that doesn’t fit into any regular pattern, one that can’t in any way be predicted. We can also say that randomness has the property of ‘penetrating everywhere;, the property of ‘leaving no stone unturned’, whereas the orderly or logical approach can only go ever where it is preordained to go. Ordered processes run on rails — they can only go where they are instructed to go (or ‘ordered’ to go). Order is therefore just another word for ‘lack of freedom’. We don’t generally see it this way it is true, but this is clearly how things are.
The property of randomness is to cover all possibilities, leaving none out, is known as ergodicity. Ergodicity is not a word we come across that often and even those of us who are routinely familiar with the term are unlikely to realise what a big deal it actually is. This isn’t just some obscur phenomenon in chemistry, something that only has meaning within a very specific niche, what we’re talking about here is freedom itself. Ergodicity means that there are no obstacles, no barriers, no limitations anywhere — put simply, it means that we have no blind-spot. We can relate ergodicity to the phenomenon of perfectly unimpeded movement, and ‘perfectly unimpeded movement’ — when it comes down to it — is the best way we have of talking about reality, the best way we have of talking about the universe we live in. This is David Bohm’s Holomovement, this is Heraclitus’s is cosmic flux.
If — therefore — we want to hold order up against chaos and compare them to see which goes deeper, to see which is the mightier, then it would clearly be no contest — chaos, more than just running deep, turns out to be the very same thing as reality itself. Chaos isn’t just deep, it’s infinitely deep. There’s no bottom to it, no end to it. Chaos is the well from which everything is drawn- it’s our mother. This is curious therefore because our attitude is always to say that chaos is the Great Enemy, the nemesis of every form that exists. It swallows everything up in its insatiable maw and in it all things are lost. Although we might still acknowledge that ‘chaos is the mother of all’, ‘the source of everything that exists’ this still doesn’t mean that we’re going to be to be favourably disposed to it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t live in mortal dread of that mother…
Chaos is unappealing to us — to put it mildly — because there is no possibility of making sense of it, no way of fitting it into our plans or schemes. It’s too wild, too free for that — chaos will not kowtow to our petty agendas, it won’t play ball and this alone is enough to ensure that we won’t take to it. We don’t like stuff that doesn’t play ball. Chaos contains all possibilities and that all-inclusivity is something we really don’t see any value in; when we come across what we see as a meaningless confusion of possibilities all we want to do is close it down quick. Everything we value is threatened by this monster and as a result all of our purposeful activity, all of our scheming and planning, is ultimately directed towards the end of keeping the beast which is chaos at bay.
From the rational or directed perspective, chaos boils down to risk and risk is the one thing rationality cannot tolerate. Rationality is only rational because it avoids risk, the directed process is only directed because uncertainty is not accepted. If risk equals exposure to enumerable nameless risks, risks that we — as yet — know nothing about, then rationality is all about blocking these numberless unidentified risks and making sure that the only events that occur are the ones that we want to occur. We have to ensure that everything works out according to the plan, in other words. Rationality has to operate on the basis of precedence, therefore — stuff can only be allowed if it has happened before, if it accords to the rules regarding what has been previously specified as being a desirable possibility. Everything unfolds according to the rules and whatever doesn’t obey the rules can’t be allowed to happen. Order is maintained by adherence to rules, while the absence of such obedience results in chaos.
What the rational or purposeful outlook calls ‘meaning’ or ‘order’ however is simply itself however, and this throws a very different light on things. What we’re calling ‘order’ is no more than self-promotion, therefore — whatever the ‘self’ is taken as being gets to be promoted and that means repressing or denying everything else. all-important demarcation between chaos and order implicit in all this talk of order or meaning. The implication — when we talk about order’ or ‘meaning’ — is that it isn’t us who are saying what that order is, but that this distinction comes from a ‘higher source’. The implication is that the order we uphold isn’t arbitrary, in other words.
If the meaning I see in the world exists merely because I myself have put it there then this isn’t meaning but just an unpleasant echo — by promoting meaning (or advocating for it) I am actually creating its absence. The so-called ‘meaning’ that the rational outlook places so much stock in is the meaning of precedence — it’s just another way of talking about right and wrong, agree and disagree, conformity and non-conformity. Whatever matches what which was already there (that which echoes what we have previously ‘accepted as gospel’ is said to be meaningful whilst anything that fails to match, fails to echo, is written off as being ‘merely random’, as being error of some sort or other. This only works when we make sure never to examine the template we are working off however — our so-called ‘order’ will be revealed as being purely arbitrary if we start digging in to it.
Order isn’t ‘deep’ at all, therefore. It couldn’t be less deep. What we see as being order is in reality nothing more than the confirmation of our biases, nothing more than ‘the faithful echo of whatever random position or standpoint that we happen to have taken up’. This is curious because what it shows us is that order is chaos after all, even though we are claiming that it is something completely different. The point is — as we keep reiterating — that the notion of order doesn’t really go any deeper than the reflection or repetition of our own starting-off point being reflected back at us. We create the illusion of depth by ignoring our complicity in the matter, by ignoring the fact that we have created it in the first place, by saying — in effect — that the meaning in question is more than just ‘skin deep’ when it absolutely isn’t. The truth is however that the only reason the so-called order gets to be order is because it matches our preconceptions, because it matches what we have already called ‘order’. The meaning we see around us is our own projection therefore, and there is no meaning in a projection.
When we come across something that confirms our biases (the rules we have regarding the way in which we see the world) then we see this as being evidence of order in the world. If it ‘resonates with our prejudices’ then that’s all the evidence we need! The point that we’re missing here is that the bias or prejudice which we are using as a standard to distinguish between ‘signal’ and ‘error’ only got to be there in the first place because of some kind of random (or non-directed) process. Biases are entirely arbitrary things — one prejudice is as good as another! A bias (or rule) can’t ever admitthis about itself of course — that wouldn’t work at all… A bias always has to claim that it isn’t merely a bias (or rule), that it is in fact much more solid than this, much more rooted in reality than this, but the truth behind the facade is that any bias will do the job. As long as we have some sort of angle, some sort of guidance in terms of how to see things, then we’re happy. The important thing is that we have ‘guidance’ of some sort or another in how to look at the world, not what that guidance says. The whole point of a bias is that it claims to be exclusively true — everything else according to it is false (and yet at the same time this distinction is completely arbitrary).
Once we’re clear about this then the trick that we’re relying on to produce a positive or ordered world for ourselves becomes obvious — we start off with a randomly-acquired viewpoint (a bias that has been arbitrarily plucked out of the air) and then — disregarding what we have just done — we proceed to call everything that matches our chosen bias true in an absolute sense. This creates a world out of our prejudice, which is a prejudice that we are not admitting to. Since all biases claim to be exclusively true this means that they are in fact all lying and are not — on this account — to be listened to. What they tell us is supremely meaningless. In practise however, we never do have this insight into the infinite relativity of all possible viewpoints; we never have this insight since we never find ourselves not being owned by some random viewpoint or other. We never find ourselves in this situation of being free.
Ultimately, it all comes down to what James Carse tells us — ‘There’s no rule saying that there has to be a rule’. Freedom lies behind everything and there’s nothing we can do about that. There’s no way to get away from it, twist and turn as we might. Symmetry (or Wholeness) lies behind everything and there is no way for us to separate ourselves from it, distance ourselves from it. That can’t be done not (in a ‘non-theatrical’ way, at least) and so we have to rely on a dodge, we have to rely on a sneaky manoeuvre. The manoeuvre in question, as we have been saying, is the one where we scrupulously abstain from questioning where our bias or rule came from and then use it across the board as our ‘template for interpreting everything’. Saying that ‘no rule is absolutely true’ (or that ‘all viewpoints are obtained via an essentially random process’) means that it is Original Chaos that we are looking at here. We are face-to-face with Chaos in all its uncontained and incomprehensible glory (as opposed to a dull, unadventurous and repetitive rule, which can only ever drum out the same old empty message). Rules can’t do anything apart from repeat themselves — they aren’t free to do otherwise, they aren’t free to do anything apart from repeat themselves over and over again in a perfectly meaningless way. In the absence of freedom tautology is the only thing on the menu. Tautology (we might say) is the cheapest form of reality there is — it’s so very cheap that it’s not even real…
Chaos is depth — that’s what always lies beneath the surface of life. Chaos is only chaos from the point of view of order however — as long as we have a scheme or a plan (or a way of looking at the world) then we will always have this view of chaos. If there was no plan, no goal, no over-valued scheme that we have to fit everything into, then how could we talk of chaos? The question as to which is the deeper, order or chaos, isn’t even a meaningful question, therefore. There’s no such thing as ‘order’ — we have to contrive it, and if we ever stopped contriving it then it would stop appearing to exist. ‘Order’ is a contrivance and it only gets to seem otherwise because we are continually distracting ourselves from seeing that we ourselves are contriving it; this being the case, to ask whether it is chaos or order that is the deeper is to miss the point entirely…
