The Architecture of Chaos
A systems theory view of why good intentions turn bad
When was the last time you felt deep love and gratitude for the chaos in your life? The chaos in the world?
Chaos has gotten a bad wrap. Understandable. It is natural to fear what is unknown, because unpredictability often leads to failure to achieve our goals. The military knows this all too well, which is why they say "No plan survives the battlefield".
But isn't unpredictability also what makes buying a lotto ticket so exciting?
At first it seems so obvious: Order is good and chaos is bad. But what if we have it wrong? What if this polarized and one-dimensional way of looking at the world was really what was holding us back?
As humans we interact with the world through a mental model of the world, a psychological-emotional program. Not everyone is aware of this, because that program is to us what water is to a fish. We don't see the program, rather we see the world through the program. We are in the program, like a fish is in the water. Yet unlike water, our program is internal and unique to each individual. The program is composed of all our past experiences, traumas, social conditioning, and beliefs. We didn't choose it consciously either, and yet we tend to live our lives as though it were a given truth.
If your program tells you that order is good and chaos is bad, then that becomes the lens through which you interpret everything and give it meaning. This kind of one-dimensional thinking will cripple you, but you would never know it until after the program was expanded. It would be as though you are driving across the country using a version of google maps with most of the roads missing. You're going to get lost, or worse, you'll end up getting stuck in a muddy field somewhere and trampled by an angry moose. You don't want that, do you?
So prepare yourself for an upgrade that will blow your mind. We are going to add a second dimension to this program. Language shapes consciousness, and your program dictates what is possible for you to experience in this world. Upgrading your mental models will upgrade your consciousness. It's wild. It's psychoactive.
This is a mental technique called a quadration. You can use it on any pair of oppositional ideas to create a new idea called a synthesis, which transcends and includes the necessary truths of both.
We begin with a single axis, a line with order on one end and chaos on the other. Order represents stability, predictability, and structure. Chaos represents change, unpredictability, and flow. There is no need for the two of these to fight, and there is no need to choose a side. They are two different principles, naturally polarized and opposite.
Now add a second axis which intersects the first, a new line with creative on one end and destructive on the other. Creative represents the life-drive principle of Eros. To create is to bring something new into the world, to construct, to generate, to include. On the other end, destructive represents the death-drive principle of Thanatos. To destroy is to remove something from the world, to deconstruct, to eliminate, to exclude.
This new model now gives us four quadrants to consider. Creative chaos, creative order, destructive chaos, and destructive order. We can now make more meaningful distinctions. Rather than regarding all chaos as bad, we can now say that creative chaos is good but destructive chaos is bad. And rather than regarding all order as good, we can now say that creative order is good but destructive order is bad.
Isn't it interesting how aligning yourself with your creative life-drive just feels instinctively right, while falling in line with your destructive death-drive feels wrong? Perhaps, if we want to choose a side, then choosing the side of life is the right move. This gives you access to enjoy both creative chaos and order, without falling into a destructive pattern in either. Could it be that in the ever unfolding process of life, both chaos and order are really partners in a beautiful and polarized dance?
We live in a world of systems within systems. A single cell in your body is a system unto itself. Your heart is an organ composed of cells. Your circulatory system is composed of organs. And your entire body is composed of your circulatory system, endocrine system, etc. A family is a system composed of bodies. A community is a system composed of families. A country is a system composed of communities. Civilization is a system composed of countries. And so it is with political and economic systems, even religions and ideologies.
Regardless of whether the system in question is your body or the global economy, every system wants to perpetuate its existence, which means maintaining stability. In systems theory this is called homeostasis. All systems can be thought of as chaos structured into order. So from the perspective of any system, it is natural to think of entropy -- the systems theory term for chaotic forces which diminish the stability of a system -- as a threat. The purpose of all systems is to maintain their stability in the face of entropy.
Yet how did the complex systems of today originally come to be? They did not start that way, they evolved over time. Every time the stability of a system is threatened by enough entropy, it reaches a point in which it may be forced to either collapse or adapt. When a system adapts to the forces challenging it's homeostasis, it expands to incorporate those entropic forces into a new more complex system.
This pattern of adaptation, growth, and evolution is the nature of the life itself. Challenges arise and are in turn used to create something new. This dance of creative chaos and order cause a system to evolve not by killing or eliminating the chaos, but by using it to structure itself into higher levels of ordered complexity. It is continual self-improvement at the systems level. If you want to see this in action just look at how your muscles adapt to the entropic stress of weight lifting. They struggle against it at first, but rather than trying to eliminate the threat they expand to include it as part of a new stronger system, and so in time the weights that were once a challenge to your muscular stability become the path to greater strength, and you find yourself looking for bigger weights.
The systems which relate to chaos creatively are called open systems. Open systems are continually getting better, stronger, more expansive and complex. Your body is an open system. A tree is an open system. The ecosystems of the planet are open systems. Open systems are alive, and thus, in their healthy state they are always aligned with the creative life-drive of Eros.
Closed systems on the other hand, do not have that kind of growth loop. They are mechanical, already dead. The exist in the death-drive or Thanatonic end of the spectrum. They are created in their optimal state and then continue to break down and die due to the entropic forces of chaos. Your vehicle is a closed system. It begins in peak form and then continually degrades and breaks down without the continual interventions of maintenance.
As modern humans we ourselves are open systems, but we are generally not existing in a healthy state. This is because we have come to see the world and even ourselves as a closed system. Thus we have come to see chaos as a threat, rather than as the necessary force to advanced life high through adaptation. We have fallen into the death-drive of Thanatos. We have become weak, and the systems we create have become massively destructive. This is wrong, there is no other way to say it.
Our healthcare systems today are a classic example. They began with good intentions, to eliminate disease. Disease is a threat to life, disease is entropy, disease is bad. But through adopting that Thanatonic program we have made disease the necessary component for the healthcare system to perpetuate it's own existence. We created a perverse incentive. The emphasis on destroying disease creates entirely different outcomes than the emphasis on strengthening our health and immune system. Charlie Munger said "show me the outcome and I'll show you the incentive". The healthcare system is a reflection of our own view, it sees life as a closed system, like a vehicle, that needs our constant interventions of force and maintenance. It is no surprise then that the United States today has the highest numbers of both healthcare costs as well as staggering numbers of disorders and disease. The forces of chaos we set out to eliminate have flourished and strengthened under the system we created, all despite our good intentions. The harder we fight in the wrong direction the worse it will get, because our efforts are aligned to the Thanatonic death-drive principles of closed systems thinking.
How many other systems today can you think of that work this way? Political systems? Economic systems? Social systems? Family systems? Education systems? Industrial systems? Under these conditions the decline of civilization is inevitable. The root of the problem is our consciousness itself, which is shaped by the programs we are running. I hope that after upgrading this chaos and order program you start to think about things differently. This will cause a shift in consciousness. And this in turn will cause a shift in the systems we create. My prayer is that we will come into alignment with the life-drive of Eros and shift our focus from eliminating what we perceive to be the enemy, to creative adaptation and growth. These are the necessary conditions for our good intentions to finally flourish and create paradise on earth. Isn't that what we all really want?
Originally published at https://gregorytzar.com on Oct 5, 2024