There is no formula for chaos, but there is for everything else. Chaos can’t be collapsed, can’t be summarised, can’t be compressed, whilst everything else – anything that isn’t chaotic – can be. This is the power of chaos, we might say. We like to say that chaos is mere disorder, that it’s just ‘accidental stuff with no significance’, but we only say this because we can’t bear to face the truth, which is that it’s actually ‘the Supreme Principle’, the ‘Source of All’, whereas what we like to call <ORDER> is nothing more than a house made of cards, a flimsy facade that can be collapsed into nothing at all with the slightest touch. We denigrate Mother Chaos – we roundly abuse her and if only we could we’d get rid of her entirely. We’d eliminate all chaotic influences across the board. This is just not something we’re able to do, however and so we have to content ourselves with speaking ill of her instead and cultivating a deeply prejudicial attitude to all things chaotic. Our attitude towards chaos is that we fear and despise it; we are in other words fundamentally prejudiced towards any sort of order that we ourselves didn’t create (and cannot on this account understand).
Chaos can’t be created and it cannot be destroyed – it can’t be created because there’s no formula for it that we can follow, and it can’t be destroyed because it’s in everything and we can’t stop it from being in everything. Chaos is – in other words – intrinsic whilst what we like to call ‘order’ is order that is Extrinsic (or imposed). It’s an overlay. What we call ‘order’ is our own understanding, our own take on things – it’s not ‘what is’ but ‘what we think it should be’. It’s the map that we value more than the territory; it’s the designation that sneakily obscures what is being designated. The point here therefore is that there is a two-step procedure going on: first we invent the order for ourselves (we pluck it out of thin air) and then – following on from – this we say that the so-called order isn’t our own arbitrary construct or imposition at all but rather that it is the fundamental immutable truth of ‘how things are’. We make up a whole bunch of rules and then we claim that it was God – not us – that made them up. It was God that did it so how dare we object… We can’t get rid of chaos – much as we’d like to – so we suppress it to the maximum and give it a bad name. We try to replace it with our own prosaic ideas.
The world we create for ourselves in this way isn’t just ‘a bit peculiar’ therefore, but majorly so. The world we make for ourselves is a half-assed affair, a kind of dysfunctional botch-job that never really works, but which we at the same time aren’t allowed to call out as being dysfunctional. The Designed World can’t be seen to be dysfunctional and so the dysfunction must be in us – there’s no other possibility, after all. This is the way it works when we make the blueprint unquestionable or inviolate – it means that when there is something that isn’t working out in the way that it’s supposed to, then it must be our fault. It can’t be the fault of the system, after all. This is therefore where the innate ‘abusiveness’ of all logical systems comes from – it arises because of the way in which logic cannot ever question its own basis (or premise), even though the basis or premise is always going to be without any truth in them. Logic – despite its reputation for absolute rigor and reliability – is utterly baseless. It’s a castle in the clouds.
This is how it is with logical systems – no matter what system it is that we hit upon (no matter what rule-set we select) there is always going to be incoherence involved (which is to say, there will always be a mismatch between our picture of the world and the world itself) and the inevitable result of this mismatch is that there are going to be ‘unwanted side effects’ to what we do – we’re going to see results that we don’t want to see, in other words. Stuff is going to happen that doesn’t fit in with our plans for what we think ought to be happening, and when we try to intervene or problem-solve with regard to these unwanted outcomes then the only thing that’s going to happen is that we’re going to generate a whole new batch of glitches, which we will then – in turn – have to do our best to try to fix. This is a fully-fledged cybernetic disaster therefore, and there’s absolutely no way we can avoid it just as long as we insist on operating out of our conceptual picture of the world. All logical systems are incoherent in this way and when we ‘act them out’ in the real world then irresolvable self-contradiction is always going to be the result. Incoherence creates paradox.
The benefits of interacting with our environment on the basis of rules (on the basis of a logically consistent approach, on the basis of a model) is that once we have the rules, once we have the model, then that’s all the work done. From then on in it’s all plain sailing, from then on in it’s party time. Once we get to the railway station, buy a ticket from the ticket machine, find the right platform, and then – finally – embark upon the train when it comes to rest then that’s all the work done. From then on all we have to do is ‘lie back and relax’, all we have to do is get comfortable and ‘let the train take the train’. All of we have to do is let the train take us to wherever it’s going, and what could be easier than this? Just as Colin Wilson says, we have engaged an internal robot (a perfect robot butler) to take over the task of living for us. The robot Butler takes the pressure off us big time because we no longer have to attend to the repetitive aspects of everyday routine existence. “Live?” we say, “We don’t have to live – we’ve got machines to do that for us.”
If something is routine (which is to say, if it is repetitive in nature) then we can automate it. If it is a matter of ‘repetitious tasks that need to be dealt with’, then we can quickly come up with a handy formula to cover whatever is needed. And as much as our lives are made up of routine stuff, repetitive stuff, we can hand over the responsibility for all of it over to the robot, over to the automatic pilot, over to the formula. This process of standardisation and automatization and regulation can thus be framed as ‘the solution of a problem’; the internal robot which – as Colin Wilson says – ‘runs our life for us’ may be considered to be the perfect answer, which would mean that we are totally justified in congratulating ourselves on our cleverness in this matter (which is very much what we tend to do) – we pat ourselves on the back, we award ourselves with certificates of achievement. If we discovered what we are congratulating ourselves over however then we wouldn’t like what we saw; it would be an unpleasant surprise rather than a pleasant one, and that’s why we don’t want to know anything about it. That’s why we – as a culture – have no genuine ‘psychological curiosity’.
Chaos – as we have said – is the only thing that can’t be collapsed chaos is fundamentally uncollapsible! Anything that is regular – on the other hand – anything that repeats, anything that has a pattern to it, can be collapsed like a concertina. Anything that is based on rules can be collapsed into nothing, just as the foam on the top of a freshly poured pint of beer can be collapsed back into beer. Regular stuff isn’t real therefore – it’s just a lot of froth, just a heap of bubbles. It’s just a trick, just a gimmick. When we collapse a regular pattern then we end up with the single unit of that pattern in just the same way that ‘collapsing’ a polymer like starch or polyurethane means we end up with the monomer that goes to make it up. The difference here however (which is to say, where the metaphor breaks down) is that a chemical monomer – we might say – is actually a real thing, whereas the basic unit with regard to Extrinsic Order (which is the order we artificially impose on the world) is not a thing in its own right. It’s a convention we adopt, a type of notation we use merely because it is ‘convenient’ for us to do so.
Because the conditioned world is constructed entirely in relation to a fixed point of reference it must therefore be collapsible back down to this fixed POR – that’s the only thing in it, after all. The self-referential world is 100% collapsible; there’s nothing in it other than ‘the self that is (incestuously) referring to itself’; this ‘self’ or ‘centre’ isn’t a real thing however – we picked it at random and said we didn’t. There’s nothing special about it at all and yet we hype it up to the high heavens, we promote it crazily, we promote it as if there were no tomorrow. We make it be ‘the basis for everything’, which it can only be if we continue with the lie that there is something unique, something special about it. We might therefore wonder what this ‘craziness’ is all about, what it actually achieves, and one answer would be to say that the ‘froth’ acts as a smokescreen which saves us from ever having to catch a glimpse of the bottomless mystery which is the world surrounding us. Instead of mystery what we have is logic, what we have is rationality, what we have is literality, and so on and so forth. What we have is a perfectly blank-or-unreal-world. Instead of unending depth we have quantification – everything has been turned into ‘dry facts and figures’, so to speak. If it can’t be defined, then it doesn’t exist. In the Realm of Extrinsic Order everything is all about following logical procedures in order to obtain the designated outcomes (the outcomes we want, the outcomes that are supposedly so very important). Everything is about control in other words. There is however no controlling when it comes to ‘the Mystery’ – there’s no controlling here because we have no way of identifying meaningful outcomes, and because we have no way of ‘identifying meaningful outcomes’ we can have no ‘strategies’ for doing so. ‘Strategizing’ (or ‘control’) becomes a meaningless concept.
The Realm of Extrinsic Order is thus what we might call a ‘derivative’ (or ‘second-hand’ form reality, a propositional (or pre-formatted) version of it. It’s as if we have a bag of pixels to play about with and we take these pixels – for the sake of the game – as being ‘real’, as being ‘irreducible to anything else’. The patterns we make out of these pixels will therefore constitute a Second Order Reality. This is what we might call a ‘conditioned state of existence’ since if the correct conditions aren’t there (if we have run out of pixels) then the state in question couldn’t exist. A conditioned state of being is thus nothing more than ‘a trick that is being played on us’. In the case of the System of Thought, we can say that the ‘pixels’ are the thoughts (or rather the categories) and that the patterns that these categories are arranged in is the second order reality with respect to these categories. The patterns – no matter what form they might take – have no abiding substance to them; they are ‘entirely superficial’, we might say. The world thought puts together for us ISN’T a second order reality however, it ISN’T a SOR because the pixels (which is to say, the logical categories) have no ‘essence’ of their own; the worlds that are conjured up by thought have no substance to them because they are wholly dependent for their existence upon conditions that we can put in place if we want to but which we don’t have to. We’re free assume the existence of the categories / pixels if we wish to, and we’re equally free not to.
What we’re talking about here is the type of situation that looks perfectly solid, that looks as if it has a genuine substance to it, but which is – on the contrary – completely collapsible. The situation looks like something, but it isn’t anything. This is a hoax therefore – it’s a ‘hoax’ because when the time comes it will fold back in on itself until there’s nothing left (just like a magic trick in reverse). There’s no formula for chaos, no formula for Intrinsic Order, but there is for ‘the World of Extrinsic Order’, which is an artificial world which is created by logic, by copying, by repetition, by ‘trickery’. The Extrinsic Reality is produced via the simple strategy of repeating basic units (as we keep saying) and the thing about a system that is constructed purely by repetition in this way is that when we ‘cut to the chase’ and examine what is left when we refrain from ‘enacting the automatic copying routine’, when we call a halt to the wretched duplication, then we immediately see that there’s nothing left behind. We discover, in other words, that there was never anything there in the first place…
Image credit – tripadvisor.com
