Is Totalitarianism Inevitable?

Episode 1 - Chaos & Order

Is overbearing Government an inevitability? In this short series I want to explore the idea that Government will always lead to more Government and that without proper balance there will always be an uprising or collapse. I believe this can be explained using the concepts of Chaos and Order, so let’s start with an explanation.

Yin Yang

I’m sure you’ve all seen this symbol many times and are aware of some of its meanings. Here is the definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica for each part of the composite symbol.

The representation of this symbol has also been used to describe the interplay between good and evil, and chaos and order. The symbol showing that - in the case of good/evil - there is good in every evil person and evil in every good person. For this blog post I’ll be using it to describe the relationship between Chaos and Order, so let’s start with the definition of those concepts.

• chaos [ key-os ] a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organisation or order

• order [ awr-der ] a state in which all components or elements are arranged logically, comprehensibly, or naturally. an arrangement or disposition of things in succession

People generally think of Order as a good thing, and Chaos as a bad thing, but I want to explain how that isn’t the case and that a good balance between the two is key.

House Rules

There is a well used phrase “Get your house in order”, so let’s use the contents of two houses as a demonstration of our two concepts.

In the first house, there is total chaos, each room is filled with items and belongings. The bathroom has an upturned sofa in it making the utilities unusable, there is a total lack of floor space as boxes, clothing, food and furniture is everywhere in a jumbled messy scatter across all the floors. You can think of this as the classic hoarders home that we sometimes see on TV.

Clearly this is not a good situation and completely unliveable for most rational people. The first thing anyone would do with a home like this, is to introduce some order by removing rubbish, getting furniture in the correct place, throwing away old food, removing dead rats and generally tidying up a bit. You would be literally introducing Order to Chaos and restoring the balance.

The opposite to complete Chaos is total Order and - although it sounds more appealing - its not good either. Imagine a house where every piece of furniture is wrapped in plastic and screwed to the floor so that it cannot be moved. Where it must remain lined up to within the millimetre with its nearest equal. Where each floor board must be the same length and width, and contain the same number and length of nail, bought from the same shop and hit exactly the same amount of times by the same hammer. Where the books on the shelf must be in alphabetical, then ‘date released’, then ‘authors name’ order and must never be read or moved. A home where every piece of food must be eaten, with none wasted, where no food can be eaten unless its exactly the correct nutritional requirement for the consumer. The first thing you would do if you came across an owner of this kind of house, is (hopefully) tell them to chill out a bit and eat a burger while you sat ‘pants off’ on the sofa to teach them a lesson. In other words you would introduce a bit of Chaos into their life and improve their situation (except for the pants bit maybe).

As we can see from the above examples, there must be some kind of balance between Chaos and Order as either Chaos or Order alone would be a living nightmare. Here’s a young Jordan Peterson describing it much better than I could.

The Zone

Many of us will recognise and have used the phrase ‘in the zone’ when in a particularly busy period at work. This requires you to be both competent at your job (you have it ‘in order’) but also requires the situation to be just on the edge of ‘too busy to cope’ (very chaotic). Let’s use the example of working in a supermarket checkout to demonstrate the three possibilities for the Chaos vs Order balance.

• Complete Chaos - You are working on the checkout but have no idea how the till system works, there is a line of 1000 people waiting and getting upset, there is no manager to call for help, the barcode system doesn’t work and you just started work today.

• Complete Order - You are working on the checkout and know all the prices in the shop by heart. There are no customers and the till system does all the work for you anyway. You have been working here for 40 years and the manager is standing next to you.

Before we move on, can you imagine how long a work day would seem in either of these cases? It would not be a good experience in either case, and a full 8 hour work day would be boring as hell and would seem to go on for weeks.

• Chaos & Order in balance - You are working on the checkout and have been working long enough to be competent in your job. All the equipment is currently working, but you have the experience to work round any problems. The shop is extremely busy and there is a constant stream of customers, the manager is available in the shop somewhere if needed. You don’t know all the prices of items in the shop, but you do know how to find them if you need to.

In this last situation the time would likely fly past, you are constantly busy and have the ability to deal with the situation through your competence. We have all been in this situation and though it can be draining it also makes you feel alive and like you are ‘riding the wave’ or ‘in the zone’. This is when we have the perfect balance of Chaos and Order.

Balance Is Best

We can see then that in order for life to be at its best, some balance of Chaos and Order is preferable. Next week I’ll use these demonstrations to try and explain why I think that governments will always lead to more government and why I think this could inevitably lead to either totalitarianism or the breakdown of society.

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~Z