Why chaos rules
 “Life
is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future
is to live as if there were none.”
-Albert Einstein
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star, said
Friedrich Nietzsche; and I am certain he did not mean the kind of
dancing stars we see on television these days or the dancing stars of
politics and politicians. What he meant was that, in life, the real
discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong,
stupid, and foolish. That is the reason why, the only geniuses produced
by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos
breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
Change
In the universe, all things it holds and for everything in it,
constant motion and constant change, is the norm. Nothing remains static
or the same even for a moment. That also is the reason why no man can
ever step in the same river twice; it is not the same river, and he is
not the same man. Change is constant and therefore, there are only
patterns: patterns on top of patterns; patterns that affect other
patterns; patterns hidden by patterns; patterns within patterns. If you
watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself, and that repetition
has a pattern.
What we call chaos is just patterns we have failed to recognise. What
we call random is just patterns we cannot decipher; and what we cannot
understand we call nonsense. What we cannot read, we call gibberish.
Thus, in the life of many, even if chaos is the rule, chaos while
closing one door, will open another. However, we often look so long and
so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which
opened for us.
Chaos also rules, when we try to be everything to everyone, instead
of being something to someone. All the most powerful emotions come from
chaos: fear, anger, love, and especially love. Love is chaos itself.
Think about it. Love makes no sense. It shakes you up and spins you
around; and then, eventually, it falls apart. Yes, it is a cruel and
random world, but the chaos is what makes it all so beautiful. Life is
nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting. Chaos is a
necessary step in the organization of one’s universe.
Chaos
There are two tragedies in life said George Bernard Shaw in Man and
Superman. One is to lose your heart’s desire; and the other is to gain
it; and as I see it, both lead to chaos in life. A good example of this
would be the recent presidential elections in this country held a few
months ago. Many millions of our citizens lost their heart’s desire,
while many more millions gained it.
The tragedy of it, to both the losers and gainers, is that chaos is
the result; for chaos is what rules now. This is because chaos is what
we have lost touch with and, as a result, forgotten that it exists in
many forms. This is also the reason why it is, given a bad name; and is,
feared by the dominant archetype of our world. That archetype is the
Ego, which clenches because its existence is, defined in terms of
control.
Thus, the current chaos is the struggle of egos for control, for
power, for the right to plunder and rob. The result of this struggle is
that, scum of our society who are thus involved and who call themselves
as politicians, hold an entire nation to ransom through their lies,
resulting in chaos. Unlike the men who create beauty out of chaos -
painters, music composers, writers - who make rich the beauty of life;
and ordinary people who toil in the sun and rain to make their life
beautiful and meaningful; these ought to be discards of society deserve
to be eliminated and not embraced.
They, if anything, are blind to the fact that the control and
approval that they seek to cheat the people is purely illusory. That
every moment of their life, teeter on oblivion. They create chaos
because it is easy to plunder when conditions are chaotic. These people
have the unique ability to listen to one story and tell another. Thus,
their lack of clarity and careless attitude towards the public is the
reason for chaos and frustration for the people. I call the present crop
of those who aspire to the legislature, the legitimately corrupt, who
cannot admit that legitimacy allows them to corrupt legitimacy; and who
legitimately tolerate corruption. When everyone wants to be a leader, it
makes one a follower to want to be a leader, without knowing what to
follow. In our erstwhile parliament, there is no exception to this
truth, for they all are crooked in varying degrees.
The one simple truth therefore is that there is nothing simple in
this complex universe. Everything relates. Everything connects. Thus, if
chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of men, ordinary men.
Yet, in spite of his dream and countless honest men aspiring to make
that dream come true; most countries of the world are in chaos: some
self-imposed, others externally induced or introduced. Why is this so?
After all, countries exist because people are willing to die for them.
It is the unusual quality of nations, shared only by families and
tribes, to command such loyalty.
Continents
The same cannot be said of other entities like villages or businesses
or trade pacts or continents. It is just not likely that anyone would go
out and die for UNESCO or the United Nations Development Programme. I
believe that when a nation is in chaos, especially the nations that were
granted independence in relatively recent past, it is because men in
western governments, being comparatively illogical in thought, who
granted independence, did not understand that freedom without chaos is
not a magic formula that can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being
illogical in thought, it was their view that, because human race had
evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1940 or so, and more so
because they were losing their grip on countries they ruled, democracy
could be planted anywhere from the outside. They had carefully closed
their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a
Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could
not be, separated from its roots. Many countries where democracy had
been, imposed from the outside or from top downward, authoritarianism
had increasingly become the rule of the day. As a result, and as time
moves on, the line between democracy and authoritarianism blur. It will
no longer seem to be the simplicity of, good versus evil; but good
versus fools, who think they are good but create chaos.
Chaos
I wonder if being sane in the midst of chaos means disregarding the
chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is
reality. A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people do not
appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness
toward the self, they cannot experience harmony or peace within
themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also
inharmonious and confused.
If you remain calm in the midst of great chaos, it is the surest
guarantee that it will eventually subside because every chaos has an
order hidden in it. What we see as a chaos is actually, driven by a very
disciplined and dedicated order of things. What we need to do is focus
on the stuff before us, make our way through this chaos, and that order
will sort itself out for us.
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