Why is it that we can say that ‘chaos can neither be created nor destroyed’? What justification is there for saying this? This is rather a dramatic statement, after all. It is however perfectly easy to demonstrate the truth of this assertion:always we can’t generate chaos ourselves because all we know are patterns, which means that even if we try very hard to come up with chaotic stuff we can’t. Whatever we do (or think) will always be the result of a formula that we have no insight to. The thinking mind is based on ‘biases that we cannot see’ and so no matter what we do it will be an extension of these biases. There will therefore always be a pattern in our thinking that we just can’t spot, a ‘secret order’ that we are incapable of being aware of. We can’t devise a machine to produce chaos for us either because machines simply can’t do chaos, can’t do randomness. Machines are based on rules, and randomness can’t come out of rules. That’s how we define randomness – by saying that there is no ‘rule’, no procedure, no pre-established order behind it. There’s no way to guess what’s going to happen next when it’s randomness we’re talking about. When there’s no rule behind what’s happening then there’s simply no way to guess what’s going to happen next (the whole point about rules being that by knowing the rule in question we will always be able know what’s going to happen next). As rational beings, ‘knowing what’s going to happen next’ is not just ‘very important’ to us, it’s our obsession.

Everyone knows about the principle in physics regarding the conservation of energy, but ‘the conservation of chaos’ is not so familiar to us. It’s not taught on the physics curriculum at school, and yet it remains a deep principle all the same – it couldn’t be deeper.

Whatever type of system we may produce for ourselves, the one thing we can be sure of is that is going to be operating in a logically consistent way. The one thing we can be sure of is that there are going to be no surprises in it. Unpredictability cannot be produced by mechanical means – there can never be such a thing as a ‘formula’, a ‘device’, or a ‘stratagem’ that can give rise to it. I can’t surprise myself with what I do because it was me that did it, because it was me that intended it! There’s no legitimate way to get around this, of course – it’s a cast iron impossibility and that is why we are forced to resort to psychological games where we set up the conditions beforehand and then erase all awareness of having done so. Games are exercises in amnesia, we might say – we arrange for things to happen without our knowledge (in what we could call a ‘pseudo-spontaneous’ way) by ‘building in forgetfulness’, by making sure that we forget (or otherwise lose sight of) the fact that we have ever had any involvement. We stop taking responsibility for our own actions and then act surprised when the consequences that we aren’t taking responsibility for arrive our doorstep, clamouring for attention…

We can’t produce chaos, and neither can we bring it to an end (since it is inherent in everything. Chaos is an ingredient no one can eliminate. We can’t plan for chaos, we can’t produce it from scratch in the laboratory, since if it wasn’t there in the first place then we could never invent it (any more than we could invent reality itself, having known nothing about it). We can relate chaos to Original Symmetry and say therefore that what we’re actually looking at here is the Law which states that – no matter what transformations may take place – symmetry must always be conserved. It can’t not be – that’s why we can say that this is a ‘deep principle’. There are no exceptions, not ever – wherever there is a positive there must also be a negative, wherever there is an UP there must also be a DOWN…

The way we think about it is to say that there is Order on the one hand and Chaos on the other – order being the valuable (or ‘proper’) thing and chaos being mere error. We’re claiming a legitimacy that isn’t really there however since the only reason order seems so legitimate to us is because we’re looking at it in a completely biased way – what we call ‘order’ is our own unacknowledged bias manifested in the world around us in solid or concrete terms, therefore. It’s our bias made flesh. This thing we call ‘order’ is only order in relation to our own particular angle, our own particular way of looking at things. We’re ‘celebrating our own thing’, in other words, and putting it like this tends rather to take the shine off it. We say that Order is the ‘Great Thing’ and that Chaos is what threatens to undo it, and so we put all our effort into promoting the former and eliminating the latter. Psychologically speaking, this translates into eliminating all uncertainty / ambiguity – the implication being that when we do this then we have won (because we have successfully imposed our own patented form of order onto the world and completely gotten rid of everything and anything else. This is what ‘extrinsic motivation’ is all about – it’s all about optimization, it’s black and white thinking put into action. When we’re in Rational/Purposeful Mode (which is pretty much all of the time) then EM is the only type of motivation we have. That’s what we’re running on…

From a psychological POV this is an utter disaster, however – we’re pushing to getting rid of everything that goes against our way of looking at the world (we want to get rid of all ‘opposition’, in other words) on the grounds that this is where our benefit lies. We are acting so as to secure our benefit and so (because this is so important) we go all out on it. We fully engage in this business of ‘promoting order and ‘eliminating chaos’ – we don’t hold back. We’re ‘going for gold’, the only problem with this being that the ‘gold’ in question is a hallucination. We’re chasing an illusion and that type of behaviour is therefore guaranteed to lead us to ruin.

Another way of putting this is to say that we’re trying to impose order on the world – which always sounds good – but there is a glitch here in that the type of order we’re trying to bring about only exists in our head. Although we don’t know it, this so-called ‘order’ is actually our own invention’, it’s an artificial creation that can only exist in our own imaginations, under the special conditions that we have set up without acknowledging it. To dignify this half-baked scheme of ours by calling it ‘order’ shows very clearly the extent of our hubris; we’re so arrogant that we make out nature to be some kind of undesirable contamination, some kind of dangerous untidiness or unruliness which we are going to replace with our neat-and-tidy own idea of ‘how things should be’ (that we don’t admit to being ours). It’s the same old principle every time – we validate our own stuff by claiming that it comes from a higher source.

What we call order is ‘order according to itself’, it is ‘self-referential order’ – which is to say, it is order which goes around in loops, using itself as its own guarantor. It’s not that we ‘invent it’ in the sense that we might invent a mechanical contraption of some sort or another; this is a scheme of things that derives from the nature of logic itself (which – although we don’t generally understand this point – is ‘right’ only according to itself). Logic is self-referential, but we don’t dwell on this. Logic is what we might call Extrinsic Order – it is order that is ‘extrinsic’ – so to speak – to reality itself. We could also say that EO is a form of order that’s purely arbitrary in nature, but which virally duplicates itself (once it gets a foot in the door) until it reaches its goal of becoming utterly ubiquitous. It does this by claiming to be NOT ubiquitous, it does this by claiming to be ‘central to everything’. Although logic promotes itself as being very serious, very ‘no-nonsense’, the single principle that logic operates on (i.e., the principle of eliminating all error, the principle of throwing away everything that doesn’t fit’) has the inevitable effect of reducing everything to nonsense. It reduces everything to nonsense by relentlessly pruning away everything that doesn’t agree with its own ‘take’ on the world (by demonizing everything that ‘isn’t itself’) . This then is Hesiod’s law of deterioration (which in more modern parlance is better known as the Second Law of thermodynamics).

The second law of thermodynamics may also be known as The Law of Increasing Nonsense therefore (although admittedly this doesn’t sound quite so scientific). When we look at what’s going on via the logical / rational viewpoint (as we always do) it looks as if we’re building something, it looks as if we are creating something amazing, something truly ‘progressive’, and so this makes ‘sense’ to us. We’re all in. What’s actually happening – as we would be able to see straightaway if we weren’t under the spell of Extrinsic Order – is that ‘the system is taking over’. Because anything that doesn’t agree with the logic that is being applied across the board is being labelled as error and then discarded, Intrinsic Order is being replaced with ‘mere regularity’ – all information (or ‘diversity’) has been lost but we can’t see it (since we’re seeing things the system’s way, which neatly inverts everything). This is the mechanism by ‘nonsense’ is increased therefore – nonsense being just another way of talking about redundancy (or ‘disguised meaninglessness’). When we get subsumed within the tautological bubble that is ‘the System’ (when we become ‘part of the bloat’) we see this as a good thing. This is what we have been promoting all along and by the time we see what it is that we have been so enthusiastically aligning ourselves with it’s far too late…

In the classical understanding of the Second Law what increases is entropy (which is also known as ‘disorder’) – essentially, all the information is leached out of the universe leaving behind nothing but noise, nothing but meaningless static. Maximum entropy equals all noise, no signal, therefore. Nothing means anything any more and what is left is just an informationally depleted wasteland. Instead of saying that ‘the entropy of a closed system always increases’ we could say that it is nonsense the nonsense content that is increasing.

This is the ‘inverted view’, however. If we took a psychological view of the Second Law, then we’d see that the interpretation we were just looking at is completely lacking in nuance (and that – for this reason – it has no connection with anything real). The nuance in question has to do with what we regard as order and what we call disorder. Extrinsic Order is by its nature completely bland, completely without nuance – it has no ‘flavour’ whatsoever. Where the nuance comes in is in our understanding of information – we say that randomness is ‘disorder’ because there is no ordering principle, because there is no logical consistency for us to hook onto. We write this off as pure chaos (which means that it is something we can’t use, and – into the bargain – something which will, if permitted, degrade the structures and systems that we have so painstakingly created. This is looking at everything backwards though, since anything that is organised (which is to say, subject to rules or conditions) is going to be compressible (or collapsible) as a result, whilst genuinely random distribution is by definition non-compressible (since there are no repeats, no consistent patterns, no regularities to reduce to some kind of convenient shorthand notation). Stuff that is compressible is merely ‘fluff’, however; it’s essentially bullshit, it’s ‘made up nonsense’ that we are valuing over anything real.

Random scatter cannot be summarised, cannot be compressed, cannot be turned into a formula; anything that comes about as a result of a formula is – by definition – not random. It’s ordered (extrinsically ordered, that is) – it comes about as a result of conditions that have been imposed, as a result of ‘biases that have been built into the system’. The setup in question is thus reducible to those conditions, reducible to those rules or biases; there’s nothing beyond them therefore, there is no ‘finer level of resolution’ with respect to the picture that we’re looking at. There is the illusion of depth, the illusion of substance, but really there’s nothing beyond the rules, nothing ‘other than’ the rules. The rules constitute the description, in other words. Just as the picture on the TV screen has no depth to it, only the ‘illusion of depth’ that is created by the pixels, that is created by the individual light-emitting cells which exist on a flat-plane surface, so too does what we call ‘order’ have no depth to it…

Just to summarize, Extrinsic Order means regularity – it means that there is some kind of recognisable pattern there. This in turn means that there is no information, that the whole thing is collapsible, that everything that exists in he universe can be expressed in terms of basic rules, basic proportionalities. This is a pure hoax, however – it’s a hoax because there’s actually nothing there. Randomness – on the other hand – being completely incompressible (since it can’t be reduced to a pattern) – does constitute information, even though we’re very quick to denounce it as ‘disorder’. What we call ‘order’ is hollow, therefore – it’s an appearance without any content. It’s Maya.

What we really mean by <disorder> is that it is a form of order that is incompatible with our own productions, a form of order that undermines our own arbitrary conceits. As rational creatures, it seems to us that ‘eliminating chaos’ is the way to go. To create a world purely out of logic would be a splendid thing we say, and in order to accomplish this aim we busy ourselves putting measures in place to roll back the chaos, to ‘sanitise things’. This is a fool’s errand however – we can’t end chaos and neither can we create it. Whatever we created order but it’s our form of order, it’s the extrinsic variety order of the extrinsic variety, it’s the inevitable extrapolation of our arbitrary assumptions about reality. Chaos is the mother of everything, including us, including our logical way of seeing things. Chaos is the mother of everything we cherish. The Formal World which is abstracted from chaos (which is abstracted from the undefined and undefinable Holomovement) is a kind of precarious fantasy, an ‘exercise in make believe’ and nothing more, and yet here we are trying to lord it over the actual uncreated reality itself, full as we are of all these bloated notions of ourselves (which we obtained via the extrinsic order). This is our situation exactly and it can hardly come as a surprise to learn that none of us are particularly keen to know anything about it. Unsurprisingly, the interest just isn’t there – we don’t want to hear about how we’ve got everything backwards! We refuse point blank to hear anything about it…

There never will be any interest as far as society, as far as the collective, is concerned. The collective can never be interested in any reality more profound than itself, and ‘itself’ is not at all profound. The Group Mind is a machine, and profundity is of no interest whatsoever to a machine (any more than ‘nuance’ is). The group (just like the ego) is a machine for seeking the advantage, and there is no ‘advantage’ in seeing the truth – the analogue of reality only gets to be ‘an analogue’ by ignoring what is being analogized. a bit deeper reality a reality that isn’t entirely superficial, a reality that does not systematically oppress us with its appalling banality to the limit of our endurance. When we identify with the group (when we make use of the collective to give ourselves an identity shared framework is to make an assumption that the group is the most important thing is to make the choice to see everything in this way and once we have made the choice once we have assumed this to be true then we can do another question it. It’s we can’t question it because it’s now our viewpoint and a viewpoint can’t interrogate itself.














Image credit – luxart.com