Order & Chaos

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Applications

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Logic behind Past Authoring Program ^[1]

You have your physiological structure as your first line of ordering in relationship to chaos because your body presents you with the world in a certain way. And then the second line of defence is something like the sociological structure that you inhabit, we call those the competency hierarchies or something like that and thank God for that. Because you know, maybe you’re gonna be able to specialize in one or two things in your life, or five things but there’s 300 things you need to know. And if it’s just you, you know, you’ll be doing your genius level mathematics while your bath tub is leaking all over your bathroom floor. And that’s not so good so you can call a plumber and hooray for that. So, you know we tend to cooperate to keep chaos under control. And we tend to cooperate to keep order under control. And that’s the political dialogue.

We maintain the culture to keep chaos under control and we balance the culture out properly to keep the culture under control. And that way we get to live reasonably peacefully, reasonably productively for a reasonably amount of time and that’s the best that we can do. And we should have some gratitude when that’s working. Because the default condition of things is that not only do they not work very well, they work worse and worse over time all by themselves. So anytime anything is working you should just be amazed by it.

So what does the frame look like? Well, I think it looks something like this:

And this is as far as I can tell this is the bare bones of a variety of things, it’s a bare bones story, it’s a bare bone conceptual framework. It’s a bare bone design to speak in high Daguerreon terms. It’s the bare bones world that you live in, you’re always in one of these worlds. There is no getting out of them. You can move from one to another but you’re always in a world like this. And so this is the world that you’re in. You’re somewhere cuz you have to be somewhere.

Now you might not know where that is. Which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic. In which case you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are. It’s like you’re lost, right? You’re lost and the problem with being lost is, when you’re lost you don’t know where to go. And the problem with not knowing where to go is, there is a million places that you could go and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying. So being lost is not good.

So you need to know where you are. One of the things that we built online my partners and I is this program called past authoring, that helps people lay out the narrative of their past. To identify. To break their life down into six stages, epochs we call them. And then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch and to write them out; what happened negatively, what happened positively, what the consequences were, what you derived from it, perhaps what you could have done differently, perhaps what learned from it. All of that. So that you can narrow in, zero in, on determining precisely where it is that you are right now.

And people are often loath to do that because they actually don’t want to know because they’d rather be spread out in a sort of half blind manner in the fog, hoping that the place they’re at is better than it really is. And deluding themselves by remaining vague than to figure out I’m right here right now with these specific problems. But it’s actually better to do that because if you have a set of specific problems and you’ve really narrowed them down and really specified them, then you can probably start fixing them. And you can start fixing them in microwaves, bit by bit.

But there is no way you can do it without knowing where you are. It’s impossible. And you can kind of tell if you don’t know where you are. It’s quite straightforward; if you are haunted by reveries of the past for events that are older than approximately eighteen months, if they continue to come up in your mind over and over and in your dreams over and over, you haven’t extracted the world out of your past experiences. The potential is still trapped in the past. And to confront the potential means to confront the dragon of the past. And of course that’s terrifying and it can seriously be terrifying.

 

Interpretations

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The Boundary between Order & Chaos

"Reality is made up of Chaos & Order, and your role is to mediate between them successfully. That is how your brain is organized."^[2]

There are opposing poles of Order & Chaos. Our aim is to live in the middle, where challenges are difficult but attainable. If our challenges are too easy (Order), we are calling on the Merciful Mother, and we always win. If our challenges are too difficult (Chaos), we always lose. Neither strategy has any benefit for us.

We should seek challenges which enable us to take on the right amount of chaos. That is the level that makes us most willing to engage in the challenge. Mediating between Order and Chaos is the logos, speech, and it can often make Order from Chaos or Chaos from Order. This is the Dao.

There is Order & Chaos, Yin and Yang, the left-brain and the right-brain, the known and the unknown. Together, these make up everything in the human experience. Chaos, the Unknown, is a threat, it is where the dragon lives. But it is also where the treasure is, so our hero myths talk about the dragonslayer, who kills the monster and brings back the treasure. But Jesus was a speaker who brought Chaos out of Order; he destroyed a corrupt Order by speaking new truths. There is a Hell of Absolute Order and a Hell of Absolute Chaos; we should strive to live on the edge.

Logos, Chaos, Order

This is what happens when we learn something through logos. An old concept disintegrates (O->C, descent) and a new understanding forms in its place (C->O, ascent). The new order includes everything that was in the old order, plus more. That is progress. We face chaotic nature; we structure it and communicate about it (to make order out of it, using the logos).

We must articulate publicly, and negotiate. Free speech is the process by which we strike the balance between order and chaos.

Chaos & Order Revealed

We sometimes watch people going beyond the limits of the possible (gymnasts, maybe), people who go to the edge of chaos, a fraction of a second from catastrophe, and they triumph. We cheer wildly because we have seen someone go to the edge of chaos and make order out of something.  

See Also

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• Logos
• Being
• Free Speech

References

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[1] The Red Queen Problem - Jordan Peterson From 5 minutes and 57 seconds until 10 minutes and 13 seconds.

[2] The Aspen Ideas Festival