Ladies and gentlmen, I welcome you to Insights in which I try to throw a little of my own perspective light onto topics with which people mail me. No subject is too off-the-wall or taboo; I'll stick my neck out on anything.
Chaos, scientifically known as entropy, is one of the growing forces in our universe. Everything, and I mean everything moves toward a natural state of disarray, disorder, and chaos. Now, hopefully everyone is aware that chaos is far beyond things like uncontrolled distruction but merely the antithesis of order. Quick example: if you were to go to an orchard, most of the time you will find all the trees in nice little rows in which they were planted. Order. Go to a forest, and you will see lots of trees in no discernable pattern. Chaos. Simple, yes?
Now, Kyle didn't really pose a question so much as mention order vs. chaos as a topic. So really, I've finished this Insight with the above paragraph. Aren't we all so informed now? There will be a quiz next Tuesday. What I really like to get into is why mankind attempts to go against the natural flow of things. I think another one of Kyle's suggestions can help answer that question quite nicely.
Free will. OK, not necessarily free will, but the need to feel that we are in control of our lives. Okay, let me give you another example. Rich guy, works hard, earns money, buys very nice house, has everything in it arranged like he wants. He goes to work at a specific time, comes home, eats dinner, goes to bed. All very routine. He's in full control of his life. Then, the CEO is indicted for embezelment causing the company to close down and the guy loses his job. The job market is bad, and he can't find a job so loses his home. Now, he's wandering around, not sure where he'll live, not sure where he'll work. Suddenly, he's not in control anymore.
Same thing goes for so-called tragedies. Anytime something remotely bad happens, it reminds people that we're not fully in control. We can't predict where lightning hits or when a tire will blow or when stray bullets fired into the air from the Mexican party down the street will come screaming back down and *kerchunk* into your skull. So maybe you should find new neighbors who are more aware of gun regulations, huh? Hey, it happened in "The Mexican", all right? Sure, they were in Mexico and not in a local area, but that's all really beside the point.
Personally, I enjoy chaos. I earned the nickname Lucky and love probabilies. All luck and odds are is finite chaos. Admittedly, you can determine probabilities which would really make it ordered chaos. I need to say it, if there were no chaos, then life would be awfully, awfully dull. There was this great book I read as a kid, "A Wrinkle in Time", in which an entire city is controlled by a being called IT. There was order everywhere. Everything fit in, everyone did the same things, and so forth. Outside of having a definite idea on when you were having sex next, there's really nothing great about it.
Mankind, by nature, enjoys power. When things look to run our lives for us, it freaks us out. So we build roads to control where people can go. We make laws to control how people can act. We build zoos and gardens to control nature. And just when we think we've managed to control everything in our lives, some mumu wearing, twelve-toothed person wins the lottery. Sometimes chaos really does suck.
Back to the homepage
Back to the Insights Page: