Chaos & Order I

I recently re-read a book I first read about a decade ago called 'The Agent of Chaos' by Norman Spinrad.

I had to actually make a print-on-demand order of the book from the publisher as I couldn't find it anywhere.

Here is a link and the cover

I am not going to give a review of the book here as this is not my purpose, although I must say I consider it a phenomenal piece of literature which offers brilliant insight in the true nature of anarchy and chaos, all through a beautiful science fiction story.

I will however go into the trouble of quoting a part from the book that explains why our definition of 'Order' is 'unnatural':

The natural tendency in the physical realm is towards ever-increasing randomness or disorder, what we call Chaos or entropy. So too, in the realm of human culture. To locally and temporarily reverse the trend towards entropy in the physical realm requires energy. And so too in human societies - Social Energy. The more Ordered, thus unnatural, anti-entropic, a society, the more Social Entropy is required to maintain the unnatural condition. And how is this Social Energy to be obtained? Why, by so ordering the society as to produce it! Which as you can see, requires more Order in return. Which creates a demand for more Social Energy and so forth, in a geometric progression that spirals as long as the society struggles to achieve Order. You see the paradox do you not? The more Ordered a society becomes, the more Ordered it must become to maintain its original order, requiring still more Social Energy and never really catching up.

What this book made me reconsider is the very definition of 'chaos'. Ever since we are born we are gradually trained to view any form of anarchy or chaos as a definite negative, an evil that must be uprooted by any means necessary.

We view chaos and anarchy as some plague that will engulf all unless stopped. Society pushes us to conform and become part of the general public which tries to follow the path to happiness. Any individual that diverges from this path either on his own accord or because the circumstances forced him to do so is viewed as a radical, a rebel, a savage. People it is just ridiculous!!!

I haven't settled it all in my mind yet, however I am close to changing my interpretation of chaos. The natural state is a state of pure chaos which we are battling, not to understand but rather to limit since it is beyond our feeble comprehensive capabilities....It just cracks me up!!!

Before I close, I would like to mention an idea present in this book which was not extensively explained or developed. What the author did in this book among others, is to express life as a temporary reversal of the natural chaotic state. He says that life is merely an incomprehensible (to us or at least to me) set of coincidences where a part of this chaos, myriads of atoms and particles came together to form life. In this context, everything originated from chaos and to chaos it must return once life, this dream that we must all wake up from, ends.

In a sense Chaos is God!!! So beautiful, words do not do it justice