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One may view natural processes, including human endeavor, as a cycle, in
which the forces Chaos and Order continuously shift, alternately crafting some
thing or idea grotesque or beautiful. Diamonds, highly ordered crystals, come to
exist through the application of pressure to carbon in a set
space---essentially, being in the right place at the right time under
environmental stresses, a method which bears a remarkable similarity to the way
by which politicians ascend to power. Nature parallels politics, both tending
towards entropy or order at different times.
At night, one watches the news, hearing of an Orwellian world. Personal
liberties, guaranteed by our Bill of Rights, vanish in the name of homeland
security. Our own version of Big Brother now wiretaps phone lines without due
process. The media reports an oversimplified version of the news, focusing more
on celebrity dramas than on the economy or combat deaths. Around the world,
ethnic groups, from the Sudan to Bosnia, from the Mid-East to Southeast Asia,
find themselves attacked for no other reason than avarice. Our world has reached
its carrying capacity with attendant climatic change. In the Arctic, permafrost
is melting, the ice cap is receding and polar bears drowning. When one
contemplates the state of our world, one cannot help but see that nature tends
towards disorder.
Every branch of human thought supports this statement. In chemistry and in
physics, some energy always "disappears," albeit a minuscule amount,
after some exchange of energy, and there always exists a margin of error in
conducting laboratory experiments. Technology frequently fails, with information
disappearing and hardware randomly malfunctioning on a daily basis. Living
organisms highly evolved and organized constructs, eventually die and decompose
into more basic components, arranged illogically. From this mess comes new life
forms, and order is temporarily restored.
As civilizations throughout history, such as the Chinese, the Romans, the
Aztecs and the British, have attempted to organize large groups of people. For a
time, everything seems to flourish and thrive: the British Empire fared well, as
they were excellent at occupying countries. Often, these governments functioned
inefficiently by design, as people fear both dictatorships and mobocracies, just
as the framers of our own constitution did, providing a system of checks and
balances to prevent their fears from becoming reality. This intentional
unproductivity leads to problems, as things do not always happen in a timely
fashion and multiple factions tend to work against each other, just as Weber
theorized. Occasionally, bureaucracies are added to remedy the symptoms of
ailing governments, obscuring the inner failings of their system under many,
many layers. As they expend more of their limited resources in hopes of
maintaining order, diminishing marginal returns set in, with more resources used
less efficiently. Eventually, organizations collapse, reverting back to their
original state. Someone will then bring order to chaos, giving hope to the
masses. Out of the ashes of fallen civilizations come newer, less corrupt
governments, which become more ordered and less idealistic as time passes. The
cycle begins again.
Our world, as a whole, can only rely upon one observation: chaos is a
constant. Once we realize this, we can work with it, finding answers to many
quandaries and appreciating existence in a new way.
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