Belly Button Lint

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Tag: chaos

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    State rights as self-limits

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    1–2 minutes

    The state both grants and protects rights, declaring them inalienable.
    Since they cannot be rescinded, they are redefined. As the grantor and guarantor, the state is crafting the boundaries of permissible rebelliousness upon which we shape our identity.

    Many of us craft our identity around limits, exploring and expanding the boundaries. Yet the constraint of our self-construction is paradigmatic and ideological: it tends to function and limit us without our recognizing its influence.

    In this way, our "intrinsic self" or "authentic core" is shaped by extrinsic forces. While we take perverse pleasure in our dalliance with overstepping, our state has increasingly limited and normalized what it means to be free.

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    Linguistic subjectivity

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    1–2 minutes

    Amidst the blurring of individuality, autonomy, sovereignty, subjectivity, agency, and identity, we look both inward to reflect outward, conflating feelings with selfhood, assuming our emotions define us outwardly: what you feel is more accurate than reality; it makes reality.

    For instance, the definition of words matters less than how you feel about them: you can declare agency as identity or sovereignty as a measure of subjectivity.

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    the urge to restore

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    1–2 minutes

    Recognize the overwhelming compulsion to get back to the way things were.

    This is not only “loss aversion” in a behavioral economic sense but a desire for orderliness: as a vase shatters, we are already cleaning it up.

    We not only restore order but brush the sin away from sight.

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    divine madness

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    1–2 minutes

    When something is too chaotic, we desperately attempt to apply logic. It functions despite our worldview, which shifts it into the realm of the mystical.

    It is this encounter with an overwhelming totality that confounds our sense of scale and order when profundity shifts into the sublime. It is our attempt to grasp -rather than accept- this glimpse of the divine that drives us mad.

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    Evil as ease

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    1–2 minutes

    The opposite of good is evil. But, as Hannah Arendt and others point out, generally, it is not malevolence that leads to evil; instead, it grows from passivity and conformity.

    Evil is born of taking the easy path too often, assuming too much, and avoiding painful efforts.

    That is to say, evil is evolutionarily natural: the less you struggle, the more calories you conserve. However, society is not based upon entropy and conservation but effort and consideration staving off casual collapse.

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    Moral Flip: Empathy as Chaos

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    1–2 minutes

    Empathy for those less fortunate leads to pleas for benevolent altruism: Universal basic, open borders, or reallocated police funding.

    Taken further, all structure and any limitation is oppression: empathetically, anyone should have whatever they want whenever they want it.

    This becomes anarchy or chaos unless by design the people are so dull that they only desire what they are told, or so enlightened they can self-regulate.

    Unfortunately, denuded of limits out of a desire for freedom, we become oppressed by our neighbors, collapsing standards, and bankrupt infrastructure. (oppressed by others and circumstances)

    This hyper-empathy mistakes Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty (freedom from restraint) and positive liberty (freedom to self-determine): the paradox of allowing self-determination is that it will infringe on the rights of others.

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    The Fragmented Mirror

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    1–2 minutes

    In the pre-digital era, a universal similarity of content was reflected back to the mass audience (the public): they gazed into the mirror of media and (mostly) saw their values reflected back. (This is the pre-collapse tower of Babel.)

    The digital era fractured the mirror into shards, which captured groups and separated them, provoking fragmented views from which yelling erupts.

    In a mythic, psychoanalytic reading, the fragmentation and subsequent rage is a tantrum of yearning for wholeness. We wish to rejoin the primordial Eden or heavenly parents from which we have been expelled.

    partially from Jonathan Haidt

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    the slope of excess into reversal

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    1–2 minutes

    Problems stem from excess.

    Something that is good in moderation, say the freedom from authority to explore or engage in taboo thoughts and desires, is liberatory.

    However, embodied as an institution, or ethos, liberation is oxymoronic: excessively pursued it undermines (deconstructs) with the goal of removing any stabilizing reality with subjective relativism and irony. This excessive liberation is now akin to chaos, anarchy, or hedonism.

    But now -as the new norm- “freedom” or “liberty” means escaping the fragmented disorder into stability: new liberation from chaos is safety, tradition, and discipline.

    These types of reversals stem from excess and are crazy-making.

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    Being in love provides access to insight

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    1–2 minutes

    To be in love, like the faith of being a true believer, is to suddenly comprehend all of the insanity the outside world cannot grasp: when you are in it, the contradictions are beautiful epiphanies.

    When you are on the outside, it is all idiocy.

    Only by doing it can you access the perspective that shifts irrationality into truth.

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    Creation requires chaos

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    1–2 minutes

    Digital reality (if it is to thrive) requires a knot, a point of chaos, at the center, which cannot be made to make sense: it is not cartesian and, therefore, can give birth to chaos and dreams that can save a world from the mathematical impulse of control.
    This allows not for linear time (once again cartesian) but circular time with variation, Aeonic or Aion time.

    In this cycle we find infinity, and this singular point (the knot of chaos) reminds us of The Aleph, where we can see and comprehend everything in the universe.

    However, seeing worlds within worlds, such as digital reality, reminds us of the unimaginable excesses that the brain cannot fathom or grasp, an abundance we do not have language for, and thus cannot remember. Our recall is to only see glimpses recalled hazily (dreams), and from this chaos, we begin to create.

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