I’ve been musing on order and chaos.
One hears of “chaotic” lives, people for whom it is difficult to arrange to set an alarm clock to get up in the morning, or to make an appointment and keep it. But, rather than thinking of chaotic people as “them”, people we want to distance ourselves from, how about thinking of the chaos in ourselves, and how we deal with it?
Some people, it seems, maybe those who have compulsions or obsessions, might use obsessive or compulsive behaviour as a way of keeping the chaos at bay. Things are not chaotic, they tell themselves, just as long as they keep whatever it is they are obsessive about under control. Maybe we all have an aspect of that? Maybe we all have limits — if certain things are not under control, we feel subject to chaos. The size of that set is what varies between individuals.
The greater the chaos in a given historical era, perhaps the greater has been the striving for order. Monasticism is a great example. It is an archetype of an ordered life. Not for nothing are they called “monastic orders” or “religious orders”. But is this over the top? I think immediately of Hermann Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game”, or “Glasperlenspiel”. In Hesse’s opinion, the ordered life seems not necessarily to be the summit of human existence.
So where is the balance? Where is the sweet spot for different individuals, and how do we find it?
In Personal Construct Psychology, there is the idea that when a construct system is in the process of change, the individual feels lost, perhaps rather chaotic, while awaiting the building up of the new construct system. So maybe it is not so much a balance, as a highly dynamic equilibrium?
I’d like to go into this more, because to me it points to some key questions concerning individual identity and personality.
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