To advance in our investigation of magical thought, we must tackle another duality that needs to be better understood by modern audiences: Chaos and Order.
Chaos and Order, in Abstract
Chaos - that which is not purposed
Order - that which is purposed
Chaos encompasses all non-/un-purposed states, from pre-purpose to perversion of purpose, to that which cannot be purposed. Order is all that is purposed through being shaped or categorized as suitable for shaping.
These principles can be understood through material examples. Through the categorical notion of Earth, we can recognize the distinction between dust, sand, and clay.
Fine particulate dust was a material that the ancients could not purpose. It was good for no thing, and, therefore, an un-thing, a chaos that could not be shaped into something useful.
Sand (of larger grain than dust) is employed in producing bricks, concrete, glass, as an abrasive, etc. Clay, quite obviously, is the principal ingredient in the production of ceramics (especially with sand as an additive!). These materials are categorized by usefulness to human artifice, and because they are readily employed for a purposed end, they are ordered substances.
Progressive states exist between the two principles as well, especially in the production of materials and goods. We can see the transition from order to chaos in the previously mentioned bricks as they weather. As they lose their form to the predation of exposure, they transition from function to constituent materials.
This brings us to changing states and the inevitable trajectory of chaos and order when subject to time.
Time and Trajectory
Consider the airplane.
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| Yes, we know this is technically a jet. |
An aircraft is a highly ordered system, a maze of tens of thousands of small, simple devices that run in parallel, layered, strung, and chained together, housed inside other devices, many of which serve multiple, simple functions to the point that by quantity and density, its ordered operations become opaque, and require trained specialists to properly service and maintain any number of the aircraft’s subsystems.
So how does this start?
The aircraft begins as raw materials, a chaos that must be mined from the earth or recycled from scrap and divided into what is useful and what is to be discarded. This is ordering.
Next, the raw materials are turned into parts. This is ordering.
Following that, the parts are separated out and set aside to construct the particular aircraft. This is ordering.
Next, the craft is assembled. This is ordering.
The entire process is repeated sequences of separating and directly shaping material, transforming base matter into the expressed idea, and from an expressed idea into the particular instance. The end result is the individual aircraft.
While the aircraft is employed in its ordered function, it must be maintained to retain that function, as it is constantly subject to chaotic forces that work to disorder the entire system.
Parts wear down from use. That is chaos.
Parts are stressed by the environment, and the material fatigues. That is chaos.
The vehicle falls into disuse and is unmonitored. That is chaos.
The manufacturer terminates support of the model and halts production of replacement parts. That is chaos.
In the best-case scenario, the aircraft will be decommissioned and set aside for non-function. That is chaos.
If a retired aircraft is not immediately recycled, it may spend decades in a decommission lot. Here, it is left to decay and is subject to being torn apart for salvage.
In this state, the aircraft is not an aircraft but a rigid chaos, a highly shaped un-purpose. Such an un-aircraft serves no end other than to house its still functional parts, which now persist in a state of quasi-purpose waiting on an interested salvager to re-purpose them.
In the meantime, the aircraft's materials are left to the elements to behave in an unmonitored fashion. Metal expands, contracts, rusts, stresses, and fatigues. Rivets pop, mechanisms lock, parts fall out of housings, rubber rots. The metals within it that corrode develop rust or some other oxide and are generated apart. The aircraft collapses out of shape and back into raw material.
Whatever mechanisms and parts aren’t salvaged are either left to return to the earth or torn apart and smelt down into usable raw materials to be recycled and re-ordered into another device.
What is the Relevance?
These principles and their vibrant dynamic are understood primarily through dramatic vagaries that rely on contrasting extremes to convey the idea. A film may describe the social turmoil expressed through rioting, looting, and arson as chaos or focus on a character as an “agent of chaos” who disrupts the status quo.
This is an issue for understanding the ideas because neither framework defines the boundaries between order and chaos. The riot is obviously chaotic, but it does nothing to tell us how chaos works. The agent of chaos disrupts the status quo, but that does nothing to define the boundaries of the disrupted order. Relative to understanding the principles, it’s much the same as asking your teachers, “How does flight work?” and receiving a picture of a bird so many times you realize none of your teachers have the faintest understanding of physics.
To crack this topic, we shall separate the principles from popular media conventions, explore the relationship between scale and relativism, the character and cultural consequences of their inevitability, and dig into how they intersect with Shaping/Generating duality.
Disentangling Principle from Aesthetic
We’ve touched on popular representation in media in a somewhat grounded sense through riots and individual disruptors. We see both in movies like Batman: The Dark Knight (2008) or Joker (2019), and they’re equally at home with less comic book-y fare like the Deathwish or Dirty Harry movies. These films, however, are more concerned with the particular theme of urban decay, to which chaos and order are subordinated.
There are two literary genres where these principles are prioritized in seemingly independent exploration: mythology and fantasy.
When dealing with chaos and order, Mythology can be both explicit and pre-articulate. These notions are understood through comprehensible symbols to describe the essential operation of the universe. The father/warrior/king/deity conquers the dangerous potentiality of the dragon/giant and acquires treasure or builds a new home/universe from its body. Here, the narrative is that the purposing of matter is good while recognizing that the matter is still imbued with the destructive, degrading danger of the great chaos monster.
This is all well and good, but more recent writers have been caught up in the aesthetic of the symbols. As our culture has developed away from commonly shared narratives to works of commercialized fiction-as-entertainment, creatures like dragons move away from symbols of dangerous potentiality to sophisticated intelligences with their own culture, customs, and character journeys. The result is the loss of much of the foundational symbolism.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these sorts of stories. This compiler is a fan of many such stories in prose, television, cinema, video games, and TTRPGs. However, this does coincide with a trajectory of increasing symbolic illiteracy, which is abundantly clear when one examines the Chaos/Order aesthetic of some of the largest pop-fantasy IPs.
Aesthetic of Chaos
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| Dungeons & Dragons demons (top), Warhammer daemons (bottom). Really, the more you know about either of these things, the more they're the same. |
Our exhibits are the Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer IPs. We’re comfortable pointing to these as the pop-fantasy standards as they are the most prominent institutions of commercialized plagiarism in the genre. Further, their aesthetic sensibilities regarding Chaos are nearly identical.
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| A DnD Vrock (left) and a WH Lord of Change (right). If it's blue and a vulture, it's a Skeksis. |
In DnD, both order and chaos have cosmic, planar dimension. Whole sub-universes of the IP multiverse are oriented towards one principle or the other. The lawful universe of Mechanus stands in opposition to the chaotic universe of Limbo, the chaotic-evil Abyss opposes the lawful-good heaven of Mount Celestia, etc.
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| Map of the Outer Planes from Planescape. |
The Abyss, home of demons, shares a near identical attitude about what constitutes “chaotic” as Warhammer and that IP’s realm of chaos, The Warp.
The commonality relevant to the narrative is that the actions of Chaos are reactionary to the emergence of Order, constantly clawing away at it through overt destruction or subtle subversion. This reactionary force is obliged to manifest in as extreme a manner as possible and on the most dramatic scale. This lends the “Forces of Chaos” a visual identity and motive but retains all the same problems as the more “grounded” fiction: the principles are marginalized in favor of spectacle.
Many of the stories told this way are perfectly competent in exploring the themes they’re actually interested in, which are always more particular. This still poses a problem, as for many people these works of fiction are how they first wrestle with the principles. As such, they’re alienated from how the principles actually play out in their own lives.
Chaos and Order are cosmic principles and play out at all levels of reality. Alienation from the principle curtails the elevation of the dramatic escalation of the mundane, which is an indispensable tool in the employ of a competent storyteller.
Determining Relation, Scale, and Polarity
Coming off from fiction where the polarity of Chaos and Order are consequential, we’re going to break down how scale and relationship affect the interpretation of polarity in the absence of an overpowering visual identity.
First, we must recognize that any reality, be it the Reality we live in or constructed, comprises multiple ordered systems (people/characters, groups, nations). Each ordered system has its own interests that scale. This means that chaos and order often play out relative to the perspective of any ordered system.
The Undeveloped Wood
Suppose you have a small mountain community that minds some woodland. The wilderness is typically characterized in narrative as chaotic. This community, however, has developed a relationship with the woodland, coming to depend on it for food, fuel, and medicine. They have put the land to use as it already was, so the land's wild state is part of the community’s ordered status quo.
Relative to the government of the nearest city, such land serves no purpose; as the land benefits them in no way, it is chaos.
Suppose this city decided to acquire the land by some means and turn it into housing developments. Relative to the city, this is an ordering of wasted land, but this is chaos to the community that depends on the land.
Which of these two perspectives is correct? Is there an objective way to assess the cosmic chaos/order polarity of the city’s move on the undeveloped land?
This is similar to many moral conundrums I have been presented with through the years by any number of role-playing games, just with a coat of fantasy or sci-fi paint. We have observed a tendency among authors to favor preservation of the small community.
The reader might think this compiler would hold a different position based on how we have discussed the principles and scaling. The city is the more extensive ordered system; therefore, its chaos/order assessment must trump the evaluation of individuals in a lower-scale community.
This might be true if the mountain community were regarded as internal to the ordered system of the city. If the mountain community were internal to City A while the attempted land appropriation was being conducted by City B, this is likely the case. However, in the scenario as written, the mountain community is an ordered system being subordinated non-consensually to the needs of the larger foreign system. The relationship is oppositional and antagonistic, in the same way a wrongly accused man’s relationship to the prosecution of the state is antagonistic. On the level of their conflict, the size of one system relative to another does not indicate morality/conformity to the greater essential structure of the universe.
This compels us to touch on something worthy of its own (forthcoming) article: the essential Order. The highest ordered structure, whether in a fictional universe or our universe, is the essential Order (or “God”) * that all other systems must navigate. This essential order constitutes the rules of reality. The reality structure is never subordinate to the ordered system beneath it. The individual and the state are both similarly incapable of changing the fundamentals of the universe; neither system can make the direction “up” the color between seven and popcorn smell. Directionality still plays out in the category of directionality, even if one tries to alter it through fantastical power. All use to the contrary in fiction is a gag.
A lower-level system, such as an individual, can easily be in closer compliance with the rules of reality than a system that is supposed to operate at a higher level, if only because there is less to bring into compliance. The individual who understands that a direction is not a color navigates better than a larger system tyrannically imposing nonsense.
The only essential measure of net Chaos/Order polarity is relative to the essential Order. If the state builds the housing development against the wishes of the mountain community, whatever follows reveals the quality of the state’s navigation of the higher Order. If the subsequent loss of vegetation leads to flooding, landslides, and destruction of the city's works, the “wrath of God” has revealed that the city’s actions were a net chaos, no matter their orderly intentions.
*The matter of “God” will be discussed in a future article.
The Aesthetic of "Too Much Order"
In contrast to the cartoonish depiction of Chaos in fantasy fiction, another aesthetic plays out in the opposite direction: the government order of the dystopian future. This is oft described as an overburdening of order, as though freedom and liberty are some kind of unipolar chaos. We intend to disabuse the reader of this notion.
In the dystopian satire Brazil (1985), filmmaker Terry Guilliam paints a terrifying vision of the future. It is a world where people are crammed into hellish cubicles, dependent on marginally functional machinery as their life is (poorly) micromanaged by disconnected bureaucrats, and life or death can be decided by the malfunctioning of a teleprinter.
Any system's function is what it does, not what it says it does or is supposed to do. Bureaucracies, like all things in the Universe, behave. The behavior of bureaucracies is to expand. They expand because of population growth, organizational influence, mission creep, and budget in all directions beyond the organization’s stated founding purpose. This expansion may be into valid management domains with a significant relation to the founding purpose, but to believe this is the normative case is wishful thinking. The bureaucracy will expand into new domains simply to have a new domain to manage without regard to its efficacy in any prior domains.
Management for the sake of management is purposeless. Management for the sake of management is Chaos. Rules for the sake of having rules is Chaos. Dependence on broken machines is Chaos. Pollution is Chaos. Being trapped in a dead-end job is Chaos.
Dystopian social orders are not orders at all but oppressive burdens that sap purpose from their prisoners. They are rigid chaos. Any author wrestling with these subjects would do well to not mistake the superficial structure of a system for its orientation toward the principles.
This is not to say that characters cannot make that mistake. It's reasonable that someone sick of the life-sapping prison of a corpo-fascist world would embrace the vitality-rich chaos of anarchy. It's likewise reasonable that they would soon become disillusioned with the purposelessness of sustained anarchy, too. A capable writer should be eager to explore all the possibilities that entails.
The Inescapable Cycle
Degradation is the fate of all ordered systems subject to time. The same principled processes govern everything from the lowest bacterium to galaxy-spanning empires. Systems built around member persons may be more dynamic and possess great longevity by being able to replace persons in ordered positions. Still, every unit, from the family to the nation, will eventually collapse and be replaced by other families and nations.
All that Man orders is doomed to collapse back into chaos.
This observation is at the root of the material dualists’ contention that the material world is fundamentally evil, as no good thing may last under such conditions. Wrestling with this dynamic, which overlaps heavily with the question of “suffering,” is core to many religions and philosophies.
Tackling the philosophical responses characters, groups, and cultures develop in response to the Chaos/Order dynamic is as important as understanding the functional definitions of Chaos and Order.
Gnostics embrace material dualism by rejecting the material for the wholly spiritual or, more annoyingly, denying the material as being of spiritual consequence. The Taoists engage in principled non-attachment and non-action. The Hindus conform themselves to the cosmic cycle of Samsara. The Abrahamic faiths regard this cycle as a subordinate feature of the ordering cosmic Will and frame the cycle as a deliberate feature of an Order operating on a scale beyond human comprehension.
These options and more are worthy of exploration by the interested storyteller, whether for world-building, thematic guidance, or a source of inspiration. Always be mindful of where principle and character can meet, as it’s the stuff great stories are made of.
Chaos/Order and Masculine/Feminine
The reader may have noticed allusions to shaping and generating in previous examples. The airplane's trajectory is simple and straightforward, with shaping/generating equating 1:1 with masculine/feminine. Conversely, the mountain community ordered themselves around the natural generation of resources, while the shaping actions of the state created chaos. This may run counter to common notions of chaos being feminine and order being masculine.
This is the normative interpretation, but somewhat incomplete. Chaos, especially cosmic chaos, is generative, just as the undeveloped woodland, the ocean, or the womb: anything can come out of it. The ordered systems we surround ourselves with are the product of a masculine spirit, men and women going out into the world and shaping things to productive ends.
However, this relationship is different from 1-to-1, as we have already seen. The significant overlap between the shaping/generating and order/chaos we prioritize respectively is governed by what is most beneficial to us, individually and up to the species level. However, counterexamples abound to the point they cannot be regarded as outliers.
The masculine chaos of vandalism and murder (shaping out of function or counter to function) is easy to grasp. The feminine order has already been discussed via the mountain community organizing themselves around the generating wilderness. In light of this, a dominant trend emerges, wherein active chaos takes on a masculine character, and passive order takes on a feminine (another parallel observed by the ancients).
These masculine chaoses and feminine orders serve as an excellent highlight for the dynamism of the principles.
Takeaway for Writers
Chaos and Order are important principles with greater dynamism and presence than most explicit presentations would suggest. Not having a firm grasp on the definition, relativistic qualities, inevitability, and interaction with other principles denies the storyteller tools for more sophisticated thematic exploration or aesthetic invention. Feel free to toy around with them on either level.
