In the last 10 years I’ve really come to terms with the discordian idea of creation v. destruction rather than the political reality of chaos v. order. At the end of the day, my concern lies with the idea of creation to help society (and self) rather than destruction. Yet, still it seems everything is frames in the dichotomy of chaos and order.

Chaos and order is necessary for motion or advancement. Without some chaos or movement there would no energy in a system to move it forward. For example, the most perfectly ordered system (mechanically) I can think of is a hunk of metal. It sits there, and until something applies a force to it, it doesn’t move at all. Similarly the most energetic chaotic system I can think of would be something like a bomb, it explodes, there is no predicting what will happen to the individual fragments and the energy is quickly dissipates and becomes useless.

Yet, a car engine is almost exactly those two elements brought into harmony. The hunk of metal (the piston) acts as an enabling constraint for the explosion of the gasoline. This allows work to be drawn from the system. From an ordered constraint, and a chaotic energy source, we get work.

After some thought, it’s easy to arrive at the heuristic that for an independent system that is self-emergent to organize in a “useful” fashion to produce work, it requires chaos in the form of some energy being released, or some normally uncontrollable flow, and it requires order in the form of an enabling constraint to allow for “work” to be drawn from the chaos. In a non-humanistic sense, work commonly just means reproduction of the existing codes/idea in order to produce more of those objects in an effective manner. In an economic sense, it means the production of better and more efficient systems for producing value and wealth.

In a human sense, it means progress.