Simon Drake – Writer

The Beauty of Chaos by Simon Drake
© Simon Drake 2002

chaos n. formless void which was thought to precede the Creation; great confusion.
chaotic adj. utterly without order.

Chaos – Our Misunderstood Friend
The saddest things about Chaos is that it’ so easy to be misunderstood. Mathematicians hunched over super computers explain ‘dynamical instability’ as chaos. News organisations describe riots and excited protests as breaking into ‘utter chaos’. To all those couch-potatoes in the comfort of outer-suburbia, channel hoping and web surfing from Fox to YouDweeb, Chaos must seem an evil thing like Anthrax (the biological weapon, not the heavy metal band), Saddam’s moustache, an incoming intergalactic fucker asteroid, and/or Friends re-runs. Who wants the pain?
Not so. If we re-read the dictionary meaning of Chaos as ‘the formless void which was thought to precede Creation’, then Chaos would be a time of calm; a moment of relaxation, and quite possible, placid reflection with a creamy cocktail in hand. Why the word also means ‘great confusion’ is a confusion within itself! Is this a double meaning? Therein lies the nature of Chaos – it’s lazing on the beach under a beautiful blue sky before the tropical storm moves in, and then ka-pow! the storm materialises, with banana lounges, beers and beach-towels flying around everywhere in a mini-cyclone! Bummer!

Chaos – Misused and Abused for Being Itself
The Church, which purports that chaos reigned supreme before God woke up for six days of creationist work then one day of chilling out, warns audiences not to stray into ‘chaos’, therefore assimilating ‘chaos’ with not only all the evils of the world, but prompting that chaos was a ‘nothingness’ and should be feared. Our wonderful world is fundamentally geared to either eradicating chaos (i.e. creating suburbia from a terra annulus), predicting chaos (so it can be controlled) or profiting from chaos (a night out gambling does not count). On the lighter side, if it weren’t for Chaos we wouldn’t have the infamous villains in the hit show Get Smart, or that unpredictable trigger of a temporarily unexplainable difference in our life that makes us get off our lazy-behinds and swing into remedial action to adapt to the suddenly changing environment, and always, for the better. Chaos, misunderstood and abused on emotive grounds, is actually far more friendlier than we are led to believe and think.

Chaos – the New Way
If accepting Chaos was the corner-stone of a New Way, things could be completely different. We would accept the ‘confusion’ of the big wonderful world as all part of life. Got no friends? Ah it’s chaos! And chaos, in time, will provide you with friends. If Chaos were a new doctrine the world would be so unbelievably different and open to rapid change it would alter itself to a healthier state faster, easier, and more reliable. Head-strong religious institutions that have been around for as long as their version of the Bible, major corporation peddling products that peaked in popularity in the 1950’s, and jaded Public Servants staring down the barrel of early retirement, find it difficult to alter their methods to the Shock of the New, or quite simple, the perceived ‘chaos’ of the evolving world. Mention the word ‘New’ and they become demented (something no human should miss out in their lifetime), then deniers (likewise) and finally, shocked. If ‘Chaos’ as a fundamental was drummed into their heads from an early age, they could adapt to change and the world would be a happier, funnier, place.
Only recently has Chaos reared its beautiful formless features into the academic and business world, but in a surgical politically correct stab, it’s called Risk Management.

Risk n. possibility or chance of danger or loss or harm.

Risk and Chaos could quite easily walk through the park hand-in-hand but to pin a prettily framed Chaos Management certificate on your wall would only infuriate one’s peers and couch-potatoes that you were a Shaman or a Soothsayer or meddled in Voodoo or stared too long at complicated fractal drawings depicting intricate dynamical instability. Chaos is too great and evil a word for any one person to control, whereas risk, like the risk in losing a game of poker, is something more tangible and comprehensible. But the reality remains that Risk is identifying Chaos and in reality its randomness is not something to be afraid of. How can evil Chaos be transformed? On a scientific level, and remember we are now entering a second century of dissecting chaos (well away from superstitious eras – we hope), to the physicist the phrase “chaotic motion” detracts from whether or not the motion of a physical system (something dynamically instable) is frenzied or wild in appearance for a chaotic system can actually evolve in a way which appears smooth and ordered – like the Universe.

Where to With Chaos?
Before you go anywhere you have to have an idea of where (not to mention ‘what’) it is. There’s an abundance of formulas (like get-rich schemes) for calculating Chaos that don’t work. It’s a shame really because any enterprising individual living in this day and age, sorting through avenues to make a living, would like to explore a New Thing with a pioneering spirit. The identifying and discussions of solutions for social problems such as Dieting, Boob and Donger Sizes, Erections, Hair Colour, Relationships, Balding, Stress and Choosing a Pet Name are all covered by the media, and like Reality TV (which purports to let chaos reign supreme but predominantly scripted by some experienced Producer), have all lost their wow appeal, and though there is always new ground to be covered, we’re over halfway up the hill. Humans need new things to keep humans human. When everything else has dried up, spat-out, regurgitated for one more re-run, what are we left with? The blandness of life? The fact that there is nothing new under the sun? Yes, yes and yes until Humans, in one fit of spatial intelligence equivalent to swimming to the moon wearing plastic yellow deflated floaties, realise that Chaos is the Final Frontier, and until we confront it, we can never move forward. All we have to fear is fear itself.

Chaos – the Final Frontier
The fact humans are inadvertently affected by Chaos is an intrinsic way of life. Take little daughter-of-dead-soldier Valerie. She’s happily sucking her little thumb, in her mother’s arms, and then the Spanish Flu comes knocking on the door and takes mummy away. Out of the Chaos of war and plague is left Valerie, shaped by Chaos into a determined individual to eradicate war and plague from her little village. In her formative years she may touch up on stress and grief-management and later on in life master the essentials of risk-management but she can never turn back the clock to the Chaos that shaped her. That is the beauty of Chaos. No matter how much the benevolent wonder-people or iron-fisted oppressors of the world around us impose order in the name of protecting ourselves from ourselves or environmental nasties, few can predict the true nature of Chaos, and more importantly, no-one can alter how we rise out of Chaos into better people.

Now where’s that cocktail! And let me explain Game Theory on the back of a napkin!