prolixitous anagnorisis - you can skip this

[flamingsword]

I know some people who can be angry about little things for hours. And I know people who just don't bother getting angry anymore. I guess it's good to be in the middle on this one, comfortably in between simmering rage and ennui as approaches to challenging situations. Of course if I actually lived here in the middle of the bell curve, I wouldn't find it necessary to comment.

So here's the plan. Defeat the current order of the world by changing human interactive systems to make entropy work for that system instead of against it. Living beings are very complicated systems, and the only way they continue functioning is by balancing between order and disorder. Enzyme reaction and diffusion are the biological equivalents of entropy, they cause nutrients to spread out through the bloodstream and become more usefully disordered, more uniformly chaotic. All human organizational systems are built to suppress chaos, and never make any use of it. (with the notable exception of viral marketing)

So if there are two great forces to be utilized, why does one always get the shaft? Dichotomy as a paradigm is overused. Male and female, day and night: how can things be thought of as opposites when they have so much in common? I think mental polyamory may be about the ability to embrace diversity for it's own sake, because denying yourself the opportunity to love half of an entire set of things is self-limiting. People are used to choosing between things, not taking both. But when you can have both, why not?

Riddle me this: how many diverse things do you love?

Comments

Chaos can be fun!

[hellocobweb.livejournal.com]

I think that the human fascination with labelling things comes from difficulty in conceptualizing more complex or chaotic ideas:

You have male and female: Anyone who is both is a freak, and should be 'fixed'. They threaten the bite-sized conceptual scheme.
You have day and night: We hide in our caves at morning and twilight, because that's when the scary monsters come. Either that, or at midnight, when it's both today and tomorrow. Kindly ignore the fact that time measurement is arbitrary.
You are either on "our" side, or you are evil: I would act the same as you, were I in your situation. But I'm not, so you are wrong and evil. I can't kill you if you are a complex, diverse person like me.

It is a little overwhelming to embrace chaos, because it would mean accepting that anything is possible. Most people could never deal with that, I think. It's a little too big for our minds, which work ultimately in a system of logic and order.

Re: Chaos can be fun!

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Some of this is true, but it's still too simple. I think a lot of people have very set rules and boundaries for different sets of things. ("boy" rules apply to things with penises, etc.) But when the lines between groups are indistinct, they don't know what rules to apply or how to apply them. They freeze up like a computer because they don't know what to do.

The feeling of powerlessness when that happens is their real enemy, but since that's inside their heads and you're outside then you're the only target they can see.

It's not just the dichotomous us-versus-them mentality that causes the problem. It's the fact that true chaos defies order, breaks it down, breaks thing up in your head. According to Terry Pratchett, the difference between randomness and chaos (which causes disorder) is a lot bigger than people think. Random numbers fit into the system, and can be dealt with. Randomness is like rolling six-sided dice. Whatever you get, one through six, it can be predicted, there are rules to govern how many times you will roll certain numbers in a given number of tries. Chaos is like rolling a six-sided die and getting a seven.

The rules break down.

Chaos is fun. We just have to get the rest of the world on board with the concept.