The Essence of Existance, in More Ways than you Know

Originally I was going to title this post "Order v. Chaos," but I decided on this one instead. Maybe I'll start titling posts like they are newspaper headlines...

Anyway, Life seems to be mostly about Order vs. Chaos. This idea is nothing new, in fact it's the basest idea on life known to man, to my knowledge. A lot of the ancient mythologies were about gods representing Order who fought monsters representing Chaos. History and creation was thought of as events in the struggle between the idea of Chaos and the idea of Order. At first the universe was chaos, then creation happened and order was created, then there was a falling out and now we are somewhere between order and chaos, slowly marching closer and closer to the Chaos end of the spectrum until finally we reach it in a Ragnarok or Armageddon of some sort.
So right now we are stuck in this struggle between Order and Chaos, which is reflected in our daily lives. John Stuart Mill proposed that governments are in power because we need a structure to rebel against. For me this seems to make sense in that Order is defined by Chaos, and Chaos is defined by Order. So without the order of government, the chaos of freedom is un-imaginable. Foucault, although possibly coming to different conclusions about the nature of government, agrees that humans need both the sense of being governed along with the sense of being free. Humans, by nature, require and seek out a sort of balance between the two.
How does one know for sure that this truly is human nature? How can we look at ourselves and decide that freedom would be meaningless without structure, and that government would be meaningless without rebellion?
One answer, I feel, is the human reproduction of life through art and entertainment. Look at songs and books. They are all based on the building of tension through order and structure, and the subsequent release in a chaotic fashion. Tension and Release. Order and Chaos. Order builds tension in our lives, while we release that through the use of Chaos. That is life as we represent it. That is life.

This is all basic stuff, the question is how does that apply to society today? Politically, what is Democracy besides the attempt at ordering chaos through the use of ordered chaos. No definite structure, but a symphony of chaotic votes and lobbies leading to structured laws and legislature used to govern chaotic individuals. Should we be using chaos to create an order which watches over chaos? Maybe that is exactly the balance Humanity is aiming towards. Or maybe it's the devolution of structure and the creation of a foothold for Chaos to finally overtake Order.

Interesting? I think so.


How about taking an idea I touched on (order defining chaos and vice versa) into other realms. I'd suggest that everything in existance is defined only by it's antonym. Joy is only defined by sadness, warm is only defined by cold, wet is only defined by dry, refreshment is only defined by thirst, and love is only defined by hate. Without both, there is none. Such it is with Order and Chaos as well. Without death, there is no life. And so it goes...