Prologue
We are beings of stories.
This is arguably what defines us best as humans – we give meaning, and with it we develop ideas, and we play with symbols that convey them; and with all of those, we build stories.
And if our stories are successful, through them we discover new meanings, and new ideas and symbols, with which we tell new stories, evolving stories – ones that lead us to evolve ourselves.
Stories are our attempts to create order.
To fit things into a certain frame of meaning, from which we can build further. That is probably the reason why one of the most ancient and foundational stories of humanity is the story about the relationship between chaos and order.
It exists in one manner or another at the cores of almost any faith and tradition, and in most it takes the form of a struggle, demanding humans to pick a side; they normally choose the orderly side.
But there are other traditions, ones that tell the story differently.
Discordianism is one such example, where the dialectic between order and disorder constitutes the core matter. Both sides are seen as manifestation of Kaos, or Primordial Chaos – the name the ancient Greeks chose for the concept of “the formless void from which the gods emerged”. Accordingly, neither side is seen as inherently preferable, and so, the faithful Discordian is tasked of finding their own personal balance within a world that perpetually sways from one side to the other.
Space here is too limited to fully explore the nature of the Discordian religion, but to proceed I’ll note that it considers the number five sacred, and so, Discordians tend to divide each process into five seasons, stages or ages, which are:
- Chaos
The first stage of any new reality, in which no one has any real certainty regarding how things work, and we start seeing different attempts of imposing some sort of order over the chaos of existence. - Discord
In here, differing orders begin colliding into each other and struggling over dominance. From the struggles, usually a new order emerges, normally of a new scale – intended on resolving the conflicts.
- Confusion
In this stage, the new order starts catching up, but very soon is being absorbed right into the compulsive swinging of the seasonal dialectic, and becomes on itself the subject of the conflicts defining this age. - Bureaucracy
Here we see a new order, of yet another scale, managing to transcend the existing orders while systemizing them and factoring them into its own views and models, cementing its perceived superiority. - The Aftermath/ Apocalypse
Underneath the neatly ordered surface, however, chaos is still steaming; the more this new order develops and assumes dominance and exclusivity – the more its inconsistencies and fallacies become undeniably apparent, until we reach a state in which, as described in the Principia, “bureaucracy chokes on its own paperwork” and its orders collapse under their own weight. This paves the way back towards an initial age of Chaos, though one that belongs to a whole new cycle.
In this essay I will apply this model of five seasons to the chronology of the evolution of human society, and use it to explore its potential meaning. I’ll be focusing mainly on the current cycle, which I call “the Civilization Cycle”; it begins around 6000 years ago in Sumer, in an age of Chaos that got human civilization up and running, and ends with an age of apocalypse which seems to start manifesting distinctively in the past decades.
My starting point is the assumption that all human social constructs are essentially stories; civilization itself is one such story, one that’s purely human and aspires to form an all-engulfing frame for all that matters. The grand story of civilization practically attempts to organize each and every meaningful aspect of the world into the social framework. Accordingly, the historical exploration presented in this essay, revolves around this very axis – core ideas, the stories that serve as contexts for them, and how they reflect back to society.
I will exert my best efforts, however, for anchoring it all in common knowledge, as well as tying it to the development of some main information-technologies that have defined each age and allowed its ideas to prosper and greatly influence human culture.
This essay covers vast periods of time and deals with overarching trends, and so it naturally suffers from excessive generalization and simplification. Nevertheless, it provides a useful framework through which we can understand “the big picture” of humanity, or at least one version of it.
This essay is also overly focused on the Western civilization on those leading to and forming it, ones I know pretty well. I see no real issue with it, though, because this is the civilization that seems to almost always stand at the forefront of human progress. And besides, I firmly believe we can spot similar processes in the other civilizations, if we know them well enough.
Anyway, let’s begin.
Chaos
The age of Chaos in this current cycle begins in the Sumerian city of Uruk, around 3500-4000 BCE.
Uruk was the first city-state in known history, and the place where civilization as we know it first rose. Here is where the Urban Revolution began; here we took our first significant steps in transitioning from small and relatively egalitarian societies turn to large and highly hierarchical ones, headed by priest-kings and an elite of counselors and military commanders. This was the period when we developed layered and intricate societies, central governance, elaborate systems of trade and bureaucracy, and institutionalized religious systems. It was also the era when we invented the wheel, developed mathematics and generally established science, and even started recording history.
It was then that we also began developing one of the most important technologies for humankind – written language.
Initially it was all about administrative purposes; writing was first invented for managing commerce, employment and taxation. Accordingly, it was also very limited, consisting mainly of pictographic markings representing various kinds of goods, and numerical signs indicating quantity. Within mere centuries, however, it evolved and became a lot more sophisticated, beginning to serve even more purposes, such as legal and juridical documents, historic and scientific records, and even epic poetry and mythological tales.
The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, and this new medium for managing information started dictating –or at least fixating– new ideas and messages, which became the core of the stories we use to explain ourselves reality, life and the world.
One of the main features that define us as humans is our ability for symbolic thinking.
Symbolic thinking means that a certain part of our consciousness is virtual; fictional, imaginary, abstract. This part is what allows us to impart meaning on things, to play with symbols, to create stories and to think in ever-evolving abstractions.
The rise of civilization essentially was an evolution of consciousness; a process within which anything becomes a specific symbol packed with meanings, and thus, a part certain perceptual categories. We have effectively “moved to live” –on a very actual perceptual level– within the virtual space of consciousness, and inside this space that’s filled to the brim with changing symbols and evolving meanings, each meaning is a definition and each definition is a category.
That’s the step when we started thinking categorically about each and every thing. A tree, for example, is no longer a distinct, specific entity; but simply a manifestation of the general category “trees”. Human beings are no longer individuals, but the role they play in society. This is not a metaphor – many anthropologists studying and living with hunter-gatherer societies report that one of the most astonishing aspects is the radical difference between how they think, see reality and operate socially, compared to us; they live in societies that are far more egalitarian, their relationships with everything –including animals, plants and spirits– are far more personal and intimate, and their psych is much more rooted in and anchored to the present moment and the immediate environment, to the here and now.
Within the frame that is the virtual space of civilization, each and every thing becomes a part of a certain domain, and each of those domains becomes a part of some larger, all-engulfing, overarching order. If everything is so neatly ordered in our consciousness, well that implies the existence of a general order for everything, ain’t it?
And really, this was the time we started constructing stories intended on ordering all aspects of our lives. Here we began developing myths and mythologies that deal with creations stories, with elaborate hierarchies of deities, with the divine and cosmic order that reflects into the orders of the natural world, and into those of the world of men, the world of civilization. For civilization is a wholly separate world, one that’s completely human. A bubble of reality which, in its entirety, is a manifestation of the purely fictional and imaginative general social orders humans have developed, and helped them not just explain their worlds, but also to form intricate societies that are no longer based solely on inter-personal relationships, but on inter-social ones, which means intra-narrative; we belong to the same society because we belong to the same story.
Discord
The age of Discord in this current cycle also begins in the ancient Near East and the Levant, mainly around the land of Canaan, around 1800-1500 BCE.
In this era, the general cognitive focus started shifting from one directed at the collective and group identity, to one directed at the individual and personal identity.
Here we start seeing, for example, a transition from group or family burial to individual burials, even among common folk and not just the elites. And it’s not just individual graves; we also see personally tailored offerings for the dead, more elaborate tombstones and specific, personal texts in burial sites. This shift to individuality manifests in social and theological contexts as well – during this period, people started working with and worshipping more personal deities, and even household ones; legal codes and religious texts begin to increasingly emphasize personal moral responsibility and individual ethics; literature and poetry transform and become much more reflective, in some cases even constituting what would later become “philosophy proper”.
Around this time we also began developing an information technology that constitutes the next leap forward.
The Proto-Sinaic writing system was developed around the 19th century BCE, by a tribe of workers of Semitic origin, whom the Egyptians employed in turquoise mining in the Sinai mines. This group revolutionized the use of written language: they took a limited set of major pictographic symbols from the ancient Egyptian writing, and established that each symbol no longer represents a specific object or idea – but rather a specific syllable, usually the one at beginning of that Egyptian word.
This method created the very first alphabet, the earliest example in human history of a writing system that is entirely phonetic, which have led to a genuine democratization of the written word: not only did it simplify tremendously the use and study of writing, but also vastly expanded what could be done with it – suddenly it became possible to write literally everything that could be spoken.
Archaeological findings show that by the 15th century BCE, this writing system had made its way to Canaan, where it became the ancient Hebrew script, and was also adopted by the Phoenicians. They, in turn, managed to simplify it even further, repackaging it as a set of 22 letters that were far more convenient and fluid to use than anything else around. It was so efficient –one simple principle upon which any language in existence could be based– that to this day, the vast majority of writing systems in the world can trace their origin to the ancient Phoenician script.
This revolution in how we handle writing –and by extension, information; ideas, stories, and the entirety of the virtual reality which is civilization– demonstrates very clearly the transition to a more individualistic mode of thinking.
It comes as no surprise that this change first “caught on” so strongly in the region of ancient Canaan; after all, Canaan was the very center of the ancient world. This isn’t some theological statement about “the Holy Land”, but rather a combination of geographic and political facts: Canaan the meeting point of three continents –Africa, Asia and Europe– which naturally caused some of the main trade routes of the ancient world to pass through it, led to it becoming one of the major arenas for great conflicts between different civilizations on their stories, and contributed greatly to the ethnic, cultural and mythological diversity in the region.
Additionally, the land is bounded by natural barriers, which made it a lot easier for smaller communities and societies to maintain certain levels of cultural and governmental autonomy, even when regional powers ruled and exchanged control over it. In accordance with these geopolitical circumstances, said communities were in many cases highly diverse, ethnically and culturally, which presumably played a crucial role in the development of a more individualistic consciousness.
One of these communities –and among the most influential of them– was the ancient Hebrew society, which was on one hand a peculiar mixture of most of those who were around, while on the other hand was also very distinct and distinguished. This matter is exceptionally well reflected in the element considered the cornerstone of Hebrew thought – deep belief in the oneness of the divine.
Theologically speaking, this idea was very unusual for its day and age. It wasn’t yet the monotheism as we know it today, but rather more like monolatry – recognition of multiple deities, with one primary god rising above them all. But even this chief deity of the Hebrew culture was radically different in essence – it was completely abstract.
This concept of an abstract divinity transcending anything else is more reminiscent of certain eastern ideas, such as the Tao that was conceptualized and developed in China several centuries later. What we’re dealing with here isn’t actually some specific divine figure, but rather a cosmic principle that transcends all phenomena and deities.
This idea, at a very fundamental level, essentially adds another referential layer to the general perception of reality: in addition to the reality layer of the natural world of plants and animals, and the layer of the human world of civilization, and the layer of specific deity figures – there exists another layer which is entirely a being of a whole new order, one that beyond being completely abstract, is also both transcendent and immanent; both above and beyond anything and present in everything. And more importantly – we all have a direct, personal and binding connection with it.
This idea provides a frame that fundamentally changes all the stories with which we understand the world, and can account for both a group unity and social diversity. It represents an essential shift in how we conceptualize reality, life and the world, and provides a new referential basis which serves as a particularly fertile ground for new philosophical and theological ideas to come.
Confusion
The age of Confusion in this current cycle begins in the Roman Empire, between the first and the fourth centuries.
The idea of a divine being transcending all concepts is a very complicated idea to grasp and conceptualize, even today – as any student (or teacher) of Tao and Zen would admit. Moreover, unlike the Chinese, who attached to this divine principle a term with neutral and impersonal meaning (Tao roughly translates to “the way”), here this idea got the name of a specific god, which added significant theological dimensions to it.
That’s how the idea of an absolute divine principle became a story about a specific divine figure. This God is still transcendent and immanent, but in many versions have already lost a lot of his abstract quality, rendering him a distinct “someone” with clear and definite wants that form a one true way or true faith – what the ancient Greeks called “Orthodoxy”.
While this transformation happened on a very early stage – already in the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Judea and Israel, still, the real credit for popularizing this story and significantly developing it further goes mainly to Christianity, and maybe to Islam too.
The formative ideas of the Christian (and later on Muslim) ethos could already be found with Jesus, even if he himself never intended for it to unfold the way it did. Unlike the faith of the ancient Hebrews, Jesus kept on talking about the body contrasted with the soul, and about the earthly carnal realities contrasted with the divine one. If there is a one God sitting on his divine throne, then there obviously is a divine realm – the kingdom of heaven. It only makes sense.
And so came to the world two of the ideas that again fundamentally altered the way people conceptualize and approach life and the world – the first ones speaks of one reality which is superior and favored over all the rest, and mainly separate from them. The second ideas dictates we’re all more spirit than we are body, meaning we’re bound to the heavenly realm far stronger than to the realms of men; and so, if we’re to manifest the kingdom of heaven here on earth – we’re tasked with the holy duty of spreading this ethos and leading every person to recognize this simple truth.
Thus was born the missionary enterprise.
Around the time when Jesus was active, in the Roman Empire as well, a novel information technology was developed, fitting perfectly to the missionary needs of the Christians.
I am talking about the codex, which we know today as simply “book”. Up until this revolutionary invention, the main format for keeping written records was scrolls of parchment or papyrus, which were very cumbersome, relatively more vulnerable and mainly, severely restricted. Suddenly, with the new invention, the content of fifty scrolls could be stacked within a single volume that was more durable, a lot more convenient to carry and allowed for far more efficient navigation within the text.
History tells us the Christians gladly adopted this new technology, effectively utilizing it to spread their faith far and wide. But that, as noted, wasn’t the end of it; several centuries later, another man of vision rose to prominence, and on a similar theological basis. Unlike Jesus though – Mohammed wasn’t just a visionary, he was also a mighty military commander and a cunning politician, and so he managed to solidify his followers and even lead them to the start of a very successful campaign of expansion and conquest.
A bit more than a decade after their prophet had died, the heads of the Caliphate were wise enough to canonize the Quran and spread it. The codex, of course, was of great help; in fact, they completely fell in love with the idea of accumulated human knowledge, so much that they started founding great libraries and initiating tremendous projects for translating important texts from all cultures they’ve met, a factor that played a significant role in the rise of the Golden Age of Islam.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the church, that already made itself established and institutional, started filling in the administrative vacuum and assuming more and more authorities, until it became a major political force. Around the Christian world alongside the Muslim –which grew and expanded, competing over resource, power and prestige– and as a result, within massive parts of the civilized world, the general “operating system” of human civilization became thoroughly religious. All aspects of life were subjugated to theological conceptions, all based on the unwavering belief in one, absolute and immutable reality which is God’s plan. Philosophy, the sciences, the arts, social life, governance and even wars – all was approached, in a fundamental level, from a deeply religious perspective, that remained highly influential to this day.
Bureaucracy
The age of Bureaucracy in this current cycle begins in Italy, Florence most specifically, around the 14th and the 15th centuries.
Florence of this period was an important cultural, artistic and intellectual center, a reputation that flourished rapidly when the Medicis, who were renowned as the patrons of art, took over the city.
The cultural revival that began there and quickly spread to the rest of the western world is normally referred to as “The Renaissance”, and it was deeply influential not just for culture and art, but also for science, politics and even religion; and as always, we can trace the roots of this grand revolution in the stories and ideas that define the borders of our perception and consciousness.
Intellectuals and great thinkers of the time inherited from religion the idea of one, absolute and immutable reality, but completely changed its referential point and the criteria with which its validity was measured; these are no longer dictated by some theological ideal, but by objective compatibility with an external empirical reality anyone can measure in the same manner.
It’s been said, for example, that the greatest issue the inquisition had with Galileo wasn’t really about the specifics of his ideas, however heretical as they may be; the real challenge Galileo has posed to the church was his claims that the reason for his steadfast insistence on his ideas was that these are objective facts that truly exist “out there”.
In other words, he granted a piece of information the same degree of absoluteness which was seen up until this point as proper only for God and those claiming to speak on his behalf. Galileo essentially was a prominent representative of the general perception that started evolving with the Renaissance, one which took from the authorities of religion the power to dictate for everyone what’s the truth and what’s reality, what’s just and what’s right; and opening up new realms of exploration for anyone who wished to conduct research independently, free from religious and theological constraints.
Some of the first sprouts of this perception actually bloomed in the world of art: even before the “official” Renaissance there were artists like Giotto, for example, who started developing the foundations for the study of perspective and depth perception in painting. He was among the first artists to treat the canvas as a window into dimensional space, and in his works we can already see quite distinctively the novel realism that’s going to be so associated with Renaissance artists.
This new perception, as we’ve noted, have gradually arrived to all realms of life, not just art. Andreas Vesalius brought it to anatomy, fundamentally changes how we perceive the human body, leading to the development of modern healthcare. People like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had brought it to astronomy and physics, and completely altered how we perceive the universe. All of those have laid the groundwork for what’s going to be called “The Scientific Revolution”, dramatically transforming all of our lives.
Additionally, this novel perception have also arrived to the world of religion, with Martin Luther, Erasmus and John Calvin, the instigators of the Protestant reformation – which have stripped absolute authority from the Pope and the Catholic church and dramatically changed the public’s attitude towards religion and religiousness.
And just like in former ages, we can see here as well that from the initial stages of this era we’ve had developed a new information technology that vastly influenced all other developments.
Print was actually invented several centuries prior, in China, but never really took hold there. The equipment used by the Chinese was fragile and expensive, and besides, their writing system’s complexity and vast number of characters made the whole enterprise too cumbersome and inefficient.
Anyway, around the start of the 15th century, printing press arrived in Europe, still a raw technology, but Gutenberg managed to improve upon it and invented some new features for it, thus paving the way for printing press to become widely spread.
More than just mere enrichment to the abilities of producing and distributing any existing kinds of text, like books, royal orders and religious edicts; print also contributed greatly to the development of whole new mediums, such as journalism or initial scientific and intellectual magazines.
Out of this cultural context there emerged a unique social phenomenon known as “The Republic of Letters”; an international community of scientists, thinkers and intellectuals, who shared knowledge and information with remarkable openness, relative to their time. Though it was never an official establishment, this “republic” contributed to the development of many, and above all, it was a very early example of a concept that’s going to evolve and take over the world in the following era – social networks.
Apocalypse
The age of Apocalypse in this current cycle began somewhere around the last hundred years, especially in Britain and the US; and more prominently in the past decades, all over the digital world and the internet.
People wiser than myself have already dubbed it “the Post-Truth Era” or even “the Infocalypse” (information apocalypse), and among them there’s a tendency of pointing at around the year 2010 as the main turning point – that’s when smartphones became popular and widespread, social networks rose to prominence and even dominance, and personalized algorithmic content started filling our feeds, and our consciousness. In fact, the term “post-truth” was even chosen as Oxford’s word of the year for the year of 2016.
The events of the Arab Spring, Brexit and the rise of Trump were probably the incidents that best exemplified this turn of the ages, but ever since, wars over consciousness and attention –especially in digital spaces– only get more intense; this era we’re now living is characterized by very convenient access to massive amounts of information and the possibility to easily create personally-tailored content en masse, and also by our ability to form social connection not limited by geography.
And so the internet, the very same tool that got all of us interconnected turning the world into an actual global village, has also provided us with the conditions allowing and promoting the fragmentation of this village into smaller and smaller echo-chambers that become ever more specific, with increasingly rigid boundaries.
We now witness the collapse of the idea of one objective reality, and the rise of the concept of inter-subjective realities.
It became particularly evident in politics and social issues, but that’s actually a general, overarching trend which can be observed within the general public, and reflects a growing interest in alternative word views and ways of life. And if it starts sounding a bit Hippie, that’s my exact intent – the Psychedelic Revolution of the counter culture movement in the 60s and 70s was the point of breakthrough for this new consciousness, at least on a social scale and not just local or personal.
It was then when we started thinking in a post-modern manner. To doubt authority – not just the political or religious, but also the scientific, social, philosophical; ontological even. And the psychedelic culture became one of the deepest manifestations of it; here we have an entire society of people actively experimenting with direct experience –on an actual sensual level, not just with their thinking– of alternative perceptions of reality and even different realities. And moreover, they’re analyzing their; sharing them, seeking appropriate frameworks of understanding – ones that transcend conventional Western scientific thinking. One point that’s interesting to note as well is that many early internet pioneers of this era were themselves part of the psychedelic movement and counter culture.
The idea of one objective reality is slipping through our fingers, gradually giving way to the concept of “reality pluralism”.
And what I find especially intriguing is that the process echoes the description found in the Principia Discordia, of Bureaucracy “choking on its own paperwork” – one of the first domains that started demonstrating this process was physics; the study of the very structure of reality from an objective point of view. Already in the first decades of last century, classical physics essentially “broke down”, and in many realms was replaced by Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – two descriptions providing excellent results, each for different parameters of reality, but they simply aren’t compatible with each other.
Several decades later, and a lot thanks to psychedelia, this upheaval arrived to domains that concern themselves with the study of how we study things and how we perceive reality – cognition and neurology. We started investigating more and more the connection between brain and consciousness, and rediscovered from various angles a very old realization: our perception of reality –which is not objective reality itself, but rather our interpretation of it– is the only reality we can directly access. Oh, and it’s also very fluid and can be highly manipulated.
And if back then, in the 60s-70s, this understanding was already significant, but still minor – today it has grown to monstrous (and magnificent) scales. As a society today, we’re much more concerned with how our perceptions are manipulated, and how we can do it too.
Politicians, marketers and all sorts of ideological leaders masterfully employ these notions for some time now, and in recent years it seems the general public starts catching up. We already know the concept of fake new very well, most of us have preferred sources from which we absorb information of the kinds and sorts we want to hear – regarding any topic, and many of us are already experimenting with generative AI, populating the web with deep-fakes.
The age of information has transformed into the age of infocalypse.
What are we going to do with it?
Epilogue
We are beings of stories.
The current age demonstrates it exceptionally well – it becomes clearer and clearer that we tend to prefer a captivating story over a cold fact.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if we know how to work with it, and in any way, seems like this was the case from the very beginning; stories are, as we’ve noted, the way in which we order ideas, concepts and knowledge in the virtual space of the imagination. Information technologies are the interface we use to connect the virtual space to the concrete – from spoken language and cave paintings, through written language and all of the milestones of its evolution as we’ve covered in this essay, and all the way to electronic devices that actually created a whole new layer of interface between abstract and concrete realities – the digital realm.
In terms of history, this current age has just started, and if we’re to judge relative to the former ages, even if we consider they get shorter due to accelerated progress – I think we’re still facing at least 100-200 years of Apocalypse season, before we begin out next cycle with a new season of Chaos.
I won’t try predicting what’s to come, but some words regarding this age are due: while we call it Apocalypse, its initial name is the Aftermath, because it concludes the cycle and brings about the implications of all former ages, for good or bad.
It manifests in evolving technologies, and also in core ideas that evolve our foundational stories, as we’ve covered throughout the essay – but it also manifests in the tools we acquire with the ever-changing surface of reality.
Each age has provided us with new referential layers for the framework of our perception of reality, and fundamentally altered all the stories we use to explain ourselves life and the world, and so each age have taught us something new and meaningful that can aid our growth, if we know how to effectively apply it – the first age taught us the power of grand stories in forming societies, turning them into something radically new that was never seen before; the second age taught us about the source of all ideas and stories, and about our inherent connection to it; the third age taught us the force of unwavering faith, and introduced the notion of a preferred reality; the fourth age taught us to break free from theological ideologies and examine for ourselves this “preferred reality” from a shared and tangible point of view.
Additionally, each age also swung on the spectrum between collectivism and individualism – in the first age we’ve united to organized societies; and in the second we’ve learned to be individuals within those societies; in the third age the emphasis shifted again from individuals too social stories, religious this time; and the fourth had brought yet again a humanistic perspective, placing the individual in its focal point.
The current age, being the one concluding the cycle, is probably going to teach us an intricate balance between group and personal identities, a journey some of us are already actively exploring in some ways or other.
Apart from that, it’s going to make us internalize some of the main teaching of each age, but also to adjust them so as to not repeat former mistakes. For example, we’ve already noted that the idea of objective reality crumbles, but it’s still useful, and for the sake of mental stability we shouldn’t shake it off completely, just tweak it a bit; if we could abandon the idea of one reality which is the exclusive truth and recognize the truth of other realities, while at the same time acknowledge the unparalleled value of the physical, tangible reality as a very firm and stable “base reality” – we could already form a very efficient frame that could better account for and work with very novel and complex ideas. After all, this is one of the main advices for anyone finding themselves in uncomfortable corners of intense states of consciousness – ground yourself, get back to your body.
I think that in a very same manner we could look at everything we’ve learned in former ages, identify that it’s all just stories over which we have a certain degree of control, and adjust them for a better fit to who and what we are, and who and what we strive to become
It requires a challenging but fascinating combination between stability and openness, stemming from a realization that all stories are attempts of imposing virtual order over a chaotic reality, and that each of those orders is relative and not absolute.
Such an understanding is what turns this foundational story about the war between chaos and order to a different story, one that’s much gentler; a story about the dance between the two sides, about creative and fruitful relations – a story of love, instead of fear.
״
When people understand Chaos,
they live their lives as they please.
When people misunderstand Chaos,
the Machine™ grinds them into grist.
The greatest cause of Disorder is Order.
The greatest motivator of Order is Disorder.
Whoever can embrace both will see for miles.
“
~From the Chao-te-Ching, a book of Discordian wisdom