Chaos and Bad Order

 

The "Apple of Eden" from the movie "Assassin's Creed."
In the story, the Apple contains the genetic code to eliminate free will.

 
CHAOS:
There is an eternal human struggle between chaos and BAD order. Between destructive freedom and destructive despotism. In a condition of chaos, such as predominates currently, the majority of humans will succumb to their base desires, especially since no one is available or trusted to train them not to do so.

Indeed, the very idea that some spiritual leaders SHOULD train people to resist their instincts, base desires and self-will is repudiated. According to "modern" wisdom, people are actualized and fulfilled by giving into their desires, even though demonstrably they are not. One only needs to look at the levels of fentanyl addiction today to see that.

People are ACTUALLY actualized and fulfilled by sacrificing their base desires and self-will for a higher cause. A holy purpose.

However the very idea of a higher purpose is repudiated and indeed, reviled by modernism. It is anathema to the modernist zeitgeist. The Assassin's Creed franchise will be mentioned in this post, but it is worth inserting at this point what that creed is:

 "Where other men blindly follow the truth, Remember:
NOTHING IS TRUE.

Where other men are limited by morality or law, Remember:
EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED."

 
Blindly follow the TRUTH? Everything is PERMITTED? Being opposed to truth and morality does not sound like a good creed to me. Truth is truth. Morality is central. Even a pagan, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, said that the practice of virtue is the essential human purpose. But these are the folks we are supposed to root for, more or less, in that franchise.

The original quote "nothing is true: everything is permitted" is originally from William Burroughs, the homosexual drug-using wife-murdering bad boy of the Beats in the 1950's, as I will address later.

So we have looked at chaos, and you do not have to look far to see it. It is everywhere, and incredibly destructive. Where everyone is FREE to follow their most base self, the majority will. They are like lambs without a shepherd, and they are also against all shepherds.

BAD ORDER:
What is bad ORDER? Order is necessary to civilized life, and we see what happens when it breaks down. Murders and rapes, sewage runs in the streets, drug addiction, the water is not fit to drink and the food is not fit to eat, electricity only runs a few hours a day. Most third world countries and many that are headed that way are like this. We are not that far off.

The problem with a human order is that those who most want power are those who should be prevented at all costs from obtaining it if possible. Power in general is a nearly irresistible temptation to indulge one's basest self (think: Hunter Biden.) Imagine what you would do if you had all power and could never be brought to account for anything you do? If that prospect appeals to you, you should never be anywhere near the levers of power; but even people who mean well can be corrupted by it because humans are easy to corrupt and it is very difficult to train them to resist corruption. It would require virtually a moral superhuman to resist abusing power.

In the AC franchise, the Templars genuinely want to end war, crime and violence and bring about a "progressive" New World Order. They are not Idi Amins. Most seem to truly mean well. However, the only way they ever seem to find to achieve those goals is to seek out the Apples of Eden which have the power to destroy human free will... for everyone but themselves, of course. They would be set up as the new rulers of the world.

However for examples of bad order, we don't have to look as far as computer game franchises. Hitler famously made the trains run on time. That's order. Order is good. He was also a homocidal megalomaniac whose actions lead to the destruction of Germany and murdered ten million people he had a personal grudge against, that's bad order. In bad order, leaders are free to oppress the people and indulge their most insane desires, because such an order is lead by a corruptible human who was probably horrendously evil to begin with or they would not have been able to grab power for themselves and keep it. Saddam Hussein and his sons are the perfect exemplars of such bad order. His sons did whatever they wanted, raped any women they wanted and murdered absolutely at will, and nobody could call them to account for it.


THE CYCLE:
And so human societies cycle between bad order and chaos, with each new wave of chaos presenting an invitation to bad order and every bad order presenting an invitation to chaos. While I have no doubt that we are currently under the sway of chaos in American society and a bad order in Washington, does anyone doubt that if things really break down there will be despots waiting in the wings that will make the Bidens look nearly domesticated? I do not. While Trump has up to this point acted in positive and necessary ways in his first administration, with his talk of revenge and executing drug dealers he is clearly poised to go despotic under the right circumstances, and under those circumstances a Trump despotism might be seen as a positive development. Sometimes an ascendant bad order that has not yet attempted to give in to its worst impulses can improve significantly on chaos if those are the only options. After all, we all do want order to be kept on the streets, the water to be fit to drink and food fit to eat, we all want to be safe in our own homes and not get murdered or raped. We all want the trains to run, the planes not to crash, and the mail to be delivered.

There are brief periods of time when a golden balance seems to be achieved between chaos and bad order, mostly when an order that isn't all that bad starts gradually shifting towards chaos. However, such times are rarely as benign as they appear, and all carry the seeds of their own destruction. The 1950's are often viewed as such a time in America, buoyed by increasing prosperity. However, tremendous degenerates were also around waiting for their moment, extending before and after the 1950's. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac were each lauded as the voice of their generation, and all were advocates for either leftism, drunkenness, hedonism, general degeneracy or all of the above. Writers in praise of the modernist zeitgeist - no wonder they were decorated with literary laurels.

Kerouac pals William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg were homosexuals and pedophiles; Burroughs admittedly a pedophile. He especially liked Arab boys. Burroughs actually went to South America to play with a drug that most decent Americans had never heard of or imagined, Ayahuasca. I believe this was after he murdered his own wife but before he wrote tomes about heroin addiction and homosexuality. So the Fifties had some real monsters: it's just that most people (and they should be grateful) didn't know about them. Kerouac himself drank himself to death, which is always a nice final coda to your literary resume. Hemingway blew his own head off with a shotgun, which is not nearly as literary as drinking yourself to death but might well be considered to be the logical conclusion of his life.

RIGHT ORDER:
If human history continually cycles between chaos and bad order, what is right order? G-d lays it out pretty clearly in the book of Exodus: you should not be dominated by a human king (Pharaoh,) nor should you be dominated by your basest self (the big party at the base of the golden calf.) G-D ALONE should be your king, and His laws the Torah and especially the Ten Commandments. You keep that, you need no other kings.

Of course just because G-d plans something nicer, doesn't mean that human beings can't decide against it. People might say, "you say that G-d had this better plan and that humans opted out of it: is G-d omnipotent or not? How could G-d fail?" Well, G-d didn't fail: humans did and failure has always been within the human purview. We are free to fail: indeed I believe that G-d continually chooses in favor of preserving human freedom, even at the price of frequent and nigh-inevitable human failure. After the righteous order under Moses and Joshua and the chaos of the period of the Judges, the Israelites wanted a human king.

So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him:

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected Me as their king.

As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

~1 Samuel 8:4-9

And so RIGHT order disappeared from the Earth. And I would be lying to you if I told you I thought there was much of any chance of it coming back. The RIGHT order is the Kingdom of G-d. Such an order may no longer be possible on this Earth, but it is not that difficult to imagine what it might look like should the miraculous happen and a nucleus of right order be created in this world. Children would be taught to keep G-d's law and conquer their baser selves for the sake of their better selves. Young people would be taught to embrace self-discipline and submit to traditional gender roles as G-d decreed. Those who govern would be the best of these altruistic people and care for the welfare of all while keeping G-d's law and restricting themselves to enforcing that law only while acting as moral guides to being better people. It is not hard to imagine: that it would ever happen is the hard and quite likely impossible thing.

I truly believe that G-d acts to preserve the human freedom to fail, even the freedom of humans to sin though of course G-d cannot approve of sin. But we must all decide for ourselves whether to submit to the rule of G-d, to the Kingdom of Heaven, and few in this age will do so.