How chaotic does the world seem to you right now?
How about in your own life — how chaotic does it feel?
Where does this lead you? Do you feel like you just want to isolate yourself from it all?
I know people who try to literally move away from what they feel is chaotic — to insulate themselves from the outside world. . It feels like an almost natural response (after all, why would you want to stay in chaos?). But, moving away from it doesn’t really deal with it, it is mostly just an attempt to avoid it, often with only short-term effect.
When I am disrupted by something, I feel like moving away from it. Others respond in the opposite way, they confront it. Disruption is not always a bad thing. But, chaos usually is, especially when it is persistent.
Chaos makes you feel like something is out of control. It makes you feel like you have to do something about it — that you can't handle it, if you don't.
Chaos disables connection.
Chaos enables isolation.
Isolation enables the impacts of chaos. It is an attempt to control it, when in fact it actually contributes to perpetuating it.
Even in its most legitimate form, isolation is simply a method to reposition how one enters the chaos. And, sometimes that is needed. But, isolation is mostly ineffective and, in the long run, an illusion.
Working on something collectively (together) is often the greatest antidote to chaos.
Going it alone, whether at a personal or national level, betrays a fundamental flaw in one’s understanding of what it means to be in a healthy relationship with the dialectic of order and chaos. Isolation only tips the scale further away from a more constructive and healthy engagement with chaos in life.
We should be both aware of and vigilant against, then, those who use chaos to divide and isolate us. Ironically, chaos when use this way is even more about power at times than order is (which can also at times feel just as heavy handed).
Disruption is one thing. Monetized chaos is another.
Given what and how these things work, we need to come together.