Order Essay

"People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events" (adapted from John Gray, Heresies, 2004). In what ways and to what extent would you say this claim is relevant in at least two areas of knowledge?

This claim is very accurate, since society is created by order. Some type of order controls every moment in our lives, whether it is a schedule, rules, habits, or accepted societal behaviors. This claim is relevant in the areas of knowledge of Social Science and in history

Every moment in or lives have some type of order whether or not we tend to recognize it. Order can be defined in many ways, and all of those apply here. Order can be defined as a set of rules, accepted behaviors, or instructions handed down to us by some type of authoritative means. Or it can be defined as a sequential order of events in which things happen, comparable to fate. It says in the quote that people need to believe in this order. In order to believe anything we have to obtain knowledge about it, then we make the conscious decision on whether or not we believe in it. We obtain knowledge through different means such as authority, deduction and induction.

One thing that is extremely important about order is that we are always striving for it. It is what sets up or society, and how we decide how to act based off of it. With order we feel as though there will only be chaos, and the feeling of not knowing how to respond based off of excepted actions or even non-accepted actions scares us. We know that if we are to commit a crime we are to be punished. Authority has told us this, or we can deduce it from information we have found, or we can also learn this by empirical knowledge of seeing a criminal being condoned for his actions.

However when we are placed in a setting with ‘no order’ humans create it. An example of this is the Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment took college student volunteers and placed them in an isolated area that resembled a prison. It put some students as guards, and the others as prisoners. There were no rules given, only to do what was necessary to keep the prisoners to behave. Automatically the guards came up with rules, and things like night checks. They placed order into a situation that did not previously have any, nor was it clear that any was needed yet. After the rebellion by the prisoners took place more rules and attempts to create order where placed down in hopes to squash any more chaos that may occur. The guard, as stated before, placed order into the situation from the beginning to make sure that there was no chaos from the prisoners. Their fear of having no order, and that it would lead to chaos is clearly shown here. People fear chaos because then there is no accepted form on how to act. If there is no order then there is no way to justify or devalue any action that has been done by anyone. There would ultimately be no way to judge anybody.

From birth we are filled with biases and our own views on the world that help to shade our perception on the world. When we meet someone, or even something, we make a conscious or unconscious judgment on them based on views that society has placed on us. If there is no order, then we would not know how to place these judgments. The inability to classify things and people in connection with ourselves scares us. If we cannot judge a person then we cannot decide whether or not this person will be harmful to us. It all boils down to human instinct, it is animalistic nature to judge if something is safe or not. The inability to be able to do so, which we feel as though would be created in chaos, scares us because that’s how we are wired as a species to work.

In the article “You’re Bored, but Your Brain Is Tuned In” from the New York Times physiologists ran tests researching boredom. It is stated in the article that boredom over time can ‘become a tool for sorting out information’. Here even in a state of daydreaming we are still trying to put order into our lives. We are ‘sorting out’ information, trying to make sense of it all and place patterns into these bits to create an order to them. In the article it is even stated that we may daydream for the reason being to solve a problem. Just like sorting something out, solving a problem involves evoking some type of order or reason to it.

This aspect of daydreaming is extremely realistic. I know for a fact if I am puzzled about something I try to place some type of order to it to try and make sense of it. If a friend of mine says something odd to me I will ponder over it. I will come up with reasons why this person must have said this: ‘oh he must have said it because of x, y, and z’. By doing this I am attaching some type or order to what this person has said. I am taking past experiences and applying them to the now, and applying some type of meaning to what I may find out about this statement in the future, or what this statement might actually mean in the future. In fact this statement could have had no meaning to it what so ever. It could have just been a statement. However since it was out of my norm, it was a but chaotic for me, so I instinctually reacted by placing order and meaning to it, in order to feel better about the situation.

In history leaders have used order in chaotic times to achieve their goals and objectives. For example during WWII Hitler was able to gain power during the chaos that the German people were going through. Germany had just lost WWI and was required to pay war debts to the other nations that fought in WWI. Germany did not have this money and only created inflation in its nation and larger amounts of debt. ‘Chaos’ arrived here because Germany was now in a state of depression, and became very vulnerable. Hitler came into play and used this chaos and vulnerability to create scapegoats, and create his own type of order. He created jobs with the SS and he created this new world full of ideals and laws and regulations in Germany that had not existed before his rule. The people looked to his plans and found order and structure in them, unlike what they had before. With all of the inflations that were taking place life felt chaotic for the Germans, and once Hitler gave them a glimpse of order and the chance to get back to the lives they once had they followed him. They did not bother to reject any ideas of the holocaust or any of the other monstrosities Hitler had planned, because they were to focus on the order that they felt would lead them from chaos. If Germany was not in debt and perfectly fine there would have been no need from the people to search for the ‘order’ that Hitler presented to them. They would have been content with life as it is.

People fear chaos. They feel that the only way to rid of chaos is to find order. When they are presented with any type of chaos they will find order to fill the chaotic void and make it go away, even if there really wasn’t any order to be found. If there wasn’t then the mind will create a ‘logical’ answer and accept it as truth until another form of order comes to prove it false.