Home » Order is Death

Order is Death

by martingbutler@outlook.com

When most people think of order, they unwittingly think of sameness. A parade of soldiers looks orderly because everyone walks the same and looks the same. Traffic flow is orderly when all vehicles drive on the appropriate side of the road. Clearly, we need order to conduct a reasonable life, but here is the interesting thing. Nothing new can come from order: it represents the death of new possibilities.

A few words about entropy are needed. Entropy is a measure of order and disorder. However, the usual understanding of order is reversed with entropy. From an entropic point of view, when everything is the same, or ordered as we would say in everyday language, the entropy, or measure of disorder, is high. Physicists talk about the entropic death of the universe, a situation where all the atoms have the same amount of energy and, as a result, nothing can happen. We only get change when there is an exchange of energy. If all the atoms were ambling about with the same energy, there would be no possibility of energy exchange. This is called the entropic death of the universe.

Take a room full of people with the same education, race, financial standing, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes, and the exchanges between these people will of necessity be purely perfunctory. The exchanges will be as dull as ditch water, with no possibility of sparking an interesting dialogue; the meetup will be dead, boring, and tedious.

A society that makes no room for chaos is a society that is dying. Unfortunately, this is the case in societies that display xenophobia, intolerance of differences, conformism, and  conservatism. From an everyday perspective, such a society may seem well ordered, but in reality it is a graveyard.

But it is the individual’s life that this applies to the most. An orderly life might mean that behaviors are repeated over and over again. Friday night might be club night. Saturday might be a shopping day. Sunday could be visit relatives day; and so on. People seek a sort of security in such repetitive behavior, but what they are unwittingly doing is dying. They will be bored, restless, and possibly desperate.

Finally, we die if our ideas, opinions, and beliefs are well ordered. Dogma is, of course, the classic example, with no room for anything new or even contradictory. If we don’t want our minds to die, there must be uncertainty, new ideas, and ferment.

You may also like