Throughout the beginning of the latter portion of my existence, I have preached the all-consuming need for balance in all aspects of existence. The chaos theory thought model called the edge of chaos — my favorite thought model, as it applies to so much of our daily lives — speaks to the need for all living creatures to strive for that necessary balance.
On one side of the thought model, you have apparent order and stability, and on the other side of the model you have apparent randomness and disorder. Thanks to the good-versus-evil mythos we regurgitate in every story we tell via our mainstream media from old Judeo-Christian Bible stories to the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, we tend to think in very binary terms. Order is good. Chaos is bad. With Chaos on one side and Order on the other, we should flock towards Order without delay, right?
Not all systems are so binary, though! As ancient Sumerian myths and modern stories like Babylon 5 and The Matrix films have illustrated (to varying degrees of success or failure), many systems — especially complex systems from human psychology and biology to the stock market — often possess three or more unique facets that can dramatically affect dynamics within those systems. With the edge of chaos thought model, you have three key aspects at play: Order, Chaos, and the “Edge of Chaos” in between, with a gradient of Order and Chaos bleeding out from the extremes to the Edge of Chaos itself.
In this thought model, the farthest ends of either of the two extremes, what I will refer to as “Extreme Order” or “Extreme Chaos”, are not beneficial places to be. To quote American poet Wallace Stevens, “A violent order is disorder”. Order may not always mean stability, or sometimes the type of order present begs the question, “Order at what cost?”1 Order can sometimes be too restrictive; it can choke instead of counterpoise.2 Too much order can stifle creativity and prevent adaptability from necessary expression, making order just as inconducive to life as Chaos. In fluid dynamics, “order” often equals “frozen,” and frozen water doesn’t help you stay hydrated when you’re lost in the Antarctic!
Along that same vein, is Chaos necessarily entirely bad? Quoting Stevens again, “a great disorder is an order.” Chaotic events can prompt evolutionary forces to produce dramatically positive results in various organisms just as much as it can cause mass extinctions.3 Chaotic mental effects like depression or other mental disorders can spur artists to create beautiful and lasting works of priceless art, and in some cases a curious form of order or self-organization can arise from chaotic, even traumatic events.4
According to the edge of chaos thought model as proposed in the 1980s by physicist Norman Packard and popularized by science fiction author Michael Crichton in his novel The Lost World, that strange, sublime region called the “edge of chaos” is where life truly thrives. At the edge of chaos, just enough order is present to provide a system with grounding and necessary stability, but just enough randomness is present to provide that unpredictable oomph that kicks creativity, spontaneity, and adaptation into high gear, producing an organism or system that is still ordered enough to live, yet still adaptable enough to remain alive and competitive.5
To hammer the point home: on one side, you have a heart beating wildly, giving the patient a heart attack. On the other side, you have the ultimate stability: death. The patient is a cold corpse, and the heart no longer beats at all. However, at the edge of chaos, there’s a decent range available6 for the human heart to remain healthy and flourish.
The edge of chaos is where true balance may be found, and that balance is what all systems and organisms need to thrive and prosper. Naturally, this includes organisms like us human beings.7
For the past decade, I have been struggling to rebuild myself after suffering through several personal catastrophes. Figuring out how to rebuild yourself from brokenness is a difficult prospect, a tough balancing act in its own right. You still have to live your life like normal (whatever your sense of “normal” may be) and maintain your physical and mental wellbeing while striving to create a better lifestyle and personality. The world around you is constantly clawing at you for vital pieces of your time, your mind, your skills, and your spirit that you also need to devote to the task of reworking yourself.
Keep in mind: no one around you means to play the part of the “Villain” in this struggle! There really aren’t as many “bad guys” in the struggle of life as we perceive there to be.8 There are always things beyond the goals in your personal sphere that need doing, like required work tasks or seemingly unending household chores. Your loved ones always want to spend time with you online or in real life, when they are available to do so; trust me, you will regret missing out on those special moments, regardless how introverted you may be. You also have to budget in time9 to rest and recuperate from everything you do that drains your vital energies. Life is what it is, like it or not, and you have to make smart choices in order to succeed at your individual aims as well as your career goals, your social needs, your spiritual necessities, et cetera ad infinitum.
How much of yourself do you safeguard from the various outside forces begging and pleading for your attention, and how much of yourself do you offer to those outside needs? How much of yourself do you give to others you cherish while still allowing yourself time to rest and re-energize with hobbies and relaxants so you have more time to give to others later? How much of yourself do you devote to God or to adhering to your personal philosophies and disciplines?10 How much of yourself do you give to your job so you succeed? Do you want to chase promotions and higher pay, or learn to be content with the position you currently hold? How do you learn to work smarter — using less energy, time, and resources to get important tasks done as creatively, efficiently, and effectively as humanly possible — instead of working yourself to the bone while wasting time, intellect, and resources on work methods that do not serve you well? How do you balance life between the need to take things day-by-day to prevent yourself from being overwhelmed, and the need to plan ahead for an uncertain future? How do you effectively plan for that future and all the potentially terrible things that could likely occur with the scant, finite resources you have on hand?
It’s all about balance. It’s the day-to-day expression of life on the edge of chaos. Too much activity (or too much unplanned activity) and you have a nervous breakdown. Too little activity and your life falls apart due to lack of maintenance. It’s a balancing act on the highest of highwires, and you’ve got to find that middle-of-the-road sweet spot that works for you as best and as fast as you can. Life doesn’t always have safety nets.
To keep matters on a relatable everyday level: the edge of chaos extends even to the self-imposed mental constructs we choose to live by moment by moment, like politics, religious systems, and philosophies or personal disciplines.11 Does the world seem too polarized and extreme sometimes? That’s because society is out of balance; our leaders don’t truly understand how to find balance because we — the people who elect them — don’t know how to find balance. This is why the quest to find the edge of chaos is so crucial. When we find true balance in ourselves, we will think, and then behave, in a balanced manner. When we think and behave in balanced manner, we will vote for better political representatives and respond to our elected leaders in a more balanced manner. If those elected delegates have found true balance in their lives and in their occupations as well, then they will respond to us and our needs in a balanced manner as well.
Instead, though, we vote along narrow-minded, utterly imbalanced party lines for various reasons born of either misappropriated empathy or unenlightened self-interests, then we wonder why our nation and its component states, territories, and cities are so unbalanced! People behave as if their nation’s politics have only two viewpoints, an Us and a Them (whichever party or political philosophy you believe Us or Them are), treating politics — which is, essentially, meant to be a game of diplomacy and compromise — like a massive culture war where the goal is to batter the enemy down with arguments, rallies, or even political violence rather than recognize their shared humanity and reach across the aisle to work alongside those we disagree with toward finding appropriate beneficial compromises on all political positions.12 We Americans liken our nation to a bird, but have we forgotten that it takes two distinct and equal wings — a healthy right wing and a healthy left wing, both of equal length and composition — for a bird to fly? If each wing goes its own way, they rip themselves apart from the bird and fall to doom in the damnable extremes while the bird also perishes!
Our leaders are reflections of ourselves! If we act out of balance — even though most individuals are really centrists at heart (either center-right or center-left), when you examine what they believe and how they vote on an issue-by-issue basis13 — then how do we expect our elected representatives, the people who represent who and what we are, to behave! We’re either going to elect people who are as out-of-balance as we are, or we’re going to elect the people whose narrow-minded arguments brought us out of balance in the first place!
Politically, the wisest position to hold is that espoused by comedian Chris Rock:
Everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with the gang. “I’m conservative”, “I’m liberal”, […] Listen! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, okay? I’ve got some shit I’m conservative about, I’ve got some shit I’m liberal about.
I‘ve already touched on religion in a few places in this admittedly lengthy missive, but I have not discussed the contentious relationship between religion and science yet. Of course, only utter fools truly consider the relationship between the physical sciences and religion “contentious”; when one studies history more closely, one realizes that science began — and, in many ways, continues to be — an outgrowth or an offspring of religion! Many scientific concepts have their origins in religion or were conceived by philosophers and religious people, from evolution14 to various mathematical concepts15 and astronomical truths.16
Religion/spirituality and science have coexisted together in a balanced relationship for thousands of years.17 For many Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance scholars, their meditations on scripture or their ruminations on the nature of God spurred their scientific discoveries and kept them pondering the nature of the universe, even when their own organized religious institutions tried to dissuade them. Even modern scientific and technological discoveries have been made by religious or spiritual souls, such as: Raymond Damadian, the creator of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a lifelong Christian and young Earth creationist; Anglican priest and theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne; and committed ecumenical Pentecostal Robert T. Bakker, PhD, the dinosaur behavioralist who posited the theory of endothermic (warm-blooded) dinosaurs alongside his storied mentor John Ostrom. These scientists not only found a balance between science and faith within themselves, they found a harmony between science and faith at a spiritual Edge of Chaos.
Striving for balance in our day-to-day existence — seeking the Edge of Chaos between the extensive gradient of possibilities between Extreme Order and Extreme Chaos — is the most sustainable way to navigate the complexities of the world around us. When we let go of aggressive extremism and embrace tranquil equilibrium in the political, religious, philosophical, temporal, and other facets of our lives — when we fully integrate the positive aspects of both Order and Chaos into our beings and live as fully unified souls — we find tremendous peace and well-being that will resonate within us like the light of the sun and extend to those around us.
- Remember: the villainous “space Nazis” in the Star Wars sequel films is called the First Order. Sometimes, societal stability comes at too high a cost, like the loss of personal and collective freedoms. This is true across all geopolitical spectrums: the Nazis (an irreligious far-right fascist state), Islamofascism (existing in various extremist far-right theocratic states), the USSR (a far-left oligarchical state cosplaying as Russian Communism), and North Korea (a fascist cult of personality whose political views range all across the spectrum) all illustrate this. Order bought at gunpoint is no order at all.[↩]
- A form of order that stifles need not be a police state. While many enjoyed the societal stability of 1950s American society, many others — especially African Americans, women, leftists, creatives, freethinkers, and the LGBTQ+ crowd — found the cisgendered Protestant male-dominated, segregationist American society of the 1950s to be quite stifling indeed![↩]
- While the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event may have wiped out the dinosaurs, several other organisms alive during that event — creatures such as crocodiles, frogs, snakes, turtles, sharks, tiny mammals, ancient birds, and other relatively small organisms — survived to the common era. Could this mass extinction have created the environmental conditions necessary for these creatures to thrive in the aftermath of the initial extinction event? Perhaps when the dinosaurs were wiped off of life’s chessboard, the surviving creatures evolved to fill the ecological niches vacated by the deceased larger organisms, leading to the rise of upright, walking, intelligent mammals like us.[↩]
- Ever heard stories about alcoholics who hit catastrophic “rock bottom” events in their lives, only to suddenly sober up and turn their lives around? What about stories of nations dramatically reorganizing themselves after losing major wars, like Japan after World War II? Catastrophe can sometimes lead to stability and even profitability, under the right conditions.[↩]
- Gee, it’s almost like reality is one big computer program that just might have a Programmer that prefers balance over extremes…[↩]
- The optimal resting heartrate for adults age 18 and over is 60 to 100 beats per minute. The optimal active heartrate is 72 to 200 beats per minute, depending on your age.[↩]
- A religious person might think of the edge of chaos as a “straight and narrow path” to their personal salvation.[↩]
- Of course, reality often presents dramatic exceptions to this rule, as World War II and the War on Terror demonstrated.[↩]
- I’ve actually touched on such time budgeting before in an earlier post.[↩]
- Religion is itself a delicate balance of the natural and the spiritual. Grow too spiritual and you inadvertently neglect relationships with others that the Lord intentionally brought into your life, or you allow your health to falter as you focus so much on your spirituality that you neglect your diet and hygiene. Behave too secularly and you might as well not be religious at all, as you never bring the faith you profess into positive action, or — worse — you behave as a narcissistic hypocrite. Focus too much on proselytization and you become a domineering inquisitor forcing others to adopt a religion you have already perverted into something horrifying, and you trespass on their God-given free will. Refuse to focus on sharing your faith with others at all, and you deny them a positive force in their lives that may inspire them to greatness.[↩]
- How many religions and philosophies focus on balance? Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Bushido, Stoicism and Neostoicism… The Jewish Reggae artist Matisyahu even referred to the Torah as “the middle road called ‘Truth'” in his song “Got No Water”.[↩]
- Don’t get me wrong; some parties and some candidates are more guilty of polarization than others, and there are self-appointed villains lurking in the political theater seeking those they may devour. The problem is that the parties that aren’t run by monsters often become new monsters while trying to destroy the original perceived “monsters”. Remember the words of Nietzsche about those who fight monsters![↩]
- This, of course, assumes that the reader is only thinking of political issues along the Right/Left dichotomy; do keep in mind, there are several other political parties in existence — this Wiki link contains a list of all of America’s registered political parties, for example (not counting the unregistered political parties out there) — and their platforms are found all over the popular four-quadrant Political Compass spectrum, and the compass is only one of many models that correctly displays the political spectrum as more than merely the Right or the Left![↩]
- Some of the earliest proponents of ideas similar to evolution were the Ionian/Milesian philosopher Anaximander and the legendary Sicilian philosopher Empedocles, and some Medieval Christians and Arab Muslims spoke of concepts similar to evolution, like the Aristotelian/Platonic notions of forms.[↩]
- Sir Isaac Newton and René Descartes, among others, were well-known God-fearing mathematicians.[↩]
- Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo Galilei, among others, were famed early astronomers who accredited their scientific discoveries to divine providence, regardless what the Church thought of their discoveries.[↩]
- Catholic Bishop Robert Barron wrote a superb must-read article about this called “The Myth of the War Between Science and Religion”. To say nothing of what chaos theory has to say about religion and vice-versa! Anglican priest and physicist John Polkinghorne, Presbyterian pastor Professor John Jefferson Davis, psychiatrist Paul R. Fleischman, Buddhist monk Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, physician Dr. Gary Young, and many, many others have written reams about the similarities between Chaos Theory and different religious systems like Judaism/Christianity and Buddhism.[↩]
