Embrace Chaos

~ Clarissa

I’m bringing this out from the comments because I need to be able to link to it and not have to repeat myself in the future.

Neoliberalism teaches us that chaos is good, order is bad. Embrace unpredictability. Be always prepared to pivot. Rules don’t matter, quirky personalities do. It’s neoliberalism, my friends. It’s liberating, exhilarating, fun. It’s all a big game where you get to change the rules all the time. And you can win BIG.

It’s so good.

Until you don’t win. Until you can no longer pivot and embrace change. Until you get tired, or sick, or tied down by family, obligation, community. If you can’t drop it all at a moment’s notice, you get dropped. Discarded.

Morality is jettisoned, too. There are no longer the same moral laws for everybody. If you have a quirky enough personality, you can stand above all that.

I’m analyzing a novel where two quirky female characters murder a little boy. What strikes me as curious is that not a single critic who has written about this novel managed to say that the women’s actions are amoral or at least just simply wrong. When I say it, I see people look at me in confusion. “Amoral? But that’s outdated. There’s no longer a shared morality. Everybody gets to develop their own morality, and it’s all good. No morality (or system of rules) is better than anybody else’s.”

Of course, the little boy gets screwed in this scenario but that’s a small price to pay for quirky, interesting personalities to be free to remake the world to their liking.

This is the conflict of our times. Boring, constraining, stolid rules versus the liberating, freedom-making chaos. We have all collectively decided to choose chaos and kill the little boy. Children need rules, routines and predictability. And that’s so unfree. Who needs all that? Screw the little buggers and let’s go be free. There is no morality beyond freedom. No higher good. Only being free to be yourself because the God of our era is the all-important, all-powerful Self.

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Published by Clarissa

19 thoughts on “Embrace Chaos”

  1. Eternal choice = not compatible with having a family, community, friends, farms, gardens, any kind of long-term goals, nice architecture, trees, healthy ecosystems, cultural traditions, maintaining local knowledge bases, land stewardship, crucial infrastructure maintenance…

    In that scheme, everything’s disposable, and there’s no reason to preserve anything for the next generation.

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    1. Absolutely. My whole purpose as a scholar is to ask people, “is this what you want? Are you completely sure it’s what you want? Ate you going into it with open eyes?” If the answer is yes, then fine. But is it? Are you planning to be 25 forever because this might not look as attractive at 45, let alone later in life.

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  2. Are you sure that we have ever had “the same moral laws for everybody?” The Anglosphere certainly did not penalize the commoners and the aristrocrats/wealthy the same, nor did men and women face the same punishments. Neither historically, nor currently. 

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    1. I don’t mean the legal system. I mean morality outside of it. For example, I don’t think adultery should be illegal. Nobody does, do they? But we all agree it’s immoral.

      Or lying to a friend. You get a nasty feeling inside when you do it because you know it’s a shitty thing to do. It’s completely outside of the justice system unless your friend is a judge on a bench in the trial where you are a witness. But we all know it’s immoral.

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            1. @methylethyl–one of the (many) things stopping me from joining a church (apart from not being that young, I’m 40) is that it would not be acceptable to my parents. Do the young people joining your church struggle with justifying their choice to their families? Do they keep it secret (or lie)? Or is is this not an issue?

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              1. “I’m 40 … it would not be acceptable to my parents”

                Dude… (or Dudette….) 40 is about 20 years past the age where you do your own thing and not your parents’ thing.

                What’s the problem, are you afraid they’ll cut your allowance?

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              2. My parents belonging to different denominations meant… they had reached a standing truce to let us all make our own decisions about religion, and not interfere. Even so… I can’t imagine still being afraid of their censure at forty. We do family more on the, uh, Appalachian (?) model, where blood ties are permanent and primary: yeah most of the relatives are devout Christians of various stripes, but nobody would get booted from the family for joining the wrong church, or announcing they’re gay, or going to jail, or anything trivial like that. We’re still family. Nothing we do would be more than a temporary scandal (short of, I dunno, murdering another family member? Even then it’d depend on your reasons…), and we’d still get together on the holidays. Our extended family is a social support unit, not a disciplinary enforcement unit that treats adults like they’re twelve.

                From talking to the converts… more than a few of them have come from families who don’t really understand their choices, or approve of them, but… they get used to it. The parents, that is. Because in the end, they love their kids and they can see that it’s important to them, and not harming them. There are, of course, also converts who already have a very unfortunate bad relationship with dysfunctional family and… for them the family’s approval or disapproval was irrelevant.

                I find it kind of hard to imagine a situation where a family would be so vehemently opposed to a member finding religion that it would…? I’m coming up blank here. What terrible thing would happen to you if you took up church? Like, would they make fun of you? Ban you from family gatherings? Disinherit you?

                I guess it’s good my parents have got nothing we are keen on inheriting… we can’t treat each other like that 😉

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              3. That’s the way it should be. Family is family. My mother-in-law marches in a military uniform and sings military songs on support of the invasion. And yet I’d never do anything to prevent her from being in contact with her grandchild if she ever exhibits such an inclination. N reinitiated contact with her for the first time in a decade, and all I feel is joy. She’s his mom. They should be in touch. Family is the greatest value. We are not going to be marching with her, obviously. But she’s an older person and old people eccentricities need to be accepted.

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              5. Same anonymous here–they would make fun of me at family gatherings. And humiliate me in front of their friends, if/when they were bored or felt like it. That would feel bad for me, and I would not enjoy those bad feelings. So, if I were to join a church I would have to have a plan for dealing with these unpleasant things from parents.

                Lame as it sounds, that’s my reality. I realized several years back that I could definitely use some sort of religious support community to help me deal with practical moral questions such as how to interact with homeless people and how to raise my kids. But it being socially not acceptable to family is a deterrent to seeking religion out.

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  3. I am not talking about adultery or lying to a friend, I am talking about theft, assault, and murder. The legal system did not and does not result in equal penalties for all criminals. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” ;-D

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    1. I don’t think decadence is the right word because it’s all about constant renewal while decadence can’t produce anything new. It holds on to the old that is decaying.

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      1. Well, the old clearly is decaying, hence the need for renewal. But what is needed are realistic plans, not just change for the sake of change without doing anything meaningful.

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