In the state of nature there are no arts, no sciences, no society; and, worst of all, constant fear and danger of violent death; and man's life is lonely, poor, unpleasant, rude and short.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

When you hear a melodramatic sob, they say, chaos is spreading throughout the world and soon we will all die because of it - as is sometimes advised, “shoot at the sound.”. Metaphorically, of course.

I'll explain why.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are directly at this moment dealing with death, defending, in particular, the right of other civilians to such apocalyptic reflections. They have no time for melodrama.

The closer you are to death physically, the less your consciousness tends to worry about all of humanity or large social groups that are not even aware of your existence.

The vast majority of the planet's population lives in completely different cultural and political dimensions. They have their own globes of the universe, including flat models. They have very specific ideas about morality, justice, order. We don't like these ideas. So we pretend they don't exist.

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Philosophical sobs about increasing chaos have been heard for decades from the Euro-Atlantic community, which continues to painfully dream of its exclusivity and representativeness.

Because hundreds of years ago their ancestors decided on the belief that order is from God, and chaos is the devil’s evil. There were approximately seven million people literate in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, and even fewer in the early Middle Ages, about two million.

These literates in their monastic bubbles read the Greeks and Latins, Hesiod-Plato-Aristotle, and then transformed the ancient calm attitude into Christian eschatology. Because there was a request to scare yourself and others. So that there is order. They would continue to terrorize themselves with this if it were not for progress. Because progress means new conflicts for ownership of the results of progress.

The pedigree of European democracy is sometimes traced back to the English Magna Carta, the 13th century Magna Carta..

But this is something like deducing the ancestry of Ukrainians from Trypillians. Of course, there is something in this, but no one has canceled the difference between archeology and political history.

After four hundred years of chaotic, bloody feud between the English kings and Parliament, Cromwell came. He executed the king and established a republic, which we would not like today either..

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was such a supporter of the “strong hand” that today he would also be called bad words, did not like all this either.. Instead canonized as a proto-democrat due to his social contract theory. Although he argued that people must voluntarily give up some freedom in order to avoid chaos and gain security.

Here he stated the state of social chaos as the reality of his time. He saw in this a “war of all against all” and proposed a way out: an absolute sovereign capable of taming chaos and ensuring order. Due to personal experience, he lived in fear of violence and chaos, worried about the collapse of traditional orders, and felt an urgent need for strong authority.

Familiar, really? And almost 350 years have passed.

Let's move on from Cromwell and Hobbes to our makitras.

Consciousness states the state of chaos not as an “objective fact”, but as an experience of loss of support. This happens for several reasons.

We all have conventional models for explaining the world. It doesn't matter whether they are scientific or metaphysical, the main thing is habit. Because ordinary activities and ordinary thoughts save energy. When habits stop working, we quickly get tired, afraid of it, and a feeling of chaos arises. This is called "

What are the emotional signs of this Anxiety, fear, confusion. Signals that your internal system cannot coordinate external events, arrange them into some kind of regular sequence that matches your habits.

And when the future becomes opaque, consciousness experiences it as chaos, even if objectively there are new patterns.

To paraphrase Sartre, who wrote in the play “Behind Closed Doors”: “Hell is others,” we can say: “Chaos is us.”.

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Why so?

Fragmented information flows, disinformation, conflicting messages increase the sense of chaos. The main role in this is played by enemy activity to create “controlled chaos” and reflexive behavior control. But psychological operations do not create new phenomena; they destructively enhance existing processes.

Theoretically, mass communication can be a stabilizer. Social narratives, media, political discourses can create the illusion of order even in chaotic conditions. But this requires political will and mutual trust between society and government..

I think we don’t need to explain much about what’s going on here..

Well, remember the medieval narrative? Fearful people are easier to lead.

Individual consciousness rarely recognizes chaos on its own; it does so in interaction with others, when chaos becomes a “shared experience.”. In the modern world, individual consciousness is almost completely integrated into social communication systems. What we call " But we need noise, noise protects us from dead silence, wrote Jung.

At the same time, a person can experience chaos without external signals - for example, due to a personal crisis or trauma. But even then, social communication sets the boundaries for the interpretation of this state..

We “see” chaos to the extent that the communication environment confirms or enhances it. People live among endless streams of lies, where the truth dissolves in a multiplicity of interpretations. This breeds mistrust, conspiratorial thinking and a feeling of loss of control..

Traditional communities - national, religious, professional - no longer guarantee stability. People seek new forms of belonging, often temporary and fragile. And different models of evading chaos.

For example, we tend to promise international partners everything they want to hear, but do not implement what we promised. Well, because everything is complicated, war, chaos. This phenomenon can be explained by more rational reasons.

For centuries, Ukrainians lived under the rule of foreign empires. Empty promises were a way to avoid repression, and failure to fulfill them was a way to preserve one's own resources and personal autonomy.

When survival depends on an external force, the habit of adapting to its demands is formed, even if they contradict internal capabilities or interests.

This is how a gap developed between the “official” discourse and “real” life. This creates a specific Ukrainian flexibility that undermines the trust of international partners and preserves chaos within the country.. When this flexibility is ours, we cherish it as resilience.. When power demonstrates it, we hate power. The dilemma of crosses and panties has not gone away.

However, besides the cultural and political sobs over chaos, there is a less cited line of thought - from ancient authors to Giordano Bruno, Erich Fromm and beyond. The gist of it is this. The old world is coming to an end, and this is not a catastrophe, but a pattern, your life is just too short to accept it. The more you hold on to the old, the more you will hurt.

The chaos of the old way of life is a global “chemical” reaction, opening up space for new forms of solidarity and cooperation. Rethinking values \u200b\u200band creating more flexible management systems (you can laugh ominously at this point). The birth of cultural and social innovations that would not have a chance in stable conditions. (We have this, at least from the example of drones we can see.

After chaos comes order. Virgil could be nicely quoted here: Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo - “The great cycle of centuries is born anew”. Because this quote of his was altered by conspiracy theorists and they even wrote something there in the dollar. (By the way, he wrote the Aeneid, not Kotlyarevsky.

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Chaos in this sense is a kind of “laboratory environment” of a new order. But he mercilessly destroys the very environment where these ideas arise. Because evolution does not operate with the concept of “happiness”.

God, they say, has no other hands than ours.. That is, someone will realize the coming of order from chaos. This is not some kind of leader or messiah, this is intraspecific selection, division into new Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Some will simply remain in history, while others will pass on the genome.

Here an existential and at the same time very pragmatic question arises - the price of order. It will not be paid for from the state budget, European money, grants or the alchemical transformation of lead into gold. The existing chaos is turbulence before the global phase transition to order.

The order will be paid for by any of us personally - from the loan of renunciation of freedoms that had already begun to seem dimensionless, if not for the war. The war stopped their implementation, but not the request.

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And this request will come into serious conflict with reality, where the old liberal Euro-Atlantic ideology is deformed and diminished, like the “shagreen skin” in the work of Balzac. The ideology to which we gravitate is like the light of a very distant extinct star, but the light still reaches us.

What we perceive as chaos will not end tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it will last for several more years. But personal psychological investments in accepting new conditions, new rules of the game can begin to be made now.

Of course you can wait. But why pay twice

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