Chaos or Order? The Optimal Middle

War rages in Ukraine. Cities laid to waste and lives ruined. Extreme climate and threats of uncontrollable artificial intelligences loom on the horizon. Modern humans are hyper-organized, while bureaucracies are making change near impossible. You may agree with me that it seems like the world has either too much chaos, or too much order, too much unpredictability, or too much predictability. Is there nothing in between?

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Anorexics starve themselves because of a fictional body ideal that is forever out of reach. Too much control is robbing them of life. Schizophrenics suffer from a breakdown of the consistency of thought, emotion, and behavior. Too much chaos is robbing them of life. Many lives have either too much order or too much chaos. Is there nothing in between?

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Totalitarian states are top-down nightmares, whereas anarchies and riots start from the bottom up. Old communism served a cold order with few individual prospects, while unrestrained liberalism and individualism took away a sense of meaning, purpose, and clarity. These phenomena show either too much order, or too much chaos, too much predictability or too much unpredictability. Is there nothing in between?

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Organisms and systems thrive when the balance between order and chaos is just right. Something magical happens then: complexity, or growth. Life. It applies to organisms, ecosystems, cultures, nations, human psyches, the internet, information systems, and future artificial intelligence. Nothing functions optimally unless we find the sweet spot, the goldilocks zone. I call that the “Resplendent Path.”

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I am strongly convinced that we can approach almost any problem, big or small, nation-wide or personal, with this concept, and solve it. Smart organizations and countries do not just exercise top-down control, they decentralize and allow for bottom-up feedback as well. Smart parents do not just use negative feedback to raise their kids, they combine positive with negative feedback, and allow for diffuse control, meaning the children are encouraged to develop their own self-control and independence from the bottom up. Smart twenty-first century professionals embrace unpredictability and chaos in their lives while balancing this out with a sense of purpose and direction, which stands for order. Smart seekers on the spiritual path consult existing texts and practices, but humbly surrender to the vast unknown beyond. As long as the foundation is a sense of love and acceptance, uncertain and gloomy prospects don’t have to be so dreadful after all!

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It is necessary to sometimes compensate for chaos in our lives with temporary control and order, just as temporary chaos must sometimes overcome rigid order. Nevertheless, the Resplendent Path must eventually prevail! I am confident that I can find it, and help others find it too, by learning to embrace chaos and creating meaningful complexity, with full ownership. This does not mean creating an everlasting utopia. It is not about attaining some kind of preordained or predestined ideal state of society or being, but rather it is an endless tweaking, tuning, challenging, changing, reinventing, and recalculating, just to find out where the goldilocks zone is located, the Resplendent Path. Nothing idealistic. Nothing magical. Nothing that could lead to dystopic dictatorships or scary sects. It is just optimizing the reality that is already around or inside us, every single day, one tweak and step at a time.

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I have experienced this myself. I used to be almost paralyzed with fear of the unknown and had low self-esteem. In spite of this, I have migrated to Indonesia. I have started a family with my wife and have become a teacher. I now face the chaos of a class full of students, as well as the unpredictability of Indonesian culture, every single day. It is never perfect, and I need to keep tweaking and tuning, but there is always a way to optimize. This gives me greater life satisfaction than just giving up and staying in my comfort zone. If I can find the way, then so can you. So can your organization, institution, or other social system.

In more detail, I have written about these ideas in: The Resplendent Path: Embracing Chaos: van Delft, Marcel: 9798367766271: Amazon.com: Books