Organised Chaos Quotes

Nguyen said, “Ho and I shall return to our positions on the deck, where we are keeping watches of two people on duty for two hours at a time.” He then continued, he said, “Cung, from what you have told me, you appear to be a loyal citizen of Vietnam. Yet, you are being hunted by the Vietnamese security organisations!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)

Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we don't like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion.

The locust has no king Just noise and hard language They talk me over

(Q: From an outsider’s perspective, what you call “chaos magick” has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn’t seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?) A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations.

Then why label people?" I tilt my head "Because that's life. Without organisation, we descend into chaos

The weakening of the state and the emergence of failed states contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm emphasises the decline of governmental authority, the disintegration of states, the intensification of ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts, the rise of international criminal organisations, refugee numbers growing into the tens of millions, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the spread of terrorism and the prevalence of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

The Fascist principle is private freedom and public service. That imposes upon us, in our public life, and in our attitude towards other men, a certain discipline and a certain restraint; but in our public life alone; and I should argue very strongly indeed that the only way to have private freedom was by a public organisation which brought some order out of the economic chaos which exists in the world today, and that such public organisation can only be secured by the methods of authority and of discipline which are inherent in Fascism.

Quelle organisation sociale pourra résister à un choc d’une telle violence ? Une simple rallonge de vingt ans, si elle est soudaine, fera courir un très grand danger à l’humanité toute entière. Vingt ans de plus pourraient nous plonger dans le chaos. Pour l’éviter, il faudra tout changer. Il sera nécessaire de réorganiser la société de fond en comble. Toutes nos conceptions deviendront caduques, notre perception du monde obsolète. A quoi pourra bien ressemble la société des hommes vivant deux siècles ? A quoi pourra bien ressembler la civilisation des « immortels » ? A quoi ressembleront ces êtres eux-mêmes ?

Concentration can sometimes become difficult if an assignment appears overwhelming. In this case, try breaking down the assignment into more ‘do-able’ tasks. If you have to research a report, write it up and present it, make the researching a goal in itself. Once that’s done, the second step, outlining it, becomes easier. Writing it up becomes your third goal; and then, finally, focus on the final step: presenting your findings. Broken down into four manageable chunks, it becomes easier for each one to be pursued with effortless concentration. Concentration dispels chaos and brings in order. And who can deny that from an organised mind emerges a powerful memory?

The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organisation, and maximise chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organise chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility – but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. Even the elephant cannot violate the law of thermodynamics – although its trunk, surely, must rank as one of the most peculiar means of moving matter using energy.

Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history. It is natural and inevitable that we live in nation states, organise our economy along capitalist principles, and fervently believe in human rights. To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights. History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts.

On 1 April 1996 there was another wonderful happening. My unit, Investigative Psychology, doubled its manpower, or should I say, woman power. We were now two. Elmarie Myburgh, a psychologist from the SAPS Institute for Behavioural Sciences where I had worked before, joined me. Elmarie had completed honours degrees in psychology and criminology. Her perfectionism compensated for my disorderliness. She started by organising the chaos in my office. Elmarie was 26 years old and had her head screwed firmly on her shoulders. She was strong-willed and eager to learn. I decided to take her with me on Ressler’s course in order to introduce her to the detectives. If they accepted her, she would be in. I could not afford to work with someone who did not get on with the detectives. Elmarie had grown up on a farm and had a no-nonsense attitude, although she could be quite moody if she wanted to be. I thought she would be able to handle the detectives and hoped they would be able to handle her.

Nobody wants to disrupt the organised chaos of their own fucking lives. And he’s right. They’ll go out of their way no’ to go out of their fucking way.

Nguyen said, “Ho and I shall return to our positions on the deck, where we are keeping watches of two people on duty for two hours at a time.” He then continued, he said, “Cung, from what you have told me, you appear to be a loyal citizen of Vietnam. Yet, you are being hunted by the Vietnamese security organisations!

Resilience versus Robustness. Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering. For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.

encourage lots of risk and failure. Some

There was something about being forged in chaos that made somebody so focused and organised. It was both a trauma response and a survival technique.

what looks like chaos is often self-organised in an intricate and invisible way.

So worried by the chaos were the British that between Christmas 1928 and New Year 1929 they organised an airlift first of their women and children then of all personnel, the first large-scale air evacuation in history

When an individual gets angry, he creates chaos in his home; when a leader gets angry, he creates chaos in his organisation.

Audit the present situation (identify clutter), clear what’s not needed (purge) and create a structure for what you’ve kept (organise).

There were no more nations, but there were neighbourhoods, regions, zones, and a hierarchy of councils, parliaments and congresses: talking shops, all the way up to some kind of world-government council. This system was what they called the Common Heritage. He wondered vaguely if this had evolved from a form of emergency organisation in the refugee days – the ‘Chaos’ – maybe built on some elements of the old UN.

One needed reform, and the eighth proposal in my ten-point blueprint, is to address declining voter participation by making voting mandatory. Established democracies, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, have seen “a slow but steady decline in turnout since the 1970s.”8 In November 2014, only 36 percent of eligible voters in the United States cast a vote—the lowest turnout in more than seventy years. And while estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2016 US presidential election, turnout was down from 2008 (when it was 62 percent). Since 1900, the percentage of voters voting in US presidential elections has scarcely gone above 60 percent. Many of the world’s countries whose turnout rates are highest—including Australia, Singapore, Belgium, and Liechtenstein, where the 93 percent turnout rate is the highest in Western Europe—enforce compulsory voting laws. As of August 2016, of the thirty-five member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), five had forms of compulsory voting. In those countries, turnout rates were near 100 percent. There are more than twenty countries where voting is compulsory, including Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, and Singapore. In Australia, voter turnout is usually around 90 percent. A more direct comparison within the European Union member states reveals remarkable turnouts from states where voting is mandatory, with 89.6 percent in Belgium and 85.6 percent in Luxembourg. For the sake of comparison, voter turnout was only 42.4 percent in France, 43.8 percent in Spain, and a mere 35.6 percent in the United Kingdom.9 Most often, compulsory voting is enforced through fines on those who don’t vote. Typically these fines are relatively small; in Australia it is AUD 20 the first time you don’t vote and have no good reason, and AUD 50 afterward, while it ranges from 10 to 20 pesos in Argentina.10 Many times, the penalty amounts to little more than a symbolic slap on the wrist.

God” is mathematics, and mathematics is simply the principle of sufficient reason. Absolutely everything happens for a specific reason. There is nothing at all that is random and indeterministic. If any such things were possible, the universe would instantly unravel into absolute chaos where order, organisation and pattern were all impossible.

Republicans too have seen the influence of money from China. Since 2015, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been Senate majority leader and the most powerful man in Washington after the president. Once a hardliner, in the 1990s he became a noted China dove (although in 2019, in a likely instance of ‘big help with a little badmouth’, he voiced support for Hong Kong protesters37). In 1993 he married the daughter of one of his donors, Chinese-American businessman James Chao. Elaine Chao went on to serve as secretary of labor under President George W. Bush and in 2017 was sworn in as President Trump’s transportation secretary. She wasted no time organising a trip to China that included meetings between members of her family and Chinese government officials, a plan that was spiked only when the State Department raised ethical concerns.38 James Chao has excellent guanxi—connections—in China, including his classmate Jiang Zemin, the powerful former president of China. Chao became rich through his shipping company, Foremost Group, which flourished due to its close association with the state-owned behemoth the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. McConnell, after his marriage to Chao’s daughter, was courted by the highest CCP leaders, and his in-laws were soon doing deals with Chinese government corporations.

It's crazy how much you can get get done when you actually want to do the thing. The difference between forced, uninspired work and passionate work is astounding.