AH, CHAOS, SWEET CHAOS
Note: My intention for today was to look at how ancient Rome dealt with its illegal alien problem. (It didn’t do well.) But the current turmoil on campuses is more urgent. It’s another warning that the Crisis Train is picking up steam.
If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for one red moment, to be
succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1902 -
Mother’s Day will arrive right on time next week. Memorial Day will soon follow. Every year the holidays come, and every year we take their orderliness for granted. Holidays are signposts on our annual journey. They tell us that everything’s right with the world. They remind us that the year is progressing on schedule. We human beings crave order. Orderliness is comforting. Life is predictable. Disorder creates anxiety.
But not for everyone. For some, chaos is the promised land. The current turmoil on campus is the most recent example.
Many of us shake our heads in befuddlement at the visceral shrieking and the incomprehensible anger currently at our universities. Why is this happening?
1. Antisemitism, which always lurks beneath the surface,
2. Leftist professors indoctrinating students for generations.
3. The need to find causes to give their lives direction and meaning.
4. The camaraderie of shared purpose.
5. Useful idiots who dedicate themselves to causes, without really understanding their destructive and illogical natures. (As discussed in the March 9, 2024 post in tgne archives).
6. Organized, non-campus groups financing and encouraging hatred.
7. Sixty years of ongoing protests on and off campus, making it commonplace, expected, gratifying and part of the zeitgeist.
8. Three generations raised on Dr. Spock’s “compassionate” but inconsistent discipline of children, that seeped out to schools and law enforcement.
9. The invigorating feeling of going against the powers that be.
10. Lovers of chaos hate order. This needs a deeper dive.
Why do they love chaos? Because they don’t do well in an orderly world. People unhappy with themselves, their lives, and their places in civilization, look to salve their tired souls by withdrawing from the world or disrupting it. In a mass movement they can do both. They escape by losing their old selves in “the cause,” while simultaneously being born again with a new identity. Burning with a compelling sense of purpose, they joyfully participate in the destabilization of the existing order. When the world is turned upside down, their individual failures will blend into the chaos that follows. The ordered world with its laws, rules and expectations, exposed their inadequacies. In the chaos of the new world, everyone is back to square one; everyone is equal. Successful and stable people love order because they stand out in it. Unsuccessful and unstable people crave disorder because they can hide in it. Chaos is a great leveler. Or as Erich Hoffer put it, “Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality.”
Lovers of chaos want ongoing crises and continuing heroic roles. They want perpetual struggle and permanent disruption in order to retain a permanent sense of fighting the good fight. Being arrested is a badge of honor. Being tear gassed is a red badge of courage. They want the lights to go out and stay out; disorder sustains them.
"l mean," said someone in a New York Times interview, "this is what we live for...catastrophe, chaos...you can't always count on the occasional earthquake to jump-start your heart." Caught in the emotional whirlwind of the movement, they lose all sense of proportion; reality becomes blurry as the cosmic significance of what they are doing makes them drunk – lustful, really – with the excitement of having found their destinies. Their goal is not to win; their goal is:
1. to have a goal.
2. to have an effect on life.
3. to disrupt the lives of happy, satisfied and successful people
4. To lose themselves in the sweet equality of chaos.
A generation ago, in San Francisco, anarchists called for the destruction of "yuppies.” (Young, upwardly mobile professionals working in the establishment). Leaflets proclaimed: “During the next major urban riots, we must attack and destroy the following yuppie bars and restaurants..." Another flier argued, "this yuppie takeover cannot be stopped. Vandalize yuppie cars...Break the glass. Scratch the paint.”
They are angry and contemptuous of people just going about their lives.
Chaos is a warm inviting magic blanket that wraps around the angry and the alienated, making their failures and uncertainties invisible. When civilization crumbles, we are all the same. They proselytize for war and revolution. They struggle (see the picture above) they sacrifice; they revel in brotherhood; they kill; they die. And in the process, they pull the rest of us down.
Writing in 1930, Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega Y Gasset described “the terrible spiritual situation in which the best youth of the world finds itself today. By dint of feeling itself free, exempt from restrictions, it feels itself empty. An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. Because to live means to have something definite to do – a mission to fulfil.
If they don’t have a mission, they make one up. Today’s fantasy/enemy/devil is the low hanging fruit of the Jewish people.
When the German people lost themselves in the frenzy of a nazi rally, it was, in the words of historian, John Toland, "...the unbridled expression of that multitude of defeated, miserable, displaced and shattered people who now saw a ray of hope, of freedom from slavery and need.” With the wandering, hedonistic youth of the twenties in mind, Ortega Y Gasset made this chilling prediction:
Before long there will be heard throughout the planet formidable
cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for
someone or something to take command, to impose an occupation,
a duty…To command is to give people something to do, to fit them
with their destiny, to prevent their wandering aimlessly about in an
empty, desolate existence.
Three years later, Hitler took command and fit the German people with their destiny, resulting in 50 to 70 million world-wide deaths. Today, almost a century later, we sit in our homes, watching another generation of howling dogs braying at the stars, waiting for someone to lead them, and waiting for an enemy to defeat.
In my 2003 book, I concluded:
All those thousand points of darkness – the anarchists who smash
windows in the streets, and those alienated intellectuals who smash
cultural institutions – all the demagogic parasites feeding
off the discontented masses, will pass from the scene, believing
they have touched eternity, never knowing that the care and
feeding of their immortal souls has wrought so much harm, and
has been part of the demise of a civilization that had for a time,
brought so much to so many.
Tonight, in living color, you can watch hundreds of thousands of the best and the
brightest trying to disrupt all that.
Vandalize yuppie cars...Break the glass. Scratch the paint.
Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do, might have worked for Jesus, but it doesn’t work for me, and for the tens of millions of us who prefer freedom and order to tyranny and chaos.
Note - In five days, the next stop in the Crisis Train will show how the current antisemitic, campus protests are the latest manifestation of a centuries-long attitudinal shift about the average man’s place in the world.