Circles of Order and Chaos

Essay from the book: On the Edge

Every organism capable of sensing and responding has a “self-world” (umwelt). The self-world consists of the aspects of the environment that are meaningful to the self. There is one reality, but there are many different ways to view it. Your self-world includes the things that you are aware of and interact with. You view the world from a personal, subjective perspective, not from a universal, objective vantage point.

As you go through life, your self-world expands outward, as your knowledge and agency increase. You encounter harsher and more complex environments, and you have to adapt to them. I will represent these environments as nested circles, with the self at the center.

Awareness and will begin in the womb. The unborn child feels sensation and emotion, and can act by contracting and relaxing her muscles. Her brain begins to induce patterns from experience. She learns the sound-patterns of her mother’s voice and body, and perhaps also her father’s voice. In this warm, dark world, there are some distinctions to be aware of, but there is very little to do. The womb environment is entirely centered on the child. To the unborn child, the distinction between the self and the world is minimal and vague.

We enter existence as completely self-centered beings, with little distinction between the self and the world. Over time, we gradually acquire knowledge of the world beyond ourselves, how that world relates to our emotions, and how we can affect it by our actions. Knowledge of the world is slowly acquired from subjective experience. It is not given to us a priori.

When the child is born, she is traumatically expelled from the only world she has ever known into a much harsher and more complex one. She has to draw her first breath. She sees for the first time. She can’t interpret most of what she sees, but she instinctively orients to faces and responds to emotional signals. She looks to the other — the parent, the mother — for everything. After the first few confusing moments outside the womb, she is back with her mother’s body, being comforted, fed and protected.

For the first few years, the child lives in the family environment. During that time, she acquires her core understanding of reality. In most cases, the family is a loving environment. Parents protect children and provide for their needs. Children are even protected from themselves. Children receive unconditional love and support from their parents (assuming a good family). They have few obligations, other than to obey the rules of the family. From the child’s perspective, the family environment is all about her. It is designed to meet her needs and support her development as a human being. In the family, she is special. She has intrinsic value. She is unconditionally loved.

When the child first goes to school, she makes contact with a slightly harsher world. School is not just about her needs. It is also about the needs of other children. In school, she is not unconditionally loved, but she does have intrinsic value. The school environment is designed to meet the needs of children and support their development. The child does schoolwork, but that work is for her own benefit.

In school, she has to learn how to get along with other kids. Sometimes, she has to compete with them. There may be teasing or even some physical violence. But the teachers act as benevolent and powerful authorities to prevent conflict and administer justice. School is relatively nice, but not as nice as home.

When the child gets older, she ventures beyond the sheltered environments of family and school. She comes into contact with the larger circle of society. In that circle, she no longer has intrinsic value. Her value to others is based on what she can do for them. Society is based on cooperation. She can exchange her labor for goods and services produced by others.

Sexual relationships are also based on cooperation. They can eventually create the circle of family, but they exist within the circle of society. Love between sexual partners is not unconditional, like the love of a parent for a child. It is conditional on various things, such as attractiveness and fidelity. It can be withdrawn at will. Sexual love is an exchange.

Adapting to the circle of society can be difficult. The young adult has to adapt to a new environment in which she is not intrinsically valuable.

Society exists within the circle of nature.

Society is harsher than family and school, but nicer than nature. Society prohibits violence between its members. It creates an internal environment of peace and cooperation. It allows some internal competition, but only those forms that have a net benefit to society, such as the competition between companies to provide products for consumers. The basic principle of society is cooperation.

By contrast, the basic principle of nature is competition. Biology allows for bubbles of cooperation to exist, but they are always immersed within a larger context of competition. Organisms have to compete for finite resources. Life is a struggle.

See Life is Violent.

Within the circle of society, interactions are selfish but mostly peaceful. In the circle of nature, violence is the rule, not the exception. That is why societies prohibit internal violence, but fight wars against each other. Societies exist within that bigger, harsher circle of nature, and are governed by its rules.

Nature exists within the cosmos.

The worst environment on Earth’s surface, Antarctica, is far more hospitable to humanity than the surface of Mars, or the void between the stars. The biosphere is what we normally think of as nature, often as “Mother Nature”. It is where you can breathe the air and eat some of the scenery. Life is intrinsically violent and selfish, but the biosphere is still much kinder than what lies beyond it.

Beyond the circle of life is the cosmos: the vastness of space, governed by the laws of physics. In the cosmos, life is a rare exception, not the rule. Life cannot exist in most of the universe. It is either too cold or too hot.

Each circle has its own internal rules. Each circle is governed, in turn, by the circle it exists within.

• In the cosmos, the basic principle is entropy or causality. The cosmos has energy and causes, but no purposes.

• In nature, purpose emerges by the process of evolution. An organism has the purpose of reproducing. There are no rights or obligations. Life is a competition for finite resources.

• In society, cooperation emerges from the self-interest of individuals. Society defines and enforces rights and obligations. Society is not based on love or altruism. It is based on cooperation between selfish individuals, pursuing their own interests.

• The family is based on love. Parents cooperate to raise their children. The child is intrinsically valuable to her parents. They work to protect and support her. The strong take care of the weak.

Each circle is a bubble. The family depends on sexual cooperation between male and female to create a bubble of parental love around a child. The family also depends on society to create an environment in which a child can be supported and raised. Society depends on outward violence and internal coercion to create a bubble of non-violence and cooperation. Every organism is a bubble of low entropy that maintains itself by consuming order and excreting disorder. The biosphere is a tiny bubble of life in a vast universe that is almost everywhere too hot or too cold for life to exist.

We adapt our minds to these circles in the opposite direction of their causal dependence. For this reason, when we encounter a bigger circle, it often seems bad, because it does not fit the moral intuitions acquired in the smaller circle. The bigger the circle, the harsher it is, and the less it is about us.

People often reject knowledge of larger circles. It can be hard to understand and accept the reality that lies beyond your self-world.

That is why leftists reject the implications of evolution for human nature and societies. They have the worldview of a child. The moral principle of nature, that the strong destroy the weak, is fundamentally at odds with the moral principle of family and school, that the strong take care of the weak. Leftists also reject the selfishness of society, epitomized by capitalism, because it conflicts with the moral intuitions of a child. In their ideologies, victimhood is analogous to childhood. Leftists also reject sexual cooperation, such as the male-female pair bond, because it is a selfish exchange. Many even view parenthood as oppressive.

The anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, accept the rules of society, but reject the rules of nature. That is why they reject the state. Society imposes non-violence on its members, but it requires violence to do so. Society is necessarily violent. Anarchists view the violence of the state as immoral. They have been taught (ironically, by the state) that violence and coercion are morally wrong. They have accepted society, but not nature.

People acquire moral values from the environments that they live in. Moral values are knowledge about the power structure of an environment. They are useful for guiding action in that environment, but they don’t necessarily work outside it.

When people encounter a bigger circle, they often reject it as immoral. They presume to judge a larger reality by the rules of a smaller reality. They correctly perceive a misfit between themselves and the environment, but they incorrectly (and stupidly) see the problem as the environment, not their own inability to adapt to it.

Few people ever come to accept the violent nature of life and the indifference of the cosmos.

Is there anything beyond the cosmos? Yes, in a way. There is a bigger circle: subjectivity. Everything that you experience and do takes place within your mind. In a sense, you encompass the entire universe. If you lie on your back looking up at the stars, and contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, that vastness is inside you. It is an idea in your mind.

So, in a way, it is all about you. Even when you stare into the abyss, you are gazing into yourself.

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