Anarchy

It is something of a mystifying etymological alignment that a word that describes an absence of overarching governance and order has become synonymous with chaos, destruction and rioting. It might even be something of an irony that the periodic cycles and returns of large-scale social collapse as revolution or civil war are themselves inevitable consequences of all aspirations to order and control, that the entropic necessity of disordered states and catastrophic dissolution are the displaced cost of all systems symmetries, that all aspirations to extinguish dissonance only ever offset it temporarily, and that every claim to control or authority is necessarily grounded upon a dissociative pathology of endless return in which the intermittent arrival of conflict and violence is the actual cost of a process of progress which purposefully recycles this chaotic waste product as both an antithesis against which it might reflexively self-define and as the utility and aperture of opportunity through which state-sanctioned brutality becomes not only normalised but quite mandatory.

There is something quite plausibly inevitable in this sociopolitical and psychocultural pressure valve of disorder but, again, it is not the original meaning of the word anarchy. We might suggest conspiratorial elitism and wealthy power plays as the source of this misrepresentation but that would always and already be to miss the point. People can’t help themselves and adopt the interpretations and meanings which quite autonomously optimise the reproduction of the patterns of information and behaviour they inhabit. That the natural world of biology functions most efficiently and far beyond our pitiful mechanisms of cybernetic or technological governance is quite apparent to anyone with sufficient maturity and intellect. This world functions best without any central authority or control but, ideology-agnostic, human beings define themselves and the sensibility and intelligibility of their world in ways which are almost entirely invalidated by such a decentralised efficiency and naturally emergent self-organising complexity.