Order and Chaos

My wife is apprehensive about letting me out of the house. She's convinced she'll have me delivered at the door by two policemen at some point. I'll get myself into trouble with my eccentric attire, and end up in a fight, or something like that. However, she's starting to see that I will neither get myself into trouble nor be an embarrassment to her. What I'm doing is completely within the law. It's not even that outrageous. It's merely a message.

Cane in hand and nose exposed

Taking my son to school this morning, I had the opportunity to demonstrate this for myself yet again. Walking down the street with my cane in hand and nose exposed, I spotted two police officers standing at a corner, looking important. My response to this was to draw my mask up two inches to cover my nose, and just like that, I went from being a disobedient criminal to a law-abiding subject of the state. The officers gave me a suspicious look as I passed them by, but what could they do? I was following all the rules. I wasn't breaking any law. Writing 666 on our mask is legal, at least for now.

Mask of the beast

Arriving at the school a little later, I pulled my mask up again in order to abide by school regulations. The school cannot very well break the law, and I don't want to get the school into trouble. However, my message wasn't any less clear due to my full compliance with the law. The teacher who opened the door broke out laughing.

My son finds this all very entertaining. He's not at all embarrassed. On the contrary, he loves my act, and he loves explaining it to his friends. He tells the kids about my experiences with hobby fascists, and how I got so fed up with them that I decided to come up with a dress code that would stop these people from harassing me.

So there's no need to break any laws or do anything embarrassing in order to make a clear statement. No-one is in any doubt about my feelings regarding mask-wearing rules and lockdowns. The message is clear, and I haven't taken any risk in delivering it.

I haven't so far met anyone prepared to challenge me about my position on the matter, but I expect that to happen at some point. My message is after all controversial. There's no lack of people who support both mask-wearing rules and lockdowns, and some of these people are acquaintances who might feel an urge to correct me. They may approach me with various facts. They may try to shame me for being insensitive to people's fears. There're no lack of arguments that can be made. However, arguments are not the way to go. Facts don't matter. What matters is attitude.

I will not deny the truth in anything anyone comes up with. I will embrace all their fears. The virus is real, it's dangerous, and it kills grandma. However, I have a life to live, and I can't let grandma get in my way, nor anybody else for that matter.

This will no doubt be seen as evil, but so be it. I'm not here to be nice. I never made it a secret that I'm an evil one. My kids know that. My stepdaughter knows it. My wife knows it. If they were under the impression that I'm a nice guy, they've been mistaken. I self identify as evil, and I don't intend to change. I fact, I can highly recommend this same attitude to others.

The obsession with niceness, sensitivity and obedience in modern society is not the virtue that many imagine it to be. It's a deplorable weakness to be detested, and Jesus himself would've agreed. He would have sided with me, because to live in perpetual fear is not a life worth living. Jesus' advice to us was to live freely, and not to worry too much about making the occasional mistake. He was also clear about what he thoughts about laws coming out of  Rome. They were to be ignored unless they could be directly linked to the golden rule. Preventing people from living freely is a clear violation of His rule, so we are to ignore the obnoxious laws as much as possible.

Implicit in much of today's nonsense is also the idea that order is synonymous with good, and chaos is synonymous with evil. Politicians are particularly keen on this idea, always ready to put order into things by introducing new laws. "There has to be rules!" I hear them say, and there's no-one asking why. How exactly will rules change anything for the better? The assumption is that rules, whatever they are, are always for the better. But there's no evidence to support this position.

Rigid rules are in fact a weakness, something the Germans learned the hard way in the battle of Stalingrad. The Germans were very much in a position to win that battle, but they made the mistake of being predictable and orderly. The Russians, on the other hand, very much the underdog, adapted a chaotic style of fighting. The result was a humiliating defeat for the Germans.

None of this should surprise anyone. A little chaos can go a long way towards personal ends. I make a point of not sticking to my own opinions all too rigidly. My wife and I had our son at home for home-schooling through the winter. But we've put him back in school. Things have changed. Institutional schooling now looks like the better option. We may bring our son back for home-schooling some time in the future, but there's no point in making any decisions about this now. Why nail down things that are better left undecided?

In Norse mythology we find that order is never total, nor directly associated with good or evil. Not even total chaos is evil. The gods venture at one point to the heart of Jotunheim where chaos is total, and it's all very strange. All sorts of weird things happen. It's impossible to navigate. There's no way of knowing if something is up or down, big or small, left or right. But to say that it's evil would be wrong. It's simply not a place for mortals. That's all we can say.

Furthermore, Norse mythology doesn't accept the idea that order can be total. Total chaos exists, but not total order. The two most orderly realms are Asgard and Midgard. The word gard refers to an orderly enclosure, such as a garden, a farm, a town, or a nation. However, as we all know, these are not places of total order. Rather, they are best described as managed chaos. Things happen organically. We keep order in our gardens by tending them. Order among men is achieved through arbitration.

Norse mythology even has a notion of heavenly chaos. Alfheim is a heavenly realm where nature runs wild. It's akin to the garden of Eden, but instead of being a relic of the past it's the likely seat for the gods in the future. This kind of natural and wild chaos is something to strive for.

In contrast, we have the tower of Babel in the Bible. It can be seen as an attempt at total order, imposed by a worldly ruler. As it turned out, such a system is neither desirable nor possible.

A little chaos is a good thing. It underscores our autonomy. Nobody tells us what to do or say, not even our former selves. We may be of one opinion today, and quite a different one tomorrow. Chaos helps us win in battles, and it has a beauty in and of itself. It's not order that we should strive for, but character. Being good is what matters. Consistency and predictability is not important outside very narrow fields, such as mathematics and science.

Tower of Babel

By Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Levels adjusted from File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, originally from Google Art Project., Public Domain, Link