Bonfires of art, of lives directed by inspired whims, insights, and discoveries are to be celebrated and declared beautiful, but we need a backdrop of order for them to produce lasting meaning. A city swept up in complete disorder is a city burning down, and anything momentarily produced during that burning will in a short time meet the same burning fate. When chaos and disorder (so often necessary ingredients for meaningful artistic creation) are managed and controlled on a personal level, they prove themselves to be a net positive for any society. More than that, they are necessary because they help stave off systemic degeneration by bringing flexible wisdom, hard-won from one’s own personal chaos, to structures prone to grow too rigid. But if we convince ourselves to forgo all law, all order, all hierarchy completely, art ceases to be beautiful, ceases to be real art, as the controlled chaos jumps out of its pits and consumes completely.
If there is one thing I think worth stressing, it is this: how fragile order is, and how fragile any high trust society is. Caught up in useful and necessary acts of creation, we must also never be so arrogant as to not do the dirty work of preservation. And half of this dirty work is simply practicing active gratitude. Be on guard, though, as gratitude is often hardest to practice in conditions where it is most warranted!
Conditions of material comfort are especially dangerous and pose many steep cliffs of entitlement. When we are given a lot, the one thing almost never given is gratitude. Gratitude we have to work for to create. Utopia is more structured than today’s popular idealists would have you believe. It is within established forms that freedom, chaos, and free spirits really find their note. We all know this to some degree. Poems without any form at all tend to lose their definition as poetry, and music with no key and no chord structure tends to descend into the worst kind of noisy racket.
So, if you are fortunate enough today to wake up in a society still generally functioning where you have electricity and drinking water, there are local businesses that cater to your needs, and you do not walk the streets in complete fear, give a silent prayer of gratitude (in whatever theistic or agnostic form you choose). Only those waking without this can really tell you what a loss it is not to have. This is why I praise human, organic order, as well as those who do the often uncelebrated work of maintenance and protection.
As I close, do you ask if I preach order or disorder? Let me just say, if you think I am advocating for an either/or solution in this discussion, then you misunderstand me. As we find so often in this life, a middle ground makes for the most fertile soil.