Chaos is a tactic
And why we must be the sanest ones in a batshit crazy world: Chapter 13
Rightio. There is work to be done. In this chapter, we identify a collapse-feeding tactic - chaos. And I propose its antidote - steadfastly refusing to add fuel to the fire. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s theories on totalitarianism quite a bit. They’re terrifyingly fitting.
You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is available only to paid subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together in real time.
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ANTI-CHAOS
“Chaos is the new cocaine.”
- Billy Crudup’s TV network executive character Cory Ellison, The Morning Show,
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.”
- Hannah Arendt
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There are big, impactful things we can do. Like, we can create anti-chaos.
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Chaos is a tactic. The world’s power brokers, like the rest of us, are scared and bewildered. They don’t like the uncertainty and the wobbly shifts in power dynamics; their decadence has also become addictive, but resources are now precarious and the mob unruly. And so, consciously or otherwise, they do this thing where they chuck all manner of discombobulating destructive stuff about the place, adding to the chaos that is already systemically mounting, to further bamboozle, outrage and polarise the rest of us into just the right kind of acquiescence.1
That’s my take, anyway (which I proffer aware my tone has an “unhinged anarchist” edge to it).
The Romans threw bread and circuses at the masses to distract them from the despotic measures they were implementing as their empire began to wobble and decline. Today the powers-that-be use not dissimilar methods that also drag our care and attention from the mounting inequality, resource grabs and Orwellian social measures, while also preventing us from cooperating and sensemaking our way through humanity’s predicament. I’d like to run a cursor over a few of them for the vigilantly focused purpose of familiarising ourselves with them so that we can then move on from them. Because this is essentially my thesis: When they go low, we must go high, to nobler ground. We do anti-chaos.
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Clearly, planting conspiracies and general social media pot-stirring are classic chaos-making tactics. Remember in the lead-up to the 2016 US election when those conspiracies surfaced about Hilary Clinton running a child sex trafficking racket under a pizza shop in Washington DC? I mean, it seemed like a straightforward election-rigging move. It was soon revealed, however, that the conspiracy mill was being stoked by hackers and trolls operating out of Russian bot factories run by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Academy. And then, later, that these same bots were simultaneously feeding anti-Trump mayhem into America’s social feeds. What? That seems mad. Why would you also tear down the opponent?
Because…chaos.
As the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy said of the phenomenon, “Chaos is the point".According to the NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence, Russia’s use of social media mayhem is the preferred way to win wars now. “The goal is permanent unrest and chaos within an enemy state”. Chaos and confusion fragments, polarises, shreds democracy, causes mass economic and social distress, all of which can ultimately lead to civil war. Not a shot has to be fired by the enemy.
The phenomenon is far from limited to Russia (or China, North Korea et al). Last year a multinational study identified a “Need For Chaos” across the US populace (and beyond). The paper concluded: “Overall our findings imply that a challenge facing modern society is the existence of marginalised status-seekers who wish to incite chaos by spreading hostile rumours”.
Sometimes the chaos-making is more subtle, rendering it even more insidious, I feel. The two academics who host the brilliant Decoding the Gurus podcast alert listeners to the chaos-making tactic of JAQing, or Just Asking Questions. They explain how power-hungry “heterodox” voices will drop contentious open-ended thought bombs into podcast conversations or online forums under the guise of innocent enquiry.
It plants a seed.
They stand back, all Switzerland-like (You’re blaming me? I just asked the question!).
Much SEO-boosting chaos ensues.
Gaslighting and strawmanning work in a similarly infuriating yet seemingly innocuous way. A gaslighter will casually steer a discussion to the questioning of the other person’s emotional perception or interpretation of the point or position being made. Strawmanning (and I’ve always been a bit hazy on this one, but perhaps because it’s a haze-making technique from the get-go) entails deliberately misrepresenting, or oversimplifying, an opponent’s position to make it easier to argue against. I think back to the Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, instead of addressing the important issues that the vote presented to the Australian people, repeatedly asked for “more detail” and bleated the slogan “if you don’t know, vote no”. Of course, he knew that referendums expressly don’t provide detail; they are an in-principle proposition2. It was a chaos-making strawman tactic, through and through. The human tendency is to get tied up in refuting strawman or gaslighting arguments, which distracts everyone from the actual important point we are trying to make.
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Another strategy is straight-up bullshit.
Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously made the argument that bullshit is more dangerous than lying. Frankfurt says people who are lying are at least still tethered to the truth – they remain alive to it when they try to conceal it. Bullshitters, however, completely disregard truth and its fundamental value in our society and care only whether they get their own way. Frankfurt adds that while bullshit might sometimes contain elements of truth, it muddies the information ecology so much that it undermines truth itself.3 In short, it creates chaos.