Chaos: The Ladder Upon Which to Birth a Dancing Star

Chaos is a a very scary thing. The disorder of chaos within the social realm can very easily destroy the ties that bind a society and lead to dissolution or to the rise of authoritarianism as an antidote to dissolution.

However, as the character known as “Littlefinger” said in his well known Game of Thrones soliloquy,

"Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try it again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb. They refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”

Of course, Littlefinger was a true Machiavel within George R.R. Martin’s famed work and the successful HBO telelvision series. He was also a low born man who had to be a Machiavel to rise in a world where money, power, and inheritance was everything. He was humiliated or ignored by the powerful and thus dedicated himself to being smarter and shrewder than they. Thus, in order to climb into success, he would need to destabilize the power structure that kept its doors closed to someone such as him.

How to do this?

By leveraging chaos. Using it as a ladder in which others would inevitably fall and allowing him to rise, The ladder of chaos was what was real and empowering to the previously powerless.

For man like Littlefinger, and countless real life persons for whom Littlefinger stands in as a literary exemplar, chaos is the door opener to a new world.

Many great men have used the chaos of revolutions to rise. Napoleon certainly did. Caesar and his ultimate successor Octavian (later Augustus) essentially did too as the Roman republic’s civil wars were essentially a revolution.

So too may artists use chaos. They leverage the visions of passions within their souls to climb their own internal ladder of chaos in order to create.

The most brilliant articulation of this concept is from no one less than the prophet of the modern age, Friedrich Nietzsche,

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”

What of science? We now know now that at the sub atomic level, there is much chaos, or quantum chaos. Ultimately, this chaos, yields probabilistic outcomes that appear as order.

Thus, chaos seems to be the underlying reality of all things and our perception of order is but the result of what can only be a probabilistic outcome.

Yet, in social environments the perceived order is essential for day to day existence of most people. Who is willing to look into the abyss of chaos seeking to find meaning in probabilistic, rather than the far more comfortable deterministic, outcomes?

So chaos is a ladder for some. But for most, chaos can only be the source of angst, perhaps even existential angst. Thus, from a societal standpoint, we must find a balance that does not seek to tame chaos so completely that eliminates creativity and the ability of innovators to strive to climb the ladder, but still allows most people to live in relative stability.