Sour Grapes
Of course we're Fair and Balanced!

2006-07-19

Chaos <—> Order



On the way to work today, I saw a pickup truck with a nicely painted slogan across its tailgate:



We bring order to chaos


I never got into a position where I could see any logo or other indication of whose slogan this was. When I got to my computer, I googled the phrase and got 72 hits. Most of them appear to be connected to some kind of pitch, such as this one from Direct Marketing Solutions, Inc.: "Basically we bring order to chaos and improve your ROI in the process."



No surprise. But it occurred to me when I first saw this slogan that one could also make a virtue of bringing chaos to order. Some art does this. So I also googled for the converse slogan, "We bring chaos to order." Ah, three hits.

The first was an essay titled "Goethean Science: Bringing Chaos to Order by Looking Phenomena Right in the 'I'", written by Tom Mellett, of Vanderbilt University's Department of Physics. Here's a sample line from the introduction.



Might we not see the appearance of Mephistopheles to Faust as the appearance of chaos and complexity to modern science and academia which is equally bored with the inane intellectual ordering and gross oversimplifying of the universe we all inhabit together?


The second was from a message board for Who's a Rat: Real Life — Real People (it claims to be the "largest online database of informants and agents). Here is a verbatim transcrikpt of how that particular message starts.



Yeah man this thread is not for the faint hearted. There are few members in here who claim that are been followed, harassed, stalked, attacked and no one believes them. Just like the National Investigations Committee on Aerial (U.F.O.) Phenomena (NICAP) No one believe us.

WE ARE the not-so-proud, the not-so-few, the ones that are too many, we bring chaos to order. We are the outcasts, the black sheep's, the ones with a scarlet letter. We are the lowest, lowliest, meaningless, end-users, -friendly users- of all this "Drug War" mess.



The third is a picture of a nuclear explosion titled "Welcome to Riotnet.net" and captioned "We Bring Chaos To Order!"



All I can say is that I seem to be keeping some pretty weird company in my head!



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