Chaos As Social Order

non-Christians, non-Euroamericans, hard drives, and endangered species show oscillations of social power in contemporary social order.

            Some further examples of this mixing and folding are Gandhi learning English and English law which he used to drive the British from India, Crazy Horse learning to use a rifle with which he killed invading soldiers, prisoners using weapons taken from guards against guards in prison riots, and students using computers to attack the military-industrial complex, university regulations, or high school dress codes.  This variable characteristic of energy-induced continuous power spectra–as though the law of the conservation of energy were functioning socially to preserve social power regardless of who has it or what its change of hands does to existing social order–shows that some kinds of social power persist through interruption.

            Two examples of persistent social power are the physical structure of a modern prison and the legal and temporal structure of modern mass education.  In the former, a prisoner’s body is disciplined twenty-four hours a day by its environment of bars, walls, locked doors, and fences with or without other individual human presence.  In the latter, people from six to sixteen years of age are persistently disciplined by a system that linearly encloses every day of the calendar year with its own significant events, such as the beginnings and endings of classes, quarters, terms, and semesters.

            A closer look at an excited fluid will strengthen the connections just mentioned.  When heat is applied to water in an open container the water moves gradually until there is a sharp transition to boiling.  Boiling

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