Chaos As Social Order

anonymity and depersonalization.  It folds the person even further into the strange attractor of change.

            At the same time, however, that modern power is “uniforming” and standardizing all of us, the modern industrial economy is diversifying and differentiating us.  If twenty different kinds of modem, thirty different makes of athletic shoe, fifty different kinds of car, or several hundred different shades of lipstick are not enough, more can be invented and produced.  The operations of modern social power upon humans thus move contemporary social order in two opposite directions simultaneously:  toward greater uniformity and toward greater diversity.

            Expansion of individualized treatments and options occurs with contraction of per capita living space and per capita unoppressed living space.  The operations of oppression may therefore be said to have two asymptotic limits.  In one direction, oppression tends to make everyone the same; in the other direction, it tends to make everyone different.  For example, short hair, low-heeled leather shoes, pants, a shirt, and a windbreaker could describe a male or female from almost any society on earth.  But in the US, where the unisex look is common, everyone of age has a unique social security number, a unique driver’s license number, and many people also have unique phone numbers and addresses.

Transients and Trajectories

            We may further this approach of chaos to social order with work in chaos theory applied to mathematical and physical phenomena that echoes the simultaneous interpenetration of contexts in social life.  We take contexts to be attractors and the habitual practices of

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