Chaos As Social Order

bread dough.  You then knead the dough.  Kneading folds and stretches the dough.  Folding and stretching mixes the blue dye through the dough until it is distributed throughout the dough.  The entire mass of dough is pale blue.  It is physically or mathematically impossible to determine from the final state of mixed dye where in the dough the spot was in the beginning.  The sensitivity of the system to its initial conditions thus means that, regardless of how close to each other the elements are initially, stretching and folding results in the initial conditions no longer being observable or deterministically relevant.  Such mixing involves simultaneous expansion and contraction.  As this happens, old or earlier information is destroyed and new or later information is created.

Chaos And Oppression

            When introduced into a consideration of oppression, this approach illuminates some crucial aspects.  First, oppression works on the human body in two distinct ways–one by removing the body from home and two by covering the body with non-indigenous, uniform clothes.  Examples of both operations can be found with prisoners of war, convicted criminals, committed mental patients, military personnel, and students in compulsory education.

            Second, oppression works on human structures and on the earth.  Imperialism, whether religious, political, military, or ecological, has repeatedly involved the destruction of buildings and of parts of the earth such as groves, crops, livestock, fields, and species.  Examples are the destruction of groves of trees in the Old Testament, the burning of manuscripts in China in 212 BC and the burning of the library in Alexandria, in 525 AD.  More

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