Chaos

Chaos is potential. It's where new things are created and innovation occurs. It's the unknown - what has not yet been explored. However, too much chaos is anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. It's also failure, things not going as planned, and making mistakes. Chaos is complete freedom without discipline to provide any order.

Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead (as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise).

In comparison to order:

If order is where what we want makes itself known—when we act in accordance with our hard-won wisdom—chaos is where what we do not expect or have remained blind to leaps forward from the potential that surrounds us. The fact that something has occurred many times in the past is no guarantee that it will continue to occur in the same manner. There exists, eternally, a domain beyond what we know and can predict. Chaos is anomaly, novelty, unpredictability, transformation, disruption, and all too often, descent, as what we have come to take for granted reveals itself as unreliable. Sometimes it manifests itself gently, revealing its mysteries in experience that makes us curious, compelled, and interested. This is particularly likely, although not inevitable, when we approach what we do not understand voluntarily, with careful preparation and discipline. Other times the unexpected makes itself known terribly, suddenly, accidentally, so we are undone, and fall apart, and can only put ourselves back together with great difficulty—if at all.

References

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson