The Struggle for Order

Weeks into a debilitating depressive episode, I realized today that the chaos of my mind adheres to a crushing causal order, and I realized that chaos itself has laws.

A man with a mental disorder has some dysfunction in his brain: a cause. That dysfunction manifests into his external world: an effect.

The conflicts between the external world (morality of corporations, which is to say impossible; material precarity) and the internal world (pursuit of the forms of God; satiety of the need for stability) amplify his chaos.

In some ways, this is horrifying. Yet it is also beautiful.

I also look outside the window to the world and see some greater beauty, for somehow in this world there is perfect order in such an enormous scale of being.

All relations, like species in an ecosystem, perfectly respond to another. A chain of cause and effect. The world itself is beautiful, which is to say each part of the whole itself is beautiful, and the sum is perfect.

From this perfection I can hold onto some sliver of hope for the posibility of movement.

Notes:

This is not to say that suffering is perfect, but the the input -> output structure is. We should strive to reduce suffering by changing inputs upstream at their source.

But is this input -> output structure truly perfect?

This reminds me of Spinoza's causal chain, but the problem is that it doesn't explain emergent features. At what point does water become wet? Why do some people emerge from horror more stable than others? If we accept the premise of the causal chain, then we must imagine that we struggle to see the true nature of reality.

If we accept, as Weil claims, that “the main need of the soul, the one closest to its eternal destiny, is order” and that there is a perfect causal chain, then there is a possibility for order.

But if there is no perfect causal chain, then what possibility is there for order in a fundamentally chaotic world?

It's worth noting that Weil herself specified order to be that of social human relations, so supposedly we could search for social order in a chaotic world.

The simplest idea: the soul's need for order in a chaotic world. But there does seem to be an order to the world itself. This is the beauty of the world, and in some ways why science can feel like discovering art.

Does this leave us with just social disorder in a orderly world? If so, I can only feel such great sadness that the world itself scales order to a cosmic scale (physical; body) but the people who pursue truth and goodness always seem to suffer at such a tiny scale (social; soul).

The tragedy of social order is that it feels almost destined to be fiction, outside of a tiny scale. Is it a tradeoff between humanity and order at larger scales?