Dark Chaos

Universe operates on chaotic principles. They might have been created by God(s) or some higher-order entity, I've no idea, but it is irrelevant. Principles are set and whether we know about them, like them or not, obey them or not, they guide our world. Like gravity. It is property of mass with consequences. Even if you choose not to believe in it, you still are going to suffer consequences when you leave your flat through your window.

Complex systems have emergent properties. An ant operates on very small set of orders,  but when it cooperates with other ants they create amazing things. For cooperation they,  obviously, need communication, and for that they have pheromones, sounds and touch. All complex system consisting of many moving parts need a way for the parts to communicate. Without communication there is no cooperation, and without cooperation there is no system, just... chaos.

Humans operate on simple principles too, despite being orders of magnitudes more complicated than ants. For us to create functioning groups, societies and nations - we communicate. Talking about weather is one thing, but more importantly we need to voice our needs, advertise our abilities, make exchanges - no man is a lonely island, and communication/cooperation is not only good for us, it is what we need to survive. Problems with communication threaten our very existence.

In terms of different systems of organization humanity tried out, the usual we talk about are communism, capitalism and various inventions between. Before them we had feudalism, but in pre-modern era everything was simpler and more.. explicit, and primitive manual controls worked just fine, or at least allowed us to survive and reach current level of complexity, which requires much more sophisticated... communication.

Communism failed disastrously, because if tried to manage complex system manually, and that had zero chance of success. Humans have needs and abilities, and there are resources lying around, and for the emergence magic to happen to connect these three ingredients - a degree of freedom is required. If the queen of ants tried to micromanage her ants - the whole anthill would collapse like house of cards. People trapped in communism had creative ways of circumnavigating official rules and cheating the system (in Poland it was like national unofficial sport. And then we got lost when we became "free" in '89) - bribes, knowing the right people, exchanging favors - I call it Dark Chaos. It is the kind of chaos that is created by communication field forced to behave in certain way - like communist idea of centralized management, that by control and force tried to manage complexity - but it is technically impossible, to eventually the whole system collapsed under its own weight.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Earth chaos could express itself in cultural and civilized way, using money as medium of communication and cooperation. Free market is the expression of chaos, in the good way. It can produce optimal usage of resources, it can explore possibilities and create new, amazing inventions - it offers enough freedom and clear basic rules, so order and prosperity can emerge. Feedback, reward and information is built-in in the system, and burdens of manual intervention are minimal and frowned upon - rightly so. This is as far as I can agree with free market believers :) However, there is of course the dark side to it. Within the basic chaos of the communication field, as thanks to human factors (like greed and lust for power) money tends to accumulate and, instead of flowing free through the system, crystallize in manually controlled structures governed and controlled by humans. Centrally and manually. And those structures seek to break free from their place and rule over nations. Natural limit of chaos is, or rather should be, non-aggression principle, regarding humans, animals and life in general, or else there will be consequences. This deserves another post explaining what-the-author-had-in-mind, but for now let's just say that our needs-resources-abilities triad should be limited by not doing harm to ourselves and our environment. It seems like a sane request, doesn't it. But dark chaos creatures seek to rule over everything, and because they do not recognize any other principles than maximizing profit and increase shareholder value - late stage of capitalism is as vulnerable as many systems before it and signs of collapse became visible already. And this time we are powerful enough to collapse our planet with it. On our heads.

So, the obvious question is, what should come after capitalism? We tested manual, centralized management, and we know it is not working. We tested free market and it seems much better in harnessing... no, wrong word - using the power of chaos. We allowed prosperity to emerge, and it did. So we need to preserve the idea of free market, but we need to restrict emergence of centralized structures... We need to keep the chaos flowing, prevent crystallization, dissolve structures that are big enough to influence us in negative ways (like governments).

And we could start with central banks. They were meant (if we choose to look only at positive aspects) to protect communication field of money, but who needs central banks when we have solutions like Bitcoin, which is not only protector and replacement of banks, it itself is the communication field? Who needs politicians and their half-assed idea of governance, when we now have means of self-organizing cooperation on planetary scale? Who needs lawyers, when we have smart contracts? We do need leaders, arbiters and role models, always did and probably will always need, but in free communities they emerge, based on merit, reputation, respect - it is only when lots of money and power is involved that they are provided to us by dark chaos structures like political parties, industrial-military complexes and who knows what dark powers behind them. So. Decentralize everything!