Chaos

There is not peace among the stars, only carnage among the harsh laughter of thirsty gods.

– Thousand sons, computer video game

 

I’m in a big of mood – pain does that. Somehow, just by sitting and doing my regular exercises I managed to pinch my sciatic nerve. I know this is a common injury, but it is uncommonly painful and uncommonly slow to heal. So the lens I now see the world is slightly biased – so sorry. Yet, it may be that this biased lens has something interesting to tell us. Let’s begin with a minor event I had a couple of days ago.

Before we get to the ‘minor event’ we need to go back 40 years to get the proper perspective on the significance of this ‘event’. 40 years ago my parents moved to Ottawa. Back then there was the same Queensway – but no traffic jams. There were the same pedestrian lights – but people never jay walked: in fact, it day, I think it was a Saturday, I was downtown and saw some pedestrians waiting to cross a street – when there were NO CARS in sight – and because the pedestrian light said not to walk, they waited. Now let’s flash forward to today. Constant traffic jams on the Queensway and jay walking has become normalized. Clearly this is partially because of a population that exceeds the capacity of the city infrastructure but it’s also because human behaviour has also significantly changed. It’s clearly becoming more like “every man for himself”, rather than following the rules because polite Canadians just do that.

So here’s my little event. I was driving in Barrhaven 2 days ago with my wife when we heard the sirens of an ambulance coming from behind. We saw it was closing in fast so, naturally, we pulled over as all we supposed to. Imagine our surprise when a car behind accelerated to go around us and go faster down the road, seemingly actint go outrun the ambulance. We were shocked. Fortunately the ambulance was faster than the car and that car eventually had to pull over. Only 5 min later [which is probably why I even remember these relatively unimportant events] as we advancing slowly but nicely north into Ottawa another car overtook us and a long line of cars using a left turning lane. Zoom. I imagined the driver was thinking something like this: “I can get away with using the turn lane. Who needs to rules? It’s all about “me” beating all of your suckers politely driving slowly forward. Yea, I did it. I win.”

What has this story of minor chaos have to do with our annihilation of our ecosystems? Our highly ordered and structured and complex “civilization” cannot exist without order. Chaos ensures its collapse and people know this – which may one reason they are voting for right wing “law and order” parties worldwide and rejecting globalism – the feel the chaos coming and rightly are afraid of it. SENSIBLE laws and social behaviours that support the common good seem to be in short supply; here are two newsfeeds from today that make it clear that our way of life has to change or chaos – which includes anything we do that makes people or our water/air/soil toxic unhealthy – will overwhelm our efforts to preserve the order our complex requires to exist.

Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tonnes of tire fragments.

These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food. Researchers in South China recently found tire-derived chemicals in most human urine samples. They account for 28 percent of microplastics entering the environment globally. [1]

A Chinese commercial ship accused of sabotaging underwater telecommunications lines in the Baltic Sea has been surrounded by NATO warships for more than a week, according to reports. Investigators are probing whether the captain acted at the behest of Russian intelligence when he released the anchor and dragged it more than 100 miles across the seafloor. The incident began Nov. 17, when the dragging anchor cut a cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden, followed by the severing of a cable connecting Finland and Germany early the next morning.[2]

Of course some chaos is a normal part of life. Our current problem is that we live in a world where most of us would starve to death in a few days of our complex supply chain did not keep things like food on the shelves. How vulnerable are we to disruptions? Read this exerpt from “9 meals from anarchy” to get you ‘in the mood’:

Britain’s biggest supermarkets, who account for around 80 per cent of our food supply, were

telling Ministers and civil servants [in 2000 when farmers were blocking the delivery of food] that the shelves could be bare within three days. We were, in effect, nine meals from anarchy. I react to the potential withdrawal of food much like a dog reacts to any encroachment on its food bowl while eating. So imagine how I feel to be told the cupboard will soon be bare. Nothing reveals the thin veneer of civilisation like a threat to its food or fuel supply, or the cracks in society like a major climate-related disaster. A cocktail of all three will give cold sweats to the most hardened emergency planner. But that is what we face. [3]

So what can we do? We can support the common good. We can grow some of our own food. We can have at least a month of food stored away for possible/probable interruptions to our food/energy supply. We can reduce our populations and build better and more resiliant infrastructure. But most importantly, given the example of cities like Tokyo whose population of 30 million seems to have less chaos than Ottawa whose population has only 1 million, we can be polite and respectful with each other and not just focus on “me”. We can pull over when an ambulance drives by with its siren blaring. We can be patient and not pull around cars using turning lanes illegally. We rush less and create financial, time and emotional “margins” in our lives so we aren’t always living the on the edge and thus feeling stressed and impatient. In other words, we can be civil and put the “us” ahead of the “me” so that we can enjoy the fruits of a win-win society.

There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy. – Alfred Lewis. 1906

References

1. https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-30-of-microplastics-come-from-a-hugely-overlooked-source

2. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/27/24307498/chinese-ship-undersea-cables-severed-russia-baltic-seabed?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter

3. https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/e0923bb9ffdeef6ebd_34m6bv9jo.pdf