Holding Things Together
Chaos may be the thing we most fear, order the thing we most urgently want. The idea of order is an aspect of the idea of the connections between things, the ways in which they depend on each other. Because love is an urge to maintain connection, there should be a link between love and order as there is between hate and chaos.
Because love is all about the continuity of connection to someone who cares, there is a link between love and the dependability of things: their ability to remain what they are over time, most notably the ability of our caregiver to remain a source of care and not unaccountably turn into something else.
Because love is all about the continuity of connection to someone who cares, there is a link between love and the dependability of things: their ability to remain what they are over time, most notably the ability of our caregiver to remain a source of care and not unaccountably turn into something else. Few things are more frightening to people than the prospect that they will live in a world in which nothing and no one can be relied on to hold its form and continue to be what it has been. As an aspect of our emotional understanding of the world, the connection between love and order remains active throughout life. Chaos never loses its association with the loss of love; and the more mature forms of connection always carry some of the significance of the origin of the connectedness of things in our connection with a reliable caregiver.
While it need not make us “conservatives” in the political sense of the term, our early need for and expectation of reliability of care is a conservative force in our lives in that it is an urge to conserve something vital about our life experience. Even if it does not make us conservatives, it means that there is in all of us a need for things to be what they have been in the past, a need for continuity of care we once enjoyed. If, however, things as they had been in the past were not all that good, if there was too much chaos and too little order in our lives, the conservative urge can be invested with a good measure of ambivalence. To escape the chaos, we wish to return to a time when we could rely on the availability of care and the attentiveness of our caregivers. But that only works if there was such a time. If not, we may need to rewrite history to accord with what we wish the past had been.
“Make America Great Again” expresses this deeply embedded ambivalence about the past so far as it signals the desire to return to a past that was anything but great. Unstated in the idea of returning to the past is that the urge to retrieve a mythical past also contains the urge to recreate the reality of the past. When the past to which we strive to return was one primarily of chaos and disorder, of hate rather than love, the desire to return to it can mean the empowerment of destructive forces. Because of this, we should not be surprised when we discover that to return to greatness means to return to chaos. The only difference is that now we are the bringers of chaos rather than its victims (although, of course, those who bring chaos are also its victims).
We can see the conservative impulse playing itself out in the struggle over universal health care in the US. The proposal for “Medicare for All” that would replace the system of private health insurance with a system of public provision runs up against the perception that it would uproot the existing system, which, while flawed in some significant ways, represents order and holds the line against chaos. Emotionally, to uproot this system means to threaten the order of things and the reliability of care it provided however imperfectly. So, many people, while wanting change, do not want much to change for fear that radical change would disrupt the order of things and leave chaos in its place. In other words, the need to hold the line against chaos creates a deep ambivalence about change however beneficial that change might be.
As we mature, the continuity of experience that originally depended on the reliability of being cared for comes to depend on the emergence of an inner world organized around our ability to care for ourselves. Order is no longer something we depend on others to create for us. Rather, it is an internal matter, something we establish for ourselves if we can. If self-care can, at least to a degree, substitute for the care provided by others, chaos will not be the inevitable result of the absence of our caregiver.
Our ability to care for ourselves also liberates us, to a degree, from the conservative impulse as it liberates us from dependence on our caregivers and the continuity of presence that we require of them.
Our ability to care for ourselves also liberates us, to a degree, from the conservative impulse as it liberates us from dependence on our caregivers and the continuity of presence that we require of them. In other words, our ability to care for ourselves creates in us an openness to change. Or, perhaps more accurately, it means that change takes on a complex emotional significance that combines the conservative impulse with a counter force rooted in a growing capacity to deal with change, even to seek it out.
What do we do when we care for ourselves? Initially, self-care involves access to memories of being cared for. Internalization of the experience of care as memory creates an internal substitute for the relationship on which we depended. As we mature and our experiences multiply, we acquire an increasingly diverse set of memories. Not only, however, do our memories multiply, but they also evolve so that they no longer consist entirely of recalled feelings of safety and gratification in the presence of our caregiver, but also of words and the thoughts expressed in them. The emergence of words and thoughts makes it possible for care to take on different and more complex meanings and to be provided in different ways.
When memories involve words and prompt the emergence of thoughts, a new task emerges: the task of finding order in or imposing order on our thoughts. The process of doing so is what we refer to as thinking (see the important for of Wilfred Bion). Through thinking, we find what lies at the center of our thoughts and of the feelings attached to them. Thinking creates an understanding of our thoughts and of the experiences out of which they emerge. By doing this, thinking finds order in the apparent chaos of our inner worlds. It also allows us to construct meaning, to integrate experience, in new and creative ways. It makes it possible to integrate experience without retreating from change.
The product of thinking is an idea that organizes thoughts. For example, we can organize our thoughts around the idea of causation as the connecting element in our experiences of being cared for. If we experience an unwelcome change in our relationships with our caregivers, an interpretation of that change that identifies who caused it, whether accurate or not, can help us manage it internally and in the world outside. (It is better, of course, if the interpretation is correct since, when it is not, the action prompted by it is unlikely to have the desired effect.) What we think is happening to us helps shape our experience of it by investing that experience with meaning at the levels both of ideas and emotions. In other words, how we think about something can affect the emotions that come to be attached to it.
One way to understand the purpose of thinking is that it enables us to cope with change. Thinking is brought into play because care has ceased to be a seamless experience, continuity of care no longer something we can count on. To be assured of care, we must now do something, which means that we must decide what to do. Thinking guides us in overcoming threats to order and reestablishing order internally when the integration of our thoughts has been put at risk.
As an internal matter, we experience our uncertainty about order as confusion. We are confused when we cannot find the connections between things and, as a result, have lost the ability to hold things together. We are confused when something important in our lives changes in a way that threatens our connection to it and we do not know why it changed or how to reestablish our connection.
Because thinking organizes thoughts, if confusion is the problem, thinking is the solution. But confusion may become a pervasive and persistent state of mind and, when this happens, we might take our confusion to signal the absence of any underlying connections between thoughts we might discover by thinking about them. The resulting experience of the futility of thinking makes thinking part of the problem since the more we attempt to think the more we confront the greater power of chaos to control what goes on in our minds. We now experience the solution to the problem as its cause: the more we think about things the more confused we get. When this happens, we regress to a more primitive way of dealing with our problem. Rather than thinking about it, which requires that we hold it in our minds, we seek to rid ourselves of the thoughts we can neither integrate nor control by transferring them onto others via projection (Bion). In doing so, we engage the external world in the work of relieving us of our confusion.
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Often enough the chaos we experience in the outside world is put there by those who must do something to rid themselves of their inner chaos. The intensity of engagement with the outside world that results makes politics an especially troubling part of external reality. When others use politics to externalize the chaos of their inner worlds, they can activate our internal struggles and undermine our ability to hold things together against the centrifugal forces operating within.
Revealed truth is the alternative to thinking as a solution to the problem of chaos and the intense state of confusion in which the members of his audience find themselves.
The Vodcast on this website featuring Christian Nationalist preachers provides a useful example. In the first segment, we watch a preacher mounting an aggressive attack on our capacity to think. He demands that we stop thinking and replace thinking with acceptance of revealed truth. Revealed truth is the alternative to thinking as a solution to the problem of chaos and the intense state of confusion in which the members of his audience find themselves. The preacher insists that there are no thoughts that we need to cope with by thinking because there is only one thought and that thought has one speaker as its vehicle: the preacher.
If, as Wilfred Bion tells us, “thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts,” here, the imposition of a single thought is used to block thinking. No matter how long the preacher goes on speaking, he says only one thing: There is only one Bible and its content is the will of God. The Bible is a unitary object; there are no competing interpretations; there is only the word of God and therefore no work for thinking to do. There is only the task of stating the one truth and doing what must be done to assure that it rules the world. This is not a truth we are meant to understand, but a truth we are meant to accept. It is a truth that is revealed.
What the Bible tells us is that God is raising up an army and “about to get glory.” He is about to do something “supernatural.” “Yes, it’s going to happen, yes it’s going to happen.”
I’ve got the Holy Spirit. I ain’t worrying about none of that stuff. I’m telling you, when you know you’re in the will of God you can throw your shoulders back and you can walk down Main Street with armies on both sides and not worry one bit. … You are invulnerable.
Then consider how putting this chaos into the world outside our heads offers a way in which we can find relief from our confusion by taking action to rid the world of all those who doubt the one true God and His message.
Think for a moment of chaos as many voices expressing many competing beliefs each imbued with rage: armies on both sides of the street. And think of the will and spirit of God as the power that rids us of chaos by ridding the world of those conflicting voices and the rage they contain by an act of destruction directed at them, a supernatural act requiring a greater power than any of us has. And think of all of this going on in our heads: the warring armies as opposing thoughts and conflicting emotions. Then consider how putting this chaos into the world outside our heads offers a way in which we can find relief from our confusion by taking action to rid the world of all those who doubt the one true God and His message.
This highlights the link between chaos and the competition between radically opposed thoughts about reality: together those thoughts assure the ascendency of chaos and the fragility of order. They create confusion because creating confusion is what they are meant to do. To manage them, we must place our trust in the pronouncements of an external authority rather than thinking for ourselves. When we appeal to authority, we invest it with powers we do not have: the power to find the one true path not by thinking but by destroying differences and thereby dispelling confusion.
But, in reality, there is no power that can magically dispel the chaos and confusion in our minds. Believing that there is may, for a moment, provide relief, but the reality of suffering will return because the reason for it never left. Indeed, the reality of suffering will increase because the cure and the cause of the disease are the same: the preacher and his message that we must stop thinking and take up arms deprives us of the one power that can overcome confusion: thinking.
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The involvement of politics with social change can make it an especially suitable arena for playing out the struggle between order and chaos especially when politics targets order itself, as it does, for example, when it attacks the prevailing “system.” “Radical” change is change that roots out the old order (the original meaning of the term radical being “root”). Following this usage, we may wonder if radical change is meant to tear the system out by its roots leaving those dependent on it rootless, which is another term for disconnected.
Even if we think the ideas of those advocating more or less radical forms of change have merit, we should expect resistance not only from those who stand to lose their dominant role and the benefits accruing from it but also from many of those who may benefit little from the existing order of things but are disturbed by the prospect of losing what rootedness it provides. For them, to the extent that the prevailing order is identified with order itself, an imperfect order, even a very imperfect order, is better than none.
Bion, W. (1967) “A Theory of Thinking,” in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London, Karnac Books.