An irony called Chaos

A great alter ego by the name Tyler Durden once said this. "Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." These lines which have now attained a cult following pretty much sum up something much deeper and mammoth than a war against mindless consumerism. It exemplifies the very nature of the human race.

The human being is no ordinary creature. It is a highly evolved and sophisticated being which is a little too intelligent for its own good. The human brain is in fact incapable of existing in a state of stagnation or non activity. It is a power house of ideas whose energy has to be constantly channeled in the right directions. Otherwise, the human spirit struggles to contain the energy. It becomes restless, uneasy and increasingly irritable. And when this unrest is contained and applied to the world around, the magic it spins leaves even Merlin spellbound. That precisely is the reason why our civilization has progressed so far till date, and it will further.

However, in this incredible journey of our kind there are lessons to learn. When the going is tough; when there are challenges and tough times, the human spirit is at work in full force. But when these tides are conquered and time beaten, the peace which ensues kills us. A calm and serene world where everything seems to be just right is where man the most ill at ease. The fact that there is no need for him and his intelligence torments him. And it is now, at this very juncture when the human mind finds its existence threatened by its obsolescence, it does the most obvious thing - it creates a need for itself.

Plagues, floods, droughts and famines are one thing. They are Mother Nature's way of reminding us of her. Wars, depressions, riots, emergencies, coups and terrorism on the other hand are the making of man. No, they are not the makings of evil men hell bent on being a blotch on the fabric of human spirit. They are the joints where two strings meet with one going over the other perpendicular to each other. Without these, there is no fabric. Just strings which fall down as empty threads when left. Chaos is an irony. It is the human mind's ultimate defense mechanism. If there is none, it merely creates it only to seek to destroy it and give meaning to its existence. Nothing sinful. In fact, nothing new. It has been happening from the time humans existed. Just that we choose to ignore it and blame a few for the state of affairs of the world we live in. What we do not realize is that without any chaos, we would probably be itching to create just that.

We are Mother Nature's biggest mistake. We should not have been created. We should not have walked this planet at all. But now that we have, God save us!