Alternative Editorial: What’s the opposite of chaos?

In Week 35 of The Shift reading the daily news has become ever more challenging: not simply taking on board the bad news reported, but the increasingly acute contradictions and deep ironies of the mainstream media. To read the front pages of all the UK newspapers each morning is like catching up briefly with members of an estranged family.

On the one hand there is something uniform about their agenda – they all take their lead from Westminster. But on the other, each have set up their own stance to deliberately make the others wrong. Fine for a family bickering with the prospect of sitting down together later, enjoying a good meal together and laughing at their fall out. Not so fine for a family that never meets and festers in the far corners of the land. 

This morning a Brexit deal with Europe is on a ‘knife edge’ according to both the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, while the Guardian describes it as ‘hanging in the balance’. Yet half the papers report that Boris will walk away (Daily Mail, Daily Express, Metro) and the others (Times, Guardian, FT) that French PM Macron and German PM Merkel are doing the walking. It’s like watching a wrestling match with each side of the political divide claiming their side is winning. 

The Sun, Daily Mirror and – not typically – the Independent seem to be in agreement that the more important thing is that the Covid vaccines are arriving tomorrow. Yet even as they celebrate, the debate rages on Facebook and Twitter about whether or not the vaccines are safe.

This is not to legitimate either side, but surely the most excruciating political moment over the past week was Gavin Williamson proclaiming that Britain was the best country in the world for getting the vaccine first? Is it also the best country for having the highest number of deaths in Europe? It’s not a question that should need to be asked, so why doesn’t the mainstream news share the despair of the audience on Question Time, who felt their patriotism was being mocked?

Some would say this is only to be expected, people are bound to disagree and why should we be fazed? After all most people only read one newspaper, not all of them. Is it true that people are not worried that we cannot come to any shared view of our major crises? Or can they not see the asymmetrical polarisation currently occurring, whereby some groups are energetically fuelling the divide to profit from the discombobulation it causes? 

From across the Atlantic we might take a lesson from US President Trump’s continued refusal to accept the outcome of what, until now, has proved to be a legally verified election. With his own supporters so tightly bubble wrapped by the constant stream of emails and social media his campaign sends out, he is in a position to control their world view entirely.

Just as the people of America need to come together to beat the world’s worst Covid rates of infection and death he is happy to set them on a collision course. It was interesting to read in the FT how much money he has managed to raise through the generating of hysteria. Enough maybe to keep him out of jail for all the court cases he faces when he eventually has to concede?

But maybe there’s another reason people happily gravitate towards bubbles where loud superficial agreements are enough: maybe the prospect of facing the full diversity of others is too overwhelming. Greg Frey, writer and team member of Trust the People and Flatpack Campaign, introduced us to a new word recently: sonder.

It comes from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig who recognised eight years ago that there is no language to express many of the complex and subtle experiences we are having today as a result of our accelerated connection to the wider world. Here is what he was naming:

n. the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

While Koenig calls it a sorrow, the sharing of it at least retrieves it as bitter-sweet. Greg and his crew enjoying the ingenious naming of the feeling because they knew it to be true: a description of alienation leading to camaraderie. What do we call that? Like the realisation that even the most high stakes competitions rely on absolute cooperation of all competitors on rules and regulations. Or that rivalry brings us together.

But these moments of deeper agreement are hard to come by in our media world: they have been closed off to us by a party political system that runs on opposition. Whether intended or not, it offers the despising of others as a power source – generating a public space that can’t get enough of it. But haven’t we known this for a long time? Koenig has another word for that: Altschmerz.

n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

 Or maybe turn again to your crew and plot a response. Knowing that while life is full of paradoxes, it’s still worth considering the idea that those who are not busy living are busy dying. Where you invest your energy counts.

Of course there are no black and white conditions or ways of life. As Erwin Schrödinger who coined the term entropy – the tendency towards ever greater chaos – said, the opposite is not negentropy, the reverse into greater order. The opposite of entropy is free energy: the constant possibility of being more. 

These are useful considerations when confronted with the daily challenge of being Alternative to the mainstream news. By withdrawing our attention from the scene of increasing chaos to places where we can get some traction – the citizen action networks we are participating in around the world – are we simply looking for order? Smaller territories where control can be more easily exerted?

Or is it that, when we participate in relationship building in real time, where people bring their own complex worlds to meet the complex worlds of others that energy appears that wasn’t present before. Like myriads of electric sparks where before there was an empty disconnect. That the opposite to faceless chaos is in fact the kind of juicy life-giving connection that makes life worth living. 

If that intrigues you, join up to our Loomio groups and get in on the building projects now unfolding. There’s always an Alternative.