Why Do We Carry the Cliché of Chaos?

When we hear the word “anarchy,” similar images appear in most of our minds: burnt vehicles, smashed shop windows, looted stores, shouting crowds and a public authority nowhere to be seen. These images have been repeated so often that we now feel a natural bond between them. If government withdraws, order collapses; if there is nobody giving commands, people turn on each other; if the police are not visible, everyone turns to crime. The cliché does not merely misrepresent a word; it also draws the limits of our political imagination. It offers us two options: either we accept the present order with all its flaws, or we fall into chaos.

This dichotomy is very useful. However visible the injustice of a power may be, the fear that something worse will come in its absence can get ahead of objection. The boss is harsh, but without a boss the workplace falls apart; the head of the family is domineering, but if he steps back the household order breaks down; the state is oppressive, but if the state weakens people devour one another. Thus the rightfulness of those who rule rests less on how well they rule than on the thought that we could not live without them. The cliché of chaos is not merely a story power tells from outside; it often speaks from within us.

Why do we take order and government for the same thing?

From childhood we live in environments where order radiates from a centre. At home it is clear to whom the last word belongs, at school the teacher speaks, at work the manager decides, in a public institution the office through which a transaction must pass is determined in advance. As this experience repeats, coordination and hierarchy become confused. The idea that people can do shared work only if someone gives orders comes to look like a fact needing no proof.

Yet a large part of daily life runs on mutual expectations, habits and voluntary agreements rather than official commands. Preparing a crowded table, searching for a lost animal in the neighbourhood, a group of friends planning a journey or people producing shared knowledge online do not always require a permanent chairperson. People talk, share tasks, cover one another’s gaps and change their decisions if needed. These examples do not prove that large societies would easily work the same way; but they show that the sole source of order is not a higher office.

Whom does the word chaos protect?

“Order has broken down” sounds neutral, yet it usually conceals from whose point of view the order has broken. When workers strike, the factory’s order really is disrupted; production stops, deliveries are delayed, management’s plan fails. But from the worker’s point of view, low pay, insecurity and the absence of a voice were already a broken order. When students at a university object to a decision the timetable may be interrupted; the administration may see this as turmoil. From the student’s point of view, having no say in decisions about themselves is a silent disorder that has lasted for years.

The label of chaos magnifies visible interruption while diminishing normalised harm. A window broken at a demonstration is filmed at once; the displacement of people on that street by years of rising rents is not narrated in the same dramatic language. A loud argument in an institution counts as “indiscipline,” while the pressure exhausting employees every day is a normal part of the order. “Protecting order” therefore does not always protect everyone’s safety. Sometimes it protects only the uninterrupted continuation of the present distribution of power.

The other human being who appears in disaster

One of the most effective scenes in the story of chaos is catastrophe. When an earthquake, a flood, a fire or a major power cut occurs, institutions lose their reach and it is said that people’s true face will emerge. Popular culture loves to narrate these moments as looting, panic and a war of all against all. Disasters of course do not abolish crime, opportunism and violence. Yet in the same moments we also see complete strangers running to the rubble, opening their homes, sharing their food and building solidarity without waiting for any order.

These examples need not be romanticised. Inequalities can form within solidarity networks, aid can be distributed unfairly, powerful groups may try to seize resources. Even so they show that human behaviour is not merely selfishness that can be governed only by fear. We do not automatically become monsters when authority weakens; sometimes, on the contrary, we draw closer to one another in the face of official slowness. The cliché of chaos is powerful precisely because it renders this possibility invisible.

The reality selected by the news image

The way media narrate plays an important role in sustaining the cliché. Conflict, fire and broken objects make powerful images; solidarity working quietly over a long period does not easily become news. A kitchen built by a hundred people may remain unseen for days, while a brief scuffle can fill the whole screen. The viewer thus sees not the whole of the life that appears when central control weakens but its most dramatic few minutes.

The same selectivity exists in language. Coercion applied by the state is an “operation,” a company’s mass dismissal a “restructuring,” a bank’s seizure of a home a “legal proceeding.” Disorderly reaction from below is immediately marked with the words violence and chaos. There is no need here to consider every protest justified. The point is to notice which harm is treated as normal and which as extraordinary. The cliché renders the violence of the order invisible while making the violence of objection to it the whole story.

Stepping outside the fear

We do not carry the cliché of chaos only because of propaganda. Uncertainty really is frightening. Even if the order we know is unjust, not knowing how tomorrow would work can bind a person to a familiar evil. Moreover we build our livelihood, our security and our social ties inside existing institutions. The sentence “let us live otherwise” does not by itself abolish these dependencies. Rather than accusing people of cowardice, we should see the real material sources of fear.

But we can also remember that we are not limited to two options. Between the present hierarchy and a void in which everyone attacks everyone lies a wide field: local assemblies, cooperatives, federations, recallable tasks, shared rules and distributed coordination. None of these is flawless and all can produce new relations of power. Even so, political thought misses the real question when it is imprisoned in “how bad would it be if authority went?” Could the place of authority be taken not by a void but by another order we build together? Escaping the cliché of chaos is not claiming to know the answer; it is being able to ask that question without fear.