Chaos Comes First

Part 2

One of my readers made a great point and followed up with a question. My last blog was more of a personal piece offering my opinion/perspective without many examples. I like to keep these as short as possible.

My main reason for starting this blog is personal - to reflect on my thoughts. So thank you for your comment!

The comment:

“History is not ambiguous about which one destroys civilizations faster.” You make this claim but do not back it up with examples. When in time do you think history shows this and how is it unambiguous?

Chaos always precedes authority. Order is not humanity’s default setting—it is a response to disorder. When life becomes unstable, dangerous, or unbearable, people demand structure. Rules emerge. Hierarchies form. Authority is established not out of idealism, but necessity. (We see this structure even in the non-human mammals)

When authority works, chaos fades from memory.

We are living at a point in human history where comfort is so normalized that the brutality required to achieve it feels irrelevant or even offensive by modern-day standards.

Food is abundant, shelter is assumed, safety is expected, and systems function quietly in the background. Because survival no longer feels fragile, we mistake stability for a natural occurrence rather than an achievement.

This is where entitlement is born.

“A privilege extended becomes defined as a right.”

Most of us inherited order; we did not build it. We live inside a world forged through conflict, discipline, and sacrifice, yet we experience them only as constraints. Laws feel random and racist. Authority feels oppressive. Structure feels unnecessary. When the reason for rules is forgotten, rules begin to look “systemic” by the white man rather than for protection.

From an evolutionary perspective, this isn’t surprising. Our limbic system (fight or flight) evolved to respond to immediate threats—scarcity, violence, chaos. Modernity removes those signals while still depending on the systems created to manage them. Without direct exposure to collapse, we lose respect for the mechanisms that prevent it.

(One of the main flaws in our society is to remain willfully ignorant about the early origins of our neurological system.)

Comfort creates a dangerous illusion… that order exists because people are inherently good, rather than because systems were built to restrain human impulses. Progress becomes sanitized. The wars, labor, hierarchy, and unequal sacrifice that produced stability are edited out of the story. What remains is the belief that comfort is a right, not a responsibility.

But history moves in cycles.

Chaos becomes intolerable. Authority restores order. Order creates peace. Peace creates ease. Ease erodes gratitude. Gratitude gives way to entitlement. Entitlement undermines authority. And chaos returns.

A society can survive inequality. It cannot survive widespread denial about what it took to become stable in the first place.

(We’re not all equal in our abilities. The more we try to make things equal, the more unequal we become. Again, this ideology manifests in a time of prosperity.)

Chaos comes first. Authority comes second. Forgetting that sequence is not just naïve—it’s dangerous.

“Humanity isn’t ruined by monsters, it’s ruined by our love of comfort.”

“Most people don’t want truth or freedom. They want a safe lie and someone to blame. If we refuse to outgrow the herd, we don’t just stay small, we help build the cage that traps everyone.”

• Fredrick Nietzsche