“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”
—From Friedrich Nietzsche‘s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1883)
The older I get and the more I am able to look back on history writ large, and the more I see that the age-old tussle between form and chaos, chaos and form, will be with us till the very end of time. (Although the question of whether there will ever be an end to time is itself a tussle among physicists that will likely be with us till, you guessed it, the end of time…) (If it ever arrives…)
Which reminds me anew of Kurt Vonnegut’s resounding shrug from “Slaughterhouse Five”:
“And so it goes…”.
The famously epigrammatic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche bathes the chaos within ourselves in the twinkling light of a “dancing star” in the quote above. It’s a fetching image, though Nietzsche, perhaps more acutely than anyone, knew the thin and combustible contours of such stars and the heavy price to be paid for a sudden slip or explosion into the starless void.
It’s most always meant as a pejorative, but Trump’s clear bent toward chaos actually serves as his superpower, hard as that may be to swallow for more rational and orderly types. And it may just be the magic carpet he rides into a second term as president…
Sickly, single and restless most all his life, Nietzsche died at age 44, long since a broken man from physical and mental maladies that included severe migraines and intestinal problems, stroke and dementia. He was also a brilliant, witty thinker and writer who remains one of the most consequential figures in the history of philosophy.
Nietzsche’s is an easy notion to grasp: No progress or creativity without conflict, chaos, resistance from without and within. No free dancing stars plummeting out of the sky unbidden and landing in our lap of self-satisfaction forevermore.
The implicit imperative: Venture on out there! Be open to change.
Dance your own selves beyond your borders, out to your murky diffused places, past your dangers pregnant with opportunities (and yes, miscarriages).
Tear down the old and make way!
The risk, of course, is that it will all go to hell, that the tear-down will occur with nothing new a-birthing to replace it.
Or if there is a replacement, the new will turn out to be nothing but a recycling of the old, disfigured.
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Of all the words bandied about to describe former President Donald Trump’s leadership style by those who have worked alongside, observed and interacted with him over the years, “chaos” and its adjectival form,“chaotic,” are among, if not the, most oft-cited.
“Donald Trump’s All-Consuming Chaos,” goes one recent magazine headline. Others:
“Trump’s Chaos Agenda”
“Nikki Haley Says Donald Trump ‘Always Followed by Chaos.'”
“Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos”
“America Needs to Get Ready Now for Post-Election Chaos in November”
It’s most always meant as a pejorative, but Trump’s clear bent toward chaos actually serves as his superpower, hard as that may be to swallow for more rational and orderly types. And it may just be the magic carpet he rides into a second term as president of the United States.
The reasons for this are rooted deep in the human psyche, where the tension between our competing drives for chaos and form subject individuals, families and entire societies to periodic states of upheaval, even as much of the tension is muted enough to keep the discord at a low hum so civil society can function (most of the time).
Nietzsche, along with the psychologist Carl Jung and many others going back to the Greeks, raised the specter of the gods Apollo and Dionysus to represent the form and chaos that maintain residence to varying degrees in every human being. They are archetypes—structures and modes of thought and expression that represent various aspects of our humanity.
Apollo’s domain is order, reason, and restraint, a solid plan and structure to underlay a job, a work of art, the trajectory of a life. Dionysus is the god of wine, among other items on his job description. He’s all about excess, ecstasy, destruction and disorder, the squeezing of every last drop of juice from the available nectar of life.
Scandinavia leans Apollo, South America, Dionysus.
Now: neither is “better” than the other. Ideally, we have them negotiating with each other toward a harmonious balance throughout our lives. The point is not to negate either—it is to honor each in its own time of expression so we can enjoy ourselves and our fellow humans while still paying our bills on time.
Joe Biden is definitely Apollo, an aged version to boot. Carefully building alliances over a long, upward trending career, working across the aisle (until it became nearly impossible given the dionysian tilt of his opposition in recent years).
The profound enthusiasm gap between his followers and those of the purely dionysian Trump (despite both men being teetotalers) was looking like it would spell doom for Biden until he finally stepped aside and the more-but-not-purely-dionysian Kamala Harris stepped in to juice up and jolt the campaign back to life.
But that still leaves us with Trump, the King of Chaos, wielding his severely unbalanced dionysian-destructo power over a seemingly hypnotized MAGA horde that is willing to do his bidding at every turn. Sometimes that means standing in the sun for hours while he rambles along checking off on his long list of grievances. For a smaller and even more beholden cohort, it meant storming the Capitol at great risk to their bodies and legal standing. Those who support the latter by referring to them as heroes and “hostages” also reflect Dionysus, though from a safer distance.
Make no mistake: Dionysus has a continuing hold on the human psyche, Americans included. He is the source, the energy, of every revolution, every rave, every rock concert, every withering critique of government, the “system,” and “the man.”
And most pointedly in Trump World: “the deep state.”
Dionysus is anti-system, only too happy to bring it all crashing down. He was there in the ’60s with the anarchist “yippies” and their jeremiads against the “military-industrial complex.” We also heard it in the “Burn, baby, burn!” chants of the time from blacks sick unto death of oppression and willing to see their own cities reduced to ash in protest.
We see it in Trump’s vows today to launch the wrecking ball at the “deep state,” firing every civil service employee in the federal workforce and replacing them with “his” people who will do away with all red tape, who will let the oil industry “drill, baby drill,” who will, like him, encourage police officers to “not be nice” when taking suspects into custody.
We see it in his response to a pop star’s endorsement of his opponent: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”, the all-caps vehemence serving as just the kind of over-the-top, unrestrained flourish so typical of dionysian sensibilities and so dismaying to apollonians who seek a measure of propriety in the public square.
And here’s where else we see it: in our, in everyone’s, sense of awe, of trembling in wonder, when a thunderstorm rips into town and branches start flying through the air along with the sounds of sirens from emergency vehicles. Or fire engulfs a hillside where moments before homes had stood, the homes now serving as torches proclaiming the raw destructive power of nature.
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It’s terrifying, yes, but in a small corner under our fear, we bow down to the sheer power of the stories playing out in front of us, the adrenaline rush of life suddenly on edge, the fierce majesty of the gods, the untrammeled, unequivocal dominance of Mother Nature.
Blow, wind, blow! Burn, baby, burn!
Less majestically, more forlornly, we hear the case for destruction in the lamentations of displaced coal miners and factory workers in small town and rural America who form the base of Trump’s support. Their jobs laid to waste by globalization, their towns and lives following as they seek refuge in opioids, in drink, in anger, in anger turned inward to suicide.
Here’s one, a jobless man speaking to the eminent Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her recent book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.” Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, the entire region reeling for decades. Coal jobs had vanished, bringing with it crushing poverty, a deadly drug crisis, and a soul-crushing loss of meaning for a once proud population.
“If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom?’ If I just look at my own life, I came from nothing and I got to nothing and I’m not a victim of racism, because I’m white. So, to most Americans, I’m less than nothing. If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?”
Pikeville had been in the political center 30 years ago, but in 2016 and 2020, nearly 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. The question is not so much how it happened, but how it could not have happened, given the timely appearance of the rabble-rousing dionysian who thunders to them: “It’s not your fault!” (Which is to a large extent true.)
But his pitch is then larded not only with the frenzy of destruction of the “system” that ostensibly stands in his audience’s way, but the viciousness of blaming other, sometimes equally dispossessed groups. “It’s the fault of criminal and lunatic immigrants stealing your jobs, the D.E.I. blacks and browns butting in front of you in line, the coastal elites rigging everything and disrespecting you.” (Most of which isn’t true, though that part about “coastal elites” should very much include him and his oligarchic peers to whom he directed the massive tax cuts that dramatically increased their wealth in 2017.)
And then: “What has the system done for you? Let’s burn it the hell down!”
Therein is the raw power and revenge of Dionysus, preying upon his followers’ cries for help, a demagogue with only his own interests at heart, seeking to overthrow the system that has barely managed to contain him from the unrestrained power he seeks, beyond the reach of all rules, codes and norms.
Will Dionysus hold sway come November, crushing the order-seeking Apollo under an avalanche of desperate, demagogic, emotional excess? No less desperate, perhaps even more so, are the forces of Apollo, exhausted by the years of conflict and rage, longing to restore some balance to our polity.
It’s an ancient match-up, made ever new again by the roiling, often conflicting impulses and needs of the human heart.
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Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
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Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Eyeing chaos by Nathan Dumlao, Los Angeles, California https://unsplash.com/@nate_dumlao
Apollo and Dionysus art from the public domain
Trump Rally by Leslie https://www.flickr.com/photos/thru_the_glass/
Another fine & provocative post my friend! War of the worlds continues its timeless “dance”… the song selection was also masterful, one of my favorite LC songs gorgeously rendered by another talented group I’ve never heard of! Maybe Norway or Bhutan have figured out ways of sublimating these archetypical and seemingly uncontrollable destructive urges ?? I confess to feeling rather helpless as I contemplate the implications of this cosmic ballet in the macro sense, instead choosing to focus on what modest daily acts of kindness I can muster feeling grateful for the daily opportunity to do my “Apollonian dance”.
Thanks for that, Kevin. It almost feels like a relief sometimes to contend with these ideas, which force me to take a step or two back for a more wide-angle, dispassionate view of just what we’re seeing and experiencing in the political realm. But I have to admit it’s not easy to stay in that place! Meanwhile, the “modest daily acts of kindness” of which you speak join with the arts, nature and the other timeless pleasures of regular life as a true balm while the macro situation plays out as it will in November…
I have MAGA relatives and we mostly just tip-toe around our differences and love on each other anyway. It’s a challenge sometimes, but it feels important. Thank you for this take though. When I was in college, I was afraid to take any philosophy class, but this and one you did on Hegel made these thinkers easy to understand.
Yeah, academic philosophy is a hard slog, Deanna, that is for certain! More often than not I start with reading ABOUT philosophers by others who help me put a toe or two in the water and get me oriented to the often impenetrable, I dunno…”thickness” of the material. That said, Nietzsche is rather refreshingly accessible most of the time—funny, often acerbic, and refusing to follow in the standard philosophical forms of argument. He was severely criticized by much of the academy a large part of his life for those “failings,” but his reputation has had the last laugh, and he’s right up there with all the giants today in philosophical history.
Your blog, a thoughtful and philosophical dissection on the never-ending struggle between opposing forces (chaos and form), highlights just how destructive this battle can be. Disillusionment with life itself breeds unrest and far too often opens the door for disaster. H.G. Wells’ book “The War That Will End War” naively predicted that the horrors of the First World War would serve as a permanent deterrent to another great war. His idealism blinded him to the truth in Nietzsche’s belief that chaos (evil) can never be completely eradicated from our DNA. He failed to truly understand Cassius’s warning that “the fault is not in the stars but in ourselves.” Wells didn’t realize how quickly revenge, economic calamity, racism, and anger can turn a dream of peace into a nightmare. He lived long enough to feel first-hand the disintegration in his “The War That Will End War” hypothesis. He witnessed the rise of totalitarianism. He rejoiced in its fall., However, to have strange mushroom clouds hovering over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the final event of that war unnerved him as it did many others. Perhaps, at that moment, he sadly concluded that humankind was a far greater threat to the world than his “The War of the Worlds” Martians.
Arlie Hochschild’s sociological research on Appalachia is a dart and hits the board of our present discord smack in the middle. Extreme poverty provides the perfect breeding ground for cataclysmic extremism. And far too often form (good) doesn’t prevail. Hopefully, come November, that won’t be the case.
Spot-on, Robert, about the disappointment—too weak a word, really, maybe “despair” works better?—of two world wars doing next to nothing to quell the dark emotions that lie at the root of the violence, demagoguery and autocracy that still rule so much of our world. Even more recently, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 was proclaimed to usher in “The End of History,” i.e., the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy across the globe with the “peace dividend” of heavily slashed military budgets worldwide allowing for a huge diversion of funds to enhance our collective humanity. We are still seeing how that dream has been playing out over the past 35 years, and it ain’t pretty…
Minor quibble, though, on your classification of chaos/Dionysus as “evil” and form/Apollo as “good.” Both have a role in the psychological makeup of a person and culture, and properly balanced, they complement each other. The forward-thrusting, risk-taking creative destruction and imagination of Dionysus supplies the juice for change, which Apollo then channels into the requisite order to be effective in the world. Most people lean more toward one or the other in their basic orientation, and of course, those leanings can change with age and circumstance. But the bottom line is we should remain on friendly, conscious terms with both of them to better understand their power and role in ourselves and the culture we stew in.