Chaos As Social Order

theory, at least to a contemporary mind and imagination, is a fully credible way to approach understanding social phenomena.

            Viewing both oral and written traditions as different contexts–as interpenetrating sites, as interacting systems–suggests that the subject-matter of social science, whether diachronically elongated or synchronically stacked, can be viewed as dissipative systems.  The continual maintenance, repair, and rebuilding required from bodily cells to clothing to transit systems to software configurations seems to leave little doubt that human living arrangements are predominantly dissipative rather than conservative systems.  In considering challenges to the management of complex systems, De Greene asserts that

            A sociotechnical or techno-economic macrosystem is a dissipative             structure in the sense that high-quality inputs (energy and matter)             are converted to low-quality outputs like heat and waste, with an             increase in disorder and entropy.  Within this overall process, of             course, low-quality raw materials are converted into high-quality             finished products, but these eventually break down, yielding further             entropy. (287)

            If this is reasonable, then it further clarifies the attempt to approach social order conceptually with chaos theory.  As Hao Bai-Lin explains in Chaos II, “it is dissipation that realizes the contraction [compression] of description [information] in a natural way: a vast number of modes die out due to dissipation; only those spanning the attractors need be taken into account in

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