Chaos As Social Order

chaos modeling             should be restricted to those ontological levels in which collective             social phenomena can be legitimately treated as a statistically             aggregated phenomenon, that is, as being composed of additive,             numerable, and interchangeable individual units. (314)

            Indeed, since improvements in concrete social forecasting have not yet been achieved using chaos theory (Berry and Kim 216; Brown 128; Jaditz 86; Rosser 209), I am inclined to agree at this time with Dendrinos summary comment that the “single most important contribution mathematical chaos has made [to social science] is to demonstrate the possible presence of new dynamical features in social systems that theoreticians had never addressed before” (238).  Hence my purpose here in showing the radical utility of chaos theory for understanding social order rather than for describing social science data mathematically.

Extended Applications

            Social order which involves mixing and folding and goes in the extreme to cultural vaporization fits the definition of non-linearity and illustrates interpenetration of contexts.  Social order viewed in this way is chaotic.  Chaos as social order also provides a way of understanding the infinite degrees of freedom that characterize human actions.

            The infinitization of human freedom is not due only to some inherent characteristic of human nature, character or personality.  It is a function of the fact that human choices are always situated in contexts which interpenetrate to indefinitely large and complicated extents in time and space.  Each piece of another context

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