#30: Chaos and Order, Yin and Yang—The Ultimate Mental Model of Reality

We recently published a new page on our website organizing all of our mental models (aka mental frameworks) into one place. We explain what a mental model is and how you can use them to better understand the world.

• Mental Frameworks: Your Toolbox For Thinking More Clearly

In short, mental models are ways of thinking that help to simplify the world. They block out the noise so that we can better pay attention to the signal. And the most fundamental mental model—the most fundamental way of categorizing and understanding the world—is understanding the dichotomy of chaos and order.

Episode Timestamps:

• [04:00] Mental frameworks/models and how they help us think and understand the world
• [05:15] Why chaos and order is the ultimate mental framework
• [09:47] What is a good definition or some examples of chaos?
• [14:48] The duality of life and death
• [18:30] The light vs. the dark in storytelling (Star Wars, Marvel movies, Harry Potter, etc)
• [23:42] The delusion of anger and the hemispheric structure of the brain
• [31:57] Why chaos is represented by serpents and why a garden is the perfect balance of chaos and order
• [41:53] Why is chaos mythologically feminine and order masculine?
• [54:24] The big five personality traits (OCEAN) and political orientation (aka why the left fears pathologies of order and the right pathologies of chaos)
• [01:05:21] Chaos and time: Beethoven's 5th Symphony, Mahler's 5th Symphony, and why the crocodile in Peter Pan swallowed a clock.
• [01:09:45] Why the ideal musical performance involves one foot in order and one in chaos.

Chaos and Order:

When we analyze reality, we differentiate it into categories—we put boundaries between things. And making a division between chaos and order is the most fundamental categorization that we can make—it is the highest level of abstraction that you can represent reality with.

When we are in order, things are happening as we expect. The car starts when we turn the key, our bodies stay healthy, and the people you know behave as they should. In order, we have low anxiety because we are in the domain of the known. Our models of reality are matching up with what we see in the environment.

When we are in chaos, however, we get hit with the unexpected. Things around us aren't working as we thought they should, and the complexity of the world comes flooding in. In chaos, we are in the domain of the unknown, and it gives us high anxiety that our model of reality must be wrong/too simple.

And this dichotomy between chaos and order is even mirrored in the hemispheric structure of our brains, as outlined in Dr. Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Generally, the right hemisphere deals with chaos(the unknown/the exception to the rules) and the left hemisphere with order (the known/the rules).

And of course, mythologically, the chaos and order duality is represented by the famous Chinese symbol of Yin and Yang.

Yin and Yang:

In this famous symbol, the white snake represents order while the black snake represents chaos. In mythological terms, order is represented as masculine (father culture) while chaos is represented as feminine (mother nature).

The key takeaway from the Yin and Yang symbol is that, like all dualities, both parts require the other to exist. If there was no contrasting black color, you could not even see the white snake (and vice versa). Many forms of spiritual awakening, like the Alan Watts video linked below, hinge on the realization that these dualities...