The shocking, yet not at all surprising, events in the U.S. Capitol this week revitalized a question I’ve been asking myself lately: How do we reconcile a president’s repeated call for “law and order” with his obvious delight in sheer, utter chaos?
Way back in the mists of time – that is, when I was a college freshman – my friends Dave and Wayne introduced me to a fun new game, Dungeons & Dragons. I soon learned that everything in D&D, from characters to monsters to random objects, has an “alignment.” Everything is somewhere on a scale from pure good to pure evil, and also on a separate scale from “lawful” to “chaotic.”
In ancient Babylon, their creation myth tells the story of how the human-shaped god, Marduk, representing order and civilization, vanquishes Tiamat, the “mother of monsters,” a force of primordial chaos.
If they thought seriously about such abstractions, the Babylonians may have conflated “lawful” with “good” and “chaotic” with “evil.” But today we can think of the two ideas independently. We are certainly familiar with “lawful evil,” as in Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi death camp personnel, people committing heinous atrocities while “just following orders.” There’s also “chaotic good” – I tend to picture dreamy young ditzes from the Summer of Love, or any number of fairies and “good witches” in popular culture. Humanity’s favorite Time Lord is a classic example of chaotic good:
Two advanced degrees in personality psychology later, I can tell you that the good/evil and law/chaos axes are not formal categories of study in today’s science. But they’re still fun to think about.
One issue that comes up, whenever people are playing with these ideas, is that “lawful” can mean at least two distinct things, depending on whether the laws and order are internal or external. Someone can be lawful by following rules and valuing structure, but they can also be lawful by practicing inner discipline and creating their own system of order. In D&D, they recognize this by noting that lawful good encompasses both paladins (think Sir Galahad, or Captain America) and altruistic martial arts practitioners (Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon).
Here’s another example: dogs and cats. Domesticated dogs are obviously lawful. They learn the rules of behavior and their place in the hierarchy of their pack, and they’re most comfortable when things happen consistently with their sense of order.
But, contrary to popular conceptions, cats also have a sense of order. They value routines and expectations; they have internal clocks and some sense of hierarchy. Based on my own personal semi-feral cat colony (yes, they’re all spayed/neutered), I can tell you that mama cats eat first, and kittens get cuffed if they do something undesirable. But in general, cats don’t follow rules; each does their own thing.
(For a fun fictional example, see Eugene author Mary E. Lowd’s “furry” science fiction trilogy, beginning with Otters in Space. Dogs get confused if they don’t know the rules and who’s in charge, while the cat gets things done.)
One special thing about being citizens in a democracy is that we, collectively, get to decide what the law is. Some, especially those who are more conservative, will prefer to defer to existing law, while others work to adapt the law to changing circumstances. Both liberals and conservatives want the law to match or support their sense of a “higher law,” moral principles, but they can disagree about what that looks like. There’s also the premise that if we abide by the law, we will have order (although the lived experience of too many law-abiding Black Americans, for example, shows that’s not always the case).
The differences between conservative and liberal attitudes toward law are paralleled in George Lakoff’s observations about parenting styles. Conservative families often have a rigid hierarchy, what he calls a “Strict Father” model, where children learn to defer to their parents, especially their father, or be disciplined. In liberal families, Lakoff’s “Nurturing Parent” model is more common – parents encourage their children to learn to make their own decisions and develop their own discipline, in pursuit of their own ends. And Lakoff believes their expectations of government follow these family models, with conservatives expecting “law and order” to maintain community discipline, while liberals want to ensure that everyone has access to opportunities and has their basic needs met so they can focus on higher priorities.
Meanwhile, I’m reminded once again of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundation Theory. His idea is that there are five moral foundations: Harm/Care, Justice, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, and he claims that liberals value the first two of those, while conservatives value all five. It’s fun to think about his categories, but! The underlying science is fatally flawed. It’s based on a survey, and the survey lacks what scientists call “face validity” – it’s not measuring what they claim it’s measuring. If you read the survey itself – at least the version they were using back when they came up with their theory – you’ll see that they’re basically asking people how much they agree with liberal ideas about harm/care and justice, and how much they agree with conservative ideas about loyalty, authority, and purity. Of course liberals scored more strongly on the first two, while conservatives endorsed all five! Liberals value loyalty, authority, and purity in different ways than conservatives do.
Okay, anyway, let’s circle back to Donald Trump. It’s pretty clear that Trump sees himself as the top of a hierarchy, such that lawfulness means following him and what he wants. We’ll have to leave for another day the question of why so many law-abiding folks would accept (even welcome) a force of Primal Chaos as their lodestar for what constitutes lawful, but they do. And when the right-wing media and the other party leaders collude with someone like Trump, it basically creates what someone on Facebook recently felicitously called not an echo chamber but a “gyre,” a massive whirlpool that pulls people in and agitates them.
Trump is the Top Dog in his world, and the people he unleashed on the Capitol this week were his well-baited pack. To us, they looked like anarchy itself, but he convinced them that some higher law had been violated – the integrity of the election – and his say-so was sufficient.
Thankfully, order has been tentatively restored in Washington. The wheels are in motion for those who perpetrated this week’s assault on the Capitol to meet America’s real law, up close and personal.
There will always be those among us who prefer the comfort of orderliness and knowing their place in a stable hierarchy. Conservatism is not going away. I think one of the most important lessons of this week is that being a person whom conservatives look up to is a special responsibility, and that we should all hope that in the future they’ll better screen their candidates for this role and choose people who won’t abuse this trust.
Meanwhile, I remembered that I have 
To these traditional meanings of authenticity, Carroll offers two more. He notes that we’re talking about “craft authenticity” when something has been made by following appropriate methods, and gives the example of the Anchor Brewing Company, the pioneer of microbrewing, where beers are made using a set of skillful and specialized techniques.
Fiske credits Harvard scientist S.S. Stevens with the underlying framework for his system. Stevens 
Conflicts between these motives come up all the time. One example Rai and Fiske use is experimentation on animals. If you weigh the benefits to human lives against the smaller number of animal lives killed in medical research, you’re using a Proportionality argument. If instead you believe that all mammals deserve to live, it’s not that you can’t do the math to get the Proportionality answer. Rather, you’re including mammals in your in-group of beings worthy of protection and care, with a Unity perspective.
If you don’t want people to do something, one obvious approach is to make it illegal (like Prohibition) or unavailable (like shutting down abortion clinics, or deciding stores can’t sell the kind of light bulbs we all used ten years ago). But people don’t always comply with laws (again, like Prohibition), and sometimes we might want people to be less likely to do something that’s both legal and ordinary (like eating meat). It’s quite challenging to get people to change an ordinary behavior, especially if it’s pleasurable or wrapped up in traditions.
When I was in grad school, for my first-year project I studied vegetarianism and veganism, so that I could learn more about how acting consistently with ideals affects our well-being. (Short answer – making life choices that feel meaningful to you leads to greater well-being, no big surprise.) It was very interesting to learn more about other people’s research on the psychology of not eating meat. People have a lot of reasons for becoming vegetarian. Sometimes it’s for health reasons; those with heart disease are often encouraged to shift to plant-based diets, for example. Sometimes it’s for economic reasons – beans and rice are much less expensive than steak and salmon. And sometimes it’s because eating meat just seems wrong, which is what I meant by “moralized.” The interesting thing is that once you see eating meat as wrong, you’re often likely to start adding all the other reasons, too, whereas if you’re just doing it for health reasons, your thinking doesn’t change as much. And of course, once you see it as morally wrong, you’re more likely to try to influence others in the same direction.
Isn’t that powerful? Unfortunately, though, America has decided that climate change is a liberal or Leftist idea, even though career military leaders remain deeply concerned about it.
Personally, I stopped reading after the third book, although I’d probably return to the series if the rest are ever published. Other fans are more emotionally invested and have had stronger feelings on the topic than myself. Responding to these fans, in 2009 novelist Neal Gaiman published 
As a writer, I would never take on a huge, multivolume project like A Song of Ice and Fire – whatever the benefits of all the success Martin’s experienced, the flip side would be way too oppressive. Other authors have embarked on epic stories with different strategies. In Steven Brust’s 
If you’ve studied classical literature, you might remember the story from Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas, a young warrior and prince of Troy, has escaped from the fall of his homeland, and the gods send him to Italy to found a new Troy, which we know better as “Rome.” On the way, he stops at Carthage, the major ancient city in modern-day Tunisia founded by the Phoenicians, and he falls in love with its queen Dido (in English rhymes with “Fido”). But he cannot stay. The gods remind him of his destiny, and off he goes, abandoning poor Dido, who dies of grief (and the sword she chooses to fall upon).
If anyone else had tried it, let alone anyone on the American Left, there would have been a major domestic crisis. The Right would have been up in arms, possibly literally. The president’s standing, if not his career, would have been ruined. And the whole debacle might not even have led to peace with China. Hence the 
If Bernie Sanders had won, he could have used the presidency as a great “
In 2007, Joe Brewer, a young man from rural Missouri, found himself reading George Lakoff’s books on cognitive framing, the conceptual models we use to make sense of the world (which include meta-narratives). With an academic background in atmospheric science, and deeply concerned about climate change, he began working with these frames to learn more about the thought patterns that can facilitate or hinder positive social change.
Joe chose three vital contexts where he really can make a difference: Barichara and its ecosystem, the broader community of people working together to regenerate the Earth’s damaged environments (including the well-being of the humans in those environments, of course), and the micro-community of his family – his wife Jessica and their inquisitive and lively daughter Elise.
