By Dr. Nurfer TERCAN
For a long time humanity thought it was living in order.
Yet what was offered to us was not order, but a controlled uncertainty.
There was a time when people could plan the future.
Even if they did not know what tomorrow would bring, they believed that the system would not collapse entirely. Now, when we wake up in the morning, we are met with a new war, a new economic crisis, a new threat of epidemic, a new energy chaos or a new digital manipulation.
The world can no longer be governed without producing crises.
Because the new form of governance of the modern age is fear.
And fear is best fed by chaos.
People are no longer seen as free individuals, but as psychological masses that must constantly be kept on the alert. Every day the media spreads a new wave of panic. The economy is shaped by fear. Politics draws power from uncertainty. And the global system tries to steer humanity by keeping it constantly in an “emergency psychology”.
There was a time of determinism.
The Western world believed that everything was calculable. Societies could be governed, wars could be planned, the economy could be controlled, human behaviour could be modelled. Laplace’s conception of a mechanical universe shaped not only physics, but also states, bureaucracy and modern politics.
But then the system came face to face with its own arrogance.
Because life was not a laboratory.
Nor was the human being a machine.
Chaos Theory was not merely a mathematical approach; it was one of the first blows struck in the collapse of modern reason. The truth that Edward Lorenz discovered through a tiny rounding error in a number was this:
A small change could bring down the whole system.
This is exactly what we are living through today.
A virus brought the whole world to a halt.
A banking crisis shook continents.
An energy war impoverished millions.
A social media algorithm changed the psychology of societies.
We are now in an age in which nothing is stable.
And the most dangerous thing is this:
Humanity is getting used to chaos.
Societies that live in constant crisis stop thinking after a while. A society that grows tired wants security. And a society that wants security begins to give up its freedom. This is where the greatest achievement of the modern system emerges: being able to present the chain to people as freedom.
The pandemic period was the clearest example of this.
Humanity did not merely experience a health crisis; at the same time it found itself facing a management of fear on a global scale. People were distanced from one another, isolated, digitalised and rapidly adapted to a way of life under constant supervision.
Today we have still not been able to emerge from the psychological effects of that period.
Because the issue is no longer only illness; it is an issue of mental control.
Chaos is no longer a condition that arises of its own accord.
In many fields, from the economy to politics, from the media to social movements, chaos has become one of the most effective instruments of those who govern.
Society is being stupefied by constantly changing agendas.
Before the shock of one event is over, another begins. People are left no opportunity to think, to question and to preserve their memory. Thus truth gives way to “momentary perceptions”.
Today humanity is living not in the age of information, but in the age of manipulation.
And the most tragic thing is this:
People now prefer not the truth, but the lie that frightens them less.
Yet the real danger of chaos is not disorder.
The real danger is the human being’s loss of the truth.
Because societies that lose the truth lose first their direction, then their conscience, and in the very end their future.
And perhaps the greatest question before humanity today is still the same:
Are we really living in chaos…
Or is someone deliberately making the chaos grow?
Notes from the Blue of the Windy City…
Translated from the Turkish original.