Chaos Theory: Are You The Controlled Or The Controller?

order-chaos

Do you remember Frecklegate? It was a Twitterstorm that happened earlier this year, coming between 2015’s Protein World-Beach Body Ready rumpus and May’s outrageous Nicola Thorp-Price Waterhouse Coopers heel horror. The dating site Match.com had run an ad showing the heavily freckled face and ginger fringe of a woman with the strapline: “If you don’t like your imperfections, someone else will.”

Obviously, this was a bit shit. Some might say it was a bit fascist, given that it was suggesting that skin pigmentations could be sorted into “perfect” and “imperfect” categories. One’s value as a human being gauged on hair colour and skin tone, with an ad-agency copywriter – always the most considered and moral of judges – as arbiter! Lovely! Match.com’s media flame burned brighter than Julianne Moore’s barnet, and deservedly so.

However, I did feel a bit of sympathy for Match.com at the time. The freckles ad was a lapse of judgement, but it was part of a long-running and actually quite good campaign based on the idea of individuals feeling imperfect. The point was that most daters put off potential partners by trying to be “better” than they really are, when acting naturally and just being themselves is attractive. When most Match.com ads use the word “imperfection”, what they mean is “the bits of you that you worry about because you think a) they diverge from beauty standards as presented in the media, and b) those beauty standards are what potential partners want”.

The fact is the word “imperfection” is currently evolving with a new, additional meaning. When someone sticks that Brené Brown quote – “Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together” – on Facebook, they’re using “imperfection” to mean “individual trait”. The gist with this and all those other motivational slogans copied from a Pinterest board or QuotesGram or wherever (“I am perfect in my imperfections”, etc) is that we should accept ourselves; we should believe we all really do wake up flawless, because the idea of a “flaw” is only a social construct.

So, in 2016, we have two meanings of “perfect”. There’s the Marie Kondo perfect that matches objective standards and is attained by working really hard, improving what you have and imposing order. Opposed to that is what you might call the Caitlin Moran model, which involves accepting and embracing oneself and change and chaos. Rolling with it, as they say.

It’s really about two approaches to life. On the one hand, there are people who believe in imposing order and logic, and have faith that if we work hard and organise ourselves enough, we can conquer anything the world throws at us. These are the sort of people you find in Silicon Valley, talking about perfecting artificial intelligence and overcoming death. More mundanely, they are the type who read storage-system catalogues and create spreadsheets to plan their outfits for mini-breaks.

On the other hand, you have the cluttered and apparently chaotic, who believe that adapting and reacting to whatever happens is the best way to live and work. I say “apparently” because, to the confusion of people in the former camp, those who fit the latter type are often not quite as happy-go-lucky as they may seem: psychological studies show that people who work in chaotic-looking environments are often highly competitive and idealistic.

The two different types, the controllers and the rollers, frequently drive each other insane. As evidence I cite a conversation I recently had with a highly controlled and organised friend called Jenny (they always have names like Jenny, don’t they? Rollers- with-it tend to have more exotic names, such as Suzanna or Sophie), in which she said she couldn’t possibly get anything done if her desk were as messy as mine.

“But how would you tidy it?” I said. “I don’t have special storage places for things like phone chargers, so I leave them plugged in.”

“But you have to have a place for everything,” she said, sounding genuinely upset. “Then you always know where it is and you don’t waste time looking for it. To me, this isn’t a desk, it’s a… mesk!”

“But I know where the charger is. It’s in the plug.”

Her face started to go that angry red around the edges. “There is no way you know where everything is on that desk.”

“Yes I do.” This was a lie, told not because I thought I knew where things were, but because she was annoying me. In Jenny’s compulsive neatness I saw an idea about how to live life that seemed to me joyless, unspontaneous and life-denying.

“Where’s your yellow pen, then?” she snapped back. “And don’t move anything.” And of course she had me. The yellow pen had been accidentally left under several pads of paper and was invisible to me.

“See?” she said. “You don’t know! How long would it have taken you to find it?”

To me, her concerns seem like a love of neatness for its own sake, rather than a genuine concern with efficiency, but then I suppose I misunderstand her just as she misunderstands me. My perfect is never going to be hers and vice versa.

Julie Bullen, a psychologist who works with businesses to help them get their employees to work better together, says the two outlooks are based on two common, and opposing, personality types. The controllers are known as SJ types, the S standing for sensing and the J for judging; the sensing doesn’t mean they’re “sensual”, more that they trust only what can be directly perceived by their senses. SJs base all their decisions on the available facts and proceed logically and rationally, step by step. They like to impose structure and order and to organise everything. Those who go with the flow are likely to be type NP (intuitive-perceiving) – that is, guided by intuition, interested in connections at a higher level than the obvious and in search of bigger meanings. They tend to be flexible, adaptable, open-ended and don’t impose structure, thinking instead that the order should arise organically from within.

“Obviously, to many people, the NPs sound more sympathetic and interesting,” says Bullen, “but that’s partly because many heroes in art and fiction are NPs – because artists and writers tend to be that type. In reality, you wouldn’t want to live in a world in which the NPs were in charge. They think they can run everything better, but in fact we need more SJs than NPs. If the world were run by NPs, there would be no running water or electricity, because no one would have organised the minor details.”

You could also argue that there’s a philosophical dimension to the difference. Various artists and philosophers, most influentially Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, have discussed the contrast in ancient Greek mythology between the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Both are sons of Zeus, but Apollo is the god of rationalism, reason and order, while Dionysus is the god of the irrational and chaotic. In the modern world we see them as opposites, but rather interestingly the Greeks didn’t; they believed both ways of thinking and doing helped you learn and understand more.

Whatever the historical background, it’s easy to trace the SJ/Apollian/Controller and NP/Dionysian/Roller dualism in contemporary culture. Calm, poised Scandi living or Latin joie de vivre? Semi-religious tech obsession that assumes computers can solve all the problems that ever faced humankind, or concern about smartphones’ effects on human relations? Neutrally painted, decluttered, minimalistically kitchened houses, with manicured box trees in square planters outside the front door, or the piled-up, book-lined, window-stickered and fuck-knows-when-the-lawn-was-last- mowed boho home?

In fashion terms, there’s the carefully curated set of clothes with sensibly chosen classic pieces and outfits planned the night before versus a maximalist, ever-growing mix from which you pick at random in the morning? A nice tidy closet, with shoe racks and baskets in order, or the chaos of the floordrobe? The rationalism of Raf Simons, Jean Muir or Jil Sander, or the emotion of McQueen, or the eclectic, magpie tastes of Miuccia Prada?

These dress distinctions may be complicated by fashion’s role in fantasising and role playing, with certain qualities in the clothes compensating for a lack of them in other areas of our lives. Last year I interviewed Jeremy Atkinson, Britain’s last surviving traditional (ie handmade) wooden-soled clog maker. He doesn’t try to make the carved soles overly smooth or uniform, often leaving in what he called “imperfections” to make them unique. He has noticed he gets a lot of orders from people who work with technology. “They’ve told me,” he said, “that because everything they do is on screens, and is so rational and ordered, they crave things that are a bit imperfect, where you can see the marks of the tools that made them.”

A desire to balance out our striving/ ordering and acceptance/disordering impulses must be a good thing, because, in practice, we all need a bit of both. Of course, it’s good to accept our “imperfections”, but then again, complete self-acceptance can shade into apathy and leave you sitting on the sofa in your pyjamas watching Loose Women every day. And a total obsession with order and the appearance of conventional perfection shades into OCD.

Bullen points out that a lot of successful double acts – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Mulder and Scully, Holmes and Watson, Cagney and Lacey, if you like – feature one intuitive self-accepter who is uninterested in conventional standards, and one sensible person who believes in rationalism and order. “To solve problems, you need both approaches,” says Bullen, “and in successful teams, the two have equal weight. It’s rare to find them in one person, but we can try.”

Illustration by Stephen Doherty

Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Magazine, TRUE RANDOM AUTHENTIC, on newsstands now…

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