On January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Joseph Carney delivered a speech titled “Principles and Pragmatism: The Canadian Way” at the Davos Forum. Carney argued that the rules-based international order established after the Cold War has fractured under the actions of certain major powers, and he called on middle powers to unite against these major powers to rebuild a new rules-based international order. Carney’s speech not only received prolonged applause from the elite audience present, but also garnered widespread discussion and attention in the public sphere. Some have already compared the historical significance of this speech to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. The impression this speech gave me, however, is that the era of order has ended, and the era of chaos has arrived.
But now that three months have passed, who still remembers this speech? Incidentally, this Canadian Prime Minister, who lamented that major powers had caused the rules-based international order to fracture, quickly expressed support when the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28. And did the attacks by the United States and Israel not create a new fracture in the international order?
The dizzying changes in the world in recent months and years prompt us to think more deeply about the relationship between order and chaos in human society.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in 2020 and when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I deeply felt that I was already living in an era where order was collapsing. I still remember February 24, 2022. I had just arrived at the library that morning and opened my computer when I saw news that made me feel as if I were sleepwalking: Russia had begun a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I could only leave the library like a walking corpse, yet I saw a peaceful and bustling scene on campus, which made me begin to doubt which one was the true reality. Worse still, I found that initially, there was no one around me with whom I could share this shock. Someone even inquired whether now was a good time to buy the ruble at its bottom. It wasn’t until several days later, as the events gradually unfolded, that I began to notice some reactions one after another.
A complete end to the chaos caused by this war still seems far off, but except for the early confusion and Prigozhin’s rebellion midway, the level of chaos in this war seems to show a downward trend. From the very beginning of the war, order began attempting to integrate chaos. The introduction of fiber-optic drones brought new chaos some time ago; initially, Russia held the advantage with this new type of drone, but gradually Ukraine’s production and usage caught up, thereby creating a new balance. Just in the past few days, Zelenskyy announced the complete success of the first ground offensive operation achieved by ground combat robots in the history of human warfare. Whether this can bring new chaos—especially whether Ukraine can utilize the window of opportunity of this new technology to expand chaos—remains unpredictable. However, looking at the history of World War I, where Britain took the lead in introducing tanks, the impact of the chaos brought by new technology may be short-lived and limited, because the opposing side can quickly find countermeasures.
From a military perspective, the US military’s operation to arrest Maduro can be described as a textbook-perfect operation. The chaos it caused was extremely brief yet extremely profound, and both sides are currently still wrestling to integrate this chaos, while a new order is taking shape.
From these most immediate examples, what I want to point out is that the relationship between order and chaos in contemporary human society seems to be: under an established order, a black-swan-like chaos occurs, but immediately following the occurrence of chaos, society begins to attempt to integrate this chaos, thereby forming a new order. No war begins with the intention of causing a permanent war, but rather only to achieve peace in the way it desires. A new order often means more advanced technology, increasingly thick laws, a deeper understanding of rules, more complex systems, and so on. The evolution of the whole of human society is, by and large, like this.
Both chaos and integration have different modalities, and may bring about different consequences. Here, let us take the 1929 Wall Street crash as an example for discussion. That terrible stock market crash brought about a massive chaos, but this crash was not the fundamental cause of the subsequent economic depression; rather, the Federal Reserve’s mistaken intervention was the fundamental cause. The crash was a moment of chaos, yet the Federal Reserve adopted an incorrect method of integration—namely, reducing the money supply by one-third and raising interest rates—and the resulting liquidity crisis quickly led to a sudden braking of the US economy. Thus, a relatively localized chaos, under a mistaken method of integration, bred a massive chaos, which was the subsequent Great Depression. The New Deal, as an integration of the Great Depression, also brought complex results; some of its measures might have aided economic recovery, but other measures, such as price controls, certainly slowed it down. By the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve already knew how to handle similar chaos, so it did the opposite of what it did after the 1929 crash: printing money and lowering interest rates, thereby ensuring liquidity as much as possible.
The response of various countries to COVID-19 is also an interesting example. While Western countries were struggling in chaos in 2020 due to relaxed management and control methods, China was enjoying the order brought about by strong management and control methods. However, as the situation reached the second half of 2021 and especially 2022, the consequences caused by the different methods of integration had quietly changed.
But if one takes a macro view of contemporary history since the end of World War II from a detached perspective, we will find that the fundamental trend of the times seems to be that new orders brought about by benign methods of integration are preserved, while new orders brought about by adverse methods of integration are forced to adjust into better new orders due to new chaos, even though the latter may bring greater pain.
Incidentally, interested readers can read a recent paper by Zhao Dingxin (in Chinese) and compare it with the views I express here. He proposes that contemporary human society is facing an expanding risk of systemic instability, and that existing mechanisms for preventing and controlling risk, such as law, morality, and the market, may be powerless to cope with it. However, I am not a sociologist, and what I propose is not a social theory, but rather thought or philosophy in a general sense. The terms I use are order and chaos, whereas he uses “positive feedback,” “intellectuality,” and “negative feedback.” The two sets of terms operate on different levels and cannot correspond one-to-one, just as Schopenhauer’s concept of Will and the concept of motivation in today’s psychology are not the same thing. What I refer to as order and chaos are true philosophical ontological concepts; order is a stabilizing force in a cosmological sense, while chaos is an unstable force in a cosmological sense, and whether it is a person’s mood swings, the ups and downs of the stock market, or a nuclear war, they are all different manifestations of chaos.
We must see that the results caused by chaos in history are more often progress rather than instability, even though progress itself is also a form of instability. It is by no means accidental that Carney supported the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, because he clearly believes that this chaos is beneficial, and that this chaos is meant to prevent a greater chaos that might be caused by Iran potentially acquiring nuclear weapons. The material and spiritual lives that people possess today are, in essence, the results of chaos rather than the results of order. If human society were absolute order without any chaos, then history would be as Hegel said, and humanity would have “no history.” Every technological innovation and ideological innovation is an instance of chaos, and entrepreneurship is, in essence, the chaotic element within the economy. This is true from the fellow who discovered how to make fire by drilling wood to the scholars today who designed the Transformer architecture that underpins large language models. And the widespread application of drilling wood to make fire, as well as the universal utilization of various chatbots such as ChatGPT, are all new orders created after these moments of chaos were integrated.
Negative situations of systemic instability do occur, depending on the nature of the chaos itself and the method of integration. The 1929 crash itself was terrible, but the Federal Reserve’s mistaken method of integration created the risk of systemic instability. The powerful military capabilities of the various belligerent nations in World War II led to terrible destruction and devastation. Once COVID-19 began to spread, no matter what method of integration was adopted, death and suffering were already inevitable. These cases all caused systemic instability. But history shows that even if systemic instability has already been caused, it can likewise ultimately be successfully integrated and form a new order. The Great Depression, World War II, and COVID-19 have all become historical memories, while the Federal Reserve learned how to respond to stock market crashes, stronger international coordination mechanisms were established, and vaccines were rapidly developed.
But I would like to call the reader’s attention to the fact that my meaning is not that because previous systemic instabilities were successfully integrated, future systemic instabilities can also likely be successfully integrated. We must note changes in two aspects: first, the frequency of systemic instability is becoming lower and lower, and its intensity is also becoming lower and lower; and the reason why this situation occurs is because, second, human society’s capacity to integrate chaos has improved, and third, the chaos of human society is increasingly being suppressed into the depths of the unconscious.
Compared with various pre-modern systemic instabilities, the systemic instabilities of the 20th and 21st centuries (especially after World War II) are like minor squabbles. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) caused the German region to lose about one-third of its population; the proportion of population reduction it caused in Germany far exceeded the proportion of population reduction caused by World War I and World War II in Germany and Europe. However, the ultimate integration of this chaos brought beneficial consequences, such as the Peace of Westphalia laying the cornerstone of modern international relations, and policies of freedom of belief and religious tolerance expanding. Granted, no one wishes to become the cost sacrificed in the process of chaos and integration, but considering macro-historical issues from a detached perspective is absolutely necessary—it appears that even the most terrible systemic instability can ultimately be successfully integrated.
More importantly, human society’s capacity to integrate chaos has significantly improved. If the integration capacity of human society in past eras was mainly manifested in post-hoc remedies, then now human integration capacity has evolved the characteristic of institutionalized advance prevention. Humanity needed a Thirty Years’ War to know the significance of establishing an international diplomatic system, but humanity does not need a ready-made nuclear war to know what its consequences would be. At present, this institutionalized advance prevention is already reflected in the policy management of AI, and in places like the European Union, this capacity for advance-preventative integration is even excessive, potentially suffocating the progress of AI. Some time ago, Cloudflare caused a part of the international internet to fall into a brief collapse due to a single line of misconfiguration, but this error was quickly corrected, and there is also reason to believe that Cloudflare will be more capable of preventing such problems.
I do not intend to discuss the source of human society’s capacity for integration, but simply put, human nature as a whole tends to confine chaos within the unconscious. From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, a psychiatric symptom called hysteria was prevalent in Europe, which was a nearly performative, overt, and somatic symptom, whether individual or collective; but in the contemporary era, this symptom has become quite rare. This means that chaos is being gradually suppressed into the unconscious by humanity.
What must be firmly kept in mind is that order and chaos in human society are not a symmetrical binary; rather, order is conscious, while chaos is unconscious. The brief disorder that may be caused by chaos will either be integrated in advance or will be rapidly integrated once chaos enters the conscious level. A healthy and continuously progressing society must be built upon the continuous integration of order and chaos, rather than being built upon the singular prevention and suppression of chaos. Truly speaking, the greater problem in human society today is the over-suppression of chaos. This is not to say that systemic instability cannot happen—after all, we do not know on which day accidents will arrive, and sometimes these accidents do not come from human society itself. But humanity has been proven to be an animal that likes to form order at the conscious level. And even if systemic instability occurs, even if an extremely painful price is paid, it will ultimately become a link in a new order. If one stops eating for fear of choking out of anxiety over a single accident that might arrive on some unknown day—because of an event with a one-in-a-million probability of occurrence—or even obsessively goes so far as to remodel the entire mode of social organization, the loss outweighs the gain.
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