The Law of Eristic Escalation

Imposition of order = Escalation of Disorder.

When I was a kid, I had a poster of “Murphy’s Law” variants on the wall of my bedroom. (Yes, even as a kid I was a cynic.) You’ll find reproductions of this 1979 classic by Celestial Arts all over the internet.

Among such observations as “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw” and “Everyone has a scheme for getting rich that will not work”, was one bit of advice I’ve only found more true with every year: “If you fool around with a thing for very long you will screw it up.”

A more accurate way of phrase the underlying principle might be, “If you keep trying to impose your will on a thing for very long, you will screw it up.” You can fool around with a thing if you’re just fooling — Sacred Fooling, enjoying, accepting, observing, considering. It’s when you start fooling around with a thing in the sense of trying to change it, trying to impose your will on it, your own sense of order, that you will screw it up.

Order fetishists have been causing trouble since the very start

As Kerry Thornley, a.k.a Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, co-founder of the Discordian Society, wrote:

Eristic Avatars can also be ascertained by the fact that they are always ignorant of their mission and have no idea they are serving Eris or, for that matter, that they are even promoting confusion.

That is made possible by the Law of Eristic Escalation, of which you must innocent to serve as Eristic Avatar. (For an unknown reason, it does not work as well for those of us who guilty of it.)

This Law pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order. It is:Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos.

Fenderson's Amendment adds that the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the
more it does when it does!

Armed with the Law of Eristic Escalation and Fenderson's Amendment
any imbecile - not just a sociologist - can understand politics.

…

"We need more laws with stiffer penalties to rid our community of drugs," says an innocent pawn of Eris. To be sure, these laws make smuggling and selling and buying drugs more risky. That, in turn, drives up their prices - thus making them more profitable. So more money and work goes into expanding the market for the contraband - in keeping with the Law of Eristic Escalation.

Or, as the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu simply said, "The more laws there are, the more crime there is."

— Kerry Thornley, Introduction to the 5th Edition of Principia Discordia

Or as Lao Tzu put it:

One who desires to take and remake the Empire will fail. The Empire is a divine thing that cannot be remade. He who attempts it will only mar it.

He who seeks to grasp it, will lose it.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter XXIX, Dwight Goddard and Henri Borel, trans.

Those who have studied physics, of course, recognize “Imposition of order = Escalation of Disorder” as a restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the Law of Eristic Escalation applies to all human affairs, even though we are not in a closed thermodyamic system.

Some science fiction fans may recognize the corollary stated in the film Star Wars by heroine Princess Leia to the tyrant Darth Vader: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

That doesn't mean stable order is impossible. But it's the order of a
well-tended Zen garden, where the gardener works with each plant's individual qualities, the order inherent in them; not the imposed order of the machine or the empire.

All of human history testifies to the truth of Eristic Escalation, but we’re getting to live through an especially vivid demonstration in the first third of the 21st Century. We live in a society characterized by conflict between two sorts of unhealthy hierarchical order: the capitalist order of Red Tribe, where rich people’s riches prove that they are better than the rest of us and should be in charge, and the professional-managerial order of Blue Tribe, where the advanced degrees and credentials of “educated” professionals prove that they are better than the rest of us and should be in charge.

Each of these factions manages to grab power for a while, impose their idea of Order, escalating Chaos as a result and creating the opportunity for the other faction to grab power and make the same mistake of believing that they can mold the world to their liking.

And thus…(gestures broadly at the contemporary United States).