This is a little titbit that I thought of while I was doing nothing.
I was sitting and contemplating the differences between order and control, and I thought I'd give it a proper blog and write down my thoughts about it. First of all, order is a type of control, and control is a type of order. You cannot have one without the other, so at the fundamental level they are very much alike. I will therefore look at each one and try to analyze it as we go.
To have order, you need a set of rules. This doesn't mean that order is neat, it can also be one giant chaotic mess. But the reason why order is there is because everything or everybody are following certain rules. Think of the natural laws and how everything reacts with each other in a certain way. If there were no rules determining what something does in a particular situation, we would not be able to build anything lasting on it's foundations.
Besides having rules, they must also follow a specific kind of logic. If the rules are random you will be left with chaos. As long as the rules are clearly defined and follow a specific logical pattern, you can have order. To demonstrate this, let's take a society, and let's call it society A. Society A has all the normal rules we would expect of a society. They have laws that says not to murder, steal, assault etc. But society A doesn't have any laws that forbid the consumption of meat. Now let's take a look at society B. Society B has the same laws as society A, except that society B forbids the consumption of meat. Therefore society B is based on fruits and vegetables. These two societies can exist perfectly fine apart, but if you took a citizen of society A and switched him with a citizen of society B, you would have a sort of chaos. You have now introduced a foreign entity that doesn't follow the rules and logic of the two societies.
In this case the order must be enforced. If the person who enjoyed meat tried to get some, it would be illegal and he had to be punished. If the person who couldn't eat meat tried some, he would have broken an internal order, and would perhaps feel guilty. In the first example the person who enjoys meat is not at conflict with himself, but the society is at conflict with him. He upsets the order, and thus he has to be punished to uphold the rules and logic. In the second example the person is perfectly fine to eat whatever he wants, but having lived in a society that forbids meat all his life, he would probably find it a guilty pleasure. This person would face a dilemma within himself, and while the order of the society is not disturbed, his own inner order is. Something has to give. Either A/B stays true to his, or his society's, beliefs or he breaks the rules and tries meat.
In either case order has been broken. Therefore it is a good time to talk about chaos. Chaos is the opposite of order, which means that chaos works by having no rules and no logic. It doesn't necessarily mean that chaos doesn't follow logic or rules, just that it is random. In the case of the citizens, they both follow seemingly random logic, compared to the logic of the society they were put in, and has a different set of logic as well, which would also be seen as random. If we took the citizens to the next level, and thought up a society C that has the same rules as society A, but all of it's citizens have different rules and logics within themselves, we would also see chaos on a mass scale. In this case, order is maintained by the society's rules, but each citizen is secretly operating based on their own. Such a society is more or less what we live in, and that's how we have crime.
Another interesting aspect of chaos is that, if a system of order is particularly large enough, even if all the elements follow a pattern that pattern can change based on chance. Take crystal structures, for instance. They will fit into formation and follow a pattern, but the results can be chaotic. You can manipulate the patterns, of course, like with a snow flake for instance. But the ways you can combine the patterns seems almost endless.
Now let's take a look at control. What does it mean to be in control? To take charge of a situation and direct it's flow? I like to think of control as being able to change something at any time. To explain it better, I will use the domino effect. If you can stop the falling of the dominos, you are in control. If you somehow built a very large domino structure, and you are no longer capable of stopping it, you are not in control. Based on this definition a person in control of a situation can change, stop or start whatever the person wants at any given time. Looking at it from a human perspective, you can also be in control if the other person lets you be in control. You could technically argue that the person being controlled could stop, start or change the situation at will, and therefore be the one who really is in control, and you'd be right. But most often than not, there are circumstances to this that means the person does what they are told because of something else controlling them. It could also be that something compels them to do as they are told, and as such simple act as a piece of the puzzle. Thus we could form a "chain of control" which extends pretty far with each person being controlled by something else, but being in control of something. This might be better for a different discussion, as I just want to look at what control means for order.
If we use the example of the two societies again, then society B exercises it's control over the meat loving citizen when he tries to get meat. They are able to put him in a prison, effectively taking away his freedom and thereby controlling where he is and what he is doing. However control is not what we call inanimate chemistry or laws of physics. In order to control, there must be a will. And to break order, there must be a will. That is why we cannot say that "something has asserted control" unless it is a thinking being. Because order is just obediently followed without any encouragement needed in chemistry or physics.
Now we can begin to see a certain pattern. In thinking beings, order is maintained with control. Control in this case means to discourage or encourage behaviour that fits with the order. Order is therefore a term that has a very passive meaning to it. Order is just there, being followed or not, while control has a very active meaning. Control is what a thinking being use to force another thinking being to follow the order, or what a thinking being forces objects to follow. In a way a building would be order formed through control of the humans who built it. Once it is built, it requires maintenance, yes, but that is because the atoms are following the same logic and rules as they did when they were put together in a certain way.
So to compare order and control more directly, control is probably the more easy to explain. It is easy to control someone or something to do as you want to, if you have the power to do so. But order is what happens without control. If the person or object you want to control still follow your order, then you will have achieved a passive order where they follow your rules and logic. If the person or object you want to control do not follow your order when you are no longer in control, then your order was imposed on them and they do not truly follow it.
As kinksters it is obvious that control can be sexy. And to lose control can be intoxicating. But usually a person do not want to be under control all of the time, or have lost control all of the time. Therefore if a person can regain control, or otherwise can regain a different order than the one you imposed, then once your control is lost they will naturally bounce back to their preferred order. Control is therefore fleeting, and must be maintained, while order is more of a baseline that a person can fall back to. If you desire something more long term, then you will have to change the order so that even when control is lost, the order remains the same.
I thank you all for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the thoughts. Also my favourite colour is red.
