The Problem of Order

I want to begin this post by asking a question:

What is order?

Now, I realize that some of you are probably rolling your eyes at this statement. To be fair, it is about as aggressively “college student” as Bob Marley posters, cup noodles, or crippling debt. It is a question that your friend who reads Nietzsche slurs out during a drunken rant. A question that sounded much better in his head. Yes, this question is clichéd; but I still believe that it is worth asking.

This Monday in class, Dr. McCoy had us discuss alphabetical order and what it means. To help facilitate this, she had us flip through the Bedford and think about the greater implications of how the book’s structure. At first glance, everything seemed pretty clear; letters were listed based on what came first in the alphabet in a linear and straightforward manner. There did not seem to be much else to it.

However, something stuck out to me.  I started to notice that the words placed next to each other often had little in common. It was not unusual to find two completely unrelated words right next to each other. Other times, one word would direct you to a completely different part of the book. Yes, you could find words that start with the same letter easily, but other than that, the book was disorganized, chaotic and arbitrarily structured around one superficial element.

That brings me to the exercise our class performed shortly after. We were organized into a line based on the letter of our first name and then our last name. It was at that moment I realized that it was exactly the same as the Bedford. Like those words, our class was put into an arbitrary system of organization based on one minuscule element of who we are. The beginning letters that our first or last names have no intrinsic meaning and say nothing about us as people and yet there we were, sorted into an empty hierarchy of letters and names.

A hierarchy of people based on alphabetical order might sound ridiculous, but it is not that far from our own reality. The word we live in already creates hierarchies based on absurd things. What does race, gender, class or sexual orientation actually say about a person outside of the things we ascribe to them? These concepts only exist because we as human beings have created them out of our desire to make sense of the chaos that is the world. The world is sometimes so impossible to understand that we try to create a semblance of order just to keep ourselves sane. Sometimes people benefit from this order and other times people struggle because of it. It is a cold reality of humankind that I believe will never change.

Wow, that was dark. Anyways, here’s a picture of my dog:

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