The Two Hands of Order — In Plain Words

In Plain Words · United Wisdom
Andrey Zarinsh and Maria Evilkut

Heraclitus calls war the father and king of all. It sounds as though the world is run by a spectacularly dysfunctional family council. But fragment DK B53 raises a philosophical question about conflict and distinctions. It does not give readers permission to hurt people for the sake of the cosmic seating plan.

For our discussion, imagine a giant golden crab in charge of the coatroom. It has two working claws: one white, wearing a velvet glove; the other black, holding a hammer. The crab creates perfect order in the entrance hall.

The white claw gently fastens every shoe. The black claw nails it to the floor. Nobody trips after that, because nobody goes anywhere. The crab awards itself a gold medal for safe movement. On top of the medal sits another medal, for modesty.

The neighbours argue over which claw is better. One defends the softness of velvet; another, the reliability of the nail. The crab is pleased. Nobody has yet asked why the shoe needs to remain nailed down.

Here is the authors' idea: care, law, coercion, and violence can all participate in maintaining some arrangement. Hearing the word “order” and choosing your favourite hand is therefore not enough. Ask what exactly is being preserved, for whom, by what means, and at what cost.

This does not mean good and evil always pursue the same aim. People may destroy out of revenge, pursue an advantage, make mistakes, or deliberately cause harm. An organised system can be unjust. A shared capacity to organise something does not make actions morally equivalent.

The second question is harder still: great evil does not necessarily require creatures that look like demons. Sometimes ordinary people, divided into jobs and willing not to look beyond their own operation, are enough. But thoughtlessness is not the only cause of evil, and knowledge is no guaranteed antidote. Ideology, interests, conscious choices, and coercion matter too.

We will move from physical images to politics and philosophy, then to the historical spread of knowledge. These languages help us ask questions while retaining their differences. The article need not become a third claw.

I. Understanding the Mechanism Does Not Excuse It

There is a moral difference between feeding someone and killing them. It does not disappear because both actions appear in one operational plan. Our fictional crab could give the nail a little velvet cushion. The shoe would still be unable to take a step.

When Arendt writes about the banality of evil, she does not make the crime small or forgivable. Her analysis of Eichmann does not remove his responsibility for participating in Nazi crimes; she supported the death sentence imposed on him. Explaining how actions were carried out means trying to understand how they became possible. It does not mean issuing participants a certificate marked “merely part of the machinery.”

Nor is this permission to shrug: “Everything is connected, so nothing matters.” Connections do not erase distinctions. The same organiser can support accessible assistance and ruthless control. Examine their decisions, consequences, and the possibility of objecting, rather than reading morality from the colour of their gloves.

Finally, different traditions do not offer one answer about the nature of evil. Some teach privation of the good; others describe a pronounced conflict between forces; still others frame the question differently. Declaring a disagreeing tradition “immature” would suit only our crab. It likes every living thing to fit a slot cut in advance.

II. What Physics Lets Us Say about Order

The second law of thermodynamics concerns entropy. In an isolated system—one that exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings—total entropy does not decrease. “Closed” and “isolated” are not interchangeable: a closed system can exchange energy.

Clausius formulated early foundations of the second law in the nineteenth century; Boltzmann developed its statistical interpretation. In this account, what matters is how many microscopic arrangements can realise the system's overall state. States with more such possibilities are more probable. “Disorder” can serve as a rough explanation, but entropy is a physical quantity, rather than a verdict on bad behaviour. Scattered slippers do not measure their owner's moral entropy.

A living organism exchanges matter and energy with its environment. It can maintain its organisation without violating the second law. In What Is Life?, Schrödinger used the familiar image of feeding on “negative entropy.” This is neither a way around a law of nature nor proof that death means maximum disorder in every sense.

Wiener, the author of Cybernetics, connects information, organisation, and control, and pictures civilisation as a temporary island of order. The image is useful: rules, knowledge, and infrastructure need maintenance. But mathematical information does not automatically amount to understanding, truth, or conscience. The crab had exquisitely precise information about every nail and no interest whatsoever in the foot.

Prigogine's work, including his Nobel lecture, examines processes away from equilibrium and the formation of structures under particular conditions. His book with Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, gives a broad account of this approach. Conditions away from equilibrium can contribute to the emergence of organisation. That does not mean every bout of chaos must produce something useful.

We can borrow a metaphor: human arrangements require work and sometimes change through tension. We cannot borrow physical proof that cruelty is necessary. The second law has signed no orders specifying whom to coerce. When the crab attached a thermodynamics diploma to its hammer, the hammer remained a hammer.

III. Leviathan: Protection and Force

In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes depicts the state of nature without a common authority as a war of all against all. Security, work, and agreements are precarious. The sovereign answers that threat: people authorise power for the sake of protection.

This is a construction in political philosophy. It is not a measurement of society's entropy, and it does not prove that everyone without a boss immediately starts a war. Yet Hobbes's question remains powerful: how do we live together when promises have no protection against arbitrary acts and force?

In Politics as a Vocation (1919), Weber defines the state through its successful claim to a monopoly on legitimate physical violence within a territory. “Legitimate” matters here. This describes power and the recognition of its claims. It is not a certificate of moral approval for every state operation.

Coercion is not always evil: law can protect people from attack. State force does not always protect: it can serve injustice. “There is order” is therefore insufficient. We need questions about rights, accountability, the grounds for restrictions, and opportunities to challenge them.

The crab declared its entrance hall a sovereign state of shoes. One law prohibited stealing footwear. That could be useful. A second law prohibited footwear from being more than a metre away from the crab. This was useful primarily to the crab. It insisted that both laws expressed the same love of order.

Hobbes's discussion of someone carrying out an action contains the image of a person as another's instrument. Comparing this with Milgram's later discussion of obedience is interesting. Declaring Hobbes the author of an experimentally confirmed “agentic state” three centuries before the experiments is not justified. The questions and ways of supporting the claims differ.

IV. Opposites: Connection without Moral Equivalence

In Chapter 2 of the Daodejing, naming the beautiful and the good is connected with the emergence of contrasting distinctions. High makes sense beside low; difficult beside easy. We can hear a question about how our judgements create pairs.

Wu-wei, non-action, offers a way of acting different from forcibly imposing a form. It is not an instruction to do nothing when someone is being harmed. Daoist language invites us to consider interventions whose frantic activity creates new problems. Our crab, for example, aligned the slippers so furiously that it smashed through the floor. The floor was promptly charged with resisting order.

Heraclitus speaks of the unity of opposites—day and night, war and peace, satiety and hunger—and of strife participating in the world's arrangement. Fragments B67 and B80 can be read alongside the Daoist text. Resemblance does not prove a shared history of origin. Nor does harm to people become just because a philosopher used the word “strife.”

For Hegel, the movement of thought involves contradictions and Aufhebung, sublation: something is cancelled and at the same time preserved in a changed form. The popular “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” pattern does not exhaust his philosophy. We need not turn it into a universal three-stage machine for every historical disaster.

The “cunning of reason” is Hegel's image of private passions participating in a course of history that exceeds people's intentions. It is a philosophical understanding of history. It does not guarantee that war, greed, and cruelty will necessarily pay out in freedom.

The crab proposed ripping out the right shoe, destroying the left, and producing a barefoot person at a higher stage of development. The opposites had technically participated. The outcome was less impressive. Not every contradiction must be useful, and not every injury deserves to be called “sublation.”

V. Privation of the Good and an Ambiguous Remedy

Augustine, who had passed through Manichaeism, develops an understanding of evil as the privation or corruption of the good: privatio boni. This is a theological answer. Evil is not a separate substance that you can pour into someone from a bottle.

But the absence of a “substance of evil” does not mean evil actions and harm are absent. A loss of safety is real, even though safety is not a liquid. Manichaean ideas should not be reduced to a cartoon of “two completely identical gods,” either. Its dispute over the principles of light and darkness has its own substance.

In the Theodicy (1710), Leibniz connects evil with the limitations of creatures and considers the harmony of the whole. Shadows and dissonances provide images of how a particular element can be understood within a larger picture. This is his philosophical argument, open to discussion and challenge. It gives no person the right to impose suffering on another for the sake of a beautiful overall pattern.

The crab hung a picture of the perfect entrance hall on the wall. Every nailed-down shoe cast an essential shadow. When the owner wanted to leave, the crab objected that the picture would lose its depth. A fine frame can sometimes treat its occupants very badly.

The Greek pharmakon can mean remedy or poison. In Plato's Phaedrus, writing is discussed as a means whose usefulness is inseparable from questions about memory and knowledge. Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy works with this ambiguity. His analysis does not reduce to an everyday rule about getting the dosage right.

This gives the article a powerful image: we cannot judge a means solely by its promise. Knowledge can help us understand, but can also serve deception and control. Law can protect, while a formal procedure can entrench injustice. Examine the use and the consequences. The label “medicine” does not make the contents of the bottle beneficial.

VI. The Banality of Evil: Becoming a Cog Does Not Remove Responsibility

In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt discusses the danger of someone who replaces judgement with stock phrases and the logic of their office. In her letter to Scholem, she contrasts evil's enormous consequences with its lack of depth, as she understands it.

This is her interpretation, rather than an established percentage of all historical crimes. It does not follow that perpetrators always fail to understand what is happening, that convictions and interests are absent, or that there is nobody to expose. Organisers, people carrying out the actions, and conscious supporters of harm remain people whose conduct can be investigated and for which they are responsible.

Milgram offers a different kind of evidence: an experiment. His 1963 paper describes 40 men who were asked to punish a “learner” with increasing shocks. The learner was a confederate of the researcher; the generator simulated the shocks. Twenty-six participants, or 65%, reached the 450-volt setting; fourteen stopped obeying. The final switches were marked XXX, rather than “lethal.”

This concerns behaviour within a particular setup. It does not prove that 65% of humanity is willing to kill. The study shows how serious the question of obedience is, but cannot be applied to every crime without further argument. The “agentic state” is Milgram's explanatory idea about shifting responsibility onto authority. It is neither an excuse for the person obeying nor an uncontested account of every participant.

In After Ten Years, written by the end of 1942, Bonhoeffer reflects on the danger of stupidity as a social surrender of one's own judgement. The text predates his arrest, although it was later included in the collection of prison letters. This historical excerpt on duty and responsibility helps clarify his question: what happens when an order seems sufficient grounds for action, and responsibility is handed to the person giving it?

His “stupidity” does not mean insufficient education, a feature of someone's intelligence, or a diagnosis. We cannot call everyone who disagrees stupid and thereby excuse ourselves from addressing their arguments. For Bonhoeffer, resistance is connected with faith and responsibility before God. It cannot be reduced to secular advice to read more books.

In The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Cipolla offers a satirical scheme: a person harms others without benefiting themselves, and sometimes loses out too. In this scheme, a bandit at least gains from another's loss, so the calculation is easier to understand. The distinction helps us notice actions that cannot be explained by a rational exchange of benefits. It is not a measured universal law establishing that incompetence is always more dangerous than a criminal, or that we cannot protect ourselves against it.

Here we can imagine some entirely fictional machinery. The crab assigned a golden iron to maintain the crease in an empty sock. The iron burned through the sock, the table, and its own stand. Every operation was completed in the proper order. Even the crab finally noticed the difference between a correct sequence and a good action.

These comparisons chiefly ask what allows an ordinary action to become part of destruction. Alongside “who is the villain?” come “who makes the decision, who checks the result, and who can stop the harm?” Conscious intent is not ruled out. Responsibility does not evaporate inside a system.

VII. Five Traditional Languages of Order

In ancient Egyptian tradition, Ma'at is associated with truth, justice, and the arrangement of the cosmos; isfet with their violation. In the image of judgement after death, the heart is weighed against the feather of Ma'at. This is a religious language of responsibility and the world as it ought to be. It is not an ancient thermodynamics textbook.

In Vedic language, rita expresses order in the world and in right action; Varuna and Mitra are associated with it, and anrita opposes it. Ritual, moral, and cosmic meanings intersect. The later concepts of dharma and karma are related to this strand, but are not simply three interchangeable labels on one box.

In Zoroastrian tradition, Asha is associated with truth, righteousness, and order; Druj with falsehood. Good thoughts, words, and deeds express ethical participation. But the relationship between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, and the understanding of evil, cannot be reduced to Augustine: Gerardo Gnoli's study shows differences among Iranian understandings of dualism. Expecting good to prevail does not make evil a mere illusion, or mean that its actions are already harmless.

The Daoist Dao and wu-wei return us to action that does not try to use brute force to replace the course of things with its own project. For Heraclitus, Logos and fragment B114 connect human laws with a common order. Even where “law” and “order” recur, their meanings and foundations remain different.

Avestan Asha and Vedic rita are connected by Indo-Iranian linguistic and cultural kinship. This does not establish that Egyptian Ma'at, Chinese Dao, and Greek Logos are one concept, or that the traditions never encountered one another historically. Similar questions allow comparison. A claim of common origins needs its own supporting argument.

Our crab tried to fit all these words into a universal shoe size. Ma'at was declared a size forty; Logos, forty-one; Dao was told to stretch a little. The resulting box could hold nothing except the crab's desire to have a box.

The authors' shared question here is more modest: how do people understand the world as it ought to be, and their responsibility for it? The answers differ. No comparative list obliges anyone to consider the existing order right merely because it exists.

VIII. Two Illusions and Several Real Tasks

The first illusion is that choosing a side with the right name is enough. We can then stop checking our own actions. But moral allegiance cannot replace an assessment of a particular decision: people with good aims can still choose bad means.

This does not make choosing a side always pointless. Sometimes the differences between positions are enormous, and neutrality preserves injustice. Our question does not prohibit choosing. It prohibits treating the chosen side's name as a ready-made answer to everything.

The second illusion is that stopping harm requires only finding someone who looks monstrous. Exposing those responsible and holding them accountable are necessary. Yet the system of implementation, rewards, and silence can outlive an individual carrying out its actions. We need to see both personal decisions and the arrangements that support them.

Knowledge and independent judgement help us examine the grounds for actions and notice another person's perspective. But intelligent, educated people can also deliberately cause harm. We therefore need rights, working limits on power, accessible ways to challenge decisions, and support for people who refuse to participate, alongside thought.

The crab read a treatise on freedom and immediately learned to explain why the nailed-down shoe was actually expressing itself through stillness. Further education improved the old nail. Things changed only when the reader gained the chance to examine the explanation and disagree with the crab without punishment.

The history of knowledge shows such possibilities. It does not establish the world's inevitable improvement. Changes can bring conflict, new monopolies, and losses. Progress does not arrive on the textbook delivery schedule.

IX. Five Centuries: Printing, Reading, and Changing the Familiar

Around the middle of the fifteenth century, Gutenberg developed European printing with movable metal type. This was not the invention of printing from scratch for the entire world. In Europe, opportunities to reproduce and circulate books changed: texts increasingly became available beyond the former narrow circle.

Print runs became large, but the press itself could not distinguish truth from falsehood. It could reproduce the Bible, scientific work, accusations, and slander. Here is our pharmakon in material form: access to texts matters, while their content and uses require separate judgement.

The Reformation shows printing becoming part of religious and social conflict. Luther's Ninety-five Theses appeared in 1517. His writings circulated through the printing network; the German New Testament appeared in 1522, and the complete Bible in 1534. People gained new opportunities to read Scripture and participate in disputes about its meaning.

This changed relationships with authority. It did not eliminate every intermediary, mean there had been no earlier translations, or make the change free of conflict. The Reformation was not one peaceful library event.

In the story of Tyndale, executed in 1536, the image of Scripture available to the boy behind the plough matters. It expresses the wish that reading should not remain the exclusive possession of a narrow group. The actual cost of this history requires serious discussion. Someone else's execution is not an illustration for a joke about the benefits of enlightenment.

A slower process follows: the growth of literacy. Historical research by Buringh and van Zanden and material from Our World in Data help show changes in European reading and book culture. Access to education widened participation. But one sequence of dates cannot establish that literacy created freedom on its own and every other condition was superfluous.

The crab first acquired a press to print instructions for nailing down shoes. Then someone printed a different guide: “How to Tell Whether Your Shoe Is Nailed Down.” The machine was the same. The question reaching the reader had changed.

In Meditationes Sacrae (1597), Bacon connects knowledge with power. In 1784, Kant calls on people to use their own reason. Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, published from 1751 to 1772, collects knowledge and crafts, expanding the possibilities for discussing the world differently. These are different projects, rather than one diagnosis or one political mechanism.

Now for several later ways of examining changes within society.

Foucault: the production of knowledge is connected with relations of power. Who classifies, who defines the norm, whose account is accepted as true? Questions about knowledge also concern how people are governed. This is neither the simple equation “all knowledge is power” nor a promise that more information automatically weakens control.

Gramsci: hegemony rests on force and on habitual ideas of what is acceptable and natural. The “war of position” concerns sustained work in culture and civil society. We can discover that seemingly eternal arrangements were historically created. It does not follow that all norms are false, or that every kind of cultural work must be peaceful and liberating.

Scott: Weapons of the Weak (1985) draws attention to everyday forms of resistance unlike a loud uprising. His research reveals people's actions previously invisible in accounts of power. It does not guarantee that every quiet disagreement will gradually prevail, or that resistance is always safe.

Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) emphasises critical discussion and the possibility of changing institutions. Making changes in stages allows mistakes and consequences to be considered, rather than declaring one vast final project perfect. The comparison with testing theories helps us discuss whether decisions can be corrected. Society does not become a laboratory where the cost of failure can be ignored.

Sen: Development as Freedom considers education and accessible information alongside people's real opportunities. In his 1999 article on democracy, Sen connects the prevention of major famines with an independent democratic country and a relatively free press. This is his historical argument about political incentives and public information. It is not eternal insurance for any system calling itself democratic. Rights and effective opportunities for discussion matter alongside information.

Rogers: Diffusion of Innovations (1962) describes how new ideas and practices spread through people and their connections. Early participants, later groups, sometimes an S-shaped curve and critical mass help us picture the process. They provide no universal threshold beyond which every change becomes irreversible. An idea can stall, be rejected, or spread to harmful effect.

Knowledge can therefore change the conditions in which people think and act. But printing is not freedom, information is not understanding, and understanding is not a good decision. An antidote to blind compliance must include the opportunity to act differently.

X. What This Means for United Wisdom and the Reader

United Wisdom participates in this quiet work: it invites comparisons of religious texts, philosophical schools, myths, and scientific questions without declaring them one doctrine. Readers gain more ways to examine the familiar, rather than a new exclusively correct side.

Ma'at, rita, Asha, Dao, and Logos can be placed alongside one another while retaining their differences. Such comparison does not guarantee anyone's maturity. The project, too, must allow its claims to be examined, challenged, and its convenient overall picture rejected. Otherwise, our version of the printing press will simply produce a more elegant booklet of excuses for the crab.

If useful, you can choose one rule or action that seems obvious and voluntarily ask a few questions.

Question	What it helps examine
What task does this arrangement accomplish?	Safety, working together, habit, or an advantage for a particular participant.
How does it affect people?	Rights, actual benefits, harm, who bears the cost, and opportunities to participate.
What grounds support the explanation?	Evidence, a philosophical argument, religious teaching, a metaphor, or an unsupported claim.
Who can object and correct a mistake?	Available ways to check and change things, including the position of someone with less power.
What can I do in these circumstances?	A manageable, safe action, a request for help, a pause, or declining an excessive risk.

This is not a duty to analyse the world endlessly or a demand to fix a system alone. You can stop if the exercise is unhelpful. When there is a threat, safety and support matter more than heroically proving your independence. Responsibility for someone else's violence does not shift onto the person who could not prevent it.

In the crab's entrance hall, one person asked for the nail to be removed. The crab produced its medal. The person asked whether the medal measured the ability to walk. The crab produced the second medal. They had to return to the shoe.

Removing one nail did not end the world. The shoe stopped standing in perfect alignment and started doing what it was for. The white claw kept a brush; the black claw kept a hammer to repair a shelf. Neither hand had to declare itself eternal evil or ultimate good. Each now had a task that could be discussed.

Order alone does not tell us whether life is arranged well. It becomes worth defending when it can withstand questions about people, rights, consequences, and correction. Beginning to think is a possible first step. Continuing to take responsibility for action is another, equally important piece of work.

Seven Comparisons That Keep the Differences

Ma'at, rita, Asha: languages of truth and the world as it ought to be can be compared; these are not three names for one religion. The kinship of Indo-Iranian concepts does not establish a common genealogy for all five traditions.
Wu-wei and Leviathan: ways of thinking about intervention and shared life differ. Neither following the course of things nor the sovereign's force justifies every existing arrangement.
Heraclitus and the Daodejing: opposites are connected in philosophical reflection; this does not make a good action equivalent to causing harm.
Augustine, Leibniz, Arendt: privation of the good, theodicy, and the banality of carrying out actions answer different questions. They cannot be turned into one proof that “evil does not exist.”
Hegel and Leibniz: the particular is considered in relation to the whole. These are philosophical constructions, rather than permission to make someone else pay for a supposed harmony.
Zoroastrian thoughts, words, and deeds, and Arendt's judgement: attention to thought can be compared; different foundations and the need for action remain.
Kant, Gramsci, and printing in Luther's time: judgement, work on habitual ideas, and the circulation of texts can contribute to change. They do not form a single mechanism of progress guaranteed to be nonviolent.

Sources and Their Roles

The reference points named in the original article are retained. Physical models, philosophical positions, religious teachings, historical processes, and experimental findings address different questions. Links identify materials used selectively in preparing the Russian adaptation; they do not signify a new full reading of every book. The English adaptation inherits the author's stated limits and adds no external audit.

Clausius and Boltzmann — the historical development of the second law and statistical entropy; describing it as “disorder” requires qualifications.
Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944) — living organisation and the image of negative entropy.
Wiener, Cybernetics (1948), The Human Use of Human Beings — information, control, and islands of order.
Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (1984); Prigogine's Nobel lecture (1977) — structures away from equilibrium and the limits of physical analogy.
Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) — security, the sovereign, and a model in political philosophy.
Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919) — the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate physical violence.
The Daodejing, Chapter 2 — connected distinctions and non-action.
Heraclitus, DK B53, B67, B80, B114 — conflict, opposites, and Logos.
Hegel — sublation and the cunning of reason; a philosophical understanding of history.
Augustine, On the Nature of the Good — privation of the good, without asserting a shared religious doctrine.
Leibniz, Essays on Theodicy (1710) — the limitations of creatures and the harmony of the whole.
Plato, Phaedrus; Derrida, Plato's Pharmacy — the ambiguity of pharmakon, writing, memory, and knowledge.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and the letter to Scholem — the banality of evil and judgement, without removing responsibility.
Milgram, Behavioral Study of Obedience (1963); Obedience to Authority (1974) — experimental results and the author's interpretation. The Russian author selectively read the paper's methods and results.
Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years (late 1942); GHDI: the “Who Stands Fast?” excerpt — historical dating, duty, and responsible action; the discussion of stupidity forms part of the essay.
Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1976) — a satirical model of harm and benefit.
Ma'at and isfet — ancient Egyptian religious understandings of truth, justice, and violations of order.
Gutenberg and European printing around 1450 — changed opportunities to reproduce texts.
Luther, the Ninety-five Theses (1517), the New Testament translation (1522), and the Bible (1534); the inherited University of Arizona reference point — the Reformation's printing network.
Tyndale, Scripture translation, and his death in 1536 — access to reading and the cost of religious and political conflict.
Buringh and van Zanden (2009), and inherited Our World in Data materials — book culture and the historical development of literacy, without a single-cause explanation of freedom.
Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597) — the connection between knowledge and power.
Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) — independent judgement and Sapere aude.
Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie (1751–1772) — organising and spreading knowledge.
Foucault — relationships between knowledge and power, without simple identity.
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–1935) — hegemony, common sense, and the war of position.
Scott, Weapons of the Weak (1985) — research into everyday forms of resistance.
Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) — critical discussion and changes to institutions that can be corrected.
Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); Democracy as a Universal Value (1999) — real freedoms, public information, and famine prevention; the Russian author selectively used sections on development and the functions of democracy.
Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1962) — the spread of ideas and practices, without a guaranteed irreversible threshold.
Rita, anrita, dharma, and karma — Vedic and later concepts; Varuna and Mitra in the original strand of comparison.
Asha, Druj, Ahura Mazda, and Angra Mainyu; Gnoli, Evil i. In Ancient Iranian Religions — differences among Iranian teachings about evil, rather than reducing them to privation of the good.

Tags: order, entropy, information, Schrödinger, Wiener, Prigogine, Hobbes, Weber, law, coercion, dialectic, Hegel, Heraclitus, Dao, wu-wei, Augustine, Leibniz, pharmakon, Plato, Derrida, Arendt, banality of evil, Milgram, Bonhoeffer, Cipolla, Ma'at, rita, Asha, printing, Gutenberg, Reformation, Luther, Tyndale, literacy, Bacon, Kant, Diderot, Foucault, Gramsci, Scott, Popper, Sen, Rogers, judgement, responsibility, United Wisdom.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh (@andrey.zarinsh) and Maria Evilkut (@ilkutki) are the author duo behind United Wisdom, a laboratory of united wisdom. Lived experience, the world's traditions, and the language of science let them examine shared questions from several perspectives while preserving differences between teachings and ways of supporting claims.

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut · United Wisdom · A laboratory of united wisdom.