I don’t want to convince anyone or prove that the “strong hand” and “order” are bad. I want to talk about something else—how we understand “order,” and how this very understanding leads us to a world championship in stepping on rakes.
Within our topic, the word “order” is surprisingly comprehensive. It denotes two different things, and they’re related in this context. The first meaning is the feeling that everything is happening as it should. Police catch bandits, not ordinary citizens; doctors heal, not cripple; nobody takes bribes, and all supermarket registers work. There’s order in the country.
The second meaning is how everything should be organized and arranged so that this feeling can arise. Order, in the broad sense, is a way that some elements interact with one another.
The desire for “order” arises when disorder sets in. And this desire, in that moment, is understandable. What isn’t understandable is the order—the organization—that is always proposed to “establish order.”
Unfortunately, we understand “establishing order” only in terms of measures that follow from simple cause and effect. Doesn’t work? Fix it! They’re stealing? Ban it! Assign a policeman to everyone! Production is falling? Put the president in charge! We reconstruct the situation from “not working” to “working” in reverse, using only the simplest patterns. It doesn’t even occur to us that if something doesn’t work, maybe it isn’t needed—or that it should work, but not this way. This very linearity in mentally reconstructing “order” from “disorder” is the most terrible thing.
This linearity leads to the absolutization of one specific type of order, or rather—organization—hierarchy. Linear understanding of the “disorder” situation leads us to conclude that hierarchical management is the only possible and correct way out “of the given situation.” The disorder situation suggests an obvious conclusion: it’s not enough to establish hierarchical order in the state; this hierarchy must be extended to as much of non-state life as possible.