A World In Chaos

The world is divided by dangerous and shifting faultlines the global order is suffering a period of dislocation. Since the onset of the 21st century, the world is embroiled into a war with itself. The democracy is receding in the era of rising populism, and nonagenarian like Kissinger are hearing the drums of the Third World War. Donald Trump, in his four years presidency, shook the foundations of the United States of America and leaving the White House in tatters in January 2021. President Erdogan is pampering the ambition of restoration of the Ottoman empire while reigning in the Kemalist forces. Muhammad Bin Salman is riding his ruthless aspirations to lead Arabs against the Iranian regime. President Xi Jinping’s China struts the global stage with newfound confidence and economic prowess. Pakistan is finding itself again between a rock and a hard place with instability at its heart and a saphronised India on its doorsteps. Worst of all, the conflict-ridden world is threatened by a pandemic that has caused an economic bloodbath from Wall Street to Tokyo with millions of lives lost and billions at risk to fall prey to a virus that is changing faster than its cure. T H Hassan analyses a grandly messed up world and proposes solutions to resolve the undergoing crises and conflicts. T M Hassan analyses the world at conflict while drawing upon the ancient enmities and imminent collisions that define the struggle for power and control in the twenty-first century. Region by region, it delayers the causes, contexts, actors and likely outcomes of globally significant violent struggle now underway. This book is an imperative read to make sense of the fractured and perilous world around us and find an exit from the ongoing chaos.

All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.

In this dramatic short story -- a prequel to the award-winning Chaos Walking Trilogy -- author Patrick Ness gives us the story of Viola's journey to the New World. Whether you're new to Chaos Walking or an established fan, this prequel serves as a fascinating introduction to the series that Publishers Weekly called one of the most important works of young adult science fiction in recent years.

This is the first book-length study of William James' style, arguing that the manner in which James writes The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience serves to construct a chaotic world for his readers. The book examines the uses of chaos in western literature and philosophy and reaches two conclusions: that chaos may be "utter confusion and disorder," but, paradoxically, that disorder is communicated through some particular order -- in Joyce's term, all chaos is "chaosmos." Secondly, what is essential about chaos is what it does: nothing is inherently chaotic, rather chaos is used to contrast with or challenge something that is more structured or formed. Finally, the author presents an examination of the religious function of James' chaotic worldview as a disorientation which orients.

Adopting an historical approach, explores four controversies facing global analyses today: the geography of world power, the power of states versus the power of capital, the social power of subordinate groups, and the changing balance of civilizational power.

Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism From a New York Times investigative reporter, this “authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media” (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world. The Chaos Machine is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein). We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone. Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear. His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

Comprehensive overview of the inroads made by Complexity Thinking approaches and ideas in the study and practice of world politics. Why are policymakers, scholars, and the general public so surprised when the world turns out to be unpredictable? World Politics at the Edge of Chaos suggests that the study of international politics needs new forms of knowledge to respond to emerging challenges such as the interconnectedness between local and transnational realities; between markets, migration, and social movements; and between pandemics, a looming energy crisis, and climate change. Asserting that Complexity Thinking (CT) provides a much-needed lens for interpreting these challenges, the contributors offer a parallel assessment of the impact of CT to anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric (post-human) International Relations. Using this perspective, the result should be less surprise when confronting the dynamism of a fragile and unpredictable global life.

Chaos can enter our lives in many different ways--through death, divorce or conflict--with friends and family, or at work. Joanne Wieland-Burston, through her work as a Jungian analyst, is no stranger to chaos, and frequently acts as companion, support and guide to those whose lives are in turmoil. Chaos and Order in the World of the Psycheshows that the experience of chaos is generally both negative and frightening, destabilizing the individual and provoking feelings of insecurity. People, therefore, often seek to deny and avoid chaos--but chaos that is blocked off does not disappear. It manifests itself in depression, fear, anxiety and various physical symptoms, often making us incapable of performing the simplest daily tasks. The author describes how she helps people to meet the chaos, to accept and see it as the starting-point for a new order in their lives. This "organic order" is better suited to their needs and personality, and provides them with the basis to come through their chaos and to lead fuller, happier and more satisfying lives. Wieland-Burston explores the modern attitude to chaos, showing how we shun and deny it while at the same time overestimating the importance of orderliness. Contemporary western society has no tools to deal with chaos, unlike "primitive" cultures, whose myths, tales and rites reveal a deep commitment to developing and transmitting to future generations models of chaos confrontation. Chaos and Order in the World of the Psychedraws upon these ancient cultures and upon modern scientific findings of chaos theory to show how we can regain the wisdom we once possessed and have now lost.