The order of chaos

“In a society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by millions of people–and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its banks.  Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less than does civilized society: it is just that they operate from the bottom up, not from the top down.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach