Life & Wisdom Quote by Tom Robbins

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth. Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. (Page 208 (reported in secondary scholarly discussion; exact first-edition page not directly verified from scanned primary page)). The strongest evidence located points to Tom Robbins's novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as the primary source. Multiple quote aggregators attribute the passage to that book, and a literary essay discussing the novel specifically cites the related line 'Disorder is inherent in stability' to page 208, indicating this passage occurs in that section of the novel. Bibliographic records show the book was first published in 1976 by Houghton Mifflin. I did not locate a directly viewable scan of the original 1976 page, so the exact page number for the full quoted passage remains not fully primary-source confirmed.