Chaos Died the Moment It Was Understood

There was only one way for a being that was complete in the story to die: to become completed.

At the end of the “Fit for Emperors and Kings” chapter in Zhuangzi, there is a short fable. The ruler of the Southern Sea was called Shu (儵), the ruler of the Northern Sea was Hu (忽), and the ruler of the Center was called Hundun (Chaos, 混沌). Shu and Hu often met in the land of Hundun, and each time, Hundun treated them with utmost hospitality.

Pondering how to repay his kindness, Shu and Hu reached a conclusion. Every human has seven orifices to see, hear, eat, and breathe—two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth—yet Hundun alone had none. So they decided to bore one orifice each day over seven days.

On the seventh day, Hundun died.

When I first read this story, I interpreted it as a tale of failure—an accident born of clumsy good intentions. But the more I reread it, the more I was caught not by their intention, but by their order of operations. Shu and Hu never asked Hundun what he needed. They simply measured what Hundun lacked against what they themselves possessed.

That calculation feels familiar because I have used it often myself. When I want to understand someone, I first translate that person into a language I know. This person is quieter than me, this person is slower than me, this person lacks something. The moment I perceive a lack, understanding has already turned into something else: the desire to fill it.

There was someone who first named this concept of a benchmark and assigned numbers to it. He came not from mythology, but from the realm of statistics.

The Face Named Average

In 1830, the newly independent Kingdom of Belgium, having just broken away from the Netherlands, was planning a nationwide statistical survey. The man tasked with this undertaking was Adolphe Quetelet, the astronomer who founded the Brussels Royal Observatory. He transferred the very methods he had used to measure the positions of stars onto human beings. He measured the chest circumferences of recruits, recorded the heights of soldiers, and plotted the values along a curve.

At the peak of that curve—the point where the greatest number of people clustered—Quetelet gave it a name: the “Average Man” (l’homme moyen). In his 1835 treatise Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, he extended this concept to society as a whole, work that earned him the title of the father of modern statistics. The calculation that survives today as the Body Mass Index (BMI) also originated from his hands.

To Quetelet, the average was not a summary, but a standard. He believed that the further a person deviated from the average, the closer they were to an error left unfinished by nature. Over the following century, this notion fundamentally reshaped the meaning of the word “normal.” Originally, normal was a carpenter’s term derived from the Latin normalis, meaning a right angle. After Quetelet, it became a ruler used to measure human beings.

When we bring this ruler back to Hundun, what Shu and Hu were doing becomes even clearer. They, too, possessed a ruler: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth. They measured Hundun with that ruler, identified what was missing, and set out to fill it in. The concept of “normalcy” performs the exact same operation: it establishes a single form as the standard, and translates any distance from that standard into a deficit.

How far this translation has reached can be seen if we simply count. The domain where this can be counted most vividly is language.

There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. According to UNESCO, about 43 percent of them are endangered, and on average, one language disappears every two weeks. Since 1950, approximately 230 languages have vanished completely.

The final moment of each dying language is usually quiet. When only one fluent speaker remains and that person passes away, the language closes entirely. What disappears along with them is not merely a list of vocabulary. The boundaries of color unique to that language, the ways of addressing kin, and the grammar once used to describe the forest vanish together. The standard language fills that void, but the space filled is not of the same magnitude as what was lost.

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Neither Shu and Hu, nor Quetelet, nor the nation-states that established standard languages believed they were committing acts of violence. The desire to repay a debt of gratitude, the wish to understand society more precisely, the justification of fostering communication and unity—the point where the boundary between understanding and normalization blurs is always right here: the moment goodwill is filled with supreme confidence.

To understand is to translate the unfamiliar into a familiar language.

And whatever does not exist in that language cannot be translated.

This is why it is not merely the story of Hundun alone. The same gesture repeats itself under different guises.

The process by which modern nation-states established standard languages and demoted regional tongues to dialects; the process by which psychiatry delineated the normal range and labeled everything outside it as a disorder; the process by which today’s platforms average user behavioral data to define normal usage patterns and flag outlier accounts as anomalies. Though the eras and technologies differ, they all repeat the same action: establishing a standard, measuring existence against that standard, and naming whatever cannot be measured as a deficit or an error. A standard is not discovered; it is declared. The moment it is declared, whatever lay outside it suddenly acquires the status of the “outside”—even though, until yesterday, it was simply another way of being.

In the end, all these stories lead back to Hundun. And there is something strange about it: Hundun never once resisted. Over the seven days as the holes were bored one by one, Hundun never uttered a word of pain. That is because he did not yet possess the language to articulate what was happening to him. That language was destined to arise only through the orifices being carved, and by the time that language was complete, Hundun was no longer there.

Even now, whenever I reach out in an attempt to understand someone, I sometimes ask myself:

Is what I am trying to fill something that person truly lacks, or is it simply invisible to my ruler?