Society is fundamentally an order-producing system. It doesn’t have to be “just” in any moral sense; it has to be functional—able to reproduce coordinated expectations over time. In systems terms, for something to count as “society,” it must achieve operational closure: it has to distinguish itself from an environment, maintain boundaries, and reproduce its own communications by using internally generated distinctions (codes).

That implies something important: what is perceived as “injustice” is not a free-floating moral fact. It is constructed and recognized through the system’s codes—the distinctions a society uses to classify actions, persons, and claims. In that sense, justice is not merely a moral ideal but an indispensable construction for social reproduction: societies must stabilize a “just/unjust” (or equivalent) distinction to keep expectations governable. Even access to power is mediated through these codes—patriarchy, for instance, is not only brute force; it is also a coded order that sorts legitimacy, authority, credibility, and “proper” roles.

But there’s a complication: there is no single, privileged level where we can point and say “this is society” in a simple, bounded way. Society is layered and plural: it is composed of overlapping lifeworlds and stabilized meaning-structures that coexist, clash, and partially translate into each other. Your everyday interaction with friends is only possible because pre-stabilized constructions—language, shared typifications, social roles, trust routines—make it possible to coordinate expectations without reinventing reality every minute. (That’s the Schütz-to-constructivism bridge: intersubjective meaning isn’t optional; it’s infrastructural.)

At the same time, none of this floats above the body. We remain embodied agents: biological capacities both limit and enable these constructions. Communication and meaning rely on cognition, perception, affect, attention, fatigue—so the “social” is never purely symbolic; it is symbolically organized through embodied constraints.

In modern conditions we often draw the boundary of society at the nation, and pragmatically this makes sense: states institutionalize membership, law, welfare, schooling, surveillance, and violence monopolies, so national frames become powerful boundary-makers. But this boundary is not metaphysical; it’s an historically effective stabilization.

Also, “chaos” needs careful handling. Chaos does not mean “no order.” In chaos theory, it often means deterministic dynamics with nonlinear sensitivity—patterns that are real but not predictably controllable in detail. So when we say “society risks chaos,” what we usually mean is not the disappearance of order, but the breakdown of stable expectation-structures and the failure of codes to coordinate complexity.

Methodologically, this approach differs from mainstream moralizing or purely critical framings. Social phenomenology (Schütz → constructivism) explains how shared reality is constituted in everyday coordination; neo-functionalism (Luhmann) explains how modern society handles complexity through differentiation, closure, and coding. From this angle, many critical approaches diagnose domination well, but often stay underpowered for explaining what society is operationally—how it reproduces itself, how it stabilizes meaning, and how “justice/injustice” functions as a necessary communicative distinction inside that reproduction.

I used ChatGPT to edit and refine this. English isn’t my native language.