"Surveying the scene, some people are provoked by the absence of order and coherence which appears to them to be its dominant feature: its wastefulness, its frustration, its dissipation of human energy, its lack not merely of a premeditated destination but even of any discernible direction of movement. It provides an excitement similar to that of a stock-car race; but it has none of the satisfaction of a well-conducted business enterprise. Such people are apt to exaggerate the curent disorder; the absence of plan is so conspicuous that the small adjustments, which restrain the chaos seem to them nugatory; they have no feeling for the warmth of untidiness but only for its inconvenience. But what is significant is not the limitations of their powers of observation, but the turn of their thoughts. They feel that there ought to be something that ought to be done to convert this so-called chaos into order, for this is no way for rational human beings to be spending their lives. Like Apollo when he saw Daphne with her hair hung carelessly about her neck, they sigh and say to themselves, 'What if it were properly arranged.'"
--Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, 1956

There is something to be said for order and purpose. I sometimes think I would prefer the sort of regime described in the Republic in which the vocations of its people are discerned by a well-ordered system that is aimed at justice and the common good. And the argument that individual goods are greatest men do what they ought to do is persuasive to me. Of course, one of the goods to be considered is liberty, and I am unsure what balance should be struck. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the turn of thoughts that the author is describing.

Ralph: I think that people can have a good degree of order and purpose in their lives and in their society as a whole without being given it by some planner or orderer. Hence, people ike you are, according to Oakeshott, apt to exaggerate the disorder.