Tom Bissell writes in his short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg that there are generally two types of countries: those of order, and those of chaos. A country like Japan is based in order, one character opines, while a place like Afghanistan is in chaos. Now to be clear, Bissell does not mean each person in these countries is one way or the other — there’s a complexity to factor in here — but rather, each country’s structure (or lack thereof) leans one way or the other.
This reads as straightforward, until considering the possible permutations on the order-chaos binary.