Amerika

In the Platonist religion, the world is not viewed in gnostic terms as a battle between holy light and evil darkness. Instead it is a struggle for the mind to remain focused and ride the sine wave of the ebb and flow of order in the world, a battle for sanity and organization against the waves of distraction.

By contrast, politics and popular religion view this world as a struggle between forces of evil, who intend bad, and forces of good, who are harmless or ideally constructive. Much of our thinking over the past two millennia has consisted of trying to understand this binary.

However, as Goethe said:

Misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.

Most of what goes on in the world that is “bad” comes from disordered minds, included self-centeredness or deferring to group consensus, not an intentional “evil.” Almost all human problems come from unrealistic thinking that arises from our hubris that causes us to act as if we were the cause of the universe.

Since before you were born, disorder has been winning out in the West. A few lies — equality, dualism, pacifism — infected the society at its core, making its people neurotic. That makes it easy for those who benefit from disorder to exploit them.

This means that “evil” is merely another scapegoat.

That frightens most humans, because it means that we must take responsibility both for our errors and the disordered state of mind that let them come about.

Since life is composed of opposites, this makes us think: does good exist? Some things that are good clearly do, and we cannot define “good” because it is so obvious. Life itself, for starters. This however is not so much good as an absence of disorder.

Even love requires that we set aside hubris and care about another as ourselves, but we cannot do this without loving life enough to believe in love, as circular as that sounds. Without affection for existence, affection for another person is an illusion.

This means that instead of universal “good” and “evil,” we have a vast array of disorder and then a few shining moments of order from which all good things emerge. Like the struggle for survival in nature, our happiness is based on our mental organization.

Removing good and evil does not remove God. As a wise man once said, religion is about belief in life, not the lesser gods of control:

Here is a famous passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, to the same effect and with a similar moral point: “The ancients of very early times bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth a tradition that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divinity encompasses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later as a means of persuading the many and as something useful for the laws and for matters of expediency; for they say that these gods are like men in form and like some of the other animals, and also other things which follow from or are similar to those stated.”

Their divinity encompasses the whole of nature; this means that Heaven and Earth are not separate, but continuous. The divine and natural are not isolated, but exist in parallel, like past, present, and future. If these have continuity, a state of order results.

James Clerk Maxwell may have been the first to realize that the degree of order of information is what propels life in the universe. Our cosmos exists because it suppresses entropy through a constant process of self-organization that doubles back on itself, including its opposites as a way of testing its conclusions.

When humanity seeks order, it finds quality, as in a sense of life being better than it could be with any other option. Instead of looking for Satan and Satanists behind every bush, or blaming the Jews or Rich People, maybe we should ask ourselves when this species will take responsibility for its own quality through the organization of its thinking.

Tags: disorder, evil, good, james clerk maxwell, order