Amerika

At times, our hearts weaken when we look at this world, for two big reasons that are so terrifying that it seems gauche to mention them.

First, there is the nature of nature as “red in tooth and claw.” Predation occurs, and often it is the sweetest and cutest bunny that gets ripped apart before our eyes by a hawk, which seems unconcerned with the question of whether its prey had a soul, a personality, or sensation. As an extension of this, we can be victims of predation or (more likely) our own error or warfare, and will be left insensate dead to be laughed at by others.

Second, there is the fact of decline itself. Everything we create will have a life cycle from birth to death, but even worse, we cannot imagine it being any different. We know ourselves how experience goes from new to mundane, and how we are constantly seeking new stimulus to avoid this cycle, so tend to have few enduring favorites.

We cannot step in the same river twice, and we cannot go home again, because the experience has changed for us internally and independent of the world. The first time one samples a delicacy, or the first time one is well and truly drunk under a midnight moon, can never be equaled. What defines them is not the external object, the delicacy or purloined case of beer, but the newness to us.

In a sense, the universe is driven by novelty as well, since repetitive events lead to entropy. As a cycle repeats, it becomes predictable, and margins loosen, introducing gradual leaks of energy and information. Over time, the leaks take over from the main, and soon all energy dissipates. This is similar to how civilizations fall, where energy is transferred from a focus on goals to the disparate desires of citizens.

As one poet wrote, “Nothing gold can stay.” Like death, this loss of intensity of experience seems to be the core of tragedy in life.

But what if these methods represented a better option to what otherwise would be logically necessary? Perhaps logic itself is inherent to existence, and as a condition of existence, the form that existence takes must be logical and not arbitrary according to its own needs. That alone is galling, since as part of existence, we want what we want to take precedence over all else, although this tendency leads to individualism which is a form of hubris, the root of all evil (if one accepts the pagan “good to the good, and bad to the bad” and not the “good to everyone” of Crowdists).

The struggle of existence in logical terms, which underlie the physical but are not discernible in appearance from it, is to avoid becoming repetitive because this is what creates the next stage in the cycle: a lack of energy created by the increasing entropy of repetition. No creature can survive by being entirely static, and no civilization can survive when it has a “system” which mandates repetition of the same ideas, even if those are merely “universal” or applied equally (be sure to genuflect to a stature of Karl Marx when you read that word) to all people.

But, then, we might ask, how do creatures in nature avoid stagnation? After all, sharks and cockroaches have been with us for hundreds of millions of years. To understand that, we must return to the wisdom of Ptolemy:

The Ptolemaic model accounted for the apparent motions of the planets in a very direct way, by assuming that each planet moved on a small sphere or circle, called an epicycle, that moved on a larger sphere or circle, called a deferent.

The importance of epicycles is that they move contrary to the dominant motion of the cycle, which keeps internal variation within that cycle, approximating motion at the level of detail instead of falling into trope with the larger motion. It is the same way with nature: species go through birth-midlife-aging cycles on the level of individual generations, but do not themselves complete the cycle to death, because in every cycle there is a contrary movement which keeps ambiguity alive as to the end result.

This is like the universe itself: to avoid entropy, it ensures that the answers are never known until they happen, which keeps an information potential of ambiguity present at all times, avoiding the repetition that accelerates entropy. If the answer is known, there is no point doing the calculation, and on an informational level — independent of time — the end-state and the starting state collapse because they are one and the same. This is how entropy accelerates.

For this reason, formalization is the enemy of survival, because it creates a dissipation of energy that leads to dark organization within a human group. Its opposite, or informal order, calculates itself on the level of detail in each epicyclic generation, and so avoids the wide margins and repetitive structures that accelerate entropy. This requires internal conflict, like anarchy plus medieval knights raging all over the place, that much as “the exception proves the rule” by the constant fighting to assert principle, re-establishes the rule.

The ancients knew that evil must exist for this reason. Evil is the exception that proves the rule, and unless allowed to gain the upper hand, serves a vital role by keeping the good in a state of constantly asserting that outlook, much as predation forces prey animals to be clearer about their own purpose. Without evil, one does not have heroes, and without heroes, the principle of heroism is lost to degeneration, a form of entropy.

And so, you may ask, why death? It is clear why there must be predation and warfare, but why is death inevitable outside of those things? The answer is that experience over time hardens the mind into conclusions, and those can then become repetitive in all but exceptional individuals, at which point it is time for a long sleep to refresh the capacity for learning. This is why the ancients possessed a complex view of death, in which most dwelt in a static state after the end, but many either ascended to heavenly realms or re-incarnated. They were bits of code that needed rebooting, having proved its utility, where those who were irrelevant (no informational utility) could simply pass into ash and dust.

Our modern morons — whatever cretin taught you in kindergarten is at the head of the list — teach us to value balance, harmony, and equilibrium by implying that those are “peaceful.” They look at a field of flowers for ten minutes and consider that nature is peaceful! In fact, they have seen effect and not cause; the cause is the endless predation, warfare, storms and chaos that rage through as epicycles and by doing so, in converse application, strengthen the deferent.

For the same reason, people should be wary of external stimulus like social media, television, socializing, and trends. These not only put people in trope, where they are all thinking and doing the same thing at the same time, but interrupt the internal process of renewal which is necessary. Our minds function best when they are mostly closed, or at least closed circuit, and we spend time studying and analyzing what we know to find new dimensions in it. This keeps our knowledge from calcifying and allows us to avoid slipping into the repetitive mental cycle of senescence.

The reason that conservatives prefer principles and flexible structures like caste, race, religion, and hierarchy to universal systems is revealed in this knowledge. In addition, we can see how our society has chosen to kill itself the way every other society kills itself: by finding the “right” method, and applying it universally, we eliminate ambiguity but accelerate entropy, hastening our rush to the end — when if we acted otherwise, we could avoid it indefinitely.

Tags: darkness, death, deferent, entropy, epicycle, evil, formalization, predation