Buckle up, buttercup. This is one of those that you should read because it’ll make you think, even if you don’t agree, and thinking is something with which you are likely out of practice. That’s not an insult. It’s a fact of the modern world. This one will be controversial, but I don’t have to worry about backlash because most of the non-thinkers will never read it. (winky, winky)
Entropy is a principle that if we truly understand it, explains everything, prophesies everything, and destroys all modern illusions. I’ll define it before we go on.
Simple definition: If you leave your garage alone it gets worse and worse and dirtier and dirtier, it doesn’t straighten itself out and get cleaner. If you leave a garden untended, it degrades. You must add force to make things better, otherwise they degrade. If you build a coliseum of stone to magnify your glory, one day it will crumble and goats will graze among the ruins – unless someone maintains it. Things do not naturally become more organized without intent, activity, and force.
Un-simple definition: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution (left alone) cannot decrease with time. Entropy here can be understood to say that any system, over time, evolves toward thermodynamic equilibrium or to a state of total entropy. This means that systems do not improve, they devolve over time unless force is applied. The 1st law of Thermodynamics allows that a branch in a windstorm may crack and disintegrate and fall from a tree, but also that it might do the opposite. It might reformulate, come back together, and fly up and reattach to the tree. But the 2nd law says that the 2nd thing can’t happen without some force (or magic) making it happen. If you drop an egg, it will likely hit the floor and break. It will not, if already broken on the floor, reform itself and fly back up into your hand completely whole again. If you saw that happen, you would know that some intentional, intellectual, purposeful activity has taken place – either miracle, magic, or sleight of hand.
Over time, though, even those forces that work against entropy themselves devolve. Some results, therefore, if left alone without power or force applied from outside the system forever, are inevitable.
The Agrarian (the farmer or anyone living off the land) never denied entropy, or signed off on the scientism long con that is “evolution”. He knew entropy even before it was theorized because the whole concept of keeping the garden and tending it was a tacit admission that things left unattended get worse and worse.
You don’t have to tend weeds.
“Science” (actually the religion of scientism) as it is preached and packaged today, is an anti-entropic cult. Before I get lectured to by the cultlings, I know that the term “science” itself is not the culprit, nor is the practice of positing theories and testing them, and then moving forward. But scientism as “settled” or as uber-god, which is what is taught today, is an anti-entropic cult of real science denial.
We, (those who think,) know entropy by experience. We know that we must fight against all of the forces of science to get up in the morning. We must move, and breath, and exert life against death, spin our torsos and put our feet against the ground and push against gravity and the inevitable. Our lives are often measured by how hard we fight against the grave, and what we accomplish during our brief time here. But the end, because of that 2nd law, is inevitable.
For anything to defy this law forever (eternally) force must be applied from outside the system itself, and this is where science fails to have an answer. And most modern religions fail too.
Freedom, in its all-too-brief rise, is counter-entropic. It always has been. It is a blip on the chart of societal degradation, and an infinitesimal lunge of hope against the tide of dissolution… a dead-cat bounce, always startling and dismaying to the forces of entropy that carry us ever onward toward destruction.
The Lord GOD planted a garden, eastward in Eden.
Freedom is that upward blast on a timeline that generally trends downward, reaching upward for a moment against the forces of human nature, and sometimes it lasts a moment, a blink of an eye, and sometimes it lasts 225 years.
As a part of the curse, GOD said, and you must toil to make your bread. You must fight against the weeds, and you must die. Entropy.
True Freedom is that burst of hope and energy and activity that applies itself against entropy. It always requires force and always requires violence. It is anti-entropic. It will never happen naturally on its own.
Participate in elections if you want. I’m certainly not stopping you. Do your part or whatever. Feel good and wear a sticker. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you are fundamentally changing anything. Entropy applies to society and cultures as much as it does to everything else. The only way things change substantively is by brute force application of appropriate means. That is inevitable.
If you are not willing to MAKE earthly freedom, you will not have it. Freedom is not natural, which is why only God can give it in the spiritual realm. In the natural realm, it is only taken and never happens on its own.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.