You would think this one would be a downer, because it starts that way. But stick with it and we’ll see, ironically, how it goes…
One of the things about growing older is that consciously and subconsciously you are daily learning about entropy (things waxing old and degrading over time) and you see it everywhere. First… in your body. Nothing gets better without force and intelligence being applied. If you just live your life and don’t take care of yourself, your body waxes old and decrepit. If you do work out and eat right – guess what? You’re still getting older, and things stop working like they used to. No one’s knees got better sitting on the couch and eating potato chips.
Subconsciously and consciously, as you age, you become intimately aware that the natural order of things, all things, flows in the direction of dissolution and degradation. Live long enough and you’ll see that everything is affected. Every product you buy – in time, when you have to rebuy that product later – you will see that the quality has diminished. The toys we had in the 70s were American Made, metal, super Tonka tough. Then came the plastics and rubber, and even now the toys aren’t made to last for very long at all. Most products are made to be thrown away. Planned obsolescence is a business model. You look around you and see that things like houses, cars, construction, materials, furniture, products – very few things are made as well as they used to be made. They are more complicated, but the materials are shoddy.
Look at any city. The rubble of the past is there if you will look for it. We were walking the other day, and there was some repair work being done in a parking lot. An excavator had dug out near the foundation of the building, and in the piles of dirt and rubble – there were hand-hewn stones from the buildings that used to be here downtown. Hundreds of these quarried stones. Once, long ago, people of industry carved these stones out of a quarry and then built businesses here with them. Many of those buildings are gone, and the rubble has been buried underneath. It’s the way of things. Archeology exists because of time and entropy.
And you see that dissolution we’re speaking of even in personal terms. As you grow old, things that were brand new – they wax old and fall apart. Your own parents grow old and die. A barn my dad and I built in 1985 – within 20 years, it was falling down. It looked like the relic of a bygone civilization. Same thing with institutions… the Boy Scouts, you name it… the American system of government, the NFL, whatever. People keep calling it great, and they use the same terms to describe it, even as it is coming apart at the seams.
Personal relationships, family, marriages, etc., all of society is pulling itself to pieces. Forces are aligned against anything wholesome and good, and the children are inundated with ideas that will accelerate the destruction.
And everywhere we apply force to counter this entropy. We push our feet against the ground when we get out of bed, and resist gravity to get moving. Our muscles and minds degrade if we don’t encounter resistance. We exercise. We try to build new things to replace the old ones. Spiritually and morally, we fight against the agents of decay.
The point is that there is a law in the universe called the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy. And the basis of the law is that things wax worse and worse by nature. They tend towards disorder and degradation. Nothing increases in order or quality or efficiency without FORCE and INTELLIGENCE being applied. Order never comes out of chaos naturally. Intelligence never grew from non-Intelligence. Existence, Sentience, and Consciousness didn’t “evolve” from non-existence. Something, someone, somewhere applied force and intelligence to the matter of Creation. The highly complex nature of life itself doesn’t just imply a predicate creative intelligence but demands it.
Everything of value requires work. Even the fruit of the ground requires labor. Revitalization requires intelligence, input, hard work, and dedication. Personal advancement – whether it is physical, mental, or spiritual – requires intelligent application of force.
This article starts out declaring the fact of dissolution and entropy, but it ends with the exhortation that to make things better, we must do work and apply intelligence, and in that way, we can improve over what exists. If your system of government is failing, if your society is crumbling, if civilization teeters on the edge of the abyss, you can know that nothing will ever improve unless resistance and force are applied to the rehabilitation of what is broken and failing. If you want freedom, independence, autonomy, you will have to make it and fight for it. If you want morality and justice and fairness, you will have to take those things from the agents of dissolution. That is the way of things. It is science.
Now you know your work. Have at it.
