The Eater of Time

Time kills all gods.

Or such is what the graphic artist and sculptor AJ Fosik proclaims in his latest exhibit. This, however, is a fundamental confusion which plays upon the fear of “running out of time,” which, in essence, is a fear of death which is itself a fear of entropic force. Even the triumphalism inherent in such a statement – Fosik’s work is devoted to the creation of ferine idols who are representative of deities bearing no following, name or attribution, a assertion of man’s creativity expanded in the absence of organized religion and the totalizing, centralic force of Providence – is misguided. The reason why it is misguided is that if time can kill even the gods then Man, against that primal force, has not a single chance of survival (my fundamental presumption is that most people, most of the time wish to survive, which seems so obvious a truism that it requires no refutation – what man, after all, does not shrink in terror at the prospect of imminent destruction?). Yet, here, there is hope.

Time is not a god-killer.

Time is a conception and conceptions have no murderous weight without accompanying action – yet time is a lever without a hand to pull it. For the idea of time can exist only so long as there are minds to conceive of it, force-patterns that will, eventually, again, conceive of mind. Thus, given sufficient duration, even time will die. But its arrow lives yet on.

The Maw of Entropy Swallows Even Time.

Sparing any overly academic descriptions, entropy is the tendency towards ever increasing levels of disorder within closed systems. It might best be illustrated by analogy: consider a fish-tank into which is poured a ruby colored food-dye. Everyone knows what will happen before they even pour it, the dye will spread throughout the water until it is wholly uniform therein. No matter how many times you repeat this experiment, the result will always be the same (statistically speaking, a upset is theoretically possible but so infinitesimal that, for practical purposes, one might as well consider it “impossible”). This is the product of the emergent property of entropy, which, it is theorized, will eventually lead to universal thermodynamic state wherein no work will be able to be done due to a lack of free energy, that is to say, a period in time where the universe reaches maximal entropy thus causing thermodynamic equilibrium wherein all energy in uniformly distributed (just like the dye in the tank).

This state has been referred as Heat-death.

It would be total eradication.

Why it matters.

Though the previous may strike one as similar to a kind of abstraction that has little to no bearing to actual life but this would be a mistake. The notions of time and death are omnipresent, they have played a role in every single philosophy that has ever existed worth remembering. But the crucial error entailed in so much of western philosophy is placing a symptom as a cause. A excellent example is the idea that the primary problem facing the Western nations is a ever growing abundance of nihilism, it is not nihilism, as such – for Universalism, secular humanism, religious liberalism and so on, are no nihilistic regimes – no, the primary problem is that those forces which are counterpoised to the prevailing attitudes of western civilization are fundamentally entropic. That is to say, they work towards ever greater forms of chaotic disruption – the immigration crisis is a perfect example of this, everyone knows that allowing such great and divergent masses to pour into a nation in a tiny period of time can lead only to disaster but they do so anyways because their ethos’s directionality is one that is wholly predicated on further and further forms of entropy (in the case of immigration, multicultural integrationism, citizen-of-the-worldism).

Consider the end goal of the one-worlders: they see a world of one race, one nation and one creed. What, here, is the difference between the one-worlder’s view and the enthropic principal of dye-spreading in a well filled fish-tank? There isn’t any.

Radical Universalism is heat death.

The solution to this problem is to work towards a methodology of particularistic anti-entropy. All that has, classically, been defined as “the good” has been that which resists the permutations of ever increasing waves of disorder. Whether that be self-control, which is, by definition, against disorder, child birth and rearing, which is the pseudo-immortality that laughs in the face of disintegration, or the continual domination of nature, the end goal of which must be the complete and utter eradication of entropy itself.

 

 

Value Ordination: Political Paradigm as Argumentation

Innumerable are the number of political compass tests which one can take online, from Playbuzz to PoliticalCompass.org to the 8 Values Github Test, all of which are sifted through and poured over, studied and analyzed by the takers thereof as if in the action of so doing they will confer some hidden and eldritch wisdom unto the reader. The popularity of political compass tests however, does not lie in their viewing by the takers thereof but in their viewing by everyone else. People that are likely to take political compass tests are also likely to be highly engaged in politics and thus are already well aware of their own political views and where they are likely to lie on any given political compass test (unless the given test happens to be poorly constructed, and thus, woefully inaccurate). They are not really seeking out what their ideological positions are but are rather looking for a shared visual platform where their ideological uniqueness can be shown to others. A narcissist’s past-time.

The fixation here is more upon the position of the individual along the political compass than upon the ideas which place them there. This is reflective of American political discourse more generally, where discussions are generally started with the prompt, “Well The Left,” or, “You see this is just what The Right has been trying to do for years now-”

Right and Left are, of a certainly, highly useful linguistic tools but there is here a problem which manifests itself whenever a particular political moniker becomes more important that being correct, that is to say, logically parsimonious (utilizing economy of explanation to arrive at a conclusion).

That may sound like a obvious truism; certainly it is true but it is far less discernible that it is readily obvious. Such is evidenced by popular internetisms like, “There is nothing to the Right of me but the wall.” Meaning, of course, that there is no one more Right-wing than the person whom is spouting the aforementioned phrase. This is only a positive however if the Right-wing views which the speaker holds are actually correct. That is to say, Right and Left are not arguments in and of themselves, nor is a statement of any ideological inclination. To say, “That is a Communist position!” is only a sufficient position in as far as it is actually wrong/illogical; it is not wrong merely by dint of being associated with Communism (which, by and large should be suspect for its historical record of death and intense political instability). Thus, for the previous example, it should, make the argument more suspect but it should not incline one to dismiss it out of hand.

Such is also true with rebuttals like, “But that is Authoritarian!” Well… why is that a bad thing? One should really be asked to explain.

In short, in the American context, the political Left and Right are all too often interjected in place of argumentation. Whenever the words Left-wing and Right-wing are utilized as a argument unto themselves, rather than as placeholders for extremely wide-ranging idea-sets, one knows that one’s opponent has woefully lost the plot.