Essays in Idleness

Perhaps we should have a political party that opposes the Second Law of Thermodynamics — but openly, instead of covertly. We might call it the Anti-Entropy Party. Or perhaps we already have it, but it is called something else. It campaigns against a policy of the Universe that is tending towards the heat death of everything. I think the Third Law may also be on their hit list, together with the First, for the conservation of energy is terribly inconvenient, if not downright fascist. Too, the Zeroth Law; and the Fourth, as soon as we decide what that is. For a truly revolutionary party must be against all the laws of physics, which so far as I can see are uniformly sexist, racist, homophobic, and lacking in diversity. All are associated with white males.

Gentle reader might object that none of these laws can be abrogated, according to all experiments ever conducted, but that is to succumb to pessimism. Maybe they can’t be changed in physics, but in politics everything is possible. We need a leader who will roll up his sleeves and declare, like Obama, “Yes we can!”

Ranged against this Optimist Party, the Pessimist Party can only offer the slogan, “No we can’t.”

Pessimist parties easily lose elections. They are grinch parties that tell us all kinds of things are impossible. They stolidly maintain the Law of Non-Contradiction, the most backward-looking of all. Supporters of that tend to be narrowly mediaeval, scholastic and catholic, these days.

True, I am a reactionary myself — a lifetime partisan of the Pessimist Party, a fussy opponent to the opponents of “natural law,” and physical laws in all of their dimensions. I have often been told the reason we’re unpopular is that we are “the party of No.” A party that just says no, no, no to everything must necessarily lose elections. Those cheery Optimists are ever waiting in the wings, with their “can do” attitudes.

People want Hope, and that’s what the progressive factions are willing to give them. They want liberation from their oppressors, and what is more oppressive than Nature? We may not be able to overthrow this oppressor right away. It has ruled like an absolute monarch for a long time, through multitudes of conspiratorial networks.

But we must start somewhere. We must make a stand against reality, because if we don’t, reality will prevail.

Entropy would be the first target. The Second Law does more than prohibit our perpetual motion machines. It has suppressed a great deal of other promising technology. The full, glorious future not only of cold fusion, but of artificial intelligence, robots, and algorithms, cannot be fully realized, so long as it is in the way. People could live forever, were entropy not staring them down. Why are we being denied perpetual youth?

Why do we allow entropy to make everything, constantly, worse? For thanks to entropy, everything is always running down. In combination with the First Law of Thermodynamics, it is the ultimate killjoy. Rise up!

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Now here is a thought, to give my fellow Pessimists nightmares. What if God is secretly opposed to entropy? Or even against death, which our best religious sources plainly suggest. What if He merely put up with entropy, while designing a material Universe constrained by what is possible, for purposes we do not completely understand? (They may be too obvious.) What if He even designed the constraints? And what if, considering it as a game, He devised a means to defeat entropy, or at least resist and give it a good run, actually from within the system? What would that be?

It would be where biology comes in. In at least one place in that Universe (here) living creatures “evolved,” or as I’d say were designed and created, from non-living matter, obeying all the laws of physics, somehow, but laughing at them, as it were. Then God made man, whose consciousness knocks mere plants and animals into a cocked hat.

And this, after having made something (the Universe) out of nothing, which was already playing it very fast and loose. For something instead of nothing is as anti-entropic as a policy can be.

Like trees, we are dragged down by gravity, but push instinctively the other way. Like dancers, we toy with our limitations. And in every corner of this Universe, that we are able to investigate, we glimpse Eternity: the whole thing serving as a metaphor of it.

Still, I think one must become a thoroughgoing Pessimist, to fully appreciate and properly embrace the cause of “pro-life.” I say this with some warmth, for I’ve noticed that, when things don’t work out for the Optimists, they wind up euthanizing themselves.