Category Archives: society

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

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When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

Social networking as an orgasm button

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In my last article I come off as a technophobe of a sort, or at least a techno-skeptic, and weird as that might sound, I think this perception might actually be accurate. I think of technology as a tool for solving problems and doing things that you want to do. If it creates more problems than it solves, does it really fulfill its purpose?

I’m a techno-skeptic (with a dozen working computers of all kinds in the household) because I see how people use technology. If someone was spending his life hanging out in a bar and wasting time in superficial, shallow conversations, we would recognize this as socially unacceptable, something worthy individuals don’t do. However, this is exactly what social media is: shallow people wasting time in superficial quasi-dialogue, and it’s all worthless and going nowhere. The only one actually profiting from it all is the bar owner.

Technology gives every kid an opportunity to become the smartest person who ever lived. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, plug it into a TV, keyboard and mouse, and install a free Linux OS on it that allows you to access the vast tomes of knowledge on the web, play multimedia and write code in multiple programming languages. And how many use it for that? How many of you did sudo apt-get install gcc?

For 200 EUR you can buy a smartphone that’s actually a 8-core pocket supercomputer with Geekbench 3 score of over 4000. You can load it with a library of books and music, you can use it to access Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, you can use it as a multiple-language dictionary, interactive road map with satellite navigation, you can use it to SSH-connect into a remote server, to write and execute Python code, essentially you can do everything a personal computer can do, that doesn’t require a keyboard and a big screen. Its price makes it accessible to almost anyone, and even for 50 EUR you can get a device that gives you most of those capabilities. Based on that, you would expect the people who own such devices, and the even more powerful ones, to be the smartest and most capable of all people who ever lived. Instead, they are barely literate, with poor mental focus, disastrous social skills, horribly limited general knowledge, are ignorant of history, philosophy, politics, art and science, they have very poor understanding of technology in general, and people in the 19th century would see them as retarded scum that lacks both education and proper upbringing.

Does it mean that I think that children should not own smartphones and computers? Of course not. My kids use whatever technology they need. They both have laptop computers and mobile phones. They both play videogames. However, they play Minecraft and Universe Sandbox, not Call of duty, and to them computers and mobile phones are not a life-substitute, but a tool. The older one can write code in Logo, Python and some c, and the younger one can tell you everything about masses and composition of planets in the solar system. Guess why? They read, they talk to adults, they use their brains.

The worst thing that can happen to children is to spend too much time talking to other children, because with other children there’s no positive intellectual and emotional differential, there’s just ignorance, prejudice, and a very violent and abusive pecking order. One of the main reasons why elderly people were so respected in the traditional communities is that they used to talk to children, to teach them true and useful knowledge, and do it in a calm and peaceful way that would unplug the children from the frenzy the other children caused. Children are actually the worst thing that can happen to children, because the only thing children usually learn in the company of other children is how to establish an abusive comparative ranking based on usually completely arbitrary criteria, because kids are too stupid and immature to know what’s really important.

And that’s exactly what people use modern technology for: they use it to entertain themselves and to participate in some social network with arbitrary and worthless comparative ranking. They thirst for attention and approval, and dread ridicule and criticism, and in they fears they primarily dole out ridicule and criticism. Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval. In order to earn others’ approval, people adopt one of the few memes and quasi-philosophies, and there’s no place for real diversity of opinion, because if you want approval of others there’s only one thing you want: you want a choice, an opinion and a philosophy that will earn you most approval, and everything else is secondary. That’s why you want the best phone, the best computer, the best camera, the best philosophy: you want others to recognize you as worthy and to approve of you.

You know what I told my kids about peer pressure and desire for peer approval? “Just accept the fact that you’ll never be accepted by all people, or even the majority of people. The only way you can get approval of idiots is to be an even worse idiot than they are. The only way to get approval of average people is to be slightly below average. What you need to do is accept the fact that whatever you do and whatever you choose, someone will try to shit on you. Even if you’re Jesus they’ll crucify you. That’s how people are and that’s what they do, and the thing is, you can never know if they are sincere, if someone is shitting on you because he honestly dislikes what you do, or if he’s just jealous. You need to measure your success by how much you are succeeding at realizing your personal goals, not by what others say. If you want feedback from others, ask the adults, who actually have a developed brain and a reasonable set of criteria, not children who are stupid and immature.”

That’s how people are abusing the technology. They use it to try to get peer approval, and instead they get to participate in a giant hen-house as a part of the pecking order, where they don’t learn anything really useful, except how to efficiently insult others and make them feel worthless, because they know what worked on them.

If you only let go of people and their bullshit approval, you can find great stuff on the Internet, stuff that can make all that technology worth while. You can find an abundance of downloadable books and music, that you can store on your mobile device and read. You can find excellent articles about ancient Rome and topology on Wikipedia. You can find analytical tools that can interpret common language queries as mathematical equations. Or you can get caught in some meme in order to get group approval on some forum.

I always use the best technology I can afford, if I find it useful. You should, too. However, to use it in order to create a virtual pub in which you’ll waste time trying to “be popular” is an abuse of opportunity. So, it turns out that I’m not really skeptical of technology; I just think most people are idiots to whom technologically facilitated social networking is as harmful as an orgasm button to a rat: it feels good, but eventually the poor animal dies of hunger and thirst pressing the damn thing all day.

Idiots and their smartphones

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If you asked a person on the street whether he thinks he’s smarter than a stone age person, he’d probably say yes. If you asked him whether he thinks he’s smarter than someone from the Roman empire, or the “dark ages”, the answer would probably be the same. After all, he knows that Earth revolves around the Sun, and owns a smartphone and a computer.

The interesting thing about smartphones is that I asked my son what do the kids in his class have – he’s 6th grade. It tuned out that most have the top-tier devices like iPhone, Samsung Galaxy 6 edge and Sony Xperia Z5. It’s a jaw-dropping piece of information considering how those kids are not really geniuses; they get average grades, are of average intelligence and are not especially well brought up, to put it more kindly than they deserve. You would ask, what are they using their super-devices for? Games, of course, Facebook and some chat app that’s currently “in”.

Do they use those things to read up on Wikipedia? Not really. Do they use them to navigate Google Earth and see different parts of the world? Not really. Are they reading the news to find out what’s going on in the world? Not really. Are they using them for reading books? Not really. In fact, my son told me they laughed at him when he told them he reads books, because “we’re not in the 13th century to read books”. So basically, those children are idiots with very expensive toys. They are as stupid as a brick, and if you think they would come on top in a comparison with a person from ancient Rome, you are probably wrong.

So, if you strip a today’s person of his technology, how much does he really know, what can he really do, and how much is he really worth?

If you try to reduce social media to the actual message that is shared, it’s all mostly “look at me, I’m a vain, shallow, stupid idiot that’s exactly the same as everybody else; nothing worth seeing here, but do click me because I seek attention”.

The kids in my son’s class act as if there’s a difference between having this or that smartphone, but is there, really? If you waste 10 hours a day hanging out on Facebook, as some of them apparently do, does a better phone help you waste time more effectively, or do you just feel cooler and more important as you do it?

If you strip Augustine or Thomas Aquinas of technology and dress him in rags, does it change what he is? But do it with one of those modern fancy girls who are so full of themselves they can’t stop shooting selfies with their phone and posting them online. Strip her of technology, wash her of her make-up and dress her in rags, and tell me, does it change what she is? What is she, really, if everything she is can be stripped away by removing the superficial?

About death and meaning

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For materialistic and godless people, the entirety of ethics seems to revolve around avoiding death and discomfort. The magnitude of evil is defined by the body count. The magnitude of goodness is defined by the number of live bodies added or preserved.

Death is so feared, as the ultimate evil and the ultimate foe, that old and mortally ill people are not allowed to die, and their meaningless agony is prolonged to the extents previously unimaginable, just because the living are unable to cope with the inevitability of their passing.

Death is so feared, that NDE reports are summarily ignored and swept under the rug, because they disagree with the common, materialistic perceptions about death and, even more importantly, the meaning of life.

Even the Catholic Church, which is usually the island of sanity and reason in the vast ocean of madness, has since the Second Vatican council adopted the ridiculous position that life is the supreme virtue. If so, is then nothing more important in life than staying alive? Is there absolutely nothing worth dying for, except, of course, keeping a greater number of people alive? What about truth, holiness, faith? What about eternity? Are we not advised to abandon this life for the sake of eternal life, and are we not warned that whomever attempts to save his life, will lose it? Is birth control really the most important issue for us to deal with, or should we let the dead bury their dead, while we reach for the life eternal?

Is the “right to live” really more important than the duty to love God, and man in whom we see God?

If death is indeed the enemy, why then does Paul greet it as the end of the race, where winners are to be proclaimed and prize is to be won?

If life is indeed the supreme value, why then did Jesus submit himself to the will of God and willingly choose suffering and death, on the narrow path?

If we are indeed to fear death as the prince of all evils, have we not already lost the battle for the meaning of life?

And if life has no meaning, why does it have value, and why is it virtuous to preserve it?

Power corrupts. Really?

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Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What incredible crock of shit.

Let’s define power, first. Power is the opposite of impotence. Power is to have options, to be able to choose what to do, instead of having your life pre-determined by demands of mere survival. Power is the ability to know, to be aware of the nature and the scope of the world, instead of living a life of ignorance and being limited by some village. Power is the ability to do what you want, the ability to express your wishes and your nature.

If someone seems to have become corrupt because of power, that’s most likely an illusion. He was corrupt to begin with, and power merely allowed him to make choices that showed his pre-existing corruption. If anything, poverty corrupts. It is my experience that the poor people have the worst character and nature; they are usually impolite, vicious, envious, spiteful and evil. They are quick to hate and slow to kindness. If you walk through a rich neighborhood, you can feel safe, but if you walk through a poor neighborhood, you are right to feel afraid for your safety, because poor people are more likely to be evil, they are the ones who will rob you, rape you or murder you. If power corrupts, how do you explain that? If anything, power improves people, because if you are powerful, you will feel worthy and important, and you will automatically see others as worthy and important. You will be more likely to be kind and considerate to others. Poor people usually think they are worthless, and they treat everybody as worthless.

There is a reason why rich people tend to keep to themselves: it’s because everybody else tries to take advantage of them, rob them, deceive them, treat them with dishonesty in order to incur some favour, or, more subtly, join powers against them in order to change society in such a way as to defraud the wealthy of their wealth. In a universal-suffrage democracy it is done by electing demagogues who promise to increase taxation of the rich, and give the money to the poor. The wealthy people instinctively understand such conspiracies against them and they will of course attempt to protect themselves in any way they can, and the logical way is to associate only with people of similar social status, who are not likely to treat them badly. If you don’t think poor people are that bad, try winning a lottery and see how the people around you will treat you. You are suddenly prey, you are worse than an animal, you are someone to be manipulated and defrauded, and your only options will be either to be a victim or to protect yourself and change the company you keep, and if you choose the latter, those who wanted to rob you will say that you “changed”, that wealth “corrupted you”. No, it didn’t corrupt you, it opened your eyes to the true nature and character of people, who are mostly predators and scum, and once you gain some wealth they will stop seeing you as a person, they will see you as resources, the same way a butcher sees a cow. He actually loves the cow, because he makes his entire living out of it. He doesn’t see his attitude as hating the cow. The cow, however, might disagree.

This, of course, doesn’t apply only to human society. In spiritual worlds, power to do things is directly correlated with someone’s spiritual value; the higher a being, the greater the power. I have seen the Gods, and they are both immensely powerful and immensely holy, to the point where I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two. This power is the degree of participation in God’s nature, the degree of possession of the qualities of brahman, which is sat-cit-ananda. It’s not merely the power to do things, it’s literally the strength of God’s light that makes one’s soul, the degree of “hardness” and sophistication of that light, and, as a result, the power over lesser beings whose light is dimmer and whose spiritual value is less. It is the power to know the truth and the authority to pass true judgement, that is of God. Essentially, it’s the difference between Jesus and some generic human. Not only that the true power doesn’t corrupt, the true power is purity and wisdom and knowledge and love and strength of character. True power is indeed true holiness, and if you know a person of holy character, rest assured that this person is powerful among the spiritual beings.

I often see conspiracy theorists who slander and malign the “elites”, and I wonder, are those people so stupid as to be unaware of the meaning of the word, or are they so envious and evil that they want nothing but destroy all who are better than they? Elites, by definition, are those who are better. It’s people who are two or three standard deviations better than the general population, the “one percent”. That “one percent” is portrayed as the essence of all that is evil in mankind, but if you take a closer look, it’s the people who employ others, who pay the most taxes, the artists, intellectuals, inventors, the people who make all the difference and create all that is good in this world. Poor people will use Facebook, Twitter and iPhone to malign the “one percent”, the very one percent that invented Facebook, Twitter and iPhone, that invented the Internet, that invented electricity, that invented radio, that invented satellites, that invented medicine and science and technology, that created their job so that they can have resources in order to live. The “elites” don’t conspire to enslave you or destroy you, as the conspiracy idiots dream in their sick brains. The elites have better things to do – they make sure that you have electricity, water, communications, they make sure that you can buy smartphones and computers, software and services, and the ones who make the things that are of most use to most people are the most powerful among the “elites”, and they get more power to do more good things, so that fuckwits of the lowest order could slander them and malign them out of jealousy and spite, while they are benefactors to millions of people.

While the “elites” dream of inventing and manufacturing even greater things for the greatest benefit to the world, the “99%” are busy dreaming of ways in which to rob the “1%”. Honestly, it seems that wealth and power indeed corrupt, but they corrupt the poor and the powerless, who become corrupted with their envy, jealousy, malice and spite towards the powerful, and it all reminds me so clearly of the feelings that I saw demonic souls projecting towards God. If anything, the poor people in their envy and malice mirror Satan’s hatred of God and his angels, and their ideas about possible improvements to the world are also quite similar. The devils also think that world would be a better place if God and his angels didn’t exist, and they mock saints and try to portray them in the most negative possible light. I think it’s the same feeling, the same spiritual emptiness that is wretched and wants to grind all that is good and worthy to dust and to shit on it before it dies in its own misery.

If power corrupts, what, then, is God?