Strikes, Piggy Flu, Coups, Economic Crises: Entropy can be comforting

I'm always amused when I see panicky media reports or panicky people. I don't know why, but I find there is something a bit comforting about chaos.

Maybe it's something to do with growing up in the popularized emo/indiekid generation, which is slightly related t the hippy generation. Hippies were marketed as carefree libertines, while emo brings the slightly sordid fun back to libertine-ism.

But it's not so much that as, just, the frequent reminder that entropy applies to social systems as much as it does to energy. Everything breaks down. Democracy, fascism, medical systems, and labour always breaks down in one way or another. And the more work and research I do, the more it seems like things are in constant disrepair, with a chipping facade of normality and orderliness.

Maybe it's the internet generation.

Everything is always changing - and I like that.

Even if my life seems to be in some state of disrepair - it doesn't even seem like a bad thing. Because it's not anything - it's just... shifting!

And this week (and next) I'm working pretty much constantly, but I'm only a few weeks away from three months in Britain being disorderly, disorganized, drunk, partying, frenetically social, and just having fun.

I have such a mix between creative and destructive urges. Not creation in an artistic or religious sense - but just to build things up, make order between things, and just make things work. And not necessarily destructive in an angry sense (although breaking things can be ALOT of fun, if you can learn to enjoy it. It's so much fun if you aren't doing it angrily) but just in a general chaotic sense.

Maybe call it Brahma and Siva - the Trimurti is actually a great metaphor for mental processes - better than Freud's.

But I find chaos so much more comforting. And it's important not to confuse enjoying chaos with enjoying violence because I think that's how that urge is commonly realized - as anger and pain and gossip - when it's really just an enjoyment of social entropy. But chaos is fantastic. It's nice to know that nothing is permanent, that things are deteriorating and changing - and I always find it so amusing that people get caught up in it.

In gossip, and chaotic happenings all over - and people immerse themselves in it, like it's real. Like it's part of their personality. But it's not really anything, it's just happening!

And as I type this I realize it's starting to sound a bit religious - more eastern religious, but it isn't. You may interpret it like that - but for me this is one of the primary realizations associated with atheism (or antitheism if you're sympathetic to that camp, which I am). But once you realize that a celestial and a terrestrial dictatorship are just as silly, but just as impermanent, then everything else isn't terrifying or threatening, or ominous, it's just amusing.

And outrage can be useful, but amusement is even better. It's the acknowledgement of something ridiculous; a mocking criticism; a condemnation; while being a measure of individual well-being. You can feel all those things -- and still be happy with the world and with people. The world is hilarious, and people are delightful. Seriously.

So next time you see chaos, feel the pull of entropy, or look at disorder - smile. It's all downhill, and it all unravels from here.

Love,

Ian

Comments

[Kelli]

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