Worshiping Entropy

Capitalism vs. Democracy - NYTimes.com:

As BO calls "inequality" the "defining problem of our time", and a new book has lefties nearly panting about the evils of "Capitalism", it seems time to take our eyes off our navels and glance around at a bit larger picture.

There are two primary forces in the universe. First -- creation, innovation, order, light, energy, LIFE, growth, existence, truth, purpose, Love. We Christians (and many others) give these the ultimate name of GOD.

The other primary force is called destruction, stasis, chaos, darkness, entropy, DEATH, decline, oblivion, lies, meaninglessness, hatred. The lord of these is sometimes known as "Satan".

Science has named these the 2nd law of thermodynamics - "the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy."

Humans always worship. For thousands of years we had "many gods", St Augustine in City of God spends a LONG time discussing the vast number of Roman and Greek Gods, and why only worshiping one God in through the person of Christ Jesus is far superior. "City of God" is one of the foundational works of Western Civilization, but today few even know of it. We have lost our moorings, but our basic nature is unchanged.

We DO "worship", but we currently often call it something else "belief, political ideology, opinion, science, etc".

Those that worship the first force believe that SOMETHING (God to me, maybe "the great random accident to you") defied "the not" and not only set in motion, but in some way sustains growth of which LIFE is just one aspect. GOD is the ultimate inequality, being supremely unequal to all else, but his power engenders infinite diversity of energy, intelligence, types, classes, and dimensions so great that the human mind can't approach imagining it all.

However, if you worship entropy, actual diversity with a difference is one of your most horrible enemies. You believe in a return to some sort of eternal sameness. Nullification, the end, death, meaninglessness become your goals. You strive to turn truth and light to "50" or ideally THOUSANDS of shades of gray, eventually arriving at total darkness. Very "fair", and very "peaceful", just like a tomb should be.

At the point of maximum entropy, all is equal, all is undifferentiated, all is at "peace". A very simple and easy to understand peace of negation,  as opposed to Gods Peace "the peace that passes all understanding", the peace of eternal life, light and bliss.

Democracy itself is a mechanism and an idea that says "everyone is the same", so it is therefore nihilistic in nature. Our nation was founded as a Democratic Republic in an attempt to prevent the corrosive effects of pure democracy, but like all corrosives, we continue to slide to "pure democracy" or "mob rule", one of the worst of the tyrannies.

Capitalism is much more like gravity than it is like democracy. Newton didn't invent gravity, he "discovered" it or more exactly, explained how it operates. Likewise, Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism, he just told us some things about how it works. Essentially, it is just competition -- which will go on by one means or another no matter what sort of system one attempts to set up. Set up a socialist system and the unions and other special interests compete to gain larger portions of the economic pie by the mechanisms of socialism.

Capitalism ... as in people exchanging goods and services in a competitive way to try to "get ahead" is going to go on. It can be somewhat "controlled", but not to the extent that democracy can. Democracy can be entirely cancelled, and has been many times in history ... though typically not by capitalism.

What is REALLY interesting in the article is the chart. I have no idea if it is factual or fanciful, but it gives one pause. For 1800 years capital returns 4.5-5%, then it's return plummets to 1% by 1913, then slowly starts to rise back to it's historic mean. Productivity meanwhile rises at an increasing rate for 1800 years, then flattens at the same time capital falls, then jumps for a mere 50ish years until being projected to fall back to 1820 levels by 2050.

Capitalism didn't show up in 1820, but the rise of increasingly bureaucratic governments, fiat currency, unions and other methods for large groups of people to increasingly vote themselves benefits from those more powerful governments did show up and grow on roughly that timetable.

So "who's zoomin who?"  Have we seen a giant increase in the power of "capitalists" in the past 100 years? or of large bureaucratic state governments, fiat currency, taxation, regulation and massive public debt?


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