"Society is doomed for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down." - Jason Pargin writing as David Wong, John Dies At The End
What the unreliable narrative voice of this excellent horror-comedy novel has discovered here and is presenting as a realisation of the awful truth is simply the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy. It is the nature of this universe that things are much easier to destroy than to build, that anything worthwhile decomposes into dust, atoms and kipple as soon as you stop paying attention to it. "Gresham's Law of Memes", as promulgated by this blog, recognises the same thing - "bad memes drive out good", destructive, nihilist appeals to the worst parts of our nature are much easier.
Somewhere in his 20+ years of blogging, Robert Fripp once quoted a Guitar Craft person who, while doing the huddle before a performance, felt the overwhelming urge to do something to spoil the mood/wreck the performance. In Fripp's parlance, that's the Great Deceiver talking (aka The Prince of This World, The Father of Lies and the Uncle of All Tricks). Eric Tamm's unauthorised Fripp biography quotes that Penfold-looking mofo as saying "Temptation is a reward... The Devil cannot make use of people who are drowsy... Until now, you were just a turkey." I think this is the same thing that Pargin is referring to, in the same book, by:
when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages... even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows... you're somebody he may have to deal with.
"Performance is inherently unlikely," goes a Guitar Craft aphorism (which Fripp has said were written not by him, but by the "personal voice" which speaks through him on very good days. I have my own version of that voice which wrote everything good on this blog). Trying to do anything worthwhile and good in a universe based on entropy is unlikely. The very existence of life in such a universe is unlikely (which is why religious brain-death merchants love to use entropy to deny the science of evolution). And the existence of intelligent life, even more so. And the existence of intelligent life which has built a complex technological society about to make breakthroughs into space travel and artificial intelligence, even more so.
The anthropic principle states that all this incredible unlikeliness must have happened for us to be here, able to grasp how unlikely it is, and make little-read blog posts about it. I wonder whether Gurdjieff talking about awakening to the true horror of the situation meant the same thing as St Silouan when he heard Jesus telling him personally to "keep thy mind in hell and despair not".
In strange and uncertain times, such as we are living through, on occasion a reasonable person might despair.
But Hope is unreasonable.
And Love is greater even than this.
