As I write this piece, numerous historical buildings across France are burning to ashes at the hands of rioters.
Some claim these rioters are lashing out over frustrations over school budgets. Or are protesting for the people suffering in Gaza. Or are just generally discontent about the state of the world. I have sympathy for all these views, and don’t doubt that some earnestly believe they are doing something for a greater good in these acts of destruction.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel they’re deeply evil, because they are using the forces of entropy to accelerate the destruction of beauty.
And that is, at its core, an anti-life thing to do.
After all, what is life but a temporary creation of beauty in defiance of the homogenizing forces of entropy?
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of an isolated system can only increase. In other words, any system that cannot draw in energy from its surroundings to maintain its order, will fall apart and die. Which is why all lifeforms on Earth take in low-entropy energy, transmute it into the beautifully complex and intricate patterns of their biology, and release the high-entropy waste outside of themselves.
In other words, we are all just holding off the forces of destruction until we can no longer. That radical act of resistance is the beauty of life itself.
Civilizations follow that path too, organizing themselves from the energy of peoples who work together to build something greater than themselves, until outside forces consume them. People who band together to build something whose sum is greater than its parts. And it feels utterly perverse to see the beautiful buildings of France’s culture, built from the blood sweat and toil of generations of ancestors, be burned to ashes by modern-day rioters who are far materially richer than any of them could have dreamed of. (And let’s be honest here, rioters who mostly aren’t even their blood descendants).
Those buildings were built by a culture, imperfect as all cultures are, but one that valued beauty not just as a means, but as an ends worthy of itself. That’s what a great civilization does. It sticks the middle finger to the forces of chaos, and builds something intricate and magnificent despite knowing it could be destroyed with a single match.
Now of course ethics and moral philosophy are far nuanced than just “COMPLEXITY GOOD ENTROPY BAD!”. Certainly many beautiful things have risen out of the ashes of destroyed pasts; process of creative destruction is also an integral part of life.
But again… that only holds true it is truly in service of a greater creation!
And if you believe “greater creation” is what’s driving these rioters, I have a bridge to sell you. These kids are not doing the effortful analysis of the second and third order consequences prior to throwing their rock through the ancient stained glass window. Their minds are occupied with one goal: burn it all down, to hell with the consequences.
And thus to hell we shall all go, if this mindset continues to spread.
I’m not saying I know the best course of action here. I’m truly at a loss both how to help these kids, or stop the spread of this wanton mindset, without building horrifically oppressive power structures which could lead us into a different and arguably far worse flavour of authoritarian hell.
I guess it’s time to just do more thinking, which is why I’m resorting back to first principles today - attempting to reason from the constituent parts of what life actually is, to see if some north stars emerge.
Who knows, maybe the answers we need wink at us from there.
perhaps powerful systems of oppression bordering on authoritarianism is actually what we need? i detest that thought itself. it's my personal hell. but with everything that is happening maybe society as a whole needs more enforced structures than we believe.
also to clear up my first sentence. by some definition, what has been done in El Salvador might be called oppressive or authoritarian, but it's hard to deny the positive effects of such an undertaking.