This Thing All Things Devours

In Christianity and Culture (1949), T.S. Eliot wrote this about liberalism:

“…it is something that tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”

When one studies the Left from every angle, from inside and out, in both its historical manifestations and its action in the present day, then the human and social particularities cancel out, and its one essential characteristic — what we might call its “chief feature” — comes clearly into focus. That feature, that essence, is entropy: the implacable tendency of ordered systems to run down, to yield to chaos, to exhaust their source of energy, to decay, to decompose, and to rust.

Order is difference. It is inequalities, gradients, distinctions. It is this thing over here being dissimilar from that thing over there in a way that offers the potential for movement, for action, for work. Order is, as Eliot says, the accumulation of energy, just as the warmth of the sun lifts to a hilltop the rainwater that, flowing downward again, powers a mill-race. Entropy is what makes the water end up at the bottom sooner or later, its energy released and spent. Entropy is what reduces mountains to rubble, and what makes bodies rot. Whenever something somehow stands up, entropy is what, sooner or later, grinds it down.

Order is the electric difference between a man and a woman that drives the dynamo of life and regeneration. Entropy is what seeks, in these dying times, to make the sexes the same. Order is a diverse global community of nations and cultures — in individual homeostasis, but with a thousand points of difference, and gradients of assets and needs, that make possible an infinitely complex web of mutually profitable relations and exchanges. Entropy is open borders and mass migration. Entropy is what peels the skins off nations and cultures and boils them together in a pot.

It is only because some things are higher, and other things lower, that we can aspire to anything at all. Order, by preserving differences, is what enables us to stretch our souls.

Entropy levels, flattens, diffuses, deflates, destroys. It is the relentless enemy of everything superior, special, noteworthy, exceptional, and distinctive. It seeks, without pause, to make everything equal to everything else. It is the heat-death of the Universe.

Leftism is Entropy.

7 Comments

  1. imnobody00 says

    I reached this conclusion some years ago and I am glad that I am not the only one.

    Entropy = Freedom + Equality. In a gas, the particles are equal and have the maximum degree of freedom.A liquid has equality but not total freedom. A solid does not have freedom but can have equality. As we move to move complex structures, a machine, a cell, a human there is less freedom and less equality between the parts.

    Entropy = Lack of structure and lack of ability to do useful work.

    Posted March 10, 2019 at 10:10 am | Permalink
  2. Whitewall says

    “Entropy= Lack of structure and lack of ability to do useful work”

    Thus, this = “Appearing at the SXSW conference Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said people should be excited by the prospect of robots taking their jobs because it will afford them more time to pursue their creative passions.”

    Posted March 10, 2019 at 10:58 am | Permalink
  3. Malcolm says

    Robert,

    …because it will afford them more time to pursue their creative passions.

    Or to become acutely, depressingly, and restlessly aware that they haven’t any.

    Posted March 10, 2019 at 12:09 pm | Permalink
  4. Hey,

    This is “antiquarian”, commenting as my current avatar. If anyone here enjoyed my comment some time back about Conquest’s Second Law describing an entropic process– which this post seems related to, you might enjoy browsing my own blog, such as this:

    http://ralphwaldoporcupine.com/2019/02/05/the-zero-sum-game-of-unity/

    Malcolm, with your permission, I’ll put this site on my blogroll as soon as I figure out how to add one. :-)

    All the best,

    — RWP

    Posted March 10, 2019 at 6:50 pm | Permalink
  5. Whitewall says

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/socialism-as-deliberate-destruction.php

    A feature not a bug

    Posted March 10, 2019 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
  6. user1 says

    Is it limited only to the left? Doesn’t every system, regardless of political ideology or culture, eventually run down this course. You could say some of the few holdouts worldwide are the Amish, the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan, and similar sects that are both religious fundamentalists and isolated from society at large in some way, ensuring their autonomy.

    Posted March 11, 2019 at 12:20 pm | Permalink
  7. Malcolm says

    user1,

    Yes, everything runs down sooner or later. Everything dies.

    That said, should we build and preserve, or lay ourselves in the dust? Should we eat food, or poison?

    Posted January 14, 2020 at 10:43 pm | Permalink

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