The universe is a bowling alley. It sets up the pins and we knock ‘em down.
That’s pretty much all you need to understand entropy. You’ll need a little more to understand humanity. We are high maintenance. We basically feast on order and crap disorder.
The chemical energy we consume and absorb is very ordered. Think cheeseburgers and sunshine. The heat energy we radiate and piss away is very disordered. Think garlic breath and sweaty pits.
Humans only survive by increasing disorder in the universe. No wonder we’re so messed up. For so long, we’ve been attracted to this notion of linear progress trending up and up to some golden age where our brains are the size of beach balls and we wear long shimmering cloaks and wax nostalgic over war, famine, corruption, inequality, poverty, climate change and the final season of Game of Thrones.
Our very nature, though, is bipolar. Order/Disorder. The signs that we are thriving as a species, really kicking dominion-over-the-earth ass are crystal clear: it’s mayhem out there. We are increasing global disorder at a mind-boggling rate, creating a golden age of man-made crises.
So, what do we do? Just keep bowling?
Or do we defy the conservation of energy and rewrite the first law of thermodynamics?
That would be a tedious proposition at best. So I suggest, as a species, we embrace disorder. A new kind of disorder.
A disorder where humanity is not always at the front of the line, on the top of the heap, in the number one spot. A disorder where flora and fauna can flourish because they are not competing with our technological heat waste and exploitation. The earth is not our heat sink. It is not our strip mine.
We can turn our waste energy and our wasted energy to shaking up the established order. We can reset the pins ourselves and not bowl them down. We can create a much more liberating and equitable world disorder by embracing biodiversity.
Biodiversity. Not bowling. That’s what the universe is really built for.
Are you ready for it?
Are you hungry for it?
Good. Now, who’s ready to disorder?
