Posted on 03/22/2022 1:04:15 PM PDT by Red Badger
In Christianity and Culture, T.S. Eliot wrote of 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 present-day actions, 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 rust, to decay, and to decompose.
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.
“cleverness rather than wisdom” describes almost all of our current politicians.
I wouldn’t even use the word liberalism, I would use leftism.
Great article.
For years my handle in the VA mail system was “Entropy is proof of management.” Apparently someone in management figured out what that meant. They made me change my handle, but it was a damn good joke for years.
I don’t know how true any of this is. The youth are captured by the left and with that there is a lot of energy — not entropy. The left’s end is vague but still very real to them — they will give their lives for it. The present is important, but that could be said of conservatism that wants to preserve what it has that exists in the present. Entropy is what tend structures towards death, but the Left sees it as LIFE. Entropy isn’t the end but the beginning point of the new regime, the perfect regime. Conservatives see entropy as decay, as the end.
T.S. Eliot is a wonderful conservative but his poems pre conservatism had passion. His Christian poems were almost dead or benign. There was no enthusiasm in heaven for him.
Also our entertainment industry, and almost all of social media.
There might be a lot of energy in the youth captured by the Left, but the Left directs them to expend that energy in the pursuit of a thousand irrelevant causes, many of which are contradictory. In short, chaos. The Left’s end is vague because to them, it is “anything but what currently is”, and that “anything” does not discriminate. The concept of that end may be very real to the Left, but they cannot define it. The Left might see entropy as “Life”, but like so much else the Left espouses, calling something “X” doesn’t actually make that thing “X”.
To borrow a phrase from Transmetropolitan, the Left aims to make things “a loud, bright, stinking mess”. But that does not necessarily imply fecundity; train wrecks are pretty spectacular while they’re occurring as well.
And our ‘journalists’ - but I guess they fall under ‘entertainment’, now.
“Entropy is proof of management.”
“Entropy is dis organization.” ....................
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