Sunday, August 26, 2012

200 yrs old (and I do mean OLD) : today's politics & 1st law of thermodynamics that spawned them

200 years DEAD !
Let us Honor the Dead , before we bury them. Because today's most popular political ideologies (Manchester Liberalism, Benthamite Libertarianism and Owenite Socialism) are all two hundred years old .

As is the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of science that actually unites all them as emerging from the same frozen moment in time, despite seemingly profound surface differences.

Science has moved forward two centuries - our political ideologies haven't


Throw in a handful of less popular political ideologies ( Nazi, Fascist and Stalinism among them) and it is clear that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the idea that the Universe is one great big perpetual motion machine of mass and energy, set up for the eternal use of Man) has had a overwhelming powerful impact on human politics.

Unfortunately Science has long moved on from the attractive-to-human-Hubris derivative First Law  to the human-Humility-inducing truly fundamental Second Law of Thermodynamics , without most of humanity noticing.

Certainly the politicians and the political chattering classes have not noticed.

(A little knowledge of High School Science from 40 years before is truly a dangerous thing.)

Ideologies that are in defiance of physical realities are almost bound to be seductive politically (a sophisticated form of whistling past a graveyard) but then fail miserably, when as an elected government, it tries to anything physical out in the real world.

I do not suppose that the brain cell lesions that produce the optimist small "l" liberal and the cautious small "c" conservative are ever likely to mutate out.

But inside the big tent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we might expect all of us (global commensalists by necessity) would at least fight out our political differences within a world view that is at  sync with the universe's physical realities.

Maybe most of us still can't re-program our VCRs (remember them ?) but isn't it time we learned to re-program our political views in tune with physical reality ?

We can't continue to go through life drinking socialist Kool-Aid and dropping capitalist Acid ....

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