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Reality is evil
The laws of thermodynamics encompass the whole of reality, from beginning to end, top to bottom, in origin, order and operation. We exist by virtue of heat exchange alone, and work entirely in service to the entropic decay of reality prescribed by that exchange.
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic... See more
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
we are nothing more than cups destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break.
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming.
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
A metaphysics that responds to the full scope of the thermodynamic revolution needs to acknowledge the dissipative and destructive function lying behind the ‘generative’ force seemingly at work within reality. To do so requires moving from the classical optimistic metaphysics of becoming to a much more pessimistic metaphysics of absolute finitude... See more
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos. ‘Live in accordance with nature,’ Marcus Aurelius urges in his Meditations. For these thinkers, nature serves as the ethical guide for our actions and the lodestone of our aesthetic ideals because it embodies... See more
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
What, then, are we to do? The only ‘ought’ we can tentatively derive from the vision of reality revealed by the thermodynamic revolution is this: it is our duty to strike back at the Universe. For it is precisely in the possibility of retaliating against the moral horror of existence that new ethical imperatives and aesthetic insights might be forg... See more
Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil
This makes me think of Camus and the attitude of absurdism. He believed that we should say fuck you to the universe and play at living for as long as possible; that we should revolt against nature and it’s decreative mission. I also think of the Dylan Thomas poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” He says “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”