Monday, November 21, 2011

How Well Does Society Mix? and the Third Law of Moral Mechanics

"The good men of every age are those who bury the old ideas in the depths of the earth and bear fruit with them, the agriculturists of the spirit. But that land will at length become exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again." -- Nietzsche (The Gay Science, 1882)

1. How well does society mix?
When exploring the topography of human progress, Nietzsche seems unworried our political algorithm will wind up stuck on the stumpiest hill, far from some Olympian global optimum, since evil -- the deviant exploratory force that destabilizes what is constant and good -- drives society to new optima in an ergodic process. Perhaps this landscape is smoothed and navigable under simplifying assumptions, such as mapping our topographical domain from R^n onto love \in R or money \in R, perhaps mapped by suggestion of your honey-pie or of your economics professor (you have my pity should these two be one and the same).

2. The third law of moral mechanics
From the Occupy Everything-Occupiable Movement, we see evil forces necessarily oppose those good forces preserving change. Since good defines that which is evil, and since good also acts to nullify any threat of evil, the force of good must be equal and opposite to the perceived threat of evil. This opposition typically results in some form of violence (among those types of violence, physical). These forces are non-violent only when they are zero -- when they are identified as equal. So, if good does not react, then old good absorbs the old evil, and together they oppose the new evil as the new good. Of course, it's not guaranteed that any old evils assimilated into the new good ascend the gradient of human progress -- but this helps ensure society mixes well with time.

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