The root of all evil

“Behold! The Wizard”, by MysticLinear

I once wrote that Brazil died and that the fact that there are still people living here doesn't change that, since even corpses harbor life — worms, fungi, etc. I was talking about politics. But I was wrong, I apologize. It's not just Brazil. It's not even just humanity. There is only death with life. All the problems start with abiogenesis. Before abiogenesis, although “organic molecules” were present, there was no life. Any problem that any living being has or had can have its origins traced to that event. From the Sauroposeidon being preyed upon by the Acrocanthosaurus in the Cretaceous period, 110 million years ago, to current political problems.

Someone might say: “Nice, but your existential talk doesn’t solve anything. What can we do to resolve the real, material and historical issue?” We can do whatever we want, but there won't be an end point. An apotheosis will not come. The only “apotheosis” is the return to the inanimate. And that doesn't depend so much on us. The return to the inanimate will come, both for the individual and the collectivity, whether we like it or not. The vast majority of species that existed no longer exist and we have a very good idea that those that exist today will one day become extinct.

Including ours.

There are those who say that the phenomenon of life is a denial of entropy and that this would be proof that it is possible for there to be a universal meaning to our existences. Yes, life, in a local and temporary sense, is the negation of entropy. A living being organizes energy and matter in such a way that it does not become dispersed. But in a universal sense, no. Worms and fungi accelerate the decomposition of a body, for example. In other words, they work in favor of entropy, although they seem to deny it as individuals. It wouldn't surprise me if life was just a universal mechanism for accelerating entropy, at the cost of temporarily and locally denying it.

What a sadness! This whole spectacle full of sound and fury not only means nothing, but is the result of an insidious, amoral, demonic mechanism. It is no wonder that, even in mythologies and religions, from time to time those sensible heretics appear who describe the world not as the work of a benevolent God, but of the Devil. These sensible people would not thank the one who imprisons them in decadent matter, much less worship him. They suffered, as some of us do today, from excessive lucidity. Therefore, they were unable to pay homage to the Creator.

In a world where the scientific view is dominant, we do not need to anthropomorphize a culprit. Nature, that is, existence, is itself to blame, but as a fatality is to blame. Purposeless and blind, nature unwittingly forged a perfect mechanism to deceive animate matter. She does it through need to fulfill an absence. In animals, this mechanism manifests itself primarily through hunger. And as animals become more complex, new absences are established. In human beings there's an absence of meaning to our existence, something that was almost instantly perverted for the benefit of a few by religious charlatanism.

Charlatanism has always been fashionable, at least since the emergence of the first societies. Ever since our species developed the ability to reflect, it started to feel alone, thrown onto the earth, as if it were an orphan, disconnected from something, but it doesn't know what. This is excellent news for scammers. But it is not only in the promise of a metaphysical kingdom that we find charlatanism. We also find it in those who promise Utopia in the world of becoming itself, that is, in the physical universe. Politics and economics offer these drugs, even though those who traffic them often believe they are selling scientific and historical truths.

∭

A relief, a brief moment of rest, the feeling of being at home. That's all we can expect from this life, at best. But we are never really at home, because this place is not our home. We are passing through here for a short while. Then we evaporate, as if we had never existed. Most of us — perhaps all of us — won't even appear in fossil records in a few million years. And if, by some miracle, we manage to get out of here and reach the stars, we will wish we had ceased to exist before the first rocket reached Earth's orbit.

In the same way, we should lament that our ancestors, having discovered fire, did not decide that it was time to stop then and there and no longer feed death with new lives. However, we shouldn't be so hard on them. After all, they had just awakened their consciousness and lived almost like automatons, without the capacity for reflection that would come to mark humanity after the emergence of the first great civilizations of antiquity. And yet, rare are those who stop living like automatons, even among us, in the contemporary world of technology.

The root of all evil is found in the beginning. If we consider man's deep consciousness as negative, the beginning was the moment we separated ourselves from other animals. But if we consider any sensation of pain that exists in the animal kingdom to be negative, the beginning is found when the first animals appeared, hundreds of millions of years ago, in the pre-Cambrian period. However, there are reasons to imagine that natural selection always ends up resulting in beings capable of feeling pain.

The beginning is in abiogenesis itself, the moment when the inorganic or inanimate was able, through certain rare processes, to produce a being capable of consuming nutrients to acquire energy and self-replication. It is rare because, from what we can observe on the other planets in our solar system and on exoplanets so far, we have not found signs of life — and even if we end up finding it, we know it will be in the minority of them. The majority of the cosmos is devoid of life and free from the condition of possibility of having problems.

If we consider the phenomenon of life to be just a mechanism for accelerating universal entropy, we should at least thank chance that it is not so abundant in the universe. Just imagine if in every rock floating through the cosmos there were beings capable of moaning and screaming when they were crushed alive, like on our planet and perhaps a few others.

Imagine an even sadder scenario: if all planets contained species capable of reflecting as we humans reflect, species capable of organizing themselves the way we organized ourselves throughout our meaningless history, doomed to go through all the endless, insoluble and violent individual and collective contradictions that we all go through. It's better that the root of all evil is rare.

by Fernando Olszewski