We don’t know much about the first 200 to 350 thousand years of the Universe. It’s a bit shrouded except for the WMAP and COBE satellite data that show in a collage of colors the minute variations of temperatures that led to the current lumpiness. That lumpiness, by the way, includes you. Yes, you’re a matter-energy lump.
But what we do know is the Beginning seems to have been if ever so briefly somewhat chaotic. Briefly? It took some fractions of a second for the stuff of the universe to form. The time frame of formation of subatomic particles and the eventual formation of the baryons that comprise your body is so compressed that it’s measured in femtoseconds, nanoseconds, well, we might as well say, split seconds. In other words, in a very short time the universe began to organize itself, and now, 13.8 billion years later—give or take a week—here we are in the midst of things working rather well, the atoms making molecules, the molecules coming together to make big things, and the universe becoming so well organized that it is conscious of itself. That last thing refers to you because you are the universe conscious of itself.
And you are given to ordering things, and I don’t mean “from GrubHub” or “from Domino’s.” I mean organizing. Putting things together to make sense of them like lining up desks in a classroom, mortaring bricks to make a wall, or pouring cake mix into one of those little separate paper cupcake cups. Yes, you do a bunch of ordering. And that includes organizing a social entity.
It seems that making things line up in order is in our cosmic nature, just as the universe gathered under the force of gravity the stars now collected into galaxies. So, it should surprise you that among your contemporaries there are groups that seem to favor chaos over order, groups that prefer anarchy and defunding the police.
Hot button topic? Touchy subject? Really? I think of the group of young people I saw on a video throwing stones at passing cars and protesting the very existence of the police. When an apparently old guy whose car was hit stopped the vehicle and got out to go toward them, one of the frightened girls said, “Someone call the police.” Ah! Chaos is good until it isn’t. Then order is good.
Regardless of the human failings that make some small percentage of police bad actors, there’s some commonsense in having a group assigned to keeping things in order. Drive around Rome or some other big city where traffic is helter-skelter and ask, “Is this what the universe has become?” Or look at the southern border of the United States, a border that was becoming more secure with the building of a wall and the “remain in Mexico” policy that the Biden Administration abolished, allowing—or should I say, inviting—hundreds of thousands of border crossers, who, by the way, have in many instances gotten “free stuff” at the expense of the American taxpayer.
I suppose a basic question is this: How did the rise of intelligence lead to the current desire for chaos? After 13.8 billion years—again, give or take a week—of organizing, the universe arrived at a pinnacle of consciousness that now rejects organization.
And apparently, the proof lies in those defund-the-police advocates and the anarchists who offer no goal other than to destroy order.
Of course, one might say that there’s third side to the chaos-order coin, and that side is extreme order, that is, the imposition of martial law and the quashing of individual freedom. That’s a legitimate concern. Police states are not happy states. Oppressed people are not happy people. So, there has to be an organizing ethics that pervades social order. But in today’s America the hues are divided like the lines on a spectrograph, there’s little melding of minds and softening of stances. From a perspective of the 13.8 billion years of order leading to consciousness, those who oppose defunding the police seem to be the more reasonable of the two opposing groups.
Thirteen point eight billion years ago—give or take a week— the universe began to organize itself in seconds. All these many billions of years later, we can’t seem to get the conscious universe to agree on order and disorder. Is this entropy at play? Have we cracked the egg of order that we cannot put back into the shell?
But what we do know is the Beginning seems to have been if ever so briefly somewhat chaotic. Briefly? It took some fractions of a second for the stuff of the universe to form. The time frame of formation of subatomic particles and the eventual formation of the baryons that comprise your body is so compressed that it’s measured in femtoseconds, nanoseconds, well, we might as well say, split seconds. In other words, in a very short time the universe began to organize itself, and now, 13.8 billion years later—give or take a week—here we are in the midst of things working rather well, the atoms making molecules, the molecules coming together to make big things, and the universe becoming so well organized that it is conscious of itself. That last thing refers to you because you are the universe conscious of itself.
And you are given to ordering things, and I don’t mean “from GrubHub” or “from Domino’s.” I mean organizing. Putting things together to make sense of them like lining up desks in a classroom, mortaring bricks to make a wall, or pouring cake mix into one of those little separate paper cupcake cups. Yes, you do a bunch of ordering. And that includes organizing a social entity.
It seems that making things line up in order is in our cosmic nature, just as the universe gathered under the force of gravity the stars now collected into galaxies. So, it should surprise you that among your contemporaries there are groups that seem to favor chaos over order, groups that prefer anarchy and defunding the police.
Hot button topic? Touchy subject? Really? I think of the group of young people I saw on a video throwing stones at passing cars and protesting the very existence of the police. When an apparently old guy whose car was hit stopped the vehicle and got out to go toward them, one of the frightened girls said, “Someone call the police.” Ah! Chaos is good until it isn’t. Then order is good.
Regardless of the human failings that make some small percentage of police bad actors, there’s some commonsense in having a group assigned to keeping things in order. Drive around Rome or some other big city where traffic is helter-skelter and ask, “Is this what the universe has become?” Or look at the southern border of the United States, a border that was becoming more secure with the building of a wall and the “remain in Mexico” policy that the Biden Administration abolished, allowing—or should I say, inviting—hundreds of thousands of border crossers, who, by the way, have in many instances gotten “free stuff” at the expense of the American taxpayer.
I suppose a basic question is this: How did the rise of intelligence lead to the current desire for chaos? After 13.8 billion years—again, give or take a week—of organizing, the universe arrived at a pinnacle of consciousness that now rejects organization.
And apparently, the proof lies in those defund-the-police advocates and the anarchists who offer no goal other than to destroy order.
Of course, one might say that there’s third side to the chaos-order coin, and that side is extreme order, that is, the imposition of martial law and the quashing of individual freedom. That’s a legitimate concern. Police states are not happy states. Oppressed people are not happy people. So, there has to be an organizing ethics that pervades social order. But in today’s America the hues are divided like the lines on a spectrograph, there’s little melding of minds and softening of stances. From a perspective of the 13.8 billion years of order leading to consciousness, those who oppose defunding the police seem to be the more reasonable of the two opposing groups.
Thirteen point eight billion years ago—give or take a week— the universe began to organize itself in seconds. All these many billions of years later, we can’t seem to get the conscious universe to agree on order and disorder. Is this entropy at play? Have we cracked the egg of order that we cannot put back into the shell?
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