Marx Darwin Clausius

The Easter 2021 Edition

The Problem of the Closed Box

"Just as the constant increase in entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy" - attributed to Vaclav Havel

You cannot struggle against entropy; that would only increase it, just as you cannot dig your way out of a hole or cut a notch out of the side of a rowboat: it would simply sink.

THAT is the basic law of the universe: it is called the "Second law of Thermodynamics", and it works in one direction only.

On the other hand, there is nothing to stop a decrease in entropy, and lifeless universe to become ever more highly structured, if the process governing this development is not thermodynamic.

Thus Cosmos can form from Chaos.

And bring forth life.

Man did not descend from Gods, as romantic as that old superstition may be: The older structures are simpler than the newer ones.

Enhanced & extended

150 years or three great generations ago, three individuals, contemporary but separately, each on his own, set out to free their societies from the clutches of religion and determination.

They succeeded.

These three were Karl Marx, inventor of Marxism, Charles Darwin, inventor of Darwinism, and Rudolph Clausius, discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in fact, all of them, plus the concept of "entropy" to boot).

Apart from the individual flaws their theories might have - Marx, for instance, failed to define his prerequisites, simply asserting a correlation, thus rendering his theory useless; Clausius may have chosen the less valid of two possible ratios, Q/T or T/Q, to define his concept of entropy or disability to do work; and Darwin very cleverly installed a tautology into his "survival of the fittest" (if he did coin that phrase) - it is however noteworthy that all three contemporaries were instrumental in very successfully throwing their, i. e. western European society off the rails.

This may have been done on purpose, as in the case of Marx, collaterally, as in the case of Darwin, or unwittingly, as in the case of Clausius. But all three did so, and all three, it could be argued, made the same basic mistake; thus perhaps, indeed, freeing their people from the clutches of individual and social religion, but in doing so leaving them completely adrift and lost at sea 150 years or three great generations later, once the last of the old religious had died, dissolving the last strands to the concept of their own creation, and with that, their own existence.

Now, one could argue that, tough luck, there is no such thing as creation, though you exist, so live with it. Go mad if you have to. Accept responsibility for the universe (if accepting responsibility for yourself is not enough), worship pagan deities to relieve yourself, or worship your own self instead, commit collective suicide or drug yourself into oblivion, or whatever you must do for not being a dumb beast, but live with it. You, along with everything else, exist solely because of a theoretically desperately improbable random freak warp in the time-space continuum. Accept it.

However, this is demanding something that is not only useless, but factually wrong.

For all three individuals in question, in order to sever ties to the "old thinking", more precisely because only then would they be able to describe their observations, theoretically cut off all influence from the outside that might disturb these.

All three described "closed systems".

Now, this might be useful in making limited statements (as long as you state the restrictions in full); but if these statements are then generalized, they are wrong.

In reality, there is no such thing as a closed system, as far as it pertains to the subjects in question, not even theoretically. This is not to say that such a limitation may impose some restrictions on the generality of outcome, but that such a limitation renders the subject invalid, as it physically cannot exist as such.

Or, to put it into context, asking of people to consider themselves as severed from their own creation would render them physically non - existent, and they know it. God or no God.

Of course, this knowledge leads to nihilism, and the narcissistic but futile effort to create oneself, as one has not been created before.

But that is not the point. The point is that by considering what are effectually closed systems which - and this is important - have already been created, and, this is equally important, are feeding upon themselves, what they are offering as a scientific explanation for the existence of human individuals and society (and, in fact, anything else) is in consequence a cannibalistic one that inevitably leads to physical death.

While they were offering restricted solutions to restricted problems of specific scientific theories, these, when generalized - as they were bound to, challenging religious belief in all three cases, as in the emergence of man (Darwin), the gift of daily bread (Marx) and the perpetuity of eternity (Clausius) - they offered no solution to the question of creation; as they had, to make their points, purposefully cut their subject off from all external input, thus rendering them at once theoretically valid and practically invalid.

Getting rid of the concept of God as a faulty explanation for the existence of the universe - and our ability to observe it! - may have freed western society, and indeed man, from the shackles of the past; but this for the price, by the very standards of the replacement theories, of non- existence in the future, once this separation had been completed.

More precisely, by resting the existence of the universe on perhaps valid theories, but which require a universe outside of the universe to actually have a subject to examine, while purposefully omitting this from their calculations, these explanations, even if valid, destroy all possibility of future existence by cutting off the past that enabled this existence to come into being, and that by their very own evidence.

You cannot exist via a system that cannot exist without external input while withholding this input.

Let's go into detail

• Religion: The Creation of the World
• Economics: The Creation of Wealth
• Science: The Mechanics of Creation

Clausius, while working on the fundamentals of the mechanics of the steam engine (which were then extrapolated to be the mechanics of the universe), stated that there is no such thing as perpetual motion.

However, there is; for though this limitation may be true of the steam engine, a system which, though the thermodynamists insist on observing "closed systems", is explicitly not closed, as it always needs an external source and sink - the ultimate one being, in fact, the universe, i. e. matter (source) and empty space (sink); beyond that, there is, in fact, in this very same universe, perpetual motion; and this for all eternity, i. e. for as long as it exists.

So, if this world would have had to come into existence by thermodynamics alone, it would not have been able to do so; its very own laws of physics would forbid it.

However, it did. And it moves. Perpetually.

And so, by extension, if you rest your own existence as a human solely on thermodynamics, you would not exist; and if you did, you could not move or breathe. Death would be too joyful a description of your state of being - it would be negative, a Dante's hell.

You would have to cannibalize your own existence to exist.

But, through no fault of Clausius', and perhaps unconsciously, people continued to regard themselves as exempt from these laws of thermodynamics, which, on the other hand, they seem to accept to govern the whole of the universe - of which they are a part. And if they do see themselves as net consumers, they resent it. It reminds them of death.

Perhaps the thought of not being able to create your own living conditions on principle frightens people, especially those that no longer feel secure in the provision of God for their 'daily bread' (although they had replaced 'the sweat of their brow' by which they would 'eat their bread' at first with the sweat of oxen, then with the smoke of steam plows, then diesel fumes).

When Darwin took care of that, as described below, by rebranding humans as the random product of blind nature (though this would not leave humans worse off than an other living creature) it broke their narcissistic dream, as one might call it nowadays.

Comparing themselves to the birds in the fields, who toil not (they do…), but the Lord feeds them nevertheless, may have conflicted with their self- esteem. But then, not only do birds toil; but, on the other hand, humans are fed as well, via the very same mechanism.

Seen scientifically, Clausius was right to point out that no thermodynamic system can sustain itself; it needs an external source and sink, one that it cannot itself provide.

From the economic point of view, therefore, no system comprised of humans, animals and machines can sustain itself, either.

But not only were the majority of humans unwilling to apply the universal laws of thermodynamics to their own actions, they demanded that their (paid!) work to be the sole source of all things manufactured, in an ever- widening realm - while learning, if indirectly, that these laws of thermodynamics, when applied to the universe, demanded its demise and destruction, even death.

Seen from the point of religion, within a generation, Creation thus went from being eternal to being doomed, with humans left to take the reigns and be responsible for their own existence; and, with that, of all Creation - at least that of the planet and its nature.

Within one generation, western man, in his own mind, had transformed himself from being a creature to being a creator - and tasked with the scientifically impossible.

Marx, then, while trying to comprehend and explain (which he thought he could do in a few weeks) how human economics work - and attempting to redeem the masses, which were rapidly being replaced by Clausius' machines (at least observing the results, completely independent of the fact whether he knew of the latter or not) - a priori reduced the production of economic value to what he - tautologically - termed the working class.

He immediately ran into the difficulty of defining this 'working class'; i. e. into endless strife about who would be deemed to be included in this illustrious circle, and who would not, and who would make this decision; and then put off this decision (as so many) into the future, never mind it being fundamental, and then calling these contradictions "inherent contradictions" - for instance, would women be included, giving birth? Is human reproduction, is the production of oneself, in theory, production?

The very fact that this production, simply for being thermodynamic by necessity, as described by Clausius would instantly grind to a halt, if cut off from external input from (and, in fact, output to) the surrounding environment, rendered it theoretically impossible if isolated or "closed".

So - apart from arbitrarily separating man from man, man from beast, and beast from machine, though all three may draw a plough (or perhaps in future reproduce humans) - the very fact that human production (and reproduction) is inseparable from the destruction of a, therefore, necessarily otherwise produced environment, renders its impossible to give an explanation of "value".

To make it personal for a moment, you take up the space of the material your body would default to; where you are, nothing else can be. And if you rest your own existence as a living human being solely on your own work, you would not exist; and if you did, even for a moment ignoring the lost work that would go into the production of yourself of twenty years, and that of your mechanical surroundings: 

Treading a bicycle generator to illuminate a potato patch to feed yourself in an absolutely cold, lightless surrounding would kill you within seconds.

But even in the most benign surroundings, the idea of being able to "feed yourself" - let alone produce a profit - is forbidden by the very laws that govern physical work, i. e. the laws of thermodynamics, as defined by Clausius. And as humans are of physical existence, all their work is physical; and the same applies for animals and machines - even for plants.

Again, you would have to cannibalize your own existence to exist. There is no way out of it.

Seen economically, Marx was right that humans value what they produce, and produce what they value; but remove human values from the equation, and you are left with destruction.

And of course he (along with others; good journalists they were) was right to call attention to the plight of the working masses; even if these could not be exclusively defined, they were there: in every system, there are always winners and losers; and almost by definition more of one than of the other.

And, to be sure, even his arch-enemies, on the capitalist side, worked on the premise of profit (most likely achieved mathematically by calling their debt or credit an "asset" - i. e. by a change of sign sleight of hand) - the main point of contention simply being who would have the right to own how great an allocation of what - with Marx calling for only those who "work" to achieve that gain to receive it - an impossible statement, as neither could this "work" be clearly defined, nor can any profit be allocated to any bit of work: there is none.

No system that stipulates sheer labor as the means of achieving it, has ever achieved wealth; quite the contrary. Profit is achieved if labor leads to access to more resources than were employed in that labor.

It does not generate wealth per se.

From the scientific point of view, no such system ever can achieve a gain of its own. All labor results in the necessary cost for a profit. And the process is one-way or directed: You can make a chair out of a tree, but no tree out of a chair. The slightest cut with a saw cannot be undone, it can only be healed.

And even if such a feat were even remotely possible, the (amount of) energy potential destroyed in the production process would not be replenished in the reproduction process, but augmented.

Indeed, seen from the viewpoint of religion, all human labor is indeed futile, as the Lord giveth and taketh as He pleases; this goes for the individual, but forming a collective out of individuals simply to have an insurance pool really would work only if the average was positive.

And even if this point of view did serve to justify injustice (which it most certainly did, from the individual and the collective human point of view, by disregarding the question if indeed all aspects had been factored in over what length of time, i. e. eternity; or, to put it more bluntly, if this was theirs to judge at all, given the fact of their missing omniscience, and obvious partisanship), the question of 'justice' and 'just rewards' sidestepped the question of how humans were to be able to control their own prerequisitions; of how dependent creatures were to become independent creators of wealth that others depended upon. Humans may understand the rules; but they cannot change them.

With the concept of Creation thus not only doomed to a final extinction, as through science, but ended then and there by economic conquest, individuals in western society so afflicted were left with the literally impossible task of doing what they could not do, of creating what they could not create, namely themselves and their own cause and destination, while taking over, as former passengers, the abandoned wheel of their vessel in the midst of a tempest.

Darwin is more intricate.

His observations were acute; his conclusions valid.

Yes, humans did evolve from a species that went before, as all living species are the product of interaction between not only themselves and their geological and biological surroundings, but of the changes in these geological and biological surroundings that are produced by this interaction.

So the expression "survival of the fittest" (plural!), tautological as it is, does explain how species adapt to a changing situation, which they themselves help to create; and the mechanism which was later declared to be the driving engine behind the adaptation to external changes would be random internal changes in their reproductive DNA - which are then 'selected', i. e. left over for reproduction if their results prove to be viable.

The trouble is, most of them wouldn't.

So, in a way (and even if only by extending the timeline), Darwin and others did destroy the notion of man and beast having been individually created by God, in one fell swoop, ex nihilo some few thousand years ago; by proposing a mechanism which, by the way, all breeders of plants and animals must have been acutely aware of in one way or another.

And, like Marx and Clausius, Darwin did arrive at his theory primarily from observing a "closed system", i. e. examining the changes in birds hopping from island to island in an archipelago, both of which - archipelago and birds - would have to already exist and be kept in metabolism in order for these observations even to take place; to later then perhaps be extrapolated backwards, linking the first amoebae to later human beings.

This would justify reiterating the points already made pertaining to self-cannibalization: life does not exist without external input - and output. But there may be something much more subtle to be observed here; namely, that the changes driving evolution are not really random; truly random changes within the structure of the DNA is usually lethal.

Instead, the development of one or more species generally seems to be constrained to go from simpler to more complex; and in any living cell, reproductive or not, the endeavor is to at least retain its complexity.

In a "closed system", in which energy turnover leads to rising entropy, this should not really be possible; it is markedly different from the decay to be expected by a random, thermodynamic breakdown of information.

It will have been tried: the experiment to conduct here would be a vat of single-cell organisms (to eliminate recombination) under good conditions, with a source of hard radiation in the middle. Would something more complex arise? Hardly. In fact, judging from the amount of inactive and even foreign DNA to be found in living creatures, it seems extremely difficult to get rid of even useless or dangerous information in a reproduction chain, without destroying it completely.

In consequence, by far the most random changes in the makeup of any living cell would not be viable, but simply lead to its destruction, death and decay. Or, as physicist Erwin Schrödinger once observed, it is not the energy we imbibe with our metabolistic intake, but what scientists call "negative entropy" that keeps our living cells the way they are, and by that, alive.

One could even argue that energy, released into a living cell without this context, usually cooks it; and plants, for instance, would have had to develop a way around that problem to be able to capture photons without wilting in the process.

Not that any of this is done by design or purpose; but the biology of life seems less dependent on change, as studied by Darwin , than it is on preservation; random changes in DNA, being mostly lethal in one form or another, must be repaired, neutralized or eliminated, for life to go on.

So, if random, or indeed, willful change is lethal without the context of adaptation, and as evolution has no sympathy either for the individual, nor for the species, not even for life itself, then nihilistically succumbing to randomness on any level regularly destroys whatever succumbed; and that, one could argue, is the essence of Darwinism.

But while, in commemoration, the "Darwin Award" has been created to celebrate those who go down that path, one should not forget that therein lies a mystery still to be solved:

Namely, the true origin of the "negative entropy", a linguistically satanic negative expression of "true order", which is infused into every living cell from the outside, counteracting the detrimental effects of its energy turnover, thus keeping it alive for as long as it can do so.

And, by extension, the origin of that order which expresses itself everywhere in our surroundings.

From the viewpoint of religion, Darwin, though himself a student of the clergy, and others (like his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who, while working on a similar project as Darwin, may have emphasized the geological evolution of the living surroundings a bit more) did perhaps destroy the notion of man and beast (and this planet) having been individually created by God.

But strangely enough, the darwinists (or indeed their religious counterparts), at least in the public perception, did not go any further, even though it was staring them in the face: seen coldly and objectively, evolution - the 'new' mechanism for creating species, and even subspecies - is, by this very definition, a form of creation (something new comes into existence which before was not).

And it is even one that, by their own scientific standards, had its beginning on day one, in starting to form the material prerequisites for later life; and that, again by their own assertions, is active everywhere, at every moment, steadily creating new variants, while letting others go extinct - and never finding an end, especially not if geology is to be included.

The only factor now missing was that of divine design - and even that would have been a matter of definition as well.

In other words: Creation is not a credit from the past, an old debt passed on to the future, but an every day act of the present.

However, by disconnecting man from God, paradoxically, man was not elevated to the heavens, but returned to the realm of the beast. Which, in time, calls for equal treatment. Man could no longer call himself special, nor, on the other hand, see the image of God's creation in an animal; and sooner or later, this turns into an anewed justification for cruelty and deification - in both directions; one could now treat humans like animals with the same impunity as treating animals as humans - and have science justify such actions. Being cruel to God's creatures - or idolizing them - cannot be frowned upon if they are not.

From a scientific point of view, there was nothing to be said against the application of a general biological mechanism, known to every breeder, to the evolution of humans themselves, along with any other species. At first sight, at least. No more than there would be an argument against erosion on the geological side.

But a debate sprang up immediately: if the proposed agent of evolution - random change strained through the filter of environment - was enough to account for the steady improvement of old, and the appearance of new species; especially when Clausius' Idea of the steady entropic decay of all things natural began to take hold in the minds of the addressees.

This was not a question of probability, but of principle: do large numbers outbalance probability? And, on another hand, would the universe even be at all possible, if certain natural constants were even slightly different - and are these constants therefore perhaps not as independent as they may seem?

This led some scientists to go astray, to deviate from the straight and narrow, and, for example, Schrödinger to propose the intake of negative entropy, or negentropy, (or, if you will, order) via the intake of food (and air, as is always failed to mention); to stabilize (and possibly enhance) the DNA of the body cell.

Though this was later refuted, there is much to be said for it. Of course, this calls for plants to receive negative entropy from the sun (or even artificial lighting); and, in the end, it leads to the quest for the ultimate - and necessarily inorganic - source for all negative entropy, or entropy reduction, or - if you will, seen positively: order.

And finally, viewed economically:

If there is no more a fundamental biological or spiritual difference between man and beast, and man creates added value in the economic process, which really is one of metabolism: does a beast then create added value as well? And if man then builds machines to take over the task of both: do machines? And if plants do little else than do the beasts that feed on them, namely, create themselves as added value, do even plants?

And, if so, which of those may retain the value that they have thus created, and which may not - and why?

And, if indeed all metabolism comes at a cost greater than the value created, and thus cannot retain even its own self, under even the most favorable of circumstances - which one of them will be left holding the bill?

In short, the questions raised by the likes of Darwin, Marx and Clausius outpass the answers they have tried to give to former questions. In fact, their proposals contradict one another, and even themselves, fundamentally; as they all, openly or hidden, one way or another, call on external input, which is refuted ideologically. Neither a society, nor mechanics, nor biology can survive and prosper on pure randomness and decay - especially not if, from the beginnnig, there was nothing.

However, when occidental man fell away from God (and that quite independently of His actual existence), he inescapably lost both mind and reason, by losing all objective standards, and having them degenerate into subjective and thus short-circuited arbitrariness.

Seen from the human point of view, the modern trinity so far defined thus could also be described as Biology (Darwin), Physics (Clausius) and Religion (Marx); and logically, from a biological point of view, no human, no living being can create their own prerequisitions (since necessarily still non-existent when these had to be created); and from a physical point of view, they cannot sustain themselves - but in his delusion and modern secular religion, modern man believes both.

Now the havoc, wreaked within the occidental mind by these contradictory, misunderstood and misinterpreted theories, is only just beginning to manifest itself, as the residual exponents of former thinking having finally died away.

For this has removed the last and final obstacles for a self-image of a randomly construed species, optimized to fit into a disintegrating surrounding, which is crumbling from the moment of its inception; unable to feed itself, but forced to do so; thereby destroying what is left of its resources on a suicidal path leading over a precipice, completely in command of it's own destiny, while utterly overwhelmed and overtaxed with the task of creating it's own prerequisites - and thus itself.

Nothing, in the cosmic order of all things, could be further from reality, or the truth, than this delusion.

[Man] is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.

Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.

Ayn Rand