SEPTEMBER 19, 2021 – Yesterday was the perfect lake day—nearly a full week into my break from “breaking news.” The weather was delicious—temps in the mid-70s, under cloudless skies, and a soft breeze out of the south tantalizing our imaginations.
For the first time in two years we were joined by friends Ann and Ravi, who, prior to the pandemic, had been regular visitors at the Red Cabin. After a hike through the tree garden late yesterday morning, we took a lunchtime pontoon cruise. I plotted a course to the south shore of the lake, where sheltered from the breeze, we found less chop. I cut the engine and kept the anchor line coiled on the bow deck. I figured we could drift as we might—in the direction whence we’d come. As it turned out, the hour didn’t take us far.
As we dined from our galley offerings (pulled from our cooler), we caught up on life and our takes on the world. No matter how gloomy our common prognostication, the sun continued to shine, as the eagles soared and spiraled above us, oblivious to our predicament and how it might relate to their own destiny.
In time, with the turn of a key I woke the engine from its afternoon nap and steered the good ship along the Barbary Coast (the south-southeast shoreline) to the edge of the “Worm Hole” (the channel leading to the adjoining lake). From there, with the breeze and light chop astern, we motored back to home port.
Yesterday evening we dined on the porch, then played Shanghai, our favorite card game.
This morning over coffee, Ravi took me on a deep dive into a working theory of his: the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) applied to the human condition. To recall from the reader’s inner hard drive, the physics definition (adopted by Oxford) is “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder of randomness in the system.” Outside of the realm of science, entropy is “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”
What triggered Ravi’s invocation of “entropy” was an online article in The Wall Street Journal about how impatience laced with expletives has now joined checkout lines at the grocery store. This parallels the increase in uncivilized behavior aboard airline flights. From the springboard of these evidentiary examples we considered the current state of the human condition—worldwide. The savage beast in all of us has been unleashed across broad swaths of society, with “leaders” like You-Know-Who, Bolsonaro, and Modi serving as catalysts.
The outlandishness that afflicts our politics, discourse, and public behavior now exceeds our collective, organizational energy to confine our anarchical tendencies. Accordingly, the next phase of civilization, runs Ravi’s theory, will be marked by disorder on an unprecedented scale—unprecedented because the world has never been under the strain of so many people consuming, interacting—and clashing—so intensely.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
