The Age of Cockroaches

Every person ends up being a sell-out midwit in the end, nobody is actually committed to anything in this dying world. Commitment doesn’t exist as a modality anymore, we have regressed to an animal existence. The most “extreme” and “ascetic” people are just in it for the self-image, a form of narcissistic self-consumption and self-idolatry only superficially predicated on a rejection of bourgeois consumption and idolatry. Everybody sucks, everybody settles. This is the Age of Cattle (or the Age of Corporations) and it will be succeeded by an Age of Cockroaches. All the battles are lost (or at least seem that way).

You could draw a chemical diagram of the compositional and combinatorial possibilities of the entire age on a single piece of paper, and mathematically prove the impossibility of change. The mass is a dispersed gas of single atoms. Anything pressurized enough to be interesting, under local and anomalous conditions bound to disperse eventually in turn, is ipso facto too isolated to be interesting. Isolation leads to rarefication, idiosyncrasy, an effective atomism, mirroring the atomism of the mass. There is no way to act upon the mass, and no point in joining with the localized blobs of merely fitful energy, welling up into little pointless sparks and fizzling out again.

Nothing can come out of this system. An entire galaxy of Boltzmann brains popping into existence couldn’t save it from its net entropy. The noosphere has imploded into a nosphere, a no-thing, heat death. Every time you push the boulder back up to the top (I can imagine Sisyphus happy. Can you?), your reward is that the hill doubles in size and taunts you with its muteness as the next round begins. To overcome the despair, consciousness has to paradoxically overcome itself, diversify itself into a whole cosmos of conflicting motivations and find itself again, go through an entire phenomenology of spirit, solve et coagula, all just to conceive the mere possibility of throwing oneself against the absurdity of the slope again. And every time it is met with the serene silence of the recursive function. That’s the real “two and two make four” Dostoevsky should have worried about.

What are really humans? Non-personality-having automatons who are effectively economic functions and ideology repeaters. Maybe. We will just slowly rot away until there’s nothing left.