Book of Life - information

CLASSICAL BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

Copyright © 2003 Victor Shane, All Rights Reserved

“You can’t fix something that’s broke on the basis of the same set of assumptions that made it broke in the first place¾you will just keep bouncing off the same walls and end up right back where you started.”

All of us are wondering why there is so much disorder and violence in the world. Why does evil tend to get selected more often than good? Is it because it embodies a higher probability state? Is there a rational explanation for the anatomy of human destructiveness? Is there a scientific explanation for such things as racism, anti-Semitism, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, suicide bombings and 911?

Science has all but harnessed the forces of nature to the service of man. The entire human race can now be sustained at the highest standard of living on its daily quota of solar energy alone, but alas nations continue to sink deeper and deeper in the quagmire of pollution, congestion and waste. Every technological ingredient necessary for the arrival of global peace and prosperity is at hand, but the harvest does not come. The vintage of true civilization fails. In spite of every advance, every improvement, every breakthrough in science and industry, we keep sliding closer and closer to the abyss.

Every nation wants peace, but there is no end to mayhem and destruction. The most powerful and resourceful institutions on earth are those that underwrite and profit from fear, war, debt, disease, addiction and pollution. It is said there are now more people employed by the cancer industry than dying from the disease. And someone has calculated that nations have stockpiled enough weapons of mass destruction to allocate 15 tons of TNT for the destruction of every man, woman and child living. What does this say about our race? What manner of madness is this that we have become accustomed to, accepting it with a wave and a shrug?

How are these contradictions to be explained? Do they exist because we are not yet “educated” enough? Would they go away if every human being had a college degree? Would they go away if everyone had lots of money, a mansion, a swimming pool, a Cadillac and a BMW in the garage? What is the answer? Where does the solution lie? In the prescriptions of secular humanism? In the pretense of “tolerance” and consanguinity? In an Orwellian paradigm of conformity and homogeneity? In a United Nations inquisition to enforce uniformity? In the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank? In globalization and privatization? In junk commercialism and “market morality?”

Where is the caput nili? Where is the source and origin of this deeply irrational component in human nature? And why should it be so inclined towards everything that is unproductive, ruinous, injurious and self-destructive? Why should it defy every attempt at explanation? Are we ourselves? Do we choose freely? Or are some of our choices and decisions being made for us by some unknown principle or principality? Are we acting according to our own “free will?” Or are we under the influence of some force or imperative that remains hidden from us? Is there a rational explanation for the statistical tendency to disorder associated with human nature? Is there a scientific explanation for the pattern of failure observed in the laboratory of human history?

What exactly are the boundary conditions that have kept mankind chained to the merry-go-rounds of de-gradation, failure and misery?

In Book of Life Victor Shane throws fascinating new light on the unsolved mysteries that surround the irrational nature of man. Book of Life reconciles the Biblical model of human nature with the scientific model of a cosmos in which disorder (entropy) is always increasing, suggesting that our understanding of our own nature has been flawed all along. Misled by our sense of pride and self-importance, we have been externalizing the nature of the cosmos and setting ourselves up on anthropocentric pedestals of privilege and exemption.

To break free of this veil of tears, Shane argues, we need to smash the last pedestal of human arrogance, swallow our pride, come out of denial and realize that our human nature is probabilistically wired into the fabric of a cosmos oriented towards disorder. The nature, property and orientation of the cosmos isn't something "outside" us — it is internalized. And if the cosmos were oriented towards disorder, then you would expect human nature to be oriented towards disorder as well; i.e., you would expect to find disorder in sufficiently large samples of human history, which is actually the case — cycles of violence, war, destruction, genocide, reduction and degradation.

Book of Life confirms the existential stumbling block and cosmic pitfall that the Bible has been warning about for thousands of years, encouraging mankind to overcome both. The hour is late and the old model of human nature obsolete. It is time for another tectonic shift — a Spiritual Revolution.