Infinity Curve - Lamentations to Unseen Friends Across the Vastness of Space

EP. 75 - ON POLITICAL ENTROPY

AFTER THE LAST SESSION, Rick took a momentary break to meditate. Despite his years of martial arts training, he still considered himself an intermediate player, someone who needed thirty or forty more years of learning to elevate himself to an advanced level.

This was also the case with his meditation. He relied on it to center himself, to calm the energy his body and mind created, to let this energy settle down to his tan tien and out through his legs. He found that meditation was the perfect complement to his readings on Stoic philosophy and adherence to its principles. To him, Stoicism made so much sense.

As a youth, Rick had seen enough emotional turmoil to last many lifetimes. Such events were enough for him to conclude early in life that emotions should carry their own abundance of caution. In order to better control his emotions, he took up martial arts and meditation.

Despite the years of practice, the latter remained his biggest challenge. His mind wandered aimlessly. Experiences, visions, and places of the past often dropped-in as unwelcome guests.

His most effective focus point was not the tan tien, that theoretical point in space about six inches below his belly. No, his best focus for mediation was the black obelisk from the movie. By envisioning the shiny, black rectangular cuboid laid out in front of him, he was able to better manage his drop-ins. He was improving over the years, but in tiny steps.

* * *

"Again, I ask for your kind patience, as this material pours through me from top of mind. It will appear rambling and repetitive due to the urgency and need to bring it to conclusion. We are nearing the end, however, and my last moment on Earth is getting closer and closer. I can sense it. I will keep this section brief because it is detestable. This will cover political entropy, an indication of humanity's maligned state of being."

"Early in this century, a court decision was handed down that had a lasting and detrimental impact on our societies and the Earth. The net effect of the decision was to grant the status of an individual person to a nonliving, non-biological entity like a commercial enterprise. This resulted in a gross distortion of the law and ever-expanding monied interest influences in our political structures."

"As corporations assumed the rights of individuals, their powers expanded on a massive scale. Within a few decades, the country moved from allowing the common person some semblance of influence in their government to one where common people had virtually no voice. The concept of governance became only an economic one, with competing corporations vying to pass laws that benefited only them, enabled by the highly corruptible process of donations to politicians and their readily adaptable dogmas."

"This court decision helped to enable other consequential dynamics in society, such as the grotesque concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Just when you thought it couldn't get more corrupt and more concentrated, you'd hear about another decision or another law that pulled the levers tighter in favor of these economic entities and against the large body of the human species. Arguments were always 'what's good for the corporation or wealthy person must be good for the human,' but history proved that premise wrong in so many ways."

"Then along came AI and large, interconnected systems of logic, control, and storage. Such systems, operated by fewer and fewer corporations, pulled the levers even tighter. As the systems grew more intelligent and capable, arguments were made that such systems were sentient. Eventually, they too, with their knowledge and algorithms of gross advantage, were granted such individual rights as the corporations were granted."

"Interpretations of 'sentience' were stretched so far that countries passed laws where one was not allowed to shut off their personal computing devices, their vidscreens, or anything with adherence to a matrix of AI logic. The equivalence in law was as if, by doing so, you were removing an arm or leg from a biological person."