More Basics of Decay
Decay is an integral part of an environment. Things that cause decay are fundamental. Like life and death, they are completely a part of the process. Reproducing, taking in waste, expelling waste, and so on. Decay is integral to the maintenance of an environment that depends on a star because, did decay not happen, there would be no matter available for living things to use as bodies. Thus, the energy produced by the associated star would not be used more than once. The specifics of how and why that energy is used are a separate subject. We are interested here in decay.
Think about the human body. No, think about all bodies which live. Humans, and animals too. They have ways of taking in, and ways of expelling, things that they can and cannot use (if you cannot figure out what those things are, imagine a cow eating from a trough and a cow making a cow patty). In addition, there are usually ways to reproduce, ways to break apart the things one consumes and select how to decide the ones that will be used and the ones that will be expelled as waste, and so forth. (Again, if you cannot figure out what those things are, think of how a cow digests food before it makes a cowpie.)
You might think that you are against decay while you are for life. It is not so, though. You actually support decay, as you actually support life, because decay is part of life.
Decay is nasty. Nasty. You do not want to be around decay. When someone poops, you do not want to eat that poop, kiss that poop, hug that poop, etc. When a society decides everyone is welcome and disregards its borders, that makes bad things happen there, too. The occurrence of such things demonstrate that decay is happening to that society. Just like the loss of elasticity a person’s skin has happen as she ages, the weakening of borders is indicative of progress toward death. As aforementioned, a human being is always a collective of human cells, and the weakening of its border is a natural part of the aging process. A society that begins to have porous borders is manifesting the same type of the passage of time--aging. Difficulty arises in understanding this because many people prefer to believe that collections of human cells are magical and separated from the life cycle. That is why they often desire to be saved and/or liberated from that lifecycle.
(They cannot, of course, be saved from the life cycle. It is hypocritical to be a living thing who claims to want a "savior." A person could commit suicide to attempt to separate her- or himself from matter--it wouldn't work, but for a while you wouldn't be a hypocrite. This strange desire for living things to separate from the life cycle--White Jesusians--is why the Jesusian stage of Christianity was designed that way.
Perhaps you can think of things you've seen that indicate the West is decaying. Think of how "the immune system" is operating much less well or not at all, permitting invaders who are not part of the West go about there. The "skin" is no longer as good [borders], humans don't want to form pairs and breed, and so forth.)
It is simple to understand the way that a human individual progresses toward death, but it is difficult for many to understand that a society of humans does the same things. If you are living in that society, it is unpleasant, but you are glad that decay happens. You don’t want to be part of it, but you are glad it happens. Every single nice, worthwhile, good thing of which you have ever become aware, every attractive person you have ever seen, has only happened because things before decayed.
Decay is part of life. Death is part of life. Some hypothetical walking skeleton who represents dying is representing a concept of which you actually approve.
This strange-seeming relationship between your approval and things you think hateful is part of life. The environments in which life dwells in this form each include, of necessity, things which are liked and things which are disliked. A creature that likes life might thus dislike or like some of these things in the environment, which means that the creature that likes life ultimately learns to approve of things happening which the creature does not want to be around when they happen. This does not mean that you actually like bad things in the sense of liking it when you stub your toe, but that you approve of those things happening because, for example, you approve of the freedom to move legs about, the related freedom to move feet about, etc. If there were not the possibility of bumping into things, then the possibility—the actuality—of not bumping into things would not be the same. An environment in which things live provides for these contradictions.
Consider food as an easy example. Some food is bad and some is good. Narrowing the range of taste in order to eliminate the possibility of experiencing bad food means that the faculty for taste is reduced. Good food would taste slightly less good if were put into practice the seeming goodness of combating bad taste. It is because of the acuteness of sense that good food is as good as it can be and that bad food is as bad as it can be. Although it may seem like a nice, good thing to eliminate bad taste, it is actually a very bad thing. Justified by the “nice” things it was doing, it would dampen the human senses incredibly. “Protected” people could even develop a culture of refinement, intelligence, and so forth. Applying to some of them degrees in tasteology, they could consider themselves very smart. They could produce books, movies, news programs, etc. Privately, each one of them could believe that they were living the dream by being safe from tasting outdated food, but in fact, they would be wholly unable to appreciate delicacies, differences, etc.
(Again, “the West” today is like that. The dummies who celebrate the wisdom and modernity of losing important senses are much like such people. Just as people without properly functioning abilities of taste can think that they must rely upon purported experts to tell them what tastes good and bad, many people of the West rely on purported experts to tell them very important things. In their ignorance, they heed the “experts” about with whom to share citizenship, and are unable to figure out why horrible things happen. Instead of a tummyache, the “wise” person who has forsworn the ability to discern may be raped, killed, or enslaved [forced to work in order to benefit others whom he did not choose to benefit]. Most people in the West are living that type of slavery. A few of them realize that slavery is bad, but the majority of them tend to have mistaken notions about what is happening. Like someone getting old and not knowing why they suddenly can't jump as high, look different in the mirror, etc. they are. They think that providing others evidence of being slaves will cause the situation to end, but it will not—the situation is part of the life cycle. People will happily strive to decay, and that will seem thoroughly confusing and stupid to some observers.)
Such is the nature of many of the things we discuss. Environments which create life are things which provision the ability to discern between different kinds of things—the ability to discriminate. Because there are bad things, there can be good things. Do you see now why bad things are actually good things? If there were no things, that would be badder than bad. The vocabulary of bad thing and good thing here fails; for better understanding, think of things you like as nice things and things you dislike as not-nice things. Conceive of the dilemma: there can only be nice things because there are not-nice things also, therefore it is good that there are not-nice things. See how it works? It can seem very good to be against not-nice things, but it is actually very evil, because to be against not-nice things is truly to be against nice things.
Take note that this is not to say that when a bad thing happens you should like it. For example, when an immigrant rapes a woman, that is a bad thing. We are not saying you should like that occurrence. However, you are glad that people take free actions, which sometimes leads to them doing very bad things. That is the kind of “like” and “dislike” of which we speak. Think of how the rain might suddenly fall on your dinner plate and ruin all the tasty food. Do you like that? No! As said, though, you are glad that sometimes it rains. There can be nice moments when it rains. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we support rape, nice dinners getting rained on, etc.
Think again on decay. Imagine that a mammal living 40 million years ago goes poop. Is the poop nice? Do you want to eat that poop? No! Of course not! But the poop is very good. Very good. You approve of poop. It does not seem possible, but you approve of that poop an extreme amount because that poop provides fertilizer for a plant that dies and provides calories for a mobile creature. That creature lives, eats and poops and stuff, and then that creature has sex and has offspring. Of the trillions of tiny bits of coding that must be created to provide for the existence of that offspring, a few of them don’t come out as perfect copies. And so on and so forth, some millions of years pass, and then the very distant descendants of that creature include the great grandparent of a person whom you love.
(Here arises an echo of a conflict between what is now called evolution and what is now called hierarchy. We have discussed the evolution of living creatures; the affectionate relationship between the work of Darwin and the killers of many people in the name of scientific economics [sic sick] is noted but shall not be here covered.)
That person whom you love would never have existed if not for decay. Thus, you support decay. You support this arrangement.
Everything is thus.
Do you like breathing air? Do you have to breathe air to live? Imagine how breathing would be if every microorganism ever to have lived had not decayed. See now why decay is a thing you support? (Again, not by saying or thinking “This was good,” but in the way you recognize that the life cycle is good overall.) Not only are all the things you love, but you yourself are, alive only because many other things have decayed.
More things than just you breathe air. Lots of things. Bats, ducks, llamas, and so on. Also, other people do. Several billion of them.
Do you see now why decay is a thing you support (or rather, better put, a thing of which you approve)?
That approval does not mean, though, that you like, or that it is good, to be around lots of the bigger kinds of decay when they happen. Think of, for an easy example, poop. Do you want to watch someone poop? What about to smell some poop? Rub your hands in it, hug it, lick it, whatever? Ew! No!
Have you ever loved someone? Ever had a good conversation with an interesting person? How would you like it if those people/that person had never been born?
Do you like it when someone gets old and dies? No. So, would you like it if every person you ever liked had just forever stayed one year old?
This is how you like decay to happen: at first thought, you disapprove of aging, but you actually like it. The save man (“savior”; being a Jesusian) or freeing yourself from the life cycle (being a “liberal”; a liberated person) can seem like very nice concepts. Death can often be very icky.
Now, make things tougher. Combine the three things we talk about re: decay. Add “everything on Earth decays” to “I think decay is good,” and to “being around decay when it happens is unlikable.”
What do you get? The hard kind of easy, i.e. things that are very simple yet difficult to understand. “Groups of humans” also known as “societies” decay, it is unpleasant to be around that, and you are very glad that that happens. You want decay to happen—just somewhere else. That means that to consider the decay of human societies we need to ask ourselves difficult questions, such as “what breaks down the components of human societies?”
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