Paradox

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Paradox Metaphysics Cosmology The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

The universe is not a rational place.

If it were, the middle management layer would long since have solved it, reduced it to atoms, reconstructed it into an binary model, devised the algorithm that will handle the known knowns for the single causal chain that definitively stretches from now to the finite hereafter — it is a consequence of reductionism being true that there is a single ultimate fate of the universe, and a unique pathway there — and therefore will have finally done away with we cantankerous sacks of mortal flesh, allowing us the unlimited leisure our technological unemployment always promised us, so we could watch, in rich, ultra-high resolution detail, the exact unfolding of the onrushing apocalypse, into whose loving maw we are already categorically and unavoidably hurtling.

Reductionism means we are solved. There are no mysteries, no paradoxes; all unknowns will be known, and known unknowns, unknown unknowns or even unknown knowns the empty set.

Some people find this exciting. Personally, I find it desolate, but only the very limited extent it is even coherent.

But — it is my unalloyed joy to declare, my friends: reductionism is nonsense; the cosmos cannot be solved; we are stuck with our grim, jury-rigged, provisional existence, rammed full as it is of the persistently irrational artefacts we know as everyday life. Right now I can’t even figure out what to have for lunch, for God’s sake. And that’s a good thing.

Now, if the price of this metaphysical freedom is having endure stupidities like non-fungible tokens, rehypothecation and performance appraisals, then dammit, I’m buying, since that same ticket also grants us a permanent, non-transferable, irrevocable licence to redesign our own private narratives to take ourselves wherever we damn well please. This is mine; readers. You can take it or leave it.

So it is with fondness and gratitude that we catalogue just a few of the potty things with which we must deal on any day — see the “paradox” box on the right. These things may drive us insane, they may make no sense at all, but since they vouchsafe our individuality and our belief in personal freedom — and they’re cheaper than a snakeskin jacket — they will do for me.

See also

• Reductionism
• Rumsfeld’s taxonomy