Metaphysical Death Engines
I. Refreshing, Isn’t It?
Let’s talk entropy. There are many scenarios in which the definition of entropy is contingent on the context, so let’s use the thermodynamic variety; a drive toward equilibrium. Hot becomes warm. Cold also becomes warm. This is due to flow of energy from a higher gradient to a lower gradient, like a cup of coffee allowed to sit in a room. The interface is where the heat crosses over from one material (the inner wall of the cup) to another (the outer wall). The energy gradient is the flow of heat from the cup to the air, and when maximum entropy is reached, there is no more gradient, no difference in temperature between coffee and its surroundings, thus equilibrium is achieved. Ah equality; isn’t it refreshing?
Let’s scale that concept up; zoom out and you’ll get to the concept of the heat death of the universe (that escalated quickly). Heat death is what would occur if all energy gradients were leveled and energy was maximally distributed across the entire universe. Just a permanent sea of lukewarm equality where nothing changes ever again because all energy at the most fundamental level has been smeared evenly across the cosmos. I bet you think you know where I’m going with this. Perhaps you’re correct; let’s find out together.
The coffee in that example moves from hot to warm over time, and political positions do so in kind. A position is less a static point on a graph and more of a vector; it has a direction and a velocity.
So the political positions we have are photographs. Where does this or that policy sit? Is that position extreme or moderate? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Every one of those questions asks for a temperature reading and none of them asks in what direction the position is traveling.
What a man holds about what is fundamentally real (metaphysics) determines what he holds about what man is (anthropology, seated within ontology); what he holds about man determines what is good for man (ethics); what is good for man determines what the state should do about it (government application of metaphysics). That chain runs downhill and it does not run back up. You cannot start with a policy preference and reason your way to a metaphysic, but a metaphysic will reach the policy whether its holder intends it to or not, and it will keep going after he stops, because premises don’t have opinions about how far they should be taken.
Concerning velocity, a metaphysic answerable to something outside itself moves slowly, because it must correspond to reality. A metaphysic answerable only to itself has nothing to collide with. It travels at whatever speed its carriers can manage, and its carriers can manage quite a lot.
All of this is to say that if I know a person’s metaphysic, I can tell where they’re headed without looking at where they currently stand.
Let’s find out.
II. Give Me the Metaphysic and I’ll Give You the Platform
To expound on the above, let’s build a (hypothetical) political party via deduction.
Here is the premise, and it is the only thing we get:
Reality trends toward equilibrium, and every gradient is a temporary and unjust deviation from that trend.
That’s it. Now watch what a mind holding that has to conclude, because the ordering is not optional; from the metaphysic follows what man is, from what man is follows what is good for him, and from what is good for him follows what the state must do about it. You cannot skip a level, and nobody gets to stop it from reaching the politics tier; it manifests whether he wants to or not.
Plank One. Universal mixing and boundary dissolution.
Start at the top, because this one is just the premise translated into political grammar. A boundary is a maintained difference; that is the entire content of the concept, whether the boundary is a national frontier or a property line or a wall of a cell. If gradients are unjust deviations, then boundaries are the instruments by which the injustice is sustained, and dissolving them is not one policy among several but the primary act of the entire program. Every subsequent plank is a special case of this one applied to a particular boundary.
Other terms for gradient include disparity, inequality. Does this sound familiar yet?
Let’s continue. An abstract line drawn on a map by dead men should not determine whether a child eats. Sounds reasonable, compassionate, maybe even radically so; the border acts as an interface of injustice in this argument, preventing equilibrium of resources from reaching the child in question.
Plank Two. Reimagined beauty, identity, and human achievement capacity.
Now we descend a level, because the premise has an anthropology in it and we have to state what man is before we can say what he needs.
Under a realist account, a man has a nature; he is a particular kind of thing, with an end proper to that kind, and he flourishes by achieving what his nature is for. Every one of those words is a gradient. A nature distinguishes this kind from that kind. An end distinguishes achieved from unachieved. Flourishing distinguishes the man who got there from the man who didn’t.
Our premise cannot have any of it. If gradients are deviations, then a nature is a deviation, and man is not a kind of thing with an end but undifferentiated material bearing whatever description is currently applied to him. Beauty, then, is not the visibility of a form achieved; it becomes a ranking imposed by observers, and rankings are gradients, and gradients are unjust. The capability of human achievement cannot be higher in one man than another because organizing achievements into a hierarchy would be a gradient. Identities associated with higher gradients of performance cannot be allowed, as we have determined non-equilibrium states are immoralities. As such, they must be dissolved as stated in plank one.
Sex (skinsuited into “gender,” and if you read Skinsuiting for Fun and Profit you already know what happened to the word before anybody argued about the thing) is inside this plank rather than beside it, and it is inside it necessarily. The distinction between man and woman is the sharpest gradient a human being carries, it was not installed by any assembly, and a premise that dissolves natures cannot leave that one standing while taking the others. Anyone who tells you these are unrelated fights does not comprehend the totality of their metaphysical stance.
Plank Three. Agency through systemic relief.
We have dissolved boundaries and we have dissolved natures. There is one thing left standing that can generate a gradient, and it is the acting man. Give a person a real capacity to choose and he will use it, and the use of it produces difference; he studies and another doesn’t, he saves and another spends, he builds and another watches, and within a generation there are gradients everywhere and you have to start over.
So agency itself has to go, and it cannot go by being denied outright, because denying that men act is absurd on its face and nobody would accept it. It goes by relocation. The premise says that outcomes are produced by systems rather than by choices, so the man who succeeded was carried by structures and the man who failed was obstructed by them, and in neither case did anything he did make the difference. Real freedom, then, is not the exercise of a capacity you have; it is the application of entropy to the structures that made your outcome look like your own doing. Personal responsibility becomes a cruelty rather than a compliment.
You have now relieved man of the internal locus of control (which comes with failure states), and as such, the plank positions itself as compassion, because it is the removal of the weight of agency that he was genuinely struggling under.
Plank Four. A kinder equilibrium.
With accumulated dissolutions under its belt, the party now states its terminus in public, because at this point it can do so freely, having incrementally dissolved barriers that would have made outright statements untenable to make out loud.
With boundaries gone, natures gone, and agency gone, what remains is a population of interchangeable units with no distinguishing form, no end proper to them, and no capacity to produce difference through action. There are no gradients left to dissolve. Competition subsides because there is nothing to compete for and nobody in a position to win; striving subsides because striving requires a height and we have removed the heights; suffering from comparison subsides, and this is the plank’s honest promise, since you cannot suffer by comparison when there is nothing left to compare.
The party calls this a kinder equilibrium and the party is not lying; it is kind within its metaphysic. Even though its actions lead to crumbling infrastructure, low trust society, and lack of opportunity for growth, this is kind from the standpoint of an entropic metaphysic. It is also the state in which nothing positive whatsoever can be allowed to occur; a palliative care writ large.
III. Now Go Read a Platform
Everything above was derived. I never looked outward, never consulted a manifesto, never checked what anybody currently believes; I took one premise about equilibrium and followed the ordering down until it arrived at policy.
So go find a platform. Any party, any country, and read it with the derivation in hand.
The Core Diagnostic Question would ask: what would a man have to believe for this to be rational? Not what he says he believes, since he’ll tell you compassion and fairness and he won’t be lying. What would have to be true underneath for these commitments to hang together as a set rather than as unrelated preferences that happen to arrive in the same decade?
The words held still while the concepts underneath were replaced, which is what I mean by linguistically skinsuited. Justice still means justice as far as anyone can tell from outside. So does health, freedom, care. But justice has become outcome parity, health has become the absence of a standard to fall short of (body positivity, for example), freedom has become relief from the burden of choosing, and care has become the reduction of gradient. Classic instances of shared vocabulary and very different dictionaries.
Which is why hunting for the men operating the engine is a waste of an afternoon. A metaphysic doesn’t require a conspiracy, it requires carriers, and a carrier doesn’t have to know what he’s carrying; he inherits a vocabulary, the vocabulary has premises in it, and the premises reach the politics whether he wants them to or not. Unwitting metaphysical advancement is not the exception but the rule; only in this case, it is the advancement of a metaphysical death engine given a political party and rationalization for its actions.
To conclude, consider the man who holds the “sensible” version of every plank and recoils from the extreme version, proud of his moderation and objective stance, able to take the good ideas from both sides. He is moving in the same entropic direction, only slower with a longer timeline, to the same destination.
Your coffee gets cold either way.
Brutus is the founder of the American Epistemology Institute (AEI), an educational nonprofit dedicated to restoring the metaphysical foundations of American life. He is the creator of Metadiagnostics — a diagnostic theory that identifies how metaphysical premises shape institutional behavior and civilizational trajectories. Twenty years of autodidactic philosophical study. A professional background in systems design. A conviction that the real crisis is upstream of politics. He is the lead author of AEI’s white papers. Read more at Grinning Brutus
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