every war in history was the good god versus the bad god. ask both sides — north v south, communists v nazis, USA v China, blue v red. the good guys are whoever printed your textbook.
if you think the news is fake, imagine history.
so if the good guys never actually saved us — who did?
the third god
mold blew through an open window while the scientist was on vacation — that’s penicillin.
1962: four soviet submarines, & on exactly one of them launching the nuclear torpedo required a third signature. the man holding it — vasili arkhipov, exhausted, half-suffocating, having a genuinely terrible day — said no.
in cloud atlas, a lawyer being slowly poisoned for his money is saved by the stowaway slave he helped free — he becomes an abolitionist. then the climax: “what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
what do these have in common? nothing heroic. that’s the point.
randomness is a sad troll with a grin. it hands out tired men & open windows, & the world gets saved by ordinary people who weren’t trying to save anything, choosing right at the wrong time.
in other words: the world is saved by retards like you and I.
retards choosing right over wrong 51% of the time is what saved us.
& maybe it was intended this way — we evolved (or were made in the image of some God) this way so we couldn’t finish destroying ourselves. deus ex ends there. the hero blows up the tower of the great men & says: “So now, I’m leaving the future up to ordinary men and women to decide.”
third god = exit
randomness is the exit. it prevents any system—good, evil, political, ideological—from becoming perfectly closed.
when you can’t win inside a system, can’t vote it better, can’t out-argue whoever holds the pen — somebody leaves & starts a new one.
the usa is an exit: thirteen colonies that couldn’t win inside the empire. & the fix for slavery didn’t come from inside either party — the whigs collapsed, a brand-new party got created in a wisconsin schoolhouse, & six years later its first president won.
every closed system bans the exit first. the berlin wall wasn’t built to keep enemies out.
& notice who builds the walls: both of the first two gods — whoever is winning imposes the status quo, & the status quo never includes a door. the world is saved by exit, & exit is only possible because of randomness. the first two gods build walls. the third god is the door.
you can only connect the dots looking backwards
steve jobs, stanford, 2005. a dropout wanders into a calligraphy class for zero career reasons; ten years later it’s the typography of the macintosh. the dots never connect looking forward. only in the rearview.
everything you ever did — every act of kindness and evil, every decision of good and bad, everything that made no sense at the time — is somehow connected and bound to others.
randomness takes care of itself
often earlier than you expect and later than you hope.
the only sin
camus stared at this exact universe & called it the absurd.
but he ends the book insisting sisyphus, owner of the most pointless job in mythology, must be imagined happy.
everything everywhere all at once. the bagel says nothing matters. Waymond says: I choose kindness either way.
the only sin in an absurd world is to give up
you are one in a quadrillion branching accidents. every decision you’ve ever made compounded into the miracle that is YOU.
because you are perfect in the absurd way the third God intended.
maybe nobody saw your years of good work, your act of kindness, your not giving up. it gets unnoticed.
but that’s the entire lesson of the tired man on the submarine: unwitnessed acts compound anyway. you’re not performing for the good god’s scoreboard or the bad god’s — those get rewritten by whoever wins. every dot you make is deposited with the only chaotic God who trolls you but never edits the ledger.
wasting the randomness that made you YOU is the only mortal sin.
believe
believe in randomness.
not “try your luck at the casino” believe. really believe: do the work, & randomness will take care of itself — sooner or later, earlier than you expect, later than you hope.
call it fate. call it karma. (i prefer randomness, or retardmaxxing, because it implies the correct amount of absurdity.)
because here’s the whole essay in one line: the world was never saved by the good guys. the world is saved by retards — ordinary people choosing right at the wrong time
arkhipov didn’t feel like a hero; he felt like shit. fleming was on vacation. Steve Jobs was a dropout doodling letters. none of them knew what they were doing. you don’t get to know either. you can’t see the consequences of your actions in real time — maybe not even in your lifetime.
a creature born in winter, living less than one season, can only infer summer: belief in a real thing it will never personally witness. that’s what believing in randomness is. plenty of us were born in winter. summer is real anyway.
do you want to live in a world where being born in winter stops you from dreaming of summer?
when a good person asks, do you believe in God? just reply, no, because I believe in you.
anyways: retardmaxx & believe. CHOOSE retard over math.
do the work. be nice. never give up. you are perfect
well written, much to think about, love this