Anything beautiful requires a shithole. Entropy always increases. It’s impossible to have anything beautiful or worth living for without some open or hidden shitholes. Every animal that spends huge sums of energy to be beautiful can do this only by consuming excess energy and excreting waste via its anus or cloaca (and co2 from the lungs and heat via the skin for that matter).

When homo sapiens or it’s predecessors like neanderthal or erectus were still in their “natural” evolutionary determined way of existence as hunter gatherers – the shithole aspect of their societies were quite insignificantly blending in, recycling into, merging with the surrounding “nature” quickly. They burnt some forest areas here and there to open up the landscape for hunting, but that “environmental impact” was barely beyond the realm of beavers changing river streams, coral dumping their skeletons on the ocean floor and wild cattle herds living symbiontyically with proliferating “all consuming” grasslands.

However, on the organism level even in that paradisical pristine state, the beauty and the shit went literally hand in hand. It was never more than a meter away from the most beautiful face or torso of the most beautiful specimen back around to their ass, the smelly portal to the domain where anearobic bacteria have found refuge after algae in the oceans completely poisoned the formerly oxygen free world, that they reigned supreme for a billion years.

The second law of thermodynamics simply demands that entropy, low order chaos if you will, increases. So no beauty or progress is possible without an “equal” amount of shit in another location. In this sense the circular logo’s of human recycling schemes as a faulty idea are as dangerous as when the nazi’s completely perverted the open ended totally “zen” swastika symbol, that used to symbolize progress and prosperity. Ideals are totally fine. Unless they are flawed at the core, since then they pave the way to hell.  

Looking at recycling logo’s (the image on the left represents death) we would almost forget that the earth is not a recycling place at all. In reality earth is much more like a “living” gas guzzling car emitting large quantities of exhaust gas. The earth consumes unimaginable quantities of solar radiation (mostly visible light) and “exhausts” infrared radiation to space. That infrared radiation represents exactly the same amount of energy that was absorbed by the planet, yet it is literally waste that can’t be used by anyone, except if some late stage civilization would invent a way to thrive on infrared, then only by emitting the same amount of energy at an even lower frequency.

So having learned that we are living on a round stone hurtling through space, circling a giant fireball, the energy of which the earth is gobbling up, just like obese persons stuff themselves with cakes and cola, then we can maybe zoom back in and look at the reality of all romantic notions of a society that desperately wants to go back to nature. Rousseau started this “nonsense” in a very dangerous way: by looking for a societal system in which the society as a whole would go back to nature by some system of laws and governance. That was the birth of totalitarianism. In our current individualistic age, having left behind the horrors that totalitairianism brought, the desire to go back or live closer to nature has myriad very nice expressions from yoga to skiing. Yet we fool ourselves that the second law is any less gripping, when we practice these wholesome activities. We forget that anything beatiful or desirable,  simply requires a shithole. Driving your car to the yoga practice is such a shithole, and a bicycle doesn’t make the equation any better (might take another essay to explain why it doesn’t). 

Just like the communists, the wish to do without a shithole, can only bring us down as a society or even as individuals. The only thing we can do is to think of better shitholes, less poisonous or ugly, but not to get rid of shitholes. A filter on an exhaust pipe cleans the air but creates another waste stream: the filter residue. We can certainly mimic nature and try to create loops in which some waste streams can be used to create useful new products like asphalt or whatever. It is unnatural however to require such recycling schemes to be 100% recycled. In some exceptional cases this may be possible, but mostly it will only be sensible to have a partly recycled product. Some waste will always remain, lest we would “waste” all our energy, effort, creativity and intellingence on costly waste pumping around schemes. If we did that we would literally permanently live in shit and focus on shit. We would totally deny and negate the whole essense of the second law of thermodynamics, which is that the purpose of life is to create beauty and to dump the waste … someplace else! There is a reason our asses are not next to our mouths.

So if we see a beautiful person, we can start looking for the cloaca and we will find it. So if we see a beautiful city abound with beautifully dressed people, we can start looking for the cloaca and we will find it. So if we see a whole thriving healthy society, we can start looking for the cloacas and we will find them. We will find sewage places, landfills, waste burning plants, mining facilities, slaughterhouses, and lot’s of “dirty” toilets as the natural logical counterbalance to the beauty we see elsewhere. To want to have it other than this, is not to want to live at all (or to be brainwashed by romantic fairy tales, which is another way not to want to live at all). Everything that lives and thrives does so on polarity. Electricity does and so does everything else. Everything happens between beauty and filth, male and female, yin and yang, hot and cold, inside and outside, summer and winter and light and dark. 

The second law of thermodynamics will never change. Entropy will increase. Anything beautiful will have an asshole. Yet the specific forms can change as society changes, as humankind progresses. Looking for the entropy in ancient Greece and Rome (and all other ancient societies) we would soon find the hundreds and thousands of slaves and their slave labor that enabled every bit of beauty to be found in these societies. Then the industrial revolution came and slavery was generally abolished. The beauty remained, and now its prerequisite uglyness or “injustice” changed from slave labor to  new phenomena like child labor, coal mining, smog, sickness, environmental degradation, extinction of animals, monoculture etc. etc.. Many of these new injustices have been eliminated, but “the shit” has remained in other forms and always will. 

What forms will “the shit” take in future societies? On one level the future will be a time where mankind will look back at the “crazy” situation where we exploded from a few hundred million to ten billion or more. It will have been a mere blink, a blip in geological history. Plastic degrades naturally in a thousand years. Future archeologists will still find Roman pottery, yet find no trace of plastics ever irresponsibly dumped by mankind during its ascent into modernity. Probably humanity will decrease again to maybe a few billion or even the magical “Georgia Guidestones” number of 500 million in the next 200 years. So the whole outlook will be different. Nobody living in that time will even consider that our numbers could be a burden on nature. That will be a laughable notion by then.

Secondly mankind will certainly keep using its knowledge of biology and ecology and the simple economic reality of ever increasing efficiency to have ever smarter (less poisonous, less ugly) waste streams that will or will not have a certain level of recycling. Waste will still be burned, releasing valuable energy used to light and heat homes, operate hospitals and just enabling modern life, while emitting low level energy forms just like the second law prescribes. Waste will also be dumped in landfills, creating artificial hills and mountains, not much more “artificial” however, than any ancient society that built cities on top of older cities. Not much more artificial than the mountains of waste that we know as coral reefs and not much more artificial than the mountains that we ski on, that are literally just a planet scale oceanic wastedump pressed together and lifted up by submerging continental plates. Not much more artificial, than our whole solar system and the very atoms that build every molecule in our bodies, being just a waste product of exploding stars over billions of years.

It’s always yin and yang. Truth can only be found by analysing paradoxes. Light is a wave and a particle. Seeing or even being blinded by beauty means that somewhere not too far away there must be “a lot of shit”. When paragliders – mimicing eagles and vultures – look for updrafts to go higher, they know they are close to finding their luck …. when they suddenly start sinking rapidly. That’s the shit, so the beauty must be close. The same in life. It’s like a plant. When it suddenly gets very dark, it means we have been planted and will soon grow to absorb sunlight again and build leaves and flowers more beautiful than we ever were. Maybe in the next life, it can all be dreamy, just beauty and no shit. But for now – in this life, on this planet, in this universe – we are stuck with the second law and the shit.

Let’s not make the fundamental mistake of Rousseau to believe that we can have life, a society without the shit, without the injustice, the unfairness. Let’s really see what it means, that “natura non facit saltus”. Let’s not believe that “renewable energy” will somehow free us from the second law of thermodynamics. The amount of “shit” that goes along with windmills and solar panels is not one iota smaller than the shit of any other energy form. It cannot be otherwise. It’s nature! Let’s accept the second law and work with it rather than quixotically against it, against nature. 

The second law is the master. It slowly eats away and then kills each and everyone of us. Maybe after death we drift away into a happy state where the law that killed us doesn’t apply. Maybe, but let’s live this awefiully funny shitty beautiful life first!