From Twitter:
A friend asked how things were going. I said great, busy, just waiting for the next shoe to drop. The reply was “I hope things stay good.” They never do, I said. We face entropy. But that’s also a sign of life. Then I had to explain what I meant:
It’s the second law of thermodynamics: disorder always increases. That’s why the universe is headed toward grayness and heat death. Whenever you use energy, you increase disorder overall. Cool a room with AC and you heat up the outside even more. It’s always net negative.
Life is an island of order in a universe where disorder keeps increasing. Earth, and every living thing on it, keeps its order at the cost of more disorder elsewhere. So life is always a triumph of order over disorder. In a sense, it’s a miracle. (This is part of my own attempt to prove God exists–it’s a bad argument like all the others, but better than most I am aware of: the fact that we enjoy life means we get something “for free” which is in a sense a type of miracle, since you never have to “pay it back” since you would prefer to have lived than not; unlike when you cool a room and there is a cost in the form of increased outside entropy. So you get to live for free, defying the natural order of the universe, sort of a miracle.)
The human condition is the same. It’s always a struggle, where success and profit are possible, and so are loss and failure. Profit isn’t the natural state of things either. That’s why, if you profit, competitors move in and your profit erodes unless you keep innovating.
This is why anti-consumption environmentalists are confused. Production and consumption, like profit, go against the grain of nature. When we manage to carve out a little oasis of life and prosperity despite life’s challenges, we should celebrate it, not condemn it with calls to consume less, recycle more, and so on. Those ideas are ultimately anti-life. Wherever there is life, or order, it comes at the cost of increasing disorder overall.
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) November 12, 2026
A friend asked how things were going. I said great, busy, just waiting for the next shoe to drop. The reply was “I hope things stay good.” They never do, I said. We face entropy. But that’s also a sign of life. Then I had to explain what I meant:
It’s the second law of thermodynamics: disorder always increases. That’s why the universe is headed toward grayness and heat death. Whenever you use energy, you increase disorder overall. Cool a room with AC and you heat up the outside even more. It’s always net negative.
Life is an island of order in a universe where disorder keeps increasing. Earth, and every living thing on it, keeps its order at the cost of more disorder elsewhere. So life is always a triumph of order over disorder. In a sense, it’s a miracle. (This is part of my own attempt to prove God exists–it’s a bad argument like all the others, but better than most I am aware of: the fact that we enjoy life means we get something “for free” which is in a sense a type of miracle, since you never have to “pay it back” since you would prefer to have lived than not; unlike when you cool a room and there is a cost in the form of increased outside entropy. So you get to live for free, defying the natural order of the universe, sort of a miracle.)
The human condition is the same. It’s always a struggle, where success and profit are possible, and so are loss and failure. Profit isn’t the natural state of things either. That’s why, if you profit, competitors move in and your profit erodes unless you keep innovating.
This is why anti-consumption environmentalists are confused. Production and consumption, like profit, go against the grain of nature. When we manage to carve out a little oasis of life and prosperity despite life’s challenges, we should celebrate it, not condemn it with calls to consume less, recycle more, and so on. Those ideas are ultimately anti-life. Wherever there is life, or order, it comes at the cost of increasing disorder overall.
