The most troubling development in American politics today is the rise of the radical Left.  Ideas that were once grounds for FBI scrutiny or social ostracism are now celebrated by misguided politicians and voters.  Despite their lofty rhetoric about social justice, the inevitable direction of this movement is destruction.

The universe is shaped by a conflict between life and entropy, between order and chaos.  According the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy is always wasted as it is transformed, and the natural tendency of a closed system is to degenerate into a more disordered state.  The end state of entropy is heat death, which corresponds to everything being spread out uniformly, without complexity, life, or change.  Entropy permeates the universe and is the bane of the human condition.

There is much disagreement about the origin of life, but we can think of life as a counterweight to entropy — the struggle to organize and survive despite the entropic tendency to chaos.  Life and human societies reduce entropy and create order within closed systems but in turn produce increased entropy and disorder outside the systems.  The sober conclusion is that life within a closed system (individual humans, homes, schools, businesses, nations, and so on) necessarily produces entropy and disorder outside the closed systems.  We cannot avoid this with political revolution or globalism.

Unlike the radical Left today, the writers of the Bible, Greek tragedy, and the Declaration of Independence were intimately familiar with the human condition, which leaves us with three options.  First, in the tradition of Schopenhauer's hostile Will, we can renounce life and desire like monks to limit the damage we cause.  Second, in the tradition of Nietzsche's das Übermensch, we can unleash our will to power to exploit others and the world with reckless abandon.  Third, in the tradition of Aristotle, we can pursue the rational middle or golden mean.

Given that the first two options are not viable or desirable, we can further analyze the third option.  Aristotle understood that our appetites are usually not appropriate guides for behavior — consider the seven deadly sins — and that we should cultivate our virtues to live in accordance with natural law.  Aristotle's two keen insights were that we can develop our virtues from potential to actual over time via concerted effort and that we have to push the envelope with virtue to achieve the golden mean, to avoid the vortex of entropy.

This middle spectrum where most of us live gives rise to the unfortunate dialectic of dueling parasites.  The Left accuses the right of living parasitically off the poor by exploiting them and imposing its values to perpetuate its power.  There is some historical truth to this, but we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater by rejecting the ideas and institutions that made Western civilization possible.  On the other hand, the right accuses the Left of living parasitically off the state, slowly draining our wealth.  Ending this dialectic requires ending parasitic behavior and treating all people as equal under the law.

The Left fears that the right aspires to Nietzschean tyranny, even though our constitutional republic has effective checks and balances to prevent this.  The right fears that the Left is moving us toward social disorder, pointing to the rise of the radical Left as evidence.  Whereas "moderates" on the left and right merely disagree on how much order and entropy we should create or tolerate, on which reasonable people can disagree, the radical Left embraces entropy — burning down the house.  The appeal of the radical Left is based on the euphoric relief of discarding the burdens and responsibilities of life in a complex society.

The evidence suggests that the shift to the left by Democrats has contributed more to the political divide than the shift to the right by Republicans, but both sides share responsibility, and the extremes are feeding off each other.  We can discuss the flaws and the merits of the radical Left's ideas and values, but one thing is certain: their ideas and values are inconsistent with the ideas and values that hold America together and are therefore destructive.  If you are a member of the radical Left who does not like America, this might sound like good news, but the movement is ultimately a primal impulse toward Shiva-like destruction.

The radical Left is horrified by American culture and history, which has included slavery, exploitation, and racism — like every nation.  Reasonable people understand our history and the challenges we face but look to world history and wisdom for better context and understanding.  Reasonable people also understand that history is a slow process, that the idea of inheriting the sins of the father is a primitive concept that should be rejected, and that the harsh realities of life and entropy cannot be escaped with wishful thinking or empty slogans.