The Old King Analogy

Lionel Luthor pretending to be blind.

One common archetypes in movies and TV shows is the Old King. There are many variations on this theme. I'll discuss one particular one in this post: the mad tyrant king.

A recent example is the father of Daenerys Targaryen from the Game of Thrones. The "mad king" in that case enjoyed burning people to death. "Lion"el Luthor in Smallville is another example. He's often the villain of episodes and in several episodes he's either completely demented or conniving.

I think the old king is last summer's sun. If you're sedentary cubical veal, then this analogy is puzzling. If you work outside in the summer especially on gardening or farm work, it's easy to comprehend. The summer sun can be a brutal task master. While the long days are good for getting things done, they're maybe too long. They can drive you beyond endurance, burn you, dry you out, and maybe in some cases, they can kill you.

I think the wealth that's attributed to this archetype is also easy to understand--all wealth is really a form of stored sunshine. The greek Plutus was an underworld god and scholars have speculated that he originated from the concept of seeds stored underground in clay pots.

The concept of "wealth" is a path to madness. It's like the old trying to hang onto youth, either through schemes and potions, like drinking the blood of the young, or by force and dominating them. The struggle between the youth and the old mad king is a very common theme of the stories that feature the Pluto character as an antagonist.

The righteous counterpoint to Lionel Luthor in Smallville is Jonathan Kent who is a farmer and is not rich, in fact, he's always struggling financially, but is mostly satisfied with what he has and he does his duty, that is, plays his part without much complaint. Justice, and acting rightly are his rewards, and are actually what cause his relative poverty.

There Aren't Any First Principles

If you are a physics major in college, the freshman and sophomore years of school are pretty challenging. It's a sort of trial by fire, at least it was when I was in school. You spend a lot of time on math and science classes, labs, and homework. I think most physics programs are structured like the one I was in--where physics is taught as a historical creation of man. It's a model of the world, and the classes really stressed that it is an incomplete and flawed model. It's really almost the opposite teaching from the popularization of physics by "media science" people like Bill Nye, or the reaction to the popularized teaching that you see by flat earthers and others on YouTube or social media.

In the first couple weeks of physics classes and labs, the problems of the toy mathematical model representation of the world become obvious. The concepts of mathematics are limited and alien to the natural world for the most part. Within the confines of narrow parameters the math model corresponds to what happens in freshman physics lab. In fact, the really basic reasoning associated with those models seems radically flawed.

On a world like ours where everything happens all at once in any moment, the concept of "First principles" or reductionism is simply an incomplete, or distorted understanding. The concept of "evolution" for example is really always about "co-evolution".