Kingdom and the Imposition of the Will.

A concept that has been rattling through my grey matter over the past few months has been the matter of Kingdom as "the range of your effective will." Pastor John Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian in California shared this nugget of revelation back in January during InterVarsity's National Staff Conference in St. Louis, and it's been in the "back of my head" ever since.

Will is a fascinating subject to me. Perhaps it's my professed Wesleyan Arminianism (in contrast to some of my friends' devout Reformed Calvinism). Or perhaps it's something a little more... mythological.

Will and Kingdom are inseparable subjects. A Kingdom is defined as the place where a King has his (or her) effectual rule and reign (unless, of course, [and this complication is worth delving into] that King is either incompetent or deceived). Thinking of political systems, there is always some sense of Will and Kingdom -- obviously Autocratic systems have a total expression of their Autocrat's Will, but even Democratic systems are ruled by a Will, although that Will is a Democratic as opposed Individual Will.

Perhaps more intimately, it is the Self who is the King over the Individual -- or Christ, if that person is a believer. The CEO is King over the Corporation. The Husband is King over the House (and the Wife most emphatically is the Queen).


Will takes a more supernatural expression in literature. For example, in J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring grants its user a phenomenal power of imposing their Will upon others. (This power is not used by Frodo often, but it is implied by how both Gandalf and Galadriel talk about the Ring of Power -- and is described in deeper depth while the Eye searches for Frodo near the end of The Fellowship of the Ring...) The danger of the One Ring, however, is how Sauron himself imposes his Will upon those using it...

I find it interesting and worth investigation what Galadriel says about the Ring and her own Will:

"...'And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!'..." 

                    (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 365-366)

She sees something about the Ring of Power. The Ring gives a great power: it extends ones' Will beyond their natural Kingdoms and imposes their Will upon others' Kingdoms. But Galadriel knows what this Power will do to her: it will make her wicked and corrupt.

Tolkien is onto something. In the Bible, there is a record of how King Saul rebelled against the Lord, and, so doing, he committed the sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft is no simpler than this: to impose one's Will upon the Universe. To do so is to deny the Authority of God Himself. This is why the One Ring's power corrupts.


I could make more conjecture about the Ring of Power, but I want to turn my eyes to the real world:

One of the fundamental relationships between Kingdoms over the past several millenia has been the concept of War. With the aforementioned idea of Will fully grasped, we could say that War is a conflict of Kingdom-Wills. If two Kingdoms have conflicting Wills, then they are at War until that conflict is resolved. This can be overt, such as Germany's expansion into Europe in the 1940's, or Napoleon's conquests; or it can be economic; or it can be political. But however we make it look, War is when Kingdoms have opposing Wills.

I see this in President Vladimir Putin in Russia presently: He has rolled out troops into Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula with the pretension of protecting Russian assets. The truth is that he is imposing his Will upon the people of Crimea, and they are collectively using their Wills to oppose their leadership in Ukraine.

I'm not going to delve into the underlying political/ethno/historical issues at play here. But I want to use this to express how this evidences a real-world example of Imposition of the Will. President Obama has responded to Russia by announcing economic sanctions against the Kremlin and its leadership -- an economic sanction is the Will of the Kingdom of America responding to the actions of the Kingdom of Russia. Russia has responded by pressing on the energy-dependence of Europe, making their Wills weaker. ...


Will is nearly a supernatural force. One can use one's Will to remove another's Will -- that is, Murder, or Witchcraft, or Tyranny. One can use one's Will to limit another's Will -- that is, Bullying (this applies to nations so very clearly). The Bible is clear on this concept of Will: we are to lay our lives [Gk. psyche = will] down. Will is a powerful force -- and we as fallen humanity can only use it for wicked and evil purposes. It is only in the Submission of the Will to the Authority of the King of Kings (whose Kingdom is the Kingdom of Kingdoms!) that we can see Good advanced in the world.

And, so, we pray: "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven..." (Matt. 6:10)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Consciousness, and Public Restrooms.

Earlier today, I went to a public restroom at my public university, and I had this distinct thought: "Why do we do this? How did we develop the restroom?"

I had a mini-existential crisis on this thought; it is something that I don't consider often and don't really think about. If one thinks about it, it would be far more convenient (from an immediate sense) if humanity didn't worry about where we went to urinate and defecate and just did it as animals do: on a random piece of ground outside. I'm certain that the Earth wouldn't mind more legitimate fertilizer.

As I thought on this, it reminded me of a social phenomenon that is currently happening in cyberspace.

That's right: "Twitch Plays Pokémon."

In this "social experiment" (as some have called it), tens of thousands of Pokémon players from around the world are trying to lead poor Red (and, in the newest incarnation, a misguided boy named [by the community] AJ) through the entirety of Pokémon Red (Crystal in the newest version) by using crowdsourced commands. It seems like a new iteration of the idea of "if you put enough monkeys in a room, given infinite time, they will write the works of Shakespeare."

Except, it's not.

I've been considering this, along with the public restroom thought I mentioned earlier, and realized that Twitch Plays Pokémon has totally different parameters than if, per se, I closed my eyes and pressed randomly-generated commands given through a computer program. Or, if, to make the story more interesting, I had monkeys randomly choosing between the options of "Right", "Left", "Up", "Down", "A", "B", and "START". I do not believe that in my latter thought-experiment I would ever succeed at beating Pokémon.

There is something about the power of Consciousness that makes Twitch Plays Pokémon fascinating. The game relies on a setting called "Anarchy," in which all of the commands from the tens of thousands of people playing are inputted as they are received... But the success of the game is actually not dependent upon real Anarchy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, naturally, energy goes from places of higher concentration to places of lower concentration. This governs the movement of light, heat, and even general principles of motion and gravity. Entropy is the measure of disorder in thermodynamics -- and it seems that the entire world is governed on the principle of the universe going from more order to less order. Chemical processes favor those which have a less energized (less unstable) state. For you non-science folks: the universe is spreading out like butter.

Consciousness throws a seemingly-ontological wrench into the system of entropy. Given the basics of the laws of thermodynamics, laws of probability, or the laws of "many monkeys" (as it were), and Pokémon Red could never be defeated by a series of random inputs. Or, if it could, it would take far longer than the 16-day feat that the Internet just churned out (which included, might I add, the capture of Zapdos, an extremely powerful (and revered?) Pidgeot, the resurrection of Omanyte and its subsequent evolution to Omastar, and the defeat of a Dragonite by "All-Terrain Venomoth" in a fundamentally-surprising way).

But a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings have done something amazingly surprising: they defeated Pokémon Red in 16 days.

What does this have to do with public restrooms? I find it philosophically to be the same subject. If we were to follow the "normal" process of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, I do believe that we would live in  a world where everyone pooped outside. Why? Because public restrooms is a higher form of organizing our excrement. Just like how libraries are a higher form of organizing information, and machines are higher forms of organizing simple mechanics, the very concept of a public restroom is an example of a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings doing something uniformly that is quite... impressive.

There are a lot of reasons for having public restrooms -- particularly from a cleanliness, hygienic perspective. But the reality that this idea was not an individually-developed idea, but, rather, a cultural/group/"crowdsourced" idea profoundly shows the discrepancy between Human Consciousness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Our ontological essence directly refutes the core operation of the physical universe.

I like that.

I say all this to make some sort of fundamental claim about the Universe and about Creation. That is, that God has created a universe which naturally and silently progresses towards higher entropy, but the very action of Creation itself disrupts that entropy and counters it. We see this in Genesis 1 when He creates the universe and then immediately gets on to organizing it. I've said this before, and I want to highlight this fundamental mechanism: God's act of Creation not only goes contrary to laws of physics which He has put in place, but He has also given to humans the power to do likewise. Consciousness could thus be defined as "that divinely-imbued power inherent in Man which allows him to create spaces of higher organization and less entropy, contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself."

And whereas I don't think anyone would go as far and make the claim that Twitch Plays Pokémon is a brilliant example of humanity's powers of higher organization, it is clearly a refutation to the belief that random occurrence could produce victory in the game of Pokémon. The mindless mass is not mindless, but Conscious, and, even, Cooperating. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 11:6) -- and that is how they can win Pokémon. Likewise, this is why we have public restrooms: not because an individual decided as such, but because Conscious beings naturally have the power to move towards places of higher organization.