Maxwell’s Demon, and the Quartermasters of Reductionism

Maxwell’s Demon, and the Quartermasters of Reductionism

Maxwell Silverhammer

Is teaching a class in Statistics.

If you take a stand outside the Normal Curve

You will be called Maxwell’s Demon

April 28, 1994

      I am standing outside the Drugstore Café In Santa Fe. The battle between

Santa Fe. The battle between the Viet Cong and the Hell’s Angels has come and gone. Regina comes walking along, and we promenade, until we find ourselves looking on an Oriental garden, in the year One After Zero.

      In the tents of that garden, the Quartermasters of Reductionism are being judged. A correlation is being made, between a very large pile of bleached bones, and what are now established to be Fascist banners. How did a whole nation come under the control of teenagers who had been schooled only in the ethic that Sadism is Cool?

      We walk across the street to see a ventilated world. The statistical graph of the ‘80's is written in bullet-hole code. The world which was so inflated is punctured in so many places, it may not be repairable.

      Behind the shrubbery in the Oriental Garden, Renata and Thieu Erathna are sharing a foxhole as they clean and oil their automatic weapons.

       “Watch out for statistical profiling,” Renata warns Thieu. “It’s getting much harder for them to get away with sniping at you with a rifle. The problem these days is, they will use our scientific achievements to map our statistical profiles. Then they can fire projectiles that are programmed to seek out those profiles, and claim that it is an accident when they actually hit us.”

      “Is it time for me to make my Tet Offensive?” Maxwell’s Demon stops by to ask the two women.

      “Not yet and get down,” they answer back.

Spiritual failure is the statistical norm.

This is what we learned from the years of the stuffed men,

The stick men, who take no thought of their Creator

But are proud of the way in which economic compulsion

Irons out the lives of the people.

Image by Nurioneheart. Reprinted by permission

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