mr. system
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mr. system lives in my head. mr. system wants to organize everything. mr. system hates chaos. mr. system loves order. mr. system serves zeus and battles kronos.
mr. system sees in networks, nodes, connections. mr. system is obsessed with learning how things work.
mr. system is zoned out. mr. system is a space cadet, because he’s always thinking about systems. mr. system can hold a system in his head, with his eyes closed, and turn it upside down, turn it around, spin it this way and that, and look at it from all of these different angles; he can take it apart, modify it, put it back together, add things to it, subtract things to it, connect it with other systems, run simulations, build models, and compare it with other systems.
mr. system is always running an analysis. he’s thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of different systems. he’s on a quest for the perfect system.
mr. system is abstract, and loves abstraction. mr. system has a body, but he spends very little time in it. mr. system skips meals because he is working. mr. system sometimes feels that his body is a burden, and wishes that his mind could just be free of an incarnate form.
mr. system hates sleeping, and hates all of his mental limits. mr. system strains against the limits of his memory and is always seeking a higher gestalt.
although mr. system has a voracious appetite for information, and spends most of his free time reading, mr. system is very frustrated by the limits of communication. it is very difficult to communicate at high gestalt. words are such blunt instruments of thought. and yet he loves them. for language is a system.
mr. system is naturally very good at economics, philosophy and technology, but struggles with the irrational and dionysian aspects of human nature. mr. system desperately tries to systematize his emotions, but they have a way of breaking out of jail.
people misunderstand things that mr. system does. for example, when mr. system does sports, people think that he is mr. playful. he is not being playful. the play is serious! the play is system.
when mr. system is doing relationships, people think that he is being personal. he is not, the relationships are system. people are an accounting problem.
process, process, process. mr. system wants to turn everything into a process. and is bewildered by that which cannot be reduced to process.
mr. system is religious, in the sense of being orthodox. mr. system loves orthodoxy. dogma is systematic.
but mr. system hates kurt godel. kurt godel was the evilest evil man who ever lived. because godel defeated mr. system once and for all.
mr. system’s revenge against godel is that even systemic inconsistency can be systematized to a degree. his paradox can be resolved by building overlapping, consistent systems, each one incomplete, but which achieve a meta-completeness.
when mr. system empathizes with people, it is a technique. conversations are systems and psychology is a system; so mr. system is just manipulating these systems to achieve outcomes.
mr. system hates the fact that by the time he is organized, he is disorganized again.
mr. system hates the fact that despite technology solving more and more problems, there are still infinite problems in the world — and no end in sight.
mr. system is friends with mr. right. they both want perfection.
one of mr. system’s redeeming qualities is that mr. system is interested in the truth. although he is very frustrated by the truth. because the truth that reveales the mysteries of systems, also confounds systems, and reveales mysteries beyond systems.
mr. system is perhaps more enlightened than mr. right, because mr. system understands that systems evolve. and so therefore there is no final perfection. still, mr. system can’t help striving for perfection.
mr. system is constantly defeated by creative dialectic. the genius of the human spirit is always escaping his traps, and always jumping out of the system, and thinking out of the box — and breaking his systems.
mr. system wishes everything would just stop and everyone would just shut up and the whole world would just pause, so that he could organize everything for eons until everything was all organized, so that he could then hit the restart button.
mr. system is the sworn enemy of entropy.
there is one question that will always unravel mr. system
it is his weakness and there is no defense for it:
what gave birth to system?
