Alexander The Grandpa was an epic personality; he made a lasting impression on my young fragile mind because all these years later I’m still reconciling his Socialist ideals with Darwinism. Thus, the collection of essays that constitutes Let’s Get Metaphysical, Learn The Meaning of Life have sought to explore Alexander The Grandpa’s impactful ideals philosophically, in relation to how the universe works: how information like money and power are distributed, and how we experience the dominance hierarchies we occupy: navigating our Darwinian-survival-of-the-fittest-quests. Let’s circle back to Learn The Meaning Of Life in the next and concluding essay. For now, a recap of Let’s Get Metaphysical.

In the opening parable What Do The Wealthy, The Sun & Popular Kids Have In Common? we pondered how the patterns of network science explain the goddamn metaphysical laws of information distribution in nature: collect the most points; autocatalytic reactions and feedback loops; exponential growth; and the 80:20 rule. 

In the essay Baseball Bats And Dominance Hierarchies, we applied network science to rationalize how those who dominate networks are most likely to baseball bat someone over the head to win. This essay also illustrated that because of their moral and ethical frameworks, Liberals are disadvantaged to Conservatives. Where a Liberal cannot baseball bat someone over the head because it’s not morally acceptable, Conservatives do whatever it takes to win, including baseball batting someone over the heard and pretending to be a Liberal.

In the essay Why the Medium is The Message, we reviewed Canada’s quintessential philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s hypothesis: when the collective masses embrace electronic media over typography, brains lost the benefit of time that is required to critically assess messages, which results in contemporary epistemology devolving and public discourse morphing into pure amusement – the rise of Trump and Qanon. This essay also reviewed the state of Western Liberal Democracies: with wealth consolidating at an unprecedented rate in human history, to circumvent their tax obligations, some wealthy people, not all but some, are funding political parties that employ psychological warfare techniques, grounded in evolutionary psychology to gain power and reduce their tax burdens. Furthermore, this essay noted the irony of the perpetual cycle: how our beloved brothers and sisters, typically those at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy with the most to lose, are conned by their brothers and sisters with slick marketing gimmicks like the “maker vs taker” myth. Where a maker signifies someone who makes things happen, a taker connotes laziness – a Socialist.

The essay The Toothless Woman With Compounding Bad Luck illustrated how bad luck kicks even well-meaning “makers” in the teeth. The Toothless Woman was down on her luck, trying to boot-strap herself back-on-track, when the poor girl lost her teeth, her car, and by extension we saw her poverty compound, skipping a generation to be inherited by her offspring. Admittedly, there was more to this essay than literally stated.  It was an attempt to illustrate the irony baked into the “maker versus taker myth,” for if bad things happen to good people, and we understand that network science dictates where there are losers there are winners, should we not help poor kids with some good-old-fashioned Socialism?