Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

s-2

2022-05-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
s-2
Votey panel for s-2
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic satirizes extreme libertarianism by inventing an even more radical political philosophy.

In the first panel, one character announces "I've become an anarchist libertarian." The other responds: "I'm an ENTROPIC libertarian." When asked if that means being anti-freedom, the entropic libertarian explains: "You merely think there should be no government over humans. I don't even think there should be small-scale order anywhere. I don't think an atom should be allowed to make choices for itself!"

The entropic libertarian declares: "I want a universe made only of photons in maximum disordered indifference in spacetime -- a perfectly uniform heat death."

The other character asks the obvious question: "How come you're still here?" The response: "Yelling at the universe has been running about 14 billion years and I'm not a quitter."

The comic takes the libertarian premise -- that authority and imposed order are inherently bad -- and extends it to its absurd logical extreme. If governmental control over individuals is wrong, why not extend that principle to all physical order? The "entropic libertarian" opposes not just political structures but the very laws of physics that create structured matter. They desire the heat death of the universe as the ultimate expression of freedom from imposed order.

The humor comes from the deadpan escalation from a recognizable political stance to a cosmologically absurd one, and from the final punchline that this person has been "yelling at the universe" for 14 billion years -- the entire age of the cosmos -- suggesting they are as old as the universe itself and have accomplished nothing, a sly commentary on certain styles of political activism.

View History (1) Original Comic
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