# [3] The Armageddon Equation and the Corruption Equilibrium

### Armageddon

Every society of reasoning beings has the capability to invent a way of destroying itself. Because we have such a capability we need also to invent or discover and then choose to accept, a set of rules which prevent us from destroying ourselves. So every reasoning society is in a race, a race between their technological advancement and their moral advancement. If they discover how to destroy themselves before they discover the set of rules which prevent them destroying themselves then they risk self annihilation. In simple terms it is God's job to teach us the rules of self preservation before we destroy ourselves. We can represent our precarious position in mathematical terms as follows:

Stability = Morality - Technology

This is what we call the Armageddon Equation. The stability of our Society is the gap between our morality and our technology. If our morality is better than our technology then we have a future. If our technology is better than our morality then we may not have a future. Martin Luther King described this very situation, observing that we have guided missiles and misguided men. The rules necessary for the avoidance of self annihilation are a derivative of our morality and the capability to destroy ourselves is a derivative of our technology.

Putting this even more simplistically. If our society is a car, then our morality is the steering wheel and our technology is the engine. Obviously the larger the engine and the smaller the steering wheel the less stable the car is. One thinks of a dragster at Santa Pod for example. The world is presently at that precise stage.

Now we all know that mankind does not normally learn any lesson until he absolutely has to. Too little too late is the modus operandi of this species. So if you were God then how would you teach us that disobeying a basic moral code will lead to our destruction? Will a load of theoretical arguments convince the great masses of mankind?

Regrettably it would appear not. So God has to allow us to destroy ourselves in order to motivate us to learn how not to destroy ourselves. Obviously he has to put us back together again afterwards in order that we can attend class. In other words God will permit those of us who have not learned the lesson of the Armageddon equation to destroy ourselves. Although he will remove (by rapture, which is an instantaneous conversion into an angel) those who have learned that lesson beforehand. But those of us who refuse to learn the lesson, using our God given powers of reason, will nonetheless learn the lesson by actually being wiped out along with their unreasoning brothers and sisters at Armageddon.

Then God will resurrect these blind ones after Armageddon and show them the action replay of their own destruction and ask them. Well guys, can you see where you went wrong here?

### Corruption

Imagine that society is represented by a boat floating on the ocean. Corruption in society is represented by the holes in that boat. Our technology is represented by our capability to pump water out of the boat.

Before the industrial revolution we had very limited water pumping capability, so we could not afford to have many holes in the boat, so we made sure that the boat was fairly seaworthy, so we were not particularly corrupt. But after the industrial revolution we invented much more powerful pumps driven by engines, so we could pump a lot more water, so we could remain afloat with much bigger holes in the boat, so we stopped mending the holes, so we became a lot more corrupt. Then with the advent of the information revolution we developed sophisticated control systems for our water pumps, and became able to pump out even more water in an even more reliable way than before. So then we had almost no motivation to mend the holes in the boat and the whole of society was being kept afloat by virtue of these fantastic water pumps. Then with advances in computer modeling and hydrodynamics we became able to make water jets which could literally shoot the water straight out of the boat. At this point it became irrelevant how many holes the boat had since our pumps were so good. Finally the boat developed so many holes that it just fell apart.

The point is that corruption just increases to absorb all of the gains that technology has made. This is the corruption equilibrium. The better our technology is, the more corruption we can sustain and so the greater our corruption becomes. The sad reality is that technology facilitates corruption, putting this in political parlance. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." A real day example of this is provided by the PC. The Windows operating system has grown in size and complexity at roughly the same rate that Hardware has grown in computational capability. This is not a coincidence. It is an example of the corruption equilibrium. The result is that many of the performance gains from improved hardware have disappeared into spaghetti code software inefficiency (a kind of computational corruption). If you like, the corruption equilibrium is the equation that has Moore's law (which states that information technology hardware will double in capability every 18 months) on one side. And on the other side it has the law that IT industry corruption will double every 18 months too, and so the consumer ends up hardly any better off at the end of each 18 month period than he was at the start of the period.

Have you ever wondered why it is that with technology and machines that are 100 times more efficient today than they were 200 years ago, we all still have to work every hour God gives us just to make a living? Surely we should only be working only one hour in every hundred today? The answer is that we have been robbed of the fruits of our brilliant technological advances by the corruption mainly of our governments but also of many other aspects of society dictated by the corruption equilibrium. We are 100 times more technologically advanced than we were 200 years ago and therefore we are 100 times more corrupt.

Putting this crudely technological advance without an equivalent moral advance is a zero sum game, which must lead to our self annihilation.

### The technology tragedy

We are asserting that technology is corrupting and ultimately completely destructive to a society unless the society has good moral laws which they choose freely to adhere to. Since mankind does not adhere to the basic set of moral laws described in the bible, all technological advance is a step backwards disguised as a step forwards. It is a step closer to the edge. This is a truly tragic realisation for mankind. The scientists who were inventing the atomic bomb, were very concerned about the uses to which it might be put. But the above reasoning shows that similar concerns should result from all technological advances, even the electric toaster.