Wiener on who and what we are

This was posted on CYBCOM by Bernard Scott:

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.…We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization….In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system….It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.

This is no defeatism….The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature’s overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too.

—Norbert Wiener