Today I encountered the concept of "flat ontology." Every thing, in its essence, is subjectively and objectively equal. No hierarchy exists that gives one thing more importance or meaning than any other thing.

Every thing is "thing." Flat ontology gives weight to ideas or other intangible "things." It gives equal weight to rocks, ducks, protozoa, and people. To ideas, hopes, dreams, plans, receipts, gravel, and stars.

I find something depressing about this approach. As an ultimate human sense of the world it won't last long. Whether God exists or not, God exists; a humanity without a god has always found it necessary to create one. (We all worship the god "Economy," even if we do not know Him by that name.) Humans are nothing if not engines of meaning-making. We'll make meaning where none exists. We prefer it to having none.

I once watched a Twitter user find profound meaning in their follower count. Every change of number meant something dire. Ghosts from their past manipulated those numbers. This Twitterer had no evidence beyond the changing numbers. They needed none. The fact that the numbers changed was enough. The changes proved that old enemies still wished to harass them online. Each change seeded a bed soon choked with meaning.

For all its bleakness, "flat ontology" also offers something of liberation. A blank slate, if you will. As Yanis Varoufakis notes, all things are pregnant with their opposites.

"All things are pregnant with their opposites" is not a mere restatement of Stein's Law: "What cannot go on forever eventually stops." All things eventually beget their opposites. Within any thing, any process, is its opposite. Growing, developing. Coming closer, day by day, to the moment of its own birth. History would tend to bear out such an observation. The arc of the universe, however long, does not bend toward justice, but toward birth.