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The druid Finn said: “No bad. Only variations
of good!” Finn
the monist druid’s minim “No bad. Only variations of good.” expresses a core claim of Procedure Monism: existence itself is already a success-state. To exist as an
identifiable reality is to have successfully emerged from Nature’s universal
generative procedure, and this success is what the druid Finn calls Original Goodness. This goodness is not moral, emotional, or evaluative, but purely
operational: being-as-working. Because there is only one source of emergence (Nature as Universal
Procedure), absolute “bad” cannot exist. For bad to be ontologically real, it
would have to oppose or originate outside this procedure, which is impossible. Every event, including those humans label as
evil or tragic, already participates in the same good-generating process. What humans call “bad” (pain, loss, death, catastrophe) is therefore
not a negative principle, but constraint-friction within the good: internal strain, redistribution, or misalignment inside an already
functioning system. Cancer, predation, stellar explosions, and grief are not
metaphysically bad; they are shifts in procedural viability and feedback
within Nature’s operation. The (monist) druid’s view mirrors St. Augustine’s privation theory of
evil, which holds that evil has no positive existence but is a lack or corruption of good. The difference is terminological,
not logical: Augustine grounds goodness in God, while Finn grounds it in Nature itself. Augustine is thus not rejected but naturalised. Pain and suffering are real at the relative, local level, but they do
not undermine the absolute layer where existence itself is good. The minim is
not optimism, since it makes no promise of favourable outcomes for
individuals. Nature simply continues to unfold; destruction and survival are
equally expressions of its operation. In
compressed form:
The druid monist
said: “No bad. Only variations of good!” adv. The druid Finn also said: |