As the current world system—the capitalist, neoliberal, rules-based order with the U.S. at its head—crumbles, regional powers are resisting entropy, becoming increasingly centralized, aided by surveillance technology, economic digitalization, and precision weapons. The nature of power can be understood as countering entropy.
In fact, we could say that the essence of power is the capacity to resist or adapt to a system’s entropy. In general, all systems—biological, technological, or institutional—tend toward disintegration and chaos, partly because every cell has a life cycle. Biology imposes changes in material conditions to which systems must adapt or perish.
A system, understood as an organizational principle that orders individual elements or smaller, simpler systems, has to resist or adapt to entropy to maintain the status quo. Under this definition, power would be the capacity to maintain a particular organizational principle while resisting or adapting to changing conditions. Resisting is short-lived, since change is irreversible. Adapting is typically a more successful strategy.
A system breaks down either because the organizational principle cannot resist change anymore or because it has failed to adapt correctly. If, as is the case with complex systems, there are other smaller or simpler systems functioning under it, these will tend to increase their own order to avoid the systemic entropy caused by the breakdown of the organizational principle.
Increasing order, then, means acting against entropy. If increased entropy can be equated with elements of a system acting in disarray relative to one another, then order is those elements acting in relation to one another under a common organizing principle. In social systems—institutional ones—this often means centralization.
Every system will tend to centralize, arranging every element or smaller, simpler system under it in accordance with an organizational principle as a way to resist or adapt to entropy. An organizational principle is a priority-setting mechanism. Priorities create hierarchies. Increased centralization, therefore, increases hierarchical structures and defines system goals.
The U.S. functioned as an organizational principle—setting hierarchies and goals—within the international rules-based system under which other smaller systems, namely other states, functioned. This was not without resistance or tension, but the U.S. had the power to avoid major disruptions in the system by pushing for order, that is, compliance with the organizational principle, and therefore resisting entropy.
This organizational principle could be broadly summarized as “neoliberal capitalism”: a particular form of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Changes created by the inertia of the system, the development of China, increasing its weight within the system, and the distancing of Russia from U.S. influence, increasing the complexity of a subsystem, among others, created tensions that U.S. neoliberal capitalism has tried to resist and is failing to adapt to, as challengers contest the status quo.
The U.S. has tried to resist entropy by trying to reverse change. That is how we can understand policies toward China and Russia: trying to curb Chinese development or to bend Russia to its will. These are two examples, but the U.S. relationship to Europe and Latin America can be explained by the same logic: trying to resist entropy by increasing centralized control.
However, as change is irreversible, the attempt to resist it will usually be futile. Moreover, it will create more tensions in the system, which will further increase entropy. Once an organizing principle has lost its capacity to impose order, trying to maintain its priorities, hierarchies, and status quo tends to result in further system erosion, because other smaller systems will now be competing to establish their own hierarchies and goals.
Smaller or simpler systems that were previously part of a larger system, once that system breaks down, will have the opposite inertia: they will become more centralized. Without the constraints imposed by an external organizing principle, these systems will strengthen their own organizing principle, their own priorities and hierarchies, in order to resist the systemic entropy that the larger system is experiencing.
The current centralization trend in many states responds to this inertia. Countries like Türkiye, India, or Israel are examples. While the U.S. organizing principle had the capacity to influence the hierarchies and priorities of these smaller systems, these systems were relatively decentralized because there was an external principle imposing order. As this principle loses that capacity, losing power, these states increase their own order through centralization to adapt to systemic entropy.
A system will grow by ordering foreign elements or smaller, simpler systems according to its own organizing principle, that is, by imposing its own hierarchies and goals. This does not necessarily mean destroying foreign structures, only insofar as they run against its own. Most systems tend to expand because expansion is a way of countering their own entropy.
System expansion will continue as long as there are elements or smaller, simpler systems over which it can impose order. However, every system is always running against entropy. Every expansion is an adaptation. When a system cannot continue expanding, because there are no elements or smaller, simpler systems it can reorder, it will try to oppose entropy.
Opposing entropy means trying to reverse change, which is very likely to fail. At this point, the organizing principle loses its strength and can no longer impose its hierarchies and goals on other systems that are already in the growth phase. When a larger, more complex system emerges, it will often displace the old one.
This theory, presented here only as a rough draft, of social system growth and decay, with its definition of power and how it counters entropy, seems to have explanatory potential to understand, and perhaps even predict, the succession of social systems with their own hierarchies and priorities.
If we accept this, with important caveats, then we could describe the present state of international relations as the end of a system—an epochal change, to use Goethe’s term—because its organizing principle can no longer order other systems that have grown under it.
This system, the neoliberal capitalist one, while on the surface it may seem to be trying to oppose entropy, by waging war in Ukraine against Russia and trying to contain China, is actually morphing. It may be taken over by a smaller system with a more powerful organizing principle, and turning into a new one that is imposing new hierarchies and priorities.
A caveat of this analysis is that, although it seems to explain the breakdown of the neoliberal capitalist international rules-based order, because there are some systematic elements that remain constant and are shared with competing systems, it could also be argued that the entire system is not ending, but rather adapting.
The two most prominent constant, shared systematic elements are the institutions of banking and the state. These two elements are present within the ending system and also within the growing ones. They are also present, with more or less organizational power, in every other social system in the world.
These two systematic elements, I believe, are actually one complex system. Their parallel emergence from approximately the seventeenth century onward, and their interdependence, seem to justify this claim.
If banking and the state together constitute one complex system, constant across contemporary social systems, we should perhaps consider that its organizing principle is imposing order across systems. In that case, what we may be seeing at present is, on the one hand, the end of one simpler system and, on the other, the adaptation of a more complex one.
To reduce entropy — through whatever (re)organization of the system under consideration — one indispensable element is required: energy, or in the case of social systems, natural resources which themselves embed energy in useful forms.
With the Road&Belt initiative, China is setting up a complex system progressively encompassing smaller (though often large) entities in order to make sure the necessary resources flow unimpeded to it.
It has long been noted that the wars launched by the USA in the last quarter of century, a lot of the meddling with coloured revolutions, the support for various actors (e.g. Israel, Ukraine), and some hidden actions (e.g. Nordstream) have a commonality — interventions in countries with important oil fields, gas fields, and networks of pipelines.
The tensions and conflicts in Africa (e.g. Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia), the Near East (Israel-Lebanon, Israel-Palestine, Iraq), India/Pakistan, China/Southeastern countries revolve around access to water, or to minerals (Congo/Rwanda, Sudan).
I presume the most grandiose attempts of those socio-economico-political systems to keep entropy in check will founder because the currently increasing entropy (i.e. disorder) of the natural systems (because of climate change, pollution, and depletion of natural resources because of overextractive activities) will deprive them of the necessary resources to achieve their goals.
The counterpart of energy/entropy pools in this model is the economy. Especially a real, manufacturing economy. With one, keeping the system to get her is easy. Without one, chaos and decay become inevitable as we are seeing.
The countries that are going to make it will be the ones who take their economies seriously. The ones who don’t will devolve into post-Soviet looting frenzies, like the US and UK have.
I view the breakdown of the current “world order” as just another shifting in the balance of power that you can expect when you look at things through a realist lens. International alliances and organizations are only maintained for as long as they are useful to their member states. The moment a state’s interests shift away from an agreement or treaty or it becomes powerful enough to disregard what it had agreed to previously, it will leave said organization.
There is no grand “international law” and there never was. Instead, powerful states just set the terms that weaker states have to agree to which powerful states enforce by economic or military coercion. When weaker states grow powerful enough to challenge these previously powerful states, they will almost inevitably impose their own terms on weaker states within their sphere of influence and the cycle continues.
The problem stems from the fact that we are imperfect beings who are each trying to hedge our bets in any way that we can and we are not even fully aware of how much this guides our psychology. As world leaders are human, they are inevitably driven by the subconscious human desire for power and domination. Hans Morgenthau was sadly right about the animus dominandi in human behavior.
Still, I do hope that by understanding how and why the above happens with its roots in evolutionary psychology, we can find ways to short-circuit these ancient behavioral patterns. It will not be easy, though.
What you’re proposing here is not entropy as understood in physics. As a kind of metaphor vaguely related to concepts of disorder and entropy in thermodynamics, fine. But if you then decide that you’re entitled to claim results in thermodynamics apply to politics, such as arguing that the political entropy of the world system can never decrease, well, you’re not entitled to that.
In fact, as a physicist who keeps telling his students that entropy is one of most difficult concepts in physics, I’d be happier if you didn’t speak of this metaphorical political entropy at all.
Maybe. I do not teach thermodynamics but it has been important in much of my professional life as a biochemist and cell biologist. The advanced courses I took as an undergraduate and graduate student still cause flashbacks in this student who hung on to the math by his fingernails in a classroom full of chemistry and physics math nerds. Nevertheless, the concepts are useful, outside of the lab or the seminar room. I did not grasp the meaning of the Second Law until we had children and were required to supply the free energy to reverse the macroscopic household disorder exuded by children. The older I get, the less it bothers me.
No, political, social, and cultural disorder are not the same as entropy described in physics. Ludwig Boltzmann has nothing to teach us here. However, the macroscopic entropy we see all around us is used by men of the notional Right to justify their concept of moral disorder that leads to disorder in culture, society, and politics. They then try to reverse the irreversible by resorting to increasingly authoritarian tactics (no strategy involved, ever). They have no idea that some thermodynamic and political pathways are path-dependent and some are path-independent. And that most are irreversible. So instead of finding other pathways to the solution they force the issue while leading us back up some very dark paths.
Even though I can still manipulate the equations (sort of, by resorting to textbooks I always kept), I find the concept of cultural, political, and societal entropy (without equations) here by Curro Jimenez to be useful. Especially compared to T.S. Kuhn’s “paradigm” in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962 IIRC), which in my experience both the notional Left and Right have completely botched (mostly by the notional Left, which never met an obscure use of a term they didn’t fall in love with). By the way, Erroll Morris’s The Ashtray is very good on Kuhn for those who want a fun read. Kuhn partisans were not happy, though.
If you read carefully, you will realize that I have not mentioned thermodynamics once. That was on purpose. I have borrowed concepts such as “entropy,” but not for their physics-specific application—rather, for their broader linguistic usage. I have been loosely inspired by thermodynamics, but what I propose is different, based on different principles.
The main basis for my proposition of entropy in a social system comes from biology, not physics. “Every cell has a life cycle,” which means that from the moment it is born, it is subjected to an aging process. This means it is constantly changing, and that is what the system must adapt to. Because every cell is ultimately—at least until Thiel and their ilk come out with a “solution”—destined to die (entropy), every social system is ultimately destined for the same end.
In that way, I’m not claiming that “results in thermodynamics apply to politics.” Rather, I’m proposing a theoretical framework—albeit just a draft, and subject to change—that may resemble the second law of thermodynamics in its phrasing, but functions according to a different internal logic.
In order to test my understanding of this very interesting piece you’ve given us.
One proposition is that increasing “entropy” in a higher system will produce “increasing order” in sub-systems. You apply it at the levels of the community of nations and the individual nation-states. What if a nation-state fails. Will we see “increasing order” among smaller groupings? Does that mean a “Mad Max’ outcome in the event of widespread nation-state failures rather than small egalitarian bands revisiting hunter-gatherer days?
Is our current information and censorship system an example of your process? It sure would seem that all efforts at resisting entropy when it comes to political views and policy and the stubborn refusal of Western elites to adapt by listening to their people on even a couple of things are heading toward disaster. Of course, isn’t this the result of the changes brought about by the impacts of technology on communication? When I was young, there were three TV networks, a few newspapers “of record,” new magazines like Time/Life, and local TV news. If you wanted to be an “influencer” and were not successful at being employed by one of these Establishment outfits, you could try to find an “underground” paper or you could set up your box in the Commons. Now create Youtube channel and you can apply your own “increasing order” on the day’s news.
Nice piece. Enjoyed it.
Ive taken two semesters of thermo and have a third lined up for next fall. The misuse of entropy used to drive me nuts but then i saw an author in a really terrible manga use the concept and accepted that there are two entropies: the scientific one, and the one that is just a synonym for randomness and disorder.
It’s CP Snow’s The Two Cultures all the way down.
Shannon’s use of the phrase arguably has more practical results for regular people than the physics version. Here’s a discussion with the best I got, starting with Tainter:
> Tainter > Two concepts important to understanding the nature of complexity are inequality and heterogeneity… Inequality may be thought of as vertical differentiation, ranking, or unequal access to material and social resources. Heterogeneity is a subtler concept. It refers to the number of distinctive parts or components to a society, and at the same time to the ways in which a population is distributed among these parts. A population that is divided equally among the occupations and roles of a society is homogeneously distributed; the converse brings increasing heterogeneity and complexity (see also… A society with a great deal of heterogeneity, then, is one that is complex.
Matt, I’d like to know what you think about Odum‘s expansion of thermodynamic laws.
I wonder where debt figures into this. Before banking as we understand it today, we had credit systems.
Banks (and Central Banks) allow a lot more activity to be coordinated. But in the end it’s not so different from the little clay tablets in Ancient Mesopotamia; if all banks failed somehow (supposing we all don’t die in the disaster) people would just have to locally make money again, by promising to pay one another and making little tokens. John Hicks has a nice little book called A Market Theory of Money which he muses about how debt and markets relate to one another which might be of interest.
I’d rather prefer Edgar Morin’s definitions in which both order and disorder (i.e. what is called “entropy”) are necessarily a part of any system, and that any system, which is a set of organizing rules which produce an order (understood as the continuation in time of a given configuration of, well, anything: social system: organization of people; biological system: organization of cells, etc.) As Morin notes, following Von Neumann, the interesting thing about living beings is that even though the parts are very unreliable (more or less stable molecules) the entire being is actually quite lasting, since it can regenerate itself; on the other hand, artificial machines, though the parts fit perfectly and are made of durable materials, the moment they start operating they start degrading and require external inputs to fix them.
Which is to say, it pays to be clear about the kinds of things we are talking about: in living systems, which includes human-made social systems, there are mechanisms which correct for the accumulation of disorder (which ultimately can be pure accidents or random) through mechanisms of negative feedback; but, on the other hand, there are also mechanisms which exacerbate certain tendencies in disorder (i.e. random mutations in evolutionary biology, for instance) which allow for a reorganization of the system in a way that potentially makes it even longer-lasting.
In that sense the demise of neoliberalism, the current order, makes the controls that cancel out disorder to weaken or fail, and thus allow the mechanisms of positive feedback to build steam and change, perhaps radically, the system. This does not necessarily mean a less complex order; but neither does it necessarily mean a more complex order either. What is important, in my view, is that disorder isn’t simply that which makes systems fail, but in fact is that which allows, up to a certain point, for living systems to function at all and furthermore to endure in time.
There are too many categorical mistakes and unsupported claims in this article.
Based on what exactly? If you make sweeping statements like this, you need to provide at least an outline of a causal mechanism that makes the conclusion plausible.
You could appeal to something like “limits to adaptability in a high-variance environment,” but that would make breakdown a function of environmental pressure rather than an inherent trajectory of all systems.
Alternatively, you might try to argue that a system tends toward its most likely configuration — but that requires specifying what configurations are possible, how they are distributed, and how they evolve over time.
The same problem recurs later:
Based on what? Not every system is “running against entropy,” and the article never explains what “opposing entropy” is supposed to mean in concrete, operational terms. If you want to relate political or social behavior to an abstract theoretical framework, you have to be precise about your definitions and explicit about the assumptions that let you map concepts across domains.
Entropy, in particular, has highly specific meanings in thermodynamics and information theory. Recasting it as a loose synonym for “disorder,” “change,” or “loss of control” doesn’t give you an explanatory framework — it gives you a metaphor that collapses under light scrutiny.
Huh? The entire universe is on a trajectory to a disordered state. Individual organissm die and their bodies decay. The idea that there is or can be a sustained and durable trajectory to more order is human arrogance.
and yet here we are. Me writing this blog comment, others reading it.
Don’t confuse the trajectory of the universe to what happens at the local level right now.
Systems can and do increase in complexity, order, information , using energy to persist as a system. otherwise we would not be here, and we would not have a rich geological record showing the increase in complexity and structure of life.
I’ve recommended it before and recommend it again – read the book “Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies” by César Hidalgo.
It’s a book from a physicist that goes from basic principles up to economics. (rather than an economist borrowing from physics). It is a more convincing theory and read than this post.
This is not just the trajectory of the universe. It is the trajectory of every object. You build a house, it immediately starts deterioriating. Even a growing biological entity (as in what you would depict as increasing in order) is subject to countervailing pressures during that time, such as injury, disease and infection, poisons, which will create local and possibly systemic damage. The attempt to create order achieves only temporary progress against the underlying, dominating trajectory to disorder.
Moreover, growth of anything in a system is limited by what it needs for growth and sustainment unless everything in the system is growing at least as fast and not making similar demands. So Tainter argues that rising energy costs due to exhausting cheap sources eventually produces collapse. Some argue that production of garbage (and its toxins) can drive collapse. Rising complexity also has information and energy costs that at some point produce inefficiencies of scale and thus vulnerability to internal disfunction.
And if a book is any good, it will always be better than a short form treatment like a post or an article on the same topic. The way you made your remark came off as a cheap shot.
The house example proves the opposite of what you think it does. A house only “inevitably deteriorates” in the special case where nothing interacts with it. The moment you clean, repair, or renovate it — i.e., inject energy, materials, or information from outside — its local order increases. That’s not a loophole; that’s the basic physics of open systems. So using the house to argue for a universal law of decline simply doesn’t work unless you assume away the very processes that create and maintain order.
And this is the deeper issue: pointing out that systems face stressors — resource limits, shocks, maladaptive complexity — is perfectly valid. Societies do fail when their institutions can’t adapt to changing conditions. But that is a contingent dynamic, not an inevitability baked into “the trajectory of every object.” It depends on structures, feedback mechanisms, and choices, not an overarching thermodynamic destiny.
I think the universe is a very organized entity. From the perspective of a normal human being it may seem a disorder state. An observation at a one point of time one may observe disorder. Our lives are nano seconds in the timeline of a solar system, not to mention a universe. Exploring the Hindu cosmology of a cyclical universe that undergoes endless cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction has broadened my outlook. Enjoyed the article.
One could look to the big bang theory – the explosion being the creation of entropy, the ultimate scattering of energy into what we know as the periodic table, and the decay elements going lighter and lighter as they proceed to accelerate and aglomerate into singularity…a state where entropy no longer exists … a black hole.
Are we in an expanding universe or at the fringes of a black whole where warping of space time and relativistic effects are our only point of view? Are we in an closed system or an open system where in either system, infinity and time can exist
Not that any of that is, or, is not applicable to politics and, or the economy. Sure most things could be made allegory – just that most times, it can go a bit cattywampus – but is helpfull to broader understanding but, can be made to skew narrative.
Like the Free Market being confused with free=freedom=freedom good=free market good
where free market ain’t free
It may just be that, in the short term, by creating the built environment, growing our population to the point that the Earth cannot sustain it, and by altering the necessary condition of the diversity of life, human beings are the entropic element on the planet, a short-term obstacle on the earth’s pathway to a long period of relative stasis. As St Basil observed in his great sermon, nothing in nature grows like the wealth of the rich and wealth ain’t going to get you very far when you are dead. But I’m prettty sure nature will mke use of our remains to help heal the planet after we have grilled ourselves to death while the universe figures out if it is going to expand or contrct much over the next few billion years. Or it may just spend it’s time examining the concept of order which may just be a matter of perspective, a simple human construct which only exists to enable us to while away the time left over for thought between conception and death.
I don’t deny that there might be inconsistencies that can be ironed out, but I do maintain that the main claim holds.
As for your two specific examples: in the first one you mention, perhaps unconsciously, you left out the second part of the statement, which qualifies the first. So let me quote it in full:
In general, all systems—biological, technological, or institutional—tend toward disintegration and chaos, partly because every cell has a life cycle. Biology imposes changes in material conditions to which systems must adapt or perish.
The “causal mechanism” is that every cell, which is ultimately the physical support of all biological systems, ages from the moment it is born and will ultimately die. The process toward death is a process toward entropy. So the claim that every system tends toward disintegration and chaos seems to hold.
As for the second specific quote:
“Every system is always running against entropy… When a system cannot continue expanding… it will try to oppose entropy.”
Per the “causal mechanism” explained above, every system is always running against the death of the biological cell on which it is based; and because every cell is constantly changing, every system must constantly adapt to that change.
I do explain what opposing entropy means: “the capacity to maintain a particular organizational principle while resisting or adapting to changing conditions.” In another part, I write: “An organizational principle is a priority-setting mechanism. Priorities create hierarchies. Increased centralization, therefore, increases hierarchical structures and defines system goals.” Opposing entropy, then, means maintaining the same hierarchical structure and goals despite irreversible change.
I do agree, however, that I could have been more precise in my definitions and more explicit about my assumptions, but I also point out that this is a draft theory, and I started this message by recognizing that there might be inconsistencies.
As for your last comment, I never once claim to have recast principles from thermodynamics into another framework. As I have mentioned in another comment, I have borrowed concepts—mainly “entropy”—because it has a linguistic acceptation with meanings beyond thermodynamics, such as chaos, disorder, or disorganization—or, as Merriam-Webster puts it:
-The degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.
Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder.
—James R. Newman
-A process of degradation or running down, or a trend toward disorder.
The deterioration of copy editing and proofreading, incidentally, is a token of the cultural entropy that has overtaken us in the postwar years.
—John Simon
” Biology imposes changes in material conditions to which systems must adapt or perish.”
– no. Biology does not impose anything. Biology is a science not a single thing, it does not have agency. You choose a very odd framing, and a very substance based ontology.
Life is not like some piece of engineering to be dissected into component units. There is a strong argument to view it as a hierarchy of processes that output something we perceive as a “thing”. but the processes are primary, everything flows from those processes.
and the idea that systems inevitably tend towards disintegration and chaos versus more information depth, complexity and order is demonstrably false. Just look at the fossil record. Look at the nature of life today versus 500 million years ago.
This from self propagating systems getting more complex over time, sustained by the throughput of energy to sustain them.
and this:
and:
nonsense. biological systems have evolved such that recycling of cells is part of the whole. you cant extrapolate that “aging” of cells has anything to do as a cause for system entropy! and you don’t take far enough – what of mitochondria? what of lower level chemical processes? where exactly do you stop?
What of higher order – the organs that form the body?
What of yeast cells – when they divide has “the cell” died? one cell is now two cells. or funghi or any organism without a “central” controlling organ – when a fungal mat is divided has the system died? no. don’t confuse change with disorder.
claiming that “The process toward death is a process toward entropy” is just wrong, a misunderstanding of biology – cells have repair mechanisms and cells die and are replaced the whole time. organs repair at different rates. I am literally not the molecules I was born with, yet I am me – the definition of stability in a system.
” because every cell is constantly changing” – this is the nature of life, it is literally what life is. Cells, mitochondira, bacteria, tree stands that are 80000 years old – these all are manifestations of the underlying biological processes. They continue to exist because of the energy they consume that preserves the order. The ongoing change to preserve the overall process is part of the hallmark of life.
Thought experiment to illustrate this
Put a coffee mug and a mouse in a box in the attic. Come back 1 year later. The coffee mug is still intact, the mouse is dead. The mouse needs energy to continue its existence, the mug does not. The mouse is the process.
there might be something in the ideas, but the way you use biology and physics terms does not work to bring them to life properly for me.
I cant get over that to try and get to the social idea at the heart of it. oh and it really needs a picture!
lastly
Two books to read. “Why information grows” by Cesar Hidalgo and “Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology” by Nicholson and Dupre
What you’re offering isn’t a causal mechanism — it’s a metaphor extended past its usefulness. You’re mapping the behavior of one domain (cellular biology) onto a completely different class of systems (social, political, institutional) and then treating the analogy as if it were an explanatory law. “A looks like B, B does X, therefore A does X” is not a mechanism; it’s a narrative shortcut.
Even shifting the argument from thermodynamics to cell biology doesn’t salvage the structure of the claim. Cellular senescence has a very specific, mechanistic basis: loss of information during replication, telomere shortening, and error accumulation in a system that cannot revise its own rules of operation. That’s a biochemical constraint on self-replicators.
Social, political, and economic systems don’t operate on that substrate. They aren’t self-replicating molecules with fixed replication errors, and they don’t have any analogue to cell-cycle senescence. Their “rules” are not hardwired; they are changeable, designed, deliberate, and often consciously modified to correct dysfunction. That alone makes the analogy to biological decay structurally inappropriate.
If you want to argue that institutions tend toward failure, the mechanism has to be expressed in the language of those systems themselves — feedback loops, resource constraints, adaptation lags, incentive misalignment, information bottlenecks, etc. Those are valid, historically grounded dynamics.
But equating institutional change with cellular aging is not an explanation. It’s a metaphor that substitutes the appearance of inevitability for a demonstrated causal process.
Using entropy or cell senescence as a linguistic device is fine; using them as if they constitute a predictive model for socio-political dynamics is not. A draft theory can be rough, but the distinction between metaphor and mechanism still matters if the claim is meant to be taken as anything more than a poetic analogy.
I often think that political systems need diversity inline with physical constraints within a given society. Not unlike diversity found in biological systems. Therefore to lead society into a better future we will need diverse political systems, not the unipolar one being offered.
For fun, let me raise the recent BIS suggestion of a Unified Ledger System as a technical “fix” for the ever expanding ‘disorder’ within the socio-economic system we call Civilization (TM.) As usual, the proffered solution is based on the centralization of diverse functions into the “gently loving hands of infinite grace” of the elites, which is, as top predators everywhere will say, “for the good of the Public.”
I believe that it is a principle of evolutionary biology that as diversity within the population increases, so do the chances of survival. Viewing any society as an analogue to a species population, which it very nearly is, centralization to the extreme is an anti-survival strategy. What the top predator elites generally fail to understand is that gathering the reins of power more tightly within their grasp reduces their chances of survival.
Sometimes, entropy is your friend.
Stay safe.
for >200 years… US cultural adherence to its ‘might makes right’ ethos has retained its brand,
the nexus of enabled capitalism for the nimble….pedigree mostly, plus earthly resources, science,,,and immigration delivering us from evil.
Looks like sidelined in 2025 by the travesty of zealotry…and past license
a metamorphosis by canon unlikely
As a unique person, you retain identity through homeostasis and regeneration: cells are replaced, molecules circulate, and consciousness remains coherent despite molecular flux, defining life as an open, energy-driven process against thermodynamic disorder.
Fossil evidence and contemporary biology show that living systems build complexity across generations, not per individual descending into chaos
Entropy is a very tricky concept which I don’t fully understand, and I studied physics. I would hestitate to use it as the basis for any non-quantitative metaphor or model. I’m with Yaz Bel.
Other commenters have noted that it is the throughput of energy (from outside the system) which allows complexity to build and maintain itself. I would add that too much energy leads to too much complexity (randomness, chaos, a state of high entropy) whereas too little energy will lead to stasis (order, crystallization, a state of low entropy).
All the interesting stuff happens on the border between order and chaos, where entropy is middling.
When its energy supply begins to fail a complex system will try to gather more, possibly by expanding and further complexifying. If it fails it will have to contract and simplify.
So I would suggest dumping entropy and using energy and complexity instead.