The sadness of entropy

by Jonathan Reisman

 

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold - W.B. Yeats

Entropy is a concept from chemistry and physics that measures the state of disorder in a system. The second law of thermodynamics makes it clear that disorder in a system will increase over time without external intervention- or as more poetically put by poet William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”.

Humans strive to put order in our political, economic and social systems as a means to counter or at least create the illusion of control over randomness and chaos.  The Constitution is one example; judicial precedents are another. Freedom can be seen as a destructive entropic force, inevitably eroding and dissolving that which holds us together.

Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek proposed an alternative pro-freedom anti-entropic concept known as “spontaneous order”- the idea that structure could arise out of chaos as a consequence of independent actions of self-interested independent actors. It is the economic equivalent of Darwin’s evolutionary “survival of the fittest” origin of species thesis- and a suggestion that the second law of law of thermodynamics and Yeats’ mournful observation need not necessarily apply. It underlies libertarian doubts about socialism and government “fixes” to our problems (generated by randomness and chaos).

I remember quite clearly when the phrase “the sadness of entropy” first entered my mind. It was in May of 1977, as I prepared to graduate from Colby and leave the comfortable structure of Mayflower Hill in Waterville, where I had learned about entropy as an environmental studies major and about spontaneous order and creative destruction as an economics major. I was heading south to Providence for graduate school, with a promising future, but I was a bit melancholy. I realized that all the friendships and comforting order I had built in 4 years at Colby were coming to an end, or at least an inflection point of change and things would never be the same. Mr. Yeats was on my mind as I loaded my 1966 Oldsmobile Delta 88 hoping to somehow cheat the inevitability of entropic disorder.

2020 has been a year of entropy. A Pandemic. A stolen election. Rampant fraud and hypocrisy. Legacy media that no longer champions freedom of the press and applauds censorship and lies of commission and omission. Partisans who scream “Listen to the science” on climate, but ignore it on abortions, sonograms, gender identity and X chromosomes. Progressives insisting that conservatives respect democracy and accept the election results when they did the exact opposite for four years. Astonishment that the story of the Biden crime family was deliberately and successfully suppressed by Big Tech and the legacy media till after the election, which will allow the power-hungry daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father (which somehow makes her African-American?) to step into the oval office.

The country is falling apart before our eyes. The left wants to defund the police, and Soros supported prosecutors across the country are refusing to prosecute crimes allegedly caused by “poverty, inequality and systemic racism.” Thus, Black Lives Matter and Antifa riot and burn with impunity, while homeowners who try to defend their property are threatened by woke prosecutors.

There is one law enforcement agency that does deserve to be defunded, and that is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has spied and lied their way to infamy. Unfortunately, as they are now the enforcement arm for the Biden crime family and the deep state, they will not be.

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