From my chemistry days, I remember learning about Entropy. A quick look at the news reminded me.

[NRaleighLiberal]

Entropy is a term I learned about in Physical Chemistry in college, as part of the incredibly difficult topic (for me) of Thermodynamics. Simply put - things tend to go to disorder if energy is not continually put in. As we watch the shit continually (and increasingly) hitting the fan, entropy comes into my mind. As in what happens to our house if we don't put energy in to keeping things orderly - messes emerge, dust bunnies of dog and cat hair. Or the ravages of time on our bodies, on our biological systems.

The world now - Trump and the electors here in the US. A shooting in Turkey. A truck careens into people in Germany. Entropy - disorder everywhere.

It's all coming undone - chaos, lack of empathy, lack of caring - it takes energy to empathize, reach out, and care....is this what is behind the cycles of disaster over our span of humanity? Big movements - the Civil Rights movement for example, with an incredible investment of energy - brought some order (necessary change) - and now is in peril.

Apathy brought about by so many factors, groups of people feeling disenfranchised, a host of other reasons. But in my 60 year life span, this feels like something different - something worse. It dampens my natural optimism.

It is going to take a huge influx of energy to get through where we now are (and about to be on Jan 20 on) and turn this around.

[smirkymonkey]

1. That is a good way to describe it, I know exactly what you mean.

This does feel different this time. I have this knot in my stomach all the time, like I am on the edge, waiting for the unthinkable to happen.

[RKP5637]

31. Same here. It's bothering me a lot, I can feel it, like walking in a bad part of town, you can

feel it in the air. Many are on the edge of spinning out of control. F, someone shoots into a car because a grandmother tooted her horn. FFS. I really think a far right movement is going to engulf the US.

[ananda]

2. I see it as an energizing of the shadow.

Russia basically is the shadow, and Trump
is a major contributor. Many who would
normally keep their baser instincts in line
now feel emboldened to let them rip.

It might grow and merge into a larger war
unless somehow it is brought into line.

[RKP5637]

30. Definitely! This, is a core problem, a very dangerous one!

Many who would
normally keep their baser instincts in line
now feel emboldened to let them rip.

[NightWatcher]

3. I'm starting to believe the World ended in 2012 and we've been coasting on fumes and inertia.

[sakabatou]

4. Only applies in a closed system

[TreasonousBastard]

6. Earth is a closed system.

[FarCenter]

7. The earth is an open system -- it receives solar energy

Plus a little mechanical heating due to the tides caused by the moon and sun's gravitational pull.

[ismnotwasm]

11. I tell my husband clutter accumulates because of entropy

He never had the benefit of a formal education and was fascinated by that particular law.

[RKP5637]

29. And! It can be proven by looking at my garage!!!

[fairwitness42]

10. Of course

because the sun, like god, is imaginary.

[sakabatou]

15. Huh?

In any case, welcome to DU.

[AtheistCrusader]

16. fairwitness42 is being sarcastic.

A Heinlein and Douglas Adams reference, all packed into a user name.
Keep an eye out, that user is going places.

And, entirely correct, the earth IS an open system, because we do receive bucketloads of energy from the sun every day.

[2naSalit]

5. Interestingly

I was having a conversation with a group of people last evening, it went easily into political topics... and the word "entropy" was used with much the same meaning when describing what our society is experiencing and has to be for someone like the chump to gain any steam in a national election for president. And it will take community building to turn our country around if it's at all possible.

[FarCenter]

8. Layman's version of 2nd Law: You can't win, can't break even, and can't leave the game.

If energy is put in, then entropy can decrease in the local open system, but it increases in some larger open system that includes the source of energy.

[RedWedge]

9. 'Twas ever thus.

[RadiationTherapy]

12. I personally do not believe entropy plays at the social level.

The same with the "every action has an e/o reaction" when people talk politics. Physical laws apply to energy and not to social interactions.

As such, I do not believe "everything is coming undone."

[GliderGuider]

17. Just like architectural designs have nothing to do with gravity, right? nt

[RadiationTherapy]

18. I don't think I agree with that statement.

Gravity obviously affects energy (matter) and so, that is a weirdish thing to say.

[GliderGuider]

19. The connection between the Second Law and collective human behaviour

is non-obvious. That's not a reason to dismiss it, it's a reason to think about it a bit harder.

The objectives of collective human behavior can be framed in terms of the thermodynamic dissipation that makes survival, and life itself, possible. The processes we invent generally make dissipation - which splits an energy gradient into exergy and entropy - more effective. Collective behaviours constrain and shape individual behaviors. Every major status-seeking behaviour on the part of individuals and organizations from small companies up to empires involves the control and dissipation of large energy gradients relative to their peers.

Human behaviour can be described quite effectively in terms of the dissipation of energy gradients within the environment.

[RadiationTherapy]

20. Sure, they can be described that way, but it would just be a vague metaphor.

I mean, I can see you have a science education and an understanding of the vocabulary of physics, but it is a vast simplification of social interaction in my opinion. I don't believe it would hold up as a metaphor among social scientists; not in small part due to the general ignorance of physics among them. Social and "hard" sciences are quite divergent from what I have seen.

[GliderGuider]

21. Well, I'm certainly not going to force you to think about it if you don't want to.

You have your opinions well formed already.

[RadiationTherapy]

24. It seems a bit silly and resentful to imply I didn't think about it just because I disagree.

I have an incomplete chemical engineering education, a graphics education, and a master of arts in communication. I can assure you - little as it may matter to you - that I certainly have thought quite a bit about using physics metaphors to describe social interactions. I think it does a disservice both ways: Too much social projection onto physical forces and too much scientific projection on behaviorisms.

[GliderGuider]

25. Here's where I ended up with this topic

Last edited Tue Dec 20, 2016, 10:01 PM - Edit history (2)

For two years in 2011 and 2012 I did a full-time literature dive in human behaviour, evolutionary psychology, complex adaptive systems and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In 2013 I wrote up my conclusions in a series of articles I put on my web site: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/ (Under the heading "Most Recent Articles&quot

7 of the first 10 articles linked at the top of my opening page explain my views on the thermodynamic drivers of collective human behavior. There's also a reading list of what I felt were the most significant papers and books in the field.

My goal was to investigate an interdisciplinary connection that I saw - one that hinted that universal non-equilibrium thermodynamic processes are probably one driver of collective human behavior - but that nobody was doing research on. Academically, psychology and physics seem to be two solitudes: each side aims to denigrate the other, and nobody's looking for links or consilience. I went looking for the links.

I'm not a scientist - computer science doesn't count - but I have a decent education in the hard sciences with detours off into psychology and a long interest in evolutionary psych. My articles have a popular tone because there was no point in pretending to be an academic I'm not. Also, they are terse because they're essentially my a journal of my thoughts - I wasn't trying to be didactic or airtight. They're one step beyond a first draft of a journal.

I did this just to scratch my own itch. After I wrote those articles I stopped publishing about the idea altogether. It makes no damn difference to anybody, and humanity doesn't have the time left to even make it into a decent discipline if it did matter to someone. But I did scratch my itch.

Some of my conclusions may have been wrong, and all of them are speculative and debatable - but I sure learned a hell of a lot along the way.

[ymetca]

13. Stupid as the "Death Star"

A planet-sized "spaceship" designed specifically to destroy planets, is the coming Trump administration.

Become the tools of our tools, indeed we have.

Eh, enough with the Yoda parables...

I keep thinking of Clive Barker's short story in his "Books of Blood" anthology, wherein two towns strap their citizens together into two, bloody, anguished, "giant fightin' robots" --automatons of human flesh, ripping and tearing at each other in mindless battle. No one knows why. They are just compelled to do this by unseen forces...

I am reminded of the falling out between Jung and Freud over Jung's suggestion that such a thing as the Collective Unconscious actually exists. For Freud, Society was merely the aggregate totality of each individual's personal psychological traumas playing out against each other. Jung, on the other hand, proposed that large masses of people are motivated by impulses that come from much deeper. A collective, pan-genomic "memory" of fighting/fornication, race, class, gods and goddesses, etc. The extraordinary madness of crowds, as it were. The dark realm underneath, wherein Cthulhu roils...

It seems whenever a society becomes too "egalitarian", atavistic forces arise, calling for some long, lost, hidden army of wrath to come forth once again to wreak havoc upon the world. Some would argue that this is a necessary component of our evolution as a species. To escape the Malthusian nightmare we have created for ourselves requires periodic blood sacrifice.

Over time we have sublimated our collective desire to throw virgins into volcanoes, and for the Killing-of-the-King-to-Make-the-Crops-Grow, into more subtle "games" of violence and retribution, like Football or Banking. But we're never that far away from the "nature red in tooth and claw" mire from which we arose. As Jim Morrison once wrote, "No one gets out of here alive" -- an existentialist pun.

To wit, some scientists propose such a thing as "negentropy", or negative entropy. In other words, the ability of living organisms to trap and store energy for future use. It doesn't deny the laws of physics, of course. Just postpones the final reckoning. But in a universe as vast as ours, perhaps such reckoning may never come. If we can only just figure out how to escape...

The desire for exploration is, perhaps, what drives all humanity. Underneath it all, each of us believes we are destined from something else. Something more. Something better. The cubicle schlub becomes Neo, the Chosen One; the lowly carpenter's son becomes the Son of God; the wimpy Arthur pulls the Sword from the Stone; and only the Fool can find the Holy Grail...

The Once and Future King can only "return" once we all believe he is "real". Pinocchio, wanting to be a real boy. Spielberg's "AI". Goethe's Eternal Feminine leading to perfection. Clarke's Star Child. The Master who Makes the Grass Green. The sky-blue Avatar opening his eyes...

Sadly, Trump's minions are only focused on "all that cheddar" underneath our World Tree...

[Wounded Bear]

22. Nice post, but you left out another good one on that line....

Dune.

[immoderate]

14. Life is entropic, and chaotic, and cyclical...

I think the universe encourages life to develop under favorable conditions, because it accelerates entropy. As life evolves, it assumes forms that use greater amounts of energy, from single to multi-cells, then plants and animals. And along come humans -- and can blow things up! Entropy gets a boost.

--imm

[RKP5637]

27. Trump, the master accelerator of entropy!

[SubjectiveLife78]

23. You know what gets us? Maintenance.

[RKP5637]

26. Same here, except in physics. Basically, once Pandora's Box is opened, you can't get it all back in.

To illustrate it simply in elementary physics a plastic box is filled with ping pong balls all one one side, separated from the other half of the box by a divider.

Air pressure is then applied causing the ping pong balls balls to bounce all over the place on the one side.

The divider is then removed and the ping pong balls now spread to both sides bouncing all over.

The theoretical probability of all returning to one side over time is, ha, obviously, pretty darn low. And hence we live in ever increasing entropy now on steroids!

Like you, I think of this very very often.

I also often think of living on a finite planet with finite resources and an ever increasing population, and also ever increasing pollution, etc, etc. As we know, the calculus is way off for a livable future.

[elleng]

28. Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html