Entropy vs. Order

Musings on the question of the inevitability of history.

Weird thoughts today.

For the past couple of years of a pattern of running the same path with my pups, I watched as a vacant area along the way as it got overtaken by brush, grass and vines, but this morning, it was clear. Somebody, probably the homeowner, had taken time yesterday to clean it up. Maybe it was their own initiative, maybe it was spurred by the semi-annual junk pickup by our city waste handlers, but action was taken.

That got me to thinking about entropy versus order and how both are part of our existence. The natural world seeks balance—I’m sure many remember the Life After People (on the History Channel) about what the world would look like if all humans suddenly disappeared. Maybe you have seen pictures of abandoned places on the web that nature has begun to take back and through one of those, you get a sense of the battle that rages every day.

If you have and you think like me (I do not recommend that, it will give you a headache), it seems plausible to consider that humans are the entropy and nature is the order.

We tend to think of entropy and order as mutually exclusive concepts, but I have been thinking that each is the reason for the other. It seems a yin/yang sort of arrangement—if there were no entropy, nature could not create new order and if there were no order, humans could not create more entropy and in the process of both energy is both created and consumed.

Over the millennia, human beings have been remarkably successful at holding nature at bay, and even in many cases, harnessing it for human purposes. Most of that effort went to human benefit, some to our detriment, but I get the sense that since nature is forever and we have limited life spans, nature will always win in the end.

I tend to think of how we try to hold nature in abeyance is a lot like stretching a gigantic rubber band. With no force applied, it would relax over time and return to a relaxed point of equilibrium. It is when the band is stretched and held by some force at one point and is constantly stretched to maintain some “desired” position that it eventually snaps back violently…and because we increase the stored energy the more it stretches, the more it hurts when it does go back to a state of equilibrium.

That’s sort of what it means when we say nature abhors a vacuum.

When I look at our existence, especially in terms of the conflicts we have, I begin to wonder if the ongoing quest for peace is just us stretching a big rubber band, especially when the way we approach conflict amounts to a lot of jawboning and can kicking. One often wonders if it is better to rip the band aid off all at once rather than doing it slowly. One also wonders how much worse we make it for ourselves and our nation through the avoidance actions we take.

In my opinion, there are damn few truces, agreements, or deals between conflicting entities that survive for more than a lifetime, if they even make it that long. As in the Life After People series, nature gets a say and our world seeks to eliminate entropy and instill order to restore equilibrium.

One also wonders if leaders make things happen, things happen to them, or reaching an equilibrium is just an inevitability.

It is easy to armchair quarterback things like the current events in Iran, but it is also legitimate to review history with a questioning eye, asking a bunch of “what-if” questions along the way and one of the big questions in my mind would be “Was America always fated to wind up right where we are and was that equilibrium point already determined by our past actions?”

In other words, did our leadership have a vision that somebody was going to get a bigger mess dumped in their lap at some point in the future and the only way to prevent it was to stop pretending things were getting better and make a move?

I know, it is a question that is impossible to answer with certainty, especially in a forward-looking way. You can’t disprove a negative or assume a positive, that much is true.

We can learn from the times past when great leaders stood firm and told their enemies they had come this far but would go no farther.

One wonders where the great leaders of the past have gone. Where are the Reagans, the Thatchers, the Churchills, et al? Maybe President Trump fits in that group, history will be the judge, but I can certainly tell you that Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden absolutely do not – all can kickers. I might even add G.H.W. Bush and second term Dub in the “not” category.

If one questions the choices for president we will face in 2028, one should understand the choices in this context.

Will we choose someone who is not afraid to let the rubber band loose before it stretches too far, or are they willing to just keep stretching it until it can’t stretch any farther?

Time will tell, one supposes.