The Law of Entropy
Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is defined as “the degree of disorder or randomness in the system” and over time it always increases. Example: take a perfect vacuum in a four-foot glass sphere; introduce a million molecules into the sphere; quickly they will disperse within the sphere as far apart from one another as possible.
In layman’s terms and applying it to any organization of any kind (corporate, non-profit, governmental, etc.), there becomes a “lack of order or predictability,” and a “gradual decline into disorder.”
It is why once giant corporations like General Electric are great in one generation, and fall apart 20 years later.
Along with the tendency toward maximum disorder, there is a concomitant tendency to hire more people to create order. This almost always fails, as more people are not the answer. They just add more bodies to be organized (poorly) and thereby create more disorder.
The answer to disorder is a constant flow of competent new people streaming into the system. This is why our military tends to defy the Law of Entropy. There is a constant flow of new officers entering the system from the U.S. military academies. They are continually promoted upwards, and as they are promoted, old officers retire. Example: at the top of the military command is the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They represent all the branches of the military and serve only one four-year term, including the Chair.
This means there is a constant supply of new blood, new ideas, and new ways to create order. After all, real soldiers live in the real world with real bullets, and the consequences of disorder can result in death.
In his most recent book, The Premonition, author Michael Lewis (who also wrote The Big Short about the 2008 Financial Crisis), takes a look at how governments in the United States—at all levels—reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a disaster. No government group, no agency, was prepared. According to Lewis, the CDC had had a pandemic response playbook, but it was last updated in 2004 and since then was lost in the shuffle.
In California, as Covid-sensitive as it seems to be, for the first many months of the pandemic, the response was denial by the State’s Chief Medical Officer. This lasted until she was replaced.
You can see the entropy phenomenon everywhere you look. In my opinion, it is why the United States and other advanced states are trending toward autocracy. Not rule by the masses, not democracy; they are too disorganized and messy. Rather, the drift is towards rule by the brutal few. This is strong-man rule. Think China, Russia, Turkey and the autocratic drift throughout Europe.
In my opinion, that same drift has affected the U.S. for some time. One can state that President Donald Trump was a one-time-only phenomenon driven by a cult of personality, but I would disagree with that. As measured by the Pew Research Center, “Trust In Government” steadily and slowly has dropped from about 80% under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson to about 20% now. Trump was/is a symptom, not a cause.
This begs the question, what does our country want?
In my bones, and it has nothing to do with any politician or current political fad, I feel something very bad is coming. I don’t know what.
As Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays, “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
The question for us, even in Laguna, even in our own little cocoons, do we care?
Michael is co-founder of Orange County School of the Arts and The Discovery Cube.
