Our Entropic Liberation
In the late hours of November 5th, I found myself perplexed. I knew this was a very real possibility, but I still couldn’t grasp it. I couldn’t grasp how self-interest and excuses and suspended disbelief vaulted horrendous human beings with horrendous plans yet again. I couldn’t grasp that this meant some of my loved ones may move away… and some loved ones may stay away (having already moved due to the shit show). Couldn’t grasp that my personal constitution about people and goodwill and progress was… just incorrect. It felt like a trainwreck where everything that could go wrong, did (looking at you, swing states).
I found myself saying “this isn’t entropy” … right? But the longer the echoes of that thought resonated through my mind, the more unsure I became.
So I broke it down into bite-sized pieces to further ponder. At its core, entropy is a measurement of disorder in a system. And thermodynamic law indicates the entropy of a closed system will always increase aka become more disordered and random. We see and hear about this entropy phenomenon in several common situations: the smoke of a campfire, ice cubes melting in your tea on a hot day, the clutter that accumulates in our homes, the eventual heat death of our universe – you get the gist. Boiling it down to the basics left me thinking social and political dynamics could easily be understood in terms of entropy.
I mean, this crazy event does seem a whole lot like entropy when we think about it in terms of disorder. Trump winning… again? Pure chaos. Alongside media control (and an actual media plan beyond “ooh so brat”) and being an expert con man, he’s got entropy on his side. Now that we are seeing the cabinet appointments, I think we can double down on this statement. Entropy is entropy-ing. In the closed political system of our country, we’ve been on this road for a while, and it continues to get worse every election. Many people say “wow I don’t remember it being this bad before”; that’s because it wasn’t. Things are getting more apparently disordered and chaotic, and that’s to be expected.
So, it makes perfect sense how this could happen. It really does. And I hate that. And it sucks. And I’m scared. But I also don’t want to keep being scared or defeated or withdrawn for the next 4 (or more) years – I want to empower myself to rise above this and go about things differently where I can. Here’s a few things I’ve come to terms with when it comes to entropy:
Chaotic things are going to keep happening. Sometimes these things will be “bad” and sometimes they will be “good”. Those “chaotic good vs chaotic neutral vs chaotic evil” charts were onto something because chaos truly exists on all planes.
That being said, as a species looking to survive, we’ve adopted a negativity bias as a life mechanism. That means by default we are wired to look for how things could go wrong and are prone to catastrophizing. This makes us associate bad events with bad outcomes, leading to unsafe-feeling chaos which stems from more bad events. This perception paints our reality. But we are capable of being intentional and looking for how things could go right, too – we are capable of overcoming our negativity bias.
Although entropy tends towards disorder, it doesn’t mean that things can’t go the other route. Plants sprout from the fire’s ash, water crystallizes into ice, we tidy up our homes and donate unnecessary items. Entropy decreases if we apply the right environmental conditions and forces from outside the system. And what forces are more powerful than hope, love, and connection?
I guess this is my way of affirming to myself there’s hope. That we can still do better and can still work it out. This isn’t a closed system, and we have the ability and free will to intervene. We have the ability, the right, and the responsibility to do that amazingly American thing we do – put all of our heart and grit into protesting and supporting and loving what we believe in, for what’s right.
Right now, the powers in America are doing what America has always systemically ordained. Historically, it has ALWAYS been we the people that right America’s wrongs and set the path of justice. So really, it’s the same as it has always been, with added chaos in the mix, new battles to fight and wars to win. Now, we can acknowledge this entropic pull on our country for what it is and battle it for what it’s not. And we can win – because a bunch of people taking on 1 corrupt system sounds like an entropy increase to me.
