1.0 An Introduction To Entropy
Since writing Breaking The Code Of History and formulating the Theory of Human Collective Systems we have continued to seek enhanced concepts that explain human interactions to better predict and understand our collective behaviours. This has led us to develop the Theory of Anti-Entropy in Human Systems to explain why humans build large social structures such as empires and why we keep fighting wars.
First, we have to understand the definition of entropy in classic terms:
- Defined as the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.
- Entropy has often been loosely associated with the amount of order or disorder in a thermodynamic system.
- Increasing entropy is the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder.
Next, we have to define the parameters of human existence by defining three points of certainty. The first is our humanity’s birth, the second death, and the third is our demise at the hands of entropy. It is thus so for every living creature that time and entropy kills our DNA and eradicates life from the universe.
Entropy is therefore the one true enemy of life as it is encapsulated within our DNA. Man has known this intrinsically for millennia and has sought to roll back the inevitable in his search for everlasting life. There are three main ways that man has sought immortality; through the aspiration of an afterlife, through the science of longevity and through larger and more productive social structures.
2.0 The Aspirations Of An Afterlife
The path to an afterlife has been the domain of human religious structures within societies since the dawn of time, giving them power over the living and greater influence within human social structures using three distinct constructs:
- The quest for the elixir of life, a fable woven into all societies. The Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail are but two of many.
- Physical resurrection of the human form in its rejuvenated state present in religions, such as Christianity, and ideals such as heroic divinity. Today, it is sought through cryogenics and scientific progression.
- Spiritual resurrection and reincarnation
These three aspirations have been able to satisfy an inner need that science could not provide in the past. In addition, they have defined religions whose powerful themes have enhanced the human organisational process to shape and enhance the effectiveness of empires and their corresponding civilisations.
3.0 The Pursuit Of Longevity
Today, the study of alchemy has been replaced with modern science, which is beginning to understand just how entropy kills our cells over time. Within our bodies as a chromosome replicates, in the process, its ends fray as it shortens with each replication until there is nothing left. The cell is then unable to divide effectively, a condition which is called ‘senescence’. These cells accumulate as a dead weight in the body and cause inflammation and then cancer and degenerative diseases leading to death. The implication is that each cell can only divide a fixed number of times to counter the effects of entropy, limiting our life spans.
However, telomeres at the end of chromosomes are there to protect the ends from fraying and thus the study of how to maintain cell regeneration by extending the telomeres’ life provides optimism for increased life spans. Strangely, not all our body's cells are susceptible to this process, i.e., germ cells in the testes, which keep working until death because they are protected by an enzyme called telomerase. This protects the telomeres from shortening. Recent scientific results have managed to reactivate senescent cells and lengthen their telomeres, providing hope that one day we might be able to hold back the forces of cellular entropy to live longer.
In that regard, modern science is our DNA's great hope for extending our life spans. The anti-entropy effects of living longer and each person carrying more knowledge would increase a society's cumulative anti-entropy potential by a quantum jump allowing humans to perhaps begin to transcend the unconscious cycles that have dominated our history. But, on the negative side, could longer lives also decrease our competitive drivers? Only time will tell.
4.0 Longevity Through Human Social Structures
Humans to date have failed to transcend individual mortality but have instead relied on a different genetic strategy to beat entropy by building large human social organisations that survive many generations. Whilst the individual human may be frail, we humans like other herd organisms have come to rely on our numbers for our immortality. Thus is the importance of our social structures that we have unconsciously shaped to use to our advantage, to grow and expand our anti-entropy skills. Individually, within society, there are two ways:
- Perpetuation through legacy of great deeds and doings in one's life that gives an individual purpose and their memory a future life in future generations who hopefully might benefit from such great experience within the context of the empire cycle of society that they inhabited.
- Through procreation; the perpetuation of our genes through our children and their future survival through the success and continuance of our human social structures to provide future stability for our genes to survive.
The Five-Phase Lifecycle, which is one of the core tenants in Breaking the Code of History, explains how a human systems cycle is directly proportional to the level of collective anti-entropy, as they rise and then fall to the effects of entropy as they break down. However, there is much more to understanding human organisational processes and its anti-entropy dynamics.
5.0 The Nine Principles Anti-Entropy
In essence, anti-entropy is the ability to order the environment around oneself at the lowest fractal degree and around one’s empire at the highest fractal degree. It can be measured by productivity and life expectancy, which is described by economists as GDP per capita.
Principle 1: The hidden human energy of anti-entropy. Human history always focuses on the destructive disasters, but between those destructive gaps is hidden a huge amount of energy of self-organisation and human anti-entropy, starting with the grandmother who sweeps the floor to the great empire builders. So it is important to always remember that the forces of human anti-entropy are always at work and are only blocked by the periodic entropy of individuals and systems at certain phases in history. Thus, it is right to be collectively optimistic and to look on the positive side of the future of humanity.
Principle 2: Empire cycles are entropy cycles as they grow they build anti-entropy. Thus a hegemonic challenge is a race to create the maximum anti-entropy to gain the hegemonic top slot. The levels of anti-entropy in an empire or indeed any human system is a function of the average entropy level of each citizen (education-health-cultural values) the size of a population, the quality of its leadership, and the level of the system’s coherence, i.e. where it is on the rise and fall curve. Growing populations create excess anti-entropy whilst contracting populations are subject to entropy. Polarisation, as defined in Breaking The Code Of History, actually defines who we compete and fight against. It prioritises loyalty to our family genes, our society genes and our race genes.
Principle 3: Bigger really is better! To perpetuate survival in nature, insects use huge numbers as a survival tool and build giant colonies. This then requires effective organisational processes to maximise the effect of the colony’s anti-entropy to create order. Humans have, in their vast population growth, become more like insect colonies than their relatively less-numerous ancestors. The bigger the population, the bigger anti-entropy potential in the system that can be harnessed for productive purpose. This is the basis of the power of China's hegemonic challenge today.
Principle 4: The average anti-entropy of a population. A systems collective potential anti-entropy is a product of the population size and the average level of the individual’s level of anti-entropy energy. Thus, whilst a self-actualised democracy enhances the average individual level of anti-entropy in its population, a larger hierarchical society whilst having a lower average level of individual anti-entropy will have a higher net level of anti-entropy. Hence the perpetual human struggles between democratic systems with their higher potential anti-entropy per capita and larger hierarchical structures like the USSR and China. The ideal human society has a high average individual level of anti-entropy and a large population. Maximisation of human individual anti-entropy is described below.
Principle 5: Destructive creation. Evolution demands that when a system goes into a state of entropy or decline, it is removed just like the senescence (dead) cells in the body. Thus, as empires decline they lose their energy and decay, leaving a vacuum into which the next empire moves to then reach greater levels of anti-entropy. Thus be prepared for the waves (and even tsunamis) of entropy that engulf systems in decline with compounding consequences. The role of warfare is the personification of Darwinist competition and is essentially a clash of anti-entropy and the side with the greatest level will inevitably ultimately win. This explains why wars keep occurring despite broad protestation that they are inhuman and uncivilised. Natural events like pandemics, earthquakes and tidal waves are also examples of entropy tsunamis.
Principle 6: Human collective accumulated anti-entropy. Each sequential empire takes anti-entropy of the net human system to a new high at the empire's peak and then declines to be replaced by the next empire which then reaches new highs. Thus, net human anti-entropy oscillates around a positive increasing gradient which is accelerating with technology and population growth.
Principle 7: Anti-entropy friction exists for both an empire and individuals. The greater the magnitude of the positive change that the system seeks to initiate, the greater the friction they will encounter in the form of more bumps on the way to push aside the forces of entropy. Indeed, the faster one seeks to execute change, the greater the resistance. Hence the importance of harnessing expanding the anti-entropy of a social system with highly capable and creative leadership, that exhibits strategic vision and consciousness. In short, leaders who can see the oncoming obstacles and how to overcome them.
Principal 8: Good versus evil and the archetypes of anti-entropy are already woven into our fables and social constructs as represented by the force of light and dark energy, e.g. as represented in Star Wars, with the forces of light and dark, or the images of WW1 and WW2 construction and destruction, or elemental Christian good and evil. All are in fact entwined in a constantly shifting embrace of light and dark, with neither being able to exist without the other. However, what has been essential for the survival of the human gene pool is to evade the consequence of entropy through the process of hegemonic challenge that to date has increased net human anti-entropy. However, the construct of anti-entropy provides a more mercurial perspective to the traditional black and white images of good and evil. Thus a self-actualised democratic system can still go into negative entropy and collapse but be part of a longer-term expanding anti-entropy process for humanity. Thus, in terms of humanity's genes, instead of good and bad the question is which social system creates the most anti-entropy over the long term?
6.0 Anti-Entropy And The Power Of Love
Principle 9: Love = Anti-Entropy. The power of attraction bonds human collective systems; the stronger the bonds between individuals, the greater the collective coherence, and thus the greater the levels of collective anti-entropy of the system.
The values of love are cultural and individual, and systems that can harness this powerful emotion across all age groups gain higher levels of anti-entropy. The Western Christian Super Empire, with its Christian values, used this dynamic to strengthen its social structure. Christianity may not be perfect, but its prime message is increased love within society and its greatest manifestation to date has therefore been the Western Christian Super Empire.
In humans, the process of bonding love starts with parental love, which is critical for the growth of healthy, productive offspring. Conversely, hate is the opposite force as it dissociates and fractures societies. Thus, a society whose values facilitate love on a broad scale is more likely to be successful in the long term. The Buddhist message of love, dating back to 500BC, is, therefore, more powerful than we perhaps have ever recognised. The most critical phase of human growth of the brain that shapes one's whole life concerning future health and happiness is the first five years. Resultantly, how we are parented and receive love is critical. We could conjecture a society that places increased awareness and support for parenting, especially in the early phase, will in future generations become more capable and productive. The work of the Duchess of Cambridge in this field is to be applauded but is also coincident with a forward-looking mindset of post-Brexit Britain. From another perspective, China’s one-child policy may have increased the levels of love and care parents transmitted to their offspring, creating unintentionally positive anti-entropy effects.
On the other side of the spectrum, in Tibet, the forced removal by the CCP of children from their families for indoctrination has caused untold pain and suffering, as was its intention. It has created a generation of children without sufficient parental love, and with untold consequences.
7.0 Individual Levels Of Anti-Entropy
Individual or group levels of anti-entropy are a product of both genetic hardwiring and upbringing. They exist in a spectrum of behaviours that we have described below, in both lateral and linear-thinking individuals.
- 15% are ‘The Leaders’ who possess a positive mindset and who are the creative, energetic leaders of human society that are predominantly lateral thinkers. This group optimises anti-entropy by harnessing chaos and fluid situations, enhancing collective beliefs and coherence which in turn optimises collective anti-entropy. These are not only the traditional leaders that rise to authority from the bottom to the top of society, but are the ground-breaking engineers, entrepreneurs, doctors, film-makers and artists that shape societies. They are, broadly speaking, anti-entropy super positive.
- 65% are ‘The Body’ who are, broadly speaking, neutral and linear thinkers who are dominated by a strong unconscious sense of collective thought an action. ‘The body’ is then activated by the energy of those at the extremes of this scale, to varying degrees, depending on the phase of society within the Five-Phase Lifecycle. ‘The body’ is, broadly speaking, anti-entropy positive.
- 18% are ‘The Unaffirmed’. Lacking essential parental love, they are unconsciously self-destructive in varying degrees and by extension act with entropy on the system. They demonstrate varying degrees of social camouflage that present the perception of constructive behaviour, which is then mixed with intermittent destructive behaviour. They are, broadly speaking, anti-entropy neutral to negative.
- 2% are ‘The Malevolent’. These people consciously act with entropy. They spend their lives perfecting the art of deception, both to themselves and to others. They develop a sophisticated social camouflage that allows them to become trusted and/or valued. Once in that position, they wreak havoc under their own agenda. They very often start by using covert energy which only when their trap has been sprung becomes overt. Only when placed under stress will their true character reveal itself. There is no compromise to be made with such people, only to remove them totally. As the universe’s trend is for entropy, it takes far fewer acting from this mindset to effect a destructive outcome. If a system is cleansed of the unaffirmed, it will self-organise into a powerful mechanism of anti-entropy.
As we described in the Theory of Human Collective Systems, human social systems are self-organising. Thus the key function of an effective leader is to ruthlessly remove all of the malevolent elements and all/the majority of the unaffirmed elements. Whereupon the system will self-organise and normalise, and demonstrate considerably increased productivity and anti-entropy.
8.0 Danger Ahead
Whilst the old mechanism of an empire’s anti-entropy has served humanity well to date, with the destructiveness of modern warfare and high population density that is increasingly resource dependent, we are at the point where our old unconscious habit of going to war to remove a declining empire and replace it with a rising one could destroy the whole human DNA gene pool in a massive act of mean reversion. That is, unless we can find new ways to optimise human anti-entropy with new non-combative mechanisms.
Option 1 Removing inter-human competition as the engine for optimising anti-entropy with an external objective such as colonising our solar system.
Option 2 Substitute our current process of destructive competition through a more constructive form of competition that is contained within a shared social construct from becoming violent. BREXIT is the prime example of a new way to manage age-old social pressures that would once have needed a bloody civil war but today have been contained by the democratic process.
Option 3 AI and automation lessen the proportion of liner-thinking genes in future generations increasing the proportion of lateral-thinking genes and thus increasing collective creativity and anti-entropy.
Option 4 Enhanced education to increase human anti-entropy potential by increasing the collective education, awareness and consciousness of humanity, remembering that consciousness directly interacts and affects the physical universe, increasing anti-entropy levels.
9.0 Applying The Theory of Anti-Entropy To Enhance Your Organisation
The implications of this theory to understand human systems are extremely far-reaching. By applying these principles, it is possible to enhance an organisation, from a nation, to a company, to a sports team. If you are interested, please see or Global Strategist products.
© David Murrin 2023. All images courtesy of Getty Images. |