WAR, ENERGY AND THE CUNNING OF ENTROPY

This is a brilliant analysis of why conflict is taking place in Iran...

  1. Defintion...
     Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
    "the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time"
  2.     lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
    "a marketplace where entropy reigns supreme"

'In the work of G. W. F. Hegel, history advances through what he called the “cunning of reason”: individuals pursue their own particular interests, yet unwittingly realise a broader rational process. Marx famously inverted this idea. For Marx, it is not Reason that guides history, but material conditions - especially the organisation of production - that assert themselves “behind the backs” of social actors.

Thermoeconomics extends this inversion further still. What we observe today is not the cunning of reason, but something closer to a cunning of entropy.......

In this light, the analogy with Hegel’s “cunning of reason” returns in a transformed guise. History is still moving through the actions of individuals and states pursuing what they frame to be their own interests. But there is no guarantee of rational resolution, no hidden teleology guiding events toward harmony.

Instead, there is the cunning of entropy: the quiet, persistent pressure of energetic constraints reshaping the behaviour of systems, often without their full awareness, and sometimes with violent consequences. And on the other side, human social organisations’ attempts at negentropic intervention to sustain complexity, maintain order and realise system reproduction. The central question of our time is whether societies can recognise these dynamics sufficiently to act ahead of them; to invest, reorganise and cooperate in ways that reduce the need for externalisation, or whether they will continue to respond after the fact, allowing thermodynamic pressures to express themselves through conflict.'





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