Social entropy

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Social entropy is a macrosociological systems theory. Social Entropy is a measure of the natural decay within a social system. It can refer to the decomposition of social structure or of the disappearance of social distinctions. Much of the energy consumed by a social organisation is spent to maintain its structure, counteracting social entropy, e.g., through legal institutions, education and even the promotion of television viewing. Anarchy is the maximum state of social entropy.

Social Entropy predicts that as creative intelligence becomes more powerful, society's cohesion becomes weaker.

Modern Western complex societies remain organized by large inputs of energy to mitigate the natural progression of increasing entropy (disorder), according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a fundamental law of physics. This effectively states that Entropy (disorder) increases with time. As the system becomes more complex, through access to energy, it becomes more susceptible to changes that may occur if one were to remove this source of energy. Think of a teenager's bedroom. On any given day, it remains messy, unless work is performed on the system (bedroom). The same goes for societies at large. Take away the energy inputs (largely from fossil fuels) and organization (for instance, blueprints, databases, etc...) corrodes, thus society becomes less cohesive and trends toward Anarchy. This is at the centre of the Peak Oil debate. Once reliable, cheap supplies of oil are limited, social systems will begin to become more disorganized and disorderly.

[edit] References

• Klaus Krippendorff's Dictionary of Cybernetics (University of Pennsylvania)
• Prediction Science
• Social Entropy Theory: An overview (ISSN 1094-429X) K.D.Bailey
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics to an Unusual Domain