Entropy of society. entropy

Human psychology is a rather inertial thing. It is understandable, millions of years of biological evolution and millennia of social have insured humanity from a sharp and most likely unsuccessful change in the structure of nervous activity.
On the other hand, the entire social evolution of a person is aimed at reducing the role of non-negative chance in his life. I highly recommend reading this further ...

Actually, what is called "humanization" of society is quite logically deduced from the reduction in the role of negative accidents in this very life of society and its specific members. For example, a certain J. Caesar, being a respected person, was captured by pirates, and if the ransom did not come, it could well be sold as slaves. However, as we understand it, the seizure of one or another member of society by bandits is an accidental fact. Those. bandits raise the measure of entropy of society. There are no bandits - the society is more orderly. Here it is enough to remember that even in the 90s the lads not only fired and blew up, but also built hierarchical schemes and rubbed graters: i.e. reduced the risks for themselves personally and for their groups from any troubles (for example, it is obvious that death in a firefight is an accidental event).

Simply put, the understanding "from the bag and from the prison ..." led to the creation of such social institutions that would significantly reduce the likelihood of both bags and prisons. Simply put, they made society more orderly in terms of eliminating negativity.

Take, for example, the consistent fight against the slave trade (very noticeable profitable business). Little is known, but the British actively used the Irish as slaves. However, both are white, and therefore there is a risk that the Englishman himself will fall into slaves (see the Monmouth uprising). Therefore, sooner or later the first segregation level was held - a white cannot be a slave. In the future, there was also a struggle to abolish slavery among blacks, etc. ... as a result, we see - there was a significant decrease in the likelihood of a negative event for a member of society in the form of turning him into a slave. By the way, archaization in the Churkestans immediately brought back this ancient and wise custom, for some reason not found among Russian barbarians ..

Note that the fight against slavery, its abolition in the United States coincided in time with the formation of the communist idea and socialism in general as a set of certain requirements and conditions. Those. such a significant event could not but affect the emerging ideology. Note that this approach automatically means the growth of egatilatrism: i.e. Negro is also a man and also has human rights. Well, etc ... However, after passing this certainly positive stage fighting social entropy

So, however, the very fact of fighting this entropy does not negate the fact that different people and social groups produce this social entropy in different form and in different quantities... But society in the majority is inertial and tuned in to fight for universal equality, and, consequently, to reduce the risk of being at the bottom, missed the moment when citizens began to accumulate in society who had some kind of craving for this very bottom. Indeed: the higher a society is ordered, the more actively it fights social entropy in the form of negative accidents (generated, including by inappropriate behavior of members of this society), the more a significant part of these very members will not meet the requirements for them.

So a socio-psychological fork arises: on the one hand, the high “anti-entropic” standards of society and a significant part of its members come into conflict with the behavior of another part of the members for whom these standards are unattainable due to education or general development. But at the same time, formally, both groups have the same rights. Where it leads? Besides, the “anti-entropic” ones will spend resources for themselves and for that guy, logically TACTICALLY losing to those who spend resources only on themselves

To be continued.
P.S. many comments have accumulated - I will answer everyone.

All the variety of types and forms of social disorder goes back to the ontological universal of chaos. Chaos is the absence of the slightest signs of order, that is, a state of scattered structures, fragmentation of elements, the absence of any forms, subordination, hierarchies.

IN ancient mythology chaos was the name for the indiscernible, undifferentiated, amorphous principle of being. According to the same ancient myths (Greek), in space, nature, society, man, from time to time, some insane forces are played out, local or universal Dionysianism reigns supreme, existence is in the grip of chaos, which knows neither forms, nor norms, nor boundaries.

Chaos either precedes order or arises from the destruction of the existing order. It carries a tremendous potential energy, which, under certain conditions, can form into specific structures.

The category of chaos includes such concepts as entropy, anomie, catastrophe, cataclysm, social explosion, denoting various facets and aspects of the disintegration of social structures, when in an atmosphere of total destruction the obvious logic of the events disappears, when in the cataclysms of the rearing world everything begins to collide with everything, and people begin to imagine that the very substance of civilization is being destroyed and the "end of the world" is coming.

Chaos is not an abnormal, but a completely natural, natural state, typical for all social systems... It periodically overtakes the system. And this inevitability makes it the rule rather than the exception in the social life of individuals and communities.

N. Machiavelli in his "History of Florence" wrote that the logic of continuous transformations makes the state periodically move from a state of order to disorder, and then back. At the same time, there is always a limit of ascent, above which it is impossible to rise, and a limit of decay-disorder, below which there is nowhere to fall. At these critical points, the movement of the state and society radically changes its direction to the opposite and rushes either upward to good and good, or downward to evil.

Social entropy

According to the second law of thermodynamics or the law of increasing entropy, all spontaneous processes in the Universe are unidirectional and are accompanied by the destruction of ordered structures, the dissipation of energy in space.

Entropy, as the dynamics of the growth of disorder, is a universal process that affects all systems, from the smallest to the most gigantic, which is the entire Universe. “We,” wrote the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, “are immersed in life, where everything in general obeys the second law of thermodynamics: disorder increases, but order decreases ... In a world where entropy as a whole tends to increase, there are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy, and the presence of these islands enables some of us to prove the existence of progress. "

The inorganic, inert substance of the planet is subject to the law of increasing entropy. Living substance has anti-entropic properties. Despite the fact that in autonomous systems entropy is constantly accumulating, the body gets rid of it by constant rhythmic efforts, exchanging with the environment, matter and energy.

At the heart of any change that takes place lies decay and chaos, which have no reasons or goals, providing only continuous movement. In this movement, various directions are possible, the choice of which is dictated by chance.

Social entropy is the dynamics of the disintegration of objective and subjective normative-value structures, accompanied by a weakening or complete atrophy of their socializing and regulatory functions.

Entropy is always present as a possibility in any of the social systems. But active, purposeful civilizing efforts of individuals, communities, society and its institutions do not allow this opportunity to pass into reality in full. Only at certain historical moments, with the confluence of a number of special circumstances, the entropic process can cover the entire social system.

So, in the conditions of a social system staying in a historically specific "bifurcation zone" any small signal, the most insignificant chance, can bring the entire system into a completely new state.

In such conditions, a landslide, avalanche-like destruction of existing socio-cultural structures begins - religious and educational institutions, family ties, moral and legal norms. Practical and spiritual "bonds" that have connected people for centuries into communities of different scales are breaking up. Legal imperatives are weakening and losing their normative and regulatory force, and the number of people falling out of their field of action is growing. Unwillingness to comply with moral and legal norms leaves individuals without internal guarantees against the danger of dehumanization. As a result, they find themselves defenseless both against the forces of external social evil, and against the evil inherent in their own nature.

Against the background of the entropy of key civilizational structures, a characteristic phenomenon of redistribution of the practical energy of the masses arises, which can rush into the mainstream of negativist-oriented political activity. The lumpenized layers are found to be most adapted to this kind of activity under such conditions. The most monstrous destruction and bloodshed are committed by their hands.

The main instrument for the realization of social entropy is the principle of total negation, which reigns supreme in most of the spheres of practical and spiritual life seized by the crisis. Under its influence, there is a change in worldview dominants in the public consciousness, as a result of which more and more people appear who see destruction as an overture to the future creation.

Among the various definitions of entropy, from my point of view, the best is given by Sommerfeld, who compared it to a director directing a work. We can supplement this comparison and indicate that for closed system entropy is a measure of the energy that we cannot use for work. I am not in a position to go into a detailed definition of entropy, and I recommend that those wishing to learn more about this issue visit the website http://www.panspermia.com/seconlaw.htm.

If we turn to income separate family and subtract from them the cost of education and the living wage in a given country, then we can find the entropy of society from these data. Expenditures on education should be excluded, since they are “dead capital” for the family. If these are expenses for the education of children, the family will never return these expenses. They are invested in children and in their children, future families. If the head of the family spends income on his education, then there are chances that he will return these expenses by increasing future income. These future incomes will be taken into account when calculating the future entropy.

The living wage in a given country is a threshold that a family must jump over to be able to talk about entropy. Entropy is a measure of freedom. There can be no talk of any freedom if the family's income is below the subsistence level. The measure of freedom should be counted from zero level, and not from some negative value, called the cost of living.

The dependence of the entropy of society on its cohesion, shown in my work on Figure I-1, is of a general nature. It's like a law of sociology. The maximum entropy occurs when the social cohesion is fifty percent. Today we have no idea what entropy is in reality and how quickly it changes. To fill this gap, we will try to determine the real entropy of society and its change over the years, as well as by country, based on the statistics published by each country. This is a lot of work, which requires the amicable efforts of specialists in many countries.

To calculate the entropy, you should use the data on the income of the population. Usually these data are available in each country and provided by the tax office. It does not matter in what currency this income is measured, since, as we will see below, we are interested in relative values.

Two values \u200b\u200bshould be calculated from the income data, of which one is the average per capita income. Let's designate this value as Dav. (This value usually appears in the statistics of each country as well.)

Another quantity, which we denote as I, is the dispersion of the population's income. I believe that the variance of incomes has never been calculated. Instead of dispersion, the so-called "Lorentz curves" are used today. In books on sociology, I did not even have to deal with the mention of Lorentz curves. They are familiar to me only from economics textbooks. As an example, I will cite here the Lorentz curve borrowed from the book by P. Samuelson "Economics".

The Lorenz curve shows what part of the population has its share of the total income of the country and, ultimately, what is the inequality among the population.

The concepts "entropy" and "variance" will replace the Lorentz curve for us.

The entropy E is calculated as the logoithm of the ratio of two quantities, namely:

The question of which logarithm to use, natural or decimal, I think is not fundamental. From my point of view, it is preferable to use decimal, however, in theoretical works, preference is given to natural.

It should not be assumed that the method for calculating entropy I have indicated is accurate and universal. I don't know how in different countries calculate income. The difference in the definition of income can introduce errors in the calculations. My method does not take into account "hidden income", which in some countries can be significant. I will cite as an example of hidden incomes of various kinds of benefits provided only to the oligarchy in the form of special hospitals, shops, places of rest and entertainment. Such benefits are widely practiced in socialist society.

So, the proposal made here can only be accepted as a first step.

RELATIVE ENTROPY

After the entropy of the society E has been calculated, it can be taken as a measure for plotting the entropy-cohesion graph in values \u200b\u200brelative to E. The relative dimension is more convenient if we want to compare different societies with each other, from the primitive to the most modern. The minimum cost of living should be used as a measure for calculating relative entropy.

A measure of the deviation of a social system or its individual link from the state accepted as a reference (normal, expected) state, which (deviation) manifests itself in a decrease in the level of organization, efficiency of functioning, and the rate of development of the system. Social entropy is associated with the presence of objective uncertainty in the state of the environment, human activities, management errors, planning, lack of knowledge (information) in the process of organizing (tuning) the system in question - an enterprise, institution, industry national economy, society as a whole. Social entropy is not just a measure of disorder, disorder of social systems, but also a measure of the inconsistency of their state with the adopted goals. Through its prism, one can see that even with an ideal external (formal) order, the system can function ineffectively, and managerial and other employees included in it, with all their external workload, clarity and diligence, can be busy, in essence, of little use and even destructive , from the point of view of the ultimate goal of the system, by activity (“anti-work”). The whole point is not in formal discipline, although it is, of course, necessary, but in accordance with the internal state of the system and each of its elements to the set integral goals. From this it follows that in the field of rationalizing the management of social processes, fundamentally new reserves open up if the task of reducing the entropy of the system is taken as the basis of this rationalization.

The introduction of the category of entropy into physics made it possible to estimate the coefficient useful action (Efficiency) of thermodynamic systems, which turned out to be very low (2-4%). By analogy with this, the entropic approach to management systems of a social nature reveals their surprisingly low efficiency, that is, efficiency, which is associated with a large deviation of their real state from the optimum. Social entropy, in contrast to entropy in physics, is not a formal mathematical, but a meaningful category. This is a value that makes it possible to assess the functioning of a social system: to what extent it does not reach or deviates from the reference level. Such an assessment is carried out primarily by methods of expert analysis, historical and sociological research, structural and functional approach, etc. The concept of social entropy is associated with new approach to work processes and to the time budget of workers, which requires distinguishing between the concepts of “work” and “useful return” of workers and work collectives. Surveys show that up to 60-70% of the working time of management and up to 50-60% of the labor costs of scientific and engineering workers is spent on performing little useful, and sometimes simply meaningless procedures, unnecessary regulations, etc. The entropy of social systems is “multifaceted”, it manifests itself in the swelling of management structures, the growth of bureaucracy, avalanche-like document flows, cumbersome approvals, endless and insignificant meetings, meetings, inspections, interdepartmental "inconsistencies", mismanagement, spontaneity. Anti-entropy measures are largely reduced not only to the elimination of these negative manifestations, but also to an increase in the information culture of the population, the formation of modern thinking in all employees, an analytical approach to life, the ability to distinguish between useful and useless work, as well as informative and “empty” (“noise ”) Messages and documents, intolerance to disinformation, etc. Of paramount importance in reducing social entropy is the implementation of measures to inform society.

"Social entropy" in books

Social space, social distance, social position