The entropy of society. entropy

Human psychology is a rather inertial thing. It is understandable, millions of years of biological evolution and millennia of social evolution have insured humanity against 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-catative chance in his life. I highly recommend reading this...

Actually, what is called the "humanization" of society is quite logically derived from the reduction of the role of negative accidents in this very life of society and its specific members. For example, a certain Yu. Caesar, being a respected person, was captured by pirates, and if no ransom came, he could well have been sold as a slave. However, as we understand it, the capture of one or another member of society by bandits is an accidental fact. Those. bandits raise the measure of the entropy of society. There are no bandits - the society is more ordered. It is enough to recall here that even in the 90s, the brothers not only shot and blew up, but also built hierarchical schemes and rubbed graters: i.e. reduced the risks for themselves and for their groups from all sorts of trouble (for example, it is obvious that death in a gunfight is a random 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 the bag and prison. Simply put, they made society more orderly in terms of eliminating negativity.

Let us take for example the consistent struggle against the slave trade (let us note 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 slavery (see the Monmouth uprising). Therefore, sooner or later, the first segregation level was carried out - a white slave cannot be. In the future, there was also a struggle to abolish slavery among blacks, etc. As a result, we see that 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 returned this ancient and wise custom, for some reason not found among Russian barbarians ..

Let us note that the fight against slavery and 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-conditions. Those. such a landmark event could not but affect the emerging ideology. Note that this approach automatically means the growth of egatilatrism: i.e. The Negro is also a man and also has human rights. Well, etc. ... However, having passed this one, of course 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 the majority of society is inertial and set to fight for universal equality, and, therefore, reducing the risk of being at the bottom, missed the moment when citizens began to accumulate in the society, having a certain craving for this very bottom. Indeed: the higher the society is ordered, the more actively it fights social entropy in the form of negative accidents (generated, among other things, by the inadequate behavior of members of this society), the more a significant part of these same members will not meet the requirements for them.

That. 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? And besides, the "anti-entropic" will spend resources for themselves and for that guy, logically TACTICALLY losing to those who spend resources only for themselves

To be continued.
P.S. I've got a lot of comments so I'll answer them all.

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, the state of dispersal of structures, the fragmentation of elements, the absence of any forms, subordination, hierarchies.

V ancient mythology chaos was called indistinguishable in itself, undifferentiated, amorphous origin of being. According to the same ancient myths (Greek), in space, nature, society, man, from time to time some insane forces play out, local or universal Dionysianism reigns, the being is in the grip of chaos that knows no forms, no norms, no boundaries.

Chaos either precedes order or arises as a result of the destruction of the existing order. It carries a huge potential energy, which, under certain conditions, can take shape in specific structures.

Such concepts as entropy, anomie, catastrophe, cataclysm, social explosion ascend to the category of chaos, denoting various facets and aspects of the collapse of social structures, when the obvious logic of ongoing events disappears in an atmosphere of total destruction, when everything begins to collide with everything in the cataclysms of the heaving world, 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 anomalous, but quite natural, natural state, typical for everyone 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 decline-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 up to good and good, or down 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 increasing 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 a life where everything as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: disorder increases and 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 makes it possible for 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 matter has antientropic 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.

Underlying any change that occurs is disintegration and chaos, which have neither cause nor purpose, 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 as a possibility is always present in any of the social systems. But the active, purposeful civilizing efforts of individuals, communities, society and its institutions do not allow this opportunity to turn into reality in full. Only at certain historical moments, under the concurrence of a whole series of special circumstances, can the entropy process embrace the entire social system.

Thus, under the conditions of a social system being in a historically specific "bifurcation zone", any small signal, the most insignificant accident, can bring the entire system into a completely new state.

Under such conditions, a landslide, avalanche-like destruction of existing socio-cultural structures - religious and educational institutions, family ties, moral and legal norms - begins. The practical and spiritual "strings" that have bound people for centuries into communities of various sizes are disintegrating. 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. The unwillingness to comply with moral and legal norms leaves individuals without internal guarantees from the danger of dehumanization. As a result, they find themselves defenseless both before the forces of external social evil and before the evil inherent in their own nature.

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

The main tool for the implementation of social entropy is the principle of total denial, which reigns in most areas of practical and spiritual life covered by the crisis. Under its influence, there is a change in worldview dominants in the public mind, as a result of which more and more people appear who see destruction as an overture to future creation.

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

If we turn to income individual family and subtract from them the cost of education and the cost of living in a given country, then we can find the entropy of society from these data. Expenses for education should be excluded, since they are “dead capital” for the family. If these are expenses for the education of children, then the family will never return these expenses. They are invested in children and in their 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 cost of living in a given country is the threshold that a family must cross in order to be able to speak of entropy. Entropy is a measure of freedom. There can be no question of any freedom if the family income is below the subsistence level. The measure of freedom should be counted from zero level, and not from some negative value called the subsistence minimum.

The dependence of the entropy of a society on its cohesion, shown in my work in figure I-1, is of a general nature. It's like a law of sociology. The maximum entropy occurs when the cohesion of society is fifty percent. Today we have no idea what entropy really is and how fast it changes. To close this gap, let's try to determine the actual entropy of society and its change over the years, as well as by country, based on statistical data published by each country. This is a big job, for the accomplishment of which the friendly efforts of specialists in many countries are needed.

To calculate the entropy, you should use data on the income of the population. Typically, these data are available in each country and are 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.

From the income data, two values ​​should be calculated, of which one is the average per capita income. Let's designate this value as Dav. (This value is usually also included in each country's statistics.)

Another value, which we will designate as R, is the dispersion of the incomes of the population. The dispersion of income, I believe, has never been calculated by anyone. Instead of dispersion, the so-called "Lorentz curves" are used today. In books on sociology, I have not even come across a mention of Lorentz curves. I know them only from economics textbooks. As an example, I will give here the Lorenz curve borrowed from P. Samuelson's book "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 of "entropy" and "dispersion" will replace the Lorentz curve for us.

Entropy E is calculated as the logarithm of the ratio of two quantities, namely:

The question of which logarithm to use, natural or decimal, I consider unprincipled. From my point of view, it is preferable to use decimal, however, in theoretical works, natural is preferred.

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

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

RELATIVE ENTROPY

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

A measure of the deviation of a social system or its individual link from the accepted as a reference (normal, expected) state, which (deviation) is manifested 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, errors in management, planning, lack of knowledge (information) in the process of organizing (setting up) the system in question - enterprises, institutions, industries 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 accepted targets. Through its prism, one can see that even with an ideal external (formal) order, the system may function inefficiently, and managerial and other employees included in it, for all their external workload, clarity and diligence, can be occupied, in fact, of little use and even destructive , from the point of view of the ultimate goal of the system, activity (“anti-work”). The whole point is not in formal discipline, although it is, of course, necessary, but in the correspondence of the internal state of the system and each of its elements to the set integral goals. It follows that fundamentally new reserves open up in the field of rationalization of the management of social processes, if the task of reducing the entropy of the system is taken as the basis for 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 entropy approach to management systems of a social nature makes it possible to detect 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 substantive category. This is a value that allows you to evaluate the functioning of the social system: how much it does not reach or deviate from the reference level. Such an assessment is carried out primarily by the methods of expert analysis, historical and sociological research, structural and functional approach, etc. The concept of social entropy is associated new approach to labor processes and to the time budget of employees, requiring a distinction between the concepts of “work” and “useful return” of employees and labor collectives. Surveys show that up to 60-70% of the working time of managerial and up to 50-60% of the labor costs of scientific and engineering workers is spent on the implementation of little useful, and sometimes simply meaningless procedures, unnecessary regulations, etc. The entropy of social systems has many faces, it manifests itself in the swelling of management structures, the growth of bureaucracy, an avalanche of document flows, cumbersome approvals, endless and little meaningful meetings, meetings, inspections, interdepartmental “inconsistencies”, mismanagement, and spontaneity. Anti-entropy measures largely come down not only to eliminating these negative manifestations, but also to improving 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 misinformation, etc. Of paramount importance in reducing social entropy is the implementation of measures to informatize society.

"Social Entropy" in books

Social space, social distance, social position