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Title: Entropy Means Freedom Author: El-ahrairah Date: 2022-01-23 Language: en Topics: anti-dialectics, dialectics, praxis, scientific socialism, science, thomas hobbes, dialectical naturalism, slavery, industrialism
“No one really knows what entropy really is”
—John Von Neumann, certified genius
Some people say that entropy is a probability-based concept that pops up
in thermodynamics and information theory. Translation— something only
STEM nerds are supposed to care about. But others insist that entropy
means chaos and disorder. If you accept this definition, the Second Law
of Thermodynamics, which states that all closed systems inevitably tend
towards entropy, has deep political implications because our entire
universe is a closed system. Conservative neo-Hobbesian intellectuals
like Jordan Peterson employ the Second Law to suggest that, since all
systems break down, to preserve “Western civilization” for as long as
possible we need hierarchical social structures.
As usual, the right-wing view is incomplete at best and fear-mongering
at worst. Entropy may mean chaos, entropy may mean disorder, but entropy
also means freedom. To the extent that the concept applies to human
politics, we should embrace entropy instead of fighting it.
[]
Jamestown was founded in 1607. By 1617, cotton is grown for export along
the Powhatan River. In 1619, the first slave ship arrives from West
Africa. In 1662, the children of slaves are declared to be slaves
themselves by a legislature controlled by wealthy planters. In 1675,
Bacon’s Rebellion temporarily unites African slaves and poor Europeans,
many of whom were indentured servants, against the wealthy planters. In
1680, blacks are denied freedom of assembly to prevent future uprisings.
In 1691, interracial marriage is outlawed. After 1692, blacks can no
longer own livestock. By the 1700s, African chattel slaves make up half
of Jamestown’s unfree labor force.
In 1764, James Hargreaves conceives the idea for the spinning jenny, a
labor-reducing, cotton-weaving machine.
In 1764, James Watt notices that Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine wastes a
lot of steam and improves it from 1% to 2% efficiency.
By 1775, Richard Arkwright combines Watt’s steam engine with Hargeaves’
spinning jenny to build mills where the entire process of spinning
slave-grown cotton into yarn is carried out by a single machine. This
marks the start of the Industrial Revolution and the exponential
economic growth that underlies what you think of as “Progress”.
In 1824, the 28-year old French engineer Sadi Carnot publishes a book
titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. In his introduction, he
writes:
“Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines,
notwithstanding the satisfactory condition to which they have been
brought to-day, their theory is very little understood, and the attempts
to improve them are still directed almost by chance.”
Steam engines had been powering factories, trains, and steamboats since
Sadi was a little boy, and yet no one before him had proposed a
scientific theory of how they actually worked. I point this out to make
clear that the reason this science was discovered by European scholars
and not Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, West African, or Mayan scholars
has much more to do with cotton slavery and the resulting industrialism
than comparative intellectual prowess.
Enough decolonizing; on to the science. Carnot subscribes to a Newtonian
theory of heat as substance, an invisible thing that flows like water.
He refers to it as “caloric”. He writes:
“The production of motive power is then due in steam-engines not to an
actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a hot body
to a cold body, that is, to its re-establishment of equilibrium— an
equilibrium considered as destroyed by any cause whatever, by chemical
action such as combustion, or by any other. We shall see shortly that
this principle is applicable to any machine set in motion by heat.”
“According to this principle, the production of heat alone is not
sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that
there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.”
And later:
“Wherever there exists a difference of temperature, motive-power can be
produced.”
If you’re wondering how exactly this temperature difference can be
translated into motion, consider that most materials expand when warmed
and contract when cooled. In practice, steam engines used water
expanding into steam in a cylinder to push a piston; Carnot points out
that, in theory, you could use an expanding iron bar to accomplish the
same effect.
Carnot realized that, in theory, this process was perfectly reversible.
As long as you can restore the temperature differential, which in his
view was just a question of moving enough “caloric” back to the source,
you can produce unlimited power. Not infinite power— he goes out of his
way to prove that, because of the already well-established principle of
the conservation of energy(his father, Lazare Carnot, wrote his own book
on the topic), the temperature differential can never be increased and
therefore the power output of the engine can never increase— but the
only reason Sadi Carnot gives for why the engine must eventually stop is
the fallibility of human engineering.
Sadi Carnot’s insights have been distilled by later scientists into the
Carnot cycle, which you may have studied in high school physics. When
contemporary engineers design anything from a more efficient engine to a
better refrigerator, they are aiming to get as close as possible to the
ideal of the Carnot cycle.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire languished in obscurity for ten
years until it was cited by a more popular treatise by another engineer,
eventually capturing the attention of the German mathematician Rudolf
Clausius. It was Clausius who gave us the first definition of entropy as
“the tendency of energy to spread itself out”. He phrases this in the
rigorous language of calculus, but if we apply the definition back to
Carnot’s insights the practical implication is clear— the hot reservoir
inevitably bleeds into the cold reservoir, erasing the temperature
difference that powers the engine.
To Clausius, entropy means thermal equilibrium. Working with Carnot’s
analogy that the motive power of the “caloric” across a temperature
differential is like the motive power of water across a waterfall,
Clausius tells us that there is a tendency for the bottom of the
waterfall to ascend and a tendency for the top of the waterfall to
descend until the water stops flowing.
At the end of his 1865 paper where he perfects his definition, Clausius
formulates the first two laws of thermodynamics:
This is how many physicists think our universe will end— starheat bleeds
into the dark chills of empty space until energy is evenly distributed.
The lonely particles of your body, separated through trillions of cubic
light-years, freeze at a temperature of almost absolute zero. An
infinite wait.
for Niels Bohr to discover the quantum nature of energy when solving the
mystery of black-body radiation
But why does entropy always increase? Most people don’t spend too much
time wondering this because it aligns with common-sense pessimism. To
most people, perpetual motion just feels too good to be true. But surely
the universe bears no special hostility to stars and engines, right? So
why does entropy always increase?
By redefining entropy, Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann developed the
answer over the 1870s and 1880s— simply because it is more likely for
entropy to increase than for it to decrease.
First, Boltzmann redefines heat and temperature. Abolishing Carnot’s
“caloric”, he (correctly but controversially in his time) understands
temperature as an emergent property of the motions of individual
particles — the faster individual particles move, the higher the total
temperature. This explains why solids are colder than liquids and
liquids are colder than gasses.
Second, Boltzmann introduces the concept of microstates vs macrostates.
A macrostate is defined by emergent properties like temperature.
However, any given macrostate is consistent with many different and
unique microstates. For example, given a particular microstate with N
particles, each with some position and some velocity, the microstate
where those N particles are in the same position but are moving the
opposite way with the same speed gives rise to the same macrostate.
Third, Boltzmann redefines entropy as proportional to ln(omega), where
omega is the number of microstates and ln() refers to the natural
logarithm. The natural logarithm is a slowly but strictly increasing
function, so basically this means that where there are more microstates,
there is a higher entropy. Therefore, macrostates with more microstates
are mathematically preferred.
Imagine an engine with immensely hot gas in one reservoir and particles
at absolute zero in the other reservoir. Though there are still many
microstates in this configuration, they are far outnumbered by the
microstates where all the particles are evenly spread through both
reservoirs. Randomly moving particles will float into the cold
reservoir. Hotter particles from the hot reservoir will bounce off
cooler particles in the cold reservoir, imparting some of their kinetic
energy. Through millions of these tiny random interactions, hot
inevitably flows towards cold. The engine stops.
There’s also an analogy with sand castles and sand dunes. If you leave a
sand castle to the winds, it will be subsumed into the dunes simply
because sand castles are a less likely arrangement of sand than sand
dunes. But if you leave sand dunes to the winds long enough, inevitably
they will build sand castles. And inevitably they will destroy them
again.
A frozen universe, an infinite wait. Purely by chance, enough particles
converge into a single point and explode into a new universe. Some think
that this may be what caused the Big Bang.
It should come as no surprise that colonizers view entropy as a bad
thing. The question that birthed the concept was “is there a limit to
how much work can we extract from an engine?”, and we discovered that
when there is chaos, when there is disorder, no more work can be
extracted. Even worse, the fact that this chaos and disorder always
increases turns out to be a fundamental law of the universe. If your
wealth and power come from controlling the machine, the fact that all
machines inevitably stop must be deeply disturbing.
But the terms “chaos” and “disorder” only make sense as definitions of
entropy when you take the perspective of the outsider who wants to
extract work from the system. If you take the perspective of the
particles themselves, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the
tendency towards entropy is a good thing. Entropy increases purely from
free interactions with their fellow particles, and the state of maximum
entropy is one where, although they’re all whizzing about in different
directions, particles have about the same energy. For the particles,
entropy means not only equilibrium but also freedom.
The global system of control we find ourselves living under operates
much like an engine where wealth replaces the “caloric”. A wealth
differential is necessary to compel people to work repetitively, to live
repetitively, to even think and dream repetitively. As much as possible,
people must be separated so that they don’t rub off on each other. State
violence, like the walls of an engine, limits the downward
redistribution of wealth. Fossil fuels provide an external source of
energy, allowing the wealthy to become wealthier despite the effects of
entropy.
Many anti-capitalist ideologies are stupid because they say “this engine
bad” and propose another design. As individuals, as particles, we don’t
want a new framework to organize how we extract work. No, what we want
is to stop extracting work, even work in service of the revolution.
People should only work when they want to or their community needs them
to.
This is going to take, as Martin Luther King Jr. presciently observed, a
radical redistribution of wealth. This can only be accomplished by
abandoning all dogma and piping the wealth directly to the people. We
shouldn’t care if people waste money buying Gucci to flex. We shouldn’t
care if white racists support wealth redistribution but continue being
racist. We shouldn’t care that the if the poor people of the global
north initially have more money than the poor people of the global
south.
By giving people more wealth, more free time, more control over their
lives, we increase entropy. People will leave abusive relationships,
workplaces, towns, even countries. People will create new art, new
economies, new forms of knowledge, new societies and traditions, new
landscapes and worlds. This lonely, cruel, and repetitive world can be
replaced with one where all the humans on this planet are healthy,
happy, and free. Because entropy means freedom.
Encoded within the idea that “entropy means freedom” is an argument
against Marxism as dogmatic academic philosophy. It’s not necessarily a
refutation of dialectical materialism, which is close enough to the true
universal human philosophy of dialectical monism as to be meaningful to
those outside of the academy. It’s certainly not a condemnation of
popular movements that advocate for wealth redistribution, educating
“the masses”, and any action that truly results in more power to the
people. There’s a view here shared between the best market economists
and the least dogmatic socialists that increasing the total amount of
wealth is good, that decreasing wealth inequality is also good, that
these things might even go hand-in-hand. There’s a quiet observation
here that true wealth is about much more than physical property.
“Entropy means freedom” is a philosophy of political praxis in the face
of both ephemeral and persistent suffering. Human society has always
been large beyond comprehension. We have always been exposed to
ephemeral human suffering that we can’t do much to heal personally,
though the television and now the Internet shows us more than usual.
There have also always been forms of persistent human suffering, though
in our era of colonization and poverty and environmental catastrophe,
this takes predictable forms that may have well-defined solutions. We
can move towards solutions to both forms of suffering through entropy.
Most critically, we can fight for more free time. I’m talking about
shorter working hours, more vacation days, more remote work, increased
leeway to goof off in the workplace, all while fighting for even higher
wages. The only people who don’t want these things are bootlickers with
personal problems. The social and moral and philosophical problem is
that many more of us believe somewhere deep down that we don’t deserve
these things. We begin to suspect that most of us are selfish immoral
deviants, that without being subjected to arbitrary human authority our
lives would be nasty, brutish, and short. This sense of unworthiness is
what socialism as a social philosophy is designed to fight. If dogmatic
philosophical commitments are preventing you from fighting for more free
time and more resources for your neighbors, even if those commitments
can be traced back to Marx, they are anti-socialist.
The wealth tax + universal basic income thus poses both an advance in
socialist philosophy and a sharp challenge to socialist dogma. The idea
opens up the once vaguely-defined possibility of a disorderly transition
from socialism to communism, where the more educated people quickly
start to live in communist bliss while many others take a while to let
go of the idea of personal property. The idea is so amorphous and
ill-defined on the small scale that there’s little danger that new
dogmas will form around it. The policy has enough well-defined positive
impacts on the large scale that it is difficult to criticize either from
a dogmatic political perspective or from an apathetic apolitical
perspective. It can only be advocated by people who genuinely believe in
people power; it will only happen when enough of us realize that we
actually deserve it.
Entropy means freedom. This means that free time matters, whether that’s
free time for high-paid office workers to self-actualize or free time
for those imprisoned by a racialized criminal punishment system to
self-actualize. Shorter working hours and prison abolition go hand in
hand; anyone worker with more free time will eventually realize this.
Entropy means freedom. This means that good vibes matter, because good
vibes bounce off on other people and helps people form more intimate
connections with other human beings. The more genuine and diverse human
connections we can make, the weaker this system built around “divide and
conquer” becomes.
Entropy means freedom. This means that ending self-repression matters.
This means educational liberation, or the total destruction of the idea
that you are stupid or incompetent, through the continuous process of
teaching and learning things you find cool. This means sexual
liberation, or the total destruction of the idea that you are deviant
and immoral for seeking sexual pleasure either through masturbation or
with enthusiastically-consenting, age-appropriate, fully-informed
partners.
Entropy means freedom. This means that self-determination matters, that
there must be unity between means and ends. This means recognizing that
the only way great people have ever improved the world is by increasing
humanity’s capacity for self-determination.
All power to the people!
Sources:
I’m not going to reveal the source for the GDP chart. I suspect that
it’s wrong, because it applies an exponential model back too far. I
suspect that the slow rise in global GDP from 1000 to 1500 would be
erased if people did deep detective work into the pre-colonial economies
of West Africa, Western Europe, and Turtle Island. This would make the
sudden exponential of industrialism even more pronounced and my
perspective on it irrefutable.