Zooming in and zooming out, moving from the micro to the meso and the macro. From the most basic of daily interactions, through to the relationships and institutions in which we work and participate, all the way up to the highest levels of international politics and global power, remarkably consistent patterns and dynamics are found. Similar shapes, similar uneven edges and jagged lines. Social entropy is fractal.
This entropy is seen at far, mediated through institutions, or experienced up close, but at each level the patterns roughly match and echo each other. Simply put, disintegrative forces outweigh integrative ones, and trendlines point towards this continuing and perhaps accelerating. Stock markets might continue to head ‘up and to the right’, but as long as other charts - such as economic inequality, acute food insecurity, forced migration, social media use, carbon emissions, global temperatures, and so on - are all also ‘up and to the right’, we can expect more social entropy.
At a certain point, ‘things fall apart’, yet there is no need for a decisive moment, institutional failure is as much a process, it is felt as it unfolds. This is something Alex Hochuli has presented as the ‘Brazilianization of the world’, and Wolfgang Streeck has described as a condition in which, ‘a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society – a post-social society, or a society lite’. Zoom in and zoom out, from the micro to the meso to the macro, one can find and feel what it means. The temptation is to populate this note with examples, but it is not needed, the reader can do that: open the news, turn to the smartphone, look outside, go to work. The fractal nature of social entropy means we each see, experience, feel what is unfolding and unravelling.
For all the talk now of ‘winning’ and ‘defeating’ others, there is a tendency to miss how much of current conditions are shaped by weakness and failure. Gaps, shortfalls, incapacities, insufficiencies. Here it is important to distinguish between different types of issues. There are some genuine ‘wicked problems’, but many of the challenges we collectively face are ones that are solvable, indeed some that have been previously solved and have become unsolved. Insofar as we might find ourselves in some kind of polycrisis, it is composed of crises mainly generated through fear, greed, identity, and grinding, blinding stupidity, to which can be added a few genuinely intractable dilemmas.
Here is the final step to take: linking entropy with stupidity. This relationship is not incidental: symptom and cause, looping on each other, an Ouroboros that devours tail and body. What is not expressed clearly enough now but simply should be: the present moment is one of brutal stupidity and the brutally stupid. This is not simply stupidity as a passive condition, but something active with agency, forceful and violent. Certainly there are other under-appreciated forces at play, in a previous conversation we highlighted ressentiment; stupidity also deserves its due.
Turning and returning to Robert Musil as muse, from his 1937 lecture, ‘On Stupidity’:
…the objection might also be raised that on occasion no one behaves as cleverly as is called for: that each of us therefore is, if not always, at least from time to time, stupid. So a distinction must also be made between failing and incapacity, between occasional, or functional, and permanent, or constitutional, stupidity, between error and unreason. This is most important because of the way the conditions of life are today: so unintelligible, so difficult, so confused, that the occasional stupidities of the individual can easily lead to a constitutional stupidity of the body politic.
Constitutional stupidity reflexively advances in step with social entropy. The different problems stuffed into the grab bag concept of polycrisis reflect an inverse relationship between the increasing magnitude of our collective challenges and our decreasing capacity to work together in pro-social and peaceful ways. It is not simply wicked problems that must be addressed, but also the threats posed by wicked stupidity.