Disorder

Disorder in all things is difficult & expensive to maintain.

Imagine, if you will, an old house. Falling apart. Front door missing or barely hanging on.

Now imagine a beautiful new house. A smartly maintained lawn. Manicured hedges.

Which house would you associate with order and which with disorder? It may surprise you that the old, failing house is the more orderly one.

This might be confusing, so I’ll explain it with a plot twist: the two houses you just imagined are actually the same house, just 65 years apart in time. The atoms in the new house aren’t naturally arranged the way they are. They’ve been formed that way by hard work. The work performed on the atoms put them into a state of disorder. And it’ll take hard work still to keep the atoms of the house disordered so that the house remains livable.

If people stop doing work on the house, it will return to it’s more natural, orderly state. Eventually, entropy will win and the house will transition to a state that we recognize as disorder but to the materials in the house, actually isn’t.

Civilization, like the house, is not easily maintained. It takes a tremendous amount of work and expense to keep things civilized. Law enforcement, court systems, rules, regulations, government. They are all expensive bulwarks against a more “natural” world where the strongest person with the biggest stick makes all the rules.

But having these bulwarks is no guarantee. Post-Soviet Russia had these things. Current Russia has them still. But they’ve been coopted by the strongest people with the biggest sticks who now sit in the Kremlin and make all the rules.

Elections are difficult. No one particularly enjoys them, especially candidates. But we cannot ignore our duty to preserve our society and to try to improve it before passing it on to the next generation. And that takes hard work.