Will Entropy Define the New World Paradigm?
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I recently wrote a lengthy analysis of lesser-known side to George Soros that I believe people who are serious about geopolitical topics should pay closer attention to if they wish to avoid falling prey to some very dangerous ideological traps being set in our path as we transition into a new world economic system.
You see, George Soros considers himself quite the philosopher and believes that through the tutelage of Karl Popper at the London School of Economics in the 1950s, he developed certain fundamental principles of economics. His economic theories are encapsulated in his General Theory of Reflexivity and is essentially a logical extension of Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics onto human self-organization.
To describe this briefly:
In quantum mechanics, the act of observing a photon or electron changes that which is observed (since the photon striking the “observed object” and reflecting back to the eye of the observer affects that which is being observed). This phenomenon finds a parallel in the world of economics, where the act of thinking (and acting upon thoughts) changes both the economic systems itself as well as the thoughts and identities of those people operating within the “objective” system in question. While the founders of the field of quantum like Max Planck or Einstein saw no need to reject the belief in truth, reason or reality, the Copenhagen school felt that the “uncertainty principle” and “wave-particle duality” proved that there was no causality, no basic reality and that everything is just random and uncertain in its essence.
This is essentially the kernel of Soros’ “theory of reflexivity”.
In 2008, Soros teamed up with a group of upper level management oligarchs in order to put these theories into action in a three-phase plan led by his Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).
In its first phase, INET aimed to prove that the neoliberal economic paradigm is wrong because it presumes the existence of rational actors and truthful ideas. Soros states both presumptions are not only wrong but are the very reasons why periodic economic crises occur.
Phase two promised to cultivate a global field of alternative theories that will offer solutions to the obsolete paradigm but which adhere to Soros’ key assumptions of 1) the non-existence of truthfulness, 2) the absolute enslavement of reason to irrational passions, and 3) the need for economists to strive for certainty and equilibrium.
While these assumptions may appear contradictory, as I explained in my previous paper, this contradiction only exists as long as you don’t think that Soros is not a liar.
The Young Scholars Initiative
Soros and his INET co-controllers like Lord Adair Turner and Rob Johnson believe that phase one is in the bag and that we are now in phase two which will be driven by INET programs like the Young Scholars Initiative.
This initiative features thousands of talented young economists under the influence of INET who are radicalized to take on the mission of reforming the world economic order under the mentorship of an enlightened old guard of hedge fund managers and technocrats. Youth who are processed through the INET program are fed with dreams of overthrowing the soul-less, collapsing neoliberal order with a new system based upon creativity, freedom and empathy. The attraction for intelligent young people is obvious.
The sad fact is that the definition of “creativity” which these kids are taught to cherish is not really creativity at all but rather just irrationalism with one set of standards for the masses and another set of inflexible standards for the social engineers and technocrats managing the world order from the top.
The Dismal Science
This dual standard is nothing new. Historically this has been the foundation of oligarchical systems of political economy for centuries and was exemplified by the “dismal science” of Malthus, Bentham and Mill of the 19th century. Just as today, 18-19th century British imperial political scientists pretended to support innovation, creativity and growth on the surface, while the intent of their models were always designed to keep their victims locked under the iron-fisted (invisible hand?) influence of a master class.
This elite always aimed to:
1) keep nations divided among themselves at all costs. The geopolitical expression of this aim were systems of zero-sum game thinking defined by the Hobbesian idea of “might makes right”.
2) keep the peasants under-developed and ignorant as possible. No questioning the invisible structures of the world system and certainly no creative discoveries that would change the rules of the game.
3) keep nations de-industrialized under cash-cropping procedures. No full spectrum economies allowed.
4) keep every slave’s mind focused only on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasures in the ephemeral “present” thinking never of the past or future in any meaningful way. The only creative acts permissible in this system must be governed by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain and nothing more. In this worldview, morality is a useful social construct to regulate the plebs which the “enlightened elite” need not be encumbered with.
5) Justify it all by a devout belief in “equilibrium” as the absolute “good” and disequilibrium is the absolute “evil”. All means taken to advance the ends of equilibrium are ok.
These were the real reasons underlying the British Empire’s systematic destruction of Indian textile industries, their promotion of Chinese opium addiction and the promotion of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a “scientific” justification for keeping nations de-industrialized, unregulated and agrarian.
This philosophy was at the heart of Britain’s support of the slave power during the Civil War in the same way that it drove Britain’s partition of India after WWII into warring Muslim vs Hindu vs Sikh conflicts as well as their partitioning of the Middle East under Sykes-Pikot.
This philosophy is behind the controlled disintegration of the western nation state system today and it is what the late Maurice Strong (1929-2015) was referring to when he rhetorically asked in a 1991 interview:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
If you have not guessed, Maurice Strong was a major force in recent history and leading architect of the the current Green New Deal agenda being promoted by the World Economic Forum, Soros’ INET and the City of London’s Mark Carney as a “Great Reset” of the world system.
Going a bit deeper
Since these misanthropic ideas are immensely influential, I think it is worth taking a few moments to shed light on their structure with a bit more effort than we might otherwise be accustomed.
Let’s do this by getting into the disturbed mind of a technocratically-minded billionaire obsessed with imposing structures of “equilibrium and stability” upon a world of chaos, irrationality and disorder. I think it would useful to start with a series of questions.
Question 1: What type of system do these technocrats believe they are controlling? Do they believe that the system is changing or not changing?
Answer: Soros says constantly that the system is changing. So let’s believe him for now.
Question 2: If it is changing, then is it changing for the better, or for the worse or randomly? Although your freedom may feel constrained by these three options, I promise you that these are the only choices you have.
Answer: Well if reason is assumed to be intrinsically enslaved to irrational passions (following the assumptions of Soros’ beloved Hume), then the discoveries required to keep humanity’s system of diminishing finite resources from running down and leading to collapses is impossible. The closed system will always thus consume more energy than it creates and just like the gasoline in a car engine, it will always tend towards a heat death.
Now, we have walked into another big idea that oligarchs are committed to: Entropy (aka: The 2nd Law of thermodynamics).
The Origins of an Entropic Idea
Wikipedia states that: “In a thermodynamic system, pressure, density, and temperature tend to become uniform over time because the equilibrium state has higher probability (more possible combinations of microstates) than any other state.”
Entropy exists as a statistical process in all CLOSED systems, and the term arose from the study of heat powered machines in the early 19th century led by Sadi Carnot. Carnot observed that a machine will always use more heat for work than it generates over time leading to a predictable winding down of its potential for action. A few years later, this idea was applied to gas theories.
To give a concrete example: Let us say you heat up a can of spray paint until it explodes.
In the first moments, there will be a LOW Entropy as the heated molecules bounce around hitting each other a lot. Lots of potential for change and singularities. With every passing moment after the can explodes, those molecules will tend to collide less and less as the heat distribution decreases, activity decreases and the molecules of the system “tend to become uniform over time” under increasingly higher and higher states of entropy. So far, everything is pretty straight forward and benign. The problems come in when entropy is universalized.
British Empiricist and general misanthrope Sir Arthur Eddington described entropy thus:
“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
Now why would a leading scientist assert that the very disagreement a new theory may have with another theory (entropy) is itself proof that said new theory is embarrassingly wrong? Isn’t this a bit unscientific?
Well, let us treat that question with a higher question: Who ever proved that entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics is something which can be put onto the entire universe??
When we start looking at transcendental concepts like LIFE, MIND, or MORALITY we tend to find that entropy breaks down in the most devastating manner.
The Biosphere as a State of Anti-Entropy
Let’s start with Life.
Rather than seeing any evidence that living matter began at low entropy in a closed system within the pre-Cambrian epoch 500 million years ago and moved into states of increasing heat death/high entropy (aka: diminishing potentials for change)… we see just the opposite to be the case.
Observations show us that Life has evolved from relatively boring single celled organisms to ever more differentiated and complex systems of self organization both creating and consuming ever higher states of energy to perform work. Not only that but leaps from lower states of life from non-life to life, and from unconscious life to conscious life and from conscious life to self-conscious thinking life.
The great Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky noted in his essay the Evolution of Species and Living Matter (1928) that the biosphere was itself an open system shaped by the intersection of cosmic radiation and internal radiations emanating from within the earth and was driven by a directed flow of creative disequilibrium towards higher states of anti-entropy. Vernadsky stated:
“the creation resulting from the evolution of new living forms, adapts itself to new forms of existence, augments the ubiquity of life, and enlarges its domain. Life penetrates thus, the regions of the biosphere where it had not earlier had access.”
Zeroing in on the mechanism driving this growth which he described in detail as the increased biogenic migration of atoms through the biosphere, Vernadsky stated:
“we see how, in the course of geological epochs, new forms of life appear. Their occurrence leads… to an acceleration of atomic current through living matter, and also provokes, within atoms, new manifestations, unknown of until now, along with the appearance of new modes of displacement”.
At a certain point in evolutionary history, a new phenomenon appeared with the rise of human reason which forever altered these biospheric mechanisms. Vernadsky described it as “the noosphere” saying:
“The noosphere is the last of many stages in the evolution of the biosphere in geological history. The course of this evolution only begins to become clear to us through a study of some of the aspects of the biosphere’s geological past.”
The Noosphere
Following a similar pattern observed in the evolution of biospheric systems, human/noetic systems defined by self-consciousness, creative reason, and free will also express a directed anti-entropic change, but in a more concentrated way. Comparing early tribal/cave dwelling societies with more advanced agricultural societies and comparing those societies with 16th century societies using water and wind power, to 18th century societies using steam power to 19th-20th century electricity-based societies to 20th-21st century atomic power-based societies, we find that humanity doesn’t become less complex but rather more complex and differentiated, as the noosphere grows. Unlike other animals, humanity’s carrying capacity is relative to the discoveries it makes (or fails to make) over time.
In his 1872 book Unity of Law, the great American System economist Henry C. Carey who understood the clash between open vs closed paradigms better than most economists today, eloquently described how humanity’s understanding extends itself ever more perfectly to the invisible forces of the universe with certain moralizing and uplifting effects which benefit all members of that society. Carey noted that by discovering the laws of nature ever more perfectly, nature itself became increasingly the servant to our minds as we develop sails, or telephones, and electric heating/cooling etc.
Extending this concept from villages to nations, Carey forecast the rise of a new paradigm:
“The great nations of the earth should each and all profit by development of the powers, mental, and physical, of each and every other; each and all growing in power for self-direction as each and every other more and more obtains power for controlling and directing the great natural forces; the harmony of all international interests being as perfect and complete as we know to be that of the individuals of which nations are composed.”
The devout Malthusian praying in the church of entropy will say that while the systems defined by life and mind may appear to exhibit anti-entropic properties, they are merely anomalies floating within an overarching dying universe. In this cynical view, every new baby is just a form of cancer needing to be kept under control by a Malthusian master class in order to slow entropy abysmal path to nothingness (aka: Heat death).
In response to such minds, Carey said:
“Of all contrivances for crushing out all Christian feeling and for developing self-worship, that the world yet has seen, there has been none entitled to claim so high a rank as that which has been, and yet daily is, assigned to the Malthusian Law of Population.”
For the current purposes of this article, I will leave out a deeper discussion into the anti-entropic nature of the universe beyond life and mind, since that requires more space that a short essay will allow, but suffice it to say, we have barely scratched the surface of our tiny corner of a solar system amidst an ocean of billions of suns within a milky way which itself orbits an array of other galaxies which we only began to discover a few generations ago. Anyone to speak absolutely about the nature of this universe might be skipping steps.
Max Planck Steps in
At the end of his 1935 Philosophy of Physics which extolled high praise on the directed evolution, harmony and creative growth of the universe, the great Max Planck tackled the problem of entropy in an interesting manner:
“The second law of thermodynamics, the principle of the increase of entropy, has frequently been applied outside physics. For example, attempts have been made to apply the principle that all physical events develop in one sense only to biological evolution- a singularly unhappy attempt so long as the term evolution is associated with the idea of progress, perfection, or improvement. The principle of entropy is such that it can only deal with probabilities and all that it really says is that a state, improbable in itself, is followed on an average by a more probable state. Biologically interpreted, this principle points towards degeneration rather than improvement: the chaotic, the ordinary and the common is always more probable than the harmonious, the excellent, or the rare.”
The fact is that the school of systems analysis that became the language for a revival for Malthus’s core closed system thinking in the post-WWII world increasingly embraced a certain school of statistical quantum mechanics which both Einstein and Max Planck did battle with at the ends of their lives due to the school’s total rejection of causality.
These new social engineers applied their theories to human self organization which stated that the 99% of humanity were like fish multiplying in a closed glass fish tank. Like the randomized stochastic activity of molecules hitting each other in the exploding spray can or gas tank, the fish may act however they feel and desire, as long as their action stays confined to the parameters of the glass tank.
The fixed rules of scarcity defined by the limits of the earth, resources, agricultural potential, energy access (and soon carbon quotas) are likened to the walls of the glass tank to be controlled by an elite class of alphas. So when Soros or any sociopathic billionaire loudly extolls the virtues of creativity, freedom and individuality while attacking the foundations of neoliberalism, keep in mind that they think of you as a fish in a glass tank and nothing more.
The cure for this misanthropic philosophy contaminating so much of the economic field today is found in the study of original works by Henry C. Carey, Max Planck and the great Vladimir Vernadsky who all insightfully recognized that mankind was destined for something much greater than imperialists can imagine.
In his essay “Some Words About the Noosphere” (1943), Vernadsky watched the ravages of WWII but saw a brighter destiny beyond the chaos:
“Now we live in the period of a new geological evolutionary change in the biosphere. We are entering the noosphere. This new elemental geological process is taking place at a stormy time, in the epoch of a destructive world war. But the important fact is that our democratic ideals are in tune with the elemental geological processes, with the law of nature and with the noosphere. Therefore we may face the future with confidence. It is in our hands. We will not let it go.”
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, is regular author with Strategic Culture, the Duran and Fort Russ and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Consider helping this process by making a donation to the RTF or becoming a Patreon supporter to the Canadian Patriot Review.
"...this contradiction only exists as long as you don’t think that Soros is not a liar."
I suspect that this double negative contradicts the author's intended meaning.