“Let us now bring in time and ask the crucial question: can any long time tendency be posited, using entropy as the basic variable? Does the world move towards higher or lower entropy in general? We shall try to show that any such uni-directional theory is bound to fail because of the strong forces operating both at the high entropy and the low entropy levels, tending to push the systems back when they have moved too far out on either extreme. In other words, we shall argue that there are considerable merits to a pendulum theory, where social systems are seen as oscillating between states of low and high entropy.”
The contents of Galtung's 1967 Theories of Peace. [4] |