In politics, democracy, from Greek demos "the people" + kratis "rule", is a form of government carried out directly by the people; by means of elected representatives of the people, called representative democracy. Some have attempted to define democracy in terms of chemistry and or thermodynamics.
Overview
In 1948, American author Thomas Dreier gave the following crude description of “heat” generated in the context of human chemical reactions: [1]
“What is democracy but a successful formula for controlling the chemical reactions of our 145,000,000 people, and turning the friction and heat generated by our living together into production and progress?”
In 1994, Canadian cyberspace philosopher Pierre Levy defining groups on the context of chemistry: [2]
“Families, clans, and tribes are organic groups [carbon-based entities]. Nations, institutions, religions, larger corporations, as well as the revolutionary ‘masses’ are organized groups, molar groups, which undergo a process of transcendence or exteriority in forming and maintaining themselves. Finally, self-organized, or molecular, groups realize the ideal of direct democracy within very larger communities in the process of mutation and deterritorialization.”
Beyond this, Levy also has ideas on how entropy relates to this model. On the topic of entropy and democracy, in the 2006 book The Case for Democracy, writers Natan Sharansky and Ron Dermer argue that in fear-governed type societies (as contrasted with free societies), external influences of the dictators or totalitarian regime, act to keep the thoughts, ideas, and reactions of the people in order, i.e. aligned within the regime, like the movement of gas molecules in a closed system. They argue, on metaphor, that these external governing fear influences act to counter the actions of the second law, or of entropy, within the system of people, on the reasoning that systems left to themselves (without external influence present) will tend to states of high entropy or high disorder. [3]
References
1. Dreier, Thomas. (1948). We Human Chemicals: the Knack of Getting Along with Everybody (pg. 86). Updegraff Press.
2. (a) Levy, Pierre. (1994). L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace. Paris: La Découverte.
(b) Levy, Pierre. (1997). Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (human thermodynamics, pg. 52, thermodynamics, pgs. 41, 44, 51-53, 197-98, 229, 232-33). New York: Basic Books.
3. Sharansky, Natan and Dermer, Ron. (2006). The Case for Democracy: the Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (ch. 2, note 3, pgs. 383-84). New Leaf Publishing.
External links
● Democracy – Wikipedia.
