In human thermodynamics, societal entropy production refers to negative elements of out-of-control, irresolvable social, economic, and political by-products, which are posited to lead to ultimate decay of successful societies.
Overview
In 2009, American physical chemist Thomas Wallace, in his 2009 book Wealth, Energy, and Human Values, was using the term freely as follows:
“Societal complications, characteristic of a failing social order, include unmanageable sociopolitical policies and practices, disintegration of cultural values, unresponsive bureaucracies, abuses of technology, breakdown of central authority and infrastructure, financial insolvency, dispirited populations, lawlessness, and inadequate responses to emerging issues. These properties and characteristics of cultural deterioration, examples of societal entropy production, have been observed in the declining years of great civilizations from ancient Greece to America.”
The issue here, to note, with this term and description as aspects of cultural deterioration, is that there is no fundamental derivation to justify these claims, other than German physicist Max Planck’s principle of elementary disorder.
References
1. Wallace, Thomas P. (2009). Wealth, Energy, and Human Values: the Dynamics of Decaying Civilizations from Ancient Greece to America (societal entropy production, 45+ pgs). AuthorHouse.
