Most people have agency. They live in their bubbles, their local municipalities, their facebook shitposting groups, their families. With the emotions and information they absorb in each, from their diapers to their diplomas and onward, they choose paths—they make decisions. With the number of people rounding 7 billion and the number of possible bubbles rounding even more, it’s roundly impossible to intellectualize all of it. In fact, it is impossible to intellectualize most of the major parts and sub-parts of it. Even if we squint to try and better understand the behaviors of just our own bubbles, the equations don’t exactly pop out.
To humans for whom curiosity and a sense of control are central, this all poses a very big problem. There are now, as it’s been for a while, too many branches of paths and possibilities to have anything that can meaningfully be called “control”. There’s too much entropy in society, too much oil on the grip of intellectual comfort.
You don’t know if there’ll soon be a terror attack on your nation-bubble’s soil, but it’s within some realm of possibility that merits concern. You don’t know if a self-driving car might wonk out and kill someone, you don’t have the resources to analyze the statistics or the software yourself, but you know that faulty systems with the capacity to kill warrant concern. You don’t know if you’ll become ill, if your insurance company will be ethical, if you’ll have a doctor available, if your doctor will be capable… but all of this is cause for concern. The behavior of the millions of people in the organizations whose decisions decide your capacity to commute, known as “the fossil fuel industry”, are both so sporadic and so impactful that you’ve probably felt their weight.
There’s too much information, and if you don’t have a team of data scientists and access to the databanks of the NSA, JPMorgan, and Merck Pharmaceuticals like Palantir, there really is no control, and within few constraints, anything can happen. And people have a tendency to reduce “anything can happen” to “the worst can happen” and act accordingly.
How can this mass upset at entropy be resolved? How can they increase the constraints, at least in their own bubbles? With authority. Authority, whether physical, social, coercive, or economic, imposes agency onto entropy. Agency is sympathetic, agency is familiar. Even if it’s someone else’s, so long as it’s not obviously opposed to yours, agency is the familiar friend who tames the wild beast of entropy with the sword and shield of authority.
But as you might see, entropy is largely liberty. It’s people’s ability to take their unique circumstances, their knowledge and their instincts, and go with it where they please. It’s their ability to communicate it to others through whisper or megaphone. Their ability to go on and bond with those others, as friends, colleagues, partners in adventure, or Grindr-bros. Their capacity to mobilize their assets, their land, their cars, their books and notebooks, their microscopes and fishing lures, as their circumstances call for it. And to trade those assets and relationships as they see fit.
These degrees of freedom lead any number of people to generate an enormous number of bubbles and spawn an even greater number of paths for the world to take. Some of those paths are hazard, most uncertain, and few utopian. And because entropy, the collective manifest of liberty, is without agency, its propaganda falls flat of any notions of “collective workers paradise” or “great aryan nationhood”.
Thankfully, there are many who find themselves just as—if not more—wary of authority, of the imposition of others’ agency, as they are of entropy. And even moreso, there are many, like myself, who see appreciate the necessity of entropy as clearly as the familiarity of agency.
Some, sadly, simply wear the cloak of liberty but retain a hatred of entropy, and develop some pathologies and ideologies. They identify themselves as lovers of liberty and warriors against authority, and end up attacking entropy: they convolute, and to themselves and the world claim liberty is actually a carefully orchestrated plan by a malicious shadow authority, and call for an authority which is more familiar than the supposed shadow authority to take its place. In reality, they’re fighting entropy and calling for authority with the caveat of decoration.
Liberty, to me and many others, is the way to maintain liberty. No amount of conceptual hoop-jumping and redefinition can obfuscate that. That entropy is a necessary consequence of liberty is an important understand that, although uncertain, if accepted, solidifies the notion that for us liberty is more important than fear of probability.
* Ronald Cohen is an organizational sociology student and researcher.
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