Thursday, May 18, 2006

Syntropy / Entropy

Just finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America.

Boy, we sure do use eachother. We take advantage of eachother. We hide and pretend not to see the truth.

Why?

Let's start with life. What is it to be alive? To be alive is to have the ability to capitalize a resource. Put more technically, a lifeform is a system capable of enacting syntropy between itself and its parent system.

The human condition is complicated. There are both entropic and syntropic forces at work simultaneously (though this is true about the physical universe as wee, so it's not very odd). You can interperet the current trend of increasing enequallity as an entropic force -- our social fabric unraveling into the spreading black plague of low-wage labor. But it must also be realized that the syntropic force of greed is at work creating that hierarchy through economic organisms that gather resources for their growth.

So it is then our responsibility to work syntropically in the social sector to strengthen social organizationa (or organizations that work toward social equality), and to work to unravel systems of concentrated wealth which will allow for wealth entropy.

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