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Social Entropy:
Tribalization and Decline of Elites
William Sundwick
Collective
Consciousness
Shared cultural experience, often reaching back centuries,
is what determines many social behaviors, from voting behavior to social attitudes
like racism or sexism. It is passed from generation to generation -- the basis
of class identity and national identity. These cultural identities determine
what we read, how we are educated, and how we interpret what we read and learn.
Indeed, often, we only accept input from certain qualified sources … the frequently
cited “echo chamber” of social media news feeds. It all comprises our
collective consciousness as a society. Some of the filters our experience passes
through become very sophisticated over time, and may be difficult to perceive. We
accept them as the rules we live by. They become “social norms.”
Ordinarily, social norms are enforced by law, custom, and
group status markers. Together, the enforcement mechanisms constitute what we
know as “authority.” But, what happens when the enforcement begins to break
down? Do we lose collective
consciousness, forgetting the norms of the past? Do we depend on individuals to
successfully break the rules, before we, ourselves, can be free from social
bondage to that collective consciousness?
Systems
theory, though originally invented to describe natural phenomena, is today common
in political science and sociology, especially via cybernetics: the study of
feedback mechanisms and system change. Application of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics (entropy) to social systems, however, has not necessarily
been accepted into the standard lexicon of either political science or
sociology. Yet, there is a link, as manifested by the transformation of complex
social organizations into tribal entities.
Tribalization
Relationships between members of a social group may be based
mostly on the larger collective consciousness, social norms; or, they may be
based on things like kinship, language, religion, and neighborhood. The
multiplicity of filters for shared experience encourages increased tribalization of society. There appears
to be a breakdown of traditional social structure underway, with big groups,
like nation states, losing influence compared to smaller autonomous groups.
These small groups emerge as virtual tribes. This is a global phenomenon, not limited
to the United States. It has been aided by the rapid expansion of
telecommunications capacity. The more complex social groups, with many
interlocking subgroups, which share the same basic cultural identity, are
becoming relics of the past. The new tribal groups, being autonomous, never need
to speak to one another. Social norms of the larger group are not enforced
effectively on their native turf. The ability to “see the forest through the
trees” is increasingly restricted to a certain social class … the one that has
been acculturated to systems thinking. While perhaps this has always been true
to some extent, something is changing now. This group is losing its social
status! The authority of knowledge is diminishing, perhaps because of mass
availability of information, and a long-established social norm no longer as
powerful as it once was. It also may be because more people feel betrayed by
the “professional class” that has arrogated to itself an ever-increasing
portion of the social pie.
One of the main concerns of pundits is with the existence of
social media “echo chambers,” where users tend to be exposed only to opinions, or
even facts, which support their own bias. Certainly, it is possible for some
exceptional individuals to break out of the prisons of their collective past
bias, if they possess the proper spirit of adventure. Eventually, such gifted
persons will decide that they may have
been wrong! The impact of this in
the social sciences is that there is no control mechanism … the Internet is not
the “property”, or under the authority, of any recognizable social entity. It
is supranational, and its content isn’t even managed by any international
organization. (See Warp & Woof
post: “Mysteries
of the Internet: IP Addresses – Where Do They Come From, and Why Should You
Care?”)
The Power Elite and
Social Entropy
Politics and sociology intersect when it comes to looking at
power relations
in society. An important component of these relationships is authority. Modern social units -- the municipality, the
state, the nation -- bestow legal authority via politics, but politics also
influences other types of authority. The authority of knowledge, especially,
comes from social constructs (advanced degrees, or a resume in government)
which, in the past, have determined
political outcomes. Not so much anymore. If any of these alternate sources of
authority are challenged, and lose, a pillar of social cohesion may be lost. This
is certainly true of the authority of knowledge, as seen in the last U.S.
presidential campaign, and the British Brexit vote. All traditional
“intellectual” elites in both countries opposed the two outcomes.
C. Wright Mills, in “The Power Elite,”
identified three social groups which, in all advanced industrial societies,
control the bulk of social and political norms practiced by the society’s
members. They were the institutions of the military, business, and government.
He didn’t include academia as a normative power elite. It seems, fifty years
later, that omission has become an endorsement for his definition of the power
elite, after all.
Power relationships in society do change. There are
challenges to the legitimacy of social institutions, and of political outcomes.
Elites are challenged. They’re often replaced by other elites, contrary to the
argument that there is a pluralism at work in advanced societies. Democracy is
fantasy, as elite theory
postulates. Still, shuffling off one elite group for another can create social
change, because of varying constituencies.
During most of the 20th century, there was an
alternative social organization to the familiar corporate,
capitalist-dominated, form familiar to us in the West (Mills’ model for the
“Power Elite”). This alternate form was the socialist model practiced in the
Eastern Bloc. The Yugoslav apparatchik Milovan Djilas described a “New Class” in these
societies, in the Soviet Union it was known as the Nomenklatura. Prophetic
socialist writers from the Bolshevik era (Trotsky) as well as anti-Communist
writers in the West (Friedrich Hayek, among others), saw this New Class as the
ultimate downfall of the utopian socialist state. Conventional historic
interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union, and transformations of the
People’s Republic of China and Vietnam, tends to support that view.
Underlying the theory of social entropy is the
notion that internal decay of all social structures is inevitable, following
loosely the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The argument goes that the more
energy that is invested in maintaining social norms the more friction, and less
useful “work” (social change?), is output from the system.
Emile Durkheim, at the end of the 19th century,
did a groundbreaking study of suicide, from a sociological perspective. He
coined the term “anomie” to
describe the case of social norms abandoning the individual, no longer serving their
personal needs. By extension, one can see this concept describing radical
social alienation in the form of protest, or even revolutionary organizations.
Indeed, whenever society no longer serves the needs of its members, we can say
there is a state of anomie in the
group which perceives that it is not served. If this anomie is spread out among
various subgroups in a complex society, one could observe general system
entropy, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
EROEI Theories
My argument is that politics and sociology, as we study
them, are based on constructs we have made about what has gone before us, often what our ancestors had created. It’s not so
much that they don’t matter in the present, or won’t influence what happens in
the future, but that they come from the past. True, knowledge is being accrued
constantly, new research does shed light on social phenomena, perhaps even leads
to a new social theory. Investment in social energy through research, just as
much as maintenance of social norms, might suggest looking at return on that
social investment. Does it match the
cost, in terms of social friction, or threats to existing elites? If not,
society will ultimately lose energy (value).
Energy
Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) theories have been proposed in environmental
science to describe similar activity regarding fossil fuels and social
structure. Like fossil fuels, it can be argued that social energy is a
non-renewable resource. It is limited by the size of the population, and by the
available social power of different groups, both elites and non-elites. It is
limited by levels of authority given to different groups. The social return on
that investment would be measured in increased power for any or all groups.
Tribalism might be a response to low return on big social investments. Little
is invested, by comparison, in the tribal group, so less needs to be returned.
Warp & Woof
When I launched this blog, last Groundhog Day, I introduced
it with a sort of charter. It would be built, I wrote, on five pillars of
content, which I called: The Past, The Present, The Future, Totems, and Beats.
Then, I went on to describe what sort of material would be in the content for
each of the five pages. The page called “The Past, What Used to Matter,” would consist of “philosophical meanderings
about politics, sociology and history.”
While history is obvious, my thinking about politics and sociology, at
the time, was that both disciplines were expressions of our collective
consciousness. They were based on shared experiences, and on our reading; but,
specifically, on interpretations of
them coming via social filters. Those filters are all rooted in a collective
social past.
Both economics and anthropology live on Warp & Woof’s “The Future” page … “What May Matter, Who Knows?” That’s
because those disciplines have an end which is future-oriented, increasing
resources, or surviving in situations of reduced resources. Political science
and sociology, conversely, only seek to increase understanding of forces which have led us to our present condition.
They have much more in common with the study of history. But, unlike history,
which is mainly storytelling, these two disciplines throw in some data
analysis, and rely on hypothesis testing, in the scientific tradition … but
grounded in data from past behaviors
(e.g., voting patterns, survey research).
Finally, I will support my thinking about the social
sciences with my reading list from the last few years. Newer authors have been more
responsible for my current taxonomy of these disciplines than the older group
cited above. These are primarily writers in economics and anthropology. Thomas
Piketty did a fantastic job of bringing a traditional Marxian model into the 21st
century. Joseph Stiglitz has further emphasized what the future “good society”
should look like. Robert Frank, a behavioral economist, contributed an
important concept for social models: relative
status. And, significantly, from anthropology, Jared Diamond, in “Guns,
Germs, and Steel,” gave me a long view of human civilization which my college
background in modern U.S. and European history never did.
My attachment to older, more traditional, social models,
like those of structuralism,
or the Marxian creed of controlling the means of production, are clearly romanticized
notions from the past. That said, I can’t be totally removed from social
turmoil, since I do believe in a dialectic tension in history … thesis à antithesis à synthesis. And,
looking at history is as much a part of my page for “The Past” as are the
social sciences. I firmly believe that history will continue to be written,
even as complex societies decompose into tribal entities, with few enforceable
social norms across groups.
Reading List
Jared Diamond, “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, W. W. Norton, 1997
Robert Frank, “The Darwin Economy”, Princeton University
Press, 2011
Thomas Frank, “Listen, Liberal”, Metropolitan Books, 2016
Steve Fraser, “Limousine Liberal”, Basic Books, 2016
Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Belknap
Press, 2014
