Today's word is...Entropy.
There's a lot of stuff we're accustomed to. Like zippers that work, your server asking you if Pepsi is okay when you order Coke, two or more bars on our phones, and a wide assortment of sugary products to choose from at the checkout line of the nearby national pharmacy chain when you pick up your insulin. We depend on unofficial conventions like "lefty-loosey/righty-tighty" being enforced by some invisible hand.
We're also accustomed to a democracy that functions more or less. And not being in the kind of war where at least one family on your block has someone in the combat zone and every family on the block is struggling with ration coupons. We confidently assume the water that flows from our taps is not harmful. Our electrical service is reliable if we pay our bills on time. We are certain that nobody will demand our "papers" if we run a quick errand downtown. And we enjoy a world where our openly professed support of candidates for elective office isn't going to lead to reprisals from employers, let alone governmental authorities.
The first list is pretty robust, but the second list - as it turns out - is fragile.
One might have thought the passage of time makes the second list even more robust than ever, but that's wrong.
It works quite the other way 'round.
The passage of time sends an invitation to complacency and it instigates a lack of vigilance. Little-by-little the expectations we have in vital institutions are eroding before our eyes. Chaos lurks, eager to fill the vacuum.
Even when entropy occurs in the open, right before our eyes, we deceive ourselves and insist these things are aberrations which will revert to a natural state of stability that we've always known.
Fascism ended in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery
with a cyanide pill and a gunshot nearly 80 years ago, right?
As Mussolini observed, in 1932, “History does not travel backwards.” He contended that fascism is a new way forward, in which the answer to the ongoing societal rot of the Enlightenment, liberalism and democracy that had run unchecked since 1789 was not to recreate the systems that preceded (and therefore gave rise to) the very things he sought to eradicate. He wrote, “A party governing a nation ‘totalitarianly’ is a new departure in history.” The powerful masterminds who scheme to keep down those they deem outcasts always think they’ve found some new way. In truth, what we he was describing then - and what we are witnessing now - is a rebranded, recycled and ingeniously adaptive reordering of power to generate misery and anguish of many to feed the egos and bloodlust of those who self-select themselves to be the desirables or self-chosen people.
Whether it’s new or old is not so much the point as it’s all too familiar with progress and justice devolving back to a natural state of chaos that generates levels of suffering that historians will predictably record as unimaginable, shocking and inexplicable.
But should we be surprised?
Sure, I had been lulled into the belief that human rights - just as one example - was always improving over time, little by little, locking in gains with only minor setbacks before locking in more gains. I’ve also been awakened to the fact that it’s always going to decay and erode unless more and more effort is spent on the Sisyphean task of pressing ahead. It’s a slow moving train. They’ve been dropping some really obvious clues along the way. Whether it’s Proud Boys, the basket of deplorables who spread their mayhem in Charlottesville, the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, or the Claremont Institute and its Society for American Civic Renewal (or SACR), they - like Mussolini in 1932 - are audaciously transparent about their intentions.
The bottom line is that there's a lot of crap going on right now in America (and beyond) that I, for one, was convinced had long been banished to the pages of history books.
A lot of this orbits around political topics (such as Congress coming for TikTok like it’s the second coming of Eugene Debs), but far from all of it's political. I mean...measles outbreaks? Child labor coming back into vogue was not on my Bingo card either. Nor did I suspect that watching TV with ads would make a comeback. It's like backtracking from smartphones to rotary phones. It's that shocking yet it's happening nevertheless.
Knowing that people quickly become complacent and that historical cycles can sometimes exceed the reach of a single lifetime, the people in the villages along the Japanese coast have placed “tsunami stones” that literally carve out a reminder of the perils of building too low to the ground. The stones offer a reminder that reaches far into the future assuring locals that a tsunami is inevitable and unimaginable in its brutality.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a rock-solid reminder to not become complacent about protecting the dignity of our neighbors, near and far, like and unlike ourselves? …Because the new wave of fascism is rolling in toward all of us and it’s not yet clear how we will meet it.
All these things in the second list - the really important stuff - are under attack right now, if not by bad actors then by entropy. Either way, the condition of rights, far from being complete as it is, have fallen into decline and things will continue to get turned inside out if more regular people don't recognize the urgency and enlist in the struggle to prevent otherwise inevitable decay from happening.
For more words from Entropy, write to Entropy Television, Entropy Village, Missouri 64063
I'm Jim Orstan Gennihan and the word is...Entropy.