Not Rolling Over for the Heat Death Just Yet

I've run into one of the strangest asymmetries in my mentor’s afterlife: the man gave us one of the cleanest, most portable diagnostic tools for understanding civilizational decay—"institutional entropy"—and yet the people who invoke his name most loudly tend to be the very types he distrusted, the goldbugs and the p’tit-boos who want a moral fable about “sound money” rather than a structural analysis of how societies ossify. These two, like revolting peasants, are the poster children for institutions that devolve from serviceable to disserviceable, except to themselves. These take on lives of their own, and become self-serving and self-protecting at the expanse of the larger society.

Why didn't "institutional entropy" become mainstream? It’s too structural for a culture addicted to agency. My mentor's mechanism is elegant because it’s impersonal. It says:

- A social group invents an organizational tool to solve a real problem.  

- The tool succeeds.  

- Success attracts resources.  

- The group begins defending its position.  

- The tool becomes an end in itself.  

- The original problem goes unsolved again.

This is a tragedy of function, not of villains or devils in history. But modern political discourse—left, right, center—wants culprits, not mechanisms.  Institutional entropy is a diagnosis without a devil or villain, and that makes it hard to weaponize rhejtorically. Goldbugs, by contrast, can weaponize “gold good, fiat bad” in a heartbeat.

It can indict everyone, not just the other tribe. This mechanism is universal. It applies to:

- universities  

- militaries  

- activist movements  

- corporations  

- churches  

- bureaucracies  

- political parties  

- even families and friendships  

No one gets to stand outside the critique. That makes it unusable as a partisan cudgel. And ideas that can’t be used as cudgels rarely go viral. Another wrinkle is that, if the civilization's economic tier in the Maslovian pyramid is underperforming because of vested interests, the discontented will divide between reformers and those who, in spite of not being members of the elect, also have a vested interest in the old institution due to nostalgia for the good old days. Something else is causing the problem. Progressive reform is not the way to Make America Great Again. Reform is a dangerous experiment. Reformers are probably the real troublemakers in the first place because they don't want to play by the old "tried and true" rules.

The entropic process requires historical time, not news-cycle time. Institutional entropy is a slow mechanism. It unfolds over decades.  

It demands:

- longitudinal thinking  

- institutional memory  

- comparative history  

- the ability to see patterns across centuries  

Our culture rewards the opposite: hot takes, novelty, and the dopamine of outrage. Goldbug narratives, by contrast, offer instant moral clarity and a single, simple villain (central banks).

It’s a threat to entrenched elites. The mechanism is a scalpel that cuts straight through the self-justifying stories of every ruling class. If widely understood, it would make it harder for:

- universities to pretend they’re still instruments of learning  

- militaries to pretend they’re still instruments of defense  

- corporations to pretend they’re still instruments of production  

- political parties to pretend they’re still instruments of representation  

It delegitimizes the institutionalization process itself. No elite wants that. Goldbug narratives, ironically, pose no threat to actual power structures—they’re too narrow, too moralistic, too easily dismissed.

It’s not emotionally flattering. The entropy diagnosis tells you: “You, too, will become rigid. Your successes will become your prisons. Your tools will become your fetishes.”

That’s a hard sell. Goldbug narratives tell you: “You are the lone rational person in a world of fools.” Guess which one spreads.

It’s a systems theory in a culture that hates systems. The entropy diagnosis ts basically a proto-systems-dynamics model. It’s about feedback loops, incentives, and path dependence.

But systems thinking is cognitively expensive.  

It doesn’t give you a dopamine hit.  

It doesn’t flatter your identity.  

It doesn’t give you a villain.

Goldbug narratives are simple, moral, and identity-reinforcing. The entropy diagnosis is complex, tragic, and humbling.

The deeper irony I'm sensing is that this most powerful idea—the one that could actually help people understand why their institutions feel dead, brittle, or performative—gets overshadowed by the least interesting parts of his work, the parts that attract the very petty-bourgeois acquisitive types he distrusted. It’s a perfect example of his own disgnosis:

His own serviceable tool (a structural theory of institutional entropy) became a disserviceable institution (a shibboleth for goldbugs and conspiracists). My mentor would have smirked at the symmetry.

This is why I'll never say his name.

The recommendations to repair or rebuild indicate that life is negentropic and so, presumably, is the human race. He’d never call it “negentropic.” He'd say: “Sure, entropy wins in the long run. But life’s job is to make the long run take as damn long as possible. Anything that quits fighting gets composted. Anything that remembers why it was built gets rebuilt. That’s the whole game.” Not without a new design. The Renaissance did not do a one-eighty back into Gothic feudalism. Even the art of perspective replaced those clunky oversized human figures standing at the walls of undersized castles.

The goal of reconstitution is the only worthy one.