Agreed—mutual benefit is real, and not all exchange is zero-sum. But I’d add: just because both parties gain doesn’t mean there isn’t a loser somewhere.
Whether it’s environmental fallout, third-party instability, or social fragmentation, entropy shows up. It just doesn’t always show up where we’re looking—or when we expect it.
Appreciate it—your framing helped crystallize that. It’s not just about who gains, but who absorbs the cost—and how that delayed consequence circles back.
Appreciate this framework—especially the way it avoids moralizing in favor of structural clarity.
The idea that war isn’t a failure of diplomacy but a structural requirement of complex systems is a difficult but important shift in perspective.
That section connecting empire, energy, and export mechanisms really stayed with me—especially how systems preserve internal order by displacing disorder.
A question I keep turning over: if violence is a gradient’s most efficient exhaust mechanism, can alternative forms of entropy export (financial chaos, cultural destabilization, digital disruption) be refined deliberately enough to offset the kinetic impulse—or are they just slower burns en route to the same thermodynamic endpoint?
Kinda depends how you look at it imo. In economics this would be a positive sum vs. zero sum trade. While this post says that every action is negative-sum from an entropy perspective (which is a physical law).
I suppose the argument here would be that any interactions’ negative externalities outweigh any positive sum benefit between the parties. Supporting some sort of degrowth/communistic mentality, which tries to minimize the gradients between humans in order to minimize the amount of entropy/violence/negative sum results on a whole society level scale.
yeah the economic beliefs (which I'm well aware of) operate many layers shallower from these foundational laws of thermodynamics. physics dictates to economics; economics does not dictate to laws of physics.
you could use the realizations in this essay for a lot of different political motivations. the information here is apolitical, what you choose to do with it is up to the reader I suppose.
ha, honestly once you see it... it's hard to look away. it is truly omnipresent, a force of life, machine, energy, everything that performs work. I've never heard of Pollack, but glad to hear others are taking this understanding to heart.
I have a jumble of thoughts and a little poem thing I wrote while reading.
The internals of man is order
For what he sows is chaos
As do all reflections of what one wants to define as god
The two parallels
The two opposites
Balancing what was created to be internalized
To what must be broken to be externalized
Banger line to end on "War is how a nation eats."
Now, homie here's my take on what I feel I have discerned your opinion to be while being a shitposting dickhead to state a stupid idea. To fucking suppose that war is the ideal release of nations cause of the high pressure gradients of nations being self absorbed absolute dickheads to each other because that's just "how nature be baby" is fucking retarded and negates the idea of actual choice in how one lets out steam. Momma and Poppa don't need to fucking blow each other up to resolve their differences, Christ, what are you? The product of a nasty divorce? Now don't get me wrong I don't disagree that war must happen. I just think there are better ways for it to happen by making it into a game. Make a piece of land into the playground of war rebuilding it each time someone has to duke some shit out. Each time everyone gets to play with their toys of death that they have been working for decades and whoever wins gets to have their rules applied to the loser. Either that or I just want nation leaders to have one juggernaut human or team of them being who fight in a ring to prove who will win. Each nation enforcing the results of the match. Get sports commentators. Get people who pilot robots. Get fucking cool god damn mechs gunning a fucker down. Make AI algorithms that command fleets of robots famous. I can't wait for alien races to smash planets into each other to resolve their differences and just say they're just following the natural laws of the universe. Come on man, I'm making a shit ton of entropy because I can't agree on not killing all of them cause I suck at communicating my wants and needs. Come on dad just fuck mom again why does it gotta be this way. Ah shit, it's cause mom's ugly now ain't it?
Anyway, If war has to happen can we at least make it entertaining and it not blow up kids?
Also, phenomenal article dude. I always enjoy reading your stuff.
on a view of enlightenment, i believe people to be capable of sharing the entropy load of their systems and not immediately dumping their entropy within proximity. such luxury aspirations of course require thorough introspection and personal discomfort, ultimately still feeding into entropy via self-doubt, reflection, pensiveness and intrusive thoughts. whether contemplation and a battle of the mind is better than a battle of corpses and munitions remains to be seen. mental damage can be just as devastating
I think there are some important details to interrogate here about how much actual similarity there is between cellular organisms and nations. Specifically, nations (at least most existing ones) are not built with purely organic substrates, and so there are some key areas in which treating them as the same kind of phenomenon seems correct, but is likely not.
There is probably a tight correlation between how many non-organic mechaninisms and structures are load-bearing to the workings of a nation, and how explosive it is as a dissipative structure to what it not inside its boundaries. This is a feasible alternative definition of empire at first approximation.
Related to your other writing, in the psychic realm, certain cognitive attractors such as rationalism (or really any hyper-left-brained equilibrium) serve similar non-organic load bearing functions to the moral architecture of groups. In this vein, technocratic managerialism as a poltical orientation matches the dissipative violence of global neoliberal capitalism as described in the essay.
appreciate you reading. in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a dissipative structure is defined by what it does (export entropy while maintaining internal order), not by what it’s made of. cells, hurricanes, blast furnaces, and industrial plants all qualify. the dissipative-structure litmus test is not whether its organic, but whether it dissipates energy and does work. synthetic creations do this just as well if not better than organic ones. the cellular "orderly pattern" was one of many examples.
whether the internal machinery is carbon-based (people, crops) or silicon-based (GPUs, fabs) doesn’t matter; both are orderly patterns that dissipate free-energy gradients, aka dissipative structures.
note the engine example in the essay, or the reference to "machines" in general. natural organism and artificial machine (each synonymous with orderly patterns/structures) both "do work" which invariably degrades energy, which necessarily produces entropic exhaust. a nation is a collection of all kinds of low-internal-entropy engines: machine patterns in service of human patterns, and both ingest energy and produce entropy. in fact, machines are often much better at doing so than their organic counterparts.
bundling machines is often the most effective way to do work. a data center is clearly an effective dissipative structure, and nothing about it is organic. all those individual GPUs doing work are as well. a data center is a collective of GPUs, one that is something of a gestalt of entropy export vs a bunch of single GPUs running on their own, because placing them all together creates a lot of heat, requiring extensive cooling systems to let them function, which requires even more "work" to be done, consuming even more free energy in the process. a nation's powergrid is responsible for it all, from the residential home to the corporate headquarters.
from a thermodynamic standpoint, the nation (human collective) is no different than the data center (GPU collective). both maintain internal order by dumping entropy into their surroundings. those emissions must go somewhere. that’s why the question “organic or synthetic?” isn’t the consideration, but rather “does it import low-entropy stuff and export high-entropy waste while doing work?” and every functioning state emphatically does.
a nation is an open, non-equilibrium system. It pulls in low-entropy resources (oil, ore, food, capital) and pushes out high-entropy waste (heat, CO₂, spent goods, burnt-out workers).
okay, i will have to think more on what you've said, because I suspect that I'm trying to point to something that is not in contradiction, but at a different resolution, and I'm not doing a good job of expressing it.
> bundling machines is often the most effective way to do work.
what I want to get at is something along the lines of – the ways the bundling happens in developmental stages (including the timeframe, complexity, selection/engineering pressures, etc.) informs how violent of a dissipative structure the object and/or organism will become.
>"I suspect that I'm trying to point to something that is not in contradiction, but at a different resolution"
yeah I suspect so too. there certainly are layers to this onion and a top layer doesn't necessarily contradict a bottom one. this essay is as close to the core as I can possibly conceive.
> "what I want to get at is something along the lines of – the ways the bundling happens in developmental stages (including the timeframe, complexity, selection/engineering pressures, etc.) informs how violent of a dissipative structure the object and/or organism will become."
I can see this. how much entropy it emits ultimately relies on how much energy it needs to maintain internal order/structure; the more intricate/advanced it is internally, the more it degrades gradients, and thus the more chaos it excretes into its surroundings.
however to your point: per the singapore/swiss examples, it does not always need to be violent. but it does always need to be extractive in some way.
Provocative free-range thinking as always. But I question whether this reasoning can be applied to 'nations' ... which don't really 'exist' in that they are an emergent phenomenon arising from the behavior of sub elements. Atoms etc can be destroyed, but does it make any sense to say an emergent phenomenon like temperature can be destroyed or decomposed?
thank you friend. this comment speaks to some of your questions. and energy gradients can be degraded/dissipated, this is the essence of the Second Law.
The simplest example of this is trash. Where do you think trash goes in a clean, first world country?
Phenomenal Essay.
Agreed—mutual benefit is real, and not all exchange is zero-sum. But I’d add: just because both parties gain doesn’t mean there isn’t a loser somewhere.
Whether it’s environmental fallout, third-party instability, or social fragmentation, entropy shows up. It just doesn’t always show up where we’re looking—or when we expect it.
Appreciate it—your framing helped crystallize that. It’s not just about who gains, but who absorbs the cost—and how that delayed consequence circles back.
well said. and my pleasure, I'm glad you enjoyed.
Appreciate this framework—especially the way it avoids moralizing in favor of structural clarity.
The idea that war isn’t a failure of diplomacy but a structural requirement of complex systems is a difficult but important shift in perspective.
That section connecting empire, energy, and export mechanisms really stayed with me—especially how systems preserve internal order by displacing disorder.
A question I keep turning over: if violence is a gradient’s most efficient exhaust mechanism, can alternative forms of entropy export (financial chaos, cultural destabilization, digital disruption) be refined deliberately enough to offset the kinetic impulse—or are they just slower burns en route to the same thermodynamic endpoint?
Kinda depends how you look at it imo. In economics this would be a positive sum vs. zero sum trade. While this post says that every action is negative-sum from an entropy perspective (which is a physical law).
I suppose the argument here would be that any interactions’ negative externalities outweigh any positive sum benefit between the parties. Supporting some sort of degrowth/communistic mentality, which tries to minimize the gradients between humans in order to minimize the amount of entropy/violence/negative sum results on a whole society level scale.
yeah the economic beliefs (which I'm well aware of) operate many layers shallower from these foundational laws of thermodynamics. physics dictates to economics; economics does not dictate to laws of physics.
you could use the realizations in this essay for a lot of different political motivations. the information here is apolitical, what you choose to do with it is up to the reader I suppose.
I am going to be a deranged maniac applying this framework to everything I see now. Malcolm Pollack has been writing about this thesis as well.
I think the energy of the Crown, for example, has been dissipated maintaining Elizabeth II as monarch.
ha, honestly once you see it... it's hard to look away. it is truly omnipresent, a force of life, machine, energy, everything that performs work. I've never heard of Pollack, but glad to hear others are taking this understanding to heart.
Malcolm is old guard like me. He's been writing on it for a while, from a bit different slant and not as exquisitely developed as this though.
https://malcolmpollack.com/2013/12/15/small-world-3/
Interesting. There seems to be a lot of truth in this framework, but still, have you considered the possibility that you're a madman?
lol. my penchant for petting my cat contemplatively and having a lair does not help my case.
nice.
Wow, interesting essay. It is going to take me a while to digest what you have written. My mind is being stretched. Great stuff and thankyou.
My pleasure friend. I needed several reflections on the substance of the physics frameworks to really grasp it too.
I can tell you are a body builder
Ha, how?
Thank you 🙏
I have a jumble of thoughts and a little poem thing I wrote while reading.
The internals of man is order
For what he sows is chaos
As do all reflections of what one wants to define as god
The two parallels
The two opposites
Balancing what was created to be internalized
To what must be broken to be externalized
Banger line to end on "War is how a nation eats."
Now, homie here's my take on what I feel I have discerned your opinion to be while being a shitposting dickhead to state a stupid idea. To fucking suppose that war is the ideal release of nations cause of the high pressure gradients of nations being self absorbed absolute dickheads to each other because that's just "how nature be baby" is fucking retarded and negates the idea of actual choice in how one lets out steam. Momma and Poppa don't need to fucking blow each other up to resolve their differences, Christ, what are you? The product of a nasty divorce? Now don't get me wrong I don't disagree that war must happen. I just think there are better ways for it to happen by making it into a game. Make a piece of land into the playground of war rebuilding it each time someone has to duke some shit out. Each time everyone gets to play with their toys of death that they have been working for decades and whoever wins gets to have their rules applied to the loser. Either that or I just want nation leaders to have one juggernaut human or team of them being who fight in a ring to prove who will win. Each nation enforcing the results of the match. Get sports commentators. Get people who pilot robots. Get fucking cool god damn mechs gunning a fucker down. Make AI algorithms that command fleets of robots famous. I can't wait for alien races to smash planets into each other to resolve their differences and just say they're just following the natural laws of the universe. Come on man, I'm making a shit ton of entropy because I can't agree on not killing all of them cause I suck at communicating my wants and needs. Come on dad just fuck mom again why does it gotta be this way. Ah shit, it's cause mom's ugly now ain't it?
Anyway, If war has to happen can we at least make it entertaining and it not blow up kids?
Also, phenomenal article dude. I always enjoy reading your stuff.
Please imagine I wrote the above while smiling.
on a view of enlightenment, i believe people to be capable of sharing the entropy load of their systems and not immediately dumping their entropy within proximity. such luxury aspirations of course require thorough introspection and personal discomfort, ultimately still feeding into entropy via self-doubt, reflection, pensiveness and intrusive thoughts. whether contemplation and a battle of the mind is better than a battle of corpses and munitions remains to be seen. mental damage can be just as devastating
of course, good morning to the dozen people left reading blogs in this climate
I think there are some important details to interrogate here about how much actual similarity there is between cellular organisms and nations. Specifically, nations (at least most existing ones) are not built with purely organic substrates, and so there are some key areas in which treating them as the same kind of phenomenon seems correct, but is likely not.
There is probably a tight correlation between how many non-organic mechaninisms and structures are load-bearing to the workings of a nation, and how explosive it is as a dissipative structure to what it not inside its boundaries. This is a feasible alternative definition of empire at first approximation.
Related to your other writing, in the psychic realm, certain cognitive attractors such as rationalism (or really any hyper-left-brained equilibrium) serve similar non-organic load bearing functions to the moral architecture of groups. In this vein, technocratic managerialism as a poltical orientation matches the dissipative violence of global neoliberal capitalism as described in the essay.
appreciate you reading. in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a dissipative structure is defined by what it does (export entropy while maintaining internal order), not by what it’s made of. cells, hurricanes, blast furnaces, and industrial plants all qualify. the dissipative-structure litmus test is not whether its organic, but whether it dissipates energy and does work. synthetic creations do this just as well if not better than organic ones. the cellular "orderly pattern" was one of many examples.
whether the internal machinery is carbon-based (people, crops) or silicon-based (GPUs, fabs) doesn’t matter; both are orderly patterns that dissipate free-energy gradients, aka dissipative structures.
note the engine example in the essay, or the reference to "machines" in general. natural organism and artificial machine (each synonymous with orderly patterns/structures) both "do work" which invariably degrades energy, which necessarily produces entropic exhaust. a nation is a collection of all kinds of low-internal-entropy engines: machine patterns in service of human patterns, and both ingest energy and produce entropy. in fact, machines are often much better at doing so than their organic counterparts.
bundling machines is often the most effective way to do work. a data center is clearly an effective dissipative structure, and nothing about it is organic. all those individual GPUs doing work are as well. a data center is a collective of GPUs, one that is something of a gestalt of entropy export vs a bunch of single GPUs running on their own, because placing them all together creates a lot of heat, requiring extensive cooling systems to let them function, which requires even more "work" to be done, consuming even more free energy in the process. a nation's powergrid is responsible for it all, from the residential home to the corporate headquarters.
from a thermodynamic standpoint, the nation (human collective) is no different than the data center (GPU collective). both maintain internal order by dumping entropy into their surroundings. those emissions must go somewhere. that’s why the question “organic or synthetic?” isn’t the consideration, but rather “does it import low-entropy stuff and export high-entropy waste while doing work?” and every functioning state emphatically does.
a nation is an open, non-equilibrium system. It pulls in low-entropy resources (oil, ore, food, capital) and pushes out high-entropy waste (heat, CO₂, spent goods, burnt-out workers).
okay, i will have to think more on what you've said, because I suspect that I'm trying to point to something that is not in contradiction, but at a different resolution, and I'm not doing a good job of expressing it.
> bundling machines is often the most effective way to do work.
what I want to get at is something along the lines of – the ways the bundling happens in developmental stages (including the timeframe, complexity, selection/engineering pressures, etc.) informs how violent of a dissipative structure the object and/or organism will become.
>"I suspect that I'm trying to point to something that is not in contradiction, but at a different resolution"
yeah I suspect so too. there certainly are layers to this onion and a top layer doesn't necessarily contradict a bottom one. this essay is as close to the core as I can possibly conceive.
> "what I want to get at is something along the lines of – the ways the bundling happens in developmental stages (including the timeframe, complexity, selection/engineering pressures, etc.) informs how violent of a dissipative structure the object and/or organism will become."
I can see this. how much entropy it emits ultimately relies on how much energy it needs to maintain internal order/structure; the more intricate/advanced it is internally, the more it degrades gradients, and thus the more chaos it excretes into its surroundings.
however to your point: per the singapore/swiss examples, it does not always need to be violent. but it does always need to be extractive in some way.
Provocative free-range thinking as always. But I question whether this reasoning can be applied to 'nations' ... which don't really 'exist' in that they are an emergent phenomenon arising from the behavior of sub elements. Atoms etc can be destroyed, but does it make any sense to say an emergent phenomenon like temperature can be destroyed or decomposed?
thank you friend. this comment speaks to some of your questions. and energy gradients can be degraded/dissipated, this is the essence of the Second Law.
https://thedosagemakesitso.substack.com/p/war-is-how-a-nation-eats/comment/127641637