Maxwell Demon and the Golden Apple

Maxwell and the Golden Apple: Global Disorder in the New Millennium Translated by Schweiler, Gao Wanni and Deng Haoyu

The central idea of the book is that international politics is steadily moving towards a state of chaos and randomness, a change that is consistent with the universal law of entropy increase. As history enters the age of entropy, chaos and randomness are innumerable. The world will be defined by the collapse of the order that once covered a wide range of social and political relations. If you want to break this increase in entropy, you can only break this closed system, restart it again, or let this system deteriorate day by day.

The laws of physics are the foundation of the material world and, theoretically, the foundation of international politics. But to impose the laws of physics here is a bit confusing to read. Like many PPT, cross-border citations or invent some words to play a sensational effect.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the energy of the universe is constant, and that the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. In an isolated system, entropy never decreases, because the isolated system spontaneously evolves towards a thermodynamic equilibrium until the maximum entropy state. All systems, including international systems, are made up of factors associated with their structure (how the units are arranged) and processes (how the units interact). Thermodynamic entropy and informatics entropy, two forms of entropy, map to these two dimensions of the international system (structure and process). Thermodynamic entropy increases reveal how structural changes in emerging international systems will lead to increased entropy, while information entropy explains how changes in system processes will lead to increased entropy. The central point of the book is consistent with the theme of entropy increase, namely, that the diffusion of power is also the dissipation of power: there are more and more actors with power, but they have only enough power to prevent other actors from exercising effective rule, far from exercising political authority on their own.

Power is the "entropy" of international politics. After the struggle for hegemony accomplished its three main tasks (destroying the old order, crowning the new king, and clarifying the bargaining situation between the great powers), a long period of peace followed. Just as a computer needs to be shut down and restarted periodically in order to reload the system, the international system sometimes has to be restarted. In international politics, the battle for hegemony is used to press the restart button, one by one. In addition to the state in the traditional sense, there are uncontrolled local armed groups, criminal groups, hackers, and various international and transnational organizations, so that power has been in a state of dispersion and entropy.

Power is a zero-sum game. The demise of the Soviet Union weakened the bargaining power of the United States over its Cold War allies. As a result, the United States has a much smaller impact today than it did during the Cold War, when it had to share the stage with its competitors. Hegemonic powers, on the one hand, agonize over the shirking of responsibility from competing strongmen, and on the other hand, they are too busy preventing their own mountains and rivers from falling, which will eventually reduce their global commitments, leaving behind an international order (or whatever remnant of it) that no single country or group of countries can be responsible for managing. At its core is the choice of friend and foe, international politics is essentially a deal between alliances and sides, and international politics is full of stories of international cooperation at the expense of the United States.

What the Entropy Age promises is not the hellish world of hegemonic war predicted by the scene of great power conflict, nor the world of heaven promised by another great power coordination plan, but a bleak foreshadow similar to the state of eternal purgatory. It will be a world of staleness and chaos, a world of abnormality and alienation, a world of instability without a means of stability, a world in which there is no orderer but insists on handing over order.

In a world of entropy, ambiguous geographic space has weakened the available firepower, while strongly supporting guerrilla tactics, hacking, sabotage, cyberwarfare, cyber espionage, and terrorism. What is left to us is a more level military arena, an arena that approximates the final state of maximum entropy "random motion" and "equal energy between particles".

The number and density of international organizations have grown exponentially over the past few decades, creating a nested and partially overlapping ocean of parallel institutions and agreements. Entropy tends to be maximized, and the disadvantage is that no one can win, and nothing can be done. The upside is that no one will lose.

The same goes for information entropy. People are depressed and have trouble concentrating, and one manifestation is the so-called high "continuous flow of entropy," in which people switch back and forth between web applications such as email, chat rooms, music players, browsers, and games. "Ping" refers to the feeling of mediocrity and meaninglessness that prevail in life, and information is raining down faster and denser. Information overload does not elevate irritation and awareness, but rather leads to boredom and alienation. Why? The answer lies in the field of economics, the study of how scarce resources are allocated. The abundance of information creates a lack of attention. When everything and its opposites claim to be true, people no longer believe what they hear and the people who give them information.

Audiences demand heat, not brightness, after all, thoughtful analysis is often tedious. The more extreme the opinion, the louder the opinion is expressed, the more outlandish the satire, and the more careless the discussion, the better. Whether listening or withdrawing, the public has allowed, even encouraged, that political dialogue has been hijacked by extremists whose dogmatic ideas, incitement, and often outright delusional ideas further polarize our politics and diminish our ability to reconcile different perspectives.

Henry. Adams said: Chaos is the law of nature, and order is the dream of mankind. The authors say the principle of creative destruction exists at the heart of most processes of change. Let the system restart, use external forces to break the shell of the closed system, whether through disease or war, and start all over again.