Negentropy of Human Experience
Most humans understand the concept of entropy and the tendency for hot things to become cool and for frozen things to melt. Entropy means our machines and even our living bodies eventually break down from wear and tear. But somehow we humans hopefully get smarter with time and experience. Our souls grow. Our minds and our hearts gain patience and wisdom which serves us as the counterbalancing negentropy. This applies to healthy human organizations too. Within any system, there are forces of entropy and negentropy. Which force rules is an issue of life and death.
Using a founding principle of as above, so below we should be able to see entropy and negentropy within larger collections of humanity. Our governments and our religions as greater representations of our mind and heart must have the ability to incorporate feedback from experience or they will both be taken down by entropy. When the government or religion is closely tied to a king or a deceased divine messenger that collection of humans has no ability to impose a feedback loop upon its organization without revolution or escape because the authority is untouchable. Whereas, the United States Constitution is arguably one of the first documents designed to be a tool of negentropy, a systematic container of experience in smooth, constant revolution due to its designed feedback loop from its people.
The metanoia and evolution of a people usually come from a hard experience. For Americans, a king months across an ocean and his local governors chosen within a colonial system of exploitation and graft was the catalyst for the American Revolution. From that oppression was born a Declaration of Independence and from that war was born a constitution. The framers of the constitution were an elite but obviously concerned with the balance of power and truly desired to frame a win-win document. But the states were unwilling to cede power to this central government without the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Where the constitution was informed by the examples of the republic and democracy of Rome and Greece, the Bill of Rights was a direct response to the fresh abuses of monarchy and its enforcing army.
The first ten amendments to the constitution, added in order for it to pass enough states for ratification, were negentropy proscriptions formed in the crucible of the revolutionary war. The next major war, The Civil War, produced amendments to resolve the issue of slavery and equal application of law. The First World War and the Spanish Flu experience of masculine leadership were an important catalyst to resolve the issue of women’s suffrage which had been unresolved since the Civil War and empowering black men to vote. The four-term presidency of FDR produced the amendment to limit all presidents to two terms. You get the idea that while people die (like cells within the body are replaced) there is a systemic container of experience the living organism carries into the future to reform the organization based on hard-won experience.
The Vietnam War gave 18-year-olds the right to vote via a constitutional amendment to go along with the need to die for government policy actions. The Vietnam War also gave us the “All-Volunteer Military” and the end of the draft. In hindsight, this action was a devolution of our country from the people’s action to reform the government versus a government’s action to act to maintain power. Would the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Libya be pursued for up to twenty years if they needed to be supported by a random draft of 18-year-olds? So who reformed whom from the Vietnam experience? The government won. The people lost. War is now a racket.
Another dropped stitch from hard won experience was The Nuremberg Code that outlawed worldwide the forced medical experimentation upon any human population without informed consent. Did this ever make it into the US constitution? No. Now we have vaccine mandates, which are no doubt another racket. Our system of negentropy is breaking down. The hard won education and reform from systemic experience must be codified within the constitution and the rule of law while the lesson is fresh. Or we will have to revisit with an even harder lesson in the future.
The American political system has traveled a devolutionary path from proscribing the Bill of Rights before we would ratify the US Constitution to fighting wars to codify needed changes to in hindsight of major conflict amending the constitution to it now it being our government which is using negative experience to reform its policies to maintain power over the people. There have been no significant amendments to the constitution for half a century while amendments for balanced budget, equal rights and congressional term limits go no where.
If we were looking proscriptively today we would amend the constitution and place a prohibition against using AI and machine based platforms to enforce the law against humans. What if an authoritarian government did not need humans to enforce their will? We are almost there.
We Americans were given a system of governing our government which we have allowed to no longer be a feedback loop. Reform has become the tool of government to change policies to enhance its power and control. This must change or the people will have to destroy the beast they have allowed to grow. It is our inaction to complete the reforms learned from hard won experience. Negentropy is like a shot of adrenaline to a heart attack patient to restart life.
If we miss these rare and precious opportunities to offset entropy after winning a victory over potential death we will be showing Nature and the Cosmos we no longer deserve a place among the living. The mechanism to reform our government still exists. Do we have the cohesive will to confront it for its own good?