Much of the book I’ve written called Benevolent
Libertarianism uses physics as a supporting lens through which to assess
economics, markets and human behaviour in society, because there is a lot of
overlap. For example, entropy and economic complexity overlap in that, in
thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder or the number of possible
configurations of a system; and economically, societies tend toward more
complex arrangements (akin to higher entropy), especially in free markets where
countless agents interact. Just like in physics, where energy moves toward
states of higher entropy, markets evolve toward more decentralised, diverse,
and adaptive structures. In most cases, a centralised economy is like a
low-entropy system - highly ordered but fragile. And in most cases, a
decentralised market economy mirrors high entropy – untidy but resilient.
Another example, Newton’s First Law (inertia)
states that objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon. You can think
of institutions and social norms as having "inertia" – in that, once
they are established, they tend to persist unless disrupted by significant
forces (revolutions, economic crises, technological shifts, and so forth). This
principle helps explain the resistance to change in economic systems. One of
the catch 22s of libertarianism is that the idea of a libertarian reform is
likely to come up against institutional inertia, requiring strong catalysing
forces to shift public policy.
You can also observe in physics that phase
transitions occur when a system hits a critical
point. Similarly, in social systems, network effects (like viral trends,
revolutions, or financial panics) behave similarly. A small trigger can cause a
systemic shift once a critical mass is reached – and this shows similarities
around tipping points in markets or social movements.
I’ve also been fascinated for many years in how
power laws or trends in society mirror nature's laws, especially tail end
distributions or severe deviations from the mean. Zipf’s Law is an intriguing one (which I’ve
written about before in my paper on parsimony and power laws) - it
states that the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank.
This applies to language (most common words are used exponentially more often)
and cities (a few mega-cities dominate, wealth distribution, online traction,
etc). It mirrors distribution patterns in natural systems, such as the size
distribution of solar flares or earthquakes – and once you delve into more and
more examples of this, as I do in the book, it becomes more and more
interesting.
The Pareto distribution (the 80/20 rule – although
it’s not always exactly that, of course) crops up everywhere too - from income
and productivity to software bugs - and resembles the power-law distribution
seen in self-organised systems in physics. In Benevolent Libertarianism,
I try to argue for outcomes that enable voluntary rebalancing or opportunity
creation without coercive equalisation – what you might say (although I might
ditch this if it proves too provocative for a publisher) a kind of capitalism
with a heart and a socialism with a head.
We also find with consistency that the value of a network increases with
the square of the number of its participants. This applies to markets, social
networks, and economies of scale – and it’s similar to gravitational attraction
increasing with mass - interconnectedness yields increased (sometimes
exponential) utility. One of the fundamental principles that has seen this
human progression-explosion in terms of material standard of living is that
free markets, open communication platforms and mutual connectivity gain value
as participation scales, encouraging more and more organic growth.
At this point, it might have occurred to you that
we can also discern political manipulation through a similar heuristic. I
believe one of the most interesting things happening right now is that, in
greater numbers, the public suspect they are not being told the full truth, but
it's hard to come together in a co-ordinated way to challenge it. Discerning
political manipulation through the above heuristics is really to be seen as
analogical and metaphorical, especially in regard to physics, but I try to make
it compelling in the book because sometimes when you have a situation that’s
hard to capture in your mind, an analogy or metaphor can help bring about a
eureka moment. So, here’s one way you could think of it. In physics, massive
objects bend space-time, creating gravitational fields that influence smaller
bodies. I think that’s similarly what’s happening with powerful political
actors (corporations, lobbyists, governments) – they generate a
"field" of influence that bends public discourse, policy direction,
and media focus – in fact, it has become its own heuristic for gaining more
traction (like Wagner’s law predicts in economics) where there is a kind of
"gravitational lensing" effect, where the narrative becomes distorted
based on proximity to manipulative political or financial mass. It’s a reliable
mechanism for sucking people in. There are, of course, many good and noble
cases where that happens in a free market economy, where successful innovators
enjoy well-deserved spoils – but here I’m taking specifically about the
negative aspects of manipulation into perverse and distortionary
narratives.
I also think there are interesting parallels in
societal behaviour and conservation of energy in physics. In physics, energy is
never destroyed – it is only transformed or redirected. Similarly, I think in
many cases, political pressure or dissent is rarely extinguished; it is
redirected or channelled elsewhere. Firstly, this means that suppressing
people’s free expressions or dismissing them won’t work if the dissent is
strong enough – it will pop up elsewhere, manifested in different forms. You
can see with the left, how populist social fervour has been co-opted by
establishment figures to maintain power under a new guise of extreme
environmentalism, for example. When a bottom-up movement is suddenly adopted by
the mainstream, just pay attention and analyse where the original intent is
being repurposed, and you’ll probably see the patterns I’m talking about. I
suppose, also, if you’ll allow me the grace to push the analogy further, with
thermodynamic information theory, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio, the
clearer the message. And sadly, socio-political manipulation often gains
traction by lowering this ratio by flooding the public with noise
(misinformation, skewed reasoning, distractions, hyper-partisan content,
galvanisation to an external cause that makes participants look good) to drown
out clarity and critical thought.
I think in an age where 1) information is so
readily available to nearly everyone, and 2) critical thinking is rarely
practiced by the majority trying to process all this information, political
discourse becomes more fragmented and unstable as political leaders push for
polarisation – a bit like a societal equivalent of the second law of
thermodynamics. And unless the energy of reason, logic and empiricism is
applied to decrease the entropy, it’s likely to get worse. This feedback loop
can be seen as analogous to a system of particles in a confined space. When one
particle exerts force, the reaction may cause the system to shift, with some
particles moving closer together (strengthening the political base) and others
moving further apart (deepening polarisation). The interaction between these
forces is not one-directional; it's a constant interplay that politicians and
the media can navigate to maintain their position, much like how forces in the
physical world create dynamic equilibrium.
It’s surely as plain as day at the moment that the
official narratives provided by political leaders and the media is so veiled,
biased, and intentionally misleading that we must be close to a tipping point.
The system of information that is presented to the public is like a quantum
system where the "true" state is elusive and constantly shifting,
dependent on the perspective of those who observe it. If you sense the
position, the momentum is abstracted, and if you sense the abstraction, you no
longer pin it down to straightforward empirical justification – and even in
cases when you might, the battleground is a morass of often justifiable
resentment and partisans.
Just as the universe operates through immutable
physical laws, the political landscape is shaped by forces, both seen and
unseen, that guide the movement of ideas, policies, and public opinion – and in
this day of technological connectivity, we are probably in the advent of a
system of organic resistance and bottom-up networked intelligence that can
mount a serious challenge to the hegemonies that have pervaded for so many
decades. And while we’ll never get rid of top-down central intelligence – and
in some cases, we shouldn’t wish to do so - we may be witnessing the birth of a
decentralised, self-correcting force capable of at least challenging legacy
power structures in a way that’s not been possible before.
