Entropy in our Everyday Lives: Active Stability

Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability. There are two types of stability: active and passive. Consider a ship, which, if designed well, should be able to sail through a storm without intervention. This is passive stability. A fighter jet, in contrast, requires active stability. The plane can’t fly for more than a few seconds without having to adjust its wings. This adjustment happens so fast that it’s controlled by software. Ther...

 The Power of the Masses

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history. "On Coalition Government" (April 24, 1945), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 257.* The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge. "Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys" (March and April 1941), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 12.* The masses have boundless creative power. T...

 Replacing the Gold Standard with an Energy Standard

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of substa...