The Shield

Chaos flies all around you. You are under attack, hiding beneath an enormous shield.

Thank goodness for this shield. Arrows are constantly flying by you, and you don’t dare step out from behind this bastion of safety, where virtually certain death is waiting for you to appear.

Your shield is effective against the onslaught, but it’s also very heavy. It’s getting harder by the minute to hold up. Your arm is losing strength.

This scary scene is the real, actual world we inhabit. The arrows flying around are chaos, and this is the normal, natural state for Mother Nature.

Maybe you’re pushing back on that, thinking about how orderly planet Earth can be. After all, life itself is propagated by a highly precise collection of information we know of as DNA. This instruction manual gives order to all life forms on the planet.

Then, there are the living things on the planet, who all seem to create even more order. There are ants who will collectively create structured colonies for reproduction, working together and marching in very orderly lines. Birds create nests out of individual sticks and tiny branches, and the very structure of animals with radial or bilateral symmetry fights against the chaos of the universe.

Even the tiniest microorganism represents an astonishing amount of order. Living systems take in energy and reproduce in a predictable manner. How, then, can I say that chaos is Mother Nature’s natural state?

It’s because we have a nice little entropy shield here on Planet Earth. In fact, that shield is an incredibly important part of what makes a system a living one.

Every orchestral pit in the universe wants to turn into a mosh pit, and it’s just the conductor working really, really hard who can keep them from moshing. The conductor needs one thing in order to keep the chaos from erupting: energy. The conductor needs lots and lots of energy.

There’s a standard way in physics to describe what I’m talking about. The idea is that eggs never uncrack themselves—imagine seeing the yolk and egg running back in there, and then the shell sealing itself back up and uncracking.

Or, even better, imagine your room suddenly cleaning itself. Instead of messy piles of clothes, you have neatly folded shirts and pants that are now put away.

This doesn’t usually happen in physics, and it has everything to do with the arrow of time. The arrows that are flying at you are very much time arrows in a sense, and you need an entropy shield in order to prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by the chaos.

That’s because there are soooooooo many more ways for things to be disordered than for them to be ordered. Since all of the laws of physics are reversible and not at all dependent upon time having a particular direction, this inevitable march toward chaos seems to be the only thing that makes the future different from the past.

The messy room analogy works at the atomic level just as well.

Fighting against this very natural tendency takes a great deal of energy. Lately, I’ve been envisioning that energy as my own shield against the chaos.

Everyone has a shield they use, but people use them in different ways. My shield tends to organize ideas, like writing on Substack in order to make sense of the world, or creating jiu jitsu systems and encyclopedias. My physical working space, however, tends to be more on the chaotic side.

By contrast, I know folks who will spend a great deal of time and energy to make sure their physical surroundings are always neat, but who have a tough time keeping their calendars straight.

In other words, you have to decide where to allocate that considerable energy. Your shield against all those arrows is very heavy, and it can be hard to move around. Where do you place your shield?