By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Entropy is a term from thermodynamics – but here we are not interested in it.
In social theory, entropy means “a state of disorder, randomness, and uncertainty.” It’s another name for sinking into chaos.
I saw the word for the first time while reading Pynchon – “Death and Mercy in Vienna”. Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’ is my favorite text by that author – but we are not interested in that here either.
The theory says that in a system left to itself, entropy necessarily increases – the system therefore continuously slides into a state of greater disorder.
At least we witnessed it so many times. That process is evident in totalitarian systems. Tito, who managed to gather the system, died. The party was weakening, entropy had done its work.
The DPS wasn’t overthrown from the outside. The system fell, fell apart. It was eaten by entropy because the power that governs the system was weakening. The same applies to Montenegro.
To be frank: I won’t be reading physics textbooks this morning. Let’s see what Wikipedia says:
“We constantly encounter entropy in our everyday life. Everyone has seen a book fall off a table with its kinetic energy turning into heat and slightly warming the surface it landed on. But no one saw the book fly from the floor to the shelf with the spontaneous cooling of the floor. In the first case, the entropy of the system increases and in the second case, it decreases. All spontaneous processes take place in the direction of increasing entropy”.
A book falling off a table is an excellent metaphor for the situation in Montenegro.
The end of KPJ meant the end of Yugoslavia. In order for the end of the DPS not to mean the end of Montenegro, which is precisely the idea of the black-green Vucic coalition, it’ necessary to do something.
But no… we’re worried about Montenegro, but expect someone else to get back that book on the shelf. Some even believe that Milo is from the Stalker family, that he’s a character from Tarkovsky: that he has paranormal power to make the book fly and return to the shelf by itself.
Like this:
And entropy is growing… It takes a huge effort to keep things from falling apart. Abandoned wagons at the railway station are rotting. Abandoned factory halls leak. Everything falls apart, even ideas: just like in ‘Stalker’.
There’s a good reason why the past (and for some, the future) always seems better. While things are happening, we are in the midst of chaos. In memory, however, there is no chaos: therefore, there is no truth either. In memory, as in utopia, there is order and causality, which we have established. Memories are literature – memories are a kind of utopian literature that is set in the past, instead of the future. And literature, unlike reality, must make sense.
“Being rooted in the present” is the greatest of all illusions. It existed and will exist, but nothing exists. The present does not exist: it is just a train that passes by us. By the time you look at it, it’s already gone down the track. A man either remembers or prophesies. It is impossible to talk about “now”, because by the time you utter a word, by the time a thought rises, “now” is already in the past. It is impossible to be a “man of your time”, because our time does not exist either. The present is not time: it is only the space that tomorrow needs to become yesterday.
But, we need to fight in that moment.
It is up to us, among other things, to fight against the logic that says: yes, the book fell off the table; yes, it also knocked over a glass of wine while falling; yes, the wine was spilled on the carpet; but what does it matter – at least we produced green energy.
We have to fight against the idea that books will be put back on the shelves by those who are only interested in burning down the library. And who ever defeated human stupidity?
Montenegro is currently surviving the consequences of that idea.
Will it happen to Bosnia – we’ll know in two days.
But isn’t it interesting how the promoters of ‘clean energy’ and ‘ethically clean politics’, those ardent bearers of ‘progressive tendencies’, in the name of change end up in an alliance with the most rigid, darkest political structures?
It’s what we saw in Montenegro. It’s what we’re witnessing in Bosnia now. Where “smart and educated people” call on their fellow citizens not to vote for Komsic because he’s a fake representative of the civic Bosnia and Herzegovina. And who’s the real representative then? What do you mean ‘who’? Well, those who scramble for the win of the policy which doesn’t even hide that its main idea is the same like the one marked in Hague as a “joint crime action’ instead of Komsic.
So like we sad, entropy is “the tendency of a system to spontaneously move into a state of greater disorder, and entropy is a measure of system disorder.”
But, there’s nothing spontaneous in the Montenegrin and Bosnian entropy. It’s the game of worldly gods of disorder, whose followers, as they take a mechanical step, are showered with flowers by a crowd of useful idiots convinced that they can see further and know better.
Contrary to Montenegro, which could avoid entropy, Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn’t have that chance; it was set to a continuous growth by the Dayton agreement.
Paradoxically, Bosnia now has greater chances to stop entropy.
