In physics, there is a merciless law: every closed system, no matter how precise or beautiful it may be at a given moment, inevitably moves toward greater disorder. Scientists call this entropy. It means that energy, when left to itself, dissipates and disperses, and does not spontaneously gather itself back together. A drop of ink placed in a glass of water spreads out and never reverses course; heat flows from a hot body to a cold one, and never spontaneously in the opposite direction. This is not a flaw in the universe, but one of its strict laws: everything isolated from a renewed source of energy is destined for disintegration.
And what applies to atoms applies, with an even subtler irony, to nations.
An institution that closes its doors to itself, a system that survives on its old memories and refuses to import new ideas, and a discourse that fears questions more than it fears ignorance—all are systems moving, quietly and inevitably, toward their own entropy. Nothing collapses in a single day. Civilizational decay does not ring a warning bell. It seeps in the way moisture seeps into a wall: invisible, slow, and cumulative, until the entire wall suddenly falls, and everyone asks: How did this happen so suddenly? The truth is that it never happened suddenly. It had been happening all along, in silence.
Here lies the fundamental difference between two kinds of systems: the closed system and the open system.
A closed system feeds on itself: it repeats its discourse, reproduces its ways of thinking, and treats criticism as a threat rather than as a source of renewed energy. Such a system is destined, by the very logic of entropy, to gradually lose its internal coherence, no matter how solid it may appear on the surface. An open system, by contrast, allows itself—despite the pain this may sometimes cause—to receive energy from outside: a different idea, an uncomfortable question, a new generation that does not simply inherit its parents’ assumptions, but reexamines them. Only such a system can postpone decay—not because it is exempt from the law, but because it understands the law.
Life itself, as one of the great physicists of the twentieth century demonstrated, does not violate the law of entropy. Rather, it is a temporary resistance to it, sustained by its constant openness to exchanging energy with its surroundings. The moment living organisms close their channels, they begin to die. The same is true of nations.
More dangerous than outright closure is self-deceiving reform: rearranging the furniture in a crumbling house without repairing its foundations. We replace one slogan with another, one official with another, and call it renewal, while the real cracks—in the quality of the minds we educate, in the space allowed for questioning, and in our respect for difference as a source of wealth rather than a sin—continue to widen beneath the surface. This kind of “reform” does not stop entropy; it merely gives it a temporary disguise and postpones the bill to a generation that had no part in writing it.
So, is decline therefore an inevitable fate from which there is no escape?
This is precisely where hope lies, rather than despair. The physical law applies to isolated systems, not to open ones. A civilization that chooses to remain an open system—one that imports knowledge without fearing it, exports ideas without monopolizing them, and raises its children to ask questions rather than merely repeat answers—is not condemned to the same fate as everything that closes in upon itself.
Consider, for example, every religious system that chooses to lock its scripture into a single interpretation and treats every new reading as sin or disbelief rather than as an act of intellectual interpretation and reasoning.
Such systems, whose texts were shaped in an era that preceded the scientific and cultural openness later produced by the human mind, face a choice with no third option: either they allow understanding to renew itself as life itself renews, or they barricade themselves behind the literal wording of the text and allow the gap between themselves and the modern world to widen generation after generation—until they become alien to their own followers before becoming alien to their opponents. This may lead simultaneously to the collapse of religions or to their radicalization.
Look, from another angle, at political systems that bet on total closure: the Soviet Union, with all the military power and apparent ideological solidity it possessed, collapsed not because it was invaded from outside, but because it closed its windows to questioning until it suffocated from within. It did not fall in a single day, just as no wall in history has ever truly fallen in a single day. It had been eroding silently for decades, until the moment arrived when the “surprise” appeared inevitable—though it had been a long time coming.
Yet openness itself, if understood as unlimited energy without restraint, carries its own trap. Freedom left without a minimum set of constraints to protect minorities and marginalized groups and to safeguard justice does not necessarily produce a more vibrant system. It may instead produce chaos, in which all suppressed energies erupt at once, destroying the system rather than renewing it.
Just as a sealed wall eventually collapses under the weight of its false rigidity, a house with no walls at all collapses under the weight of dispersion.
Wisdom, therefore, lies neither in closure nor in complete release, but in the delicate balance that physics itself speaks of: a system open enough to breathe, yet constrained enough to preserve its form while it breathes.
Entropy, in this sense, is not a prophecy of inevitable doom. It is a warning—a sign that calls for renewed deliberate action, not passive surrender to an irreversible fate.
The question we should ask ourselves, as individuals, institutions, religions, and nations, is not: Are we coherent today? Rather: Are we still a system that breathes, or have we, without realizing it, closed the windows that once supplied us with the energy that postpones the inevitability of disintegration?
I fear that simply opening discussions such as these—discussions that draw upon insights from physics and history, from science and human experience—may itself be forbidden, and may even become, in some societies that choose to close their eyes to the truth, an existential threat to the course of entropy. Yet the purpose of entropy, and of understanding it, is precisely to use energy for building, development, survival, and life—for generations that did not create the circumstances they inherited, but will nevertheless bear their consequences.
Thank God we are a society that understands entropy and avoids it.
