Entropy Rules

Comparable titles: Marcelo Gleiser’s The Dawn of a Mindful Universe Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens

“Goodbrand dedicates many pages to dismantling humanity’s view of itself as the pinnacle and point of life, saying our ‘self-centered exceptionalism’ leads us to ‘cruelty and destructiveness.’ Yet those traits, he notes, seem inevitable, as we follow our own ruthless survival instincts and therefore fulfill the cosmos’ larger aim of taking everything apart. Accordingly, Goodbrand doesn’t come up with a solution to life’s woes so much as propose a temporary fix: relative safety for the greatest number of people achieved through technology and adherence to scientific precepts, combined with a realistic acceptance of our fleeting place in a larger scheme that will end in universal extinction. It’s not the most optimistic place to end up, but for those readers with a hardy existentialist bent, it should prove enlightening. Takeaway: Insightful, unsparing look at humanity in a universe hostile to life.” (BookLife Reviews)

The real story is not human-centered. Science alone allows us to see ourselves from the outside, particularly through the law of entropy. This second law of thermodynamics prescribes the breakdown of organized particles into random ones that can never again be gathered into complex matter. We exist to participate in this mandate as part of the arc of the cosmos. We resist entropy but fail. This physical process underlies the conflicts within our species and social organizations as we try to amass matter but inevitably burn through it; create order and destroy it.

How can we make ourselves safe in this world? Will we create a new species? In Entropy Rules, retired psychotherapist Grant Goodbrand — with over 50 years of experience helping individuals find personal meaning — explores how the laws of physics underlie our personal meanings and the values our species imposes. This offers us within the limits of natural law ameliorating alternatives to our destructive activities.

Grant Goodbrand enjoyed a long and fulfilling career as a psychodynamic therapist. His first book, Therafields, chronicled the rise and fall of Lea Hindley-Smith's psychoanalytic commune in the 1970s. His interest is in the beginnings that determine the present and how individuals can find safety in a precarious world. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.