Living in Entropy: Power in the Entropy Age, or Who Thrives When Things Fall Apart (E4 of 5 in Series)
Welcome back to cyberspace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. If you're new here, this is the show where we look at how psychology, media, culture, and technology shape the way you think, feel, work, and live. This week, we're moving through a five episode series about the psychology of living through the entropy age. In the first episode, we stayed close to your inner life and talked about emotional entropy, existential anxiety, ontological insecurity, and anticipatory grief.
Leslie Poston:In the second episode, we stepped out to look at system decay and how institutions under late stage capitalism shape our sense of safety and possibility. In the third episode, we talked about epistemic entropy, information overload, and what happens when the truth stops feeling real. Today, we're going a little deeper into power. Who benefits from entropy, how they think, and why chaotic conditions are not equally costly to everyone. When structures feel unstable, most people experience that as stress.
Leslie Poston:For a smaller group, especially those who already hold wealth or influence, entropy is often a resource, a shield, or even a strategy. In this episode, we'll learn more about the psychology of power in these conditions. How tendencies like hierarchy seeking, authoritarian thinking, and moral disengagement make it easier for some leaders, oligarchs, and tech founders to function comfortably while everyone else around them is worn down. We're not going to diagnose specific individuals today. Instead, we're going to talk about patterns that show up again and again when people are rewarded for hoarding power in systems that are already fraying.
Leslie Poston:Let's start with a basic question. What does it mean to hoard power when systems are decaying? In material terms, we can see it in the concentration of wealth, in control over tech platforms and infrastructure, and in access to political influence. But there's also a psychological style that tends to align with this pattern. Researchers who study social dominance orientation look at how strongly a person prefers hierarchies between groups.
Leslie Poston:People high on this trait see society as groups stacked on top of each other, and they believe it's both natural and desirable for some groups to dominate others. They're more comfortable with inequality, and they're more likely to support harmful policies that maintain status differences. In a relatively stable environment, this might express itself as quiet support for existing class privileges. In the entropy age where many people are struggling with basic costs, climate risk, and political instability, a preference for hierarchy can become sharper. If you already choose to believe that some people are, quote, meant to be on top, then system decay can look less like a crisis and more like confirmation that only the strong, clever, or ruthless will survive, even if you're suffering under the system.
Leslie Poston:There's also a more literal kind of hoarding that shows up, which we've talked about in one of our two episodes on the psychology of billionaires. People at the top of hierarchies may accumulate property, cash, and assets far beyond any practical need. They may invest in private bunkers, exclusive enclaves, or gated communities. From the outside, this can look like cartoon villainy. Psychologically, it often reflects a scarcity mindset paired with the belief that safety is an individual project, not a collective one.
Leslie Poston:The thought process goes something like, If the system is unstable, the answer is to build my own personal system within it and to use any available tools to keep my position. That can include tax strategies, political lobbying, political donations, and control over communication channels and technology. Over time, this kind of hoarding does not just protect individuals. It actively deepens entropy for everyone else by draining resources and attention away from public goods. From a psychological angle, it's important to see that this style of thinking is not neutral.
Leslie Poston:It is supported and rewarded by cultures that equate human worth with monetary net worth that celebrate, quote, winners who break norms no matter the cost or consequence and that present structural advantage as individual genius. In that environment, hoarders of power try to propagandize the populace to see hoarding as a virtue rather than harm. Another cluster of research that helps explain why some people thrive in chaotic conditions looks at authoritarian tendencies. Work on authoritarianism identifies a few recurring themes. One is a strong preference for order and conformity within one's in group paired with hostility toward those seen as outsiders or rule breakers.
Leslie Poston:Another is a tendency to misplace trust by trusting strong leaders who present themselves as decisive and to tolerate or even applaud harsh measures against perceived threats. In unstable times, authoritarian styles can feel reassuring to some people, which we covered more deeply in the episodes about the psychology of authoritarianism and the psychology of mass delusion. If you're afraid of change or loss, a leader who says I alone can fix it or I will restore order can sound appealing. For people who already hold power, chaos can be an opportunity to position themselves as the only ones capable of restoring control. There's a paradox here.
Leslie Poston:Authoritarian movements often market themselves as defenders of stability, tradition, and safety. Yet they frequently rely on tactics that increase instability for others, attacks on independent media and the courts, threats against marginalized groups, erosion of civil rights, and the deliberate seeding of fear and confusion. This is where the idea of manufactured order comes in. In a complex interconnected society, no one person can truly control outcomes. What authoritarian leaders can do is create the appearance of order for their base by drawing sharp lines between us and them, by cracking down on dissent, and by presenting dissenters as sources of chaos.
Leslie Poston:From a psychological point of view, this taps into the same existential anxieties we talked about in episode one. When people are afraid, they may trade away complexity and nuance for clear stories even if those stories are inaccurate or harmful. Leaders who are comfortable exploiting that fear are often those who are less disturbed by the costs their actions impose on others. For tech founders and corporate leaders, for example, there's a sneakier version of this pattern. It shows up in slogans about disruption or moving fast and breaking things.
Leslie Poston:The promise is that breaking existing systems will lead to innovative new ones, but the reality is that disruption is profitable for those at the top, and the costs of those broken systems are borne by workers, users, the environment, and communities. In both cases, the psychology is similar. There's comfort with using turbulence as raw material and a belief that if harm occurs along the way, it's either justified by the outcome or simply not their concern. One question that often comes up is how can people at the top tolerate the level of harm that system decay causes, especially when they're contributing to it? Bandura and others who study moral disengagement have described several mechanisms that allow people to participate in harmful systems without experiencing overwhelming guilt or cognitive dissonance.
Leslie Poston:One mechanism is moral justification. Harmful actions are reframed as serving a higher good. For example, layoffs are described as necessary for the health of the company, or harsh policies are framed as protecting freedom or defending tradition. Once the action is wrapped in a moral story, it becomes easier to support. Well, at least until it causes moral injury in the people who become cogs in the system.
Leslie Poston:Another mechanism is euphemistic labeling. Neutral or positive language is used to describe negative outcomes. Civilian deaths are called collateral damage. Predatory products are called innovative financial instruments. A destructive algorithm is called an engagement optimization tool.
Leslie Poston:This language creates distance between the decision and its human impact. A third mechanism is diffusion or the displacement of responsibility. Decisions are portrayed as the result of market forces, shareholder demands, mysterious algorithms, or the system in a way that makes them seem inevitable. Individuals can say I was just following the policy or the data made me do it even when they had real choices. We're seeing this kind of inevitable language centered on AI right now as people who are overinvested in it try to make it seem inevitable.
Leslie Poston:There's also dehumanization and victim blaming as tactics. Groups harmed by policies or products are portrayed as less deserving, less competent, or responsible for their own suffering. If people in poverty are framed as lazy, if sick people are framed as careless, or if persecuted groups are framed as dangerous, then harms against them can be rationalized as unfortunate but acceptable. These mechanisms of moral disengagement are not limited to any one party or sector. You can see them in corporate language, political speeches, investor presentations, and even tech platform policies.
Leslie Poston:Over time, repeated exposure to this framing can reshape how ordinary people talk about harm as well. In an entropy age, moral disengagement from the top accelerates decay. When leaders don't fully register the damage their choices cause or when they have ready made stories that convert harm into necessity, there is little internal pressure to change course. Instead, harm is normalized and woven into the background of daily life. It would be easy to end here with a simple story.
Leslie Poston:Powerful people are bad, and everyone else is good. But reality is more complicated than that. So I want to close by focusing on what these patterns mean for those who are not at the top of the hierarchy. One cost is chronic mistrust. When we see leaders, executives, or founders repeatedly deflect responsibility, we learn that official narratives can't be taken at face value.
Leslie Poston:That doesn't mean we become conspiracy theorists, at least we hope not, but it does mean we feel we're on our own when it comes to interpreting events and protecting ourselves. Another cost is learned powerlessness at a collective level. If attempts to voice concerns, organize, or push for change are repeatedly ignored or punished, it's easy to draw the conclusion that nothing you do will matter. That conclusion is wrong, but it is understandable given the evidence many of us see. I talked about getting past this on a previous episode.
Leslie Poston:There's also a more subtle emotional cost. When you watch others treat harm as acceptable, especially harm to groups you care about, it can create a deep sense of moral injury. It's painful to see suffering that doesn't have to happen and to know that people with resources choose other priorities. The pain can sit under the surface as anger, grief, or numbness. At the same time, it's important to try not to internalize the values of those who benefit most from entropy.
Leslie Poston:We live in a culture that often presents hoarding, domination, and moral disengagement as normal business practice or as smart strategy. It can be reassuring to remember that these are not the only ways to be human. Just as there are psychological patterns that align with hoarding and authoritarian thinking, there are patterns that support care, fairness, and solidarity. There are leaders who feel the weight of their choices and who work to reduce harm. There are communities that share resources, build alternative structures, and who refuse to treat other people as collateral damage.
Leslie Poston:In this fourth part of the Entropy series, we looked at power. We've talked about how social dominance orientation and hoarding mindsets make it easier for some people to feel comfortable in decaying systems. We touched on authoritarian tendencies and the promise of manufactured order. We talked through mechanisms of moral disengagement that allow harm to be framed as necessary or inevitable, and we named some of the psychological costs that fall on everyone else when this happens. Have any of this helped you make sense of the behavior of leaders, corporations, or movements that you've been watching?
Leslie Poston:I hope it gives you a way to see their choices as part of recognizable patterns and not as mysterious or all powerful. If this episode resonated, share it with a friend who may have been saying, I just don't understand how these people sleep at night, and who might appreciate a more psychological lens on that question. The show notes will include research and resources as always if you want to read more about the concepts we've touched on. Next time in the final episode of the Entropy series, we'll talk about responses. We'll explore how people create small, grounded forms of order and resistance and how tactical whimsy, joy, and connection can coexist with clear eyed awareness of decay.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember to stay curious, and tune in tomorrow for the next episode in the series on entropy.
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