> This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. "Decay" is ve

> This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. "Decay" is very subjective. The laws of thermodynamics only tell us that entropy (an objective quantity) must increase over time, but it does not tell us how it increases or whether this increase is desirable or not. Life itself exists only because the combination of life + the environment creates more entropy than just a lifeless environment. Yet few would describe life as a "decay" of physical elements into self-replicating structures. This is not to say that the phenomena you describe doesn't exist, it's just to say that the laws of physics at the scale of statistical mechanics are far removed from high-level processes at the scale of human society.