Thermodynamics of Mind Control
How Donald Trump uses entropy as a strategy—and became our national amygdala.
Second Law of Thermodynamics:
Entropy (disorder) in a closed system always increases.
Clean Your Room!
The basic laws of thermodynamics are intuitive: Unless you put energy into a system, it tends to break down. We learn this from a young age. “Clean your room!” is the parental version of a lesson on entropy. The longer you wait, the worse it gets.
This core axiom holds true across all strata of reality: disorder is easier than order.
In this article, I will show how this essential property of reality helps unlock an understanding of destructive group dynamics demonstrated by MAGA and similar personalist cults. The mind, like any system, obeys the laws of energy and information. Order requires effort; disorder feeds on neglect.
What Is Mind?
The mind is not an easy thing to define, despite all of us having one. The reason is that the ontology of “mind” is a continuum from the physical to the metaphysical—from the machinery to the meaning.
Ontology, the philosophical study of being, is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality.
Here is a non-exclusive list of systems of meaning that help define the mind, from pure physics to pure thought:
Physics
Neuroscience
Linguistics/Cognitive Science
Psychiatry
Psychology
Philosophy
Politics
Ethics
Religion
Metaphysics
This is an intimidating list. As I’ve learned, there are a near-infinite number of ways to examine the mind—from the biochemistry of threat to the metaphysics of belief.
But what if there were a way to fuse these branches of thought into a single pattern that we could use across this whole continuum? I propose that there is.
If we think about each of these knowledge domains in simple thermodynamics terms—and what represents order versus disorder within them—a dualistic pattern emerges:
order : entropy
prefrontal cortex : amygdala
conscious : unconscious
executive control : threat reaction
ego : id
love : fear
growth : trauma
empathy : narcissism
humanism : authoritarianism
liberal : conservative
enlightenment : nihilism
moral : immoral
rational mysticism : occult delusion
good : evil
This dualism is not moral judgment; it is observation. It is not a phantom, or a mythopoetic metaphor. It is a reflection of a core truth about the mind, and about the way it can be controlled.
Thermodynamics of Mind
Thermodynamically, an individual or collective mind can move in only two directions: put energy into creating less entropy (more order), or put energy into adding entropy (more disorder). For example, imagine you want to get somewhere and you are given the following items: a car with an empty tank, a can of gasoline, and a matchbook. You can either add energy by putting gas in the tank and driving away, or you can add energy by pouring gas on the car and setting it on fire. You can create order, or you can create chaos.
Let me illustrate how this translates to politics and ideology through three of my favorite quotes. In each case, the speaker shows how disorder propagates from one ontological layer of the mind to another.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire (1765)
Voltaire was speaking against the tyrannical control of the Ancien Régime in 18th century France. The quote’s brilliance is the efficient connection it makes between two ontological layers of the mind: psychology and politics: If you add disorder to psychology, you get disorder in politics.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
—FDR (1933)
Here FDR was explicitly asserting that you can reverse political and economic disorder like the conditions of the Great Depression by reducing the emotion of fear. This is a neurological diagnosis—and a correct one. Fear is dominated by activity in the amygdala, the unconscious threat system. This reduces the ability of people to make correct personal and political decisions.
The New Deal, FDR’s program to ensure there was a basic social safety net for every American, was as much a neurological solution as a political one. Reducing the threat—of poverty, hunger, and destitution—gave the population the ability to reason. Creating order in the mind creates order in the streets.
“Evil… is the absence of empathy.”
—Gustave M. Gilbert (1947, Nuremberg Trials)
Gustave Gilbert and Hannah Arendt both noted in the aftermath of the Holocaust that the metaphysical idea of evil—entropy in its Platonic form—has a psychological parallel: the absence of empathy. This psychological deficit drove the most destructive political movement seen in world history. Both Gilbert and Arendt were showing how disorder travels fluidly from one system of meaning to another.
Entropy as Strategy
The brain is a thermodynamic system: it consumes energy to preserve cognitive order. Normally, this energy sustains distributed, complex thinking across multiple parts of the brain. When under threat, however, the brain becomes less efficient, less conscious, and more synchronized. It spends its energy creating a cognitive dictatorship instead of a pluralistic democracy of competing thoughts.
This is not a metaphor. When disorder enters the brain through external threat, the amygdala overrides the prefrontal cortex, centralizing control in the brain’s threat system. This internal synchrony—orienting cognition around a threat—propagates outward into behavior and, ultimately, belief.
When an entire nation becomes attuned to the threats of one man, the neural panic of his followers propagates instantly into the group behavior of millions, each amplifying the other. I call this mimetic synchrony—the tendency of a cult like MAGA to move as a school of fish rather than a political movement. It is not based on reason—it is based on threat.
In short, Donald Trump has become our national amygdala.
This is how the process operates at scale—a closed feedback loop of fear, projection, and validation that keeps the national nervous system in a state of crisis:
Donald Trump perceives a threat—anything that contradicts his personal reality: Epstein, Democrats, the legal system.
He projects that fear outward onto a new threat: Antifa, immigrants, “Democrat hoaxes,” narco-terrorists.
His followers’ brains process this threat as real, shutting down rational thought.
Trump interprets their panic as validation of his reality—and doubles down.
This system of externalized fear also explains how Trump is so easy to manipulate by his sycophants and hangers-on—people like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, among others. They present Trump with a threat, or a solution to one, and his own psychology does the work for them. Show him an old video of Portland burning down, get National Guard troops attacking American cities.
Fear Is an Entropy Detector
The emotion of fear can be seen as an entropy detector. It signals that disorder is entering your personal reality. A threat is a prediction vector for rising entropy in the system.
Disorder, chaos, entropy—call it what you want. It is the primary strategy of Donald Trump and his subservient government.
The United States, like any other system, obeys the laws of thermodynamics that govern a can of gasoline. You can handle it correctly and put it in a car, or you can choose to light a match.
But disorder is not a sustainable strategy. It is self-defeating by definition. As an energy source, fear burns hot and inefficiently—and ultimately burns out.
The dictator’s call for “law and order” mirrors the brain’s reaction to threat: the greater the chaos, the greater the craving for control. But it is not “order” being introduced—to the contrary.
True order is not passive or submissive. A well-ordered brain is complex, pluralistic, and rational—distributing energy across diverse circuitry and processes. This is just as true of a society, or a government.
Chaos is easy, lazy, and destructive. Order—real order—takes energy. “A democracy if you can keep it” is an 18th century warning that the laws of thermodynamics—whether in physics or politics—are inviolable.
“Order arises not in spite of entropy but because of the energy we spend to resist it.” — Ilya Prigogine, Nobel physicist
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