Almost everything dies¹; people, organisms, organizations, even civilizations³. Why? A college mate recently shared an episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast on aging featuring Nobel Laureate Dr. Venkataraman Ramakrishnan. The episode is a fascinating one to view or listen to in its entirety. I will paraphrase a bit extensively from the (AI generated) episode summary here:

There is a rather rich vein to mine for gold here on parallels to death of societies and organizations. When Dr. Ramakrishnan says that death is “irreversible loss of that individual's ability to function as a coherent whole”, it is an apt definition for organizational and societal decay and death. The demise of civilizations as wide ranging as the Indus Valley (3300 - 1300 BC), the Akkadians (2300 - 2190 BC), the Incas or the ancient Romans are all attributed to not one single cause but an accumulation of damage much like living organisms. Very few companies survive past a few decades for the exact same reason.

Entropy dictates that, left to itself, any system will naturally degrade toward the lowest energy state and highest disorder. Humans are not closed systems; we exist in an open environment, utilizing external energy (from the sun/food) to maintain biological order, complexity, and repair cellular damage. So do societies. It takes energy and intention to maintain order. While life uses this energy for maintenance such as repairing DNA, clearing out defective cells, and maintaining tissue, this process is never perfectly efficient. According to the second law of thermodynamics, there is always energy loss during conversion, meaning the repair mechanisms themselves have inefficiencies. And for societies and civilizations, the maintenance of values and norms (codified as laws) requires energy and is not perfectly efficient. It takes a lot of skill and energy to build and maintain things and very little to destroy it or as Sam Rayburn so pithily explained “Any jackass can kick a barn down but it takes a carpenter to build it”. There is a lot of kicking down of barns going on lately.

Because these maintenance processes aren't perfect, the system inevitably experiences a slow, cumulative decay. This explains why aging is a complex, “multifactorial” process of unraveling rather than a single, sudden biological switch. And such is the case with societies. Corruption in societies can be treated as the equivalent of leakage and friction energy loss in a system. I was reminded of this with the recent protests by the satirically named Cockroach Janata Party in India : India's youth-led "Cockroach Movement" forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, driven by anger over massive entrance exam leaks and high unemployment. The movement, which satirically re-appropriated an insulting remark by a senior official into a symbol of protest, saw thousands of youth engage in mass demonstrations in New Delhi. This brings me to a couple of other parallels between organisms and societies. Even from the moment of conception aging begins. Cells are programmed to die once they are past their usefulness.²

Senescent cells says Dr. Ramakrishnan, are damaged cells that stop dividing and no longer perform as designed, but don’t die. Instead, they cause inflammation and over time the damage they cause compounds. .

Late-stage civilizations become clogged with "senescent" entities too. Vested interests, bloated bureaucracies, and layers upon layers of regulations that no longer generate real value. Because these institutions refuse to "die" or yield resources to newer initiatives, they consume vast amounts of energy and are sources of systemic friction.

Dr. Ramakrishnan notes that when generational turnover slows down in a society, power, wealth, and influence concentrate in an aging establishment. This stifles young thinkers who are essential for fresh, out-of-the-box approaches. In Stewart Brand’s Pace Layering model, healthy complex systems rely on fast-moving layers (Art, Fashion, Commerce) to experiment and innovate, balanced by slow-moving layers (Governance, Culture) that provide continuity. Experimentation and fresh ideas are a necessary element of a healthy society. When those are thwarted, the civilization grows intellectually rigid, unable to reframe its problems or respond to novel external shocks. At the same time, if “jackasses” tamper with the foundational layers (as Rayburn indicated), the society does not recover fast enough to a stable and healthy state. Both are problematic. The rejuvenation of societies and civilizations depends on their youth and stable supporting structures.