What Entropy Can Predict About the Future of Authoritarianism

“And now we must act in complete unity, strongly against anyone who is trying to shut down our strength, the unity of our nation!” The crowd of thousands gathered, against the backdrop of a grey sky in late December, to listen to their president’s declaration. Though they had heard all of this from him before, they enthusiastically cheered him on, raising placards plastered with his image. 

Until the moment arrived when the cheering stopped, the mood of the crowd turned. Insults were thrown, “Down with the dictator!” The audience rushed the building where the president stood on the balcony, visibly stunned and confused. Pulled into the building by his bodyguards he, along with his wife, fled the capital city by helicopter.

This was the final public speech made by Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Communist Ruler of Romania, the second — and ultimately the last — leader of the Romanian regime. Within a week, a 60-year-long regime collapsed.

This is what happens when what used to work just doesn’t work anymore. This is what maximum entropy looks like: a prolonged moment of complete vulnerability, a weakness devoid of protection.

It’s the political underbelly of all regimes.

Entropy is the probability that, in the lifecycle of a system, there will be measurable periods of time of uncertainty and unpredictability. Though born in the world of physics and its second law of thermodynamics, entropy is a concept that’s applied to many disciplines — from economics to information theory to politics. Anywhere there is a system that follows a pattern of behavior, that behavior will swing like a pendulum, back and forth, between periods of function and those uncertain and unpredictable periods of dysfunction. 

If you can recognize what it takes to disrupt a functioning system, you can see that these systems, regimes and their political leaders are vulnerable to collapse.

“We will never give in, we will never give up, we will never back down, and we will never, ever, ever surrender. We will fight, fight, fight. We will win, win, win because we are Americans and our hearts bleed red, white, and blue.” Those words are so similar in tone to Ceaușescu’s, yet they didn’t prompt anyone to turn on their speaker. This crowd cheered and rooted on President Trump as he spoke in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 3, 2025.

For a system to maintain its existence, including political systems like a regime, it needs energy — in the form of rhetoric, or repression of others, or some other type of manipulation that benefits those who have the most power — so that its swings into functional periods will last longer than its swings into dysfunctional periods. These are the times when entropy is low. Yet, when there is a swing into a dysfunctional period, there then needs to be a reserve of energy that can quickly push the regime’s pendulum back to the functional side. It’s a constant balancing act.

When a system is relatively new, like the Trump regime, there’s a lot of energy that keeps its pendulum slowly swinging on the functional side. The cult of personality is turned all the way up, and there is hardly any chance of a prolonged state of entropy. 

But, as it is in the lifecycle of all systems, as time passes, a regime’s pendulum swing will begin to have diminishing returns. That’s what is meant by “what used to work just doesn’t work anymore.” By the time Ceaușescu gave his final speech, he’d been president for 21 years and his country’s citizens never experienced any “strength” nor “unity in their nation,” only a deficiency of food, fuel, and medicine. Due to a culmination of factors, his regime was falling apart. For years Ceaușescu had been an effective orator, but his complete disregard for, and detachment from the reality of, the Romanian citizens was wearing thin, and his public didn’t care to hear from him, nor did they believe him anymore. 

Ceaușescu knew he’d gone down the wrong path of rhetoric right in the moment. So after five minutes of unrest, as his audience was corralled, he started talking about wage and pension increases for the people. But instead of energizing the dysfunctional to swing back to functional, his words appeared to make the situation worse.

It’s diminishing returns like that which helped to deliver his authoritarian regime into maximum entropy, where believability and trust in Ceaușescu’s words contained little to no functional energy, and the roar of the crowd energized the dysfunction to such an extreme that it basically broke that entire social system.

Though entropy is routinely used as a synonym for disorder, it’s really about the measurement of the probability that that disorder will occur. This word-nerd distinction is important because it’s not about if the disorder and dysfunction will happen, it’s all about how soon and for how long that period of dysfunction will be.

We ourselves experience bouts of entropy, feeling rundown after a period of not enough rest. As we get older, we too see diminishing returns when we don’t quite bounce back like we used to. Each scar contributes more friction. In our aging process, no matter our genetics or possessing the means to live a “healthy” life, at some point, each of us is going to reach maximum entropy. There are countless paths to it.

But for authoritarian regimes, there are four prominent gateways to maximum entropy.

1. 1. When They Mishandle Information: Communication as Entropy
      Manipulation of information is a hallmark trait of any authoritarian regime, and it’s a daily battle to combat the onset of entropy amongst the multitude of information channels that exist in the 21st century. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has managed the information distribution in his regime, a playbook Trump appears to be following. Eliminating government funding for public information resources and critical thinking institutions in and out of academia is a necessary step early on for any dictator, but Trump doubled-down.Trump didn’t just massively cut public access to information, he also proclaimed (via an executive order) that he would “restore truth and sanity in American history,” by removing “improper ideology” from federal sites and institutions such as The Smithsonian. This autocratic legalism restricts freedom of thought and behavior through pre-meditated legal maneuvering.Yet, for every action that a regime expends energy in an attempt to avoid an entropic moment, the more opportunities that it may have the opposite effect. When a regime’s leader crosses that indefinable line, their own words can take them down. In 2021, well into the global pandemic with a daily death toll higher than other countries, Brazil’s President Bolsonaro told a crowd, “Stop all this fussing and whining. How long are you going to keep on crying?” Remarks like these contributed to his reelection loss in 2022.As the definition of free speech is manipulated and steam-rolled by Trump, independent journalism offers a glimmer of hope. Even in Orbán’s Hungary, online media like Telex and Partizán exist, relying on reader donations (much like DAME) to spotlight political opposition. This, coupled with the overzealous pace of our democratic backslide, may be the energy needed to swing Trump’s rhetoric into a period where entropy starts to rise.
   2. When They Have No Backup Plan: Succession as Entropy
      A regime’s penetrable succession plan is a potentially lethal entropic event. Stalin’s death in 1953, without a stated successor, led to a three-year power struggle in the Soviet Union between four strongmen (including one who was executed while in office), eventually settling on Khrushchev. Over the next ten years the swings into entropic periods became increasingly frequent.Similarly, in 2011, Kim Jong-il’s death nearly destabilized North Korea. His son, Kim Jong Un, untested in a leadership role, was appointed as Supreme Commander. To secure his authority and ultimately hold back the regime from slipping towards maximum entropy, Kim Jong Un eliminated two of his uncles, one by assassination and the other by conviction of counter-revolutionary acts and subsequent execution. Many of their aides also met violent ends.Not wanting history to repeat itself, Kim Jong Un’s daughter has been by his side for most official appearances these past few years, an anticipatory move to impede a possible quick fall into maximum entropy upon his own death, given his paternal line’s history of heart disease.Self-evident authoritarian regimes are not alone in these succession issues. Electoral autocracies, where a regime holds democratic elections that may be more performative than by the book, are susceptible, too. When those types of regimes also have aging, long-serving leaders, such as Cameroon or Turkey, they face high levels of entropy when a democratic succession is not guaranteed.
   3. When Their Team Deserts Them: Internal Upheaval as Entropy
      The most probable contributor to a regime’s collapse into maximum entropy is an authoritarian’s sycophants becoming turncoats. Dictators like Italy’s Mussolini and Libya’s Gaddafi neglected the ongoing maintenance of their political stooges, thereby sacrificing their support and protection.One way for a regime leader to head-off future internal unrest is to consolidate the power of those close to him, and to do that sooner than later in their rule. Trump, under the guise of merit-based awardments, has assigned multiple roles to individual cabinet members.By fractioning responsibilities across departments, his act of meritocracy is self-serving. A coup is harder to pull off when a cabinet secretary’s attention is split between the multiple departments they manage, departments which may have competing needs.The more extreme version of an internal betrayal occurs when a regime’s military turns on its leader. The 21st century has seen nearly 50 coups, most of which have been military-led, from Ecuador in 2000, Egypt in 2011, Nigeria in 2023.Both successful and failed coup attempts (of which there are more) expose a regime’s sensitive underbelly of maximum entropy, allowing an exploitation of weakness. Whether successful or not, the energy required to overthrow a regime sets off its own pendulum swing of progressively depleting actions.
   4. When It Starts to Implode: Self-Destruction as Entropy
      The most ironic antidote for an authoritarian regime’s long-term survivability is what they all shun: diversity. A political regime, like any ecosystem, becomes more vulnerable over time if its homogeneity increases. That alone gives energy to an entropic rise.Structurally, a dictator-led monoculture presents many benefits for those in charge, not least of which is that management can be streamlined and resource allocation of public services — health, food, even entertainment — can be mechanized on a large scale.
      
      Yet, vulnerability to a system can come swiftly, as it’ll lack the buffering capacity for cohesive adaptation when conditions will, naturally, change. Similar to a farm planting only one crop, a lack of diversity increases susceptibility to disease or a crisis overtaking an entire population. Public resilience during an unexpected adverse event relies on “functional redundancy”: a greater capacity and network of people with varied skillsets.
      
      When diversity in thought and expression is forbidden in government, maximum entropy often manifests as an economic crisis. In mid-20th century Argentina, Perón’s economic nationalism was characterized by domestic siloing, rejection of open trade and high tariffs. These actions were a major contribution to the fall of Perón’s (first) regime, and the ongoing game of tariff roulette may have the same effect on Trump’s as well.
      
   5. When Entropy Is a Bellwether
      For those of us experiencing the daily impact of Trump’s regime, it’s apparent that our democratic system of government has ventured into gaps of loopholes over the past eight months. Yet, by being familiar with the entropic process of a regime, we can better anticipate and recognize when any of its inherent weaknesses, that underbelly of authoritarianism, will be exposed. We can choose not only where to place our energy within this system, but also when to act for the greatest impact by recognizing the behavioral actions that precede a regime’s descent into vulnerability.