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lasting peace won't be the heaven on earth that one might wish for either. 
Instead, we are on the cusp of an eternal purgatory. It will be a world full of 
confusion and instability. The age of entropy will be a time of restless 
disorder, an aimless but forceful hostility to the status quo -- a hostility that 
inspires the pervasive use of the dismissive prefixes anti- and post- (as in 
anti-Western, post-American, postmodern) and the promise to reinvent 
much or all of the present global order and its associated institutions. But 
the hope that getting rid of "what is" will by itself spawn something new 
and workable to take its place is just that, mere hope. In his Delphic 
interview with Time, former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi put it this 
way: "The world is now much more difficult than it was during your 
revolution. It's even more difficult. The world. More complicated, 
complex, difficult. It's a spaghetti-like structure. It's mixed up." None of 
this is to suggest that we will inhabit a miserable world of endless gloom 
and doom, that we and future generations are fated to endure wretched 
lives of perpetual unhappiness. Although we can't reverse the process of 
information overload, we can figure out how best to adapt, and maybe even 
learn how to turn floods of information into useful and reliable knowledge. 
There are no strategies that can guarantee success. But the focus should be 
on creating decentralized and self-organizing networks that are capable of 
responding to rapidly changing environments. 
The age of entropy will not be a utopia, but it need not bring us to despair. 
Disorder does not suppress all that is good in the world. Without great 
wars, we have enjoyed prosperous and peaceful times. Nor is disorder itself 
something to fear or loathe. "The struggle itself," as Albert Camus 
famously pointed out, "is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine 
Sisyphus happy." Like Sisyphus, we need to embrace the unknowable, to 
accept our unintelligible world and our futile struggle to come to terms 
with its incomprehensibility. For better or worse, we have no other choice. 
RANDALL L. SCHWELLER is a professor of political science at the Ohio 
State University and author of Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple: 
Global Discord in the New Millennium (Johns Hopkins University Press, 
2014), from which this essay is adapted. 
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