Markowitz famously observes that “[e]very Social Conflict is the arena for three mutually antagonistic forces: the Establishment, the opposition which seeks to overthrow the existing Order and replace it with one of its own, and the tendency towards increased Social Entropy which all Social Conflict engenders….”; and it is certainly true that these three forces exist on both an individual level and on the level of the vast historical movement. (In fact these forces are at continual work within individuals, and on smaller scales as well, but the point is tangential.) Conflict, it should be added, is not a continual state in human affairs, though it is virtually so on the larger social scale; in communities, nation-states, and on the world stage. Now, the Establishment, so called, and its opposition are alike in that they are each trying to force a particular condition or set of conditions in the future to occur, and they are both ineffectual and impotent because Social Entropy assures that neither future will fully come to pass. Let us take an example.
The Roman Empire was a Hegemonic Establishment almost without parallel, and it exercised the full extent of its will toward the indefinite extension of the Empire through time and space, and the suppression of opposition forces; but it was unable to suppress Chaos, which is not a force and is the opposition of the Oopposition as well as the Establishment. One Opposition movement, that of the Jewish nationalists under the rule of Rome, sought to roll back the Empire in their tradition territories and restore their defunct kingdom. These mutually antagonistic forces collided and were in open and bloody conflict for decades; and in the short term, the Romans appeared to have defeated the Jewish nationalists, who were in fact obliterated and cast to the seven winds. But, in the longer term, through a series of unforeseeable events, set in motion by some decidedly minor individuals, a splinter of the Jewish nationalist movement became a tiny cult which soon achieved widespread popularity throughout the Roman Empire. And this movement, unpredictably transformed but still strongly Jewish in character, in turn transformed the Empire and became its imperial religion. In effect, Rome turned into its opposition, and then vanquished itself.
