“Cultures are societies which produce little disorder – what doctors call ‘entropy’ – and tend to remain indefinitely as they originally were: which is why they look to us like societies that lack both history and progress. Whereas our societies, those corresponding to modern civilizations, are powered by a difference of electrical pressure, as it were, expressed in various forms of social hierarchy. Such societies have managed to establish within them a social imbalance which they use to produce both much greater order – we have societies that work like machines – and much greater disorder, much less entropy, in relations between people.”

“The study of human experience glitters with imaginative and insightful approaches—Marxist modes of production, Levi-Straussian structures, Weberian verstehen, the Batesonian mind, and many others, all of which share one characteristic: they pertain to no common universe; most are untranslatable one to another.”

— Richard Adams (1988), The Eight Day (pg. xiv)