The Cybernetics of the Chosen People: A Homeostatic System

Cybernetics is the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. But it is also the study of society. A society is a system held together by the transmission of messages. If the messages are clear, the society survives. If the messages are corrupted by noise, the society dissolves into entropy.

When I examine the Jewish Identity Formation during the Babylonian Exile, I am looking at a masterpiece of social engineering. I am looking at a system designed to maintain homeostasis (stability) in an environment of maximum entropy (disorder/exile).

The Problem of Social Entropy

Entropy is the tendency of nature to degrade the organized into the unorganized. For a small ethnic group exiled to a massive empire like Babylon, “assimilation” is just another word for entropy. It is the dissolution of the distinct structure into the background noise. The natural fate of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel was entropy. They assimilated. Their information pattern was lost.

The Jews of the Southern Kingdom faced the same threat. To survive, they needed to build a machine—a social machine—that could resist this decay. They needed a system with negative entropy (negentropy). That machine was the Torah.

The Torah as a Feedback Loop

In any control system, you need a “Set Point” (the desired state) and a “Feedback Loop” (to correct deviations).

• Set Point: The Covenant (Holiness/Separation).
• Sensor: The Law (Halakha).
• Effector: The Community Discipline.

The Ezra and Nehemiah Reforms were the calibration of this machine. Consider the dietary laws (Kashrut). From a cybernetic perspective, these are not religious rituals; they are information filters. They create a high-frequency feedback loop. Every time a Jew eats, they receive a signal: “I am distinct. I am separate.” If you eat with the “nations,” the signal-to-noise ratio drops. You start to absorb their information patterns (culture). By strictly regulating input (food/marriage), the system maintains its internal order.

Moral Dualism as Binary Code

The note on Moral Dualism describes the conflict between Asha (Truth) and Druj (The Lie). In information theory, we deal with binary digits: 0 and 1. To transmit a message clearly over a noisy channel, you need a code that clearly distinguishes signal from noise. Zoroastrian dualism provided this binary clarity.

• Asha = 1 (Signal)
• Druj = 0 (Noise)

By adopting this binary worldview, the Jews hardened their system against ambiguity. There was no “gray area.” You were either with God or with the Idols. You were either observing the Sabbath or you were breaking it. This high-contrast coding is essential for transmission over long periods of time. Analog signals degrade; digital signals (binary) can be copied perfectly. The “Portable Identity” was a digital identity. It could be copied from Jerusalem to Babylon to Rome without losing fidelity.

The Prophets as Error-Correction Mechanisms

A system without error correction will eventually drift. In the cybernetic model of Israel, the Prophets functioned as the error-correction mechanism. When the system drifted away from the Set Point (idolatry, injustice), the Prophet acted as a high-gain amplifier. He screamed the error signal. “You have strayed! Return!” The concept of Teshuvah (Repentance) is literally “Return”—it is the negative feedback that brings the system back to the Set Point.

The destruction of the Temple was interpreted not as system failure, but as a massive error signal. “We failed to follow the code, so the hardware was destroyed.” This interpretation saved the software. Instead of discarding the code (abandoning Yahweh), they debugged it. They patched the vulnerabilities (intermarriage, lax observance) and rebooted the system in Exile.

The Human Use of Human Beings

However, we must ask: What is the cost of such a rigid system? In my book The Human Use of Human Beings, I warn against rigid control systems that reduce humans to ants in a colony. A system that is too stable, too homeostatic, loses the ability to learn. It becomes a fossil.

The danger of the “Chosen People” cybernetics is that it can become a closed loop. If the feedback only comes from inside the system (Torah), and never from the outside world (Science, Art, other cultures), the system suffers from “thermal death.” It runs out of new information. The genius of Jewish history is that it managed to be an open system disguised as a closed system. It took in energy and information from the outside (Persian dualism, Greek philosophy, Arabic science) but processed it through its own internal logic.

Personal Reflection

We are all steering. That is the root of the word cybernetics (kubernetes - steersman). We are all trying to steer our little boats of identity against the overwhelming tide of entropy. The modern world is a Babylon of noise. We are bombarded with so much information that we are losing our form. We are dissolving.

We can learn from this ancient cybernetic experiment. We don’t need to become religious zealots, but we do need “Set Points.” We need to define who we are and what we value, and we need feedback loops to tell us when we are drifting. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. The Jews survived because they knew who they were. They possessed the information of their own identity, and they built a mechanism to transmit it to their children, generation after generation, with high fidelity. In the age of the machine, this is the ultimate human victory: to remain human in the face of the noise.