Entropy of Law in a Closed Society

As an open, complex organized system, law cannot be effective in a closed, internally contradictory and nonlegal political system. The subordination of law to ideology and politics, characteristic for a “closed” society, inevitably deforms all elements of legal culture, giving rise to legal nihilism. The erosion of law, disregard for its ideals and values, fixed in the public consciousness, entails a negligent attitude to the law and the rule of law. Lack of understanding of the value of law generates unformed legal knowledge, limited skills of legal activity, and leads to the destruction of the legal system. Within the framework of the synergetic scientific paradigm applied to socio-legal models, it is possible to search solutions to the problems of the legal life of society, taking into account value orientations, behavioral models, interaction of norms, the state of legal consciousness and legal culture, determining in their unity the direction of development of society and the state. The interaction of these and other, less obvious, factors allows us to consider socio-legal processes as orderly and self-organizing, in which the role of external managerial (actually legislative) influence is significant, but not decisive. In a “closed” society, the law mediating the expression of power is not derived from public opinion. The legal system of a closed society, as a category reflecting all the legal phenomena existing in society and the entire legal reality, inevitably degrades to the standard state for closed systems and is reduced to positive law and its corresponding law enforcement, serving the interests of the ruling elites. The entropy of law in such a society is due to the immanence of conflict, the irremediable contradiction between positive law and real public interests.