  The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each
scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that
is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used
to describe the effectiveness of systems in self-regulation, the consequences
for failure have not been formalized. Here we use this law to consider the
internal dynamics of an unstructured system, and its response to a structured
environment. We find that, due to its inability to respond, a completely
unstructured system is inherently unstable to the formation of structure. And
in general, any system without structure above a certain scale is unable to
withstand structure arising above that scale. To describe complicated internal
dynamics, we develop a characterization of multiscale changes in a system. This
characterization is motivated by Shannon information theoretic ideas of noise,
but considers structured information. We then relate our findings to political
anarchism showing that society requires some organizing processes, even if
there is no traditional government or hierarchies. We also formulate our
findings as an inverse second law of thermodynamics; while closed systems
collapse into disorder, systems open to a structured environment spontaneously
generate order.
