Opening and closing in open systems

After considering some phenomena of collective behavior, this paper suggests an amendment to the open social system model. Only under some conditions does a pluralistic society approximate J. S. Mill's description of the free market of ideas. A more accurate picture is continual oscillation between relative openness and closedness—resilient adjustment to intakes of information and states of entropy. When such oscillations are more fully analyzed as information games, we may better understand how open systems work, as well as such phenomena as ethnic revivalism, cultic movements, backlashes, mass contagions, fads, and fashion cycles.