VIII. Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Ecosmocene CoCreativity

4. A Complementary Genocracy: me + We = US

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Noted more in Mindkind, a Queensland University of Technology computer scientist advises shows how a local neighborhood and planetwide connectivity can empower and foster a true citizens democracy, much beyond infrequent elections.

Bystydzienski, Jill and Joti Sekhon, eds. Democratization and Women’s Grassroots Movements. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999. Reports from many lands about the difficult struggle of women to achieve justice, empowerment and community in authoritarian and emerging societies.

Carney, Dana, et al. The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives. Political Psychology. 29/6, 2008. Among “political science” journals, this one offers a rare admission and study of these polar proclivities, which strongly divide into dual cerebral and personality archetypes. Social psychologists Dana Carney, John Jost, Samuel Gosling, and Jeff Potter cite such deep rootings for blue and red state options, so opposed in the 2012 election. And in the same journal, online November 2012, “Themes of Self-Regulation and Self-Exploration in the Life Stories of Religious American Conservatives and Liberals” touts the same categories. A popular note would be “Political Instincts,” New Scientist, November 3, 2012, which identifies this destructive contrast, which seems affect two party “democratic” nations on every continent.

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orientation has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a “Big Five” framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized. (Abstract)

Clark, John. Worlds Apart: Civil Society and the Battle for Ethical Globalization. Bloomfield, CT: Kumerian Press, 2003. A veteran NGO campaigner, mostly with Oxfam, seeks to mitigate the invasive, corrupt downside of global commerce with a “deliberative democracy” which would respect and empower local participants.

Dahl, Robert, et al. The Democracy Sourcebook. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. In this format, seven sections cover definitions, sources, culture and society, constitutions, presidents vs. parliaments, representation and interest groups. A final chapter delves into democracy and the global order.

Durante, Federica, et al. Ambivalent Stereotypes Link to Peace, Conflict, and Inequality across 38 Nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114/669, 2017. Nineteen scholars from the USA, Italy, Turkey, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Jordan, Switzerland, Egypt, Finland and France including Susan Fiske consider how the new Big Two personality model (search SF) might be beneficially applied onto national and cultural phases. It is suggested that the general, malleable agency and communion aspects can contribute vital insights which if appreciated could help mitigate internecine social strife here and everywhere (such as our own polar two party debacle).

Stereotypes reflect a society’s inequality and conflict, providing a diagnostic map of intergroup relations. This map depicts the prime, relative warmth (friendly, sincere) and competence (capable, skilled) behavioral cast of each group. Some societal clusters are high on both (positive “us”) vs. low on both (negative “them”). Other societies, including the United States, have us-them clusters with variance (high on one dimension, low on the other). This cross-national study shows peace-conflict predicts ambivalence. Extremely peaceful and conflictual nations both display unambivalent us-them patterns, whereas intermediate peace-conflict predicts high ambivalence. Inequality and intermediate peace-conflict each use ambivalent stereotypes, explaining complicated intergroup relations and maintaining social system stability. (Significance)

Edsall, Thomas. What Happens if the Gender Gap Becomes a Gender Chasm? New York Times. July 12, 2018. A commentator on politics, demographics and inequality writes a clear delineation of American governmental culture as ultimately defined, and compromised in terms of male and female identities. According to Jane Goodall, Christopher Boehm, Dan McAdams, Steven Pinker, and others, Donald Trump is a primate Alpha male with bombastic, abusive displays, which appeal to men but are abhorrent to emphatic women. Problematic issues such as gun control and climate change can only be understood and resolved if we become aware of this fundamental polarity. More than Republican conservative or Democrat liberal, the reason that elections in the USA, and everywhere, split 50-50 trying to get one winner is their basis in these gender archetypes.

Feng, Michelle and Mason Porter. Persistent Homology of Geospatial Data: A Case Study with Voting. arXiv:1902.05911. UCLA mathematicians first show how this topological method along with simplicial complexes (see below) can help distinguish network phenomena. They proceed to apply this view to actual election patterns and find even such social intensity to take on a typical dynamic network formation.

A crucial step in the analysis of persistent homology is transformation of data into a simplicial complex. We present two new methods for constructing simplicial complexes from two-dimensional geospatial data (such as maps). We apply these methods to a California precinct-level voting data set to show that our new version can capture geometric characteristics that are missed by distance-based constructions and yield more interpretable persistence modules. In particular, they are able to distinguish short-persistence features that occur only for a narrow range of distance scales (local voting behaviors) from short-persistence noise by incorporating information about other spatial relationships between precincts. (Abstract edit)

Although we tailored our methods to yield improvements for the particular problem of detecting voting patterns from Shapefile data, one can use an adjacency construction on data sets with a network structure, and the level-set construction is appropriate for any type of 2D manifold data. More generally, given the ubiquity of 2D spatial data, the insights that we highlighted with the voting application are relevant for a broad range of problems, including transportation networks, spatial demography, granular materials, many structures in biology, and others. (19)

Persistent homology is a method for computing topological features of a space at different spatial resolutions. More persistent features are detected over a wide range of spatial scales and are deemed more likely to represent true features of the underlying space. In mathematics, a simplicial complex is a set composed of points, line segments, triangles, and their n-dimensional counterparts. (Wikipedia)

Fiske, Susan. Political Cognition Helps Explain Social Class Divides: Two Dimensions of Candidate Impressions, Group Stereotypes, and Meritocracy Beliefs. Cognition. 188/108, 2019. The Princeton University psychologist and prolific, collegial author and editor contributes to this 21st century shift from Five to Two prime agency/communion personality traits. Indeed, new names and definitions are a work in progress for this major advance, as the first Abstract alludes. See also her companion paper Stereo Content: Warmth and Competence Endure in Current Directions in Psychological Science (27/2, 2018, second Abstract). But as this Organic Democracy section tries to document (Abele, Ybarra, et al), a salutary distinction of complementary bigender archetypes still awaits. See for example Geert Hofstede, et al (2010) for glimpses of a me individual and We group reciprocity.

As a commentary, within our universe to human website compass, similar versions are in current ascent across a wide range such as particle/wave in physics, matter/symbol in neuroscience (Gazzaniga 2018 for both), conserve/create, more/less order cerebral chimeras, self-organized criticalities (Chialvo, Kauffman, et al) and so on. Might our nascent sapiensphere which learns on her/his bicameral own, closing on truth and a hopefully clearer 2020 vision, be at last able to realize nature’s own familial genetic DNA/AND code?

Political cognitions as impressions and stereotypes along two fundamental dimensions of social evaluations play a role in explaining social class divides and resentments. First, the Big Two dimensions (warmth/communion and competence/agency) describe candidate, personal, and group perception. Various evidence from social psychology, political science, and sociology indicates common beliefs that support cross-class dichotomies. Anticipated by systematic theories, these cognitions (impressions, stereotypes, beliefs) help explain the populist and nativist antagonisms in current political discourse which result in polarized, dysfunctional politics. (first Abstract excerpt)

Two dimensions persist in social cognition when people are making sense of individuals or groups. The stereotype content model (SCM) perceives these two basic dimensions as warmth (trustworthiness, friendliness) and competence (capability, assertiveness). Measured reliably and validly, these Big Two modes converge across survey, cultural, laboratory, and biobehavioral approaches. The SCM proposes and tests a comprehensive causal theory: Evident social structure (cooperation, status) predicts stereotypes (warmth, competence), which in turn base emotional prejudices (pride, pity, contempt, envy), and finally, the emotions cast discrimination (active and passive help and harm). (second Abstract)

Florini, Ann. The Coming Democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. The project director for New Approaches to Global Governance contends that while many nations are beset by economic, security and environmental problems, advances in electronic communication is creating a worldwide transparency and free sharing of information which if properly implemented can provide viable common solutions.

Galesic, Mirta and Daniel Stein. Statistical Physics Models of Belief Dynamics. arXiv:1706.02287. The Chair of Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute and a NYU mathematican discern a novel cross-connection between these disparate domains such that political and cultural conceptions can be quantified as agents which interact in the shape of spin-glass physics, network topologies and more. However a realization awaits, which could not be more obvious, that electoral polarities naturally hold to a particle/ wave, me/We complementarity. This week in February 2019 a senate election in North Carolina was so 50/50 close, and tainted, that it has to be done over.

We build simple computational models of belief dynamics within the framework of discrete-spin statistical physics models, and explore how suitable they are for understanding and predicting real-world belief change on both the individual and group levels. We find that accurate modeling of real-world patterns requires attending to social interaction rules that people use, network structures in which they are embedded, distributions of initial beliefs and intrinsic preferences, and the relative importance of social information and intrinsic preferences. We find that simple statistical physics-based models contain predictive value for real-world belief dynamics and enable empirical tests of different assumptions about the underlying network structure and the social interaction rules.

Geier, Fabian, et al. The Physics of Governance Networks: Critical Transitions in Contagion Dynamics on Multilayer Adaptive Networks Applied to the Sustainable Use of Renewable Resources. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 228/2357, 2019. Complexity scientists from Germany and Sweden mainly at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research including Jurgen Kurths and Jonathon Donges, apply the latest theories as they focus on a common tendency to seek and reach an optimum reciprocal balance. By our natural philoSophia view, collective human ingenuity begins to realize a universal mathematic dynamics which underlie and guide our historic, societal affairs. In regard, by a 21st century revelation and revolution could align with life’s complementary preference, rather than mutual conflict. See also Governance Networks in Public Administration and Policy by Christopher Koliba, et al, eds. (Routledge, 2018) which advocates an avail of complex adaptive systems.

Adaptive networks can serve to model phenomena such as contagion and spreading dynamics, critical transitions and complex structure formation. Here, we study multilayer adaptive networks with dynamic node states and present an application to the governance of sustainable resource use. We focus on a three layer model, where a governance network interacts with a social network of resource users which in turn interacts with an ecological network of renewable resources. Our results uncover mechanisms which lead to emergent critical transitions in contagion dynamics and show how they can be analyzed and understood with relevance complex adaptive systems from physics and epidemiology to sociology and global sustainability science. (Abstract excerpts)

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