VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

4. A Natural Genocratic Complementarity: me + We = US

Liu, Wei, et al. The precursor of the critical transitions in majority vote model with the noise feedback from the vote layer. arXiv: 2307:11398. This entry by Xian University, Beijing Normal University and Chinese Academy of Sciences physicists is a good example of how an integration of statistical physics theory to social situations can reveal deep formative principles at work. Their novel worldwise knowledge, if realized and availed, could advise a much better, middle balance.

In this paper, we investigate phase transitions in the Majority-Vote model coupled with noise layers of different structures. We examine the Square lattice and Random-regular networks, as well as their combinations, for both vote layers and noise layers. Our findings reveal the presence of independent third-order phase transitions in all cases, and dependent third-order transitions when critical transitions occur. This suggests that dependent third-order transitions may serve as precursors to critical transitions in non-equilibrium systems. Furthermore, we observe that when the structure of the vote layers is local, the coupling between the vote layer and the noise layer leads to the absence of critical phenomena.

Phase transitions exist widely in nature. From traditional materials to the biological flock, both of equilibrium and non-equilibrium critical transitions show similar scaling behaviors in the same universality classes[1, 2]. The transition from a disordered configuration to an ordered state in social systems such as opinion formation, cultural dynamics, language dynamics has attracted much attention in recent years as well[3]. Near the critical point, the social systems exhibit
a quick response to external disturb or the avalanche effect. Hence, predetermination of the critical points or the location of the points should be of significance. (1)

Lopez, Shane and C. R. Snyder, eds. Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A 700 page second edition of this premier source as it moves beyond prior, albeit necessary, concerns for psychic maladies to cover self and social enhancement over behavioral, lifespan, emotion, cognitive, interpersonal, biological, coping strategies, and other aspects. Typical chapters are “Toward a Science of Mental Health” by Corey Keyes, and “Curiosity and Interest: The Benefits of Thriving on Novelty and Challenge” by Todd Kashdan and Paul Silva.

The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology is the seminal reference in the field of positive psychology, which in recent years has transcended academia to capture the imagination of the general public. The handbook provides a roadmap for the psychology needed by the majority of the population - those who don't need treatment but want to achieve the lives to which they aspire. These 65 chapters summarize all of the relevant literature in the field. The content's breadth and depth provide an unparalleled cross-disciplinary look at positive psychology from diverse fields and all branches of psychology, including social, clinical, personality, counseling, school, and developmental psychology. Topics include not only happiness but also hope, strengths, positive emotions, life longings, creativity, emotional creativity, courage, and more, plus guidelines for applying what has worked for people across time and cultures.

Lopez, Shane, et al, eds. Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2015. This comprehensive textbook champions a 21st century movement in this field to turn from an initial emphasis on pathologies, maladies, and dysfunctions to getting on with personal and social well-being, enjoyment, and service. An especial chapter on “Eastern and Western Perspectives on Positive Psychology” proposes the same capsule we had earlier used this site: me + We = US. This complementary of free individual and interdependent group, long embodied by Yin, Yang and Tao, is so obvious if we just might think about it. Altogether now a truly viable life style, neighborhood, and nation can be achieved. As the quotes notes, the authors make a vital distinction between West and East. While “me” wants each day to be better, “We” people abide in a dynamic harmony. In a creative union, difficult day will be followed by a good time.

“A good fortune may forebode a bad luck, which may in turn disguise a good fortune.” This Chinese proverb exemplifies the Eastern perspective that the world and its inhabitants are in a perpetual state of flux. Thus, just as surely as good times occur, so, to, will bad times visit us. This expectation of and desire for balance distinguishes Eastern’ views of optimal function from the more linear path taken by Westerners to resolve problems and monitor progress. Ever adaptive and mindful, Easterners move with the cycle of life until the change process becomes natural and enlightenment (i.e., being able to see things clearly for what they are) is achieved.

Luders, Eileen, et al. Parasagittal Asymmetries of the Corpus Callosum. Cerebral Cortex. 16/3, 2006. UCLA and University of Zurich neuropsychologists including Eric Zaidel avail 21st century MRI imaging methods and enhanced computer analysis to gain novel insights into the central role of this significant bundle of fibers connecting the complementary brain hemispheres. Among the results reported, additional proof is given for the gender tendencies of a main left side emphasis in males, while female brains tend to evenly balance left and right modes. We add that this increasingly verified finding ought to be appreciated as a major scientific distinction and discovery. It is commonly held that men deal in dots, but miss connections. But women do not employ, as long defined, only a right bias of sensitive, “irrational,” holistic emotions, rather both competitive entity and cooperative empathy are equally integrated.

In regard, a popular quip nowadays is that if Lehman Brothers were Sisters, they would not have gone bankrupt through reckless, myopic, self-serving investments. Might one obvious use be to view the United States “bicameral” two party government, “two sides of the aisle,” as similar to brain hemispheres that are trapped in gridlock opposition. A true organic, intelligent democracy would join both right Republican “me” individual with left Democratic “We” community. A worldwide bilateral brain, and her/his genesis universe discovery, would thus be much more feminine in natural kind and in humane peacefulness.

The present study revealed distinctive and extensive asymmetries in the anterior body and additionally in a small and less significant region in the anterior third of the CC of males. In contrast, asymmetry in females was less significant in general and applied to smaller callosal regions in the anterior body, in the anterior third and additionally at the border between the isthmus and splenium. (352) Our findings are of particular interest considering previous results which indicated that right-handed males show significantly different depths of the central sulcus in the two hemispheres, whereas no interhemispheric asymmetry was found in females. Similarly, functional imaging revealed sex differences in peri-rolandic asymmetries in a tactile discrimination task, where females predominantly activated both premotor cortices but males showed an asymmetric activation. (352)

Madron, Roy and John Jopling. Gaian Democracies. Devon, UK: Green Books, 2003. The book is a Schumacher Society Briefing subtitled: Redefining Globalization and People-Power. The dominant Global Monetocracy is locked in a terminal spiral of destroying people and consuming the earth. A radical alternative based on the organic principles of complex interconnected systems such as shared purposes, ecological sustainability, networking, full participation, and an openness to change. A companion website is the Worldwide Democracy Network: www.wwdemocracy.org.

Maner, Jon. Dominance and Prestige: A Tale of Two Hierarchies. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 26/6, 2017. A Florida State University psychologist contributes to a growing perception that dual but often oppositional social styles are in wide existence. Within these title terms, the “Dominance” mode is narcissist, aggressive, uses coercive, intimidates, rules by fear, while Prestige favors agreement, relations, empathy, respect, and so on. Examples are given as Dani warriors in New Guinea and Donald Trump, or Tsimane communities in Bolivia and Martin Luther King. See also his 2016 chapter Dominance and Prestige: Dual Strategies for Social Hierarchies in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 54), and a 2019 paper A Dual Model of Leadership and Hierarchy by Mark Van Vugt and Jennifer Smith, below.

Dominance and prestige represent evolved strategies used to navigate social hierarchies. Dominance is a strategy through which people gain and maintain social rank by using coercion, intimidation, and power. Prestige people gain and maintain social rank by displaying valued knowledge and skills and earning respect. The current article synthesizes recent research about differences between dominance- versus prestige-oriented individuals, including personality traits and emotions, strategic behaviors in social interactions, leadership mores, and physiological correlates of both behaviors. The article also reviews effects that dominance versus prestige has on the functioning and well-being of social groups. (Abstract)

McManus, Matthew. Liberal Socialism Now. Aeon Magazine. February, 2024. A University of Michigan political scientist posts a popular review of his thought and writings which have come to advocate an egalitarian reciprocity of personal and communal welfare. He notes how these polar options which have jostled each other through history are often misunderstood and ill defined. In our hyper-stressed moment it is imperative that an obvious middle way complementarity be considered.

The idea of ‘liberal socialism’ might appear odd and opposite. This would be true for those on the Right and the Left who regard liberalism as market capitalism. We must now make an effort to retrieve its historic theory and make the case for a new salience in the 21st century (see also my forthcoming book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism). The composite phrase is a political ideology that combines support for many liberal institutions and rights with a socialist desire to establish far more equitable and democratic economic arrangements.

Nevertheless, all liberal socialists are committed to three central principles. First, they value (both) collectivism and normative individualism and believe that the wellbeing and free development of individual persons is a moral priority along with their embeddedness in society. Secondly, liberal socialists are committed to each person having an equal opportunity to lead a good life through the provision of shared resources. Third, they are committed to a basic social structure by participatory democratic policies and principles for family and the economy.

Miller, Noam, et al. Both Information and Social Cohesion Determine Collective Decisions in Animal Groups.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Early Edition, March, 2013. Also noted in Cooperative Societies, with Simon Garnier, Andrew Hartnett, and Iain Couzin, Princeton University behavioral biologists provide sophisticated quantifications of democratic Me and We reciprocities, a natural complementarity principle, that well serves both creature and community. See also Ed Yong and other 2013 entries in Cooperative Societies for many more examples.

During consensus decision making, individuals in groups balance personal information (based on their own past experiences) with social information (based on the behavior of other individuals), allowing the group to reach a single collective choice. Previous studies of consensus decision making processes have focused on the informational aspects of behavioral choice, assuming that individuals make choices based solely on their likelihood of being beneficial (e.g., rewarded). However, decisions by both humans and nonhuman animals systematically violate such expectations. Here we experimentally disassociate cohesion-based decisions from information-based decisions using a three-choice paradigm and demonstrate that both factors are crucial to understanding the collective decision making of schooling fish. Balancing of personal information and social cues by individuals in key frontal positions in the group is shown to be essential for such group-level capabilities. Our results demonstrate the importance of integrating informational with other social considerations when explaining the collective capabilities of group-living animals. (Abstract excerpts)

Mooney, Chris. The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality. New York: Wiley, 2012. A journalist builds an engaging argument that our oppositional political parties split along characteristic personality types. Conservative Republicans are fixated to maintain familiar certainty, while liberal Democrats aeem more open to novelty and change. We add that quantified support can be found in the journal Political Psychology, e.g., see Carney, et al herein. As the A Complementary Brain and Thought Process section documents, these traits quite match typical left and right cerebral hemisphere attributes. And of course which track obvious gender modes, male Me and feminine We. But in an American culture so left dominated it seems cognitively impossible to admit this glaring fact (nor climate change, phony wars, etc.). If we ever might, their gridlock standoff would be seen as fundamentally flawed, begging to be scrapped for a 21st century salutary reciprocity of both complements – as bipartisan inquiry panels necessarily achieve.

From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why won't Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts? Science writer Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs. (Publisher)

Mulya, Didi Ahmad and Romi Muslim. Phase transition and universality of the majority-rule model on complex networks. arXiv:2402.13434. In a paper to appear in the International Journal of Modern Physics C, National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia, and University of Technology, Yogyakarta, Indonesia consider possible ways that bipolar political elections might be based in and attributed to basic statistical physics phenomena.

We investigate the phenomena of order-disorder phase transition and the universality of the majority rule model defined on three complex networks, namely the Barabasi-Albert, Watts-Strogatz, and Erdos-Renyi versions. Assume each agent holds two possible opinions distribute across the nodes. Based on our scaling analysis, it is found that the model undergoes a continuous phase transition, with critical points for independence model greater than the anticonformity model. We obtain critical exponents indicating that they exhibit the same universality class as the mean-field Ising model. (Abstract)

We conducted an analysis of the order-disorder phase transition and the universality class of the majority-rule model implemented on heterogeneous networks, wherein each node maintains connections to at least two other nodes. Each agent has two possible opinions across all network nodes. Each agent adheres to the principle of conformity by behavior aligned with the majority opinion. Notably, agents also exhibit anticonformity and independence proclivities. Within this model, anticonformist agents adopt the minority opinion, adjusting their opinion or state to align with the minority viewpoint, while independent agents act autonomously, unaffected by the influence of other agents. (5)

Noveck, Beth Simone. Wiki Government. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009. We quote the author’s extensive vitae to make the point this work goes beyond an academic treatise. President Barack Obama has in fact choose Dr. Noveck to lead his Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform group so as to put these concepts into practical reality. There is a distinction to be made between prior modes of participation, mainly a yearly vote, and real, daily involvement in issues and their solution. Because of the public’s higher access to and degree of knowledge due to the Internet, both through text and visualization, in such a “collaborative” democracy persons and groups can make a significant contribution, and can electronically weigh in all year long.

Beth Simone Noveck is the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University. She is a Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property and innovation law and policy, constitutional law, e-democracy and e-government. Previously a telecommunications and Internet lawyer practicing in New York, Prof. Noveck graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor in Social Studies and Master of Arts in Comparative Literature. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School … and a doctorate in Political Science and German Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Pal, Ritam, et al. Universal Statistics of Competition in Democratic Elections. Physics Revies Letters. 134/017401, 2025. nto a new year when an extra importance of contentious USA and international elections is foreseen, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune theorists proceed to develop an broad, insightful view of a fundamental statistical physics and complex system basis for this public activity. As the quotes say, a natural universality is then revealed across and throughout this widest phenomenal span. With regard to a common global Geonome source ecode, for example its familiar genetic complementarity (me + We = US) could serve to repair and resolve the many polarizations that defy and destroy us at present.

Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective human behavior. As a complex system, emergent macroscopic patterns, which can be anticipated as a manifest universality. Despite the availability of much empirical data, such common patterns, valid at all scales, and elections, has not yet been quantified. We use voter statistics from 34 countries to demonstrate that a scaled measure depending on margin and turnout does achieve a robust universality. (Abstract)

A cornerstone of democratic societies is that governance be based on an expression of the collective will of the citizens. Elections to public offices are instances of such decision-making, whose outcome is determined by multiple agents interacting over a range of spatial and temporal scales. These features make elections an interesting test-bed for statistical physics whose key lesson is that a multitude of complex interactions between microscopic units of a system can manifest into robust, universal behavior at a macroscopic level. In the context of elections, a universality principle could serve for not only distilling the complexities of electoral dynamics into predictive frameworks but also safeguarding its integrity. (1)

In this work, using extensive empirical election data from 34 countries, we have obtained two significant results: (a) scaled margin distribution can be predicted from the election turnout, (b) the scaled distribution of margin-to-turnout ratio μ has a universal form independent of country, regions, turnouts and the scale of elections. A Random Voting Model in this work faithfully reproduces all these features observed in empirical data. (4)

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