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

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

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)

Petit, Patrick, ed. Earth Capitalism: Creating a New Civilization through a Responsible Market Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011. . A volume in the Goi Peace Foundation’s (Toyko) Initiative for Creating a New Civilization, which is a good example of abiding, non-western visions for a better world. An Introduction by its president Hiroo Saionji calls for a “Four S” program: Sustainability, Systems, Science, and Spirituality. For more instance, economist Hiroshi Tasaka agrees that markets left to their own profit devices are a passing stage unto an “empathy capitalism,” a “direct democracy,” rightly founded on Living Systems. We quote from his chapter on how societies progress, or ought to, by a yin and yang "dialectic."

Dialectic: In Western philosophy, dialectic began in Greece with Socrates and was systematized by Georg Hegel, the German idealist philosopher. Also, Karl Marx used this philosophy in his theory of social change and jean-Paul Sartre discussed its tenets in the context of Existentialism. In Eastern philosophy as well, dialectic has been dealt with at a profound level by Buddhist, Taoist, Esoteric Buddhist, Zen and other thinkers. Dialectic offers two laws in particular that are extremely helpful when foreseeing the future of capitalist societies: the “law of development through spiral process” and the “law of development through interpenetration of opposing objects.” (Tasaka, 23)

Piketty, Thomas. Long Life Participatory Socialism. Noema Magazine. November 10, 2021. This essay by the French historian is somewhat a synopsis of his latest work A Brief History of Equality (Harvard University Press, 2022) which proposes scopes out a viable, egalitarian resolve between these personal and polity aspects. We also note that this central position is just what the complexity sciences are finding everywhere as nature’s optimum self-organized criticality between more and less relative order. We also cite as a social version of the Patterns in Autism paper by Bernard Crespi (search). How obvious this perennial Golden Mean ought to be, while nations (autistic America) are torn apart as these complements battle each other.

I used to believe socialism was a failed idea. But then capitalism went too far. Now, I believe we need a socialism that is decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial and feminist. (TP)

Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab. He is the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) which gained an international popularity.

Noema publishes essays, interviews, reportage, videos and art on the integral realms of philosophy, governance, geopolitics, economics, artificial intelligence, the climate crisis and onto democracy and capitalism. In ancient Greek, noēma means “thinking” or the “object of thought.” Our intention is to delve deeply into the critical issues transforming the world today, at length and with historical context, in order to illuminate new pathways of thought in a way not possible through the daily media.

Pirker-Diaz, Paula, et al. Unraveling 20th-century political regime dynamics using the physics of diffusion. arXiv:2411.11484. University of Potsdam, Germany and University of South Carolina, USA political scientists including Karoline Wiesner make a strongest assertion to date that our human societal propensity for elective government between polar parties canin fact be found to have a deep ground in physical phenomena.

Uncertainty persists why some countries become democratic and others become autocratic. By applying the spectral Diffusion Map technique, we identify a non-linear manifold on which electoral regimes move. We show that regimes in-between exhibit dynamics distinct from autocracies and democracies, and higher instability. Our study pioneers the use of statistical physics in the analysis of political regimes and provides a quantitative, theoretic framework for regime-transformation and risk-of-conflict assessment. (Excerpt)

Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Reviewed more in the Anthropocene section, a Duke University professor of law seeks to identify and scope a suitable democratic abidance.

Rihani, Samir. Complex Systems Theory and Development Practice. London: Zed Books, 2002. A new conceptual model is proposed for effective social policy, especially for emerging regions, based on an innate self-organizing complexity. The linear Newtonian paradigm is no longer adequate and its use explains why so many current programs do not work. Human societies are in fact dynamic, nonlinear systems whose component members need to be empowered, interconnected and supported by workable legal canons.

The Complexity argument is straightforward: the stimulating layer of self-organized Complexity that lies between deathly order and wasteful chaos could only emerge if people were free to interact and capable of interacting, and if their interactions were facilitated by appropriate rules that command popular support. (11)

Satin, Mark. Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004. The activist lawyer provides a vigorous exposition of how to breakthrough from the right/left, either/or gridlock that confounds us. Four guiding principles are cited: maximize choices for all, give everyone one a fair start, maximize human potential, help the developing world. Based on these inclusive concepts, many practical examples are presented.

Seeley, Thomas. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. The Cornell University entomologist draws on a lifetime of clever field studies to lucidly explain how these social insects are so successful in locating and maintaining their home hives. I heard Tom Seeley talk on Collective Intelligence in Honey Bees at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Sept. 15, 2017 where he cited these five attributes: a common goal and mission, hive members have diverse information, this is freely shared, debate goes on but toward the objective, and via quorum sensing an aggregate, unbiased solution is reached. The buzz before and after was about how much political governments could benefit from such natural wisdom of agree instead of argue. It also points out how bereft we are of any common, Earthly human sapiens identity and purpose.

Shih, Chih-Yu. Collective Democracy. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999. A scholarly and realistic study that China is indeed moving toward “democracy” but from its tradition of collective, village culture. A Western style individualist version, one size fits all, is simply not appropriate for their historic milieu. As a comment, rather than a single, enforced definition, “democratic” societies need to be situated in their bilateral Eastern and Western modes.

Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. London: Zed Books, 2016. This is a new edition of a 2005 volume by the inveterate physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author. A new Preface over 22 pages provide an update survey with especial notice of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, and a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Vandana Shiva offers an alternative, empathic, feminine vision whereof the welfare and enhancement of people, communities and nature is of paramount value, rather than market forces and profit motives.

Sperling, John, et al. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito, CA, PoliPoint Press, 2004. Not an endorsement but one sociological study of how the United States seems to be sharply divided into red Retro and blue Metro states of Republican or Democratic values. A biased view which would push the polarization even further, the authors see Retro as white male, orthodox religion, conservative, intolerant while Metro is inclusive, progressive, not afraid of science, and so on.

Szpiro, George. Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy from Plato to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. An Israeli science journalist argues that the democratic ideal of palliative governance by, of, and for the people remains elusive because all manner of elective polities statistically will tend to thwart it. However might we then realize that our social abidance needs to respectfully become naturally organic, a reciprocity of free individual and supportive group? (See Simon Levin 2010 in A Viable Gaia)

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