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

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

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)

Terrell, John. Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual. New York Times. December 1, 2014. The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, anthropologist and author contributes a rare clear, strong statement of the obvious archetypal personality complements of the two party political persuasions, ever locked in win-lose gridlock. This is so patently evident, yet political scientists cannot imagine its organic, complementary me + We = US resolve because no such greater reality is allowed. See also Terrell’s new book A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait (Oxford, 2014).

At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. In a broad sense, Democrats are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

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