Networks, Politics, and Mass-Movements

[James Brody]

James Brody, Ph.D.
Editor, Dead Cats & Clippings: A Conservative Newsletter
October 23-24, 2009

“Darwinism teaches that organisms become adapted to the environment through natural selection. And it teaches that they are passive throughout this process. But it seems to me far more important to stress that the organisms find, invent and reorganize their environments in the course of their search for a better world.” (Karl Popper, 1989/1994, p. viii)
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This essay started with the proposition that we all become 912-ers and my “Hell No!” I then collected six pages of “good reasons” and good books that reinforce my instinctive scream.

Conclusion: Recommendations for the Valley Forge Patriots
“Cats turn fish into fur every day. Jesus was impressed.”
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Collectivists will argue that power and influence are possible only for large organizations. As Tom Sowell noticed, they believe in super governments and the perfectibility of human organizations but not individuals and they have no need for a God. They develop their belief early, pursue it rigorously, and impose it on everyone.

It is also to the collectivist advantage to find and amplify a series of crises: collectivism is most rigid when resources are limited.

Individualists find opportunity in the differences between people and situations. They believe that nations grow from the bottom-up and that God created not only virtue but also differences in how we each pursue it. Every society is and should be different as society is the emergent product of individuals who make opportunities.

We now face the decision to merge into a larger group and, more importantly, how much to merge. (Or even to join with the intention of taking over!)

I suggest that we continue to respect both our conservative nature and that of our founders who gave us a “republic” of mutually influential partners.

Doing the opposite gives us one more big government, big business, big law, or big religion: each becomes dominant, forms partnerships, and oppresses us more surely as our computers replace the radios that Hitler once gave out.

Introduction
There are five sources of information that reveal similar things:
1) Molecular physics.
2) Equations with strange squiggles instead of numbers.
3) Computer simulations.
4) Sociologists (!)
5) And intuition.
The last on the list, intuition, is the most convincing. Our minds grew up and still grow up in the middle of environments with peculiar names – “chaos,” “phase transitions,” and “stasis.” In order to arrange such environments to fit our personality, every one of us makes tidy arrangements from chaos but also breaks rules.

You routinely sit in the middle between unpredictability and boredom. Life – both yours and mine – is, also routinely, the alternation of turns towards opposite extremes.

You drive always within speed limits? You’re a bit crazy! You never drive within speed limits? You’re also a bit crazy!

Some Concepts
It is generally useful to talk of three stages in organizations whether those organizations happen to be human, neural, electrical, or chemical.
Chaos
Molecules and atoms in a cloud of gas – i.e., steam – are generally in a chaotic condition: no two participants, having met once, meet a second time. We each experience chaos when we have too much to do with too little time and too little help. And we simplify our condition by means of anger, retreat, or screaming “HELP!” As a friend – a female – put it while attempting to schedule a meeting: “Joe can’t make it on Wednesday. How is everyone for Thursday morning? Friday is the day before Halloween and the young moms might be busy.”

Phase Transitions
Exploration, experimentation, and invention occur in phase transitions.
A “phase transition” is the wonderful but narrow boundary between chaos and stasis. Water exists between zero and 100 degrees C. Vapor can be infinitely hot and ice can be infinitely cold. Water, therefore, is a phase transition wherein partnerships between molecules of water are partially stable as it forms shivering clumps and partially temporary as they kick out some members and take in new ones.

Life follows water because water is in a phase transition. Even the brain of an infant is in a phase transition where breathing and digestion occur easily and parents are recognized by odor and by the sounds we heard before birth. The mix of exploration and routine leads to adolescent rebellion and cultural changes.

We easily become partners with people similar to us. That relationship makes life a bit less spontaneous but also a bit more stable as we manage and extend our own “phase transition.”

Stasis
Ice is comparatively static, and, frequently, so are old people and old cultures. And most organizations through time and repetition, drift into fixity.

Our minds are most inventive when we are young but with time, our right frontal brain no longer turns strange sounds into familiar words, colors and lines into art, or noise into music. With age, our right side shrivels while our left brain executes languages and routines that we already learned.

There is no eraser on a legislator’s pencil and older lawyers enforce rules as do mothers, professors, and old clerics. (So do Bolsheviks and other liberals who have one set of rules for anyone who is below them.)

The advantage in these changes is that things that work are retained; the disadvantage is that outside conditions may change faster than our habits.

While society and personal happiness depend on stability, they also depend on innovation! The challenge is that of staying with a thermostat or under the same roof as Goldilock’s three bears … not too much, not too little, but just right.

The Role of Assets in Organization
Gas molecules show these three phases – chaos, fluidity, and immobility – as they cool to absolute zero. Steam becomes liquid which, in turn, becomes a super-cooled mass wherein a herd of atoms begin to act as if one. These changes are often described with Bose-Einstein equations that, surprisingly, also describe the same three stages in social networks.

Efficiency drives the formation of phase transitions from chaotic gas. Further efficiency drives the formation of “winner-take-all” organizations wherein one player controls 85-90% of the transactions.

Winner-take-all – a form of stasis – seems to be the inevitable outcome of competition in a stable environment. Michael Jackson dominated musical charts, Dale Earnhardt dominated NASCAR tracks, and there is generally only one successful pusher in a neighborhood. Winner-take-all, however, fails when environments change.

One set of rules – whether based on facts or fantasy – mean that we keep on doing whatever we did.

As you cut resources – by means of disease, drought, earthquakes, invasions, or meteors –useful routines are no longer effective and may actually speed the collapse of a group if its members insist on doing more intensely what no longer works.
Civilizations then collapse into fragments that rearrange themselves or that an invader rearranges for new purposes. Invaders, for example, found that raped Roman women were good mothers. A set of highways can serve commerce or army tanks, whatever their origin.

Human Personality: Our Compass and Mortar
The behavior genetics folks have found significant “heritability” for nearly every piece of our psychology. There is even heritability to “liberal” (collectivist) and conservative (individualist) voting preferences. One-third of us – regardless of what we are taught in school and regardless of parental belief – pursue Marx’s “greater good” and don’t object to taxes and shared property. One-third of us – follow Adam Smith and do the opposite, finding “the greater good” to be the construction of many individual goods.
(The remaining third? They often, as if in a phase transition, do whatever the neighbors do. Elections are mostly about convincing that middle third of the inevitable victory of a particular liberal or conservative candidate!)

The Problem
Relatively small differences in efficiency can lead – under prolonged stability – to winner-take-all that collapses when resources vanish.

Physics drives this outcome even for molecules. Christiian Huygens noticed in the 1600s, during his bout of pneumonia, that the pendulums in his house ticked and tocked at the same instant, even when he set them out of phase. Three hundred years later, Yoshiki Kuramoto derived equations that “predicted” the occurrence of synchrony in any group of oscillators – no matter how many – if there were both similarity and mutual influence between them.

Gossip, radio, newspapers, and television grow crowds. Mass movements such as tulip sales in Holland (one bulb was worth a house and team of animals), South Sea bonds, mesmerism, and about twenty other mass delusions were described by Charles Mackay in 1844. His book was reprinted, still valid, in 1990. (“Sync” also accounts for why Hitler gave radios to German families, Roosevelt gave fireside chats, and why Michael Jackson or the Beatles captured a generation, and why Obama won the last election.)

References
Popper, Karl (1989/1994) In Search of a Better World. Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years. London: Routledge.
Heritability
DeFries J, McGuffin, P., McClearn G, & Plomin, R. (2000) Behavioral Genetics (4th Ed.) NY: Worth. Also McGuffin, P., Riley, B., & Plomin, R. (2001) Toward behavioral genomics. Science, 291, 1232–1233.
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. Esp. Chapter 16, Politics. Also: Alford JR, Funk CL, & Hibbing JR (2005) Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review. 99(2): 153–167. Alford J, Funk C, & Hibbing JR (2008) The new empirical biopolitics. Annual Review of Political Science. 11: 183-203. And the first such paper: Martin, Nick G, Lindon J Eaves, A. C. Heath, Rosemary Jardine, Lynn M. Feingold, and Hans J Eysenck (1986) Transmission of social attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 83:4364-4368.
Neural Maturation: Innovation vs. Stability
Goldberg, Elkhonon (2006) The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Brain Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older. NY: Gotham.
Goldberg, Elkhonon & Costa LD (1981) Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain Lang 14(1): 144–173.
- Goldberg Elkhonon, Podell K, & Lovell M (1994) Lateralization of frontal lobe functions and cognitive novelty. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 6:371–378.
- Goldberg, Elkhonon et al. (1994) Cognitive bias, functional cortical geometry, and the frontal lobes: laterality, sex, and handedness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 6: 276–296.
Networks
Barabási, Albert-Lazlo (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. Fun! Clear! Explores “emergent networks” wherein each member chooses who joins next. Rougher going, for the persistent!
- Albert, Reka & Barabasi, Albert-Lazlo (2002) Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics 74: 47–97. Early publication in June 2001 at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0106/0106096.pdf.
- Barabási, Albert-Lazlo & Albert, Reka (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. arxiv:cond-mat/9910332v1, 21 Oct 1999
- Bianconi, Ginestra. & Barabási, Albert-Lazlo (2000) Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. arXiv:cond-mat/0011224 v1 13 Nov 2000.
- Bianconi, Ginestra (2002) Quantum statistics in complex networks. ArXiv cond-mat/0206433 v2 13 Sep 2002.
Brody, James (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Starts with phase transitions, ends with personal will as our essential tool that arranges our world. Lots of biographies. Http://rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer. Also Garas, Antonios, Panos Argyrakis, and Shlomo Havlin (2008) The structural role of strong and weak links in a financial network. arXiv 0805.2477v1 [Physics.soc.ph], May 16. (Financial networks, even after losing a major player, re-inflate themselves! Should’a told Bush and Bo….)
Frank, Robert. & P. Cook (1995) The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. NY: Free Press.
Gintis, Herbert (2000) Strong reciprocity and human sociality: game theoretic models and empirical tests. Presentation at Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Amherst, MA, 6/9/00. Explored “strong reciprocity”: When a social group collapses, it members not only punish defectors but also anyone who fails to punish the defector. Democrat and Republican behavior now shows lots of “strong reciprocity” in regard to health care.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. NY: Little Brown.
Kauffman, Stuart (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford. Rough going. Chapter One in Brody’s Rebellion (Http://rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/) is an easier path!)
Levitt, Steven & Stephen Dubner (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. NY: Morrow. Finds, among other fun things, that pushers usually live with their mother and work at Wal-Mart.
Strogatz, Steven (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion. (We make pairs, trios, quartets, and eventually mobs on the basis of mutual influence and similarity to one another.)
Individualism
Goldberg, Jonah (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday. Pairs nicely with Friedrich von Hayek (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom and expands on many points in Beck’s Commonsense.
Murray, Charles (2003) Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts & Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 NY: Harper Collins. (Western civilization exploded when we found a God who approved of individualism!)
Popper, Karl (1984/1992) In Search of a Better World. Lectures & Essays from Thirty Years. London: Routledge. (Dry. Falsification is vital for science. We advance by finding out what is not true. Also, life’s ability to make its own environments.)
Sowell, Thomas (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books. History from Adam Smith onward in regard to our political and legal systems. Very well-written and more interesting than it sounds! A strong foundation for Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny or Beck’s Commonsense.)
Mass Hysteria
Mackay, Charles (1841/1980) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. NY: Three Rivers Press. Ideas can travel like a plague. A tulip bulb in Holland was briefly worth a house and ox. Our stock market, 912 demonstrations, and Obama’s wave of popularity – all rest on the same principles.

[James Brody]

* Every society is and should be different because society is the emergent product of individuals who make opportunities. Swarms of birds, termites, rock fans, and Obama supporters follow the same basic rules identified in computer simulations – keep up, don’t crowd, and move, whenever possible, to the center of the group. Did the same processes that elected BHO also produce the 9/12 demonstration in a pendulum of “push-push-back”?

** The American republic has been peculiar for the ease with which people on the “bottom” move to the “top” and from the “top” to the “bottom.” In contrast, the children of royalty – through time or murder - occupy the throne and, in a similar manner, there is some tendency for the sons and daughters of politicians also to become politicians.
It is fortunately true that children of gifted parents are rarely so talented as their parents. (Frank Galton discovered this in the 1850s; we learn it again when we watch Bob Casey…whatever he should have just isn’t all there. Will Chelsea be smarter than her mother but dumber than her father?) Fortunately, noble brats – again through time or murder – fall off the throne, out of entitlement, and into the masses.
A book for “Aha!”: Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books. Paper. About $20 new.