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Old January 17th, 2008, 04:45 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Exclamation "Liberal Fascism": Mike Bloomberg

Liberal Fascism: Mike Bloomberg*

"Organisms are extremely internally heterogeneous. Their states and motions are consequences of many intersecting causal pathways, and it is unusual that normal variation in any one of these pathways has a strong effect on the outcome. To be ill is precisely to be dominated by a single causal chain. To be obsessed by an ideé fixe which motivates all one's actions, or to be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness...Indeed, we may define 'normality' as the condition in which no single pathway controls the organism." (Lewontin, 2000, 93-94)

Atta' boy!

Both sides of the human brain make patterns (Goldberg 2001; Brody, 2008). Further, one of them can lie and the other can find patterns where none exist, including ones about designs with or without designers. Thus, I admit the possibility of error but find coherence in the following ideas from two books that tell one story. That story also petrifies me and should scare the bejeebers out of you...

1) Yoshiki Kuramoto (1984) explains synchrony in a field of oscillators. (Pendulums work here. So do scholastics!) If there is a) similarity in the fundamental frequency of two oscillators and b) mutual influence between them, they will move into synchrony. There is no limit on the number of oscillators that can march together! Clock pendulums started apart eventually move together. (See the eerie demonstration at Daniel's website! Kuramoto's scrawls and squiggles have real outcomes.)

2) Jonah Goldberg (2007) describes synchrony in masses of citizens when he compares Progressivism (born at the turn of the last century in America, transplanted to Germany and Italy, and a dominant force in the administrations of Wilson (W!), FDR, and LBJ. The dissonance: Progressive agendas and tactics were nearly identical to those of Mussolini and Hitler.
Hitler and Mussolini and FDR were, for a while, mutual fans as they a) applied pragmatism to achieve political control, b) promised a great society, a super-nanny that would care for infants, mothers, and old people while also managing property, marriages, and employment. Nature was to be defended, bad foods forbidden, and cigarettes banned.

Mike Bloomberg walks this same path.

Humans, like other species swarm in the face of starvation, disease, territory changes, and external threats. Whether Leninism or Lennonism, the foundations are the same. Enforcement emerges for behaviors that used to be voluntary. Hitler used Brownshirt thugs but the American Protection League made him look silly...FDR had 250,000 enforcers, licensed to read their neighbor's mail and even one complaint in public led to significant jail time. (Both Hitler and FDR probably worked to hold back rather than urge their bullies forward.) Jump several decades: Jack Kennedy appears to have whipped up crises, black protests in the '60s elicited a new degree of secular uniformity (sometimes attributed to "white guilt," and 9/11 let Nutty George do the same thing (Goldberg, 2007). McCain and Obama differ from Chelsea's momma only in the amount of time they spend in trousers.

Kuramoto, an obscure Japanese physicist, however, explains everything in Goldberg.

1) Resource loss, as in a Bose-Einstein condensate, moves organizations from scale-free to winner-take-all as resources diminish. WTA emerges as a function of energy loss; it also increases vulnerability to strategic attacks.

2) Movement from Stage 2 (scale-free) to Stage 3 (winner-take-all) brings to mind findings by Yoshiki Kuramoto who explained one aspect of uniformity's emergence from chaos: if a) oscillators are similar and b) share a mutual influence, then they will move into synchrony. Similarity becomes identity no matter how many oscillators are linked to each other (Strogatz, 2003; Kuramoto 1984. See Daniels, 2005 for a demonstration.)

3) Reducing assets or increasing threats by invaders, disease, or economic hardship increases the probability of mass movements such as those described by Mackay (1944/1981) and seen in the contemporary resurgence of Progressivism and its easy connection with bans on smoking and trans-fats and promotions of environmental purity. American voters, perhaps reacting to fears of pending economic, climate, and military crises respond to promises of unity, vision, and change. These themes are identical to those in early Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and, for that matter, to promises and demands in the Old Testament.

4) Ideas from behaviour genetics mirror those of Kuramoto.** That is, the baseline frequency of an oscillator resembles the genetic influences reflected in nonshared environment; the mutual influence between oscillators becomes a shared (imposed) environment. Changes of territory, food supply, and climate reduce the individual preferences (non shared environments), and increase the influence of imposed environments. Demands for national unity turn hives into swarms.

5) Religion and secularism compete and either one rewards mass conformity and punishes dissenters. Either one can take responsibility for regulating birth, rearing children, helping the elderly, and the managing the businesses of mating, work, and national service. To surprising degrees, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were admirers of Bismark, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin and the last three admired the success of the first two (Goldberg, 2007). The events in Europe and the United States in the '20s, '30s, and the '60s were much alike and are closely similar to those of the current decade. It may be that economic changes and mass communication made a Hitler possible and will help us to make a more efficient one now. The quarter-million membership of the American Protective League in 1918 will be insignificant when compared to the next generation of brownshirts who work over the Internet.

6) Finally, some irony. Many evolutionary scientists resist the notion of a creator but some of them find in religion a possible survival tool for individuals and for groups! (Wilson, 2007) Others of them attempt to convert believers to an evolutionary, secular relativism! (Dawkins, 2006)

In contests between secularism and religion, secularists promise stability and impose uniformity but guarantee collapse for reasons suggested in statistical physics and in studies of reciprocity. Religion can seem to be an opiate but is no more so than promises from competing sources. Further, religions will endure after governments scatter and Toynbee was correct in his thought, "For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race" (Toynbee, 1958, 89. See also Murray, 2003) even if for reasons that apply to millions of other species and the communities they form.

As for Kuromoto's ideas: have less mass communication and you would have neither fascism nor Progressives. Bottom-up organization and local custom prevail, Hitler remains a provincial deviant, and the Devil can go down to Georgia without including Massachusetts.

JimB


* Most of this essay was adapted from Brody (2008) "Einstein-Bose, God, & Suicide," submitted for publication.

** They are also consistent with those of Thomas Sowell (1992) who compares the concepts of bottom-up and top-down organizations from Edmund Burke to the modern era. Bottom-up advocates recognize that cathedrals emerge from a centuries of smaller dwellings; top-down focus on architects. Top-down members tend to stress the perfectibility of human achievement; bottom-up fans find no end points for us on this side of heaven.

References (abridged):
Bianconi, G. & Barabasi, A-L (2000) Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. arXiv:cond-mat/0011224 v1 13 Nov 2000.
Bianconi, G (2002) Quantum statistics in complex networks. ArXiv cond-mat/0206433 v2 13 Sep 2002.
Brody (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
Daniels, Bryan C. (2005) Synchronization of globally connected nonlinear oscillators: the rich behavior of the Kuramoto model. Physics Department: Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. Demo at http://physics.owu.edu/StudentResear.../kuramoto.html
Kuramoto Y (1984/2003) Chemical Oscillations, Waves, and Turbulence. Orig: pringer. Reprint - NY: Dover.
Goldberg, E. (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.
Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.
Steele, Shelby (2006/2007) White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. NY: Harper Collins.
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.
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