Overview

Democracy - a force of nature The unicycle provides a singular image of balance and impending peril, lifted by whimsy for the weighty subject of this book. All the evidence of experimental science confirms that nature is asymmetric. No pure symmetry has ever been found. What does it mean to live in an asymmetric environment? Unicycle introduces the logic of asymmetric change to interpret the evidence, while showing how our symmetry-based math has failed to grasp a vital ethical connection between humanity and the environment. The observation that nature is asymmetric allows us to introduce reasoning that is as organized as the logic of symmetries currently in use, by using symmetry as a foil in a proof by contradiction. One result is the discovery that nature, the universe, does indeed have a non-random sense of direction with vital ethical consequences. Humans are drawn addictively to pure symmetry in the form of absolutes, like moths to the flame, or in this case - like fools to the unicycle. The more extreme the instability, the greater the requirement for balance. There is a Tao-like polarity where neither pure chaos nor absolute order can exist. The more monocultural we become, the more we need to reach out for balance, as though we are bound for chaos. We must learn to navigate the River of Asymmetry. A key finding is that symmetry and asymmetry are mutually exclusive. That nature's asymmetry is a creative continuum that cannot be stopped with absolute finality. That which connects us is more profound than the differences that divide us. Nature's asymmetry is multifarious and fundamentally inclusive. This provides the ethical basis for a democratic society and a fresh understanding of natural law. Economic value is nature-based - not confined to the prices of an easily distracted market. We are not to be valued by what we are paid. Business cycles can be balanced with cultural change. The reasoning is elucidated with an interdisciplinary narrative fiction, including mythological tales. The stories gain a realism of their own through the deductions. Nature comes to life, along with the characters as they work on the book by a river in Maine - discovering Mother Nature's moral compass.

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9781882190935

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Reviews

Very scrupulously set out. It is extremely well written and beautifully literate. -Dr. Diane Collinson, author of Plain English, Fifty Major Philosophers, Fifty Eastern Thinkers, coauthor of the Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers A provocative book by a serious thinker, well worth the reader's time. -William A. Haviland, PhD, Professor Emeritus and founder of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vermont, coauthor of textbooks including Cultural Anthropology and Evolution and Prehistory Unicycle is an important book. I am very impressed. It covers a lot of territory, and it is very thoughtful and even charming. The math and logic are understandable to the interdisciplinary reader. I agreed with everything the book has to say. -Esther Pasztory, PhD, Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor Emerita in Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, author of Thinking with Things, Aztec Art, and Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living This book contains some serious mathematics - smart, thought-provoking, and engrossing. -William H. Barker, PhD, Isaac Henry Wing Professor of Mathematics, Bowdoin College, coauthor of the textbook Continuous Symmetry: From Euclid to Klein An eloquent explanation, with spare logic and excellent argument. In my critical thinking class, my students study the core ideals of the Enlightenment; this book's world view gives me a position from which to triangulate between absolutism and relativism and illuminates all three. -David S. Cook, MA, author of Above the Gravel Bar: The Native Canoe Routes of Maine and History of the 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment

Author Information

The Author's Story: Paul Cornell du Houx grew up among several Western countries. At Amherst College, he majored separately in economics and French. His honors thesis identified the aesthetic mysticism in the works of Gustave Flaubert. This led to his early attempts to bring cross-cultural insights to clarify a crisis some economists saw in the utilitarian way mainstream theory was moving. He decided to investigate the marketplace first-hand, rather than take the well-worn academic path that one day would lead the world economy into the Great Recession and now largely unprepared into the 2020 pandemic. Clearly, capitalism has gone begging for something more than money. While looking for answers, Cornell du Houx wrote currency reports for the MSA consultancy newsletter in the London Square Mile, audited companies for PwC, studied law at the Inns of Court, sold computers, and with his patented improvements on an electrical connector got involved in a start-up. Attracted to the succinct form of the ancient sutra, the author began gathering ideas in the late seventies under the Yoganomics portmanteau, written as a conversation piece, in the spirit of his storytelling grandfather, a Kansas farmer with a talent for making up words and combining disparate ideas with comedy. They would not be the only ones to be pleasantly surprised at further plays on the word, economics. Eventually, Cornell du Houx developed the math proposed in Unicycle that lets us read the ethics of natural law within the environment. In 2020, he decided to rewrite Yoganomics accordingly. Somewhere along the line, he wrote What the Farmer Told the Bard, a near-apocalyptic novel involving runes encoded in a Shakespeare monument. In 1991 Ramona and Paul settled with their children in Maine. Publishing books, art, and the news magazine Maine Insights led to founding the Solon Center for Research and Publishing, with the mission of helping to build community in Maine and beyond, through words and art, science and music. Gallery Fukurou at 20 Main St., Rockland, Maine, opened to the public in 2018. At the Solon Center, Elected Officials to Protect America (EOPA, ProtectingAmerica.net) works to combat climate change, often focusing on water security, with the help and leadership of military veterans. It is the author's hope that the sense of a deep democracy in nature, which inspired Native American communities and merged with our Founders' Enlightenment vision of natural law, will help bring hearts and minds together in time.

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