Latest From LaRouche

The LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) released this statement on May 8, 2007.

MY MAY 8TH DECLARATION

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The pattern expressed by recent waves of elections in the United Kingdom, in France, and next in Belgium, poses the question: Will there actually be a 2008 Presidential Election in the U.S.A.? I make no prediction, either way; my intention here is to pose the deadly reality of the situation in which presently leading U.S. pre-Presidential candidates appear as virtual actors in a Laurel and Hardy version of "Babes in Toyland," a situation which presents all of the present nations of western and central Europe as relics of the presently oncoming crisis of "ungovernability." This state of affairs—and affairs of state—is to be recognized as the crisis which U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her accomplice, France's François Mitterrand, have inflicted, still to the present date, on those regions of Europe as a whole.

On the subject of what I shall present, if only in summary, this afternoon:

As I have just summarized the case in my EIR "End-Game Forecasts" of April 28th, the intrinsic, and deadly incompetence of virtually all my putative rivals among leading economic forecasters, and U.S. pre-Presidential candidates today, is that when they are not basing their forecasts, and related policies, on virtual voodoo, such as that of the Mont Pelerin Society and American Enterprise Institute, they rely implicitly on the intrinsically incompetent, mechanistic-statistical methods which prevail among today's usually accredited, and often also wild-eyed, leading forecasting agencies.

Given the acceleration of what is no less important than escaping a currently onrushing threat of such a general, global economic-social collapse, the immediate future of mankind depends, urgently, on understanding the immediately practical implications of that issue of policy-shaping.

I am not "predicting" a collapse; I am warning of what must be changed, in current policy-shaping trends, if we are to avoid a terrible early consequence, which is now looming as a threat on a near-term, global scale. I will predict only, that if the world acts in accord with the kinds of policy-shaping circles dominating the U.S.A. and both western and central Europe now, there will be an existential quality of general financial and economic collapse beyond the present imagination of any of most current governments.

I repeat: I am not predicting a collapse. On the contrary, I am dedicated to what I foresee as the only immediate alternative: a partnership of sovereign nations, built around the essential core of the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, to enact emergency treaty-agreements to bring the world's presently onrushing general breakdown-crisis to a halt, and to launch a recovery consistent with what had been the intention of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, had he lived.

On that account, for the sake of that alternative, it can not be over-emphasized, that the general run of economic forecasters, and their credulous admirers in government and elsewhere, are relying on the pathetic legacy of those failed, "mechanistic-statistical" methods and incompetent, axiomatic ontological presumptions of the René Descartes, and also John Locke, which Gottfried Leibniz, first, and repeatedly exposed, during the 1690s, and later, as intrinsically incompetent in both mathematics and physical science.

Competent Forecasting

Competent economic forecasting starts with rejecting the axiomatically reductionist, mechanistic-statistical methods of the same general category as those of Descartes, in favor of a contrary, dynamic method. The latter is the method which Leibniz derived from, chiefly, the precedents of the founder of modern astrophysics, Johannes Kepler. The methods of Kepler, as complemented, notably, by Fermat, and their follower Leibniz, formed the essential basis for the later development of modern physical science through the leading role of the work of leaders of France's Ecole Polytechnique under the leadership of Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot, and by such protégés of the Alexander von Humboldt as Carl F. Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, Lejeune Dirichlet, and Bernhard Riemann. In the expressed views of Albert Einstein, all competent modern European science is coherent with the line of development, through the work of Leibniz, from Johannes Kepler through Bernhard Riemann.

That view of economic development which is specific to the science of Leibniz, Riemann, et al., is the indispensable foundation of any actually feasible defense of a civilized planetary system of relations among sovereign states today.

The typical incompetence which I find among prominent economists and related policy-shaping circles today, is that they demand more or less randomly assorted handfuls of globular "facts," but base their conclusions not on reality of the process ostensibly under discussion, but the apparent interpretation of a mere selection of data expressing what are, intrinsically, methodologically incompetent, mechanistic-statistical methods of arranging undigested so-called "facts." They refuse to consider the need to discard the incompetent methods by which they turn mere facts into intellectual garbage. They interpret facts in the fashion which they believe to be consistent with their ideological presumptions, with the result that what pours from their mouths, is not science, but regurgitation of wildly aprioristic, and infallibly false assumptions.

That is the situation which confronts us when we are looking, clinically, only at the strictly formal aspect of the incompetence shown among the most widely considered economic forecasters of today. That is to say, if and when we put the fact of often tendentiously corrupt personal motives aside.

Science versus Statistics

Nature is, so to speak, nature, but society, and, therefore economy, are products of functions of the conscious individual human mind which do not exist among the beasts. If we include the failure to make a feasible sort of necessary discovery as an expression of the act of human will, all of the actual net progress and failure of society is something for which human cultures, such as the evolution of so-called natural conditions, and, in some crucially important cases, the individual, knowledgeable human will, are to be held responsible.

Thus, to account for the way in which the universe treats the human species, and individual cultures, we must recognize the existence of a lawful character of that universe on which we act, and which acts upon us and our conditions. An agreement among persons, even an entire society, can be no better, no more durable in its effects, than man's submission of his, or her, will to valid knowledge of the manner in which the universe is organized. This must be recognized as the universe on which mankind acts, and which reacts on mankind, and, also the manner in which man presumes that universe should act so.

Therefore, facts in and of themselves, are often even worse than worthless, if those facts are interpreted in a way which expresses a false notion of the way in which the universe is organized, or a false notion of the way in which mankind is enabled to both increase the number and the typical physical and other conditions of life of the individual within that universe.

Those reflections should prompt us to judge the behavior of leading currents in society today in a certain way. This requires us to examine the history of European civilization, since its recovery from the "new dark age" of the Fourteenth Century. What principles of, respectively, nature, and the human mind, are expressed by the great increase of fertility, level of generally typical individual development, and progress of the human species, which has radiated from developments, for respectively better or worse, inside globally extended modern European history since the beginning of the Fifteenth Century? What has been the special achievement of the U.S.A., relative to the persistence of oligarchical forms of repression characteristic of Europe since the Eighteenth Century?

European science, whose existence may be traced from, chiefly, Egyptian influences on the emerging Classical Greek civilization from approximately 700 B.C. onward, is traced, chiefly, from two sources. On the one side, competent science, from Thales, Heracleitus, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plato, through Eratosthenes and Archimedes, is rooted in the Egyptian method of astrophysics known to the Classical Greeks as Sphaerics. This method of Sphaerics was revived in modern Europe by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's appropriate translation of the term "Sphaerics" as the title of his A.D. 1440 writing titled "De Docta Ignorantia."¹

The crucial distinction common to ancient Sphaerics and the work of Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Kaestner, Riemann, et al., is the principle known to ancient Classical Greek science as dynamis, or the modern transliteration of that concept, as the term dynamics, as introduced by Leibniz on the one side, in his defining the fraudulent character, on the other side, of attempts at basing physical science on those Venetian Liberal dogmas of Paolo Sarpi, dogmas which formed the core of the implicitly neo-imperialist practices of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism, such as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialism, whose so-called "geopolitical" view of its global interests has been responsible for two so-called "World Wars," beginning with Britain's deployment of Japan against China in 1895, in the so-called "Cold War," and in the geopolitical assault against civilization as a whole, called "Globalization," at this time.

In brief, our planet has reached the point in its development, that it would be impossible to avoid a plunge of the planet into a new dark age, unless we proceed to shift into increasing emphasis on the role of technologies of nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion. We have already entered a point, at which the accumulated effects of underdevelopment of the conditions of life and practice among the majority of mankind, has been increasing, globally, over the recent several decades. This is only typified, but not limited to conditions in Africa, the Arab world, and among the poor of Asia. Without a return to emphasis on capital-intensive and power-intensive modes of science-driven increase in the technology-driven increase of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, we were already, with our present trends in policy, at the verge of a planetary new dark age.

This Brings Us to Dynamics

The simplest way of identifying the intrinsic incompetence of the types of attempted economic forecasting premised upon mechanistic-statistical methods, is that the forecaster makes the scientifically fatal presumption of assuming that the universe in which the nation and its economy exist, is axiomatically consistent with a Euclidean form of space. Therefore, economists of that implied, aprioristic persuasion, presume that a more or less linear extrapolation of a statistical correlation premised on the quasi-Euclidean assumptions of the Cartesian method, can supply a prediction of a certain date at a certain, definite point in future time.

For such forecasters, the arrival of a "predicted" event of that type, or its failure to arrive on a predetermined schedule, is the test of an "economic theory." These fellows were not necessarily educated in the famous academy of Lemuel Gulliver's travel to the floating island's Grand Academy of Lagado, although their forecasts might prompt one to suspect that they had been.

There are two intellectually fatal errors, errors of incompetence, intrinsic to such assumptions in the work of such economists.

First, there is the fact of the efficiency of the human individual free will, in choices of pathway, even of an unchanged mode of action, a bounded, but otherwise free will, which is being expressed by the real-life subjects of the attempted forecast as might have been proffered by the representative of Gulliver's Lagadian school.

Second, that the conditions which define the limits of a current trajectory of the economy, are not to be found existing in the empiricist school of Descartes et al.

The singular events, such as economic catastrophes, which serve as relative limits imposed upon the extended course of a currently prevalent set of economic policies of practice, are not products of an implicitly linear (e.g., mechanistic-statistical) extension of that process; they are results of a current processes' encounter with something external to the kind of process represented by a typical Cartesian, or similar method of attempted forecasting. With that observation, to parody the famous opening of Bernhard Riemann's habilitation dissertation: we have departed the realm of any attempted reductionist description of a physical geometry of economic space-time. We have entered, as Riemann would have concurred, the domain of dynamics, as the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Leibniz commonly defined the meaning of dynamics.

As Albert Einstein outlined the competent strain of modern science, as the unfolding line of development from pertinent roots in the discoveries of Kepler through the fulfillment of Kepler's objectives in Riemannian physical hypergeometry, and, implicitly, discoveries in biology and the Noösphere, by Academician V.I. Vernadsky, the significance of real events in the domain of human experience, is located in the universal physical principles which bound those processes, as if externally. To understand the underlying implications of real economies, we must consider these, first, as physical economies, rather than financial processes, and consider those physical processes as bounded, as gravitation, as discovered, uniquely, by Johannes Kepler, bounds the universe in such a fashion, that the universe as a whole is finite, but that without external boundaries. The universe is bounded, thus, by an expandable process of discovery of experimentally, crucially validated universal physical principles which are the self-boundaries of that universe.

Moreover, as the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel converged on this point, there are no adducible arithmetic, or kindred bounds to the domain corresponding to an attempted mathematical representation of the universe as known at some stage of the development of human knowledge. The absurdity of the axiomatic presumption of Bertrand Russell, and of such Russell lackeys as Professor Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, as in Russell's Principia Mathematica and the related pathological assumptions of "information theory" and "artificial intelligence," should be viewed from the vantage-point of Kepler's treatment of the conjectured existence of the equant, in both his The New Astronomy and his The Harmony of the World.

As Gödel showed in his celebrated 1931 On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems and his 1932 reply to John von Neumann (The Formalist's Way of Founding Mathematics), no mathematically closed system could correspond to the actual universe. This was to be a crucial point of convergence of Gödel's thinking during his collaboration with Einstein at the Princeton Institute. Contrary to the empiricist tradition founded by Paolo Sarpi, his lackey Galileo, and other followers of modern Liberalism, and contrary to the Aristoteleans of Roman times, as shown by Philo (Judaeus) of Alexandria, the universe is not bounded by a principle of universal entropy; here we meet the essential incompetence in the work of Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, et al., on the subjects of "energy" and "force." The universe is, as this is implicit in Gödel's referenced argument, and also, independently, in Einstein's locating the work of Kepler and Riemann as a single fabric of the development of the physical universe as anti-entropic, always developing to higher states which are expressed by new discoveries of efficient universal physical principles. This is, otherwise, an expression of the principle of human individual creativity, as in experimental physical science.

This operates to the following effect.

The human individual, and, therefore, his or her species, is distinguished from the beasts by a power of creativity, which is expressed in such ways as the increase of the relative potential population-density of the human species, an increase to be measured as a rate per capita and per square kilometer. This is otherwise expressed by what certain leading Soviet scientists contributed to scientific discussions of the 1970s and 1980s, by use of the term "energy-flux density," as a needed correction of a popular, foolish error of measuring "energy" in calories. It is anti-entropy, as implicit in Kepler's treatment of the irony of the equant in The New Astronomy and in The Harmony of the World, and, most significantly, the role of harmonics of the Solar system (and, implicitly, the ironies, respecting living and other processes, of the Periodic Table).

The function of categorically increased potential relative population-density in human behavior, but not in animal life, reflects a distinctive quality of power of the member of the human species which is not simply biological, as behavior of animal species is so to be viewed relatively; it is a distinct quality of physical potential, a distinction, peculiarly human, which segregates the Biosphere from the Noösphere. It is a potential for which something in human biology is peculiarly appropriate as a supporting medium. Here in this peculiar quality, lies the distinction of man from beast, and human being from such debased pseudo-species as "Global Warming" freaks.

If man is in the image of the Creator, he is also in the image of the processes of development within the universe as a whole.

The ability of the human species, to increase its species' potential relative population-density, rests upon a capability of the human individual which not only defies the Satanic figure of the Olympian Zeus, but which represents the universal distinction in function of the human individual from the beasts. To impose "zero technological growth" on the majority of humanity, as today's "Global Warming" freaks do, is not only utterly anti-scientific, but it is both immoral and insane.

The Limits of Growth

Thus, the existence of the human species, which, obviously, has achieved successive advances in potential relative population-density beyond apes, and also more poorly developed human cultures, defines the boundaries of human economic progress, and even of sustained existing levels of population, as bounded by the limited range of the discovered universal physical principles employed in physical-economic and related practice.

Not only does the level of such discoveries bound the rate of growth of potential relative population-density; failure to advance on this account means the relative depletion of those resources on which sustenance of existing such potential depends. Without growth in science-driven and related modes of increase of potential relative population-density, mankind is doomed to catastrophes caused by such negligence of mankind's inherently embedded moral duty as a species.

In short, the mental-creative powers of the human individual are the expression of the individual human soul, which distinguishes man from beast, and, also, from beast-like men and women.

Thus, the boundaries of an economic process are to be defined, summarily, in the following general terms of reference.

A society which had achieved a certain level of combined development and potential for further extension of that process, approaches certain kinds of barriers. Essentially, growth, or even merely persistence of stagnated earlier periods of growth, as in the U.S.A. and Europe since 1971-72 attests, the combination of reliance on resources being depleted, and, more importantly, the failure to push forward with scientific-economic expansion in technology, create a boundary-area which, as now, comes to define an immediate threat of collapse for this reason.

So, it is not the trajectory leading to that boundary-condition which should be the basis for forecasting, but, rather, the recognition of increasingly steep resistance to progress resulting from failure to energize scientific-technological growth in the physically defined potential relative population-density of societies considered as wholes. It is the gradients so defined which are the focus of competent economic forecasting.

What I have outlined on this account, here so far, is a view of the role of Riemannian dynamics, rather than inherently incompetent Cartesian-like mechanistic-statistical forecasting, which must and will be employed by all competent economist-forecasters today.

For that urgently needed, radical change in policy, the planet has already run out of time. That is all that governments really need to know, and to act upon today. Today's would-be economists, on the other hand, must revolutionize their practice, as I have summarized the case for that here.

1. It must be noted here, that the usual translation of the title, De Docta Ignorantia, is, from case to case, either an intentionally malicious fraud or simple ignorance of the systemic reflection of a Platonic view of Egyptian-Pythagorean "Sphaerics." In modern physics, the correct meaning is that of Cusa's follower Kepler, as also Leibniz, and, most emphatically, Bernhard Riemann's explicitly anti-Euclidean physical hypergeometry. The modern opposition to the common legacy of Sphaerics, Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, and Riemann, has been, chiefly, either an echo of strictly reductionist view of medieval Aristoteleanism, or the somewhat radically revised reductionism of the modern Liberalism of such followers of Venice's Paolo Sarpi as Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Kant, et al.