This article appeared in the September 18, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Death-Agony of Olympus
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 1, 1998
Not only the leading political strata world-wide, but also growing numbers of U.S. citizens generally, are responding to the most recent turns in the global financial crisis, by saying, in effect, "Doctor, tell me: what is happening inside my head?"
One symptom of those changes, is the way in which the so-called "New Democrats" (also known as "Third Way" ideologues[1]) have moved, suddenly, in the wake of August 17th Russia developments, toward openly defecting from the traditional U.S. Democratic Party.[2] The "New Democrats' " recent change in tactics, may be partly a calculated factional tactic, aiming toward fusion with Gingrich Republicans,[3] but, also, partly a kind of sociological, "knee-jerk" reaction to the recent, dramatic change in the global financial-monetary environment. Whatever the causes for this change in the behavior of those aberrant "New Democrats," various other, usually less aberrant, leading strata of the U.S. population are, also, suddenly, behaving, for better or worse, in various new ways, ways which each would have rejected as either "too risky," or otherwise unthinkable, as recently as a few weeks earlier.
Related developments are manifest around most of the world, during these same few weeks and months. This includes the fact, that many in Britain's Labour and other circles are relishing the anticipated, early downfall of the U.S. "New Democrats' " singularly unlovable co-thinker, "Third Way" Prime Minister Tony Blair.[4]
What threatens the political doom of both Blair's and the New Democrats' "Third Way," is the fact, that, already, not only within the U.S.A., but throughout most of the world, a radical, rapid shift in "cultural paradigms" is in progress, directly reversing the earlier "cultural paradigm-shift," which had been first popularized during 1964-1972. World-wide, for virtually all literate strata of populations, the widely accepted, putative meaning of the term "political reality," is being changed in content, suddenly and rapidly. This is not an homogeneous shift, but a complex one, expressed in many, diverse, sometimes mutually exclusive ways.[5] It is not only reality itself which is changing; there is a rather sudden, and rapid change in the meaning which the crisis itself is compelling people, more and more, to lend to their implied definition of the term "reality."
The relevant simile is: the relevant ideological kind of debtor's balloon-note has come way overdue. In other words, reality, which has been operating, for decades, as if from behind the scenes, is now breaking free from the concealing mists of what had become, heretofore, the dominant varieties of popular delusions. The legendary, gruesome "monkey's paw," is knocking at the door. With the advent of the newest round of the century's greatest financial crisis, Yuppiedom's post-1963 parody of the "Flapper Era" has ended. As for the populations of the U.S.A. and Europe during the 1929-1932 onset of the so-called "Great Depression," this new change comes in the form of successive shock-waves, ruining most of those fanciful assumptions which most of the population, from all political classes and ranks, have preferred to believe, since before the most recent two decades, until now.
Such changes have arrived as very bad news for the the likes of "Third Way" shaman "Dick" Morris. Yesterday's popular opinion, as pollsters had proclaimed it to be unimpeachable, until the proverbial day before yesterday, is discredited, more and more. The world as most people in the U.S.A., Japan, or Europe had assumed it to exist, just a few months, or even a few weeks earlier, no longer exists, and never will again.
There are more, and still more shocking changes, yet to arrive. During each of the coming succession of short periods, each of no longer than several weeks, the world as a whole will experience now-oncoming, new, sudden shocks, mostly economic or economics-related, each coming one after the other. In most cases, each of these shocks of the coming weeks and months, will be of a quality which, until a few weeks earlier, most leading political strata, and others, would have been certain could absolutely never occur, changes which no previous shock had prepared them to foresee, or understand. For these dismayed folk, today's political weather-forecast for the coming weeks, reads something like: "Tigerland tornadoes yesterday, Yen hurricanes today, awesome volcanic eruptions in Europe's Russian backyard tomorrow, and cataclysmic earthquakes everywhere the day after that."
Who will bring relief from this recurring nightmare? One can safely say, categorically, that, with the exception of China and those of its neighbors, such as Malaysia and Taiwan, who are now already joining China in an emerging policy-bloc, there is, up to this present moment of writing, virtually no other government anywhere else on this planet, including the government of the U.S.A., which is intellectually or emotionally prepared, yet, to deal rationally with the situation it faces during the coming few weeks and months.
In other published locations, I have presented, in considerable detail, the programmatic features of the economic and related policy-changes which must be adopted to solve the objective financial, monetary, and physical-economic features of this crisis. My chief purpose in writing here, has a different emphasis. My task here, is to help leaders, both inside and outside our government, and among what might be named the "organic leaders" within the pores of local and regional constituency associations, to make sense of the maelstrom of change now whirling inside their own heads. My task here, is to provide the basis in understanding, for that quality of peace of mind, which today's political leaders must summon to guide their judgment, in facing the otherwise nerve-wracking succession of crises still before them.
I outline the case to be presented, as follows. I situate the present state of the crisis, by reference to the point when the most recent qualitative shock hit the U.S. government and others, suddenly, beginning August 17, 1998. We shall begin, thus, with attention to the more obvious, surface features of the changes associated with this phase of the crisis. After that, we shall turn to the principal subject of this report, to the more profound implications. There, we shall focus upon the psychological and related effects which most citizens, including leaders of our government, would not be capable of either understanding or mastering, without the kind of assistance I provide them here.
The day reality struck
Many of EIR's readers will recall, that, in a report drafted on August 14th, published in our August 28 edition, I defined three, relatively short-term options, or, what might be called "branching points," respecting the outcome of the presently accelerating disintegration of the existing international financial and monetary system.[6] On August 17th, three days after that report had been outlined, what my associates and I had warned would be the immediately impending new Russia crisis, exploded. The world has not been the same since that August 17th, and never will be again.[7] Those and related events of August are the setting in which the recent revolution in popular opinion erupted.
Respecting the continued aggravation of the post-August 17th Russia crisis, the following note should be interpolated here. The reader should be reminded, that the effects of Russia's financial crisis are predominantly those of a European political-strategic crisis, in contrast to the threat to the global financial-system inhering in the deep bankruptcy of Japan's banking system and the policy-making of its present government. In contrast to Russia, it is Japan, under its present government, which represents the greatest present threat to the planetary financial system as such. Thus, by contrast with the far more ominous Japan crisis, the impact of the Russia crisis which erupted on August 17th, reflects a relatively much less acute threat to the world's financial system as a financial system. The importance of the Russia crisis lies in its severe and profound strategic political significance, especially for Europe, and, therefore, as a consequence, also the U.S.A.[8]
For example, post-August 17th developments in Russia, when situated within the global context of Japan's bankruptcy, scrambles the pre-existing agreements to establish stable financial and monetary relations among western European states. No longer can Europe's internal affairs be managed on deceased French President François Mitterrand's evil terms.[9] Thus, the present combination of the Japan and Russia crises, spells the unavoidable doom of the European Monetary Union's presently upcoming plans for agreements on implementing the so-called "Euro." Any workable means for actually solving Russia's immediate economic crisis, depend upon junking the "free trade" reforms instituted, successively, under Gorbachev's perestroika and President Yeltsin; without strict capital and exchange controls, and an accompanying, protectionist approach to reviving Russia's agricultural and manufacturing potential, any approach to Russia's present crisis will fail catastrophically, and very quickly. Thus, while the available immediate measures of economic solution for the most pressing features of the Russia crisis, are obvious, the problem for Europe is, that any such workable solution for Russia's crisis, overturns the entire structure of "free trade" and "globalization" measures imposed upon all of Europe during the 1989-1993 term of U.S. President George Bush; that is the crucial political difficulty for Russia's western European neighbors, and also for the presently much-beleaguered U.S. President Clinton.
Once again: relative to Russia, it is the position of Japan, not only in relation to East and Southeast Asia, but, more significantly, the "derivatives" bubble at the core of the ongoing collapse of the planetary financial and monetary system, which continues to be the major element of financial, monetary, and economic destabilization planet-wide. Thus, in the current round of post-1989 Russia's chronic crisis, it was not the problem of Russia's known debt, which absolutely terrified Europe's bankers. It was the sudden discovery that an accumulation of more than $100 billions of derivatives, "side-bets," had been issued, as international obligations, against the Russian debt; it was this threat to detonate the Japan-centered, global derivatives bubble, which scared the proverbial pants (and perhaps a few actual pants, too) off the world's leading bankers.
Since absolute clarity on these particular issues is crucial for understanding the present world situation as a whole, I restate the crucial points I have just made, as follows.
The reason the latest Russia crisis is so threatening, is the refusal of the U.S. and European supporters of Russia's Viktor Chernomyrdin, a leading original architect of Russia's present bankruptcy, to accept the fact that the so-called "Russia reforms" have now reached an absolute dead end. The backers of Chernomyrdin's re-nomination as Russia's Prime Minister,[10] have stubbornly, foolishly refused to recognize the relevance of the global conditions under which the most recent Russia crisis has erupted: the inevitable doom of a world-wide system of "free trade" and "globalization."
This threatened "crash" of the present Russian system, is most likely to be brought about through chain-reaction effects of today's persisting, hopeless bankruptcy of the majority of Japan's leading banks. Had Washington, for example, succeeded in bringing Japan to its senses, as Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had proposed at the end of 1997, the kind of tactic of international "re-regulation" adopted by Russia Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, on August 17th, would have enabled the partnership of the U.S., Germany, and Russia, to buy some amount of time for building genuine solutions for the Russia crisis. Moreover, had Japan reacted sanely to Rubin's warning, the political situation for President Clinton's dealing with today's Russia crisis, would have afforded Clinton greater freedom to make sane offers to Russia, rather than the potentially fatal error of "staying on course" with the doomed reform.
While Prime Minister Kiriyenko's measures, by themselves, would not have provided a solution for the crisis, they could have been used as an essential first step in the direction of seeking a remedy, had Clinton found the political courage to act boldly. It was the ouster of Kiriyenko, by those who preferred the Russian "finance oligarchy's" Chernomyrdin, which made everything about Russia's financial crisis terribly worse, more desperately critical politically.
We stress the crucial political point once again. It was the refusal of Japan to heed the continued advice of Secretary Rubin, and the refusal, by the pro-monetarist, utopia faction, inside the U.S.A. and Russia, to accept the measures announced by Prime Minister Kiriyenko, which made the present Russia crisis much more ominous than it need have become otherwise. Thus, the essential, strategic crisis of Russia today, is political, rather than simply financial; the essential element of the corresponding, global political tragedy of the moment, is essentially psychological.
All factors considered, in addressing the crisis in Russia, or anywhere else, the first and foremost fact to be faced, is this. The most fundamental of the continuing causes for the present world crisis is, that as long as the utopian factions in the U.S.A., as elsewhere, are able to obstruct and delay the indispensable immediate termination of presently established "free trade" and "globalization" policies, every action by the U.S.A. and other governments intended to continue those "free trade" and "globalization" policies, will tend to ensure that there will be no result from any proposed reforms of the present situation, but to make every terrible situation catastrophically worse.
That said, resume the principal line of argument in progress in this report: the psychological effect, especially upon the U.S. population, of the most recent developments in the global financial and monetary crisis.
The political shock itself
Now, turn our attention to the crucial political factor: the psychological shocks which the most recent developments have delivered to both leading political and financial circles, and to the populations more broadly.
Most of those EIR readers who have thus far reported their reactions to my report in the August 28 EIR, said that they had been shocked to read there, that the only options available to this planet, during the months ahead, are, either a return to a new world financial and monetary system echoing the pre-1958 Bretton Woods agreements, or a global form of "new dark age" echoing the nightmare now rampaging through sub-Sahara Africa. They stated, that they were shocked to read the evidence proving this fact, proof that a continued attempt to install a post-industrialized form of global utopia, would ensure a rapid descent of the world as a whole into a planet-wide "new dark age." However, a significant number among those readers emphasized, that even more shocking to them, was my warning, that the kind of policy symbolized by such utopian catch-phrases as "globalization" and "free-market," is itself the policy of a planet hopelessly doomed to a virtually immediate, world-wide economic and political disintegration.
What shocked them the most, was not the simple fact that I showed why such utopian policies are doomed. Rather, it was the recognition that the doomed, now discredited utopian scheme represented every policy, which, up to that moment of reading, they themselves had been conditioned to consider as inevitable, unstoppable. The source of the greatest shock was, therefore, that the latter utopian belief had become an "unshakable opinion," which most of them, themselves, like President Bill Clinton and his predecessors, had cultivated as so-called "realistic political thinking," over a generation or even longer. The deepest shock comes as a reaction, not to the proposal that existing policies must be radically, and even quickly changed. The most profound shock is the result of their confrontation with the evidence, that the mind of both the President and most other citizens must now undergo, quickly, a radical change, away from what most of them had believed up to now.
Such was the implication of their confrontation with the reality, that the only real choices presently available, are between a return to the kind of nation-state system envisaged by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and a global "new dark age." In today's real universe, there is no third way. That is the reality which underlies the causes for the growing turmoil in the minds of people, inside and outside the U.S.A., since the new outbreak of world-wide financial and monetary crises during the August 17-31 interval.[11]
The point which must be emphasized, is that this shock was not caused by any event outside their own skins, not something they could view, "objectively," at a distance from what goes on inside their own skins. The shock was not that the financial system had to be changed politically. The shock was, that they themselves could not survive, unless they, themselves, were changed, inside themselves. The shock was, that they must now face this reality subjectively. That defines the urgent function of the present report.
European civilization has already provided the political instrument needed to overcome this subjective crisis: great Classical tragedy.
On this point, every conscientious U.S. citizen must recognize that same principle of Classical tragedy emphasized by Aeschylus, Christopher Marlowe,[12] Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller.[13] The purpose which the greatest such tragedians have served, in succession, in developing the notion of Classical tragedy, is their attempt to communicate to their audiences of typical citizens, an impassioned recognition of a fundamental principle which governs the shaping of actual history. The central underlying principle upon which the artful composition of all great Classical tragedies is based, is the principle cited by ancient Mencius, that no hegemonic culture is ever destroyed by anything but, like Biblical Belshazzar's Babylon, its own lack of the moral fitness to survive.[14]
Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, by refusing to abandon his accustomed ideology, doomed himself willfully to what he came to foresee as the bloody end of both himself and the kingdom of Denmark.
When one experiences a terribly perplexing sense of shock, of the type we are referencing here, the indispensable first step toward a fruitful peace of mind, is the victim's successful identification of the source of the personal inner tension which has prompted that sense of shock.[15] Those who are most likely to find the kind of peace of mind the present crisis requires, are to be met among those persons who have at least some degree of literate familiarity with Classical tragedy on stage.[16] Indeed, the political importance of Classical tragedy on stage, is that, since Sophocles and Aeschylus, it was a form of art crafted to the purpose of providing living audiences the impassioned intellectual sources of insight, and renewed moral strength needed, to deal successfully with precisely the relevant type of shock, the shock which populations are now experiencing as a result of the present turns in the international financial and monetary crisis.[17]
Take three cases from Classical tragedy as illustration of the point. We take these cases in the following order. First, the most familiar case, that of Hamlet's Third Act soliloquy, "To be, or not to be." Second, what playwright Friedrich Schiller identified as the crucial folly of Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's Don Carlos. Finally, the role of Prometheus in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.
In Hamlet's soliloquy, he restates that moral crisis within himself, which had been the theme of his soliloquy[18] in the close of the Second Act. In the Third Act, he reflects upon two choices. The first, is his customary behavior and belief (like the behavior and belief of present-day utopians), which he has recognized as leading toward his self-destruction; the second, he rejects, as "impractical," as a journey into the unfamiliar, "a bourn from which no traveller has returned." Having made his choice, Hamlet proceeds willfully, to bring about his own doom. There, in that paradox, that metaphor, lies the source of the shock, the passion evoked by that soliloquy![19] The intelligent member of that audience, who has sensed the possibility of the same choice of folly within himself, proceeds from knowledgeable recognition of that fatal passion, to fight against that fatal emotion, and, thus, in relevant later moments of real life, to avoid the doom inhering in succumbing to errors like that of Hamlet.
In Schiller's Don Carlos, Schiller proceeds from his insight as the leading historian of his time, from the precise, actual-historical circumstances which had prompted Spain's real-life, self-doomed King Philip, to unleash the hecatombs of religious war upon the Netherlands. Schiller elaborates that real-life tragedy of Spain and the Netherlands, by crafting three potential heroes as the central figures of the stage to appear in that drama. The only true hero, the heroine, is the Queen, Elizabeth, whose conception and counsel are clear, but those whom she would have influenced failed, fatally, to heed her counsel. The second, fatally failed hero, is Rodrigo, who has a clear conception of the alternative which Spain must choose to avoid religious warfare; however, Rodrigo is trapped by his own vanity, in betraying both his cause and his ally of the moment, the third hero, Don Carlos. As Schiller comments on his writing of the drama, Rodrigo is diverted from the cause he himself had earlier, correctly defined, diverted by his egocentric lust for holding to what he believed he had recently secured as a position of trusted advisor to a debased King Philip.[20]
In the play, this misconduct by Rodrigo dooms all the protagonists, including, off stage, in real life, the historic, real-life people of both Spain and the Netherlands; all, dramatic characters and real people off stage, alike, are doomed to share a common ruin and depravity, in the unquenched, maddening slaughter which ensued in real history, as on Schiller's stage. It is artistic compositions which achieve such conceptual congruence between art and actual history, as Schiller achieved this in his Don Carlos, which represent the highest, and most indispensable level of human culture.
Don Carlos is an example of the policy which governed Schiller's approach to, and motive for composition of stage-tragedy: to use the awfulness of the tragic failure on stage, to fill the audiences emerging from the theater with the joy of knowing that they had become better people leaving the theater, than had entered it before. When we are gripped, perhaps by help of such a work of Classical art, by that deep anxiety and shock, which comes only in that moment we recognize the terrible situation to which our own habituated follies have led us, we have increased power to deal with the problems of life, and increased joy in being alive.
If we can see clearly, within ourselves, that passion which, still unchecked, will surely doom us and our society, the fact that we can see that passion itself so, and can resolve to defeat it, gives our mind a great serenity, the confidence of knowing we are committed to the right cause. In that more fortunate state of mind, we are committed to discovering the right thing to do, to avert that doom which the unchecked fatal passion might bring upon our society. We can risk our lives for such a cause, because we know we have thus secured for our souls a just place in the simultaneity of eternity.
Aeschylus' Prometheus is the consummate antithesis of Classical tragedy's failed heroes. In the drama's simultaneity of eternity, Prometheus, a god who can not be killed, and the defender of mankind against the evil Zeus, is taken captive, and condemned by Zeus to immortal torment. Arch-oligarch Zeus's price for freeing his victim, is that Prometheus must reveal to Zeus the way in which Zeus will bring about the destruction of both himself and the wicked oligarchy of Olympus generally. Rather than give Zeus the information by means of which Zeus's power might survive indefinitely, Prometheus, to save mankind from the status of being forever doomed dumb human cattle, willingly chooses paying the price of immortal torment, as penalty for his own silence. That is not a tragedy of Prometheus, but, rather, the story of the tragic folly of the self-doomed Satan, oligarch Zeus. That is the most powerful image which could be chosen as real-life subject for the dramatic stage.
In fact, what is being acted out before us, in our real world today, is the final act of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy, the death-agony of Zeus's Olympus. That, in fact, is the key to understanding and mastering these troubled times.
So, it is with the mind's eye of the greatest Classical tragedians, that the Russia tragedy and its implications must be viewed. Only in that approach, is the leading political figure, or the ordinary citizen, likely to find that serenity of mind which civilization's survival in the present situation demands of us all.
A doomed political class
Between the new outbreak of the Russia crisis, as announced by since-ousted Russian Prime Minister Kiriyenko, on August 17th, and the major new New York Stock Exchange panic, of August 31, the early doom of the presently collapsing, utopian system of "free market" and "globalization" shibboleths, has been pronounced "as good as dead" by a rapidly increasing number of leading bankers and financial press.[21] The shock of this reality has hit sundry influential strata in varying ways.
There have been two leading polarities of reaction to this outbreak.
On the one side, there is a well-informed view typified by an increasing number of representatives of traditional banking and related economic functions. These are persons who have reacted to the combination of the Japan and Russia crises by words to the effect: "Whether we like it or not, the world will not survive unless we now eliminate the present policies of `free trade' and `globalization,' and return to reliance upon the institutions of the sovereign nation-state, and to the forms of regulation which may be recalled from pre-1958 experience."
On the opposing side, there is what is fairly contrasted to such banking circles, as "the presently ruling, doomed majority of today's reigning political class." The phenomenon of the "Third Way" is a typical symptom of the onrushing doom of the presently ruling political class.
In former times, the very suggestion of a "Third Way" tactic as a policy, would have been widely rejected. The policies of a Tony Blair, neo-Jacobin Newt Gingrich, or "Dick" Morris, would have been regarded, rightly, as a symptom of their advocate's unspeakable moral and intellectual decadence. Now, or then, it is properly seen as an idea, like the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, too immoral, or, on other grounds, perhaps simply too absurd to be tolerated.
I, for one, remember a world from what might seem to many a long time ago, before 1971. It was a time when the world was still being managed mostly by relatively saner governments. At that time, the most influential notion of what U.S. political life must be, was of a process of interaction among the relatively independent, semi-autonomous "interest groups" of which the majority of the citizenry was composed. Farmers, industrialists, labor, and the more influential learned professions, were typical constituents, as were the so-called "ethnic" or "minority" interests. These ancient foundations of civilized political life, have been chiefly supplanted by the kinds of obscenities we encounter among Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Third Wave" klaverns or a "New Democrat" faction whose differences with Gingrich's collation have lately become increasingly difficult to locate.
Instead of the real, mass-based political parties of the pre-1971-1976 interval, U.S. political parties have degenerated into parodies of kept women. They have been transformed, step by step, from instruments of political representation, into echoes of the worst sort of political party formations known from the history of Europe since ancient Rome's politics of bread and circuses. Typified by the corrupting influence of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), they have degenerated into mere political fronts for the oligarchy-controlled institutions of governmental bureaucracies.
This political change is typified by the symbiosis of Wall Street "chaos theory" junkies with Wall Street hegemony over the financing and mass media propaganda-support needed to conduct successful election-campaigns, both combined with the permanent bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of Justice, all combined with the Federal Reserve System, and all combined with the leading globalized, and chiefly morally debased "mass news and entertainment media" of the U.S. and other nations. This is a combination which has largely displaced the former function of mass-constituency-based politics from the national political life of the U.S.A., and of relevant other nations. This kind of miscreant has emerged as most typical of the presently ruling political class.
Perhaps the most disgusting example of this among nations more or less familiar to most of us, is what France degenerated into becoming under the satanic figure of its President François Mitterrand. Post-Bonaparte France was already notorious for its role as Europe's leading police-state, and its related tendency toward sheer bureaucratic brutality. In France's worst features on this account, we encounter, too often, the existentialist's quality of tendencies toward indifference to principles of truth or justice, its amoral propensities for bureaucratic tyranny. This Bonapartist, bureaucratic legacy, combined with the devilish immorality of Mitterrand and what he has represented, has engendered, today, an abomination which prompts neighboring states to shudder in disgust at the mere name of Mitterrand's and Chirac's Paris.
What Britain's Prince Philip and his "Transparency International" bandits have done to the political institutions of Italy, through his post-1991, captive "Clean Hands" thuggery, is another example of the way in which the modern state has degenerated under the influence of the recent decades' utopian rampage. Symptoms differ, as diseases adapt their corrupting influences to the constitutions of their prey.
Thus, in today's world, where actual industry has been reduced to an impoverished and looted relic of a more prosperous, abandoned age of agro-industrial progress, political power has become concentrated in a most unwholesome entanglement of links among governmental bureaucracies, major factions of political parties, and leading mass-media interests. This unwholesome collation, has coalesced into a single, tightly entwined commonality, a depraved union aptly described, with sexual innuendoes, as a slithering mass of polymorphous perversity. The U.S. establishment of a British-designed U.S. concoction, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), only best typifies this recent subversion and degradation of our political processes.
The symbiosis of the Chaos faction within the British Commonwealth oligarchy (e.g., Prince Philip and the Murdoch-Hollinger press mess) with the right-wing, "New Democrats' " and U.S. Justice Department's targetting of U.S. President Clinton, is an example of those polymorphous perversities which have virtually enslaved our citizenry to tyrannical rule by such post-modernist extremes in political corruption as the NED.[22]
Until the present moment, throughout what is termed euphemistically today's "European civilization," hysterical defense of the current modes and policies adopted by such polymorphous perversities, prevails among the top-ranking agencies of the political class, especially the mass "news and entertainment media." Now, some recent developments of this Spring and Summer have shaken the power of that political class as it has not been challenged so in more than a decade. Under the impact of the new global financial and related shocks on the way, major changes, qualitative changes, are to be expected during the weeks to come.
Thus, until the present moment, throughout western Europe, as in the U.S.A., the prevailing political commitment of leading politicians and major press has remained an hysterical determination to defend "free trade" and "globalization," however painful or cruel the penalties and risks of doing so. This has continued as the prevailing posture of leading political circles in those countries, even after the Russia debacle of August 17th. This has continued, so, despite the fact, that relevant banking circles, and official spokesmen of some leading banking institutions in Europe, are beating the drums for scrapping "free trade" and "globalization," for a return to "re-regulation," as the only sane alternative: for restoring the authority and role of the sovereign nation-state, instituting capital and exchange controls, and so on.
Yet, although the leading political circles still deploy a ferocious, if rear-guard resistance against all efforts to introduce sanity to the public discussion of the present international crises, the voice of the saner bankers, and others, is leaking into relevant sections of not only the financial press, but spills over, if usually in an awkward way, into some of the leading mass media. Utopia is doomed; new, pro-nation-state policies are now in the making.
There are two levels to this most recent pattern of change, as displayed during the August 17-31 interval. There is, on the one side, the impact of straightforward considerations of perceived reality. There is, also, what must have been viewed at first as a more subtle, but ultimately more powerful feature, the pattern of the recently ongoing, new cultural paradigm-shift. Before focussing upon the latter, our principal topic in this report, we summarize the general situation among the three factions representing, respecting, the three strategic options addressed in the August 28 EIR report. For EIR readers, what we say in the following few explanatory paragraphs is not new; but, it is necessary to summarize the point once more, here, for the benefit of those who are not already familiar with the argument.
First of all, as any old-fashioned top industrial banker might recognize, the doom of the present international financial and monetary system in its present form, is immediate and inevitable. Unlike the virtual idiot-savants who have been running, and ruining, the financial trading sections from their handheld electronic calculators, the world's leading old-fashioned bankers may often be very wicked, but, unlike the trading pit's current generation of young zero-sum hyenas, they were competent at what they did. For such bankers and related professionals, the evidence now in hand is overwhelming. This convinces such a banker, in opposition to the typical spokesmen of today's decadent political class, that it is past time to clean out, and fumigate the trading-pit, and, perhaps, get back into the play himself. He is readily persuaded, from his recent experience, that the only way to save the world from a plunge into Hell, is to act immediately to eliminate the existing fad of "free trade" and "globalization."
On that first account, the leading practical question is, whether relevant governments are willing to scrap that system in time to avoid an otherwise inevitable plunge of the entire planet into a "dark age" chaos.
On the second account, since the 1987 U.S. stock-exchange panic, the sundry ruling lunatics of the world, including Margaret Thatcher, the late François Mitterrand, and George Bush's crew, have been monkeying with the international financial system, in the effort to keep aloft a doomed world system which was already rotten and ripe for collapse during the mid-1980s.
From such 1982 measures as the U.S. Garn-St Germain and Kemp-Roth follies, through the patch-work changes improvised following the 1987 U.S. stock-exchange panic, all of the supposed "miracle cures" which these authorities alleged they had discovered, were based upon the very same delusion used to create the failed John Law-style bubbles of the early Eighteenth Century.
However the new version of the scheme was tailored, the method used never varied. Use political power to loot both government and private interests. Shut down and sell off entire large chunks of production, gouge wages, replace wage-labor by actual (prison labor) or virtual slave-labor (as by NAFTA), loot pensions, loot insurance stocks, all to turn the liquidation of assets into nominal one-time income. Use the mechanism of price-earnings ratios to turn that financial pirate's booty into a financial capital asset several times greater in price than the amount stolen. To make this earning-price conversion "work," pump various kinds of money or near-money into the market for these fictitious financial assets, thus creating a vast hyper-inflationary bubble, many times greater than the gross domestic product of all of the world's nations combined.
My "Triple Curve" [Figure 1] describes the inevitable result of all such improvisations since 1971. What has been inevitable since 1987, is now the present moment of history; the dead end has been reached. The "free trade" and "globalization" games of the utopians have reached the end of the proverbial trolley-line; the Titanic is about to plunge beneath the surface. For the sane citizen, it is time to get off; for the fanatically self-deluded utopians, there is no place to go. For these utopians, there exist no further options for continuing their "free trade" system of looting the world's widows and orphans.
All this could have been easily calculated in advance. In fact, I did forecast it, and my forecasts were spread into every relevant leading political and financial center around the world. I gained the position of the world's most accurate forecaster as a result, first in August 1971, again during 1979-1983, but especially over the course of the 1987-1998 interval.
Among economists and government policy-shapers, my opponents preferred not to make actually serious kinds of calculations, at least not publicly. Such opponents of mine lied, a lot; they usually lied in everything they said about the state of the economy, and the results of the policies they were peddling at the moment. To others, they lied freely, wildly; but, the worst lies were those these ideologues told to themselves.
The validity of my past forecasts is easily demonstrated, and has been actually demonstrated repeatedly. No contrary, honest calculations were ever possible. Calculation would only have shown my opponents the same result which I had warned was inevitable. They did not wish to know the truth; they preferred to enjoy the luxury of looting until the inevitable date of doom for their system had arrived. It would have spoiled their game, demolished their ill-founded self-confidence, to acknowledge the reality ahead. For them, the scorned inevitable has now arrived; the legendary monkey's paw is now knocking at their door.
Now, calculations are no longer needed to calculate the signs of doom written on every wall. The traders' handheld calculators have set themselves on "self-destruct." The old sadistic bitch, Fortuna, leers her pleasure in contemplating the doom and suffering of the unfortunate men she has turned into swine. The system based upon the utopian ideologies of "free trade" and "globalization" is simply, unavoidably, and inevitably finished; no rational, reasonably intelligent person will continue to support such obviously failed, utopian policies. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of Circe's irrational victims running loose, and not all of them are "New Democrats."
In such a fix, as America's Ogden Nash once wrote, those who had committed themselves politically or financially to seeking fertile satisfaction between the utopian "plated decks" of "free trade" and "globalization," have only two remaining choices for their pleasure. Either join Prince Philip's Chaos faction (if he and his cronies, such as George Soros, will take you into their club), or change allegiances fundamentally, back to the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Konrad Adenauer, and Charles de Gaulle.
So, each day now, more confessed former supporters of the "free trade" faction, are apologizing to the former friends whose cause they are now betraying: "We had to do it; I am just doing my job." These relatively more intelligent people may express their politely gentle regrets at being obliged to jump over into the camp of pre-1958-style "re-regulation" of finance, monetary affairs, and international trade; but, nonetheless, the simple fact of the matter is, that they are acting strictly according to customary ethical standards: deserting their former friends of the doomed utopian faction, as those same friends have, in similar earlier situations, and according to the same standards of ethics, customarily betrayed them; "We admit that you made your contributions in the past, but the time has come to make some improvements. It is time for us all to move on."
These changes now come in increasingly large proportions. "The smart ones are now getting out while the getting is good." Thus, in what are often admittedly sordid, and also other ways, the historical process unfolds. Such are the complexities of the unfolding of a process through which radically new global policies are now put into the making.
How society works, or doesn't
A wise senior flag officer, commenting upon my report in the August 28 EIR, made the point. When a new war erupts, most of the senior officers show themselves incapable of responding effectively to the new situation. That remark has been made, often, by military professionals commenting upon the somewhat analogous circumstances of earlier generations and centuries.[23] The passage of time, and recent decades' deterioration in quality of education and experience of upcoming senior ranks, has made that oft-repeated aphorism not less appropriate today.
Major crises, like the nest of present, intricately interrelated, global financial and political crises, signify that the habits of thought engrained during the decades preceding the new crisis, defined most among today's leading figures, for example, as so much contaminated by the bad habits of the society which had caused, or allowed the crisis, that most of those senior figures have been unable to adapt themselves successfully, subjectively, to the new realities which the crisis had defined.[24]
The relevant fundamentals of strategy are restated here, as follows.
Unlike the human species, species and varieties of animals interact with nature, including other species, according to an ostensibly "genetically" fixed set of axiomatic rules of behavior. Unlike animals, human beings have the means to choose, to overrule any supposed "genetic" predetermination of their culture, and to change the axiomatic rules which govern their behavior. It is such choices of axioms which determine both man's relative success or failure in mastering the universe about us, and which determine the way in which the members of society interact with one another. For human beings, the crucial question is, whether or not they can react to failures in their old patterns of behavior, with the alternative of creating new conditions, that by means of appropriate, successful choices in new sets of adopted axioms governing human conduct.
Thus, old generals, too much attached to the apparently successful, narrowly defined set of habits which they have been conditioned to adopt as "natural," or, "practical," during a past period, often fail to respond effectively to a radically new set of circumstances.
The exemplary expression of this challenge, is the way in which members of society respond to successive shocks of crisis, either by making successful, sudden, radical changes in axioms of behavior in response to crises, or failing to do so. The ability to choose and to make such changes successfully, and to make such changes with appropriate confidence, or to fail to do so, is the pivot upon which the survival or doom of entire cultures often turns. These are the issues often brought most clearly, and painfully, to the surface of great events, under conditions of general war-fighting, or kindred forms of strategic crises.
The relevant, crucial point of competent qualities of strategic thinking, is, that, while the physical survival of cultures depends upon society's physical interaction with the universe around it, the question, whether a society will choose a successful form of radically new interaction, or not, is not an objective, but a subjective question. That is the issue which must become the center of attention for any crisis-ridden culture, faced with a breakdown in its previously established mode of survival. That is the issue which we address here. Look at the causes for the present series of cultural shocks from that vantage-point.
After we have considered what modern European civilization had accomplished earlier, until the recent decades' accelerating decay of our culture, we must face the fact, that what has come to pass, recently, respecting the standard for defining "educated persons," today, is worse than a great disappointment; it is, substantially, a terrible fraud. During all of this present century, to date, the most conspicuous expression of this decadence among so-called "educated persons," has been an accelerating rate of moral and intellectual degeneration in such departments of university and secondary education as literature, music, plastic art-forms, and the so-called "social sciences."
Until about thirty years ago, despite that century-long trend, the modern physical-economic progress associated with science and technology, combined with vast improvements in public sanitation and other basic economic infrastructure, and in the demographic characteristics of households, was awesome, when compared with the vastly inferior performance of all known cultures from ancient and medieval times.
Admittedly, even during the ruinous, most recent decades, some commendable, if relatively feeble steps of technological and related progress, have occurred in the proverbial domains of "here and there." Such scattered recent exceptions to the prevailing, downward trend, have, admittedly, occurred, despite three decades of overall net reversal of former tendencies for economic growth; but overall, civilization has been in decline, and, up to now, if we put the case of China to one side, the planet has been going backwards at a generally accelerating rate.
The former technological and related progress of our civilization, especially modern European civilization, was real; but, apart from those qualities, an essential added requirement was usually either lacking, or poorly expressed. Most notably, as we noted here a moment ago, in the fields of the arts, literature, and the so-called "social sciences," our culture has been degenerating, overall, and more or less consistently, throughout the present century to date. During the latter time, each new generation's elites, in particular, have been, on the average, less intelligent, less literate, less rational, less sane, than those of the predecessor generations. This judgment is not a mere matter of cultural "preferences," of mere personal "opinion;" the possibility of the survival of civilization depends upon recognizing the clear evidence of that decadence, and reversing this decay in very specific respects. That crucial task is our subject here.
So, we today have been living in the decadence of a dying culture, a culture which has been dying by objective, physical-economic standards of performance, a culture which has also been dying in terms of its subjective qualities, the shrinking of the ability of its elites, and populations generally, to think and behave rationally. That has been the case, pretty much world-wide, for more than two decades.[25] This has been most emphatically the case, since the time of the U.S. Carter Administration's policy of massive, deliberate reversal of human progress in all spheres of physical, political-economic, moral, and cultural deliberation. It is that trend of the recent decades, the which has brought the world's civilization to the present brink of collapse.
It is the convergence upon that limit of civilization's folly of recent decades, like the convergence of an accelerating airborne projectile upon trans-sonic velocities, which has produced the recent succession of shocks threatening the immediate extermination of the present civilization. We shall not survive these shocks, unless we are able, now, to suddenly eradicate those habituated habits of belief, those attitudes, which have misshaped the world's most popular and other leading economic and cultural developments of the recent three decades.
It is that process, that approximately three decades of cultural retrogression, cultural decay, which has created the political and social preconditions for the series of shocks now threatening the continued existence of our failed civilization. It is from that vantage-point, that we must define the new, radical changes in outlook and culture, needed to rescue our civilization from the doom immediately threatening the planet as a whole.
Our adopted task for this report, has been to use the principles of Classical tragedy as the crucial, subjective standpoint, from which to define both the subjective problem before us, and the nature of the required solution. As we approach the concluding phase of this report, we must now define more exactly the relevant distinction the reader must make, between "objective" and "subjective" determinants of the physical-economic success, or doom of cultures.
To define "objective," put the emphasis upon economics. Throw aside all of those notions of "economics," or "political economy," which, until now, have become generally accepted and taught in universities, and among most of today's professionals, members of Congress, and the mass media. Define "economy" from the only sane standpoint available, as the definition established through the successive work of the European cameralists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by the founder of economic science, Gottfried Leibniz, and associated with the Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List "American System of political-economy."
Objectively, economic science assumes the outward form of mathematical physics, by measuring changes in output in relevant physical, rather than monetary terms. Competence in this field limits itself to measuring the physical, not monetary output, in terms of per-capita of labor-force, per-capita of household populations, and per square kilometer of the relevant portions of the Earth's surface-area.
Two additional features of this physical measurement are required, for defining relative economic performance.
First, we must compare the per-capita and per-square-kilometer output of society, with the physical costs of those allocations needed to maintain the social potential for maintaining such, or better rates of output. These allocations include the relevant maintenance and improvements in basic economic infrastructure, of the territory of the society in its entirety. These include the portion of physical output which must be allotted to maintaining and increasing the productive powers of labor through capital-intensive, power-intensive modes of productive, and other essential activity. These include, similarly, the physical costs of maintaining the productive potential of the members of households, including the physical costs of maintaining and developing the required quality of educational system, and supporting those Classical modes of cultural activities needed to maintain the relevant intellectual and moral qualities of the population in general.
Second, we must define "productivity" itself in these physical terms: the ratio of total physical output, to physical, not monetary, costs of all required inputs. This productivity must increase, per capita and per square kilometer, despite the relative rise in absolute physical costs of combined "market baskets" needed to foster such increases in productivity. In other words, we must measure the physical performance of economies in physical terms cohering with the biological notion of anti-entropy, cohering with the notion of that ordering of both all living and cognitive processes, the which sets living and thinking beings absolutely outside the entropic ordering deemed characteristic of non-living processes as particular processes.
In consequence, the effective practice of the science of economy, has situated considerations such as quality and content of education, and the fostering of generalized scientific and technological progress, as typical of the indispensable components of that society's total bill of consumption, needed for effective economic performance by societies taken as wholes. The efficient function of these types of components can not be measured in explicitly physical terms. Rather, we measure the functional determination of these physical effects only indirectly, in the sense these effects are associated with rations of the composition of the functionally necessary activities of households or the population as a whole, and as they are associated with the incurred physical costs needed to sustain such types of activity. Nonetheless, despite that point of formal difficulty, to the extent that such programs of education and science can be defined in terms of allocations of effort and physical resources, these considerations can be treated as if they were objective, i.e., physical, features of economic policy and policy-shaping.
To quote our friend Will Shakespeare, "There's the rub." None of these ostensibly objective policies and related considerations, actually work as they are usually described as working. They do not work without the addition of something entirely outside what ordinary opinion regards as objective. At this point, the subjective shows itself to be the ultimate determinant of the success or failure of all systems, all economic and related kinds of so-called "objective" policies and programs. Here, the absolute difference, the subjective factor, which places the human species apart from, and above the beasts, shows itself most forcefully.
The substance of this subjective factor, is a quality whose existence was denied by modern Aristotelean Immanuel Kant, the quality named cognition. Without the efficient role of cognition, in determining whether ostensibly "objective" forms of activity lead to entropy or anti-entropy, civilized forms of human existence were impossible.[26] Without the continued subordination of so-called "objective" forms of economic and related activity to the "subjective factor" of cognition, as we define cognition here (for example), any society would degenerate and disintegrate, falling into some form of "new dark age."
This brings the reader--Bang!--into the middle of a most distressing, most shocking kind of intellectual and moral difficulty, a veritable intellectual quicksand from which no Aristotelean, such as Immanuel Kant, or other formalist, has ever successfully escaped. How do we reconcile the objective efficiency of an ostensibly "non-objective" activity, cognition, with the fact that cognition, as we have situated it here, is functionally, an integral, controlling, even dominant feature of what ordinary opinion regards as "physical processes." As Will said, "There's the rub." On this account, an example from the domain of modern physics should prove helpful, perhaps indispensable.
Wilhelm Weber and `strong forces'
Some, perhaps many readers, will experience difficulties in following closely some portions of what I have to report in the course of the following paragraphs. Those readers should not be put off by the apparent difficulty. In serious statement of any important case, we are often morally obliged to put on the record all essential evidence bearing on the argument to be made, whether or not each such point were likely to be readily understood. Among arguments submitted to reasonable and honest men and women, the acknowledgement of the existence of mysteries yet to be solved, is not only allowed, but required; willfully hidden mysteries are frauds,[27] which are never to be allowed. We will not foster any hidden mysteries in what we have to report. It will be sufficient for our purposes, if the reader gets no more than the gist of the matter presented in the several more difficult among these few paragraphs. The importance of including these indicated few paragraphs at this point, will certainly be clear enough.
As I summarized the same point in a preceding report,[28] a popular delusion shared by most science undergraduate students, textbooks, and others, teaches that the laws of the physical universe are formally consistent with nothing different than the mechanistic teachings of such empiricists and positivists as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Augustin Cauchy, Lord Kelvin, Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, et al. Contrary to that popular delusion, the universe demonstrates that there is not one, but, rather, four principal known kinds of mutually exclusive ordering, which must be viewed, in their interacting combinations, as governing what we must actually perceive as "cause and effect." Only one of these four types or ordering, which may be recognized as the entropy model, comes close to resembling the currently popular delusions of the science undergraduate.
The first such fundamental difference in mathematical forms of apparent "cause-effect" ordering, is the elementary difference in ordering between all living and non-living processes, respectively. All particular instances of non-living processes, as understood by the typical science undergraduate, have an ordering which Nineteenth-Century empiricists such as Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, and Boltzmann defined as "entropic."[29] In contrast, living processes, as a category, are distinguished from all ostensibly non-living processes, by the fact that the characteristic ordering of all living processes, is anti-entropic. Thus, so far, we have two distinct orderings of what is ostensibly "cause and effect:" non-living and living processes. There are two additional, respectively distinct types of higher, anti-entropic ordering.
First, as Plato insisted, and as Kepler and such successors as Carl Gauss have supplied definitive, crucial experimental proof of this fact, the universe as a whole (the astrophysical universe, for example), is governed by its own form of higher anti-entropic ordering.[30] Second, finally, we have the characteristically anti-entropic ordering lying within the domain of individual human cognition. As Plato's argument would imply, the universal ordering, subsumes and situates the other three. Cognition, while similar to the ordering of living processes in general, is not limited to such similarity; for reason of its admittedly imperfected approximation of the universal ordering of the universe as a whole, it is of a higher order (i.e., higher cardinality) than merely living processes generally.
These differences in ordering represent the only valid epistemological basis for speaking of a type, called differences of "curvature," within the domain of physical space-time. This leads us to such questions as, "What happens to a non-living form of molecule when it is incorporated as an integral feature of a living process?" (as distinct from a molecule which is only grossly "mixed" with that process, as virtual "dirt"). Clearly, we can speak of "incorporation," only in the case it is demonstrable that the assimilation is efficient: that it can be reasonably inferred, that the curvature of the space-time associated with the non-living molecule, for example, is changed to conform to the non-linear, microphysical characteristics of the living process (in the infinitesimally, "non-linear" small). The crucial experimental evidence of the "non-linear" role of so-called "bio-photons," in optical biophysics, is an example of such a notion of co-functional incorporation.
This is also precisely analogous to the evidence supplied as conclusive, crucial proof, that such interaction is what occurs when a non-living sub-process, physical economy as ordinarily viewed, is located conceptually under the regime of cognition. The evidence, that cognition superimposes an anti-entropic ordering on what are otherwise, ostensibly entropic forms of physical-economic processes, is, in itself, a conclusive, crucial experimental proof of this type of connection.
There is another way of looking at such interactions among integrated systems of respectively different ordering. Typical is the example of physicist Wilhelm Weber's proof of the efficient existence of an Ampère "longitudinal force."[31] Weber's crucial experimental proof for the existence and magnitude of this "force," leads to the introduction of a notion of special curvature of processes within the sub-atomic, microphysical domain: the notion of "strong forces."
Put the question this way. What happens, when a process which is ordered characteristically according to one type of curvature, is compelled to submit to an ordering of a different type of curvature? One might describe this as something beyond all ordinary undergraduates' textbook notions of mechanical "cause and effect;" one thinks of a wrenching of physical space-time itself. By "wrenching," one signifies a local change in the curvature of physical space-time, as present-day references to "strong" and "weaker" nuclear and related "forces," illustrate the case. For example, if the geometry of the Solar system of orbits was changed from its actual Keplerian form, to a simple Euclidean form, that would be a case of the quality of "wrenching"--a wrenching degradation, in this case--to which we are referring here. This wrenching must be viewed, then, as a special case of what mathematical physics knows, more generally, as the key problem of analysis situs.[32]
Take, once more, our earlier reference to Carl Gauss's conclusive proof, that the Solar system is ordered as Johannes Kepler defined the nature of that ordering, but not as Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and other empiricists have insisted. The notion of a Keplerian, or Gaussian determination of orbits, is adduced from crucial physical evidence, which shows that the Solar physical-space-time in which the planets are situated, is neither empty space, nor a curious substance of the sort foolishly imagined, as a "luminiferous ether," by Gauss's, Riemann's, and Weber's avowed adversary, J. Clerk Maxwell. It is not an "ether;" it is a physical-space-time curvature, which imposes some entropic or anti-entropic principle of orbital ordering, upon the events situated within that domain, that multiply-connected manifold.
This is precisely the quality of phenomenon we are observing, and measuring, when we show that scientific and technological progress determines a "non-linear," anti-entropic ordering for what is otherwise regarded, objectively, as a physically "objective" process located in an hypothetical physical-space-time which is implicitly assumed to be characteristically linear in its infinitesimally small interval of action. In this case, we are pointing to the successful forms of physical economy.
Given, an objective model of a physical economy. The economy so defined would appear to belong to a linear physical space-time, like that of John von Neumann's "systems analysis" or Norbert Wiener's "information theory," which is linear in the infinitesimally small. Anti-entropy could not exist within that economy; therefore, it must appear, that actual profit could not exist in such a characteristically linear, or "zero-sum/entropy" model of economy. However, in real economies, speaking mathematically, the subjective intervention of cognitive processes "wrenches" the physical-economic space-time in the "non-linear" domain of the infinitesimally small. The result of this "wrenching," is to give the economic process the functional characteristics of an "orbit" which is characteristically anti-entropic.
There never was a successful form of physical economy, in which precisely this mode of anti-entropic action was not characteristic of the relevant subjective practice of that society. It is the cognitive processes of individual persons, the which generate the anti-entropy expressed, measurably, objectively, as increased productive powers of labor, within the objective domain of measurable physical-economic effects. This relationship between cognition and the anti-entropy which cognition adumbrates within the objective domain, is the characteristic form of action which determines whether a physical economy works, or does not work.
It works, when it does work, as follows. In the imagery of Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation,[33] a new physical principle whose discovery has been crucially validated, as in an experimental way, adds a new "dimension" to the known geometry of physical space-time. This new "dimension" changes the characteristics of the newly defined known domain, relative to the formerly known domain, which the discovery has superseded. In such cases, the experimental evidence shows, that the higher domain corresponds to a characteristically "more efficient," more powerful form of action. In other words, the subjective action associated with generating efficient knowledge of the higher domain, is relatively anti-entropic in its effects.
In brief review of this implication of Riemann's work, consider the following restatement of the case just outlined above.
Given, the crucial experimental evidence which has proven that physical space-time conforms to a Riemannian physical-space-time manifold of n "dimensions," each such "dimension" a crucially validated physical principle. Suddenly, we are confronted with undeniable evidence, that there is a stubborn flaw embedded in the earlier presumption, the presumption that that n-fold manifold adequately represents actual physical space-time. In serious examples of this kind of problem, the suspicion that the presumption has been mistaken, is forced upon us by the most insistent form of paradoxical evidence. Evidence demonstrates, that there is no deductive form of solution for this paradox; it is a true paradox, analogous to a true metaphor within the domain of Classical art-forms.
This paradox defines a shock, in the same general sense the stubborn persistence of a global breakdown of the world's financial system evokes a profound sense of shock. There is no remedy for this shock (suicide aside), but to discover a validatable new principle, a corrected view of the universe. Such discoveries are generated as Immanuel Kant, for example, insisted they could not be; they are generated only through the "non-linear," anti-entropic agency, of an individual's cognitive processes.
These paradoxes and their corresponding, validated discoveries of new physical principles, acquire a social form in two interrelated, but distinct ways. First, the prompting paradox (or, metaphor) can be demonstrated, and validated for other minds, by each individual's corresponding act of cognitive replication. Once a crucial experimental validation of a new discovery has occurred, then, and only then, can the results of that validated discovery also be shared with others, by means of the kind of cognitive replication we associate with a Classical-humanist form of secondary and higher education.
Such discovery, validation, and social replication define the transformation of a paradox-ridden n-fold Riemannian manifold, into an n+1-fold Riemannian manifold freed from the relevant paradox. As we have reported here just a moment ago, such an n+1-fold manifold always represents a physical-space-time whose characteristic form of action is more powerful (e.g., of higher cardinality) than that of the n-fold manifold it supersedes. It is that gain in power, through such transformations, which represents, formally, the source of that anti-entropy which scientific and technological progress, for example, transfers to a relevant physical economy's objective expression.
To complete the relevant reference to the implications of Weber's referenced discovery, the following notation should be made. The experimental evidence of work in the field of multiply-connected manifolds, shows us, that changes in ordering, which result from imposing one type of ordering upon another, are expressed mathematically, as relatively infinitesimal, so-called "non-linear" changes within the characteristic action of the incorporated ordering. It is, similarly, the way in which anti-entropic action, as in the expressed form of scientific and technological progress, increases the objectively manifest productive powers of labor in an economy. We shall discover, very soon, the highly practical bearing of this principle upon the political crises being addressed by this report.
We should add here, what has been said on many relevant, earlier occasions: Such discoveries of validated new physical principles, or other discoveries of universal principle, as in Classical art, are uniquely products of the same cognitive processes of the individual human mind by means of which valid solutions to true artistic paradoxes (i.e., metaphors) are discovered. Physical principles, as we describe such principles in objective terms, pertain to mankind's relationship to nature, per capita, and per square kilometer of our planet's surface. Classical-artistic principles pertain to the subjective aspect of the social relations through which improved, effective, cooperative development of mankind's physical practice is made possible.
The combined characteristic gains in power, as represented by validatable discoveries of both physical and Classical-artistic principle, are the source of the anti-entropy upon which the continued survival of civilization depends absolutely. The successful, individual's original, or replicated creative act of cognition, so expressed, is the act--the work--by means of which the human mind transmits objectively manifest anti-entropy, subjectively to the physical-economic process. It is this form of work, cognition, which distinguishes the human activity of civilized forms of society, categorically, from the exertions of our farmer's cattle, or of other lower forms of life.
The power of the individual
With respect to the ordinary course of daily experience, what we have said here of the role of the subjective, implicitly defines the scale according to which we may measure the difference between rational, optimistic and creatively active individual minds, as the former are opposed to dull, mediocre, cynical, and brutish expressions of mental life and social relations, such as today's so-called "techno."
The existentialist types, for example, such as the infamous Voltaire, or the followers of proto-Nazis and outright Nazis, and Nazi-like leftist types, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre, or the Nazi-like "Jenny" of Bertolt Brecht's "Three-Penny Opera," typify the brutish mind at its relative worst, relatively most entropic, therefore, and most destructive.
Let us view these and other shadings of difference in cultural characteristics of individual and group behavior, on a scale which corresponds to what we have said here respecting the transmission of anti-entropy, subjectively, to the observable, objective characteristics of the physical economies influenced by the subjectivity of the sundry, various personality types.
For initial purposes of illustration, let us define our notion of those relative qualities of mind which are functionally significant economically, by resort to a preliminary "rough cut." To illustrate the relevant point in a preliminary way, choose, if but temporarily, five, simply defined types of mind-sets as the reference-points for mapping a scale of comparison.
First: At the highest (best) level, we have "creative." This is typified by the kinds of minds which Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt sought to foster through the Schiller-Humboldt mode of Classical-humanist reforms in general education, with emphasis upon secondary levels of education provided for the population as a whole.[34] These are typified by the "sparkling" minds of both science and art, those who are habituated to use of their cognitive powers, habituated so through a system of education which, rather than indoctrinating the victim through textbook-style drill and grill, "walks the student through" the re-enactment of the historically original discoveries of principle.[35] This form of education begins from the starting-point of reference provided by Classical Greece's relevant conflicts and contributions, respecting validated discoveries of either physical or Classical-artistic principle.
Second: Lower down, less useful, we have the well-informed, but not creatively-inclined person, drilled and grilled according to currently prescribed fashion: "informed." He, or she, who has been boned to pass his examinations, and to perform related tasks, thus achieves what passes, superficially, at least, for assembly-line modes of mass-produced social success, a success invoked through human sacrifice of the power to know, a killing of the soul performed on the altar of learning--or, as it is often said today, the altar of "information." Such Schlemiels! For their pathetic little sins of opportunism, they doom themselves to an endless midlife crisis. The pathetic little lives they lead, behind the mask of pretending to be important, become an existentialist's eternal Purgatory, a flight from the terrors and other oppressions of being "thrown" into a regime of self-imposed eternal boredom. Such pathetic little, would-be Fausts! Poor Kafka's cockroach! Thus, we see them today, condemned to dwell in the perpetual, meaningless torment of an "information society."[36]
Third: Still lower down, we have "mediocre:" who sometimes perform useful duties, but remain, otherwise, spewably lukewarm in intellect, taste, and morals.
Fourth: At the bottom of the pit, where "rock" performers and derivatives-traders dwell, we have Jonathan Swift's and the Nashville "Agrarian" models of Stars-and-Bars-style Yahoos: "brutish."
Finally, all among the lower three of these classifications overlap, Venn-diagram fashion, with that quality of cynicism whose impact ranges from only noxiously corrupt, such as pollster "Dick" Morris, to the satanically evil, existentialist quality of a Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Richard Wagner, Martin Heidegger, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, or François Mitterrand.
Reflection upon these four-plus, or five reference-points, prompt useful, if but preliminary thoughts, on the subject of the relevant intellectual and moral characteristics of a society as a whole. As in the case of Carl Gauss's use of relatively tiny observations to adduce the orbit of Ceres,[37] these are characteristics which are rooted in the expressed differences in personal character of the typical individual members of that society, rather than some statistical sampling of apparent population behavior on large scales. Since the generation and transmission of the wrenching power of anti-entropy proceeds, from the sovereign cognitive processes of the individual's mind, to the economic and related processes of the society at large, a comparison of the intellectual quality of the typical individual members of one society, with the quality of the members of another, is crucial for determining the anti-entropy expressed by that society's physical economy as a whole. In short, we must portray the "analysis situs" among these five points of reference, as Johannes Kepler studied the composition of our Solar system, from the vantage-point of the first, highest quality, rather than attempting to find goodness in people, as Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and other empiricists do, by examining their parts from the bottom, up.
However, that cautionary observation said, as we look downward, from above, to discover what evil subversion is being done from below, think of the implications, for the U.S. economy, and its physical-economic standard of living, of the cultural down-shift which has dominated the U.S. society and its institutional practices since the post-Kennedy cultural paradigm-shift of 1964-1972.
Include among the nature and effects of a cultural down-shift, the radical, and accelerating degeneration of public and university education, which took over the content and goals of education during the early to middle 1960s. This degeneration was begun, beginning the period coinciding with the 1963 issuance, by the Paris office of the OECD, of an anti-rational reform of education policy, a new policy first insinuated into the public policy of Nanterre and other educational centers of France as early as that same year. The so-called "Brandt reforms" of education in Germany are part of this same cultural paradigm-shift in the education policies of not only Europe and the U.S.A., but also so-called "developing nations." In the U.S.A., the related process, of destruction of public and university education, which began during the mid-1960s, was aimed, explicitly, against the aerospace-development policy of President John Kennedy's administration.[38]
These and related developments, all assisted by the satanic legacy of Theodor Adorno's and Hannah Arendt's anti-rationalist "Frankfurt School," gave the world the so-called "New Left" of Germany's Oskar Negt, et al.[39] These developments included truly evil features, including covers provided for the deployment of the "factory rejects" of the New Left, as cat's-paw covers for international terrorism, cat's-paws recruited and deployed under the cover of the so-called "Sixty-Eighter" phenomena of Europe and the Americas.
The authors of the "cultural paradigm-shift" of the 1964-1972 interval, targetted a highly suggestible fraction of the student populations of leading universities--as in the U.S.A. and Europe--for what can not be fairly described as anything other than "mass brainwashing" conducted in the style of the London Tavistock Institute and associated Clinic. The chief targets in the U.S.A. for example, were the giant "multiversities," such as the University of California at Berkeley, the associated think-tank organizations, such as the frankly satanic, "New Dark Age" projects of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of the nearby Palo Alto area, and "Ivy League" and kindred universities such as Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and so on.
To locate the sources of today's leading problems of public policy-shaping, one must focus upon the included fact, that the tactic behind the 1960s "New Left" project was elementary, and, unfortunately, all too successful. The principal target of the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift, was a stratum of secondary school graduates, college and university undergraduates, then chiefly still adolescents (emotionally, if not physically), of the type which had been selected to be educated and otherwise socially conditioned as the leading representatives of the coming adult generation's new batch of recruits for the finance oligarchy's captive intelligentsia. As it was said then by my wife's most fervent adversaries in the mass media and related locations of Germany today, her opponents from among the former "Frankfurt School" storm-troopers recruited from among Germany's 1968 veterans, the assigned goal of the New Left was to "march through the institutions," and take power over almost everything by this means. It was the same in the U.S.A., and elsewhere. The New Lefters were the obvious disease-carriers, and the satanic doctrines of Prince Philip and the "Frankfurt School" were the "RNA lentivirus," the ideological "AIDS virus," which had infected the disease itself.
Today, we are approaching two generations' lapse of time, since the mass-brainwashing of 1964-1972 began. Twenty-five years, or more, later, the ranks of the Sixty-Eighters have been selectively groomed, repeatedly re-indoctrinated, and selectively promoted, or culled of those deemed young cows with bad feet, to be deployed in regimental formations, as tailored sets of replacements for the former leaders. Notably, "former leaders" signifies, today, chiefly, representatives from the older, President John F. Kennedy generation. This process of takeover of command, by the "body-snatcher" recruits from 1968, has occurred in most of the key positions of influence in government, education, mass media, and elsewhere. The takeover of the editorial direction of the Wall Street Journal, by the ultra-irrationalist Robert Bartley, beginning the early 1970s, is one example of this New Left-style "march through the institutions."
The old cronies of Weimar Germany's "Frankfurt School" circle, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Arendt's Nazi companion of the pre-Hitler regime period, Martin Heidegger, typify the most willfully evil among those who crafted the ideology in which the Sixty-Eighters of both Germany and the U.S.A. were indoctrinated. Notable on this account, is Adorno's and Arendt's own variety of ultra-irrationalist breed of fascist doctrine, the so-called "theory of the authoritarian personality." Essentially, what Arendt copied from her mentor, Adorno, was the combination of two leading elements. First, an explicitly satanic passion, like that of "Frankfurt School" godfather Georg Lukacs, or Brecht's autobiographical character "Jenny," for "destroying the existing civilization," in every way possible. Second, the effort, through the spread of the Adorno-Arendt "authoritarian personality" dogma, to outlaw considerations of both truth and justice from every aspect of official and private intercourse. For those who know the histories of both the fascist and anarchist extremist movements in Europe, Arendt and Adorno, like their Nazi crony Heidegger, sat together and cozened "where the woodbine twines," in those depths where the worst of Nazism and the ultra-left have always found their common, Blair-style utopia, since even long before Blair named it a "Third Way."
So, in this concluding section thus far, we have listed two leading, microcosmical factors determining those characteristic distinctions among societies, the which are rooted in differing qualities among relevant types of individual personalities. We have identified, first, the role of the relative level of growth, or debasement, represented by the individual person's cognitive development. In addition, we have referenced the relevant case of the Sixty-Eighters, to illustrate the implied importance of willfully resisting and defeating anti-social passions, including outrightly satanic ones, which are threatening the self-destruction of cultures. There is a third principal, higher consideration to be featured as the keystone element in this repertoire: the role of choice of axiomatic conception of the nature, and situation, of the human individual within the universe at large.
The latter factor in determining the success or doom of cultures, is best identified as the issue posed by the proposition that the individual man and woman are each made in the image of the Creator. In fact, this third factor implicitly subsumes all of the issues presented by the other two.
It is permissible, and useful, to cluster all of these and related considerations, and their bearing upon the generation and transmission of physical-economic anti-entropy, under the rubric of a general conception of the role of cultural paradigm-shifts. The last of the three considerations just listed, takes us directly to that goal.
The modern nation-state republic
The last, most crucial issue to be considered, in conclusion, here, is the practical, real-life implications of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy. This trilogy, and the implications we have referenced under the discussion of Classical tragedy, above, are to be examined from the standpoint of the way in which the Christian conception of man and woman as made in the image of the Creator,[40] led, in fact, into the idea underlying the establishment of the United States as a sovereign Federal constitutional republic: the case of the so-called "American exception."[41]
The core of the issue, is not the simple-minded, bald assertion, that man and woman are each and all made in the image of the Creator. The core of the issue, is the available, crucial proof, that this claim is true.
The proof is the fact, that humanity alone, acting through the sovereign cognitive potential of the individual person, is able to increase mankind's power over the universe, per capita, and per square kilometer of our planet's surface. This cognitive power for discovering such efficient truth, innate to the individual, is crucial proof of the existence of a "divine spark of reason" universally innate to the human individual. The emergence of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, is the result of the impact and persistence of that Christian principle.
The essential features of the republic, are two. First, that we must end, everywhere on this planet, the notion that humanity can be divided between a ruling class, the oligarchies and their lackeys, on the one side, and a ruled class, subjugated, virtual "human cattle," as victims, on the other side. The earlier societies, including evil Venice, anti-American Britain under its present monarchy, and the anti-American reactionaries represented by Metternich's Holy Alliance, insisted, like the British Foreign Service's self-proclaimed asset, treasonous Henry A. Kissinger, upon maintaining the traditional division between oligarch and "human cattle." On the opposing side, there has been the influence of those whose work led into the mid-Fifteenth-Century Council of Florence and King Louis XI's Renaissance-guided reconstruction of France as the first modern nation-state, representing the interest of all of its people. This pioneering achievement of Louis XI's France, led into the later establishment and defense of the United States' Federal Republic as the noblest enterprise of European civilization as a whole.
The American Exception emerged as a reflection of the fact, that the Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Europeans could not realize their objectives, to establish a true republic overthrowing the ruling vestiges of oligarchism, simply and directly, within their respective own countries, or even within Europe as a whole. In this difficult circumstance, the effort to build up a true republic, in Plato's sense of that term, in North America, was conceived as a way of circumventing the apparent impossibility of establishing republics by means internal to Europe alone.
The future patriotic leadership and republican conceptions of the U.S.A., emerging as factions built up in the Mathers' Massachusetts and Penn's and Logan's Pennsylvania, during the course of the Seventeenth Century, reflected this conception and long-range intent. From the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, the best Europeans, including the English, Scottish, and Irish opponents of William of Orange, Marlborough, and George I, allied with such leaders of the U.S. cause as Benjamin Franklin. Nineteenth-Century U.S. leaders best represented by John Quincy Adams, Alexander Dallas Bache, Henry C. Carey, and Abraham Lincoln, typify the continuity of the same kind of internationalist perspective of the U.S.A.'s best patriots.
Thus, over these centuries, to date, American and European heirs of the Renaissance worked together, to establish the U.S. republic as the rallying-point for freeing the entirety of our planet from the relics of oligarchical forms of racism and other tyranny. I stand, personally, in that American patriotic tradition, respecting the development of cooperative relations between the U.S.A. and Europe.
It is crucial to understand, still today, that the achievements produced by the struggle for liberty inside North America, were not a product of ideas which sprang up autochthonously, within the geographic and related circumstances internal to North America. Always, the development of the struggle for liberty inside North America, and the establishment and defense of the U.S. republic itself, was chiefly a product of the work of those Europeans who were best typified by the figure of Gottfried Leibniz, Europeans acting under the influence of the best leading currents within the culture of Europe.
Some exemplary facts should be reviewed, if only briefly, here. From the Sixteenth Century on, Europeans went to North America to find and build a republic; these Europeans built the foundations of the U.S. republic's achievements. The immigrants to North America came from Europe. The ideas underlying the American Revolution, came from the Augustinian Golden Renaissance heritage within Europe. The successes of the United States in winning its freedom from its mortal enemy, the British monarchy, and defending that freedom against the combined forces of the European financier-oligarchical and other oligarchical enemies, were always accomplished in concert between U.S. patriots, such as Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams, and the European factions to which Americans turned for essential assistance in wars against such enemies of freedom as the British monarchy, France's Napoleons, and Metternich's Holy Alliance. Without those European allies of the U.S., the combination of British agents and pro-British factions inside the U.S.A., would have succeeded in destroying the U.S. from within, at several crucial points during the Nineteenth Century, such as 1812, and 1861-1863.
That is the view of the U.S. republic as the work of a Transatlantic collaboration with European anti-British co-thinkers, enemies of such shameless overt agents of British influence as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. That is the view of collaborators committed to the cause of the Christian principle of the "divine spark of reason." That, in opposition to the babblings of Teddy Roosevelt's favorite, Frederick Jackson Turner, is the only true "American Exception." The United States was created by Europeans as an instrument for freeing Europe itself from the grip of such evil forces as the British monarchy, the family and tradition of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Holy Alliance. Without continuing to adhere to that purpose, for which the U.S. was created, the U.S.A. itself would not long survive.
It is that same view of Europe among leading patriots of the U.S.A. in the tradition of Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Carey, which informs a patriotic view of what U.S. Russia policy must become today. Russia is, as France's President Charles de Gaulle emphasized, an integral, important, leading part of Europe as a whole, a Russia whose collaboration with both the United States and the Leibniz-Schiller-Humboldt tradition within Germany has always been key to the, unfortunately, all too exceptional, best periods in the history of Russia's policies and foreign relations. Russia today must be brought into playing its proper role within Europe as a whole, a role which depends upon the proper shaping of the relations among the U.S., Russia, and Germany.
The case of Russia leads us, by way of Eurasia as a whole, into a much more important matter, the ordering of the affairs of this world as a whole.
The greatest leaders of the U.S. republic, such as Franklin and John Quincy Adams, always understood that the security of the U.S. itself ultimately depended not only upon freeing Europe itself from the oligarchical legacies of the British monarchy, the Napoleons, and the Holy Alliance, but also upon establishing a world order of cooperation for universal improvement of the human condition. The best U.S. patriots among us have always understood, as President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed this, in opposition to Winston Churchill, and in opposition to Roosevelt's confused and corrupted successor, President Harry Truman, that this matter of bringing justice to all of the nations of the world, is our republic's true destiny, the destiny inhering in the creation of our republic. The historic mission of the United States, is to ensure the creation of a system of cooperation among perfectly sovereign nation-states, to establish a system of justice, based upon commitment to truth, throughout the world as a whole.
For the Americans, as heirs of the mid-Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance, this meant a world order based on the conception of man and nature inhering in the conception that all persons are made equally in the image of the Creator, and endowed with that potential of creative reason, expressed in scientific and Classical-artistic forms of progress of universal improvement in the condition of the human individual, which expresses their likeness to, and the Christian's agapic love for their Creator. That is the principle of agape¯ featured, in defense of truth and justice, in Plato's Republic; that is the principle of the Christian Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13. That principle is key to any successful effort to address the implications of the presently ongoing disintegration of the world's present financial and monetary system.
That historical outline, respecting the case of the American Exception, situates the following, concluding features of our discussion of the subjective determination of history.
The highest point of individual morality, culture, and intellect, is found in reflection upon the fact, that the greatest of all things created is the individual human being, whose innate gift of reason, situates that individual, in practice, as made in the image of the Creator. (For the information of those unfortunate persons who may object to this theological outlook, we warn them, that it might be considered imprudent to insult the Creator, as many professed "Christian Fundamentalists" do, by accusing Him of bad taste in respect to the love for all mankind expressed by Jesus Christ and His Apostles.)
In practice, the conscious, as distinct from innately potential morality, of that individual, begins with his, or her reflection on the fact, that each of us is mortal. The fact that each is born, and will die, impels anyone not an utter fool, to find, in life, that which transcends death. The same thing, said in the language of Classical philosophy and Christian theology: to find, and secure one's immortal place within the simultaneity of eternity.
There is nothing merely fanciful in such apparent speculations. The characteristic feature of human existence, which sets the human personality absolutely apart from, and above the lower species, is creative reason, as reason is typified by the crucial-experimental validation of newly discovered physical principles of the universe. The generation, and replication of such valid discoveries, has the efficient consequence, that we, the living, may act to give fresh kinds of life to those fruits of creative reason which have been bequeathed to the living by the dead, and may act similarly, such that, we, once dead, still act to shape the future states of this universe. There, we dwell, today, in the simultaneity of eternity.
In these connections of present to past and future, the which we have just summarized in the two preceding paragraphs, we should recognize that the kinds of educational policy in force in the United States, and other nations, today, are intrinsically evil. What is evil in the policies of such wretches as John Dewey and his successors, is the fact, that the contemporary educational policies of our public and private schools, and universities, including so-called "home schooling," were introduced with the explicitly stated intent, to destroy the best forms of public and university education previously established, the forms of education associated with the Classical humanist methods of such as the Brothers of the Common Life and the Schiller-Humboldt reforms in Germany.
In Classical humanist modes of education, education is centered upon the student's re-enacting, as exactly as possible, the reliving of an original discoverer's impassioned[42] act of discovering a validated principle, either a physical principle, or a comparable principle of Classical art. This is a moral act, as contrasted with the immorality of mere textbook learning of that which was, actually or only putatively, proven by some work from past centuries. Since, these principles are made known to the student by reliving actual moments of discovery of principle, from the minds of persons long deceased, this form of education corresponds to the moral principle identified just above. That moral principle, informed by a richness of reliving the most important known discoveries of principle from the past, defines the student's moral commitment, to live today in such a way as to foster a better future for generations yet to come.
The relatively simpler illustrations of this principle, come from the history of physical science, as science is best traced from the centuries of the Academy of Athens under the leadership of Plato and successors such as Eratosthenes. All of the greatest valid achievements of modern science are derived from work premised upon the foundations of the method of Plato. However, as we have stressed near the beginning of this present report, there is a danger in relying upon so-called physical science to such a degree that we overlook the decisive role of Classical art. Look at the transition from the barbarism expressed within the Homeric epics, into the critical view of those barbarities and their civilized alternatives from the standpoint of Solon of Athens, Aeschylus (for example), and Plato. The referenced case of Orestes, and Athena's intervention against the blood-vengeful barbarities of the Furies, is an appropriate illustration of the point.
There is virtually no instance, in which the poem of Solon of Athens, and the greatest Greek tragedies of the Classical period, are not demonstrations of principle as much needed for today's populations, as they were in the time the Classical tragedians were struggling with their audiences, to expose the barbarous follies included in the events and policies reported in the Homeric epics. There is no problem of law, in the practice of today's U.S.A., or most legislatures and judiciaries of other nations today, in which reference to the treatment of justice, in Book Two of Plato's Republic, is not a much-needed correction for the barbarities commonly practiced by the U.S. Department of Justice and other relevant contemporary institutions.
Thus, on such account, students and teachers, who show contempt for study of Classical Greek literature, today, are rightly identified as "contemptible" fools.
It is by reliving the issues of Classical art, first as these issues were posed in Classical Greek literature, that the secondary pupil in a Classical humanist program, comes to know the moral principles of Classical works of art, in the same way in which the valid discoveries of physical science should become known to the student, by reliving the experience of original discovery of that same knowledge, as if he, or she were there. The study of modern works of art from the standpoint of comparison with the Classical Greek productions, such as the tragedies and Classical forms of commedia, of Rabelais, Marlowe, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Schiller, or the Classical-Greek modes of poetic composition used by Goethe, Shelley, and Keats, has this same quality of importance. Students who graduate from secondary schools without this kind of experience, are rightly called "barbarians," "illiterates," "unfortunates." They lack that developed moral sense, peculiar to Classical art, on which the continuation of viable modern forms of civilization depends absolutely.
We must emphasize here, once again, a crucial point we have made in other published locations. In Classical art, it is indispensable that we never lose connection to the principle of historical specificity. For example, any Classical drama, especially tragedy, which is composed as situating a subject-matter in a specific place and time in history, must never be presented as a "timeless lesson," never presented as a matter situated in a different historical setting of time and place, than that for which it was originally written.[43] This applies to education in secondary schools, as it ought to be enforced in public dramatic performances. There is a profound moral issue involved in this.
The moral issue here flows from the factual one. In the course of actual history, the relationship among present, preceding, and later generations, is the location in which the characteristic features of the historical process are located. For the case of tragedy, Schiller illustrates this point very well, by the relationship between his study of the composition of tragedy by Shakespeare, for example, with his own compositions. History is located, essentially, not in physical acts as such, but in the succession of those ideas in which the subjective order of objective action is situated. To violate, or simply overlook that principle of real-life history, is to sow the kind of confusion leading to the worst, potentially fatal blunders of judgment by both leading statesmen and public opinion generally. Morally, to do such a disgusting thing as that, is to reject absolutely the principle of truthfulness respecting the consequences of both ignorance of the past and respecting rational regard for the future consequences of present actions.
The image of some creature fit for a part in Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, masturbating with his handheld calculator, in a financial trading pit, provides an epitome of the kind of soon-doomed Yahoo a person is, who disregards the fact, that the ordering of the causal sequence of events occurs in reality, according to the principle of historical specificity.
Thus, the moral citizen is he, or she, who situates the notion of self-interest, not in personal profit or loss, nor immediate pleasure or pain, but rather with respect to one's personal world-historical place in the course of history as a whole. Thus, that person is moral, because his, or her notion of world-historical interest approximates the principle of an order within the meaning of a simultaneity of eternity. It is this location of one's self-interest, which defines the only truly happy persons on this planet, the kind which laughs in the Devil's face.
This, in summary, is the first, and highest moral standpoint. It is from this standpoint, and only this standpoint, that history can be understood, and the relationship between characteristics of individual human behavior, and the lawful ordering of anti-entropy and entropy in societies as wholes.
The crucial fact about history so viewed, is the relationship between the increase of mankind's power over the universe, and the notion of a correlation between such progress, and a Riemannian ordering of the progress of ideas of both physical and Classical-artistic principle. Hence, the importance which all of us, among those who have understood history, have placed upon a certain notion of universal education for all our young. It is to the degree, that we have fostered bright and happy young people, through their locating their own identity in history as the history of ideas, that we have fostered the development of our future citizens as typically sparkling wits, filled with actual knowledge, rather than mere learning, and, brimming, therefore, with laughter, wit, and joy in mastering strange places and more advanced discoveries of principle than have been known before.
Be thus happy, and we shall conquer all that we must.
[1] "Third Way": It is not idle wit, to identify such ideologues as advocating the political-economic equivalent of a policy of "Neither life nor death, but a Third Way." In their "Lotus Land," the devotees of such views do not work, but devote themselves to search for convergence in their idle choices of opinions and other expressions of bad taste. In the post-Civil War culture of the U.S.A., this sort of "Lotus Eaters" ideology was most aptly expressed by such ungently decadent creatures as the Nashville Agrarians ("The Fugitives"), as the latter are typified by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransome, and Kissinger's William Yandell Elliot. This surely, is the real-life, mint-julep-sipping, or other equivalent to the fictional "Count Dracula," who neither toils nor spins, but merely sucks.
[2] Admittedly, already, during May-August 1996, the "New Democrats" bullied President Clinton into throwing the Democratic Party's chances to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives, by forcing both Clinton and traditional Democrats into submitting to a piece of the U.S. Yahoo right's legislation on "welfare reform." In the setting of the August phase of the current international financial crisis, the same "New Democrats," including celebrated Puritan "Dick" Morris, used the pretext of Kenneth Starr's Lewinsky Affair to launch a public attack amounting to an open break with the President and the traditional constituency-forces of the Party. Among those vying for the Democratic "Hall of Shame," are: former Sen. Sam Nunn (Ga.), who suggested in a Washington Post commentary on Aug. 23 that the interests of the country may require President Clinton to resign; House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.), who said on Aug. 25, that President Clinton could be impeached, and that his conduct was "reprehensible"; Rep. James Moran (Va.), the co-chair of the "New Democratic Coalition," who told Barron's Hotline that Clinton's admissions constitute a particular peril to "New Democrat" candidates in swing districts. Similarly, on Sept. 6, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.) said that President Clinton had committed impeachable offenses by lying in the Paula Jones deposition and by lying to the American people. Moynihan told ABC's "This Week," that there is a "crisis of the regime," and that Congress "ought to get on . . . with an impeachment procedure." In fairness, it should be acknowledged, that the present tendency for convergence upon unity between the followers of "Third Wave" Gingrich and "New Democrats," is the outcome of a twenty-year process of defection from the Democratic Party, especially from among those states in which slavery of African-Americans had been formerly legalized, prior to post-Civil War Reconstruction. There is a corresponding connection between British Prime Minister Tony Blair's affinities for the legacy of anti-labor fanatic Margaret Thatcher, and "Dick" Morris' affinities for conciliation with the "Benito Mussolini of Georgia," Newt Gingrich.
[3] In a January 11, 1995 address to the Washington, D.C. National Press Club, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) pointed to the reason the Democratic Party had lost the 1994 congressional campaign (see "Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party Has Begun," EIR, March 29, 1996). "The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties," he stated. What he was pointing to, was the way in which certain currents within the Democratic Party were drifting toward political convergence with the Gingrich wing of the Republican Party. Since then, these same, deviant currents within the Democratic ranks, have found kinship with the "Third Way" tactics of Britain's Tony Blair: Blair's avowed commitment to replace former British Labour Party constituency-oriented politics, by a kind of political sex-change, a convergence of the Labour government with the ideology of the Mont Pelerin Society's rabid Thatcherism. This, Blair identifies as the "Third Way;" the "second Republican Party" inside the Democratic National Committee's reigning "political advisors," has adopted Blair's version of the "Third Way" as their own. The ideological roots of the "Third Way" among today's nominally Democratic Party circles, are to be found in two anti-labor currents from earlier times. One, especially among political figures from former slave-owning states, is typified by the perennially decadent "Nashville Agrarians." The more recent, converging source of the "New Democrat" perversion is the "new leftist" form of explicitly anti-labor, countercultural ferment associated with 1964-1972 phenomena such as SDS, the Weatherman break-out from SDS, and the Rainbow Coalition of the earliest 1970s. In the lexicons of Europe's 1920s and 1930s, both today's Gingrich types and the "Third Way" New Democrats would have been classified as strictly "fascist."
[4] For our purposes here, Blair's significance is that he not only typifies, but is integral to a Transatlantic spectrum of so-called "Third Way" clowns, from the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich's "New Democrat" partners, to Germany's dubious "shadow" Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. Blair is currently under heavy, increasing attack from responsible British Labour Party currents inside England. Denunciations of Blair from these Labour Party quarters each and all pin-point defects in Blair's policies and personal character which are also the despicable characteristics of the worst among Germany's SPD leadership and the worst among the leading spokespersons of the "New Democrats' " own "Third Way" faction in the U.S.A. The Aug. 14 London Guardian announced a "Third Way" conference on "Democracy in the Global Economy," for Sept. 21 in New York (to coincide with the UN General Assembly), hosted by the World Policy Institute. Speakers were to include President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italy's Romano Prodi, and Sweden's Göran Persson. Brazil's President Sir Henrique Fernando Cardoso and Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor candidate Gerhard Schroeder were invited, but are unable to attend, because of their respective election campaigns. The London Financial Times of Aug. 27 reveals that there have been "several meetings between top U.S. and U.K. officials over the past year . . . as a way of focusing attention on their new policy model. . . . Mr. Clinton's advisers believe if he is able to emphasize his strong policy credentials and international stature, it could help sway public opinion and head off possible impeachment hearings." Prime Minister Prodi told Italian TV that, now that we are accustomed to speaking of "global economy," we have to achieve "global politics." Like Britain's waning Prime Minister Tony "Cheshire Cat" Blair (successor to Margaret "Mad Hatter" Thatcher and John "Dormouse" Major), the U.S.'s "New Democrats" represent a form of irrationalism so shamelessly lacking in principle, as to prompt the modern clones of the Republic's Thrasymachus, but not the U.S.A.'s "Dick" Morris, to blush. The Aug. 14 issues of the London Guardian and Times both report a letter from former Industry Secretary Tony Benn to Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, charging that he has "no industrial policy," and which suggests that the protection of the rich is one of the Government's main objectives." The Aug. 7 issue of the New Statesman, runs a cover story by Helen Wilkenson, who writes that a "culture of cronyism appears to be permeating government. . . . The cancer that threatens to eat away at the heart of New Labour is the love of power, and control for its own sake. This love of power could become, as it did for Margaret Thatcher, New Labour's Achilles' heel."
[5] For the oldest presently living generation of Americans, the relevant comparison is to the "reality shock" which struck many at various points during the 1929-1933 interval. In the more celebrated, extreme cases, we had the spectacle of yesterday's Wall Street multimillionaire, suddenly bankrupt, homeless, and shunned by his former associates, peddling apples on the street. The comparable, less extreme case today, is the rather typical case of the person depending upon a mutual fund account. The relevant quality of "reality shock" is implied by the fellow who, up to a certain moment, thinks, "That could not happen to me," and, in the next moment, sits in rueful terror, "It happened to me." The resulting process of ongoing "radicalization," will produce effects reminding us of the polarization of the world at the beginning of the depression-ridden 1930s, with the emergence of President Franklin Roosevelt's factional position on one side, Adolf Hitler's on the other, and Churchill's somewhere in between: an entirely new constellation of political forces is emerging to replace what had been the leading partisan alignments of the preceding thirty-odd years.
[6] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "What Will Happen, If . . . ," Executive Intelligence Review, August 28, 1998.
[7] On August 17, 1998, Russia's Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko announced the enactment of emergency measures imposing capital and exchange controls upon the Russian economy. From that day onward, the hitherto hegemonic international political dogmas of "free trade" and "globalization" were effectively overthrown, and will never be re-established during a period of perhaps not less than a decade, perhaps a generation, perhaps never. There is no way in which "free trade" and "globalization" could be reimposed upon Russia (and other countries) without setting off an immediate political chain-reaction which would blow out the U.S. economy, and bring down the U.S. and other governments within a period as short as weeks. Thus, on August 17, an era of more than a quarter-century ended.
[8] As emphasized immediately below, the present Russia crisis will blow out the set of 1989-1992 agreements which the governments of Britain, France, the U.S.A., and the Soviet Union shoved down the throats of Germany, Italy, former Communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, agreements which have remained in force for Germany, Italy, Russia, and Ukraine, up to the present day.
[9] For "Mitterrand's terms," see Helga Zepp LaRouche, "Germany's Missed Historic Opportunity of 1989," Executive Intelligence Review, August 14, 1998.
[10] President Yeltsin had just previously dumped Viktor Chernomyrdin, in a purge of March 23, 1998. See Executive Intelligence Review April 3, 1998. On the role of U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, see Jonathan Broder, "Who Lost Russia?" in Salon magazine, Sept. 1, 1998. Through his father, former Senator Al Gore, and his father's sponsor, triply "designated personality" Armand (e.g., named as "Arm-and-Hammer," as in baking soda, or Socialist Labor Party) Hammer, Gore has close connections to the creation of Russia's present financier oligarchy. Hammer, long a triple agent of the U.S.A., the British monarchy, and the Soviet apparatus, was a key connection to the faction of the late Yuri Andropov and Andropov's Hammer-linked protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev. The source featured by Salon, is Stephen Cohen, a specialist on the subject of one-time Soviet dictator N. Bukharin. Cohen et al., recognize that Gore's current Russia policies are a continuation of former President George Bush's; Cohen makes implicitly clear that he sees the onrushing doom of Chernomyrdin's policies as an echo of the downfall of the Soviet NEP, dictator Bukharin, and Bukharin's leading U.S. agent, Jay Lovestone, at the close of the 1930s.
[11] There was a related reaction even among a significant ration of the author's close political collaborators. In these cases, even persons who had been intimately informed, for two decades or more, of the author's forecasts of these developments, there was a psychologically lawful kind of flight from reality, away from the actual political situation, into the safety of a blinkered focus on one or more smaller, practical tasks available. The rule is: When the world becomes too big for comfort, find a sense of safety in shrinking your own mind!
[12] i.e., Dr. Faustus.
[13] The importance of Aeschylus', Shakespeare's, and Schiller's Classical compositions is better grasped when we recognize that the complementary, Classical principle of comedy, as understood by Erasmus of Rotterdam, and practiced famously by both François Rabelais and Miguel Cervantes, has the same function as Classical tragedy. In Classical comedy, the fatal, pompous conceit of the fool is brought to most humiliating ridicule by the fool's own folly. So, Cervantes warned the aristocracy and people of Spain, that Spain was doomed for no reason but that the King and people of Spain had become a pack of fools. Few recognize the importance of Rabelais as an exponent of that Classical culture which France must recapture, still today. The essence of what fools misread as the mere ribaldry of Rabelais, is an appeal to the successors of great King Louis XI not to continue to behave as fools. One imagines Panurge in Hell, tormenting the evil François Mitterrand with ridicule.
[14] Better to grasp the principle involved, imagine the silly effort of some modern, foolish playwright, to compose a drama in which Belshazzar's Babylon is saved from doom by aid of counsel from some ancient "balance of power" freak, like Henry A. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. As students of ancient Mencius might remind us, no diplomatic or other cheap tricks can save a nation which has lost the moral fitness to survive. Nothing could save from doom a U.S.A. which adopted the "balance of power" policies of a Kissinger or Brzezinski.
[15] As I emphasize later in this report, as in various earlier published locations, this matter of identifying the source of the inner tension which has prompted a sense of shock, is identical with the experience leading to the validatable discovery of a new physical principle. Faced with a perplexing, vicious paradox in the relevant scientific evidence, the first task of the prospective discovery of a new physical principle, is to identify, to locate the features of the problem which point to the origin of the paradox itself. In other words, to define the issue posed by that paradox. In other words, one must ask oneself, "What is the problem here?" It is at that point, that the paradox is transformed from an anxiety-ridden state of confusion, into a more or less well-focussed investigation. Gauss's work, in defining the focus of his attack on solving the orbit of Ceres (see Tennenbaum and Director, op cit.), is an excellent model of the way a sea of confusion is replaced by a well-organized choice of direction of search for the needed solution.
[16] The most obvious musical examples of the same political principle of Classical poetry and drama, are Giuseppe Verdi's settings of the tragedies from Shakespeare and Schiller, and also Mozart's Don Giovanni. An additional Mozart contribution should be included: Mozart's treatment of the part played by the "Queen of the Night" in his The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), a theme which, it must be emphasized, is direct from the Classical Greek case of "Orestes." This Orestes theme, featuring the role of Athena in civilizing the "Furies," was recently elaborated in a Dichterpflänzchen presentation by Rosa Tennenbaum.
[17] This function of the compositions of Sophocles and Aeschylus, especially Aeschylus, is shown by examining the way in which Aeschylus, for example, addresses the paradoxical barbarities posed within the Homeric epics. This is made clearer when that relationship between the great Greek tragedians and Homeric epics is cross-gridded with two other crucial points of reference: the great poem of Solon of Athens and the dialogues of Plato. It is this quality in the best work of Classical Greece, not accidents of geography, which, to this day, defines any rational approach to the history of European civilization as Schiller did, as rooted in the overcoming of the early Greek's own barbarism by the authors of the greatest Classical works, from Solon through Plato.
[18] "O, what a rogue . . . am I . . . "
[19] Those with at least a rudimentary grounding in mathematical physics, will profit from comparing the notion of "shock," as we reference the paradox of Hamlet's soliloquy, to the notion of the principled way in which acoustical, trans-sonic shock-waves are generated, according to Bernhard Riemann's paper on "The Propagation of Plane Air Waves of Finite Amplitude," Bernhard Riemann, Über die Fortpflanzung ebener Luftwellen von endlicher Schwingungsweite, Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint, 1953). Note that Riemann's prediction of shock waves generated by successful trans-sonic flight of accelerated projectiles has a correlative in such fields as thermonuclear fusion, where the same principle appears under the rubric of isentropic compression. This is also, more fundamentally, an elementary characteristic of the human mind; the processes of cognition are characterized by shock-wave-like solutions to those paradoxes otherwise known as metaphor. This principle of cognition, is also the fundamental principle underlying the generation of multiply-connected manifolds of the Gauss-Riemann type.
[20] See, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Substance of Morality," Executive Intelligence Review, June 26, 1998, note 37, p. 30.
[21] e.g., Patricio Ricketts, "Russia Says Goodbye to Adam Smith," in the Peruvian magazine Sí, Aug. 31; Neue Zürcher Zeitung, lead economic editorial, "Monetary Policy Out of the Poison Cabinet," Aug. 26; MIT economist Paul Krugman wrote in the Sept. 7 issue of Fortune, that "Plan A," i.e., backing the International Monetary Fund, has not worked, and it's time for Asia to adopt exchange controls; Dan Atkinson, "Roosevelt's New Deal Would Be the Right Medicine for Today," London Guardian, Aug. 31; Brazil's O Estado de São Paulo, editorial "Hong Kong's Warning," Aug. 25; Walter Meade, senior fellow at the New York Council on Foreign Relations, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 23, "Forget suicide car bombers and Afghan fanatics. It's the financial markets . . . that pose the biggest immediate threat to world peace"; Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, "The financial firestorm that has been scorching economies around the globe is intensifying into one the world's worst . . ." (See EIR, Sept. 4, p. 6; Sept. 11, p. 23.)
[22] The polymorphously intertwined Lord William Rees-Mogg, Rees-Mogg's association of his political commitments with the "Third Wave" cult of Alvin Toffler and Newt Gingrich, the Hollinger Corporation's London Daily Telegraph, and the network of "Get Clintonites" spewed from Mellon Scaife to the clique behind Kenneth Starr, exemplify the reach of Prince Philip's "Chaos faction" into the U.S.A., as distinct from the doomed relics of present-day liberal utopianism.
[23] For example, the same observation was made, typically, by a dear, since deceased friend, France's General G. Revault d'Allonnes, during a seminar of senior military professionals from several European nations, which I convened in Germany during the mid-1980s. General Revault d'Allonnes referred to an incident, which occurred in Germany during the immediate post-war years, as he described the incident, when he had been a "mere colonel," seated at the lowest ranking position of the table among a group of French flag officers. In response to the question, "What is the first action we must take in the case of the outbreak of war?," then-Colonel Revault d'Allonnes had created a sudden silence with his hubristic "fire all the generals." In the history of France, the outstanding example of the merit of such sudden changes in composition of command, is that of the brilliant success of the leadership provided by France's Lazare Carnot, during his own, most eminently successful, 1792-1794 occupancy of the position of commander of France's military forces. The case of Carnot is the best illustration of the positive principle lending authority to the referenced remarks of Revault d'Allonnes. For the military history of Germany, the great Scharnhorst is the outstanding positive example, with "old" Moltke a close second. In Twentieth-Century U.S. military history, the case of General Douglas MacArthur's Pacific command during World War II, is the model for new generals to match today. In Nineteenth-Century U.S. history, the prime example is President Lincoln's passing the command to a General Ulysses Grant greatly aided by the military genius of General William Tecumseh Sherman.
[24] The relevant use of the term "worse," in connection with today's U.S.A. and other nations' senior military ranks more recently, or currently in service, emphasizes the impact of return of military policy to a kind of decadence modelled upon Eighteenth-Century "cabinet warfare," during the decades following the combined effects of U.S. President Truman's unjustified nuclear bombing of Japan and Winston Churchill dupe Truman's later ouster of General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur. Typical of the problem, are those military and related professionals who presumed, mistakenly, that "SDI," as initially described by President Ronald Reagan, was a weapons system, rather than a Classical strategy in the sense "strategy" was understood and practiced by such as Lazare Carnot, Scharnhorst, the U.S.A.'s John Quincy Adams, or the German General Staff under, for example, the celebrated Graf von Schlieffen. The legacy of the influence of the Swiss Jomini, and Jomini's pernicious influence on the education of the U.S. military professionals, is a prime example of the sort of disorientation which must be rooted out at the approach of a new war.
[25] For example: The so-called "Brandt reforms" in education, in Germany, have resulted in a state of affairs in which Germans from the period of the pre-Brandt-reform Classical-humanist education of the 1960s, are, functionally speaking, almost a superior species to those younger Germans who have been victims of the Brandt-reform and related trends in educational and related cultural policies. A less dramatic, but otherwise comparable case, is the profound collapse of the quality of education in the north of the Commonwealth of Virginia, U.S.A., relative to the standard of practice during as recent a time as the early to middle 1980s. Under the influence of current trends of "politically correct" policies in universities and public schools, today's typical university graduate is usually not only a functional illiterate in matters of common skills, but seldom capable of sustaining rational forms of intellectual behavior under even relatively slight stress.
[26] Without the developments associated with Classical Greek culture, as such developments are typified by the work of Solon of Athens, Aeschylus, and Plato, society could not have risen above the barbaric level stubbornly maintained by, for example, both ancient Rome and European feudalism, in which over ninety-five percent of the population was kept in the degraded state of dumbed-down human cattle, virtual Yahoos out of the pages of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
[27] For example, the fraud of petitio principii, used to defend the proposition that the mathematical physical universe is linear in the infinitesimally small, a falsehood which was perpetrated by the Berlin Academy's Leonhard Euler, in evading the fact that the theorem he claimed to have proven, against Leibniz, was already an axiom within the choice of geometry he employed for constructing his fraudulent claim of proof.
[28] See, in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "What Will Happen, If . . . ," Executive Intelligence Review, August 28, 1998: pp. 52-53.
[29] The formulation for "negative entropy," as provided by Clausius, by Ludwig Boltzmann's construction of his H-theorem, and as Boltzmann is parodied by the "information theory" hoaxster Professor Norbert Wiener, is not the alternative to entropy, but only a subsumed feature of what Boltzmann and Wiener, like Clausius and Grassmann earlier, define as "universal entropy." Hence, to avoid the confusion spread, over a half a century, by Wiener's misuse of the terms "negative entropy" and "negentropy," I have insisted upon using the term anti-entropy, instead.
[30] ibid. See, also, Jonathan Tennenbaum and Bruce Director, "How Gauss Determined The Orbit of Ceres," Fidelio, Summer 1998. On Plato, reference the treatment of this matter in his Timaeus (Plato: Vol. IX, Loeb Clasical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975]).
[31] Laurence Hecht, et al., "The Significance of the 1845 Gauss-Weber Correspondence," 21st Century Science & Technology, Fall 1996; pp. 21-43.
[32] The latter, as understood by Lazare Carnot, et al., is the feature of Gauss-Riemann forms of hypergeometries which define the modular relations within a multiply-connected manifold as intrinsically "non-linear" in the extremely small, characteristic interval of action.
[33] Bernhard Riemann, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen, Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber, ed., (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953).
[34] In the history of public education in Europe and the United States, the proverbial mantle of leadership has passed from certain Christian teaching orders of medieval Europe, through the model established in the Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Mathers, through the educational reforms which Friedrich Schiller and the Humboldt brothers built up in Germany around the preceding initiatives of the collaborators Lessing and the great Moses Mendelssohn, and, thence, to the model of secondary education developed in the U.S.A. by an associate of Alexander von Humboldt, Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache. In the the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries' history of North America and Europe, the figures of international leaders in science and related matters, Gottfried Leibniz and Benjamin "God's Sparks" Franklin, are a crucial part of the history of education.
[35] On the battlefields of science and education, the war between morality and bestiality, is typified in the most concentrated way, by the connection among Benjamin Franklin, Georg Forster, Friedrich Schiller, and Ludwig van Beethoven, on the one side, against the satanically evil tool of Jeremy Bentham, that vicious maenad, Mary Shelley, who authored the literally (theologically speaking) gnostic piece of anti-science fiction, Frankenstein, on the Devil's own side. The hatred of Franklin and the U.S. Federal Republic, which prompted Mary Shelley's expression of hatred against "God's sparks," in her novel, was Franklin's role as both a leading scientist, and science organizer, on the one side, and also a leading international figure of the late Eighteenth Century, which prompted Georg Forster to eulogize Franklin's combined, international, scientific and political leadership with the metaphor, "God's Sparks Götterfunken." The same metaphor was employed by another European recruit to the American Revolution, Friedrich Schiller, in the celebrated "Ode to Joy," later incorporated, with a prefatory warning emphasis on the principle of metaphor involved, by Beethoven himself, in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The connections between the American Revolution and Beethoven's compositions, were documented in a report on the subject of Beethoven's opera Fidelio, by Don Phau, who, ironically, was sent to prison, in the unjust manner of both the real-life Marquis de Lafayette and the fictional Florestan, on orders of the same enemy, the British monarchy of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (Pizzaro). Prior to the ascent to tyranny by British assets Philippe Egalité, Maximilien Robespierre, and British Foreign Service agents of Bentham, Danton, and Marat, all of the best leading people of Europe were sympathizers of Lafayette and the opening events of the French Revolution of 1789. They, like U.S. War for Independence propagandist, Tom Paine, were supporters of what they knew as Benjamin Franklin's international leadership of the struggle to free mankind from the bestiality of oligarchical rule. Of this, Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, like Friedrich Schiller, were a part, with sympathy and patronage from the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. With the death of Joseph, the anti-American, oligarchical princedom of Austro-Hungary seized power. A terrible slaughter of all of the leading pro-Americans was conducted under the direction of the evil Chancellor von Kaunitz; Mozart, and all of his political associates who were not themselves agents of von Kaunitz's secret police (Geheimpolizei) died, all within the same few months, and all under circumstances controlled by von Kaunitz's secret police. As Beethoven stressed, Mozart was not poisoned by Salieri, but, as Beethoven knew, but did not say, by the same means which Metternich's Geheimpolizei used, in planting Metternich's police-spy, Schindler, into Beethoven's circles. (Much of the false interpretation of Beethoven's musical work, was the result of operations run, using police-spy Schindler, by Metternich's Geheimpolizei.) Notably, as emphasized by the cases of Emperor Joseph II and several of Beethoven's dedications of compositions to his prize student, Habsburg Archduke Rudolf, it was not the biological family of Habsburg which was the enemy of the American War of Independence and Federal Constitution, but rather the Venice-dominated circle of ruling princes of the Venice-controlled southern branch of what had been the Holy Roman Empire (a case typified since the late Eighteenth Century, by the hereditary head of the Fürstentum, Thurn und Taxis). Chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich typify that body of medieval princes, as a political power greater than that of the Emperor, a power which sometimes culled the flock of Habsburg heirs and the plebeian associates of those heirs. The fact that Beethoven dared to present his Ninth Symphony within the context of Metternich's Nazi-like, anti-Schiller Carlsbad decrees, attests both to Beethoven's politics and courage, and also his powerful connections with some opponents of the medieval Fürstentum within the ruling Habsburg house. Also of extreme importance bearing on the same point, is the role of a key asset of Empress Maria Theresa's family, Ambassador van Swieten, who, with aid of connections to Felix Mendelssohn's aunts, provided Wolfgang Mozart the circumstances under which Mozart's intensive studies of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, shaped all the important Classical musical composition and performance of Europe, from 1782 until the present day. Before you try to make a public fool of yourselves, spinning populist-style "conspiracy theories," steep yourself in the history of ideas, as the Classical culture of Solon's, Aeschylus', and Plato's Greece defined Classical culture for both the Golden Renaissance and the struggle for truth and justice in modern European civilization after that.
[36] For purposes of cross-reference, this mediocre personality is consistent with Professor Lawrence S. Kubie's study of victims of "neurotic distortion of the creative process," typified by promising young doctoral candidates who went intellectually "dead" about the time they either passed their orals, or secured their first significant professional appointment. The sort of induced neurotic disorder identified by Kubie, is comparable to the academic pathology which Jena Professor of history Friedrich Schiller denounces as the production of so-called Brotgelehrte.
[37] op. cit.
[38] Cf. Marsha Freeman, "The Railroad and the Space Program," Executive Intelligence Review, August 28, 1998. It should be emphasized, that this effort to destroy both science and rational forms of education, was driven by the same circles around Britain's "Dark Age" Prince, the Duke of Edinburgh, which launched the so-called "environmentalist" movement with the 1961 founding of the World Wildlife Fund and the associated "1001 Club" of Princes Philip and Bernhard. The connections between the attacks launched, beginning 1961, against both science and education, are typified by the close collaboration among such key figures as Britain's Lord Solly Zuckerman and Dr. Alexander King, and the U.S.'s sometime National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger sponsor, and Ford Foundation chief, McGeorge Bundy. Britain's King was the OECD official who launched the 1963 campaign to destroy university and public education in Europe (and elsewhere). King and Zuckerman were the leading architects, in collaboration with the U.S.'s John D. Rockefeller III, in launching the Club of Rome and related efforts. King, Zuckerman, and Bundy worked closely with Soviet President Kosygin's son-in-law, Gvishiani, to found the East bloc division of Prince Philip's project, the Laxenberg, Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Bundy, in concert with figures such as Herbert Marcuse, was a key Ford Foundation figure behind the funding and direction of ultra-left "anti-reason" cults, such as the Columbia University-based SDS Weatherman sect, during operations of the 1967-1969 interval. As usual, in such matters, ours is a small world, after all.
[39] Arendt, a former intimate of anti-semitic Nazi ideologue Martin Heidegger, played a significant role as an exponent of Adorno's anti-rational doctrines inside the U.S.A. Typical of her evil-doings is her participation in the anti-science campaigns of the 1960s, including her 1963 "Man's Conquest of Space." Cf. Marsha Freeman, op. cit.
[40] Unlike the contemporary radical-Zionist and analogous mis-readings of Jewish history, Christianity does not recognize any kind of racial, ethnic, or analogous forms of "particular" distinctions among peoples or persons. As the Apostle Paul warns: Beware the concision! Any "particularist" form of distinction is immoral, implicitly evil, because it is "racist," because it implicitly fosters the division of mankind between oligarchies and subjugated "human cattle," as radical Zionists, such as Prime Minister Netanyahu's cronies, regard Palestinian Arabs.
[41] A summary of the notion of the U.S.A. as "the American exception," may be found in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Where Franklin Roosevelt Was Interrupted," Executive Intelligence Review, July 17, 1998, pp. 32-33.
[42] No truthful principle was ever discovered by methods of deduction. The essential feature of the process of discovery, is the specific quality of passion, actually a form of expression of what Plato and the Apostle Paul identify as agape¯. For example, in the classroom, there exist two, alternative, mutually exclusive qualities of emotion associated with the student's efforts to secure what he or she regards as "the answer" to a question posed. One, is the whorish desire to express, as a putative answer, some opinion which will win approbation from some choice of so-called "authority." This morally debased classroom method and procedure is called "learning," such as "textbook" or "dictionary" learning, or, in the alternative, the acquiring of "information." The opposite quality of emotion, is the fear that one might choose an answer which is not truthful, in Plato's Socratic sense of truthfulness. In the latter case, the moral person will reject, as a matter of principle, the search for an answer whose attribute of "correctness" lies in the expressed opinion of some putative external authority, such as a teacher, textbook, or political or judicial authority. The student in the Classical humanist mode, must be certain, on his or her own authority, that the answer he chooses is right, in a way which is independent of merely adopting the opinion of some putative external authority, an answer which, in many instances, will be right precisely because it defies the contrary opinion of most available, or prevailing authorities so-called. In this case, the student relies upon the authority of a developed method of investigation, a method which corresponds to the student's experience in re-enacting many among the greatest of the validated discoveries of principle from the previous centuries' work of mankind. It is that internal authority, located in that kind of internalized reliving of the creative acts of the greatest discoverers from the past, which the truthful student prefers to such putative authorities as mere textbook opinion, or deduction. What drives the truthful student to such effect, is a quality of passion, a passion which sustains the needed concentration-span, which will not let the mind of the student go, until the student has discovered the answer, and proven it, by the best of his own resources. In this sense, the question of truth, even truth which relies upon objective forms of crucial validation, is subjectively motivated, not objective in the sense empiricists, for example, employ the term "objective."
[43] There are, admittedly, cases of dramatic productions, in which such abuses are a matter of indifference. This is true only in the case that the dramatic production in question is such a piece of trash, that it could not be made worse by such anti-historical manglings.
