by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Date: February 4, 1998
The most deadly, sometimes fatal delusion found in today's popular opinion, is the fallacy of presuming that "the facts speak for themselves." In fact, I defy any sane person to argue that any specific fact, or set of statistics, has ever spoken, let alone responded to cross-examination on the matter of its ostensibly stated or implied opinion.
What we commonly name as "a fact," is, in fact, an act of judgment. That judgment is, in turn, a product of the influence of ideas upon the interpretation of some actual, or imagined experience. The principal influence, shaping, or misshaping that judgment, is those ideas, perhaps combined with naked prejudices, which function as axioms, or postulates, of judgment-making. By "axioms," we signify a notion of function which is broadly analogous, in effect, to the role of an interacting set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, in a consistent, schoolbook geometry.
Such combinations of often unacknowledged, axiomatic ideas and prejudices, affect the making of policies of governments, for example, in two distinguishable ways. In some cases, the adopted policy is directly a product of such axiomatic influences. More often, as in the case of the Clinton administration's opportunistic adoption of Britain's demand that helpless Iraq be bombed again, these assumptions do not determine the policy simply and directly, but do supply a deceptively marginal degree of "spin" to a series of policy-decisions. Often, as in the case at hand, the cumulative effect of marginal spin may have a more subtle, less easily identified, ultimately more devastating impact on cumulative policies of practice, than the relatively more obvious case of a policy directly derived in entirety from more readily identified, false, axiomatic assumptions.
"Consensus" Politics
It is from this standpoint in Socratic method, that we must judge the influence on President Clinton's policy-shaping, of what the notorious Roy M. Cohn's cousin, and sleazeball huckster, Dick Morris, is supposed to have named a policy of "triangulation."(1) By "triangulation," we understand an attempt to shape one's policies to appeal to the prejudices characteristic of an adduced present, or emerging consensus. The President's apparent commitment to a new bombing of Iraq, is a reflection of the same adaptation to "triangulation" witnessed in the July 31, 1996 announcement of the decision to allow the murderous Welfare Reform bill to become law.
The currently widespread delusion, the belief in "consensus" politicking, which we shall reference hereinafter as a doctrine of "consensus," or "mainstream" politics, is to be recognized as an outgrowth of the influence of the irrationalist fads of moral and cultural relativism, introduced through the university-student generation of the 1964-1972 interval.(2) We refer to what Britain's leading psychological-warfare think-tank, the London Tavistock Clinic and adjunct Tavistock Institute, labelled a 1964-1972 "cultural paradigm-shift" launched among university-student populations --the so-called "Sixty-Eighters," in both the Americas and western Europe.
The term "irrationalist," is not to be brushed aside as a mere expression of opinion; it references the relevant, axiomatic claims to irrationalism, the denial of a universalizing principle of truthfulness, in choices of moral and cultural values.
That term, "irrationalist," also references the method and manner employed in inducing a politically hegemonic stratum of this 1964-1972 student generation to accept such radical flights from reality, as induction into the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" and neo-Malthusian "post-industrial" utopianism. The method was exploitation of shock, a method initially developed through aid of the Tavistock Clinic's studies of the kinds of behavioral change --featuring greatly enhanced lability and greatly heightened suggestibility-- common to the so-called "shell shock" cases from the protracted trench warfare experiences of World War I's western front.
In this case, the protracted 1946-1972 experience of the age of nuclear terror, condensed into a shock-effect by the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, that followed by the assassination of President Kennedy, and that followed by the nightly TV spectacle of butchery in Southeast Asia, combined, modularly, to supply the "non-linear" shock which made it feasible to induce such a cultural paradigm-shift on such a large scale, so quickly. Think of the draft-age student population on the campus of that period, as a type of "shell shock" victim in its own right.
It was in the early 1970s, as signalled by the initial, post-1968-1969 division of the existentialist left-wing of the "Sixty-Eighter" movement among sexual and other cultural fragments,(3) that the Rainbow coalition emerged, and, with that, the beginning of the kind of search for unprincipled "consensus" politicking, which the case of Dick Morris illustrates.
It is President Clinton's capitulation to related policies of "triangulation," as conspicuously visible beginning the May-August 1996 interval, which is significantly key in seeking the roots of such unprincipled consensus politicking as the President's statement on the subject of Iraq, within his recent State of the Union message.
But, there is also reality
Consider the widespread popular rallying to President Clinton's defense, in the instance of the latest attempted swindle concocted by the dirty mind of steamy-sex-obsessed, runaway Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.
Starr is fairly assessed as a present-day caricature of England's most notorious Seventeenth Century prosecutor, the Bloody Assizes' foul-mouthed, dirty-minded, former whore's court judge, Lord George Jeffreys.(4) Starr has been able to keep his floundering "get Clinton" effort afloat, through the aid of plain political corruption allowed by a Republican Party-dominated Congress and backing of the Bush-league "secret government" operating under the pretext of Executive Order 12333. That Bush-era "secret government," otherwise known as the "Iran-Contra" conspiracy of "crack cocaine" notoriety, features Starr and Pepperdine patron, Pittsburgh's London-linked LaRouche- and Clinton-hater, Dennis King backer Richard Mellon Scaife; the apparently deranged, obsessed Mellon Scaife, has been an active, leading part of this band of Bush-league burglars for more than a decade.(5)
On or about January 12, 1998, the combined forces of the President's enemies, those within the Washington Post's wing of the Democratic Party, and others, including Starr, launched an array of new, diverse assaults against the President, onslaughts whose combined effect was the kind of shock which might be wishfully designed to break the President's will, and to disorient him into the kinds of politically fatal blunders on which Starr's floundering prosecution is relying. It failed, partly because of clear and simple, public counter-attacks by the President and his wife, and also because of widespread revulsion against the latest manifestion of the ever-prurient mind of political pornographer Kenneth Starr himself.
That fortunate turn in popular opinion, should have alerted the President to the reality, that any misperceived, apparent 1996-1997 trends toward "consensus politics," are now being overturned by the same kind of sharply increased, political polarization of the population witnessed in the explosion of popular hatred of the British monarchy, in both Britain and the U.S.A., following the Paris vehicular homicide of Princess Diana. The traditional Democrats and the young knuckledraggers of Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" cult, are not converging upon a future point of reconciliation, but upon the field where they will fight a long-overdue, hard-fought, political life-or-death battle for supremacy, against one another.
On the surface, the Democratic Party apparatus is dominated, for the moment, at least, by "New Era" Democrats of the type which appear to be allied with Katharine Graham's Washington Post. These "New Era" Democrats, opposite to the former mass-base of what had been the traditional post-war, pro-minorities, justice-oriented, pro-labor, pro-social security, pro-growth (i.e., Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy) Democratic Party, are indeed converging, together with ex-leftist neo-conservatives such as Irving Kristol and his son, upon the "Third Wave" ideology of New Gingrich's Phrygian horde. These "New Era" Democrats are part of a Fowler kind of party organization, whose outstanding accomplishment is the usual loss of one critical election, such as the 1996 Democratic congressional campaigns, after the other, on both the state and national levels. The correlative of such Democratic Party defeats, accomplished under leadership of the "New Era" Democrats, is the fact than a growing margin of traditional Democratic voters, and independents, avoid the elections, largely out of disgust with the "New Era" Democrats' current, temporary stranglehold on the party's platforms and programs.
The result of such "New Era" influences, is the perception of a very special kind of Dick Morris-style, triangulated consensus-point as a goal. This becomes the search for a "new American majority," a "new political mainstream," which a growing majority of the citizenry does not support at the polls. Thus, we witness a very interesting notion, the tyranny-soaked, dangerous delusion, of a ruling consensus shared by a shrinking political minority, as illustrated by such historic cases as the Nazi Party which came to power in 1933 Germany.
Apart from the President's appeal to the votes of women, the core of the current moment's swing factor in politics, is found outside the "New Era/Third Wave" convergence, among those citizens who are repelled by the "New Era" Democrats, the type of disgusted citizen who, nonetheless, rallied in sympathy for the President, out of disgust for Starr's newest edition of his appeal to the dirty-minded side of low popular opinion, his remake of Britain's 1963 Profumo soap opera.
This recent, happier turn of events does not signify that the President is "home free." Without appropriate changes in direction of White House policy-shaping, this happier turn could be only a temporary one. These are very dangerous times, in which the now increasing rate of accumulation of new, frightening shocks, in economy, and otherwise, tends to induce a "shell-shock"-like lability and suggestibility in the majorities of populations around the world.
The political danger here, is that the hard-core of a potential, lurking American fascism, a trend toward such fascism typified by the bleary-eyed, wildly irrational cult-followers of televangelists Robertson and Falwell, will congeal as a new political force under conditions which are more or less analogous to those of Weimar hyperinflation Germany of Fall 1923, when Adolf Hitler's Nazis first emerged as a significant future force in that country.
These are not times in which to sit before a television set, sitting like one of the cheering mob of spectators in the imperial Roman arena, yelling "Thumbs up!" or "Thumbs down!," uselessly watching the horrid parade of our rapidly degenerating culture. Sometimes, "rooters" means vegetables. These are not the times to leave the shaping of events to contemporary Caligulas such as Texas Governor George Bush, or Kenneth Starr, or the shaping of policy on public improvements to the flaming Neros of editor Robert Bartley's Wall Street Journal. These are times, in which either men and women of good will take the making of history in their own hands, or, otherwise, the worst outcome is virtually assured before the close of the present century.
The possibilities we need are there; but, we must seize them while they still exist.
The Principles of Policy-Design
In discussing the issues of policy-formation, we situate ourselves within the domain what has become, for most U.S. persons, a lost science of psychology. In addressing this area, as we do here, we must situate the discussion to follow by a few words to situate the core of the topic being addressed: How the human mind formulates and understands policy.
As we have noted in published locations, the following: the quality of education and culture in the U.S.A., as reflected in terms of the cognitive content of the student year in public and higher education, has collapsed during the course of the now-concluding century.
Until the assassination of President McKinley, that marking a major turning-point, downward, in the quality of intellectual life of educated Americans, During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Benjamin Franklin's City of Philadelphia was the center of intellectual life in the U.S.A.
Philadelphia's leading intellectual celebrities, such as Matthew and Henry Carey, and Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, were the central figures of science and related matters of intellectual and political life. It was Carey, Bache, and their heirs, who, through the political role of President Abraham Lincoln, made the U.S.A. the foremost economy in the world, and the most advanced in technology, during the interval 1861-1876. The work of Thomas Edison, who electrified not only the U.S.A., but Emil Rathenau's Germany, typifies the direct outgrowths of Philadelphia's role as the dynamo of U.S. intellectual life during the Nineteeenth Century.
The technological achievements centered in that city during those centuries, reflected chiefly, during the Eighteenth Century, the intellectual patrimony of the world figure of science and philosophy, Gottfried Leibniz, and French technological progress. In the Nineteenth Century, first, the French science of Lazare Carnot and Gaspard Monge's Ecole Polytechnique, and, from about the 1830s onward, the early hegemony of the German science and Classical culture, of Friedrich Schiller, Carl Gauss and the von Humboldt brothers. It was on this foundation, that French and German science were combined with the American System of political-economy, to produce the most successful models of modern industrialized economy according to the "American model" of 1861-1876, throughout various leading economies of the world.
From comparing the leading intellectual product of successive generations of the Twentieth Century with the leading product of the preceding two centuries, Americans had progressed, until the mid-1960s, in their intellectual qualities as learned "bread-winners," but with an accompanying erosion of the quality of scientific and cultural thinking which we have inherited from leading thinkers of earlier generations.
After the double-impact of the 1930s Great Depression and the game of "catch-up" played by the veterans returning to university at the end of World War II, the emphasis upon secondary-school and university studies, was to prepare for more prestigious, more lucrative employment, rather than to develop the cognitive powers of one's own mind. With the descent from an emphasis upon the Classical tradition traced back to Plato's Classical Greece, upon which the thinking of our republic's founders had been premised, to that mere bread-learned kind of educated mind against which Jena Professor Friedrich Schiller had famously warned, the moral quality of intellectual life among the leading educated circles of the U.S.A. declined over the course of the successive generations of this now-concluding century.
The available literature composed and read by the university and secondary-school graduates of this century's successive generations, like a comparison of the content of the titles offered by 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s bookstores, reflects a deep, generally accelerating decline, not only in the intellectual quality of U.S. life, but, more emphatically, a collapse in moral quality, and even widespread loss of even simple degrees of rationality.
To sum the matter up: The test of culture, the place to make the relevant measurements, is what a people profess to enjoy, when they profess to "let their hair down," in their so-called "free time." On that account, we have fallen way down, especially since the middle of the 1960s. With the increased interest in the psycho-therapy group and related, Tavistock styles in "social engineering," there has been a precipitous collapse in the ability of the population to discover how the individual mind actually works.
On that account, principles of Socratic method which were more or less widely comprehensible to literate persons from among earlier generations, appear forbiddingly strange to most putatively educated strata of "Sixty-Eighters" and "Xers" today. This erosion does not make those principles less valid, or less relevant, but, directly the opposite. Without their use, we shall not rise above the wretched intellectual and moral condition to which our population has fallen, even relative to the generations of World War I and World War II veterans. Even the survival of our nation, and this civilization, depends upon the degree to which at least a few leaders among us practice those "lost arts," as we do here.
By "Socratic method," we signify the study of human knowledge and of the workings of the human mind, from the standpoint of hypothesis. The correct, Classical meaning of that term (as opposed to ignorant, popular usages in today's university classroom), is typified by the notion of the role of a set of interacting definitions, axioms, and postulates, as in an ordinary schoolbook geometry. To wit, in the rational process of determining whether or not a given proposition shall be adopted as a valid theorem for practice, we require not only that that proposition be consistent with the supporting evidence, but not inconsistent with any among the elements of the hypothesis containing the relevant set of definitions, axioms, and postulates.
However, in the case that the kinds of theorems preferred by a given hypothesis are in direct contradiction to the relevant evidence, we must then employ Socratic method to adduce the relevant fallacy within the hypothesis employed.
Those notions, as indicated by the role of a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, of which an experimentally validated hypothesis is composed, are known to Classically educated persons as Platonic ideas. The great achievement flowing out of the successive discoveries of Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and my own original contributions to the science of physical economy, is the reduction of all definitions, axioms, and postulates, to those kinds of experimentally validated Platonic ideas, which correspond to the "dimensions" of a physical geometry based on the Kepler-Leibniz-Gauss-Riemann notion of what is termed, variously, Analysis Situs or modular functions of hypergeometry.
These distinctions apply not only to the principles of nature associated with the work of experimental physical science, but also those adducible principles of the human mind, by means of which we discover the new dimensions of a superior form of physical geometry, the added physical principles of a qualitative improved form of physical science.(6) In those terms of reference, the same issues of method appropriate for scrutiny of fundamental scientific progress, apply directly to the making, and effects of policies located within the domain of both art and political science.
Broadly speaking, the first step in examining any systemic problems of policy-formulation, is to apply the Socratic method to reduce the terms of each such problem to the forms of hypothesis, as we have summarized that again here. What are the underlying, axiomatic-like assumptions which prompt the adoption of some proposition (e.g., policy-decision) as a virtual theorem of that hypothesis?
There are three bench-mark types of cases to consider, if we are to appreciate the connection of the fallacious axiomatic assumptions of "consensus" politicking, to the shaping of the President's susceptibility to Britain's proposed new bombing of Iraq. The first bench-mark is typified by the case of a policy which is either derived directly from, or shaped by "spin" supplied by, some underlying set of axiomatic assumptions. The second type of bench-mark case involves a policy based upon common sub-sets of two otherwise incongruent hypotheses, the bastard kind of policy-making implicit in the "triangulation" doctrine popularly associated with the Dick Morris of the 1996 Presidential campaign.(7) The third type of bench-mark case, is a Riemannian-like process of successive changes in geometries, changes associated with a procession of newly validated "dimensions." The first two types represent relevant kinds of special cases; the third, repesents the fundamental case.
Classical American patriotic thinking on the subject of the second type of case, is supplied by the precedent of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' argument for what became the U.S. "Monroe Doctrine" of 1823. It is this tradition which President Clinton has explicitly violated by both his general concessions to "consensus" politicking, as in the case of the non-veto of the 1996 Welfare Reform bill, and his adaptation to the British demand that the U.S. adopt London's policy, that Iraq be bombed again (on the customary "cacomamy," diplomatic pretexts).
Britain was never a model of military genius, but rather, like its role-model, medieval Venice, a master of those evil arts of diplomacy which the Mephistopheles of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus practiced upon the duped Faust. Especially during the Twentieth Century, the United States has too often, too long, played the duped Faust to Britain's ever-lying Mephistopheles. Nothing suits the British Crown better than a general muddle, the more muddled, the more to its liking: the more maneuvering room for deceiving the relevant suckers. As France's Louis XVI was to discover, and as today's Germany is in the process of discovering, to become Britain's treaty-partner, is to take the first step toward becoming Britain's ruined victim. This point was clearly understood by the greatest of all our republic's diplomats, Secretary John Quincy Adams.
The common ground for the Vienna Congress's pact between the rival powers of Britain and Clement Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance, was a shared hatred of the U.S.A. The British and the Habsburgs were commonly determined, that the defeat of Napoleon would be taken as the opportunity to stamp out everything resembling the American model, on the continent of Europe and also in the areas of Central and South America. London and Metternich disagreed on the division of the spoils, notably including the case of Central and South America. In due course, Jeremy Bentham's protege, Lord Palmerston, deployed his London-based agent Giuseppe Mazzini, to destroy Metternich's power, but, throughout the period 1814-1863, London and the Habsburg realms were committed to the destruction of the United States.
In this setting, British Minister Canning hoped to dupe the Monroe administration into allying with London against the Habsburg attempts at regaining control of Central and South America. Actually, contrary to London's controlled asset, Walter Lippmann, and, as Simon Bolivar later warned, while the Holy Alliance was engaged in such bloody-handed efforts, the anti-U.S. British themselves were running Jeremy Bentham's freemasonic revolutions throughout that region.
Quincy Adams was not deceived. He warned President Monroe to reject Canning's offer, emphasizing that there existed no basis for a "community of principle" between the British Crown and our republic, just as there is today, no "community of common moral or political principle" between honest patriots and the policies of promoting free trade in large-scale morbidity-increases among Americans, by that quasi-fascist, Phrygian horde of wild-eyed "Third Wavers," which was deployed into the Congress, beginning January 1995, by the London-controlled, Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation.
Thus, Morris's "triangulation" outlook represented unprincipled political opportunism at its worst. However, once one recognizes the connection between a "Baby Boomer"-dominated government's adoption of such immoral types of "consensus-building," and the emergence of the cultural relativist's "Rainbow Coalition" of the early 1970s, the axiomatic basis for this White House blunder can be viewed with a compassionate, clinical insight.
Although the organization behind the creation of EIR was chiefly drawn from those "Sixty-Eighters" who, during the late 1960s and 1970s, rejected the existentialist, sociological, virtual-reality irrationalism adopted by the majority of the student Baby-Boomer generation, even many among those who shared in founding of EIR, suffered elements of the same symptoms as those typical of official Washington today. If one with knowledge of that experience thinks back, today, to the character-formation of the adolescent and young-adult campus "Baby Boomer," then, the axiomatic roots of certain current social-political phenomena are more readily recognized.
Especially during the interval from May through August 1996, the Clinton White House underwent a phase-change in axiomatics of policy-shaping, lured into the false promise of creating a new "mainstream consensus" through evolutionary convergence of the radical minorities represented by "New Era" Democrats and "New Age" Republicans. This turn lost the Democratic Party its hope of regaining a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and led to a tragic loss of many elections since then; nonetheless, despite that self-discrediting performance, for the moment, the "New Era" Democrats remain in the top-most positions of control over party organization. This "New Era" adaptation, exerts a marginal, corrosive, politically suicidal element of influence on the shaping of administration policies and tactics. The appearance of the administration's support for Britain's demand that we bomb Iraq again, is a cumulative result of the biased thinking affected by the combined "New Era" politicals' influence and the orientation toward the search for a new middle based upon a "New Era"/"Third Wave" convergence.
The Alternative
In the validated features of the London Tavistock Institute's doctrine of induced cultural paradigm-shifts, it is recognized, that the general effect of those fearful shocks which may be used to effect induced cultural paradigm-shifts, such as that induced among the campus Sixty-Eighters, is a flight of the victim, away from painful fears, into the realm of consoling fantasy.
On this account, whether, commonly, among the terrorized students of the mid-1960s campuses, or the cult-followers of barking-dog televangelists such as Robertson and Falwell, the most prominent reflection of the flight from reality is obsessive sexual fantasies, whether as the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" of the 1960s, or the obscene fascinations shared by the new evangelicals and their "Elmer Gantrys" in the pulpit. "More souls conceived, than saved," is still the apparent obsession which grips putative "evangelical" Kenneth Starr, and is the wind that still fills the air, whether outside the revivalist's tent, or blowing from off-stage, onto the TV screen.
As in the case of the effects of the Versailles conditionalities imposed upon Weimar Germany, the great present danger is, that, unless President Clinton escapes from the grip of those assumptions which have apparently biased Administration policy-shaping since the May-August 1996 interval, that the lack of a reality-oriented leadership in the relevant key places, will make the presently inevitable new round of global, financial, monetary, and economic shocks, the occasion for a worse sort of flight from reality, than we witnessed during the 1964-1972 interval.
President Clinton has the intellectual capability for making such needed shifts back to reality. This fact is illustrated by his bold and commendable proposals on equitable health-care reforms and science policies within the laundry-list reading euphemistically described as the 1998 State of the Union address. His declaration on Iraq, and his anti-scientific sophistry in defense of the Global Warming hoax, in the same address, illustrate the fact that "the jury is still out" on which way -- back to reality, or on to ever-wilder, consensual fantasy-- the President will turn as the crisis worsens. All concerned citizens should agree; we have to work on that problem.
The danger is, that as in Weimar Germany, the lack of effective leadership back to reality, means that something equivalent today to the Nazi taking of power then, could become the miserable fate of the U.S.A. Looking back to 1932-1933 Germany: when the German Social-Democrats, on orders from London, toppled the von Schleicher government, they deprived a ruined Germany of its last hope of a rational government, and thus paved the way for the tyranny of a minority party, the Nazis, instead. The impeachment of Clinton, and its virtually inevitable sequel, the dumping of Vice-President Gore, faster than you could say "Spiro Agnew," would create such a awful possibility in the U.S.A. Imagine a President Gingrich!? If that were not a new Hitler, it would fill in, as London's new Ramsay Macdonald, Prime Minister Tony Blair, is presently filling in, in London: until the real product could be put into place.
This brings us to the third case referenced above: the case of a succession of successively validated new hypotheses, a succession of validated discoveries of principle. Such an hypothesis underlies a program of commitment to ongoing progress in the condition of all mankind, through both advances in culture, and in the form of benefits of forced-draft scientific and technological progress.
At the time, during the middle 1960s, the London Tavistock Institute was contributing its role in the induced cultural paradigm-shift of that time, it argued strongly, in its Rapoport report, for massive cut-backs in the Kennedy "crash" aerospace program. Its argument to the Johnson adminstration's relevant "wonks," was that the achievements of the space-program in progress, were inspiring an excessive faith in rationality, within the population. After the submission of that report, that space program, the most profitable investment the U.S. economy ever made, was cut back savagely during the following fiscal year: with no sound economic reason for doing so!
What this nation, and the world generally, needs, is the articulation, with great substance, and with a pungency and force reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt, of a great global program of rebuilding the world economy through reform of the bankrupt, present international financial and monetary system, and by state-sponsored, vast infrastructural development programs, aimed at stimulating the highest possible rates of growth and technological progress in private entrepreneurship in machine-tool-design-driven forms of scientific and technological progress. We conclude this report now, with a summary argument on that point, referencing what we have identified as the third case of hypothesis.
How To Measure Real Progress
The crucial problem which the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift has introduced to the shaping of economic policy, is the substitution of the virtual reality of ideological gratification, as the standard of measure of effectiveness of policy, for the pre-1964-1972, predominant standard: real, physical-economic performance. Real, physical-economic performance was measured, ultimately, in terms of the measurable increase of mankind's physical power to command nature, as this result might be measured in terms of improvement of per-capita, and per-household demographic characteristics of the population considered as, functionally, an indivisible unit-whole.
That change in yardsticks of performance for policy, from real to emotional-ideological criteria, correlated with a shift from emphasis on happiness, to emphasis upon the immediate perception of "pleasure-pain." The Sixty-Eighters' "Don't go there!" rejection of reality, or, the kindred syndrome, "Whatever," reflect the flight from happiness, to sense of momentary pleasure. The "new sexual freedom" syndrome of the 1960s, expresses that flight.
Two additional trends of the recent thirty-odd years also express this shift. One is the enhanced price of an article of apparel, associated with the large and loud display of a brand-name as the dominant feature of that item. Speak of alienation! The second was the shift from quality of physical product produced, to money, and to conjecturable financial assets per se. The current obsession with delusions such as monetarism and "free trade," typify the latter aspect of a general flight from reality. In former times, going without means for satisfying urgent physical needs, or health care, was the perception of disaster. For the Sixty-Eighter, catastrophe would be a loss of one's wishful, fictional self-image, or loss of the several millions dollars nominal capital gain which had existed only as a fictional value on paper, or only in the fantasy-world of off-balance-sheet cyberspace futures.
The urgent task, is to return as much of the population as possible, away from cyberspace and politically correct, "sensitivity group" dream-worlds, to reality. Value must be relocated, psychologically, once again, in the functional realm within which the physical determination of demographic characteristics of the whole population is effected.
So, proceed accordingly here.
Looking at scientific and technological progress only in terms of the experimentally validated discoveries of new physical principles involved, we have the following first-approximation picture.
The axiomatic expression of increase of the effective productive powers of labor, per capita, is the addition of a newly validated physical principle, which has the effect of shifting the axiomatic basis of human scientific knowledge, from a manifold (physical-geometry hypothesis) of "n dimensions," to a higher manifold of "n+1 dimensions." This defines the characteristic action of that physical-economic space-time. This action is located, primarily, within the second step of what we have defined in other locations as the four-step cognitive function.
This is expressed as a special kind of modular function, in which "n" corresponds to a number of cycles of action, analogous to astrophysical cycles. The colligating action among these "n," defines a highly non-linear characteristic unit of curvature and action in the extremely small (e.g., "infinitesmal"); that action corresponds to a unit-action of human cognition, for the case that cognition generates a validatable discovery of principle solving an otherwise insoluble ontological paradox of experimental physical science.
Wilhelm Weber's mid-Nineteenth-Century proof of the existence of Ampere's longitudinal (e.g., angular) force for electrodynamics, revolutionized electrodynamics relative to Maxwell, for example, and also opened the gateways to development of a rational sub-atomic physics. This case illustrates the notion of progress from a manifold of "n dimensions," to a superior one of "n+1 dimensions."
This characteristic unit of action, so defined, expresses the primary form of activity, which is mankind's functional relationship to our species' continued existence, in terms of our efficient relationship to the universe as a whole.
To restate what is admittedly a challenging conception for the novice. Respecting mankind's physical relationship to the universe, there are two principal considerations. First, that we are able to adduce experimentally validatable physical principles which have, as axiomatic considerations, the effect of increasing mankind's power, per capita, over the universe. Second, that the utilization of scientific and technological progress, so defined, results in a gain in the demographic characteristics of the population as a whole, and also in the demographic characteristics of the individual household. That defines reality; that reality is rooted in the successful development and use of those cognitive powers of the individual mind, through which validated discoveries of principle are generated.
This pathway back, from linear cyberspace, to non-linear reality, expresses more than man's practical increase of our species' physical ability to maintain and improve present levels of population and living conditions. When we place the emphasis, where it belongs, on that developable, creative power of cognition, which sets mankind absolutely apart from and above such self-professed "great apes" as the brutish Worldwide Fund for Nature's Prince Philip, we foster the circumstance in which the essential nature and equality of all men and women are the determining basis for the moral sense of moral and other social values. We thus foster not only the kind of morality needed to guide us to actions which meet material requirements of the individual person, but to forms of social relations, of value placed upon man by man, the which are consistent with the proper image of man, and the proper moral definitions of social relations.
The notion of the statistical-social middle ground, the notion of the emerging new consensus, is an essentially inhuman view of the nature of both man and the universe. It denies that principle of universality upon which the idea of equality among all persons depends absolutely. It denies the existence of any truth common in its effective relevance for all persons. It substitutes the Weltgeist of G. W. F. Hegel, and the Romantic radical positivism of the Volksgeist, of Karl F. Savigny and Nazi law, for validatable principles of universal truthfulness. Remove the constraint of universal truthfulness from law and other statecraft, and substitute the radical positivism of consensus, and we are soon back to the satanic world of Thomas Hobbes.
Thus, the corrosive, if marginal influence, of thinking in terms of "consensus politics," has supplied a cumulative effect of bias into the misshaping of many kinds of policy-decisions, under the Clinton Administration, as earlier. Under Clinton, this bias was accelerated in effect by the more marked shift to "consensual" politicking, which became apparent during the May-August 1996 interval. The recent adoption of the British policy for a new bombing of Iraq is a typical expression of the effect of such cumulative bias.
Then, in the course of such developments, we reach the point, that some horrid effect looms before us. The popular, naive impulse, among many, perhaps most of those who recognize the dangerous effect so posed, is to attempt to change only the specific policy which they see as proximate to that effect. This view errs, in overlooking the fact, that that specific policy is a product of a cumulative reshaping of the underlying array of axiomatic-like assumptions, which guide, or misguide a government, such the Clinton administration, to the policy in question. Without addressing that underlying axiomatic structure, it were unlikely that efforts to change merely the relevant policy could succeed in anything but the failure which such an approach virtually guarantees.
Whoever does not place the emphasis on understanding the historically determined character of the axiomatic understructure of decision-making, knows no more than a little bit about real politics, and virtually nothing about the making of history.
1. Interesting is the connection of widely despised Lucianne Goldberg, currently of Linda "Bad" Tripp and Kenneth Starr notoriety, to the late, right-wing sleazeball Roy M. Cohn, Murray Chotiner, organized crime bosses, et al. The correlation between the common, "sleazeball" characteristics of Cohn and his cousin Morris, is of unignorable relevance in assessing the impact of Morris's dogmas on such aspects of the Clinton administration's policy, as the President's politically nearly fatal error of electing not to veto the relevant Welfare Reform act. It is the opportunistic indifference to truth and morality, as in the behavior of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, or the Nixon era's "White House Plumbers," or the Jack Keeney-led Criminal Division of the Justice Department itself, which underlies, axiomatically, the "sleazeball" factor in political judgment.
2. The separation of the 1964-1972 interval from the later 1970s, is marked by the "reality shock" represented by the outbreak and immediate aftermath of the August 15-16, 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. This event, which had been proclaimed as rendered "absolutely impossible," by Paul Samuelson's and other Economics 101 pablum; this shock, of mid-August 1971, was followed by the sudden, cruel effects of the Hjalmar Schacht-echoing austerity measures of Nixon's "Phase I" and "Phase II" gouging of popular incomes and "life styles." This was followed by the establishment of the catastrophic "floating exchange-rate monetary system," and the Henry Kissinger-orchestrated oil-price-shock crisis of the mid-1970s. The world of endlessly upward prosperity and apparent "capitalist power," against which the "Sixty-Eighters" had railed, was clearly ended --at least, for the time being. The single-goal-oriented, united mass-rallies of the late 1960s were superseded by the sodden, "multi-cultural" anarchy of the "Rainbow Coalition" type. There was a cultural paradigm-shift within the cultural paradigm-shift. Hence, the 1972 dating for the end of the first phase.
3. The principal germ of Sixty-Eighter existentialism, was the the Freudian Marxism of the Georg Lukacs who had served as the culture minister of the short-lived, 1919 Communist dictatorship of Bela Kun in Hungary. Lukacs was one of the by-products of the emergence of an influential satanic cult, steered by the British theosophists, since the 1880s, in Vienna, Budapest, and the Bayreuth of satanic "high priest" Richard Wagner and the British Scottish Rite's Quatuor Coronati freemasonic research lodge. The circles of Ernst Mach, of Gustav and Anna Mahler, of Sigmund Freud, and of Lukacs, were among those whose intellectual character, and characteristic features of work-product, were shaped by the radically decadent influence of this collection of cultural degenerates. Lukacs, during the 1920s, was, directly, the principal intellectual architect of the so-called "Frankfurt" School of such creatures as Walter Raymond, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, et al. The influence of Lukacs' follower Herbert Marcuse, and his One-Dimensional Man, in shaping the U.S. side of that Sixty-Eighter ferment, in conjunction with McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation and the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is relevant. The other principal influence was that of a French by-product of German fascist existentialism, that of Nazi Martin Heidegger's cothinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. The "Situationist International" influence among the trans-Atlantic Sixty-Eighters, typifies the French branch of the sewer-pipe. The late 1930s movement of Sigmund Freud and the international psychoanalytical movement of Sigmund and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, to the London Tavistock Clinic of Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees and Eric Trist, led to the establishment of the post-war Tavistock Clinic/Institute network inside Julian Huxley's functions within the United Nations Organization and in the U.S. psychological and sociology professions, which, together with the imported "science fiction" cult of H. G. Wells et al., and creatures such as the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation's Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson of "mind wars" notoriety, developed the seed-crystals of the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift inside the U.S.A.
4. Thomas Babington Macauley's The History of England Since the Accession of James I, provides a deliciously elegant literary portrait of this Jeffreys, who also served as the role-model imitated by Roy M. Cohn's Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) in McCarthy's own "Bloody Assizes" of the early 1950s. Jeffreys did not actual vanish from history in his nightshirt, but telling it that way is poetically truthful, and prettier prose, if not exactly accurate on every fine point.
5. Mellon Scaife first appeared in a Bush-linked, secret-government operation against Lyndon LaRouche, et al., during 1983. This was a secret intelligence operation run, at the prompting of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and FBI Director Webster, under the provisions of Executive Order 12333, covering secret operations combining official and private agencies within the U.S. and abroad. This operation was set in place in January 1983, and went into general operation a few weeks after the relevant announcement of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) by President Ronald Reagan. The propaganda operation run out of the George Bush/Ollie North corner of the National Security Council was set into motion in April 1983, under the direction of "fully witting" New York banker John Train, who brought together a combination of government agents and representatives of news media, such as NBC-TV, the Wall Street Journal, and others, all of whom played a leading part in what became the most massive black propaganda campaign ever run internationally by a corrupt press against any private personality, in this case Lyndon LaRouche. The operation was run along the lines of the policy of "public diplomacy" directed on Bush's and North's behalf by former CIA operative Walter Raymond. At the prompting of the John Birch Society's John Rees, Richard Mellon Scaife arranged for the funding of a hack-writer, Dennis "Caspar the Ghost" King from the stable of the notorious and odious Roy M. Cohn. Curiously, every "wired in" enemy of LaRouche from those 1983-1989 operations, has turned up as a deadly enemy running similar kinds of operations against President Bill Clinton. Kenneth Starr is part of precisely this set of dirty connections.
6. Bernhard Riemann himself sensed the importance of work of discoveries in this direction. See his posthumously published papers on this subject: Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953), pp. 507-538. However, the explicit connection to physics and physical economy had to wait until the work of the present author, beginning a project undertaken during the 1948-1952 interval. The "Four-Step Method" of cognition reflect the core of those original discoveries from the 1948-1952 project, as these notions have been refined through successful applications during subsequent decades.
7. Imagine two hypotheses, one corresponding to the lunatic assumptions of the Gingrich Phrygian horde customarily stabled at the Heritage Foundation, the other the "New Era" Democrats' ideology. "Triangulation" presumes that the two are on a converging course; in other words, that, if present ideological trends persist, the axiomatics of the two distinct ideologies will overlap increasingly, as a Boolean image of such an overlap suggests. Thus, although the two will disagree on political philosophy as a whole, they will concur in respect to those policies associated with a common sub-set of the axiomatics of each. The joining together will be facilitated by the presumption that the gain in power to be shared between them, is the advantage which must enable them to adopt certain common policies in respect to the common sub-set.
