Gore: Ozymandias Topples!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
January 7, 2000
The manner of Vice-President Al Gore during a televised, January 5th New Hampshire debate with former Senator Bill Bradley, a manner matched to the increasing thuggishness shown by Gore's campaign organization, has once again brought the issue of Gore's personal state of mind into the foreground. Since the incident of Gore's shocking personal conduct in his nationally televised debate with Ross Perot, over NAFTA,[1] and in his lunatic assault on the Prime Minister of Malaysia,[2] the Vice-President has shown a side of himself which warrants his classification as the "Uriah Heep" of today's U.S. political scene. Like the typically "bi-polar" personality which his schoolyard bully's style has often shown him to be, throughout the years of his role as Vice-President, his public behavior is characterized by wild oscillations, from snivelling sycophant to goon.
I referred to Gore's January 5th conduct, in my reply to a question to me during an international webcast on the following day. I replied, on the matter of Gore's rumored assignment to lead UN Security Council inquiries into the Africa AIDS matter, that Gore's recent behavior revealed him as a man beginning to crack up under the stresses and strains of his Presidential-nomination campaign. I recommended to that international audience, that Gore be allowed a compassionate, two-month's vacation from all Vice-Presidential and campaign duties, for the sake of his own mental health.[3]
New reports received this morning, including reports of a recently stepped-up bullying shown in New Hampshire by Gore's campaign, indicate that the recent pattern has now become a matter of wide and growing concern in press and other circles. Some observers of that same pattern in Gore's behavior, will recall Charles Dickens' portrayal of Uriah Heep; others might call up the image of the pagan Roman Emperors Nero and Caligula. As long as Gore continues to suffer the stresses of his present campaigning for the Presidency, the problem is not going to go away. It will become worse, and increasingly the subject of a world-wide scandal. In this increasingly crisis-ridden state of affairs, the Vice-President's behavior and suspect mental condition, are national-security issues of the utmost importance to the people of our own, and other nations.
On this urgent matter of U.S. national security, except for that broad reference to the clear evidence of a "bi-polar" pattern in Gore's publicly exhibited political behavior, I leave the practice of psychiatry to the psychiatrists. My relevant best expertise lies within the domain of a branch of science known as epistemology, the standpoint represented by all of my professional achievements in the branch of science known as physical economy.[4]
Epistemology is the branch of science which defines the way in which both valid and falsified universal principles are generated, and how their often unsuspected presence in the human mind, influences human behavior, both the individual behavior of persons, and of social relations among persons on a larger scale. On this occasion, I am applying my expertise in that branch of science to the case of the state of mind exhibited by Al Gore: or, to employ a term which we Americans sometimes borrow from British convention, what may be defined as the Vice-President's turbulent "mind-set."
The term "mind-set," used in that way, signifies that we must look at the fact, that the subject person's predispositions to believe and to act, are determined in a manner which resembles the way in which a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates of a standard secondary-school Euclidean geometry, predetermines what are considered the acceptable theorems of that geometry. To map that set of axiomatic assumptions, we must dig still deeper, to uncover the core assumption underlying all of the other definitions, axioms, and postulates.[5] In sum, we must look at that mind-set in the way the best-known figures of modern anti-Euclidean geometry, Carl Gauss and his follower Bernhard Riemann, successively defined what became known as a modern, relativistic form of physical geometry.[6]
Therefore, if we are to explain Gore's moments of such aberrant behavior competently, we must first ask ourselves, "Who is Al Gore, really?" Or, to be more precise, "What is the tragic discrepancy between what Gore himself wishes to believe that he is, and Gore's intended victim, the contrary reality, a real world which Gore regards as the adversary stubbornly refusing to bend to what are, in fact, his tragically misguided assumptions on that account?" That takes us to the inner core of his mind-set. Once we recognize who he imagines himself to be, we may readily recognize what he is, as well.
`Is he man or beast?'
As one ought to suspect from reading Gore's Earth in the Balance,[7] the most generous thing which can be said respecting his sense of personal identity, is that he is a man of uncertain belief on the issue of whether or not human beings are merely another kind of animal species. In fact, the thesis of his book is, that he has decided, in his stated intent of practice, in favor of the beasts, rather than man. So he behaved in his debate with Ross Perot, and his baboonishness against Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. This, naturally, makes it most difficult for Gore to maintain the pretense of being a Christian, or even a card-carrying member in modern European civilization generally. Imagine Gore being challenged publicly by some church, by the following series of questions:
"Al Gore, are you a Christian?"
"Yes." At that point bi-polar Gore's mood vacillates, like a touchy barroom drunk already half-soused, between sickening-sweet sycophancy and menacing overtones of truculence.
"Then, you accept the conception of man expressed by Genesis 1: 27-30?"
Gore becomes restive. He struggles to hide the wild-eyed storms in his mind's eyes from showing themselves. He stares, with his customary wooden-Indian pose of feigned sincerity. "As I tried to leave no doubt in writing my book, I believe we are given the duties of stewardship in nature." Perhaps, at that moment, Gore imagines, that the Duke of Edinburgh, whom he greatly admires, would be proud of him.
To understand the source of the torment which Gore is suffering inwardly at that moment, one need but know that for about twenty years at the least, Gore has been a follower of the anti-human views of Canada's Maurice Strong, and was a 1970s confederate of the now-former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Alvin Toffler in promoting such "Third Wave" kookery as those "Air Land Battle 2000" military dogmas which Gore has supported so energetically in his campaigns for the bombing of several targetted nations. As Earth in the Balance reflects this, Gore is an avid true believer in following the radically neo-Malthusian population-reduction policies of the British Royal Consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, and of like-minded promoters of globalized genocide generally.
The questioner poses the question again: "I asked you: do you believe that man and woman are made equally in the image of the Creator of the universe, and therefore given dominion over other species? Or, do you believe that man is just another great ape?"
Gore now finds it most difficult to prevent his eyeballs from dancing wildly, as the eyes of enraged "bi-polar" types are wont to do. A certain smell permeates the auditorium at that moment. Inwardly, Gore is gripped by a rage to kill. He appears, at that moment to be about as democratic as the Hollywood image of mafia boss attempting to strike a pose of "class."
It is the smell radiating, repeatedly, from those moments of Gore-like moral ambiguities, which has caused Gore to be virtually unelectable outside the state of Tennessee. Being chosen as part of the baggage of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for the general election, is not necessarily the same thing as being elected a person in one's own right. Gore knows that, and it rankles him.
That is the state of affairs at the center of Gore's personal tragic flaw. It could also become the fatal tragic flaw of any nation, or political party foolish enough to make him its choice of President. This flaw is the deeper inner well-spring of that boundless rage which has erupted lately with increasing frequency, from Gore's combined real and imagined failures to secure his grip on what the poor wretch wishes to believe is his pre-rigged year 2000 election as President. Barring an intervening collapse of Gore's Wall Street backers, nothing is more likely to drive Gore over the edge, than the fear that the August 2000 Democratic Party nominating convention might turn out to be an unrigged, open convention. That is precisely what would drive him, inwardly, to wish he were a modern-day King Richard III, with the power to launch a thermonuclear ballistic-missile barrage at someone: perhaps me, first of all.
That much said, now turn your eyes inward, to your powers of imagination. Imagine the fabled Ozymandias as described by the great Classical poet Percy Shelley.[8] Now compare that image with the Washington Post's recent front-page presentation of a group portrait of 1966 Harvard freshmen, in which Gore stands out as one apparently attempting to project the self-image of the pathetic Ozymandias described by Shelley.[9] Now, see that same Ozymandias again, this time disguised as a wooden cigar-store Indian, wearing a psychotic glare about the eyes. Now, compare that wooden Indian with the toppled fragments of the self-doomed Ozymandias, as described by Shelley's famous short poem. See the severed head of the statue rolling in the desert sand, the psychotic glare still fixed upon the face. Let your imagination roam across those panels, from left to right, letting the process of change, as represented by scanning, replace viewing each panel individually.
Now, pause for a moment. Reflect upon the implications of that imagery. I have introduced this imagery for a most relevant reason.
To understand the processes of the mind, it is indispensable to copy the method of Plato's Socrates. If you ask me, "Why?" I will respond by asking: "Did you ever actually see a universal physical principle? Did you recognize it with your eyes, or by sound, touch, or smell? Did you ever see an idea with your senses?" To reach any competent judgment respecting the human mind in general, or the actual mind-set of any person in particular, it is indispensable to grasp the notion of the mind. The mind, considered either in general, or in a particular case, exists for us only as an idea, that in the Platonic sense of idea.
That the human mind, as distinct from the sense-perceptible brain as such, exists, is beyond doubt. Otherwise the human population would never much exceed that of the higher apes; but our knowledge of the existence of that efficient agency, the mind, comes to us, not as the perception of a sense-object, but, rather, only as our cognitive perception of an efficient idea, an idea which is as real as thermonuclear fusion, but which is more powerful, more efficient, than any sense-object as such.
Another name for idea is metaphor. That is not metaphor as the term is falsely defined by Aristotle. It is typified by the practice of Leonardo da Vinci, for example, in composing his Milan The Last Supper. To see that painting, you must view it as you move about within that chapel, viewing the portrait on the wall from various positions, as you move sideways and back and forth. Then, the images within the room portrayed by the painting, move with you, as if you were looking into the room portrayed. The use of Leonardo's same principle of composition of metaphor in plastic art-forms, is also to be seen in the most famous paintings by his follower Raphael Sanzio. The same principle of composition of metaphor, is the characteristic of those methods of well-tempered, polyphonic thorough-composition, which Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms derived from the work of Johann Sebastian Bach.
All true ideas are generated as non-deductive, cognitive solutions for otherwise insoluble deductive paradoxes. No deductive method could ever produce a valid solution. The act of insight, by means of which the cognitive processes of an individual mind generate an experimentally validatable solution for such a paradox, is the proper definition of idea in all Classical scientific and artistic use of that term. The fact that a second mind can re-enact that cognitive discovery of a validatable hypothetical solution for such a paradox, and that both minds can share the proof of that hypothesis, defines that replicatable act of cognition, the act of discovery itself, as a knowable, known idea, in Plato's sense of idea.
Bringing this back to the matter immediately at hand, the mind of a subject such as Gore; the human mind itself is the greatest, the most fundamental of the paradoxes which the human mind must solve.[10] It is from that standpoint, and only that standpoint, that we can come to a validatable understanding of our own mind, and that of others, such as the pathetic Gore. The task here, is to define a clear and distinct, cognitive idea of what is tragically wrong with Gore's mind. We approach this just as Shakespeare presents a clear and distinct, metaphorical idea of the mind of the historical Richard III,[11] or Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, or as Aeschylus and Shelley present the mind of the wicked, self-doomed tyrant Zeus, and as Friedrich Schiller presents the tragic folly of both Spain's real-life King Philip II, and also the tragically flawed character of Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa.
That method is the same used by Leonardo and Raphael for plastic composition, the method which Shakespeare applies with exemplary force in the famous Third Act soliloquy of Hamlet. There, in "To be, or not to be . . . ," Hamlet states the paradox on which his life depends, but explicitly refuses to accept the solution. It is then that refusal which leads Hamlet to the doom he brings upon both himself and his kingdom.
The connection is underscored by the character Horatio, while fresh dead Hamlet is being carried off stage:
"... let this[12] be presently performed,
Even while men's minds are wild:
lest some more mischance
On plots and errors happen."
Thus, the audience's mind is turned, by the contrast between the final irony of the dialogue between foolish Fortinbras and insightful Horatio. The audience thinks back to the Third Act soliloquy, and recalls, with a cold shudder, the foreseeable doom which Hamlet had embraced within that soliloquy. The fateful unfolding of Hamlet's folly awes the audience, because it is so recognizably true to life; but, then, now recognizing that such a doom might have been willfully avoided, is a lesson in hope. So, as Schiller said of great tragedy well performed, the audience leaves the theater better, more optimistic people, than it had entered it a few hours earlier.
Such is the nature of ideas. Such are the powers of the human mind for insight into itself. If the citizens of today, could better see the folly of supporting a Gore, or George W. Bush, aided so by the tragedian's art, might not our nation be saved from an otherwise more or less certain doom? The great tragedian would see what Celtic tradition describes as a fey look, around the glaring eyes of Gore, and would whisper to the audience, "Avoid this man, lest the doom he bears become your own."
A great painter, such as a Leonardo, Raphael, or Rembrandt, would recognize that fey look around the eyes of that Gore from the 1966 Harvard photograph. That portrait might invoke memory of Hamlet's encounter with the ghost, in the First Act. Already, there, the tragic flaw in Hamlet betrays itself to the viewer. Such is the way of doomed actual and would-be princelings, even an ignoble one, such as poor Gore.
To avoid an otherwise likely misunderstanding, let us now warn the reader against the popular, illiterate misuse of the term "tragedy" as a mere synonym for "awful" or "pitiable." "Tragedy" is an important word, whose use must be reserved for the function it performs, not only in Classical drama, but in the practice of statecraft.[13] As the meaning of the term has been passed down to us from the Classical Greek epics and drama, it signifies a condition partaking of the sacred, such as the inevitable, self-inflicted doom of the gods of Olympus, or of a real-life nation, or what might have been, otherwise, a great statesman. It signifies self-inflicted doom, as brought about either by the whole people of a nation, or some leading figure who, for a moment, held the power to bring on, or avert that doom. It signifies the refusal by a people, or their leaders of that time, to seek and accept the truth, truth in the Socratic sense of truthfulness and justice.[14] It signifies a systemic, existential quality of conflict, between the intent of the decisions generated by a ruling, but wrong-headed mind-set, such as the belief that one must respect a currently foolish trend in policy-shaping as "inevitable," and the reality upon which that false and foolish intention is stubbornly imposed. It signifies a nation self-doomed by its own most cherished, perhaps Kantian customs. Like that character Thrasymachus of Plato's Republic, or the Olympus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, it is doomed by the same laws by which the nation had proudly consented to be ruled.
Such is the presently looming tragedy of Vice-President Gore, and therefore of any political party, or nation, which adopts him as its choice for President. The root of the Vice-President's pathetic state of mind, is his refusal to be redeemed, his refusal to accept the fact of the fundamental difference between man and beast. Worse than that state of belief itself, is his staking the entirety of his identity on becoming the President who leads the nation to the doom such a belief incurs. Gore should reconsider his tragic ways by comparing himself today with the image of doomed Adolf Hitler in his bunker, as the specter of Old Marley showed Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge the urgent need to change his own foolish, greedy ways.
Why Gore hates reality
There is a bit of Gore in every mechanic who reacts against a machine's disobedience, by smashing that machine with his tools. Or, compare the driver who smashes the windshield, or headlights of his car, to punish it for running out of gas. Would you wish to put a man of such disposition in the position of Commander in Chief of our armed forces? Watching relevant symptoms of Gore's public performance, prompts us to think of some rural racist, filled with sweet memories of the Confederacy, who warns his African-American neighbor, "You know how I get, when I don't get my way!"
For a long time, until the change which erupted on university campuses during the 1964-72 interval, the propensity for such "bi-polar" styles in tool-breaking, was constrained by the general population's sense of the rightness of a certain American tradition. Despite the evil done to our nation and its popular culture, by such sons of the Confederacy as Teddy Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klan enthusiast Woodrow Wilson, and by the mysterious death of President Warren Harding, this tradition was renewed, to a significant and beneficial degree, by the U.S. popular experience under President Roosevelt, during the 1930s Great Depression and the war which followed. That tradition was a sense of confident commitment to the betterment of the conditions of life, through reliance upon the benefits of scientific, technological, and related progress. As long as that tradition prevailed, the neighbor who occasionally smashed things out of rage, was a problem, but usually a tolerable one. The tendencies for such irrationalism, even those bordering upon insanity, tended to be contained within the bounds of representing an occasional aberration, bounded by a healthy surrounding cultural tradition.
When that tradition ebbed, as it has over the course of the recent three decades, the aberrations were less and less contained. One of those endemic aberrations, is the legacy of the Confederacy known as the Nashville Agrarian cult of figures such as Huey Long-hater Robert Penn Warren and the rabid Anglophile William Yandell Elliot. Young Gore, like Teddy Roosevelt, a Miniver Cheevy in his own right, fits more or less exactly into that decadent tradition. Long on ambition, and short on interest in cognitive activities, young Gore fell in quite readily with the up-and-coming campus counter-culture of the middle to late 1960s.
To understand Gore, one should compare his case with that of the youth counter-culture of post-Versailles Germany's 1920s and early 1930s. He typifies the existentialist who hates the society into which he imagines himself to have been thrown. He is an echo of the same moral sickness typified by such sundry, existentialist right-wingers and leftists as Nazi Martin Heidegger, or Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's follower Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre's protégé Frantz Fanon, all of whom were avowed haters of truth, of reason, and of mankind in general. They were haters, like Gore, of modern, science-driven industrial society and the Yankee-style nation-state republic.
In the case of the German and French existentialists of the 1920s and 1930s, we should reject, with disgust, the attempt of nominalist phrase-jugglers to divide political currents between "right wing" and "leftist."
Those existentialists of the 1920s and 1930s were equally products of what is termed by scholars "the Conservative Revolution." In both the relics of the Confederacy's legacy and in late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, "the Conservative Revolution" was rooted in the doom of the Habsburg-centered system of feudal landed aristocracy, and the replacement of those feudal relics by the new Venetian financier aristocracy which had chosen London for its new world capital. The doom of the princely tyranny of such creatures as Austro-Hungarian Chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich, unleashed a deep, implicitly satanic pessimism and anti-social rage among the fading feudal tyrants, and the class of habituated lackeys which had adored their former way of life so passionately.[15]
It was the same with the would-be feudal landed aristocracy on which the Confederacy had been based. It was the British Foreign Office's Bentham and Palmerston, who created Giuseppe Mazzini and what became Young Europe, and established the future organization of the Confederacy, as Young America, in the U.S.A. So, the Ku Klux Klan emerged as the harbinger of fascism in the U.S.A., as did the Conservative Revolution which bred Nazism in Germany. Both the so-called "right" and "left" factions of the existentialist ferment, represented that often frankly satanic outburst of cultural pessimism among the lackey classes of Europe. Thus, Heidegger, Jaspers, Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, the leftist acid and right-wing lye of European cultural pessimism. Thus, the array of existentialist cults in the U.S.A., ranging typically from the Ku Klux Klan to Nashville Agrarians. Hence, Al Gore.
Compare Gore to a second type of rabid tool-breaker. Take the case of those whom Gore follows, whether with full comprehension, or not: the Bertrand Russell devotees Professors Norbert Wiener (of "cybernetics" notoriety), and John von Neumann, the putative grandfather of the August 1998 collapse of a Gore crony, Wall Street's Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The combined life's work of Wiener and von Neumann, which Gore knows as "The Third Wave," has turned out to be an hysterical fit, an elaborate tantrum, prompted by the refusal of the physical universe to obey the lunatic linear dogmas of the father of nuclear terror, Bertrand Russell. Typical is von Neumann's virtually psychotic (e.g., literally schizophrenic) passion for the possibility of "artificial intelligence," and Wiener's promotion of the same hoax under the rubric of "information theory."
To appreciate such behavior among persons ostensibly dedicated to be original thinkers in science, one must focus upon the way in which all validatable discoveries of universal physical principles have been generated: through the cognitive processes to which I have referred here, above. Every successful discoverer recognizes this fact from both education and professional experience. Valid such discoveries could never occur in any different way than that. But, then, as a brilliant Yale psychiatrist, the late Professor Lawrence Kubie pointed out, there are many talented scientific professionals, and others, who had once been considered of great promise, but who seemed to go almost brain-dead sometime after receiving their terminal degrees. Kubie addressed this in his book on The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process,[16] and, later, in a report, "The Fostering of Creative Scientific Productivity," published in the journal Daedalus.[17] I have had occasion, in times past, to observe this phenomenon directly, as the case of brilliant young minds who turned intellectually sterile, transformed into pitiable mere pedants, during the period immediately preceding the final qualifying stages of gaining a terminal degree.
Snippets from the personal history of Wiener and von Neumann, point to the phenomenon of the enraged "tool-breakers" among science professionals who became notable after they became cognitively sterile. Both were thrown out of Göttingen University. Wiener was chucked out for scientific incompetence, by David Hilbert himself. Later, von Neumann, originally brought in by Hilbert, was chucked out, for offenses against academic honor, at the prompting of Richard Courant. Notably, von Neumann's career in the hoax known as "systems analysis," was shaped, from the beginning of the 1930s, on, chiefly by the crushing defeat of his mentor, Bertrand Russell, by the mathematician Kurt Gödel's refutation of the principal feature of Russell's life's work in mathematics.[18] The breakdown in the cognitive abilities of both men turned them into compulsive tool-breakers within the domain of science, just like the neurotic mechanic, who reacts to frustration by attempting to punish either the machine or his tools.
In the case of both Wiener and von Neumann, their escapades in scientific quackery were expressed by their desperate attempts to show that there was no area of scientific inquiry which could not be mastered from a simply deductive, linearized approach to mathematical thinking about physical processes: by linear methods of mathematical modeling. Like Russell, both Wiener and von Neumann excited themselves over the topic of "random theory," a tell-tale choice of topic, a desperate effort to refute the Hilbert, Courant, and Gödel, who had caused much pain to Bertrand Russell, and to Wiener and von Neumann, too.
Gore's tragic flaw is of a parallel quality. To suggest that I am saying that Gore is a "science-illiterate" would require a vast overestimate of Gore's intellectual powers. What I am saying, and implying, is that the neurotic form of Gore s pathology is of the same general type as that of the enraged back-yard tool-breaker, or the hoaxes of Wiener and von Neumann. Gore has adopted certain petulantly childish beliefs as to how the universe must behave; he, like the man seized by a quasi-psychotic fit of cursing and tool-breaking, is obsessed with the intent to force the universe to work the way he, Gore, demands, or else.
That kind of problem is endemic among today's more poorly educated populations. However, with Gore it is much worse, a potentially terminal hovering at an increasingly turbulent threshold of insanity. Many people suffer from analogous follies; the difference is, that they, at a certain point, are prepared to abandon a folly which they recognize to be such. Gore is more like the Titanic passenger who would cling to the sinking ship, solely because he is determined not to let anyone cheat him out of occupying the luxurious stateroom he has just taken over from a guest who took to the lifeboats. He is prepared to kill anyone who would prevent him from enjoying that purloined stateroom, and perhaps even prepared to kill anyone who would insist that the ship is actually sinking.
Gore's most visible obsessions of more functional nature are three: 1) His commitment to his faith in the "inevitability" of the utopian fantasy of "globalization;" 2) His commitment to an assortment of ideologies fairly grouped under the heading of "Third Wave;" 3) His picaresque self-image, that of a would-be aristocrat in a utopia akin to the Nashville Agrarian fantasy, in which he becomes virtually "king of the world." His attachment to each and all of these three notions, is more emotional in nature, than conceptual. As we see lately, the stress of the campaign has now put him close to, if not over the edge. The impulse to do something akin to smashing tools, is evidently either overwhelming, or nearly so. Perhaps some psychiatrist might suggest the term "paranoid;" I leave that matter to his ministrations. I have a different relevant point to add, here and now.
What is sanity?
To understand insanity, one must first know what constitutes sanity. There, among his other faults, Dr. Sigmund Freud, for one, failed absolutely. Given the fact, that we must all die, what is a sane, optimistic view of our individual mortal life?
A short time before a famous musical arist, Gertrude Pitzinger, died, my wife and I, and two others, had a private birthday celebration with her. It was said that she was ninety-two years of age. She had been among the great singers, in the U.S.A. and in Europe, during the 1930s and 1940s. On the occasion of that birthday celebration, she had my wife Helga recite certain German poems, after each of which Madame Pitzinger would produce one of her recorded performances of a song based on the same poem. In the course of this visit, she said of those songs, that she had been privileged in life to be able to sing this music so. That was no overstatement; her performance of the Schumann Frauenliebe und -leben, for example, is among the masterpieces of the recorded musical literature. It was the last time we met, and it was an extraordinarily beautiful, happy, and most memorable moment.
In great Classical artistic compositions, as in valid discoveries of universal physical principle, the mortal individual touches immortality. There is no vanity in stating that; it is a plain fact known to and relished by every sane person. There is no blind faith in such a statement; the evidence is strictly scientific. The proof goes as follows. The proof is, among its other applications, a source of insight into the reasons Vice-President Al Gore is, so visibly, such a mean and unhappy man.
What is it which sets each man and woman equally apart from and above the beasts? The proof of that fact is the relationship between the cooperative employment of validated discoveries of universal physical principle, and mankind's increase of our species' power in and over the universe. The Creator has so designed this universe, that whenever mankind generates a valid discovery of a universal physical principle, the universe is obliged to obey the command which that discovery represents. Thus, the nature of the human individual, and man's relationship to the Creator and His universe, lies in that sovereign cognitive power of the cultivated individual human mind, by means of which valid solutions to deductively insoluble paradoxes are generated, as valid discoveries of universal principle.
The cultivation of the individual's such sovereign powers, is effected in us through our reliving the act of discovery of such principles, reliving the creative acts of those who have gone before us. We, in turn, should not only pass that experience on to future generations, but, hopefully, add something to that stock of wisdom. Thus, for the scientist whose mind has been cultivated and employed in this manner, his or her mortal existence lies in a definite and permanent place in the well-ordered simultaneity of eternity.
This is clear for science. What does this say for art?
In Classical art, as distinct from mere popular entertainments or contemporary Romantic, modernist, or post-modernist fads, what defines a composition performed as art, is that the composition embodies some demonstration of a discovery of principle, in the same sense that this applies to the discovery of valid universal physical principles. Look at this from the standpoint of the performing Classical artist, in music, the Classical stage, and poetry. What constitutes a bad, or good performance of such compositions? Wherein do we touch the immortality of Gertrude Pitzinger's performing artistry, for example?
In those instances, the key lies in the cognitive principle of metaphor. The poor attempt at Classical artistry in performance, is usually a tendency to sing the notes, rather than the music, to deliver the words of a poem in a stylized way, rather than, as this century's greatest conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, did, convey the passion embedded in the ironies the composer has supplied. In a good performance, the artist enables the audience to relive the discovery of the universal idea in the composition, an experience which only an artist could provoke in that audience. In all such cases of successful performance, the essential relationship among the performer, the performance, and the audience, is a cognitive one, not a matter of sensory effects or symbolisms as such. By cognition, we should understand the same kinds of social relations and sovereign personal experience presented by inducing a student to re-enact the discovery of a valid universal physical principle.
Thus, does an art, and its qualified artists, perform an indispensable function of transmitting the universal principles of the art of the past, to future generations. So, all Classical artists who work so find a permanent place in the simultaneity of eternity.
Yet, there is something more in Classical artistic composition. As the case of Shakespeare's character Hamlet attests, all Classical art has the general social function of civilizing populations, by imparting to them those insights into social relations which are essential for daily life and statecraft alike. Classical art is the science of society, as Classical science is the science of man's mastery of the universe. Thus, the cultivation of the sovereign cognitive powers of each generation, a cultivation rooted in reliving the discovery of the great universal principles of the physical universe and Classical artistic composition and performance, is the form of activities of the mortal individual in society, which offers each the opportunity to secure a permanent place in the simultaneity of eternity.
This is not a matter of finding consolations for mortality. It goes much deeper than that. We are like a visitor sent from some distant galaxy, here briefly to fulfill some necessary mission for both mankind and for the universe in general. Therein lies our identity, our essential sanity.
That sanity is what the obviously wretched, self-tormented, pathetic Al Gore presently lacks. He has publicly repudiated everything he might become which is truly human, for the sake of his foolish desire to be nothing better than a cruel wooden doll--an evil wooden nutcracker, perhaps--in a paper universe.
That said, the rest which might be added follows implicitly.
Barring an intervening collapse of Gore's Wall Street backers, nothing is more likely to drive Gore over the edge, than the fear that the August 2000 Democratic Party nominating convention might turn out to be an unrigged, open convention. That is precisely what would drive him, inwardly, to wish he were a modern-day King Richard III, with the power to launch a thermonuclear ballistic-missile barrage at someone: perhaps me, first of all.
There is a bit of Gore in every mechanic who reacts against a machine's disobedience, by smashing that machine with his tools. Or, compare the driver who smashes the windshield, or headlights of his car, to punish it for running out of gas. Would you wish to put a man of such disposition in the position of Commander in Chief of our armed forces?
Gore has adopted certain petulantly childish beliefs as to how the universe must behave; he, like the man seized by a quasi-psychotic fit of cursing and tool-breaking, is obsessed with the intent to force the universe to work the way he, Gore, demands, or else.
[1] Nov. 9, 1993.
[2] Keynote to the final dinner at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Nov. 16, 1998.
[4] Physical economy, a branch of physical science founded by Gottfried Leibniz, concentrates attention on the role of addition of universal physical and other principles, such as validated, fundamental scientific discoveries, in determining the potential rate of increase of the physical productivity, and improvement of the demographic characteristics of populations, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface area.
[5] For example, in the case of empiricism, the assumption of the method of deduction is the underlying assumption of the system. This aprioristic assumption serves as the basis for the axiomatic assumption of linearization. In all of this, the underlying, aprioristic assumption, is that only the evidence provided by the dots of sense-perceptual acts, is truthful representation of the real universe.
[6] It should be noted, for precision, that the founder of what became known as non- and anti-Euclidean geometry, was Gauss's teacher, Göttingen Professor Abraham Kaestner. Kaestner, a leading scientific follower of Gottfried Leibniz, and opponent of the empiricist Leonhard Euler, was a collaborator of Gotthold Lessing, and served as host of Benjamin Frankin at Göttingen University.
[7] Al Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
[8] "I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, in The Top 500 Poems, edited by William Harmon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 495.
[9] Photo by Christopher Bayley, Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1999.
[10] Some might protest: "Is not the idea of God the greatest idea?" One should reply to that challenge: How does one know oneself as in the image of the Creator of the universe? Is that not the greatest question which directly confronts the human mind?
[11] Shakespeare's Richard III is based chiefly on extremely detailed, extensively first-hand historical studies supplied by Sir Thomas More and More's father.
[12] The re-enactment of this tragedy.
[13] It could be fatal to our nation, were we to follow the illiterate's advice given by the New York Times' William Safire, to decapitate the function of the President of the United States, by proposing that he conduct himself as the elected officer of a common chowder-and-marching society. Contrary to Safire's contemporary Times, a U.S. President must be `Presidential.'
[14] I.e., the Classical Greek agape, as also in the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13.
[15] For the benefit of those who expect historical niceties from me in such matters, the following qualifications are supplied. The existentialist movement in Europe takes its root from the cultural and political legacies of the Roman Empire, both of Rome and Byzantium. This legacy, known as Romanticism, was the hegemonic current in western European feudalism, until the Greek Classical revival introduced by the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Golden Renaissance. During the Sixteenth Century, Romanticism divided itself between a Conservative (pro-landed aristocracy) and radical (pro-financier aristocracy) current. The empiricism of Paolo Sarpi, typified the latter. The first forerunners of modern fascism, or neo-Caesarism, erupted in the Romantic `Enlightenment' of the Eighteenth Century. Fascism began its emergence with the Jacobin Terror of Jeremy Bentham's British Foreign Office assets Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Saint-Just, and with the principal forerunner of Mussolini and Hitler, the Romantic figure of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Romanticism took root in Germany in the aftermath of Napoleon's victory at Jena-Auerstadt, and Metternich's 1819 Carlsbad Decrees. Hegel and Savigny are representative, as are Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, et al. The pro-satanic theosophical movement of such figures as Aleister Crowley, is part of the same development.
[16] Lawrence S. Kubie, The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961; reprint of 1958 University of Kansas Press edition).
[17] "The Fostering of Scientific Creativity," Daedalus, Spring 1962.
[18] Kurt Gödel, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" (1931), Collected Works, Vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
