Call Them
`The Baby Doomers'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
June 18, 2000
A recent re-reading of Justice Ferdinand Pecora's 1939 report on the 1933-1934 U.S. Senate Investigation of Wall Street's J.P. Morgan, et al.,[1] is a timely reminder, that there are two points of measurably great difference between the respective characters of crisis-wracked Wall Street, then and now.
First, the disaster now onrushing, is, not only quantitatively, but, as I shall explain, also qualitatively, a far greater threat than anything which the U.S. has experienced since the great Civil War of 1861-1865, the greatest financial crisis European civilization has experienced since the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War.
Second, the relevant difference between the morals of Wall Street robber barons of the 1920s, and those of Wall Street's peddlers and their admirers of today, is that, the morals of those between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age, who are currently occupying leading executive and professional positions in government and elsewhere, are, in most instances, even far more distant from a sense of reality than their already foolish predecessors, those Flappers of President Coolidge's time, who led the nation into the 1929-1939 Great Depression. This difference is, also, not merely quantitative, but, as I shall explain, also qualitative.
All considered, many, even, perhaps, most of those of that so-called "Baby Boomer" generation now in key positions of day-to-day executive power, in finance and in government, were better named "Baby Doomers." Pecora's book, quoting liberally from Wall Street's own testimony then, thus points only toward the common features of the crucial moral issues involved in this comparison, then with now.
The gist of Justice Pecora's presentation of the facts, was that the leading Wall Street bankers of that time, had little or no interest in building up the nation's physical economy, or improving the general welfare of the people. Quite the contrary. Then, as now, since the founding of the Bank of Manhattan by the British Foreign Office's agent, Aaron Burr, the barons of Wall Street have been essentially predators.[2] Then, as now, they orchestrated the behavior of those whom they considered their lawful prey, the population in general, in the manner the celebrated cattle barons bred, herded, and culled their cattle. So, then, as now, the investing cattle, Wall Street's customers, have been misled, sheep-like, into the relevant shearing-pens and slaughter-houses of finance and economy more generally. On the level of short-term to medium-term, day to day financial practice, the essential purpose of Wall Street's orchestration of increasingly poppable, vast financial bubbles has been, then, as now, to lure more and more of the investing public, into the pits where that public is swindled out of its present financial resources, while also imposing added debts on those same prey; and, when the victims' cash ran out, the swindlers continued to loot them even of what the victim did not have: milking as much as possible, in those and other ways, by added debts imposed upon even the victims' non-existent, but only conjecturable future incomes.
At the time of those 1933-1934 Senate hearings, the nation's conscience was shocked by the Dracula-like images of the Wall Street barons testifying on the hearings' witness-stand.[3] Laws were enacted to outlaw and curb any repetition of the most outrageous among those Wall Street practices. For those laws, Wall Street hated Franklin Roosevelt then, and, as we can readily observe, has hated his memory ever since, to the present day. Indeed, for one who knows the pedigrees of the top Wall Street circles, then and now, behind the restructuring of corporate and partnership organizations, the family-style collation of baronies remain--with some pluses and minuses in the roster--essentially the same collation of root-entities today that they were then.
Beginning with the 1977-1981 Carter Administration, most of the regulatory measures and other reforms of the Franklin Roosevelt era, have been repealed; the predators have not only returned to their old anarchic ways, but have added evils which had not yet been invented at the time of the 1933-1934 Senate hearings.
Typical of the full-tilt return to the immorality of Wall Street's "roaring Twenties,"is the recent, lunatic repeal of Glass-Steagall, that on the eve of the very kind of crisis which that act was conceived to address. The more obvious difference, today, is that today's swindles of the nation and its credulously investing public, are vastly greater, more savage, than anything examined before that 1933-1934 Senate Committee.
However, today, something qualitatively new has been added to the old. Instead of aiming simply to loot the economy, as Wall Street did then, this time, during the recent thirty-odd years, Wall Street has looted the economy with the literal, stated intent, not merely to bleed it, but to destroy it in the most literal sense of those terms.
The continuing, characteristic feature of the economic and related policies of the 1977-1981 Carter Administration, and its successors, has been to bring about what Carter-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker described as a "controlled disintegration of the economy."[4]
Since the election of President Jimmy Carter, the continuing policy of the Wall Street-controlled Federal Reserve System, for more than twenty-one years, under Alan Greenspan as under Paul Volcker, has been to be the enforcer of an ever more aggressive effort to bring about the total "controlled disintegration of the economy"--both the U.S. economy, and the world economy as well. The relevant measures of "floating exchange-rates," "free trade," "privatization," "globalization," and "democratization," have been applied to the intended, combined effect of destroying those institutions of modern economy built up during the course of the recent five hundred years.
To understand the cause and cure for such periods in our national history, such as that of the "roaring Twenties" and today, it is indispensable to begin with a strictly rigorous, and appropriate, functional definition of mass insanity of that type. I mean the kind of popular mass insanity otherwise typified by the Seventeenth-Century Dutch tulip bubble, and the John-Law-style financial bubbles of the early Eighteenth-Century British monarchy's Liberals and the duped lunatics of Voltaire's and Rameau's France. To grasp the deeper implications of such forms of mass insanity, we must compare what would have happened in the U.S., if a Wall Street military coup against the incoming Franklin Roosevelt Presidency, had succeeded,[5] with what actually did happen, when British and Wall Street financier interests, such as, notably, England's Montagu Norman and New York's Brown Brothers, Harriman, succeeded, in January 1933, in bringing Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.[6]
1. The Fundamental Law of Economy
In taking up the issues thus posed, we must take into account the fact that the greatest global financial, monetary, and economic debacle in the several recent centuries of globally extended European civilization, is currently in progress; we are at the brink of the worst financial and monetary crisis in more than two centuries. We are presently on the steepest part of the slope of a boundary-condition [Figure 1], which separates the continued existence of the present world financial system from its doom. We have the chance to come through this crisis quite successfully, provided we abandon the foolish effort to maintain the present financial system and its policies in their present form. We, ourselves, our nations, can survive this crisis very well; but, to bring about that success, we must accept and deploy some very radical, very deep-going changes in the way governments act, and the way most people think at the present moment.
Thus, any subject of practical importance touching on those matters, can not be competently addressed in what have been heretofore generally accepted terms of reference. The proverbial rules of the game are about to be radically changed. Only fools will attempt to find ways to make the present system work better; it must be replaced, together with what many people, up to this moment, have come to accept as generally accepted ways of shaping changes in policy. Therefore, any competent discussion of practical matters at hand, must be a more deep-going reexamination of customary, but failed axiomatic assumptions. Such discussion, if it is to produce a happy outcome, requires more prolonged concentration-span, than is customary for most readers. There is no safe way to avoid those issues and survive. The readers must accept the challenge I offer to them here. So, we now proceed.
To address these referenced, and closely related issues competently, we must begin with what is best termed a systemic definition of the essential differences between the modes of popular economic sanity of both the 1920s and the 1946-1966 intervals, and the kind of popular economic insanity which has been spread and built up during the recent thirty-odd years, since the events of 1966-1968. By "systemic," I mean a definition which is universally true, in the same, special sense as a uniquely validated universal physical principle in physical science, is to be acknowledged as true.[7]
In other words: By "systemic," I mean a universal characteristic, common to all phases and other aspects of the specific physical, or analogous system being considered as a whole. I mean universal characteristic, as Gottfried Leibniz introduced this notion, and as Bernhard Riemann made this notion of characteristic curvature the central feature of the Gauss-Riemann notion of a relativistic physical space-time.[8]
In that specific sense of universal principles: All competent study of political-economy, begins with two issues of elementary--which is to say "axiomatic"--principle: 1) What is man's relationship to nature, as this is expressed, in effect, as measurable in physical terms, per capita, and per square kilometer; 2) What is that relation among persons, by means of which individual members of societies cooperate, to defend and enhance in common their physical power in and over nature? All fundamental matters of economic policies, whether of modern or the most ancient forms of human existence, must return, always, to those two sets of questions. These define the framework in which the functional meaning of human culture is located for economics. This is as true for the most ancient, as for whatever will become the most distant-future form of human existence.
I now summarily restate those questions, in the degree to which that discussion is necessary for understanding the functions whose effects we are studying here. On that account, we must show, step by step, how these questions lead us, Socratically, to the required definition of a functional form of popular economic sanity.
Although the points I summarize again here, are elementary by nature, and although I have presented these notions in numerous lectures, and in rather widely circulated published writings, during the past decades, today's customary textbook and other putatively expert learning has failed, so far, to master these ABCs of any competent economic science. It is indispensable that these ABCs be restated here. Otherwise, no one could truly make sense of the calamity now descending upon humanity, to say nothing of overcoming that calamity.
Always bear the following in mind, first and foremost: From the standpoint of an attempt at a mathematical representation of the issues of animal ecology, the rise of the human population, and the changing demographic characteristics of such populations, sets the human species absolutely apart from, and superior to all other living species. The separation of the higher apes from mankind on this account, is demonstrably absolute, not relative. Mankind is the only living species which is able to willfully increase the characteristic potential relative population-density of its species, not only in part, or by biological evolution, but as a species.[9]
It is this distinguishing characteristic of our species, upon which the notion of economy depends absolutely. All competent definitions of the terms of political-economy, or of the study of economy otherwise, depend absolutely upon the notion of this distinction which is characteristic of our living species.
In first approximation, such ecological studies of individual human behavior, are focussed upon man's increase in physical power in and over nature, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's functionally defined surface-area. This approximation isolates the role of the discovery of validatable universal physical principles, and the related role of the generation of technologies directly from experimental validation of such discoveries; this is the combined form of human action, through which man's power in and over our universe is increased. For simplification of the discussion, let it be understood that, in the remainder of this report, unless otherwise specified here, increase in such per-capita power, signifies net increase of power both per capita and per square kilometer.
This defines an additional paradox. That paradox is sometimes listed under the topical heading of "the role of technological attrition." That is to say, that to maintain an immediate gain in per-capita power, it is essential that new discoveries, and related, axiomatically revolutionary advances in technology, be constantly supplied, that in order to offset the effect of technological attrition. Thus, the nature of the special power of the individual member of the human species, is not defined by the isolated, self-contained act of discovery of any individual universal physical principle; rather, on account of technological attrition, it can mean only a continuing process of generating an endless succession of (axiomatically revolutionary) discoveries of validatable universal physical principles.
This means, that man's power in and over the universe, lies not in individual acts considered individually; but, rather, that power lies, elementarily, in the continuing, developing power of individual persons, to generate, as well as to assimilate, a continuing generation of new such discoveries, a succession of discoveries prompted by the emergence of the new conditions produced as a result of application of previous such discoveries.
It should be stressed here, that, contrary to Paolo Sarpi,[10] Immanuel Kant, and their followers, this distinction between the isolated act of discovery of a principle, and the action of continuing generation of successive such discoveries, has the same epistemological significance as the famous use of the notion of a universal principle of change by Heracleitus and Plato's Parmenides dialogue. This signifies the use of the word action as in the sense of a continuing, generative principle of action.
Lest the reader be misled into suspecting that this distinction between an act and action, might be put aside as an optional idea, the reader should be warned, that all of the most deadly follies associated with the doctrine of "free trade," including the role of "free trade" as a chief cause for the Great Depression of the 1930s and today's global financial and monetary crisis, are among the fruits of overlooking the implications of the elementary point I have just stated.
That is to emphasize, that the function of family-household income and related infrastructural settings, is to define and provide the necessary preconditions for fostering the maintenance of a rate of progress in knowledge and application of discovered universal principles, a rate of progress which is, at least, sufficient to resist the entropic effects of technological attrition.
If the physical and related cultural standard of family-household existence is lowered, through cut-backs in physical market-basket content of labor's consumption, or, if the infrastructure is not maintained, or, some combination of both, then the rate of progress, as considered relative to technological attrition, will suffer. On this account, the use of foreign cheap labor as a substitute for better-paid domestic productive labor, as through out-sourcing, is the cause for the collapse of the productive powers of labor in the importing society, and for a corresponding depletion of the society whose cheap labor is being exploited.
Similarly, if the composition of employment, and of sources of family-household incomes, is shifted to the detriment of emphasizing high ratios of composition of technology-relevant operatives and professionals [Figure 2], then a high income for the other, non-productive, "overhead" and personal services classes of households, as for the case of the upper twenty percent of family-income brackets in U.S.A. today [Figure 3], ensures a functionally decadent economy, one headed in directions akin to the decline and fall of the Latin Roman Empire into its Dark Age [Figure 4].
For similar reasons, as leading U.S. economist Henry Carey emphasized, during the 1850s, the exploitation of slave-labor by a parasitical class of slave-owners, not only contributed nothing to the net income of the pre-1861 U.S.A.; but, as the post-slavery, 1861-1876 U.S. economic miracle illustrates, the product of slave-exploitation actually lowered the net real income of the U.S. economy as a whole.[11] Not only is slave labor a source of net loss to the national economy, but even underpaid labor, tends to become, similarly, a net drain on the economy considered as a whole.
The essential national-economic function of expenditure for maintenance of a standard level of high-quality incomes for family households, and for matching rates of growth of capital investment in technological progress, is to generate the continuing, axiomatically anti-entropic, action of technological change, by means of which the technology-driven productive powers of labor are increased.
Those apologists for "the peculiar institution" of slavery, and for the related bucolic-utopian moral imbecility of the Nashville Agrarians, such as the admirers of Robert Penn Warren and Henry A. Kissinger's Harvard University professor, William Yandell Elliot, are to be compared, as a common social type, with the wastrel slave-holding class of ancient pagan Rome, whose very continued existence and influence ensured the collapse of that putrid slave-empire into a great Dark Age.[12] It is the symbiosis between such bucolic utopians and the parasites of Wall Street financial houses and law firms, which is, functionally, at the root of the presently ongoing threat of doom descending upon the U.S.A. today.
The essential economic role, and necessary form of scientific education, is to be derived from the set of considerations just summarized.
Scientific Education
To produce an adult population capable of sustaining the action of continuing technological progress, requires not merely a certain quantity of education, but a specific quality of education. Those who would base educational policies on standard testing methods, rather than Classical humanist methods, will tend to foster thus the kind of graduate who is well-rehearsed in babbling induced rituals, but whose ability to perform competent discoveries of principle, were more likely ruined, than helped by such mis-education--even to a terminal degree.
The essential principle of competent scientific and pre-scientific education of the young, is that the student must not merely learn a discovered principle and its associated technologies. By Classical humanist methods of education, I signify that the student must relive the reenactment of the discovery of every important earlier, validatable discovery of universal principle by mankind, and must reenact that discovery in a way which corresponds to the original act of discovery by an original, or relatively original historic figure of discovery. This traditionally Classical approach to education of the young, must be accompanied by emphasis upon the appropriate methods of experimental validation of original discoveries of universal physical principle.[13]
This approach to pre-science and scientific education, is aimed to foster in the pupil, the development of the mental habit of generating validatable discoveries. In that way, the student's mind becomes attuned to the action of the continuing generation of both new physical principles, and of the technologies which emerge as by-products of successful designs of experimental validations of such discoveries of universal principle.
This, in turn, requires a quality of family and other relevant social settings, in which the same kind of relationship in sharing ideas, is fostered as an acquired habit of everyday life. In the child and young adolescent, the relationship to sharing ideas which have been generated as a part of experiencing a continuing action of validatable discovery of principle, occurs in the form and guise of play, a form of play akin to a happy child's teaching new games to a happy pet puppy.[14] It is the education of this natural, human quality of playfulness, through applying the play-principle to the pupil's reenactment of validatable original discoveries of principles, which fosters the future emergence of the creative, rational, emotionally mature adult. Morose and sombre pedants and their classroom acolytes, are not likely to be exemplars of creative impulses, or aptitudes.
Let us understand, that creative scientific thinking is never derived from the methods of formal, deductive logic. The methods of Immanuel Kant, for example, typify the personality which is axiomatically uncreative, as Kant was the kind of person who may be clever, even very deviously clever, but never actually truthful in matters of principle.[15] Creative reason is to be found away from the company of empiricists, sophists, and Kantians, in a domain beyond deductive argument, within the domain known, interchangeably, as cognition or reason, as Plato's Socratic dialogues exemplify the non-deductive function named, alternately, cognition or reason.[16]
This act of reason has three leading features. 1) An ontological quality of contradiction--what is termed an ontological paradox; 2) the generation, by an individual mind, of a proposed (e.g., "synthetic") solution for that ontological paradox; 3) an appropriate experimental form of validation of such a proposed solution. These three features are typified by the Socratic method of Plato's dialogues. The examination of the way in which such a three-step discovery by one mind may be shared with another mind, should supply the necessary clarification of meaning to be given to the term cognition.
There are two points in this three-step process of cognition, at which powers of sense-perception permit two minds to share crucial aspects of each successful discovery as a whole. Those two points are, first, the display of the evidence identifying the ontological quality of the relevant paradox, and, second, the experimental demonstration of the proposed principle. Otherwise, the difficulty is, that the faculties of sense-perception are, axiomatically, incapable of showing us directly the act of cognition occurring in another mind. It is only to the degree that two persons have shared the same action of cognition, relative to the initiating ontological paradox, that the two can recognize the nature and significance of the act of cognition to be a solution for the corresponding ontological paradox, as this is shown through the relevant experimental demonstration.
The capacity to infer from those two points of perceptible evidence, that the nature of the connecting, cognitive experience in another's mind, is comparable to the experience in our own, is not obtained from single such experiences. Rather, through a succession of such individual experiences, something similar in effect to the infant's conquest over infantile purblindness occurs. A wide variety of validated cognitive experiences (and, reenactments of original such discoveries), is needed to bring the cognitive powers of insight to the degree of maturity needed to become efficiently conscious of cognitive processes occurring in the mind of others: i.e., recognition.[17]
Again, cognition is a form of action, which can be known as an alternative to mere sense-perception, only as an accumulated experience of numerous changes in one's encounter with the phenomena associated with cognitive discovery. The result is one we often associate with the term insight, signifying cognitive insight. One "sees" how the other mind generated the proposed discovery which solved the identified ontological paradox. Nonetheless, once known in that way, it is known, and that with an increasing, validatable certainty, through a faculty of insight, cognitive insight, which is far more reliable than sense-perception as such. This developed quality of insight, is what we rightly recognize as truthfulness, as Plato's dialogues define truth and justice.
Such cognitive experiences are the acquired skill of every competent teacher of the young. Those who have not acquired that skill, are not competent to teach. The corresponding devotion to a Socratic quality of truthfulness, as opposed to mere opinion, is the moral quality which distinguishes the qualified teacher and classroom, from the dangerously immoral, all too commonplace, contemporary quack.[18] Those who insist, on principle, as Kant and the existentialists did, following the empiricists before them, that there is no truth, but only opinion or custom, are, by self-definition, pathological liars, whose oath itself were intrinsically an act of fraud, and perhaps of treason, too.
Classical Culture
The process of cognition, as I have just, once again, summarily described it, has two interdependent aspects. In first approximation, it pertains to mankind's increased power, per capita, in and over the physical universe: ultimately, the entire universe. Yet, at the same time, it pertains to those social processes, by means of which the development of the individual's physical-scientific powers in and over that universe, are generated by individual persons and shared among other persons within society. These latter social processes define human relations within society, as primarily rooted in cognition, rather than in mere sense-perception or fixed, biologically instinctive or other mind-sets. It is those social processes, defined "axiomatically" in terms of acts of cognitive insight into matters of universal principle, which supply us the only meaningfully defensible, functional definition of the term culture. A scientific education of the type I have described summarily above, typifies the cognitive quality of truthful relations upon which the notion of a Classical culture depends.[19]
In the history of globally extended European civilization, since ancient Classical Greece, the specific significance of Classical Greek culture, is typified by the celebrated examples of a new mode of plastic-arts composition provided by surviving items of the work of the sculptors Scopas and Praxiteles. The transition, from the necrologic quality of the Archaic, to the capture of transformation in mid-motion, presents us clearly today the notion of true ideas, as distinct from sense-perception and mere symbolism. Later examples, include Leonardo da Vinci works such as his The Last Supper, Raphael Sanzio's The School of Athens and Transfiguration, and Rembrandt's celebrated portrait of the blind bust of Homer peering insightfully into the blind, deductive stare of Aristotle. These kinds of artistic ideas, typify, in the domain of art, the same notion of idea associated with the validated discovery of a universal physical principle.
In the Classical Greek legacy, from Homer through Plato, most notably, we are able to trace successive transformations in the ancient Greek way of seeing the relationship of mankind to the mythical gods of Olympus, and also to the snake-god known variously as Python, Dionysus, and Satan, and to Python's Delphic mother, Gaea. Mankind rises from the status of virtual human cattle of the gods, to Aeschylean Promethean man casting off the shackles of the tragically evil and doomed Zeus, to Platonic man seeking reconciliation with the "unknown God" of Plato's Timaeus and the Apostle Paul's epistles. These transformations in human knowledge are congruent within that principled use of that term idea, which we must associate with a validated discovery of a universal physical principle.
Take, as an example, the development of the method of Classical polyphonic composition developed by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et al., built upon the foundations lain by such J.S. Bach discoveries as Bach's A Musical Offering and The Art of the Fugue. In Classical four-part composition, for example, the music is not degraded to mere voice and accompaniment, nor mere instrumental-like chordal textures. Like the very conception of the well-tempered system itself, in Classical, as opposed to Romantic composition, the musical idea lies beyond the reach of mere sense-perception; it lies "between the notes," in the idea generated by the polyphonic interaction among the registrally distinguished, participating human singing-voice species.
So, in great Classical tragedy, from that of Aeschylus and Sophocles, through Shakespeare and Schiller, the tragic principle lies in the failure of the relevant dramatic personality, the failure to discover the idea which defines a means for averting an otherwise inevitable tragedy, or, similarly, in Schiller's Joan of Arc, walking in the imitation of Christ, willfully sacrificing one's mortal life to death, even in torment, for the sake of bringing forth a nation.
All such Classical ideas, such as those of the ancient Classical Greek artists, François Rabelais, Miguel Cervantes, John Keats, Percy Shelley, et al., lie "between the notes" of mere sense-perception, in the domain of cognition otherwise termed metaphor. Universal principles are not properties of sense-perceptual objects; they are the qualities which exist, often, among deductively apparent objects, but not within them. These qualities underlie, and determine both the existence of those objects, and of the functional ordering of the relations among them. These underlying realities, are qualities which the human mind is able to access, but solely by those special forms of social relations known variously as cognition or reason.
The subsuming view of all forms of Classical artistic composition, both plastic and non-plastic, imparts the quality of Classical also to the development and use of language itself, as Panini's celebrated argument points to this for Sanskrit. Dante Alighieri's program for superseding Latin with a Classically-literate, metaphor-rich development of an otherwise crude, popular language, capable of imparting Classical ideas, that from the so-called crude forms of popular speech, points to the principle upon which the existence of the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic depends, upon which the very continued existence of modern economy depends absolutely.[20]
The essential, underlying principle of any literate form of spoken and written language, is the principle of Classical metaphor.
Reason enters when dictionary-nominalist and other deductive-literal and symbolic meanings, are expelled to the anteroom, so that the discussion among thinking people may proceed without the disconcerting noise of pompous fools' babbling.
Dante Alighieri's work is of special relevance at this juncture. With that work borne in the back of the minds of each among us, consider a few examples most pertinent to the matter of systemic definitions of economic principles. The first principle of any literate language, is the principle of Classical strophic, sung poetry. That is to emphasize, that all literate forms of language-usage, are dominated by prosodic coloration, for which neither flat, or nearly flat "greys," nor post-modernist or other forms of merely arbitrary, stylized affectations, are tolerable substitutes. These musical qualities, which are the naturally provided potential, physiologically, of each individual human speaking-singing voice, are an integral and essential part of the ability to employ language to convey ideas, not only to convey meaning to hearing, but, even more crucial, to the cognitive-digestive processes of memory.
Hence, the continuing development of all literate languages, presents us a process of making the use of that language as precise as science requires, and as the influence of Classical forms of biologically predetermined prosody among registral voice-species, shape the evolutionary development of the language, thus, into a medium suited to the emergence of the cognitive precision which scientific education and work requires. Thus, often, what may thus be defined, strictly and properly, as defects in the manner of speaking of a person, will faithfully indicate corresponding flaws in the way in which they think about matters of science, or other matters, such as political-economy.[21]
The pivotal issue, in defining the relative literacy of a practiced form of language-culture, is the issue of Classical qualities of metaphor. It is the recognition of the way in which the natural potentials for development of languages adapt themselves to the requirements for expressing recognizable Classical metaphor, which enables us to define those qualities of used language which render that language capable of meeting the requirements of conveying ideas comparable to those of Classical physical science and Classical artistic composition.
In the history of modern Europe since the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the best general example of this is the evolution of German Classical poetry and song, from the influence of Gottfried Leibniz and J.S. Bach, through the collaboration among Abraham Kästner, Gotthold Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn, the pre-1806 Johann Goethe, and by Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Heine, through the Classical song as first introduced by Wolfgang Mozart,[22] and continued by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms after him.[23] This point is best illustrated for the topic, economics, immediately at hand, by reference to the case of a validated discovery of a universal physical principle.
I refer the reader to the three-phase act of such discovery, as summarized above: ontological paradox, discovery, validation. All Classical metaphor, whether in plastic or non-plastic art, and in the general, literate usages of a language, expresses that same tripartite form. The appearance of such metaphor is most simply defined by reference to the notion of an ordered set of multiply-connected physical-space-time manifolds, as defined by Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation.[24] Although it is not customary, to refer to the role of cognition in scientific discovery of universal principle as an expression of the same principle of Classical metaphor associated with artistic composition, the fact is, that the two sets of events, are epistemologically of the same nature. I have often addressed this in my writings; I summarize the relevant points here.
The essential form of any valid discovery of a universal physical principle, begins, as I have said, as an ontological paradox. This occurs as a manifest error of principle in preexisting scientific opinion. The most typical example of this, is the case in which reality demonstrates not only that preexisting scientific opinion is false to reality, but that this error reflects the lack of recognition of some universal physical principle. In the case in which the error is only of this form, we may say that, although we already know a certain number of assumed universal physical principles to be valid experimentally, there is an additional such principle which we have heretofore overlooked. This poses the challenge: What is that missing principle. If the relevant known principles are n in number, what is the missing principle, n+1? This describes a true, Classical form of ontological paradox, which is of the same, Socratic, characteristics as the function of metaphor in Classical artistic composition.
At that point in the study of an ontological paradox of physical science, the entirely sovereign powers of an individual person's cognition, must now generate the proposed new principle which would correct the error. If experiment shows not only that the proposed new principle solves the paradox, but also shows that the universe as a whole, not merely the particular, paradoxical experience prompting the inquiry, requires the addition of that principle, then we have shown that discovered principle to be truly, uniquely, a universal physical principle. That notion of a unique-experimental characteristic of any true universal physical principle, is the central feature of what are rightly defined as Gauss-Riemann multiply-connected manifolds.
It is the same in Classical poetry. The self-same experience confronts us with a paradox. The name we are accustomed to give to seemingly similar experiences has now been permeated with a double meaning, a contradiction in meaning. Two meanings for that experience now appear, meanings which are in mutual contradiction. What is the resolution of this ironical paradox?
Hamlet poses this to himself: "To be, or not to be . . ." Shall Hamlet continue his customary ways, which pre-assure his self-destruction, or shall he adopt new ways, of which he is fearful. He prefers to destroy himself, rather than risk any new ways, which might threaten his established, habituated sense of actions consistent with his sense of personal identity.
The underlying principle of the flank, in military science, has this same quality: to outflank the adversary, is to outflank his mind. So, presently, clinging to the "Sixty-Eighters' " acquired infatuation with the myth of "post-industrial" utopias, threatens most governments led by "Baby Doomers" with self-destruction, that by virtue of their Hamlet-like, tragic refusal to consider any course of action "but our own." Hamlet's decision to that effect, assures him that doom lurks for both him and the kingdom. So, he delivers the warning of forthcoming doom to Ophelia--whether she is intended to actually hear this, or not: "Get thee to a nunnery."
It is the same in economics. Faced with a crisis, technological progress affords a safe escape. Reject that progress and we are doomed to suffer a great catastrophe. The existing financial-monetary system is doomed? Bring that failed system to an end. Existing policies for globalization and the reign of free trade, doom us; end those policies and choose saner ones instead.
In general, empires have customarily fallen into dust, because those who dominate those cultures have so desperately associated their personal identities with the practices bringing them to the verge of self-doom, that they would, like Zeus' mythical Olympus, in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, rather destroy themselves and the universe, too, than abandon their habituated, fatal mind-set, their habituated sense of social, cultural identity. In precisely that same sense, the institutions which have imposed the policy-changes adopted during the recent thirty-odd years, the anti-Franklin Roosevelt policies imposed during the course of the decades following the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, would rather destroy the world, and themselves with it, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers seems wont to do, rather than abandon the erroneous habits and mind-set which have now brought them to the brink of doom.
Such propensities for tragedy, infect not only the wills of the ruling oligarchies. The legendary pagan-Roman cult of the predators, vox populi, has seized and possesses, tragically, the sense of personal identity of most of today's human cattle, the subject population--both voting and non-voting--in general.[25] Today's typical U.S. citizen locates his or her sense of personal identity, not in who and what she or he actually is, but in what each imagines the currently resident Satan of the local neighborhood, whose voice is "popular opinion" (vox populi), might tell them they must appear to be.
Thus, since the typical individual in today's sick society finds his or her sense of personal identity in the virtual-reality mirror of (largely popular-entertainments-orchestrated) mass popular opinion, rather than in the reality of society's relationship to both itself and the physical universe, the typical citizen of today is, in this degree, more often a pathology-afflicted, rage-brimming mental case, than a truly rationally human being.
This extremely popular form of today's mental illness, is not composed merely of isolable individual points of popular opinion. The presently prevailing mental illness, is predominantly pervasive, axiomatic, systemic in character. The mind of the typical individual, in the corridors of power, or in the cattle-pens where the television-addicts are gathered for spectator-sports and other entertainment, is a person whose body dwells, and dies, in the real, physical world, but whose mind dwells in the escapist fantasy-world of virtual reality, chiefly the fantasy-world known as popular opinion. They would rather be popular in Hell, than happy in Heaven, if living in Heaven means being libelled or snickered at, today, by passing spectators on the streets of Hell.
Thus, the mass of today's population presents us a spectacle akin to that of a mass of sleepers, each and all dwelling in a nightmarish fantasy, their dream world, that dream-world the virtual-reality nightmare world, of current popular opinion. To save the victims of such a state of affairs, it were necessary, first of all, that they be reawakened. The shock needed to awaken them, is in the process of being delivered: a general crash, of one currently probable form or another, of the existing global financial and monetary system. That needed blessing, that shock, they are about to receive.
In such an awakening, the hope is, that the human individual's inherent, inborn capacity for cognition will enable most of the people to readjust quickly to reality, abandoning that popular opinion which has so viciously misled and betrayed them. That happy change happened to the victims of the Coolidge era, when Franklin Roosevelt became President. The added problem is, that, unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the needed quality of leadership will be presented to the people. It did not happen in Germany, because the leading bankers of London and Wall Street--including Governor George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott, decided to put Hitler into power in Germany, instead of allowing Kurt von Schleicher to continue as Chancellor.
The combination of the leadership provided by Franklin Roosevelt and that exposure of Wall Street by the Senate Committee which was represented by Pecora, typify the way in which the U.S. population not only escaped the fascist coup which Wall Street had planned, but also was led into the New Deal decade of not only economic recovery, but also a large degree of recovery from the insanity of the Coolidge 1920s. We must hope that that happy turn would be the result of that presently onrushing global financial-monetary collapse now in progress.
To sum up what has been said here so far: In most of known history, potentially doomed cultures are rescued only when two preconditions are satisfied. First, there must be a terrible, sudden shock, which terrifies the majority of the population into fleeing from those mind-sets which had been the mainstream of popular opinion, up to that shattering moment of onrushing, pent-up reality. Second, there must be constructive leadership, which leads the population, or at least much of it, into abandoning the corrupt habits of popular opinion-making which had led them, step by step, up to the moment of threatened self-destruction.
Thus, the crucial need, during those moments of deepest crisis such as that, is, first, to define both the currently popular insanity which must be rejected, and, second, to appeal to the cognitive powers of a leading layer among the population in general: to appeal to them to adopt a suitable new mind-set, replacing, quickly, previously popular beliefs, with sane ones. Such is the crucial strategic importance of the points, respecting cognition and Classical culture, which I have summarized here, up to this point. What remains to be done in this report, is as follows. It is essential that we clarify the nature of the popular insanity, including wild-eyed lunacy in the matter of economics, which has, excepting a few notables, gripped both our government, and most of our popular opinion, during the recent thirty-odd years.
2. Price Fantasies Versus Physical Reality
Every competent discussion of what is termed "economics" today, must begin with agreement as to the nature of the specific aspect of that subject-matter being discussed. Unfortunately, most university courses and popular discussion of this matter, proceed from a most remarkable ignorance of precisely this elementary prerequisite.
The incompetence predominating in those circles, is not merely a matter of technical shortcomings, or even, as in the case of Professor Milton Friedman's circles, outright frauds; the majority of today's stoutly held beliefs in economics and related matters, are insane in the strictest, functional sense of that term. To define the nature of the prevalent insanities, one must first define, at least summarily, what is both technically competent and personally sane.
Here, we are confronted by two overlapping issues. First, that presently generally accepted, entirely incompetent beliefs concerning economics, dominate both the government and the majority of the academically trained members of the economic profession. This occurs at a time when the existing global economic system is in the process of disintegrating of its own accord. Second, that the immorality associated with those beliefs, is an error which must be overcome, even removed, as a precondition for any possible economic recovery. Thus, what might otherwise be seen as currently popular morality, is actually currently prevailing popular immorality concerning economic issues. This is especially the case with that immorality presently prevailing in government and, also, most emphatically, among the upper twenty percentile of family-income brackets. This immorality must be radically changed, or, better, removed. The presently prevailing, academically preferred, actually insane beliefs respecting economy, must be replaced quickly by the authority of sane ones.
To that end, I proceed now, first to some fundamentals concerning the required definitions of economics in general.
Any functionally relevant use of the term "economics," must begin with respect for the historical specificity of the concrete topical area to which this term is being applied. For example, the use of the term "economics" in a universal way, referencing inclusively so-called prehistoric expressions of human activity, as well as the species observable during so-called historical times, requires resort to the branch of physical science founded, and initially developed (1671-1716) by the great universal genius Gottfried Leibniz, the science of physical economy. In no way, can any other version of economic science be treated as universally applicable.
Otherwise, apart from the universal values addressed, uniquely, by the science of physical economy, in each other case, we are speaking of an inferior topic. In such cases, we are addressing what is, relatively, merely a subsumed family of types, each and all such types bearing the name of either social systems, or political economy. Each such use of the term "economics," must refer implicitly to a specific historical setting, such as, for example, the form of modern European national economy begun in the France of Louis XI. Within such a specific historic setting, and, within that category, such as European national economy, for example, we must address the specific class of social system associated with the type of national economy under immediate scrutiny.
Thus, for example, every effort to build up a theory of economy in general from the "ivory tower" starting-point of "a Robinson Crusoe model," suffices to prove that the author of such an undertaking, like "systems analysis" founder John von Neumann, either bears the mark of an outrightly malicious faker, as von Neumann was, or, if innocent of malicious intent, is simply a hopelessly illiterate slob in the subject-matter of economics, and also in the matter of scientific method in general.
To situate the development of the extended European forms of modern economy into the period of the past 145 years or so (since the global impact of the U.S. victory in the 1865-1876 aftermath of its 1861-1865 Civil War), the following general observations on the matter of historical specificity introduce this discussion of the globally hegemonic forms of contemporary political-economy as such. Begin that discussion of historical specificity, by situating the proper meaning of the term "modern history."
Currently prevalent convention has divided the periods of the existence of mankind, between what is called history, and what is usually termed pre-history. Currently popular-academic (and ideologically long over-ripe) English-speaking convention, dates the beginning of history to approximately the time, about 6,000 years ago, that a highly developed maritime culture of people, speaking, and writing in a language of the Dravidian group, established colonies in lower Mesopotamia, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Canaanite Palestine-Lebanon.[26] With the decline and fall of the culture established, as Sumer, by the Dravidian-speaking maritime culture, the local, relatively primitive Semites of that region, who had been previously colonized and assimilated by that maritime culture, began the long reign of successive ebbs and rises of that culture in Mesopotamia.[27]
Thus, since before what bigotted modern convention persists in misidentifying as the beginning of history, there emerged an intersection and collision between the Middle East successors to the relevant Dravidian maritime culture and the culture of Egypt. Out of that intersection and culture, what came to be known as today's globally extended European civilization, emerged in what has come to be known as ancient Greece.
The ancient Greeks, as we term them today, were also chiefly the products of a maritime culture, one whose roots are traced to origins including an Atlantic oceanic maritime culture flowing into the ancient Mediterranean, perhaps since as early as during the most recent post-glaciation melt, to a time more than 10,000 years ago. Ancient Greek culture, as it is designated today, would not have amounted to a proverbial "hill of beans" in the long run, but for the development of what has come to be known as a Classical Greek culture, as represented by Athens, the Ionian city-state republics, the Greek colonies in lower Italy, and ancient Cyrenaica. These ancient Greeks, whose principal cultural debt was, otherwise, to a culture they adopted from the legacy of the Golden Age of Egypt,[28] went a qualitative step beyond their Egyptian patrons, to establish the kernel of what became today's globally extended European civilization.[29]
Out of those developments in ancient Greece we associate the Classical tradition of Pythagoras, Thales, Solon, the Golden Age of Athens, and Plato's Academy. The most significant feature of that Classical Greek legacy, is the developed conception of the idea, a conception best defined by the Socratic dialogues of Plato. It was from the further development of that Platonic legacy by the Christian Apostles, as it is most clearly articulated in the Gospel of St. John and the Epistles of St. Paul, that the best features of the past 2,000 years of now globally extended European civilization were spread.
From that point of historical reference, now so placed behind us, we focus here on three leading points which have axiomatic authority in any competent discussion of the principles, practice, and issues of modern economy today. We begin as all competent political-economy must, from the archetypical standpoint of the universal science of physical economy.
In the following pages, I focus upon the dominant economy of the world today, that internally conflicted form of world economy which developed within today's globally extended modern European civilization, that conflict which emerged since the revolution which erupted during the Fifteenth-Century Italy-centered Renaissance. That latter is the Christian Renaissance of the Classical Greek tradition, the Renaissance which marks the beginning of modern, globally extended European civilization, and, thus, provided the watershed for the formation of all forms of globally significant, mutually conflicting varieties of modern economy.
Three Crucial Points: Leibniz Revisited
I emphasize the several crucial points which I stated earlier in this report. These points denote the domain of universal economy, otherwise known as physical economy. In the course of outlining that case, I reformulate several among the crucial points introduced at the outset of the preceding section.
First, from the standpoint of any effort to construct a mathematical model of human ecology, the existence of the human species represents a fundamental ontological paradox within the schemes of currently, academically popularized notion of ecology itself. This is the paradox which sets our human species, universally, apart from and above all other living species. Mankind is the only species which is able to increase the potential relative population-density of its entire species willfully. This demographic result is measurable, in purely physical, non-monetary terms, per capita and per square kilometer.
In other words, just as the existence of living processes defines, paradoxically, the need to recognize the existence of an axiomatic quality of universal physical principle, one not found within the domain of functions inhering in non-living species, so human existence defines the existence of an efficiently universal physical principle, one not to be found otherwise among living processes.[30] The result is, that "animal ecology" were valid only as an approximation (a subsumed phase-space) of the corrected, higher form of a truly universal ecology, the universal ecology which includes the specific qualities of human ecology, the latter as distinct from the relatively impoverished, inferior axiomatic assumptions of merely animal ecology.
Second, this willful power unique to the human species, is expressed, in first approximation, by the action of adding, successively, validated discoveries (or, rediscoveries) of an axiomatic quality of universal physical principles. The expression of those validations in the form of derived new technologies, enables the qualitative, as well as simply quantitative increase of the power of the human species in and over the universe as a whole. This is expressed as the increase of the human species' per-capita power (Leibniz: Kraft, not Leistung) over nature. Hence, also mankind's increase in per-capita power over the universe, as measured per square kilometer of the Earth's surface.
The continuation of Leibniz's principles of physical science, by his anti-empiricist, anti-Kantian followers, such as Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann, led to the elaboration of the Gauss-Riemann notion of an ordered series of multiply-connected physical manifolds (i.e., Riemannian relativistic physics), in which the ivory-tower notion of a so-called a priori Euclidean manifold, is replaced by the principle, that there exist no valid universal physical principles in the universe, except those which are generated by aid of physical-experimental validation of a new discovery of an added (axiomatic) quality of universal physical principle.[31] This, thus expandable, multiply-connected array of such principles, situates the universal principle of change governing mankind's willful increase of his per-capita power in and over the universe.[32] These axiomatic relations can be represented only in terms of Riemann's specification for an orderable series of multiply-connected manifolds.
However, the realization of this potential increase in per-capita power, depends upon cooperation within society. This brings us to the third point, as summarized earlier here.
Third, the primary expression of forms of cooperation relevant to realization of the benefits of scientific and technological progress, is located in the domain of cognition, as I have defined cognition here earlier: not in the realm of merely deductive forms of communication. In other words, to communicate the discovery of a valid universal physical principle, from one person to another, the relevant act of cognitive insight must occur within the cognitive processes of the recipient. Communication of real ideas by deductive means, is impossible on principle. Hereinafter, this use of the term cognition, supplies the definition of the term reason, as distinct from mere logic.
This third point signifies, that a society efficiently realizing the social benefits of scientific and technological progress, can only be a society in which there is widespread and increasing emphasis on the cognitive element in social relations, as contrasted to a culturally inferior society, which, for example, teaches science according to the deductive-reductionist terms akin to the methods of a merely formalist mathematical physics. This means that equal emphasis must be placed on Classical forms of art and education, in the sense of the Classical Greek (Platonic) tradition. This must include the emphasis on such Classics in scientific education, in artistic composition, and also in preferred forms of publicly practiced entertainments.
Otherwise, a society may have significant scientific cadres, even of high quality; but, if the prevailing cultural standard within the society as a whole, is predominantly an expression of the hegemony of a reductionist-deductive popular ideology, such as empiricism or existentialism, the society's development will be technologically abortive, respecting the general net rate of its increase of the average productive powers of labor.
As I have stressed above, since the forms of communication required for execution of such insight, require mastery of what I have defined as Platonic forms of ontological paradox, otherwise called metaphor, the possibility of communicating the discovery of universal physical principles efficiently, depends upon a correlated form of development of the social relations among individuals, specifically their cognitive processes as such. This education requires the individual person's discovery of cognitive insight into these specific processes. In other words, insight into the act of cognition conscious of itself.
Self-conscious cognition, "cognition acting with consciousness of itself," does not differ from a Platonic notion of principles of Classical artistic composition. This means not only the principles of Classical plastic and non-plastic artistic composition. It means the shaping of the use of language into the only form which is a truly literate one, contrary to the corrupting, virtually decorticating influence of empiricism. This must be a development and use of language, contrary to empiricism and other reductionists' schemes. It thus reflects the users' shared experience in the development and use of Classical artistic principles of metaphor, as much as universal physical principles. It also means the application of those same principles to the domain of statecraft as such.
As the Socratic dialogues of Plato are exercises in the successful development of individual scientific principles, through cognition, so the principles of Classical artistic composition are developed in the same cognitive mode.
Look at the relevant physical-economic application of a new discovery of a valid universal physical principle, as providing an example of what is to be recognized as the meaning of "cognition acting out of consciousness of itself." The following discussion is directed to that point.
The paradoxes which lead to widespread qualitative improvements in knowledge and practice, are principally of two types. In the first instance, there are paradoxes which reveal a plain error in some conscious or implied choice of axiom. In the second case, we have the type of ontological paradox repeatedly referenced above: the case in which the error is attributable, not to a falsely adopted axiom, but to the absence of knowledge of some axiomatic quality of valid universal principle.
In all cases, the relevant paradoxes, of either type, are defined as such in an experimental way. By experiment, one means human physical action upon the universe. All verification of these paradoxes, and of the principles which overcome them, relies upon the relevant physical form of experimental action. Thus, for example, as Gauss and Riemann have demonstrated, in succession, it is not sufficient to demonstrate an apparent choice of principle; it is necessary to design and conduct an experiment which seeks to determine whether or not the proposed principle is universally necessary, necessary to all competent forms of physical science, for example.[33]
We are not ignoring the issue of purely formal consistency, such as that which might be displayed on the classroom blackboard. If the error of inconsistency demonstrated, is not a correctable error of a deductive-inductive form as such, then it must tend to suggest the relevant involvement of some erroneous assumption of universal principle, or, of a related lack of some axiomatic principle which we need to discover. All latter such errors are resolved, not at the ivory-tower pedant's blackboard, but by relevant methods of physical experiment. Test of consistency may be an invaluable, but, otherwise, merely auxiliary part of this process.
Thus, all issues of principle, whether in physical science, or otherwise, arise from, and are resolved by, those types of physical action through which the human species increases its potential relative population-density. In other words, in which an individual mind has contributed a valid, axiomatic principle, which, if socialized effectively, has the effect of increasing the potential relative population-density of our species as a whole. Thus, all such action, and the principles whose discovery relies upon such action, represents a quality of mental practice lying outside the domain of any merely deductive system of thought.
Such actions are, by their nature, intrinsically non-linear: not as "non-linear" is misdefined by such acolytes of Bertrand Russell as John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, for example, but, rather, in the larger, higher sense of transfinite, as implicitly defined by the notion of a Gauss-Riemann series of multiply-connected manifolds. I.e., as associated with the changes in approximately measurable curvature, reflecting the ever-ongoing transition from one such physical-space-time manifold to a successor.[34] Since the true value of this measurable magnitude, depends upon a further extension of the still-ongoing process of change within which it appears, it is not a number as such, even though its value may be approximated by a number--it may adumbrate a number usable for some practical purposes of estimation; but, that is an aspect of the matter which need not be explored further in this present location.
For reasons previously stated here, the only form of human action which is universal, is that which expresses mankind's increase of its species' power in and over the universe as a whole. Only in such ways, can we define truthfulness. That is to say, that truth means, essentially, that set of axiomatic principles, defined as universal, which represent mankind's physical-experimental determination of the discovery of universal physical (and other) principles of an axiomatic quality. Granting that our knowledge of universal such principles is always incomplete (e.g., imperfect), statements which are in accord with all presently known universal (axiomatic) principles are rightly deemed truthful in practice. We are untruthful, only when, either, we violate arbitrarily, available, previously known, valid principles, or when we, in clinging to already adopted principles, attempt to conceal, or simply ignore evidence at hand which shows that we are obliged to seek out an additional universal principle.[35]
Persons--and social institutions--which govern the making and application of their policies according to this rule, are to be deemed truthful, at their worst. Those who do not heed that rule, are to be despised, or to be considered as insane, as the present policies of the Scalia-led majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are to be regarded as axiomatically untruthful, and the current economic and related policies of the U.S. government in general, as not merely negligent, and also untruthful, but also even clinically insane.
We must therefore say, also, that truthfulness is never static, passive, but always active. It is not only mission-oriented; it exists only as truthfulness is impelled and governed by the impulsion of an adopted, relevant mission. The general form of that mission, is what we rightly term progress, as, specifically, progress in the general welfare of all of the people and their posterity.
To summarize the crucial points listed thus far, we have the following.
The discovery of valid new universal physical principles expresses, if but in first approximation, the specific quality of the human species' individual member, the which sets us apart from, and above all other living species. This activity, which thus incorporates scientific and technological progress, defines a healthy human nature as an efficient commitment to scientific and technological progress for the advancement of the potential relative population-density of the human species as a whole. Any person or society which rejects or resists that form of mission-orientation toward constant fostering of scientific and technological progress, is therefore a person, or a society, which is acting in defiance of human nature, in defiance of the nature and vital interest of the human species. Such as the disciples of empiricists Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, John Locke, François Quesnay,[36] David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Utilitarians, are, by definition, not only functionally insane, but also axiomatically immoral.
However, as already emphasized, that expresses the relevant principle only in first approximation. Since the realization of the indicated imperative, requires what I have indicated as the premising of social relations upon cognition, rather than sense-perception as such, the possibility of realizing scientific and technological progress, depends upon coordinate progress in the discovery and general use of principles expressed as principles of Classical artistic composition. (This signifies, once more, the included extension of those latter principles to the development of language and statecraft.)
In other words, to adduce a principle generated by the sovereign cognitive processes of the mind of another person, one must not only re-experience that generation in one's own sovereign cognitive processes. One must be conscious of the quality of ideas one is re-experiencing, as ideas in the sense of Plato, rather than simple reflections of sense-perception. To be conscious of such ideas, is to be conscious of the fact that the nature of the human individual, and human species, is defined by both cognition, and the mission which inheres in the nature of cognition. Thus, the essence of the matter, is a mission to act in accord with cognition self-conscious of itself. This is the essence of human nature. That sense of mission is reflected in individuals' practice, as living according to a choice of vocation so selected.
Yet, once again, none of this involves the "ivory tower" philosophizing which is inherent to the sundry reductionists, such as the primitive materialists, deductive formalists, empiricists, Kantians, existentialists, et al. The echoes of simple sense-perception, which define the meaning of objects of thought for all varieties of the reductionists, the notion of static objects floating in otherwise "empty" linearized space and time, are to be rejected. The objects of ideas are not the reductionists' objects; ideas correspond only to transformations in the state of man's actions upon the universe. There are no static ideas; all ideas are of the ontological form of "becoming," of "change," in the sense that "change" (in the sense of "becoming") is the elementary form of existence for Plato.[37]
Such ideas can not exist apart from their natural habitat; that habitat is the ongoing mission of constant, effective change in mankind's power in and over nature.
Just so in competent and sane economics. So-called "traditional societies" are, by their intrinsic nature, a state of bestialized mankind; such cultures are not merely immoral, but cruelly so, that by definition. Indeed, the famous Code of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, which became a standard for the worst among the European feudal oligarchies, prescribes the enforcement of such a bestialized tradition, from one generation of a family to the next. The notion of a "traditional" form of economy, is specifically characteristic only of societies in which a ruling oligarchy and its associated lackeys degrade the majority of society to the status of virtual human cattle, that in precisely the spirit of the Code of Diocletian.
Every competent form of modern economics teaching, even those which are but approximately competent, recognize the significance of the phenomenon of what I have referenced earlier here, as "technological attrition." If we impose the notion of "traditional economy" upon those treated as virtual human cattle, that society is self-doomed on that account alone, on account of technological attrition. When we rise to a higher level of technology of practice, technological attrition requires us to proceed to rise to a still higher-level; we are, again, and again, required to do that, by the factor of technological attrition.
Thus, we have two ways of looking at the same conception. First, human nature requires that we think in cognitive terms about man's place within the universe, as the succession of discoveries of universal physical principle, defines individual man's natural place in the universe. Second, we must recognize that man's relationship to nature, is not ordered through the mechanisms of mere sense-perception (e.g., pleasure and pain); individual man's relationship to the universe is through social processes which are elementarily cognitive, rather than merely sensory.
Thus, it is the adducible principles which govern our consciousness of our cognitive relationship to the ideas existing only within the perfectly sovereign cognitive processes of another person, which are the means by which we are able to cooperate in effecting those expressions of endless fundamental scientific and technological progress, the which are the characteristic of a moral human nature. In other words, the ability to muster the development of one's cognitive powers in ways which lead to individual contributions to generalized scientific and technological progress, is necessarily subsumed by a still higher principle, the principle of self-consciously cognitive relations among the individually sovereign cognitive powers of the individual members of society. Thus, the cognitively discoverable, universal principles of Classical artistic composition, not merely parallel, but directly subsume valid scientific discovery.
The Classical English poets, Percy Shelley, of A Defence of Poetry, and John Keats, of Ode To A Grecian Urn, would nod in agreement to what I have just said. So would Friedrich Schiller. Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth. Beauty is true metaphor realized. Beauty and truth are mankind's acting truly in accord with our special nature. Poets--true Classical poets in the Classical Greek tradition--are, indeed, the true legislators of mankind's progress.
3. What Drove Al Gore Mad?
On performance, Al Gore has been the worst U.S. Vice-President since Aaron Burr, the latter the treasonous asset of the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham.[38] Almost certainly, unless something very unexpected intervenes, the intrinsically unelectable Al Gore will become neither the next U.S. President, nor, hopefully, even at this late date, the Democratic Party's nominee as Presidential candidate. It must be said, however, that an electorate which would reduce its apparent choices of leading candidates for President to a man as aberrant as Gore, or as Nero-like as the notoriously mean-spirited Governor George W. Bush,[39] is a people which, by and large, has presently misplaced its moral fitness to outlive the global financial, monetary, and economic collapse now descending upon mankind as a whole.
As the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has stressed, in presenting The Message of Fatima,[40] the fate of cultures is not predetermined by prophecies, but by critical choices, choice of the ways in which decisions of a systemic, existential quality are made. In threatening to reduce their own choices for the next U.S. President to either electing, or tolerating an Al Gore or a Governor Bush, it is the current majority of the people of the U.S.A. themselves, who have, so far, threatened to bring the most awesome kind of catastrophe upon themselves. That is to say, that the way in which prevailing popular opinion presently tends to guide U.S. behavior, is the mark of a people which, in general, appears to have, for the moment, lost the moral fitness to survive.
Were either Bush or, the less likely Gore to become the next President, it is virtually assured that the U.S., as a functioning nation, would not survive the relatively short-term time of peril immediately ahead.[41] Indeed, already, more and more nations from around the world, have been recently distancing themselves from the U.S.A., that in the manner of passengers paddling away, with increasing displays of energy in doing this, from this new, sinking, doomed Titanic. For this reaction from most of the rest of the world outside the U.S.A., the spectacles produced by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and the far-right Republican cabal in the Congress, are much to blame; but, it is the disgusting prospect of a future U.S.A. under a President Bush or Gore, or a United Kingdom under the continued ministry of British Commonwealth leaders such as Gore's crony, the Benito Mussolini-like Tony Blair, which the world at large finds, increasingly, most fearfully appalling.[42]
It must be said, therefore, that there could be no more suitable measure of the difference between sanity and insanity, than the difference between the culture of a people capable of choosing to survive, and the alternative. Clearly, if Bush or Gore is chosen, the popular majority of the people of the U.S. will have shown themselves lacking the moral fitness to survive, will have avowed themselves as, collectively, functionally insane--at least for the present time. They can, and might survive; but that depends on whether or not enough among you, the readers, will help me lead our people back to sanity in their thinking about economic matters.
With individuals, as with entire cultures, it is often the case, that the moral defects of the person have been acquired by choice. Observation of Vice-President Gore, in that office, and other activities, does not suggest that his obvious, many, and disgusting, personal mental and moral defects, are either biologically predetermined, or chemically induced. Whether by induced parental and other influences, or otherwise, his manifestly stubborn stupidity, his boundless cupidity, his sheer meanness of spirit, and the beastly quality of his feral propensities, are qualities of a type one acquires by choice. Something similar must be said of the observable moral and intellectual deterioration which is to be readily observed as in progress among those citizens who have chosen to hitch themselves to the cause of such a candidate as either Gore or Governor Bush.
To what degree, and in what ways, do the U.S. people, in general, find in themselves the desire to be represented by such tyrannically inclined, murderous thugs, such manifestly racist, half-witted degenerates, as a Bush or Gore? Among those who support, or who even merely tolerate the candidacies of such wretched public figures, there are obvious, but also obviously differing motives for, and expressions of their common folly.
Look first, at the patterns which tend to explain how such a depraved state of public morality came into its present influence upon our nation's political life. Then, that said, focus upon the internal mechanisms of the new kind of general insanity about economics which has taken hold in the U.S. during the course of the recent thirty-odd years, especially during the recent quarter-century, since the unfortunate election of President Jimmy Carter.
Public Morals: Then and Now
If only in first approximation, the reason for such depravity among the public, parallels the documentation supplied by Justice Pecora. The notable financial houses and law firms of Wall Street, then and now, display a peculiar sort of professed perception of morality, a perception which were fairly compared to a search for good taste conducted among a tribe of fratricidal cannibals. If anything, the present specimens are generally more depraved than even their predecessors of the Coolidge era.
More remarkable is the depravity pervading most of the upper twenty percentile of U.S. family-income brackets. One might speak of them most gently, as of persons with a certain impediment which might prevent them from getting, like a camel, through "the eye of a needle." In that stratum, which presently dominates both the leading circles of political parties, and the recent elections, we find frequently, especially among those under fifty-five years of age, a quality of general depravity which is truly comparable to that of ancient Sodom and Gomorrah.
Among the lower eighty percentile of family-income brackets, there is, admittedly, a shocking incidence of those about as immoral as has become commonplace among the upper twenty percentile; but, the general problem of the increasingly poor is of a somewhat different political character, reflecting somewhat different economic circumstances [Figure 3]. Moreover, morally and otherwise, the composition of the lower eighty percentile is variously stratified.
Overall, especially since Wall Street's mid-1960s launching of the U.S. Republican Party's opportunistic "Southern Strategy," we might be rightly reminded, more and more, of the conditions of life under what die-hard Confederates used to praise as their "peculiar institution." The Republican alliance between Wall Street and the Confederate legacy, abetted by the electoral strategy of Vice-President Gore's Democratic Party allies, has corrupted the nation, its courts, and its law-making, with an ominous, virtually treasonous regression toward the view of the majority as virtually human cattle, the view which was characteristic of feudalism, and is characteristic still of our republic's ancient enemy, the British monarchy. Thus, as a result of the recent decades' shift from commitment to civil rights, toward a view of the majority as human cattle, we have the following.
At the top of today's social heap, there are those who consider themselves members of a privileged oligarchy. Under that financier oligarchy and its attached law firms, there is a hierarchy of various ranks of oligarchical lackeys.[43] So, the pecking-order goes, stratum by stratum, down to the general rank and file of all of those considered virtually as human cattle, all the way down to the employed "field slaves," and, below them, the virtual outcasts. The latter are typified by convicts, who might have committed no relevant crime, but are nonetheless condemned, by aid of racial discrimination, to slave-labor in prison systems, or to similarly menial forms of existence out of prison. There is, also, presently among us, a general stratum of persons, totalling about 10% of the U.S. population, condemned to those Third World-like conditions in which the general life-expectancy has been depressed to Third World levels of fifty-odd years.
Thus, today's division of the population between those in the upper twenty percentile and the lower eighty, is a result of a quarter-century of economic, social, cultural, moral, and political degeneration of the U.S. society as a whole, a degeneration which has been accelerating since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and, more emphatically since the 1977 inauguration of David Rockefeller's lackey, President Jimmy Carter [Figure 3]. The most rapid rate of general economic and moral decline, since Carter, has been experienced under policies introduced during the 1987-1991 period, the first years under Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's term in office.[44]
Over the course of the recent thirty-odd years, especially since the ruinous effects of the 1977-1981 Carter Administration, the population in general has settled into a habit of learning to adjust, with increasing submissiveness, with increasing political passivity, we might say even lethargy, to the perceived reality of ongoing economic, social, and political policy-shaping trends in government, Wall Street, and the Wall Street crowd's BAC-controlled major mass media. The pervasive immorality among family households occupying the lower ranks of the economy, is the immorality of "I must go along to get along," the perennial policy of those who prefer to live lives as tolerated serfs, rather than free men and women.
This tendency to salute and submit, like dutiful serfs, to whatever might be perceived as ongoing, established trends beyond one's power to change, converges upon the quality of a traditional society, as that might be inferred from the Code of the Emperor Diocletian. The result, is a manifest tendency for each distinguishable branch and stratum of the population, to attempt not only to learn to fit into its destined place, but, to attempt to survive while doing so. This is reflected in the lowered level of participation in elections, among the lower eighty percentile of family-income brackets. It is shown, even more clearly, in the willingness of even those who do vote, to be left flatly unrepresented in the internal affairs of the Democratic Party.
Wall Street and its lackeys from among the upper twenty percentile of family-income brackets (the "middle," or "Third Way," of pandering to the caprices of the "suburban" voters' blocs), dominate both leading party's machines, and the elections. Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party base, and the FDR legacy, have been virtually squeezed out of the controlling interests in what had once been his Democratic Party.
Thus, it is typical of today's increasingly racist Democratic Party leadership, that it was the Gore core of the Democratic Party machine which acted to bring about, and enforce, a 1999 nullification of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a Democratic Party leadership which customarily condones and even participates in blatantly racist discrimination against what are usually classed as African-Americans, and the explicitly racist role of Jack Keeney's Criminal Division of the Justice Department, in false and malicious prosecution of elected African-American officials. Naturally, the Gore faction of the Democratic Party machine resorted to the son of that same Jack Keeney, to initiate the recently effected virtual obliteration of all of the gains of the Civil Rights cause dating from the 1960s.
What I have just described as the moral degeneration of what is wryly, and widely called "democracy" today, is relatively new, a phenomenon of the recent quarter-century. However, the susceptibility, among our people, for such acclimation to imposed depravity, was already evident to me from studying the behavior of the U.S. population, at close quarters, during my childhood and adolescence, during the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was a phenomenon which was embedded, conspicuously, in "popular culture" during the period from the 1901 assassination of President McKinley, through the pre-crash 1920s, a trend which was carried over from the parental households to the children into the 1930s, and into the 1940s. The rise of philosophical pragmatism, as typified by the influences of Harvard's William James and John Dewey, and the popularization of the childish "frontier" mythologies of Frederick Jackson Turner,[45] is a notable correlative of the kind of corrosive moral degeneracy which took over more and more of the formation of so-called popular opinion, during the course of the 1901-1929 interval.
Then, such moral decay was usually referred to simply as "popular opinion." It was merely consistent with the fostering of Walter Lippmann's apology for the pagan Roman cult of popular opinion (vox populi),[46] that "popular" had already become, increasingly, a substitute for morality during the 1920s. Being a "popular" person, cautiously conditioning oneself to prefer "popular" fads, such as "popular music," and so on, became typical of the trend toward moral degeneracy, then, and during the so-called "McCarthyism" period, later.
Typical was the role assigned to the high school or college cheer-leaders, sports figures, and public entertainers, whose function was to aid in determining which current fads and persons were to be generally acknowledged as being currently "popular" ones: which or who was to be admired, and which or who were to be deplored. There really was very little rationality in the matter of currently preferred tastes; it simply was whatever currently operating caprices decided.
Those abominably serf-like characteristics of the population under the "Teddy" Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Coolidge Presidencies, were pushed somewhat into the background, by the combined effects of the 1929-1934 period of the Great Depression, and the Franklin Roosevelt Presidency. Two features of this healthful shift in direction must be considered most urgently. First, was the sudden discrediting of pro-Wall Street outlooks, caused by the successive shocks of the 1929-1933 financial crises. Second, was the contrasting introduction of an element of renewed, typically American cultural optimism, engendered by Franklin Roosevelt and his incumbency. Thus, for as long as Roosevelt remained President, there was a prevailing net upturn in public optimism and morality. The reaction to the shock of the Pearl Harbor bombing, is a notable point of inflection to be studied in this pattern of rise of cultural optimism.
Then, beginning with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a long, recently accelerating, slide down, set in, back toward the cultural pessimism which had preceded Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 election-campaign.
For me, as for most others I knew in overseas war-time service, the depressing effect of the Truman succession, was more or less immediate, and it accelerated. I remained, personally, among the few who continued to be culturally optimistic; it is fair to say, that about ninety-odd percent of those with whom I had shared that kind of cultural optimism, prior to Roosevelt's death, soon lost it, at least in a large degree. The eruption of "McCarthyism," under President Truman, from mid-1945 on, especially with the Congressional election of 1946, was not a product of Senator Joe McCarthy; it was a product of the Harry S Truman Administration. Truman's reversal of Roosevelt's intention, to end the war by ridding the world immediately of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French colonialism, and Truman's unleashing of the militarily unnecessary, contraindicated nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were crucial initial elements in fostering the post-war resurgence of cultural pessimism.
Among my generation, and some of their children, some of the optimism of the Franklin Roosevelt war years, was revived under President John F. Kennedy. Then, the shock effect of the 1962 missiles crisis, and, more profoundly, the assassination of President Kennedy, brought out the worst among a large ration of my generation's offspring, the "Baby Boomers." The prolonged war in Indo-China, and the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., accelerated the moral decay, especially among that stratum of relatively more privileged suburbanite "Baby Boomers" in universities during the mid- to late-1960s, and beyond.
The sudden, deep cuts in the Kennedy space-program, already introduced under President Johnson, and the ruinous economic and related social policies of the "Southern Strategy"-oriented Nixon Administration, unleashed a revival of the old cultural pessimism--and racism--lurking in the legacy of the 1920s; but, this time, beginning 1977-1981, the pessimism--and insurgent revival of official racism--soon became, in general, far worse than anything seen during those 1920s.
So, it happened, that the name of the game today is, "be on the inside." It is shocking, and disgusting to consider the number of persons, then and now, whose "own mind" on almost any matter is borrowed from what is perceived to be current fads. Then, and more so now, the ultimate squelch of any unwanted statement of true fact, is, "You should know that none of the people whose opinion I respect would agree with you."
There is little difference, on principle, between the mechanisms of so-called popular opinion and entertainment-choices today, than what was represented by watching vox populi marching, thumbs up, into Nero's arena, to cheer for lions eating Christians. Never forget that the Latin word populari as used then, would be translated as "the predators" today. "Popular opinion" is the popular form of general immorality; it is Hobbesian tradition of the slaves killing those among their fellow-slaves who threaten to deviate from the opinions which the slave-masters dictate. "Popular opinion," and the willingness to sell one's opinion to whoever appears to offer them a chance "to be on the inside," are, today, pretty much the same thing. Then and now, it has been the shackles which the slaves put upon one another, the shackles which lead free persons to transform themselves, too, into willing slaves.
It is not always so. As I have already emphasized, even during the early to middle 1960s. There have been better times. The popular support for the Civil Rights movement then, typifies the persistence of some of the best qualities to be found among our citizens and youth during this century.
For example: Thirty years ago, especially before the Carter Administration, the times, and the people, and our government and its laws and courts, were either much better, or, much less bad, morally and intellectually, than they have been since. Then, the likelihood that the person seated next to you could actually think, was much greater than it has been during the recent twenty-odd years, until hopeful signs of improvement during the most recent months. Such changes do not "just happen;" there have been reasons, some very important reasons. The fact that there were reasons for the change, does not make unfortunate conditions more tolerable; it only helps us to understand the problem involved, and once understanding it, perhaps recognize how to overcome it.
For me, the hopeful sign of the times, is that there is a significant trend of increase, again today, in the incidence of people who are willing to think, rather than regurgitate, knee-jerk fashion, what passes for popular opinion. Some observers measure political progress in the population by counting the number of persons who have come to agreement with their own opinion. I do not. For me, the important thing is signs of actual thinking, whether or not that change is associated with disposition to support my explicit proposals. If people will but think, I will risk assuming that we may hope to come to important, cognitive qualities of agreement sooner or later.
My own views to this effect, are colored significantly by my experiences during the 1930s and during World War II. Review what I have stated, above, on this matter.
During moments of crisis, while Franklin Roosevelt remained President, the tendency toward increased optimism, and matching increase in willingness to think, was a trend. With Roosevelt's untimely death, and President Truman's follies, pessimism crept in, and more or less took over. The degree of optimism which I had come to know during the war-time years, as long as Roosevelt lived, waned quickly and sharply under Truman, and, despite the brief upturn under President Kennedy, never really re-embedded in the members of my generation.
It was the spread of pessimism under President Truman, and the "however" quality of the subsequent Eisenhower years, which caused most members of my generation, especially those who fled into white-collar suburbia, to plant the seeds of potential self-destruction in their children, creating thus the potential for the explosion of cultural pessimism--e.g., the existentialism of the "rock, drug, sex counterculture"--known as the "Sixty-Eighters" of the middle to late 1960s. The effect of this among the college-graduate layer of the so-called "Baby Boomers," is key to understanding the scale and depths of the moral and general cultural decay which has gripped our nation, increasingly, during the recent quarter-century; it is this which set the stage for the immorality pervasive among the upper twenty percentile of family households today.
This is key to understanding the way in which election-results have been shaped, increasingly, during the recent quarter-century. As the culturally decadent majority among the upper twenty percentile, has dominated the political parties and elections, increasingly, since the 1984 elections, so the political parties' top-ranking machinery has degenerated to the present point, at which wretches such as Governor Bush and Vice-President Gore are seriously considered by many, as almost assured Presidential nominees of their respective parties. Notably, there are certain differences in details, even important differences, but no significant difference in personal moral quality, between that pair today, and the Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler of the 1920s and 1930s. The choice between the members of such a pair, is like an old-time Utah death-sentence: Would you rather be hanged, or shot by a firing-squad? People who debate such choices, rather than rejecting them altogether, seriously need their heads examined, as I am examining the sick heads of our political parties here.
So, today, among the upper twenty percentile, pathological trends in behavior run to: "We are running things to protect our privileges," against the eighty percentile which is viewed as desiring to eat what the upper twenty percentile intends to steal from health-care, social security, and other general-welfare accounts of the lower eighty.
Among the lower eighty percentile, the prevailing trend is either simply not to vote at all, staging a more or less hopeless rear-guard defense of what is being taken from them, while bidding for a few crumbs from the table of government and political-party machines controlled by a chiefly ultra-corrupt upper twenty percentile.
Not accidentally, during the past quarter-century, the United States government has become increasingly, outrightly racist. For a quarter-century, this racist onslaught against what the Civil Rights movement won during the 1960s has been led from the U.S. Department of Justice. The hard core of the Republican Party's far right, leads a virtual revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and also in the Democratic Party, we have the Nashville Agrarian variety of Al Gore-like southern gentility. Recently, I emphasize, once again, the fact, that since 1996, under Vice-President Gore's increasing domination of the Democratic Party's national leadership, the racism of the Justice Department and Taney-like Supreme Court majority, has been revived by the Democratic Party's collaboration with Jack Keeney, Jr., the son of the Justice Department's leading racist, to nullify the 1965 Voting Rights Act, all done with active encouragement, and vigorous support of this action from Vice-President Al Gore.
However, the recent decades of cultural and moral decay in our national life, are not merely repetition of cycles of alternating optimism and despair from our national past. Something new, more evil than we have experienced here earlier during this century, has been injected in the depressing course of the recent thirty-five years. The principal immediate victims of that evil, were those commonly called "The Baby Boomers," those born either during World War II or not long afterwards.
The social stratum on which to focus most intently, are those presently under fifty-five years of age, in key governmental, corporate, professional, and related positions of leading executive authority today. It has been through the retirement and other attrition of more competent leadership, that our nation has lost much of its competence, gaining, in return, what threatens to become a most awful tragedy in our nation's economic and social policies.
The simplest way to identify the new kind of insanity which that "Baby Boomer" stratum has brought into the national policy-shaping process, is to point to the fad which began to take over the most politically pro-active student layers in the middle to late 1960s university campuses, the fad most conveniently identified as "post-industrial utopianism," that is to say the lunatic cult-belief in what is called today, "information society" or "The New Economy."
Consider the way in which that fanatical, irrational cult-belief has been enabled to take over the leading currents in economic-social and related policy-shaping, and the special quality of doom now threatening us, were readily understood.
Post-Industrial Utopia
When the Democratic Party meets in Los Angeles, this mid-August, fifty-five years will have passed since U.S. President Harry Truman, at British instigation, dropped two fission-bombs, without any just cause for doing so, upon the helpless civilian populations of Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As I have reported the most relevant essential facts in numerous published locations, the motive for that bombing was supplied by a circle within the British intelligence establishment centered around H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. The purpose for this development of nuclear-weapons arsenals, was first specified by Wells, back in 1913, and the actual initiation of the development of these weapons, was by Bertrand Russell himself, personally. It was sometimes self-styled pacifist Russell, whose policy caused the 1945 nuclear bombing of Japan, a Japan which had already been defeated by forces commanded, with his celebrated regard for economy of time and losses on both sides, by General Douglas MacArthur.[47] The Russell nuclear-weapons policy, under which Truman ordered the bombing, was later published in the September 1946 edition of the Russell-controlled Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The purpose of that 1945 bombing was, as Russell stated in that and other locations, then and later, was for the included purpose of setting the stage for launching a "preemptive" nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The deeper, longer-term purpose of that proposed threat of launching of "preemptive" nuclear war, was, as Russell stated repeatedly, to use nuclear weapons as a terrorist device for inducing all existing governments, including that of the Soviet Union, to give up national sovereignty and submit to one-world government, as Russell follower Henry A. Kissinger's SALT I and the 1972 ABM treaty, were intended to push the world to the verge of such a result.
That has been the continuing nuclear-weapons and related policies of the United Kingdom's monarchy and its U.S. dupes, such as the late John J. McCoy and McCloy-trained Henry A. Kissinger, ever since. Today, "world government," otherwise better described as a new "Tower of Babel," is also known by such names as "free trade," "globalization," and the world "rule of law." It is, purely and simply, an intended revival of the old pagan Roman Empire, this time as actually a world-wide one-world dictatorship, exerted by a London-centered international financier oligarchy itself under the dynastic rule of "Caesar" Elizabeth II and her heirs.
The intended dictator of this new world government, is presently functioning as a group of five English-speaking former nations, four of which are governed by the presently incumbent British monarchy of Queen Elizabeth II: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The fifth nation is that led by U.S. components of the British-American-Canadian (BAC) set, as typified by those who have been knighted by Her Majesty, such as Sir George Bush, Sir Henry Kissinger, Sir Caspar Weinberger, and so on. In short, the assimilation of the ruling, Wall Street financier oligarchy of the U.S.A. into an English-speaking union of this Filthy Financier-Oligarchical Five, is intended to rule the entire world forever more. That latter act might not be called treason technically, but what else, in fact, could any honest U.S. patriot call those U.S. oligarchs who have connived to force such a rule by "globalization" upon us?
Thus, when, during 1989-1991, the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union were being dismembered, the British monarchy, together with President, later Sir George Bush, connived with France's President François Mitterrand, to use the combined authority of the Four Power agreement governing post-war Germany's Berlin, as the pivot for establishing what was intended to become an irreversible march to world government. The orchestration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 1990-1991 war against Iraq, and, following that, the ensuing orchestration of an endemic 1992-1999, still bubbling Balkan war, chiefly at British direction, set into motion the effort to convert "an expanded NATO" into a weapon commanded by the "English-speaking powers," to establish and enforce world government at Anglo-American imperial pleasure in perpetuity.
This use of terror by threat of nuclear weapons, to attempt to bring about the surrender of the U.S.A. (and others) to world government, was already in motion on other fronts of U.S. cultural life, at the time Truman dropped the bombs.
Witness, for example, a 1940s project, featuring such literally pro-satanic figures of the so-called "Frankfurt School" of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, in a propaganda campaign intended explicitly to eradicate the patriotic "American intellectual tradition" within the U.S.A. itself.[48] This overlapped the activities of other Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells confederates, such as the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation of Bertrand Russell lackeys Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, et al., in concocting and promoting pseudo-sciences such as "information theory," "linguistics," and "systems analysis," in working to outlaw competent science and even the practice of truthfulness itself, from U.S. public and leading private institutions.[49]
The firing of General Douglas MacArthur, by President Truman, was a key part of the effort to destroy the patriotic tradition of the U.S. military itself, making way for the emergence of what became notorious as the "utopian," "anti-traditionalist" faction within both the military and strategic establishment more generally. These "Dr. Strangelove"[50] and other utopians, were the legacy of the Wells-Russell world-government-through-nuclear-weapons policy. The widespread destruction of the honor and quality of the U.S. military institutions through a prolonged dirty, useless war in Indo-China, put the utopians into the dominant position.
The wave of pessimism unleashed by the combined impact of the 1962 missiles crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, the launching of the worse than useless Indo-China war, and the assassinations of both the Reverend Martin Luther King and President Kennedy's brother Robert, turned a virtual majority among the most politically pro-active strata of university graduates, into a breeding-culture for what became the most savage converts to a new variety of the same Conservative Revolution which produced both the Nazi Party and the Horkheimer-Adorno-Arendt Frankfurt School in Germany. This social phenomenon was but another version of the same extreme cultural pessimism which had produced both those German predecessors, and such followers of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger as France's Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre's Nazi-like Frantz Fanon. These utopian "New Leftists," typified by the Weatherman cult, became the most rabid devotees of irrationalism in general, and the peer-group bellwethers of the politics of post-industrial, anti-progress utopianism.
The way in which Wall Street's cabal of British-American-Canadian (BAC) oligarchy, variously coddled and culled the flock of these young utopians, who were marching, like Fourteenth-Century Flagellants, "through the institutions," produced, as a net result, a selection of a new kind of upwardly mobile political, corporate, and professional elite, rising to the top positions which they have dominated increasingly, during the course of the last decade. These are, with relatively rare individual exceptions, the hard core of what I have identified by my choice of metaphorical double-meaning, as "The Baby Doomers." Here, in this increasing influence of this stratum of leadership over the population as a whole, during the recent several decades, lies the core of that mass insanity which makes today's global financial crisis far more deadly than anything from the 1920s and 1930s.
Today, that post-industrial utopianism has assumed the form of a doctrine named "The New Economy." Vice-President Gore stumbled into those cult-beliefs, together with his cronies such as Alvin Toffler and sometime Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, back during the Carter 1970s. Toffler typifies a strange sort of political left-sectarian from the vintage of the early post-war years, who had been picked up by the rabidly utopian faction's circles within the U.S. military, and played a notable role in launching what became known as the cult of the "Third Wave," from which Gore's "Third Way" orientations were spun out.[51]
One of the leading elements among the currents from which this "Third Wave" sprouted, was the science-fiction cult of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The cult's literature featured sundry varieties of blendings of odd bits of scientific terminology, with Wells-Russell-style sociological fantasies, with added blendings ranging from updates of "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" comic-strips of the 1920s and 1930s, to more sophisticated contemplations of a future world-government for the universe. Most of the world-government-oriented Star Trek television scenarios I have occasionally audited, have been baldly utopian "New Age" ideological trash, and mass-media brainwashing practices along similar lines.
Amid that pulpy tradition of utopian fantasies, there was included a featured, crucial, thematic philosophical current, copied directly from such pseudo-scientific acolytes of Bertrand Russell as "information theory's" Norbert Wiener and "systems analysis's" John von Neumann. The name of this theme was "Occam's Razor." "Occam's Razor" is a piece of medieval irrationalism, attributed to William of Ockham, resurrected during the late Sixteenth Century, by Venice's Paolo Sarpi, who was the master for house-lackey Galileo Galilei, and was also the controller of such figures as England's Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Since Sarpi, this neo-Ockhamite dogma became known as the English empiricism (and French Cartesianism), from which utilitarianism, Kantian irrationalism, and the modern logical positivism of Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, Carnap, Karl Korsch, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann, among others, are commonly derived.
The most notably relevant significance of the "New Age" revival of the original Ockham, is that, under that dogma, cognition[52] is outlawed. Actual fundamental scientific discovery is outlawed, as Kant demanded in his Critiques. Only "Dr. Spock's" logic, is permitted to intrude upon what are otherwise luridly irrational fantasies on radically cultural-relativist themes. In essence, actual human nature--actual reason--is outlawed from the "science affliction" scenarios.
To assess the influence of such trashy science-fiction upon the young "Baby Boomer," we must compare the problem such trash represented then, with the psychotic-killer-inducing effects of Nintendo (e.g., Pokémon) and related games and TV broadcasts, in producing, for example, "Littleton-type" mass homicides today. Add the effects of doctrines such as these referenced "Third Wave" science-fiction types, to the effects of the horror provoked by a mass-media-illuminated fear of nuclear extermination of "Mommy, Daddy, and me" among suburbanite children and adolescents of the 1946-1968 interval, and the kind of brainwashing which produced the phenomenon of today's "Baby Doomers," should be apparent to anyone who understands the special suggestible, immature natures of victims of such conditioning: such as the growing child and adolescent whose adult environment did not intervene to protect the child and adolescent from such brainwashing. Don't quibble--don't blame guns, for example; that type of conditioning, then and now, was and is brainwashing pure and simple, for which the responsibility for the crime lies with the adult world which allows it to be imposed upon its children and adolescents, even under the pretext of "free speech"-licensed, popular mass entertainment.
This kind of conditioning, combined with the downshifts in intellectual and moral quality of educational policies and teachers introduced into public schools and universities, combined with the accelerating rate of post-World War II moral degeneration of so-called popular entertainment, fostered the ripeness for victimization of those reaching or entering adolescence at about the time of the 1962 missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination.
The cumulative result, combined with the fearful events of 1964-1968, was not merely a panicked flight from reality, but an hysterical impulse to destroy reality. This meant destroying the attachment to reality in their victims' own individual minds, and seeking to destroy the reality which they perceived as having had, or threatened to push them back into a real world which they wished would go away. The anti-science and anti-technology, anti-industry, anti-industrial operative, and so forth, impulses expressed typically as the "rock-drug-sex counterculture," and "leave nature as it is" fantasies of deranged ecologists, were the result. The greatest of these induced, irrational fears, was anything associated with the word "nuclear fission," not actual nuclear fission, but anything which the most rabid victim of indoctrination of Chomskyian linguistics, might associate with "nuclear." "Post-industrial utopianism" was the result.
"Post-industrial utopia" meant: "Eradicate industry; we must reduce the population which requires industrial growth, and suppress the farmers who feed a growing population, as well. Eliminate the sovereign nation-state! Reverse progress!" It has meant: Use HMO's to hasten the extermination of what Adolf Hitler classified as "lives not worthy to be lived," a pro-genocidal medical policy in full flight forward today. It has meant: Limit science to the eructations of formal mathematics, and call this anti-scientific science "information theory," the "Third Wave," and "The New Economy." The result was not a march of horrid creatures from some Hollywood black lagoon. It was something much worse; it was our own children, the Baby Boomers, who were transformed by my generation's cowardly negligence, into the "Baby Doomers" who generally rule and ruin most of globally extended European civilization today. Under continued such rulership, civilization will not survive for the generation or more immediately ahead.
Gore vs. the Nation-State
Sanity is a state of mind in which a person's intentions are efficiently premised upon knowing the nature of the species he or she represents, and knowing that in the context of his efficient relationship to the universe, the relationship on which our species' continued existence depends. These are points already identified and covered in preceding portions of this report. Now, reviewing the topics before us in that light, examine critically some currently commonplace views on the subject of economy. Those will bring us to the required definition of currently popular forms of insanity respecting the matter of economics.
In its simplest expression, insanity in matters of economics, takes as its currently most typical form, the delusion, that a reduced current market money-price for a necessity of life, is axiomatically a gain to the purchaser, even if the price paid does not cover the costs cumulatively incurred by that society for maintaining the continuing production of that necessary good. The ruinous agricultural and agriculture-related policies of the U.S. government, especially since the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, are an example of the quality of savagery to which that currently popular delusion carries matters today.
That false belief, which is axiomatic for advocates of "free trade," betrays the fact, that a person gripped by that delusion, thinks of himself or herself implicitly, as a "hunter and gatherer" inhabiting a cornucopia of endless wealth; he is a parasite upon the bounty of nature, rather than as a producer of the means upon which continued human existence depends, even that level of existence represented by current levels of average consumption.[53]
The excuse which the followers of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Adam Smith, and utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham have employed, to justify ignoring foreseeably incurred costs from consideration, is the lunatic's argument, that economic processes are governed by principles which, by their nature, are not knowable by mortal man.
This is the argument which Lord Shelburne's lackey Smith set forth in his 1759 work on "moral philosophy,"[54] the argument he also drew upon, later, as the excuse for introducing his doctrine of "free trade" into his 1776 anti-American tract, known as The Wealth of Nations.
Bernard Mandeville, whom Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society (and Heritage Foundation) have adopted as the chief architect of their religious faith,[55] resorted to an explicitly demonic argument in his The Fable of the Bees.[56] Like those who, like George Soros, propose, today, to legalize the Lord Palmerston-like traffic in deadly drugs, that according to this same argument, Mandeville insisted that giving free play to vices, is the only way in which to assure public benefits as a consequence.
The argument of these fanatical irrationalists is, that by carrying the democracy of sin toward infinity, the right price for everything will ultimately spring forth from random interactions of that sort, that for reasons which are inherently incomprehensible by the human mind! Not only do they insist that the price will ultimately tend to be the right one, but that the economy will prosper by these methods. Apparently, reading Mandeville, or such avowed religious devotees of the demonic Mandeville as the Mont Pelerin Society's Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, one suspects such persons to believe that only the certified deity of vice, the Devil himself, could control the way in which these wonderful results desired by Mandeville's devotees are to be brought about.
How can we regard any person as either sane, or even truthful, if he, like the dupes of Mandeville and Adam Smith, claims to know what he insists no human being could know, but insists that the consequence he proposes will be, with absolute certainty, more beneficial than any other course of action? What a swindler such a fellow is! It is sheer lunacy, contrary to all reason, and yet it is held in awe, as if it were a law of the universe, among today's economists and political figures generally.
The relevant general fact of the matter is, that in any such idealized society of "hunters and gatherers," man is degraded implicitly to the status of a higher ape, not a human being. Such a man, were he actually turned into an ape, would have a potential relative population-density, as a species, of not more than several millions living individuals. (No society of human beings could survive for long, were its members to imitate the behavior of great apes successfully; but some human societies have destroyed themselves out of continued efforts to behave as members of a species they are not.) Since about two millions years ago, under the ebbs and flows of glaciation and corresponding falls and rises of the levels of oceans and seas, the environment of this planet would not support a humanoid-ape population higher than approximately the highest reached by the higher apes in general, during the highest population-densities for apes ascertainable from within the scope of recent millennia.
In contrast to what is known of population-densities of apes, we have significant information enabling us to reconstruct some fair estimates for the demographic characteristics of uniquely human populations as early as up to hundreds of thousands of years ago. One case, recently reported from Göttingen University studies, shows a human site in Germany with artefacts reflecting a high degree of refinement of the cultivated cognitive powers of the subject.[57] The most pertinent study, is the comparison of the estimable trends in world population and its demographic characteristics, for the recent 2,500 years, to those of European civilization as such. For the latter case, compare the demographic trends, and their fluctuations, prior to A.D. 1500, with trends, and their fluctuations, since. Then, add consideration of the impact of modern European technological progress on the productive powers of labor world wide.
The point on which to focus proportionally greater emphasis, for the discussion at hand, is the combined and interdependent, demographic effect of both cultural and scientific-technological changes. On this account, nothing on the subject of demography, in pre-modern history, or pre-history, can even begin to match the success of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance, and the founding of the first true modern nation-states, those of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, as direct outgrowths of that Renaissance in general, and the Council of Florence most immediately. The influence of the manifold work of Dante Alighieri, including his De Monarchia and Commedia, defines the vantage-point from which to trace the role of both Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's Concordancia Catholica and De docta ignorantia, in launching both the notion of the modern sovereign nation-state emulated by France's Louis XI and the founding of modern experimental science.
The crucially distinct feature to be emphasized, is the increase of the rate of both scientific-technological progress and popular cultural development, as made possible by the combined impact of the Renaissance and the establishment of a form of sovereign nation-state based upon the same principle emphasized in the opening paragraphs of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and the echo of this in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, contrary to the moral illiteracy of U.S. Associate Justice Scalia. That is the principle, that government has no moral authority, under natural law, except as it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare for each and all of the living and their posterity: the so-called, in English, commonwealth or commonweal principle.
The absolute right of a sovereign nation-state republic to assert its sovereignty, that in lawful defiance of overreaching efforts by supranational or other agencies, is derived from the state's efficient commitment to promotion of the general welfare. The authority of the sovereign state in this regard, lies not only in its commitment to serve that principle, but in the fact that no other institution but the sovereign nation-state republic, is capable of meeting that obligation. Indeed, the moral legitimacy of every other institution, such as morally acceptable forms of alliances, supranational facilities, and so on, depends upon the submission of that latter to the principle of doing no harm to the principle of absolute sovereignty of the nation-state institution.
Happily, the government of France has stated a policy apparently intended to the same effect, respecting the prospect for the emergence of a federation of perfectly sovereign nation-states in continental western Europe. If I read France's stated intention correctly, this is a policy intended to serve as revival, and of a continuation of that set forth in Nicholas of Cusa's Concordancia Catholica.
This same principle applies with full force to the law of warfare. The Versailles Treaty imposed by the victorious predators, at the close of World War I, was a crime against humanity, for which a complicit world paid the price of World War II. If a war is truly a justified one, then that war is lawful; but, the peace imposed by war must strengthen, not diminish, the principle of sovereignty of the nation-state, even for each and all of the defeated nations. The lessons recognized in the adoption of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, are of exemplary relevance on this point, lessons violated in Europe at the end of two World Wars, and violated afresh in the conditions imposed at the close of the Anglo-American powers' so-called "NATO war" against Yugoslavia, and 1990-2000 continuing war, and accompanying practice of genocide, against the people of Iraq.
No other institution conceived by man could replace those essential functions which could be performed only by such a state, either lawfully or in fact. To act to nullify such a state, is, in and of itself, a crime against humanity. That is to say, that to nullify the principle of sovereignty, is to deprive the people as a whole of those benefits, that protection, which no other agency could deliver, an agency which is indispensable to assure to all of the people their right to live and act according to human nature, rather than as human cattle.
The superiority of the sovereign nation-state over any different composition of society, has been the impact of the struggle for sovereign nation-states based on the general-welfare principle, which has created those social and physical conditions which are indispensable for the fostering of scientific discovery and technological progress. The growth of the world's population from levels seen at the close of the Fourteenth Century, to the levels of today, would have been impossible without the radiated impact on the world at large, of the emergence of the sovereign nation-state in at least a number of successful nations.
The principle of sovereignty, so defined, is the foundation upon which all competent notions of modern economy depend absolutely. Any contrary view is, as I am in the process of showing here, functionally, axiomatically insane from the standpoint of economy, and most destructively so.
Proceed now to a critical technical point, and derive the remaining essentials of the argument from that.
The improvement of the demographic and other characteristic conditions of life of the individual members of populations, including their posterity, depends upon the present society's contribution to the benefit of the future. This requirement can be met only if the society (e.g., economy) as a whole is intrinsically, functionally anti-entropic. By anti-entropic, we signify, that to generate that output, the society must generate more than it must consume from the universe, to achieve and maintain that level of potential relative population-density. This can not be accomplished by reducing the incomes of the producers; it can be accomplished only by elevating the anti-entropic gain in the productive powers of labor.
There are three levels on which the sources of such entropy or anti-entropy are to be located and defined.
First, there is entropy, as defined, axiomatically, by an aprioristic interpretation of the typical behavior of non-living processes.[58]
On the second level, there are living processes, which contain a universally characteristic, anti-entropic principle, a principle which is not properly adducible from reductionist definitions of non-living processes. The cumulative geological and related transformation of the planet Earth by action of living processes, is such that the ratio of product of biological activity to the rest of the Earth's composition, is increased, geologically and otherwise. That latter is but one significant illustration of the point.[59]
Thirdly, there is human cognitive behavior, which expresses, universally, through the effectiveness of discoveries of universal physical principles, in increasing man's power in and over the universe, an anti-entropic principle not to be found within merely non-living processes as such, nor living processes other than cognitive human beings. The increasing part of cumulative and present human activity in defining the composition of the Earth and its activities, is the experimental proof of this.[60]
Thus, on those grounds, we must recognize that the notions of "information theory," "systems analysis," "artificial intelligence," and "New Economy," typify an axiomatic element of insanity, respecting both economy and the nature of man, but an insanity which has been adopted among the believers in those currently rather popular fads.
Viable societies, and what we may recognize as their physical economies, are defined as viable because they are characteristically anti-entropic.
In other words, even by relatively popular standards of professionals' belief, a society whose profitability, or other measure of apparent growth, is generated through an increase of the entropy in the society's future relationship to nature, is a doomed culture. Without anti-entropy, economies, even mankind itself, were systemically doomed to extinction, somewhere down the entropic pathway it is travelling.
Whence, then, the anti-entropy which has produced the net increase of mankind's potential relative population-density during the recent five to six centuries? There are but two presently known, principled sources of universal anti-entropy in the universe: the anti-entropic principle of living processes, and the additional anti-entropy supplied, as a principled characteristic of human beings.
The success of the human species during its emergence out of some time during the recent two millions years of its existence in its present distinctive quality, has been entirely the result of the anti-entropy supplied by cognition to increase the potential relative population-density of our species. Thus, in doing exactly that, mankind is bringing more and more of the universe we inhabit toward a condition of true dominion by the human species as a cognitive species. We are humanizing the universe in this way, in this degree.
For the sake of clarity about what may be to many a new idea, let us repeat that crucial point:
In this arrangement, insofar as societies are successful in physical-economic terms, mankind is humanizing the world of living creatures, assimilating them into the processes of society. To the degree that anti-entropy is being contributed, in a different form, by living processes generally, mankind's progress humanizes those living processes generally. To sum matters up, viable forms of societies are fairly characterized as representing an ongoing process of humanizing the universe. Man, in short, is made in the image of the Creator of this universe, man whose commands upon the universe must be obeyed, when man speaks the language of the Creator, the language of cognition--the language of Nicholas of Cusa's Platonic docta ignorantia.[61]
The most simply stated significance of this three-level view of anti-entropy, is the following. In a successful form of physical economy, the per-capita cost of production, when measured in physical market-basket terms, is always rising; but, the per-capita output, as measured similarly, is always rising at rates which exceed the rate of increase of the cost of production. Most immediately and simply, this rate of gain is the result of fundamental scientific and technological progress.[62] The mathematical form of representation of the gain so effected, is essentially Riemannian, as indicated above. This is, in first approximation, the mathematical form for representing anti-entropy as it occurs in physical-economic processes: as a change in the characteristic curvature of anti-entropic action within that economy.
It is not necessary to take up the details of those mathematical forms here. It is sufficient to take into account, that this is the form in which the fundamental principle of a science of physical economy must be recognized.
However, there is something of equal importance: taking into account those social relations among cognitive processes which make possible the transmission of the experience of an act of discovery of principle among the members of society. That accounts for the chief difference between forms of European civilization existing prior to the Fifteenth Century, and the vastly superior rate of progress in both science and technology as a result of the impact of that Renaissance and the emergence of the struggle to establish and universalize the institution of the modern sovereign nation-state republic.
The principles relating to the issue of economic lunacy (or, sanity) are therefore summarized as follows.
The Road Back to Sanity
The sovereign nation-state implicitly assumed sovereign moral responsibility for that development of all of the territory of the nation in the manner and degree needed to ensure continued progress (anti-entropy) in the present and into the future. This pertained to the conduct and maintenance of public works and the promotion of the conditions required for ordering commerce and the production of goods as the public interest may require. This emphasized the government's responsibility for the education, health, and social welfare of the population as a whole. In order to meet these responsibilities, the state must assume primary responsibility for promoting scientific, technological, and cultural progress, and the participation of the population as a whole in these benefits.
The division of labor, between the economic functions of the state and the so-called "private sector," is clearly implicit in this outline. The function of the private entrepreneur, is to play a leading part in the development and application of scientific and technological progress in useful products. The function of the state, is to stimulate and protect such private economic initiatives as a benefit to the general welfare, while the state assumes ultimate responsibility for those undertakings which correspond to the state's inalienable responsibility for those matters which are intrinsically universal requirements of the total territory and the entirety of the population. This does not mean that the government itself must always conduct those economic functions; but, in all matters affecting the general welfare, the government must regulate, and also promote private enterprise to the degree this is necessary to accomplish those ends for which the government of the sovereign nation-state has a unique, unsheddable prime responsibility. The state may delegate authorities, but never relegate them in such a way that it relinquishes its own moral authority and responsibility in these matters.
The development of the population of a society operating at current levels of potential relative population-density enjoyed by leading economies, must begin the reproductive cycle of the economy, with an outlay of about a quarter-century, with little or no return, in bringing a newborn future citizen, from the relevant pregnancy and birth to the threshold of current standards of professional technological and related maturity. This quarter-century span represents outlay by both government and by the family household. This expenditure for developing a future productive adult citizen up to the level of the future's expectable technology and other conditions, exemplifies the principle of long-term capital outlays: of fifteen years to a quarter-century or more.
The essence of modern economy is a wide assortment of capital outlays, expenditures which must be made significantly in advance of the year they will begin to deliver relevant benefit to the economy as a whole. For our purposes here, it is sufficient to note that such capital outlays are of types generally classed as short-term, medium-term, or long-term.
Some of these capital outlays will be offset by future income gained by some private enterprise. Others will be offset by fees for services, or through tax-revenues. Some will be activities supplied by the government. Some will be borrowed from other nations.
The question is asked: "From whence does the money for these capital outlays come?" To that, the modern economist competent in principles of physical economy responds: The sovereign government exerts a monopoly over the issue of national currency against its power to create credit. This credit is issued, partially, in the form of the creation of new volumes of national currency.
The issue of paper currency in the U.S.A. reflects a successful precedent in the actions of the Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay Company, which, for a time, issued chits which functioned as a paper currency in trade among the inhabitants. When the British monarchy acted to destroy many of the original rights and liberties of that colony, the issue of a paper currency was discontinued. However, Cotton Mather campaigned for its reintroduction, and his follower Benjamin Franklin wrote and published an influential renewal of the proposal for such a paper currency. This precedent is reflected as an adopted feature of the U.S. Federal Constitution. The importance of what had been this unique contribution of the U.S. was well understood by Europeans who followed closely both the leading U.S. economists of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, such as Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey.
These monetary policies were virtually nullified by a foolish collection of more or less treasonously inclined Democratic Party leaders, such as Jackson, van Buren, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan. They were destroyed by a foolish majority of the U.S. Congress, which betrayed U.S. sovereignty to the British gold standard. The introduction of the Federal Reserve System on the initiative of New York agents and accomplices of Britain's King Edward VII,[63] and the surrender of U.S. sovereignty to increased power of the Federal Reserve System, after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, have all done great damage to that constitutional principle, and have caused most professional economists of today to be hopelessly misinformed and disoriented on this principle of economy and law. Nonetheless, the principle itself remains a sound one. More notably, it would be impossible for the U.S. to avoid a general, deep, and prolonged economic collapse, unless we responded to the now onrushing global financial and monetary collapse with a general currency and credit reform based on a revival of this much-neglected principle.
The proper monetary policy of a sovereign nation-state, is derived from the need for a supply of credit which is created by the will of a sovereign nation-state. This credit is issued against the current and future, combined public and private revenues of the sovereign nation. When issued as national currency, it is to be used as the Massachusetts Bay Colony did, to promote a condition of full employment and full production, mustering resources which would be idled, or insufficiently developed, unless this credit were provided. The use of public credit, and related issues of paper currency, as a monopoly of the government, in this way, not only increases the money-supply in the market; on the condition that it efficiently fosters the inclination of households and entrepreneurs to save, the savings so amassed, as through industrial banking, accelerate the velocity with which currency and credit circulate.
The success of such a policy, depends upon its effectiveness in bringing about an increase in the average productive powers of labor, and, thus, the potential relative population-density of the society. This depends, simply and obviously, on injecting a growing ratio of scientific and technological progress into production. It also requires the development of the territory of the national economy, as through public works which supply the basis for more productive land-use in that territory as a whole.
The only way to correct a bankruptcy, is to make the relevant economy more productive, as productivity is measured in physical-economic, rather than simply monetary terms. If the physical-economic policy is right, the monetary result can be managed nicely. If the physical-economic policy is wrong, no amount of monetarist and financial tribal dances and other mumbo-jumbo, will bring the economy to a state of health.
Right now, the knee-jerk reaction of those in power in most financial and monetary institutions today, will be disastrous. Their knee-jerk reaction will be the folly of a failed President Jimmy Carter: to demand fiscal austerity, and still more austerity, chiefly against the real economy, the physical economy, and in the form of greatly increasing suffering of the population, as President Jimmy Carter did, in flagrant defiance of the Constitution Carter had sworn to uphold: at the expense of the general welfare. Such austerity policies would be fatal to civilization under the conditions existing world-wide at this time. The correct reaction is directly opposite to that.
Instead of imposing austerity on the physical economy, in the misguided attempt to bail out bankrupt financial and monetary assets, sacrifice--as it were done surgically--the disease that has sickened the economy, the speculatively bloated financial and monetary assets. Do this with the promptness, and in the degree necessary, to defend and increase the physical-economic rate of growth. This correct reaction will inevitably create a relatively much larger economic role for the sovereign nation-state, a sudden reversal of the recent quarter-century's global trend on that account, a result which would be greatly deplored by the deplorable, and expendable Mont Pelerin Society.
As I have spoken and written on this matter many times during recent years, the quick reaction to a generalized financial and monetary crash, the one already overdue and now inevitable, must be to restore precisely those kinds of protectionist, regulatory arrangements used to prompt the economic recovery of the U.S.A., Japan, Western Europe, and some other nations during the post-war period of 1946-1958--and somewhat later. This means, immediately, scrapping most of those "free trade," "globalization," and related dogmas, which have been popularized among governments during the past quarter-century under the lunatic "floating-exchange-rate system" which has brought the world to the present state of ruin. Such reforms are to be preferred, precisely because they represent tested precedents, which worked, whereas the departures from those policies, during the recent three decades, have been proven an inevitable, global catastrophe.
The result of such needed, sudden reversals in policy-direction, will be sharp increases in prices of many things, while holding down the costs of others. This will be a result of anti-free-trade, protectionist measures, which are indispensable to prompt and sustain high rates of new investment in both basic economic infrastructure, including the rebuilding of those education systems and health-care systems which have been destroyed, with increasing savagery during the recent thirty years.
We must restore to investors in goods-producing industries, the margin of income needed, over and above other costs, to maintain a rate of real investment corresponding to rapid, technology-driven increases in physical productivity and quality of product. We must rebuild the agricultural systems we destroyed, increasing the ration of the total labor force employed as industrial operatives, focussing upon "hard science" progress in production investment, and so on. We must bring about an accelerating "hard science"-oriented technological upshift, in composition of employment and investment, while downshifting the percentile of employees employed in the recently expanded categories of financial and other services. These changes must be made by governments, individually, and in cooperation with the so-called "private sector."
In short, summing up these and implicitly associated measures, we must become suddenly sane in our economic and related policies, abandoning the lunatic follies which have dominated recent decades. It is virtually a rule, that every change in U.S. economic policy since Nixon should be promptly reversed.
The use of the renewed sovereign powers of the nation-state, to build in required levels of combined public and private cost and investment-rates into the effective prices of goods, will not be a net increase in the cost of living of the lower eighty percentile of the family household-incomes; it will be a great, long-overdue reform, a restructuring of the composition of costs and incomes, returning toward overall ratios of employment categories more like those of the mid-1960s [Figure 2]. We shall cut the useless and diseased financial, monetary, and related "fat" out of the system, to return to the relatively much healthier structural ratios of income and investments of about the pre-1966 period.
In other words, physical production and payments to labor employment in that production, combined with an increase in the ration of the labor-force so employed, will shift the composition of total national income greatly in favor of today's lower eighty percent of family-income brackets, while cutting the financial-speculative and otherwise parasitical fat out of their share of national income. The cause of the economic suffering of the U.S. population today, is not the burden of taxation; the suffering is chiefly the result of the taking of an exorbitantly growing ration of the total national income by those diseases of parasitism to which I have referred repeatedly here. As Captain John Smith warned his Virginia settlers: Cut out that parasitical "fat;" shift employment from today's parasitical, and back to productive categories, and the economy will come back into a quality of balance not seen since Nixon and Carter successively unbalanced it.
The U.S.A. in particular will reorient itself to a global economic mission similar to that which President Franklin Roosevelt had intended, had he lived to see the end of the war. We in the U.S.A., like Japan, continental Europe, and the reemerging scientific technological potential of Russia, will be focussed upon a national export-mission, of providing those parts of the world which have presently greatly insufficient levels of overall physical-economic productivity per capita, with long-term and related technologies, exported by us, on the very low borrowing-costs made possible by a return to a 1950s style in protectionism and fixed-exchange rates.
The only way in which such a now desperately needed change can be brought about, is through reviving the unique potentials of the sovereign form of nation-state republic, as our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution intended we should become.
That is the road to sanity. We must use the great, sudden, "Pearl Harbor"-like shock, which the oncoming collapse of the present global system will deliver, to bring the American people (and others) back to their senses, back to at least a fair semblance of the sanity our nation once enjoyed. We must then act as patriots conscious that their vital interest in the general welfare of our republic, demands that we strike a great blow for the principle of sovereignty, before the backers of the Bushes and Gores of today plunge the entire planet into a new dark age like that which struck Europe during the middle of the Fourteenth Century.
4. What Is New About This Present Crisis
The challenge confronting us has a long history. Many times in the past, nations, even entire regions of the planet, have been confronted with a threatened catastrophe which is the result of nothing so much as the foolishness of the majority of the population, foolishness which was merely aggravated by the follies of the most politically powerful governing strata. Sometimes, entire nations, even entire regions of the planet have been doomed chiefly as a result of the folly of the majority of their own people, in this way.
Sometimes, there has been a happy outcome of such a crisis, but sometimes not. When qualified leaders have appeared and been chosen to lead, as when Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, the nation has recovered, more or less, from its folly. Yet, sometimes, as in relevant German military and other leaders' successive acts of submission to Anglo-American financier interests, in permitting Adolf Hitler to be put into power in January 1933, and the consolidation of Hitler's dictatorship during the Summer of 1934, the result has been, that immediate calamity thus set into motion, led, more or less inevitably, into what became a disaster of an existential quality for that misled nation. Usually, however, even in those cases in which a nation was fortunate enough to be led to recovery, as President Franklin Roosevelt led the U.S.A., the nation, the majority of its population, has later relapsed into their self-destructive old ways, sometimes, as in today's U.S.A., creating a far more menacing catastrophe than that which had been conquered during the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s.
On this subject, Solon of Athens's constitutional warning to his fellow-citizens, is a relevant point of reference. After leading the Athenians in freeing themselves from virtual slavery, Solon, years later, found them drifting back into the old ways from which he had earlier led in rescuing them. He addressed that problem of decadence in ways which were found memorable among the founders of our Federal republic. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution show, the exemplary insight into the problem of constitutional law posed by Solon, for leading U.S. patriots of that time; but, neither our nation nor any other has, so far, defined and installed the cure for the kind of menacing cyclical patterns which Solon addressed. That is key to understanding what is qualitatively new about the presently onrushing, global financial and monetary collapse.
The qualitative difference is, that, similar to that experience of Solon's time, Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency saved the U.S. from the kind of fascism which the Wall Street coup-plotters would have brought upon us; but, the decadence of our nation and its people, especially since the assassination of President Kennedy, has brought us now into a worse, more menacing state of moral, intellectual, and economic decadence, than that from which Franklin Roosevelt's leadership rescued us, nearly seventy years ago.
When we look around the world, we find that all parts of the world are menaced by that same corruption of the nations and peoples associated with the overreaching policies of the hegemonic, virtually imperial, Anglo-American bloc. The currently accelerating rate of collapse of the potential relative population-density of this planet as a whole, leads us toward the conclusion, that merely another recovery were not an adequate remedy for the present situation. It is apparently the case, perhaps already inevitable, that, at the present time, the world can not afford to risk a new cycle of recovery followed by decadence. It were likely, that the human race does not have the margin of safety to tolerate that mistake again; to risk a new cycle, would be to embrace the almost certain risk of plunging all humanity into a prolonged, planet-wide new dark age. That risk, is the new feature presented by the presently onrushing global financial explosion. This time, the reforms must strike more deeply into the root of the recurring problem.
Therefore, in light of the new element in the crisis, I have emphasized here, the importance of focussing attention upon the moral and intellectual corruption of the people in general, rather than condoning the popular myth, that the sufferings of the people are chiefly the result of the tyrannical abuses by a ruling few.[64] Those who cheat the mass of the people, are often enabled to trap them so, chiefly because of the people's own cupidity.
The U.S. Republican's demagogic taxation, regulatory, and governmental budgetary policies, since 1981, like the similar policies of the Carter Administration earlier, are typical of the way in which demagogues use the cupidity of the credulous populace, to ruin the future of the majority of not only the lower eighty percentile of the population's income-brackets, but also those greedy fools who lusted for such measures of "free trade" and "fiscal austerity." Thus did the politicians who pushed such policies of "deregulation," "free trade," and austerity, not only loot the majority of our population, but created, beginning with the Carter Administration, the chronic Federal and other debt-crises which have plagued us as a result of Carter's so-called "fiscal policies," ever since.
Thus, in the present crisis, the first obligation of any professed defender of democracy, is that he or she must see matters as Solon of Athens did: to hold the mass of the people chiefly responsible for the folly which lures them into bringing their own suffering upon them.
What makes the overwhelming majority among the people of Europe and North America as typically self-corrupted by their own opportunism, as they are today, is to be found in the popularity of the reductionist form of philosophical conceits of the empiricist, Cartesian, Kantian, and existentialist. The relevant, contrasting principle to be considered, is the following summary of the argument made here earlier--as I have emphasized the same principle in numerous earlier published locations. The fact that these corrupting philosophical outlooks are rightly called "Romanticism," points explicitly to the origin of the corruption which is merely reflected by the modern empiricist, existentialist, and so on.
The proximate origin of all of the underlying evils in modern European society, is nothing other than the continuing influence of the characteristic philosophical and moral world-outlook of the general population of pagan Rome, whom the ancient Romans described by the name for "predator," the populari. Hence, the depravity of vox populi then, and of the kind of "popular opinion" described by Walter Lippmann and his admirers, today.
It is by appealing successfully to the baser impulses of the people, that demagogues succeed so often, as in the U.S.A. of the past several decades, in corrupting the majority among the people into ruining themselves as they have this the recent quarter-century to date.
Therefore, ask yourself the question which every child should be able to answer, before that young person should be considered morally qualified to graduate from adolescence to the authority of being an adult: "Since, by now, you know that all individual human beings are born, and will die, what, when you are dead, will be your interest in having lived? Now, recognizing that challenge, how will you act to defend that self-interest, while you are still alive to qualify yourself to act according to that interest? Now, having thought about that question, consider another: What criticism must you make of persons who believe that their self-interest in living, is definable in terms of sense-perception, or of related notions of perception of pleasure and pain, or of gains in the immediate here and now?" The adolescent who can not answer that question competently, is not yet sufficiently mature, morally, to be considered a responsible, sane adult, to be a true citizen.[65]
Certainly, by that standard, very few of Wall Street's bankers and lawyers were morally sane in the time of Coolidge, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt; fewer are morally sane today. Equally rotted-out, are those who speculate in Wall Street and related conjecturable kinds of financial gains, and most of those who advise them in such ventures.
The right response to that two-fold question, points directly to the reason the U.S.A., having been rescued from its own folly by the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, slid back, after Roosevelt's death, into the spiral of moral, intellectual, and economic decadence which has gripped us for more than a quarter-century to date.
The answer is already implied in our review, above, of the principled features of the domain of cognition. We are human in the respect, that we are creatures whose primary species-characteristic is cognition. Man's relation to nature, as a species, is lodged within the process of accumulating valid discoveries of universal principle over many successive generations, a process of accumulation which enables us to increase the potential relative population-density of our species, to increase the power of mankind in and over the universe, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface. Human relations are those which serve as vehicles for the communication and shared practice of this cognitive knowledge. These relations have a discoverable character as valid universal principles--as Classical principles of artistic composition and related knowledge, just as discoveries of universal physical principles do.
These discoveries, taken together with the development of those relations, are, in their practice, the only form of human action in and upon the universe, by means of which mankind's development and relative power is increased. The act of cognition is, unlike the domain of mere sense-perception, a domain of perfectly sovereign acts by individuals, acts which occur only individually, by and in individual persons. Thus the discovery, rediscovery, and transmission of the universal physical and Classical-artistic principles by the individual, expresses the perfect, indivisible identity of the individual person, an identity which reaches to the earliest part of the universe, and the most distant yet to come. Thus, we say, that in successful exercise of the sovereign individual power of cognition, when that power is deployed for the general welfare of the human species, the individual lives not merely within the span of his, or her mortal life, but within the simultaneity of eternity.
The mentally healthy adult, is, therefore, only that person whose most powerful motivation, is to contribute to his place in that simultaneity of eternity. The morally decadent adult--the aborted adolescent merely passing biologically, but not morally, for a true adult, is the individual who compromises that fundamental self-interest, for the sake of a "bowl of pottage," for the gratifications associated with the empiricist's definition of pleasure and pain. All the greatest leaders of mankind, like Solon, were able to act for the general welfare, only because they located their own personal self-interest in the way any healthy, mature adult is self-governed by the implications of cognition. A person such as Solon, or the Christian Apostle of the Epistles, values his joyful sense of the simultaneity of eternity so much, that the playful exuberance of cognitive creativity, on that account, serves as a power he or she is able to summon, through which the true leader overwhelms any contrary baser impulses within his, or her mortal self.
In the typical, pitiable case, the individual slides into moral decadence, by muddling what should be the clear distinction between one's fundamental self-interest, as a cognitive being in the simultaneity of eternity, and those shorter-term responsibilities associated with personal material responsibilities. So muddled, the empiricist, Kantian, or existentialist, turns values upside down, in favor of the reductionist's petty and immediate, chiefly sensual rewards.
The great distinction of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as a national leader--and more--of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, contributions which set him apart from nearly all others participating in that role, reflects exactly that joyful sense of the simultaneity of eternity within himself, as he expressed this clearly in his "mountain-top" address. Thus, do all true leaders resist vigilantly, the tempting, corrupting tugs upon their coat-tails, of "reminders" of personal interest and desire for popularity, and act against such temptations, by acting solely on behalf of the simultaneity of eternity, that as opposed to what morally less matured persons regard as a calculable appreciation of one's own "self-interest."
The specific quality of corruption which has contributed the most to the decadence of the U.S. population (among others) recently, is policies, such as those of public and higher education, which reject the notion that ascertainable truth, as Plato's Socrates defines truth, for example, is superior to all contrary mere opinion. The tendency to degrade education, and policy-shaping generally, to mere learning of opinion, or of deductions from learned opinion, is at the root of the accelerating disaster called U.S. public education. The spread of the teaching and acceptance of so-called "existential philosophy," exemplifies the moral rot which is destroying our nation and its people today. The characteristic feature of all such moral decadence, is the resort to the reductionist's caprice, of defining everything in the particular and the small, as in the so-called "Robinson Crusoe," deductive models of economy.
The Morals and Sanity of Economics in Action
What I have just described is not some moral teaching to be imposed upon reality otherwise defined. This is not a "You shall not do this," "You must not do that," kind of moralizing. It is not a judgment imposed externally upon the act otherwise generated. It is as the Apostle Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13. It is a morality which inheres in the generation of the action. This morality is, once again, playfully exuberant in quality, a joyful sense of pleasure in doing good, as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin emphasized. I explain.
The typical reductionist's view, places physical science and morality in separate compartments. Physical science, as commonly misdefined by such fellows, is viewed as morally indifferentist[66] respecting both the manner in which the act is generated, and also respecting its effect. For the reductionists and kindred fellows, the moral implications of the act and its effect, are irrelevant to the act as such. Science, on the contrary, must, from the inception of that action itself, judge the morality of both the generation of the act and its effect. There is nothing inherently murky in such a theorem; the sense of murkiness may arise in the reader's opinion, but only as a delusion, as a result of ignoring a point of universal principle, a point which ought to be obvious from the arguments I have developed at earlier points here.
To sum up those earlier arguments on this point. The highest level of morality knowable by human beings, is expressed by the division among one level of apparent universal entropy, that typical of ostensibly non-living processes, and two higher levels, the quality of characteristic anti-entropy expressed, respectively, as life per se, and cognition. Mankind humanizing the universe through cognitive action, is the highest scientific standard of morality in this universe. Some may be pleased to recognize, that that argument coincides with a scientific reading of the relevant verses of Genesis 1; but, nonetheless, even those not Jews, Christians, nor Muslims, should recognize, as in the case of Plato's definition of the Creator of the universe (as the Composer) in his Timaeus dialogue, the fact of the matter is otherwise evident from the scientific evidence as such. That which contributes to cognitive anti-entropy in the universe is good; that which, in net effect, works to the contrary, is bad. Thus, from that vantage point, the morality of the action lies in the characteristic relative anti-entropy truthfully expressed in the generation of that act.
This general principle spills over from the study of the impact of human action upon the universe, into the action of the individual person. The moral individual action, is that which works toward the related effect in respect to the action of humanity as a whole.
These considerations are expressed even in what might seem to be relatively simple, ordinary ways.
The principles of sanity in economics, are derived, axiomatically, from the two fundamental principles of physical economy presented and discussed earlier: 1) The human species' increased power in and over the universe, as measured in physical terms, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface; 2) The relation among persons, by means of which individual members of societies cooperate, to defend and enhance in common their physical power in and over nature.
In practice, these principles are immediately expressed chiefly within the culture of the nation-state--or, what should be a sovereign nation-state. On the condition that that nation's policies are efficiently directed to promoting the benefit of these principles among nations, the individual's contribution to the nation, is implicitly a contribution to the human species as a whole, is an act lodged within the simultaneity of eternity. In all cases, it is the physical action, through which this contribution to the anti-entropy of the nation and world is effected, which is the primary focus.
Since a people can deliberate its self-government only through the medium of a common, literate form of language-culture, and also a common principle of self-governance, it is necessary that nations be both individuals, and truly sovereign ones. "Democracy" in a Tower of Babel, is a recipe for inevitable tyrannies. "Melting Pots" are a source of strength for nations, on the condition that the young are educated to a high degree of literacy in the form of common language-culture, in addition to whatever other languages might be in use. The cultural development of the population and the cognitively defined relations among its members, is implicitly an integral feature of that physical action.
However, it should be obvious to each such nation-state, that the effect of its actions, as a nation, on the world at large, must tend to strengthen the development of a community of interest in both the existence, growth, and well-being of a community of principle among sovereign nation-states. In such a configuration, the citizen finds his identity as a patriot realized as that of a world-citizen, through his or her nation's participation in a community of sovereign nation-states.
This patriotic individual's view of the necessary form of physical-economic action, without any initial concern for either money-price of purchases, or nominal price-valuation of titles to property, defines the proper meaning of economic sanity.
The notion of price must be derived, not from the standpoint of monetary theory, but from a determination of the typical cost of maintaining a family household at the level of cultural development and potential relative population-density to which the nation intends to rise. The cost of that household, is then determined according to both the level of productivity and the rate of increase of physical-economic productivity, per capita, to be achieved by the society as a whole.
Crucial in determining both feasible levels of productivity and also necessary physical cost of household income per capita, is the determination of the life-expectancy of the population, and the birth rate. The determination of the physical-economic bill of consumption for such households, is then to be applied to the division of labor, and composition of directly productive and other employment in the society. This estimate must include provision for the physical implications of a chosen, or otherwise expected pathway of scientific and technological progress. By stipulating the margin of profit as a margin of physical-economic growth, rather than in monetary terms, and stating this solely in physical-economic, rather than financial terms, we are able to synthesize estimates for national income and national product, in mutually cohering physical-economic, non-financial terms. The interdependency among the indicated "market baskets," thus defines a notion of estimated physical-economic price, a price gauged against a standard household of an operative employed in direct physical production of necessary components of that national-economic market-basket.
The subsequent assigning of a financial price to that family-income requirement, provides us the means to create a relative scale for assigning market-value to the money issued as national currency.
That does not mean that the real economy will work exactly as such an expert synthesis of national income and national product suggests. Rather, such a carefully crafted synthesis provides society, government, and others, a rational basis for assessing the way in which the results of policies of practice should be measured. When such a synthesized estimate is crafted, we must present such an estimate with the warning, that individual initiative will cause the outcome to differ, for better or worse, from the normative estimate I have just outlined. The function of the estimate, is to provide us a mechanism of analysis for assessing the impact of those deviations, and of the individual initiatives which have contributed to such (beneficial, or other) changes. This synthesis also serves as a model for the sane view of economy and economic matters by individuals within society.
A moment later, here, I shall clarify the nature of the referenced discrepancy between projected and actual performance of the economy as a whole. At the present moment, continue to focus upon the issue of the economic outlook of the sane adult individual.
The sane individual adult views his or her role in the economy, in terms of actions which induce those kinds of changes in mankind's relationship to the universe, which tend to foster improvements in the potential relative population-density of mankind. The economically sane individual believes that these actions must be taken in a timely fashion, because the results of the actions are deemed indispensably necessary, or will tend to bring about a physical improvement in mankind's relative power in and over the universe.
At the same time, in the same spirit, the sane adult seeks those forms of development of the immature members of the household in the community at large, those which both foster mankind's increased power in and over the universe, or which are necessary to foster the acquisition of, and transmission of knowledge which will foster more effective cooperation in effecting mankind's efforts to increase our species' physical power in and over the universe.
The sane adult does not think primarily in terms of money as wealth, but simply recognizes the functioning of money as a medium of sale and purchase of products and services whose consumption will benefit the ongoing effort to increase mankind's power in and over the universe.
It is fair to say, that the sane adult can say to the other members of his or her family and community: "You need me, for what I can contribute to our common interest," a common interest which reduces to maintaining the processes by means of which man is enabled to increase our species' power in and over the universe. Within the scope of "You need me," the individual demands the right to exert a relevant degree of sovereignty in dealing with his own affairs. The sane adult requires the right to exert some discretion in defining that right. A sane society demands that he enjoy precisely such freedom.
Such individual rights include the right of the child to relevant nurture, including the education which brings the child through the perils of adolescence, into sane maturity. This maturity must include the development of the cognitive powers of the young, and the circumstances in which the young individual is free to exert that principle of happy play which is intrinsic to cognitive activity. The development of the young, includes the right to have access to that knowledge and related personal development, which is relevant to all of the opportunities with which the ongoing, forward development of society might confront the person in the process of becoming an adult.
This principle of freedom extends to the latitude provided to the immatured and matured, to seek to develop their cognitive potentials for validatable discoveries, and to concentrate on effecting such discoveries. True entrepreneurship, as distinct from the intrinsically less creative publicly held corporation, allows individuals relatively greater latitude to innovate in ways which are of physical-economic contributions of some importance to society. And, so on, and on, thus listing various ways in which individual human nature requires a certain degree of latitude for doing what society at large might have previously regarded as among "unexpected developments."
Here, we touched the point on which doctrinaire socialist theory was inevitably a failure. However, at the present moment, it is not the failures of doctrinaire socialism, which constitute an active current threat to society. Excepting the case of the economic model known as the Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, so-called "capitalist economy," as customarily defined for today's prevalent mass news-media and popular opinion, has also been, all circumstantial factors considered, inevitably, globally, a failure even worse, and more dangerously so, than that of doctrinaire socialism. What, then, are the sane alternatives to both doctrinaire socialism and the Adam Smith variety of so-called "capitalism"? What does that question reveal, respecting the way in which a sane form of sovereign nation-state economy must function?
The axiomatic failure of doctrinaire socialism, was essentially its denial in practice of the function of the cognitive powers of the individual, in generating an increase in the productive powers of labor. The myth-ridden reliance upon the supposed "innate (epiphenomenal) wisdom" of the proletarian, was an imitative reflection of the same reductionist method associated with the characteristic delusions of the so-called Eighteenth-Century English and French empiricist-Cartesian Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, as typified by Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, saw the right price, and right policies of a society, as solely the consequence of some mysterious statistical principle of free interplay among individual wills and individuals' willful actions. The doctrinaire socialists adopted the same method of apologetics, to argue that such socialist interest is the mysterious quality of wisdom secreted by the collectively interacting wills of the "working class." These socialists proposed that the remedy for the ills of society, is a state operating in the so-perceived interest of that "working class."
Thus, unfortunately, the policy-interest of that "working class," was assumed by the doctrinaire, to be defined in the same mysterious, morally perverted fashion that Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Vice-President Al Gore have defined, the same kind of irrational, statistical, so-called "democratic" process for their mystical, proposed, British capitalist style in utopias.
The moral appeal of the doctrinaire socialist cause, which it had no need to regret, was its stated commitment to the general welfare of all of the population, especially the welfare of those which the oligarchical tradition, including the modern financier-oligarchy, relegated effectively to the status of either chattel slavery or human cattle in another form. The socialist thus appealed to a just cause, but his proposed remedy for injustice, was simplistic, mistaken, and ultimately a failure. The root of that mistake, was to treat mankind as Friedrich Engels did, as virtually a more highly evolved beast, rather than as actual, that is to say, cognitive, beings. The typical error of all of the doctrinaire socialists, on this account, was to lump the essential intelligentsia of society, its driving-force for actual progress, into the status of an alien political class, into the minestrone of a lackey-like petit-bourgeoisie.
This mechanistic delusion of those doctrinaires, had the effect, not only of lumping the naturally secreted intelligentsia of the people as a whole, into the same pot with sundry oligarchical lackeys and the like. It is right for any person, or persons being treated as virtually human cattle, to fight for his freedom, and to choose his friends, and adversaries accordingly. However, to create a fraudulent doctrine of "class struggle," such as the dubious Friedrich Engels' doctrines of "the opposable thumb" and "the horny hand of labor," the anarcho-syndicalist delusion that ideas are drippings of sweat on the workshop floor, is a myth intrinsically as counterproductive as it is also immoral, anti-scientific, and generally disgusting.[67]
A Classical humanist could have no principled quarrel with the socialist, if that socialist would have come to his senses on this matter of human nature, on the issue of the function of the intelligentsia in the European Greek-Classical tradition in science and art. If the socialist recognized his error on this count, and corrected it, the former doctrinaire would recognize the economic-policy implications of the critical leading role in progress of such a Classical intelligentsia, an intelligentsia which should be organically rooted in the cognition-oriented, mass education of the entire population.
That socialist should have heeded historian-poet-tragedian Friedrich Schiller on the tragic lesson of the French Revolution's degeneration into a Jacobin Terror: A great moment had found a little people. He should have paid closer attention to the poet Shelley's A Defence of Poetry; it is the poets--the Classical scientific discoverers of universal principles, and the Classical composers of great art, who are the true expression of the interest of the people as a whole, those often unheralded legislators who lead the lawful way into progress. All known progress in the history of mankind, has been the fruit of the influence of poets of that kind. The true interest of wise nations, lies not in popular opinion, but in the leading role of its cultivated cognitive intellects, perhaps "a philosopher king" as Plato defines this.
It is not the capitalist system, as Marx or any other opponent of the Leibniz-Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List-Lincoln American System of political-economy defined capitalist system, which led the way to the physical-economic successes in technological progress and rise of standard of living in the U.S.A. or western Europe. It was the role of the scientist, Classical artist, and cognition-driven entrepreneur, such as the technologically progressive farmer, which the Carter Administration sought to render extinct, not the financier-oligarchy-controlled corporation, which generated the scientific and technological progress on which the sometime excellence of the products of large corporate enterprises depended.[68]
This successful contribution of the entrepreneur depended, in turn, upon large-scale public works, and kindred undertakings of government, and the role of government in regulating domestic and foreign trade, banking, and currency, which created the environment indispensable for the successful role of the technologically innovative entrepreneur. This, in turn, depended upon the role of Classical thinkers in the struggle to establish those forms of education, in which the commitment to discovering the truth or falsehood of any opinion, especially the popular ones, produced the thinkers who could innovate in the way progress required.
The conflict of interest, during the preceding centuries and now, assumes the form, chiefly, of a conflict in vital interest between a ruling financier oligarchy, and that majority of a population--such as the lower eighty percentile of today's family-income brackets--which the ruling financier-oligarchies regard virtually as human cattle. That is, in a manner of speaking, evidence of a certain kind of "class conflict." The objective should be, not to bring about the supremacy of any class, but, rather, to free society from the grip of such evils as the legacies of the pagan Roman empire, including the ruling role of today's financier-oligarchies over virtually the entirety of the world.
The American System of political-economy, that of President Abraham Lincoln, for example, provides the only presently available working model, of the kind of political-economy which meets today's requirements, and is free of a required leading role of a financier oligarchy. That system, premised upon a government-regulated division of labor between the public and private functions of a healthy national economy, is the point of reference from which the discussion of adoptable norms for new forms of development of national economy, and international cooperation, should develop.[69]
I must now clarify one crucial point respecting the principled characteristics of the true entrepreneurial firm, before coming to my summary on the subject of the deadly political implications of today's prevalent economic insanity.
Insanity and Linearity
As I have elaborated this in sundry earlier published locations, one of the most common contributions to economic lunacy, both among economists and the population generally, is the popular delusion, that economics is rightly an offshoot of financial accounting. The same popular delusion, but expressed in a more vicious, more pernicious form, is the belief in mathematical economics, as defined by Bertrand Russell acolyte John von Neumann, et al., and the cult of "information theory," popularly associated with another Russell acolyte, Norbert Wiener.[70]
Recently, former Director of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, warned against the currently continuing folly of the U.S. and certain other governments, in failing to recognize the urgency of reforming the present global financial and monetary system. In this connection, Camdessus explained that the collapse of the U.S.-based Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) entity, during August-September 1998, had brought the entire global system to the threshold of a general collapse, but that nothing had been done at that time to deal with the fact that the global system was already overripe for such a catastrophe.[71] The state of affairs has become much worse, because of the measures which the U.S. Clinton Administration, and other G-7 nations took, during October 1998, and since.
The crux of the LTCM case as such, was that the organization's foolishness was directly the result of basing its policies on a Nobel Prize-winning mathematical-economics formulation, the Black-Scholes formula. That profoundly incompetent, but Nobel Prize-winning formula, is typical of the methods used by leading institutions of that global, London-centered international financier oligarchy which rules and ruins the entire world's present financier and monetary systems today. The LTCM case is an excellent choice of example, of the follies and consequent disasters inhering upon either economists' or governments' excessive reliance upon financial accounting methods, and of any attempt to construct a method of economic analysis which is based upon the linear assumptions widely prevalent in academic economics doctrine today.
At root, behind the lessons to be learned from the LTCM catastrophe, are the delusions to which I have just referred: 1) The delusion, that competent economics can be derived from today's generally accepted financial-accounting practice, and 2) the delusion, that those methods of so-called mathematical economics taught in most of the world's universities during recent decades, are not intrinsically insane. Focus upon this two-fold source of the common failures of governmental and other economic policy-shaping today.
The core of the issue here, is the fact, that on the one side, current practice of financial accounting and most academically revered economics dogmas, are based upon a lunatic, anti-scientific presumption, the presumption that economic processes can be represented, with reasonable approximations, by linear mathematical methods. The fact of the matter is, that both scientific and technological progress, and cognitive processes, are intrinsically non-linear in ways and degrees which render ridiculous the efforts of Russell acolytes, such as Wiener and von Neumann, to concoct an explanation of the meaning of "non-linear" which evades the definitions, implicit and stated, supplied by Gauss-Riemann principles of multiply-connected manifolds. A few of the simpler aspects of this point are sufficient for the purpose of locating the pivotal issues of economic sanity.
The general problem for science as such is twofold.
The first point is, that in competent physical science, we do not attempt to derive the principles governing a process from formal mathematics--e.g., as if at the blackboard, or by a digital-computer model. Instead of trying to create a map of the world by mathematical deduction, we must create a mathematics which conforms to the actually existing physical map, as Kepler's and Gauss's successive revolutions in astrophysics typify the use of the physical-experimental map to define mathematics. The foolishness of the Black-Scholes formula is, that the very idea of using such a formula for defining an economic process, even a real-life financial process, is an act of insanity in and of itself. The woes of Vice-President Al Gore's cronies and financial backers at LTCM, were inevitable, and the firm's sufferings a just payment for its foolish reliance on a device as inherently silly, scientifically, as the Black-Scholes formula.
That is the same kind of foolishness, carried to an extreme which shows, as David Hilbert discovered the proverbial hard way, the intrinsic incompetence of the way in which "information theory's" Norbert Wiener and "systems analysis's" John von Neumann thought about the real world.
The second point is, that in competent physical science generally, and in competent economics in particular, we do not rely upon the measurement of things; we rely, instead, on the study of actions, not "Euclidean," linear, space-time relations among things as such. All measurements of things and their apparent space-time relations, must be grounded in the study of a specific quality of action. In this case, by action, we signify, primarily, a change in state of the process being considered, a transformation within the process studied.
All other kinds of measurements are made as subsidiary to standards of measurement (e.g., formulas, constants, etc.) derived from experimental definitions of transformations associated with change in state.
The most important class of such transformations, is Riemannian: a change in the multiply-connected array of universal principles. This array may represent our study of the universe in general, or a subsidiary sort of universality, a phase-space, such as that represented by the science of physical economy in general. All the most significant forms of action, those associated with qualitative changes in state, correspond to the kinds of ideas associated with cognition, not with sense-perception as such.
For example, an increase in the typical productivity of an economy, as productive is defined in physical-economic terms, is the result of such an intrinsically non-linear technological or cultural transformation, or of a combination of both. These transformations can not be predicted by what are generally accepted, and intrinsically linear financial-accounting methods. In general, all such changes are essentially qualitative, not quantitative as such. The effect may be reflected in terms which could be measured as if the changes had been quantitative, but the action by means of which that change was induced was not determined in a way which is simply quantifiable in a linear way. The same rule applies to the specific kinds of physical processes associated with qualitative transformations to higher levels of productivity. The same applies to downshifts in levels of productivity.
All such downshifts and upshifts pertain immediately to mankind's physical relationship to nature, man's physical transformations in the universe. Generally, we mean changes in state. Thus, it is the quality of physical action performed by the productive operative, or other personal actor, which is the primary point of reference for defining the characteristics, direction, and manifest rate of change of real economies. Thus, it is the ratio of physical actors, such as production operatives, to total employed adult population, and the ratio of that employed population, in general, to the total population, which provides the competent economist, or manager of an enterprise, the structure for the evidence to be taken into account. That, and only that, represents a sane view of economic processes; contrary views are intrinsically not sane ones.
Other aspects of the composition of the total population must be taken into account. These include the demographic composition, and sickness-rates among the total population, and also of each of its functionally distinguishable component sectors. This includes, presently, such factors as the dependency of an educated total population on average life-expectancies approaching eighty or more years, for example. These include, similarly, both birth rates and mortality and illness rates among infants and children. For example, a high birth rate among a prosperous, healthy, long-lived people, combined with high rates of investment in both basic economic infrastructure, and scientific and technological progress, virtually assures high rates of real economic growth. These examples typify the way in which qualitative factors determine the likely and actual directions in which an economy will go, often contrary to what short- to medium-term reading of financial-accounting estimates suggests.
It is actions which express an improvement in such qualities of which the population and its activities are composed, which are of primary importance for economic analysis and long-range forecasting. It is the choices of changes in those physical qualities, which are the action on which the economist or other relevant executive or professional must principally focus his or her attention. These kinds of action, including the fruits of scientific progress, are intrinsically non-linear in a way quacks like Russell and his acolytes would, and did deny. These are the actions which, as causes, determine the physical-economic rate of growth.
A Symbol-Minded Pair
The natural political constituency for characters as deranged as both Governor George W. Bush and Vice-President Gore are, is the symbol-minded dupes of what have been, up to the last financial-market reports at this moment of writing, a large ration of the upper twenty percent of family-income brackets, especially those who share the world-outlook predominant among those employed in financial services. It is such symbol-minded dupes who exert the largest degree of influence on the Republican and Democratic parties' machines at this time.
To call them symbol-minded, is not a witty sort of insult; it is a simple statement of fact. They believe that money, even imaginary money, a mere financial-accounting symbol, is a primary value, the ruler which holds sway, as if self-evidently, over all things consumable or otherwise pleasurable. This kind of symbol-mindedness has a long history behind it. If we take into account a few selected, typical elements of that history, we can better understand, and, therefore, deal more effectively with the kind of lunacy which pervades the minds of most in that upper twenty-percentile bracket today.
In contrast to those lunatics, the American Revolution of 1776-1789, was made possible by the growing political influence of a cultural revolution spreading throughout Europe. This was the so-called Classical revolution, led by the avowed defenders of the legacies of Gottfried Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach, the leading cultural opposition to the French and British Enlightenment of that time.
The scientist, and leading then-influential advocate of Leibniz's work, Göttingen University's Abraham Kästner, Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn, were the central figures in this revolution. Without the direct and effective intervention of these leaders of the Classical-Greek resurgence, there would have been no Carl Gauss, no Bernhard Riemann, no Josef Haydn, no Wolfgang Mozart, no Friedrich Schiller, no Johann Goethe, no Ludwig van Beethoven, no Franz Schubert, no political liberation of the Jews in Central Europe, and so forth and so on. It was this Classical upsurge, to which Benjamin Franklin was personally and directly linked, which viewed the American republican cause's victory over the British monarchy as the hope for the cause of freedom inside Europe itself.[72]
If we trace the Classical influence into the Seventeenth-Century North America around the Winthrops and Mathers, and the role of Mather follower Benjamin Franklin, it was the influence of Leibniz, through these and related channels, which is chiefly responsible for the political philosophy and economic thinking of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the 1789 Federal Constitution, and the 1789-1791 economic policies of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
After more than a dozen years of the disastrous confusion and corruption within the Federalist Party, after President George Washington's retirement and death, it was this legacy which was revived, around the publishing house of Benjamin Franklin's adopted successor, Mathew Carey,[73] and among the American Whigs gathered around the Careys, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and the Carey-Clay-Adams protégé Abraham Lincoln. It was this legacy, which Franklin Roosevelt had inherited by descent from his Hamilton-allied ancestor, which Roosevelt tapped for his role as national leader during 1932-1945. It is a political-cultural legacy which, I am proud to say, is also my own.
These observations supply us a bench-mark for mapping the implications of the symbol-mindedness typical of today's core supporters of today's leading politician substitutes for Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Bush and Gore.[74] Go back to the crucial issues between the British monarchy and American patriots during 1714-1789 (in particular). Locate these issues of that period within the context of the issues already implicit in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the founding which set the cornerstone for the later emergence of our republic.
The British monarchy which was brought to power in 1714, as a legacy of the tyrant William of Orange, was a captive creature of the wide-ranging Venetian financier-oligarchy of that time. That oligarchy had reestablished its roots in England under Henry VIII, strengthened that control through the accession of James I, and, with the defeat and death of Queen Anne by the Duke of Marlborough's accomplices, established the newly created British monarchy as the leading rival of the Netherlands for the position of the dominant financier-oligarchical sea-power among the nations of Europe. It was the political implications of the Venetian financier-oligarchical influence, from about the time of William of Orange's coup d'état in England, through the accession of George I, which defined an irrepressible conflict of interest between the leading forces in the North American English-speaking colonies, and the established British monarchy, a monarchy which became increasingly an instrument of the British East India Company.
This conflict is made clearer, by emphasizing that the 1776 Declaration of Independence features an explicit rejection of the philosophy of John Locke, and of the policies of Lord Shelburne's lackey Adam Smith. Smith, for example, was deployed to work on a quasi-Physiocratic design for crushing the economy then developing in the North American colonies, and also for ruining the American patriots' admirers in France. Smith's Wealth of Nations was composed and published in 1776 with the specific, included intent of destroying the cause of the American patriots.
When one contrasts such typical American writings as Hamilton's 1791 On the Subject of Manufactures, to the symbol-minded mentality of Adam Smith and his followers, the significance of such symbol-mindedness in leading U.S. circles today, should be immediately recognized. In Hamilton, production of real wealth is primary; money and credit must be organized to ensure that they work to the ends of the physical economy's development along the lines described in that report to the U.S. Congress. The symbol-minded supporters of Bush and Gore today, are instinctively the American Tories of 2000, as Anton Chaitkin, for example, exposes those perennially treasonous Tories in his Treason in America.[75]
These symbol-minded modern American Tories, have adopted, and imposed a doctrine of usury, as a replacement for the former notion of a physical profit of enterprise. That is to emphasize, that formally, from the time Franklin Roosevelt first became President, until the calamitous election of fascistic Professor Milton Friedman's Richard Nixon, the economic and related policy of the U.S. have been, predominantly, at least, in the Hamilton-American Whig tradition. Under all patriotic U.S. Presidents, it had been the function of the state to develop basic economic infrastructure, and to promote the benefits of hard-commodity trade and productive enterprise, to the end of promoting the general welfare of the nation and its population as a whole. Under those Presidents, and with the support of what emerged as the American Whig current in U.S. political life, regulatory and related restraints were imposed and maintained, to protect this American System of political-economy from the shark-like encroachments of the symbol-minded, pro-usury faction.
From the period of Wall Street's preparing for the November 1968 Nixon election-victory, commitments were already being put into place, leading toward breaking up the post-war Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange-rates, and also virtually ripping out the general welfare clause from the Preamble of the Constitution, as the Mont Pelerin Society's fascistic Professor Friedman had insisted be done. The pivotal assault was the break-up of the former Bretton Woods agreements, in mid-August 1971, and quickly succeeding establishment of a ruinous, global floating-exchange-rate system, instead. The 1977-1981 Carter Administration, continuing the Friedmanite legacy of the Nixon Administration, looted and virtually destroyed what the 1933-1966 development of the U.S. economy had built up, from out of the wreckage left behind by the Coolidge 1920s. Deregulation, and related actions, created a ruin from which the economy has never recovered; and subsequent Presidencies made the situation consistently worse than Carter left it.
Today, there are only a few scattered surviving relics of the great work built up over about three decades following Franklin Roosevelt's election. The economic power within the U.S. no longer lies in our nation's production of wealth, but in the production of the symbolic power to buy up what is a rapidly diminishing rate of output of the world's real wealth. Ironically, most of this national purchasing power depends upon an avalanche of funds our nation borrows, with no means to repay, from the rest of the world. Taking into account the soaring U.S. current account deficit, the additional trillions borrowed annually from abroad, and the forces of hyperinflation beginning to show themselves in some commodity markets, the U.S. is sliding toward a bankruptcy of the symbols, as well as substance of financial power. As part of this, quality employment in modern productive technology, is exported to cheap-labor sources abroad, spreading and deepening the misery among the lower eighty percentile of our family-income brackets.
When that hyperinflated mass of nominal financial assets collapses, as is inevitable, soon, one way or another, reality will strike. An economic and social crisis beyond belief will be the immediate, and now early result--unless there is establishment of a new monetary system, empowered to put the old system through drastic measures of bankruptcy-reorganization.
The crucial point is: there never was a rational reason this had to happen. There is no rational reason, for example, that there is poverty suffered anywhere in the U.S.A. today. But for the downward plunge begun with the Nixon Administration, programs such as the Kennedy manned Moon landing program, had put us on a course of forced-draft scientific and technological progress, which, combined with the 1960s Civil Rights revolution, would have eliminated most of the kind of want which has been increasing in the U.S.A. since 1970-1971. Look again at Figure 3, showing the decline, since 1977, in the percentile of total national income of the lower eighty percentile of family-income brackets. This was never necessary; it was a creation of "The Baby Doomer" generation, first as a politically potent new, Carter constituency of "Sixty-Eighters," and, a decade later, a generation which had been culled and groomed to enter the higher ranks of executive and related power in and outside government.
The Looming Threat of Fascism
The result of this implicitly treasonous ruin of our once-great economy, is the presently rather immediate threat of a fascist regime in the U.S.A., and also elsewhere, in many nations around the world. Otherwise, the front-running status of Presidential pre-candidates such as Governor George W. Bush and Vice-President Gore, were not possible.
Am I saying that these candidates are fascists? Absolutely. For anyone who has studied the European history of the so-called Conservative Revolution, which gave us Mussolini, Hitler, and the Frankfurt School, among others, Bush and Gore, like Prime Minister Tony "Mussolini" Blair, are strictly fascist types, steeped in exactly the same variety of ever-decadent European Romanticism which produced the fascist insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s. Gore and Bush are of this European tradition; the shading of difference between them, on the one side, and the Mussolinis and Hitlers, is that these candidates represent the "Southern Fried" varieties of the same intellectual currents which gave the world European fascism.
For the benefit of those who squirm at that characterization of Bush, Gore, and Blair, I summarize the relevant points concerning the development of fascism in modern Europe since the first notable case of fascism, that of France's Napoleon Bonaparte.
Fascism, as Benito Mussolini insisted, for example, was the intent to establish a form of modern state modelled upon the pagan Rome of the Caesars. The tendency in this direction was not new to medieval and modern Europe; it was the crisis conditions under which the attempt was made, as by Bonaparte, Mussolini, Hitler, and others, which made the attempt so menacing, so capable of being carried out. The specific distinction of modern fascism, since Napoleon's dictatorship, is that it has been, as Britain's Lord Shelburne intended, a step toward resurrection of a global world empire based upon dedication to a ruling financier-oligarchical form of interest.
On that account, Mussolini and Hitler were products of special conditions resulting directly from the continuation of circumstances established by the post-World War I Versailles Treaty, a Treaty appropriately associated with a notorious Ku Klux Klan fanatic and incumbent U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. However, although Versailles created that potential, the rise of the fascist regimes was not inevitable. It was the financier oligarchy of London and Wall Street--typified by the circles of Montagu Norman, Averell Harriman, and Governor Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, et al., who combined forces, in support of Norman's Hjalmar Schacht, to foster that potential, and usher the otherwise unelectable Mussolini and Hitler, like Gore and Governor Bush today, into state power.
Although neither Mussolini nor Hitler were elected to their positions as Roman-style dictators, the popular forces rallied behind them were a numerous plurality, and fully in the modern fascist tradition established by Napoleon Bonaparte. The root of that fascist tradition, was, and is today, the legacy of ancient pagan Rome, or what is known in modern European civilization as the anti-Classical, Romantic tradition in politics, science, and culture generally, the same tradition represented by the British and French Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment. Fascism, as typified by Napoleon Bonaparte's capture of power and reign, is the natural outgrowth of that anti-Classical Enlightenment, just as the founding of the United States was an outgrowth of the Classical legacy.
To recognize the seriousness of the fascist potential represented by otherwise unelectable political figures such as Blair, Bush, and Gore today, we have but to compare today's circumstances with those which developed in France beginning July 14, 1789, the occasion of the London asset's, (a Benjamin Franklin adversary) the Duke of Orléans' storming of the Bastille as part of an election-campaign for the former French Finance Minister, Orléans' and London's candidate for Prime Minister of France, Jacques Necker, who had just bankrupted the government of France.
All of the events leading into the Bonaparte coup d'état, including the role of Orléans and Necker, were directly the result of the orchestration of the Jacobin Terror by the head of the British Foreign Office's secret committee, Lord Shelburne's protégé Jeremy Bentham. Bentham and his committee directed the Jacobin terrorists from London, where Bentham personally had housed and trained Danton and Marat, for example. Most of the famous speeches of the terrorists within France's revolutionary government, were actually written, in London, by Bentham's secret committee. It was, for example, on the order of the British government of William Pitt the Younger, actually the work of Bentham, that the Austrians incarcerated the Marquis de Lafayette in the dungeon at Olmütz.[76]
By 1792, France was being invaded by virtually all of the nations of Europe; the defeat and dismemberment of the nation were considered virtually assured. The Jacobin regime responded to this hopeless situation, by passing the prospectively inevitable defeat of France to the hands of a defense minister Lazard Carnot, who was already known as, and soon proved himself one of the genuine military geniuses of the century. By the Spring of 1794, France's forces under the direction of Carnot, had been revolutionized to such a degree, that not only were all of the invading armies defeated, but the new model of French army had been built into a virtually undefeatable force on the continent. At that point, the dictators Robespierre and Saint-Just moved to have the declared "Organizer of Victory," Carnot, guillotined. It was an ill-advised venture on their part; it was they who went to the guillotine, instead.
However, in the meantime, the national intellectual elite of France had been so much butchered and otherwise decimated, that it was no longer capable of echoing the perspective of constitutional reform intended by Lafayette et al. at the beginning of the revolutionary crisis. Bentham's London and the Habsburg chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich, had accomplished their intended end, of eradicating that faction in France whose support had been chiefly responsible for the victory of the American struggle for independence, and, hopefully, soon eradicating the United States itself. France's military victory, and the scientific and technological revolution launched by Carnot, Monge, Legendre, et al., had given France the potential to be the leading nation-state power of this planet; but the hecatombs of the Jacobin Terror had stripped France of much of what had been the needed leadership in depth.
So, in such circumstances, Barras brought Napoleon out of obscurity into power, and Napoleon repaid the favor by dumping Barras, and then went on to declare himself the new Caesar of Europe, creating a regime based, from top to bottom, on the anti-Classical Romantic tradition of ancient pagan Rome. He did not omit the step of declaring himself de facto Pontifex Maximus of the state religion.
It was the triumph of Napoleon as Emperor, which turned the tide in Europe against the Classical legacy of the late Eighteenth Century. The stunning impact of Napoleon's triumphs, especially after the crushing of the Prussians in the twin battles of Jena-Auerstadt, was that the Romantic movement in politics, philosophy, and art, became the widely sponsored trend in political fashion throughout Europe. Hegel, and to a lesser degree Goethe, were caught up in the German side of the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Hegel emerging as the Prussian state philosopher of the Metternichean, fascistic Carlsbad decrees, and Hegel's accomplice Savigny setting forth both the neo-Kantian dogma of Romanticism, and setting forth a form of the Romantic dogma in law which set the stage for the emergence of the Nazi law-system of the 1930s and early 1940s. Thus, did a revived Rameau supersede Bach and Beethoven, through Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner. Thus, the Romantic wave of cultural pessimism, from Schopenhauer, through Savigny, and Nietzsche, led to the rise of Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Martin Heidegger.
But for the success of the circles of then-deceased Friedrich Schiller's circles of friends, around Wilhelm von Humboldt, in orchestrating the Prussian reformers' role in orchestrating the defeat of Napoleon in Russia and during the ensuing Prussian Liberation Wars, the triumph of the Romantic movement would have been virtually complete.
To understand the fascist threat represented by the incumbency of Blair and the candidacies of Bush and Gore today, we have but to compare present circumstances with those of post-Jacobin Terror France. Given a spoiled and demoralized nation, such as Germany in the wake of the 1923 hyperinflation, or a France in which none of the political viable contending forces were positioned to assume responsibility for government, the danger of a Romantic, which is to say Caesar-like dictator, was a grave possibility. If one simply eliminates a qualified leader or two, as Montagu Norman, Harriman, et al. orchestrated the dumping of Germany's Chancellor von Schleicher in favor of Hitler's dictatorship, a modern Caesar, like the Emperor Napoleon, is a likely result.
Remember, that at the time Hitler was put into power, by forces of Montagu Norman, Harriman, et al., Hitler's popularity was in decline. As stated by Hjalmar Schacht, those backers of Hitler acted out of desperation, knowing that if they could not push him into power then, the possibility of doing so would evaporate. So, just as an intrinsically unelectable Gore's shallow support, is now rapidly evaporating, thus tending to ensure a Bush victory--or an Electoral College jam-up, Wall Street's drive to make the otherwise unelectable Bush and Gore the only candidates presented as likely winners, now assumes a quality of desperation, like that which motivated London and the Harrimans, et al., in the case of Hitler's waning chances.
Gore and Bush are intended to be either fascist dictators themselves, or place-holders for the fascist tyrant to supersede either of them. That is why thuggish intellectual perverts, such as Bush and Gore, were selected to be the "only" contending candidates to be considered at this time.
That can change, and suddenly; but, for the moment, that is the way things are.
Behind all of these matters we have considered in this report, one of the crucial points we have underscored stands out above all else. The often bitter lesson to be learned from an aging Solon's warning to his fellow Athenians, is, that, to the present day, humanity has not grown up to true moral and intellectual adulthood. As Schiller warned, in assessing the spectacle of the Jacobin Terror: A great moment has found a little people. In the present circumstance, I am determined to save the people of this nation from the worsening disaster which you my fellow-citizens have brought upon yourselves by your tolerating the current epidemic of intellectual and moral littleness of spirit. However, there are some things on which we must come to agreement, soon, if we are to succeed in rescuing this nation, and the people in it.
We must bring the people of this nation to the maturity of intellect and morals which only the adoption of the Classical tradition in science and culture can bring about. This must become our policy for education, and our policy for shaping what is referred to as "mass culture." We have reached the point at which the fate of civilization depends upon the happy appearance of a modern Solon or two, to rescue you once again from the looming disaster which your own negligence of the general need for intellectual and moral development, have once again brought upon us.
No longer must you permit yourself to demand that political leaders come down to your level; it is time for you to reach upwards, seeking out the best in those leaders, of course, but, more urgently, in yourselves.
The slogan which ought to be on the lips on every American on most occasions, is: "Please stop doing that!" I hope, that having said what I have said here, you will. Our nation's future depends upon it.
