Economics:
At The End of a Delusion
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
[PDF version of Chapters 1 and 2]
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Ahead to Chapter 2
1. What Is Economics?
No rational discussion of "economics" is possible, unless we define what that term should signify. Unfortunately, especially today, after the so-called "cultural paradigm-shift" which erupted during the late 1960s, most of today's generally circulating definitions of the term, are proffers of allegedly "self-evident" gobbledegook, which are not designed in a way which might provide the hearer with a sense of functional correspondence to reality.
The first thing to know, is that, contrary to some ivory-tower "true believers," the subject of economics did not exist in any rational form prior to what is known, alternately, as the Fifteenth-Century, or "Golden" Renaissance. It was that Renaissance which defines the difference, between, the essentially medieval, A.D. 300-1400 history of European civilization, and its post-1400 phase, as modern civilization.[8] Economy began with the birth of the modern nation-state, over the course of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-pivotted Renaissance.
By national economy, I mean a continuing process of durable improvements in the potential relative population-density of the whole population and its posterity. By economics, we should signify the existence and use of some scientifically demonstrable principle, which permits us to forecast efficiently the connection between today's practices and the worsening, or improvement of the relative well-being of the present population and its posterity, as a whole, a generation or two ahead.[9]
"Economic Forecasting," properly understood, signifies assuming accountability, in the present, for the future consequences of the choices made today. Without such accountability, there is no morality worthy of that name. That requires the existence of a form of government which holds itself efficiently accountable for ensuring such improvements as are measurable in terms of their per-capita and per-square-kilometer physical effects.[10] In applying that definition of "economics," it is not sufficient that that government should intend to bring about such beneficial results; the intention must be an efficient one.[11]
Societies qualifying as such economies did not exist in ancient or medieval history. Those who ruled then, used the subject populations as virtual human cattle, for the advantage of the ruling oligarchy and its lackeys. For them, as for the notorious feudalist Dr. François Quesnay, the fruit of society belonged, by divine right, to the overlord; the rights of the toilers were limited to the same kind of rights a farmer accords to the lower forms of life he hunts down, or maintains, or culls as cattle. That oligarchical system is also typical of the philosophy of John Locke, and the radical-positivist[12] definition of "shareholder value" recently upheld by the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The notion of accountability for the general welfare of a human population, as specifically human, as a whole, did not exist.
Although the first reasonable approximations of true nation-state economies, were those of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, the adoption of the set of universal principles on which the modern sovereign form of nation-state and its economy have been based, the notion of the general welfare, had been already brought into being, earlier in that same century, largely through the leading role of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, as typified by 1.) His Concordantia Catholica, which set forth the principled argument for replacement of the imperial system as it existed under feudalism, with a community of principle among individually sovereign nation-states; 2.) His founding of modern experimental physical science, as merely typified by his De Docta Ignorantia; 3.) His role in pulling together the circle of scientists and other influentials, on whose work Columbus, among others, depended, for the wave of great trans-oceanic explorations launched during the latter decades of that century.
The pivotal principle of law, upon which that coming-into-being of the sovereign nation-state republic was premised, was the adoption of the doctrine of natural law known variously as the general welfare or common good, as typified by the central argument of law later expressed by the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and as stated explicitly as the fundamental law of the U.S.A., in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.
Although this involves subject-matters which are, in part, lodged in the history of pre-modern centuries, even the mere right to existence of the institution of the modern nation-state, has never been uncontested, even within globally extended European civilization, up to the present day. Brutish cultural relics of the cultural heritage of the ancient Rome and medieval feudalism, have more than merely persisted into the Twentieth Century; the effort to reverse the clock of modern history, back to brutishness, has been the dominant post-World War II trend in Anglo-American policy-shaping for about a half-century. The U.S. wars against its historic adversary, the British monarchy, are an example of the conflict between the U.S. defense of the principle of the general welfare, against that modern relic of the Norman-allied, imperial maritime power of Venice's pro-feudalist rentier-financier policies, the policies of the British monarchy since 1714. The Preamble of the Constitution of that British puppet, the Confederate States of America, for example, stressed the suppression of the principle of the general welfare, in favor of the immoral John Locke's defense of slavery.
Today, the depraved relics of Europe's ancient and medieval past, are resurgent in such forms as so-called "globalization," "shareholder value," "the rule of world law," and the effort to establish a military dictatorship in the form of universal fascism.[13] Fascism is typified today by such lackeys and cronies of the late Professor William Yandell Elliott as Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel P. Huntington. These are typified today by family interests, and associated major law firms, gathered around such influential institutions as the H. Smith-Richardson, Olin, and Mellon-Scaife foundations, and associated circles such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the RAND Corporation. That fascist ideology is also rooted axiomatically in the doctrines of the Mont Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation, et al.
Typical, as I have summarized this in earlier reports on the implications of the celebrated events of Sept. 11, 2001, are the views expressed by the collaborators Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and British Arab Bureau veteran Bernard Lewis. Inside the United States itself, a new, utopian military doctrine, has sought to destroy the legacy of that citizen-soldier typified in military history by Germany's Gerhard Scharnhorst, and the republican U.S. legacy of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, General Douglas MacArthur, and President Dwight Eisenhower.
As Huntington speaks for today's often explicitly self-described universal fascists generally, the Huntington-Brzezinski image of the role of the military, harks back to the genocidal practices of the Roman legions and the Nazi Waffen-SS: legions of the professional warrior, recruited from assorted nationalities, as the instrument of death deployed by a global neo-Roman, universal fascist tyranny, which hunts, herds, and culls populations as the Nazi Waffen-SS echoed the Roman legions in this genocidal practice.
These universal fascists have appeared in the Anglo-American sphere as chiefly products of the process out of which the British Fabian Society emerged. The most influential such ideologues include Thomas Huxley's Golem, H.G. Wells, whose 1928 The Open Conspiracy typifies the way in which the Fabian method promotes the universal fascist influences expressed by such Wellsian fanatics of the Brzezinski circle as the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who confessed herself a Wells follower, speaking as Secretary of State, openly, in a 1999 public address. The influence of Bertrand Russell, and his Unification of the Sciences project, is an integral part of that same campaign for universal fascism detailed, step by step, in Wells' The Open Conspiracy.
The principal target for destruction chosen by these contemporary universal fascists, is always the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic, and the doctrine of the general welfare or common good. It is sufficient to study The Open Conspiracy, and to note that Bertrand Russell signed on to that policy publicly, to understand how the influences of universal fascism work intellectually, as they permeate the departments specializing in the so-called "social sciences," in academic and related life in the United States and its government institutions today.
In summary, these universal fascists, with their present, frantic search for an "integralist" "pagan ethic," are the modern expression of the attempted resurgence of the model of the ancient Roman and kindred empires, and of the worst of medieval Europe's history. The essence of the movement for universal fascism, typified by Brzezinski et al. within the U.S.A., is a movement whose purpose for existence is to eradicate the existence of the modern nation-state from any and all parts of this planet, and to replace the nation-state with world-government over the population-controlled inhabitants of a global, dehumanized zoo.
There is no significant danger to civilization on this planet today, which could not be made manageable, were this threat to be removed. To paraphrase a famous Harvard professor, those who do not wish to recognize my emphasis upon history, may be forced to relive the very worst part of what they, who presently profess "I don't go there," prefer to ignore.
Therefore, all competent policy assessments of the present world economic situation, that of the U.S.A. itself most notably, are rooted in a grasp of the continuing historical origins of modern society. The following brief summary of the point elaborated in other published locations, should therefore be sufficient here.
During the pre-Fifteenth-Century history of Europe, especially since the emergence of imperial Rome out of the its military conquests during the same general period as the close of the Second Punic War, the power to make law came to be invested in a figure selected to perform the function of a pagan Pontifex Maximus, an emperor whose function was centered in his authority to arbitrate disputes respecting essential matters of doctrine and related practice among the diverse religious and cultural groups of which the subjects of that pantheonic tyranny were composed.[14] In other words, like many of today's would-be busy-bodies setting themselves up as the arbiters of peace, the Pontifex Maximus imputed to his own person the right to "play God." The Roman Empire, in particular, was thus maintained as a permanent state of warfare, representing a process of hunting and culling the ranks of, even exterminating, some of the sundry religious and cultural groupings, either within the Empire or at its periphery, as the associates of Brzezinski and Huntington adhere to such perspectives today.
This state of imperial depravity of ancient Empires, such as Babylon and Rome, was also characteristic of the ultramontane faction of medieval society over the interval A.D. 300-1400. It was this characteristic of medieval Europe under domination of the Venice-Norman alliance, which led into that vast depopulation and lunacy of the mid-Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age," a dark age of genocide which one Twentieth-Century historian has characterized as "a distant mirror" of that troubled century's likely outcome.[15]
By its essential implications of doctrine and practice, the oligarchical interest represented by the function of Pontifex Maximus, divided the subjects of that imperium between the oligarchs and their lackeys, on the one side, and the mass of the subject population, the human cattle, on the other. The human cattle fell into two grand sub-classes, herded and hunted (e.g., "rogue") cattle. Thus, the imperial law of the ultramontane tradition, by reducing herded and hunted subjects to cattle, reduced the rulers themselves, including the Pontifex Maximus himself, to the axiomatically implied status of a beast like that which Britain's Thomas Huxley claimed to be, a beast from H.G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau.
Thus, in an imperial, or kindred social order, the mass of the human population, of all categories, was herded and culled according to the perceived interest, or merely the caprices, of the ruling authority. Thus, in imperial society (including all those societies called variously "ultramontane" or "integralist," or "globalized"), the people exist for the convenience of the ruling power. Whereas, in the modern form of sovereign nation-state, as prescribed by our Federal Constitution, the state exists for the promotion of the welfare of the present and future population as a whole.
I emphasize the most crucial point of relevance for shaping contemporary economic policies.
The state must therefore be subject to control by the principle of its obligation to serve the promotion of the general welfare, to serve the common good. The moral right of the government to exist, is conditional upon its efficient promotion of the general welfare of all of the present generations and their posterity. No type of rule of law may be tolerated, which violates that principle.
That notion of law premised upon the notion of the common good, is the distinction of civilized government in modern society. That is the distinction which defines the modern sovereign nation-state republic; that distinction was the essence of the continuous quarrel between the patriots of the United States and the British monarchy over the interval 1776-1901, and the quarrel between President Franklin Roosevelt and the British monarchy's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, during World War II. That is the essential difference between the American System of political-economy, as exemplified by the work of Hamilton, the Careys, List, and Lincoln, on the one side, and the neo-Venetian, British rentier-financier system of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and the Mont Pelerin Society, et al., on the other.
This function of the principle of the general welfare, is no mere precept, no mere tradition. It has a functional basis in the essential distinction between a man and an ape, between the human individual and all other living species. This connection is, as I shall indicate here, the key to understanding the physical principles of economy on which the entirety of a competent practice of statecraft, including economics, depends in an efficient and fundamental way.
For reasons included in this chapter of my report, an efficient understanding of economics, and of the economics issues underlying the present world crisis, could not be attained within that medley of mysticism and reductionist fanaticism which pervades today's usually taught classroom instruction in, not only economics as such, but also much of the teaching of mathematics in particular and science in general. Therefore, the required understanding of the problems of policy-shaping posed to us by the present crisis, must include emphasis upon certain issues of scientific method. The feature of economic science on which I have placed emphasis in this chapter of the report, is the deeper practical implications of the notion of physical-economic cycles, especially long-range cycles.
A. The Physical Basis for Economic Cycles
To serve the stated purpose of this report as a whole, I must now turn to define what I mean by the practice of a science of physical economy. I must show why and how that science is indispensable for understanding the predominant influence of long-range and other physical-capital cycles, in steering the evolution of the economy, from point to point, within such governing cycles.
Economics, when properly defined as a branch of physical science, should be understood in terms of principles defined in the same way universal physical principles are, first, hypothesized, and, later, proven experimentally, in any competent form of physical science.[16] In practice, the measurements to be made for society as a whole, are to be made in reference to general cycles, long-ranging cycles, of not less than one to two generations. This means, that the measurement of performance in periods of less than a generation's span, must apply to the short-term measurements in economy, echoes of those same methods Kepler used for astrophysics, in connection with his original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation.[17]
So, Kepler defines the universal physical principles of organization of the Solar System, from the standpoint of the long-range cycles which are commensurate with completed orbits, and with the cycle of those combined planetary, lunar, and comets' orbits, of which latter the System as a whole is visibly composed. The motion within any local, much shorter interval, must be understood as an expression of the orbit as a whole; not, contrary to today's typically foolish Wall Street statistician, the orbit as the expression of the cumulative effect of localized motions. This is as true for economic cycles, as it is for Solar ones. This approach to the principle of cycles, was, incidentally, the method underlying and permeating the original, 1676, first published announcement of the discovery of the calculus, by Gottfried Leibniz; therefore, the principle I am invoking here, is by no means a Johnny-come-lately innovation, but is an elementary, and solid matter of scientific method, as it should be taught in all respectable secondary schools and universities today.
The long cycles built into the top-down design of the Solar System, do have a determining influence upon the circumstances in which life within the Solar System depends; but, for reasons I shall identify here a bit further on, the authority of those cycles does not prevent man from changing even the Solar System itself, including changing it for the better, if but only gradually, and over very, very long periods of sustained action, as living processes have transformed the Earth into a Biosphere.
The widely accepted methods among today's economists, of measuring economic cycles in a simple statistical way, commit the same blunder which Kepler exposed as the common, anti-scientific error of the earlier astronomical dogmas of such diverse authorities as the Aristotelean Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe.[18] The use of the mere describing of nature as a substitute for discovering the underlying universal physical principles at work, is the typical folly of those intellectually impaired statisticians who pretend to be economists, a folly abhorred in competent modern astrophysics since Kepler.[19] It is for the reason of their refusal to recognize this issue of method, that all the principal forecasters opposing my forecasts, have been, at their best, simply incapable of providing competent projections of their own.
The source of the failure of those forecasters, has been, to a large degree, the incompetence of the way in which economics has usually been taught in all leading universities, and often practiced in the profession in general. For example, if they had studied and understood Kepler's founding of the first approximation of a comprehensive mathematical physics, and the developments in the same direction, through Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, et al., after Kepler, they would not have produced the often catastrophic effects typical of their work on business cycles, and the continuing influence of that misguided work on policy-shaping today.
The importance of Kepler which must be recognized among economists today, is that he was the founder of the first successful effort to establish a comprehensive form of mathematical physics, the first to establish a comprehensive method of attack which freed science from the ivory-tower mathematician's blackboard, and to civilize mathematics by bringing it into the real world, the world of universal physical principles, rather than the purely imaginary world of abstract ivory-tower mathematical speculations. The first discovery of an experimentally defined principle of universal gravitation, by Kepler, is the point of departure from which all subsequent progress in developing a comprehensive form of modern physical science has emerged. So, it is inevitable, that fertile scientific minds are impelled, repeatedly, to return to Kepler's arguments, as Albert Einstein did in his reappraisal of the importance of the discoveries of both Kepler and Bernhard Riemann.
Kepler recognized certain anomalies in the orbit of Mars, which had been overlooked by Brahe. This led him to recognize, not only that the Mars orbit was elliptical in general form, but that the Sun was located at one of the two focii of that ellipse. Kepler observed that the measurements made by aid of his normalization of an observed orbit, precluded the possibility of predicting, statistically, both the position and velocity of the planet's motion within an immediately subsequent portion of the orbital cycle as a whole.
This required throwing away all as-if-at-the-blackboard varieties of Euclidean mathematics, such as those used by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, et al. For Kepler, there must be a physically efficient intention embedded in the Solar System, which determined the characteristics of the orbit. By that use of the notion of intention, Kepler signified the existence of some corresponding, experimentally demonstrable, efficient, universal physical principle, such as his original discovery of universal gravitation. This notion of a universal quality of intention, by Kepler, has been the definition of an experimentally validated universal physical principle, among all competently educated persons, ever since.
Therefore, as I shall summarize the case here, anyone who would wish to become a competent economist, should study the pivotal ontological paradox, which led Kepler to a crucial discovery of a universal physical principle, in this case, gravitation.
Kepler recognized, that although the orbit as a whole was observed and knowable with experimental precision, the velocity and position of the planet at any time could not be predicted as a simple statistical projection of its immediately preceding action. Kepler's measurements led the way to Leibniz's future development of the calculus, by showing that the orbit fit such rules as "equal areas, equal times," for the case that the angular measurement was made with respect to the relatively fixed position of the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. The measurable fact of "equal areas, equal times," pointed to the existence of an efficient agency existing beyond statistical comprehension of the mere moment-to-moment motion observed for the planet itself. Kepler's development of the concept of the relationship among the harmonic ratios of orbits, in the ordering of the Solar System as a whole, was a continuation of that same method and approach.
The same class of problem confronts the attempt to solve the mystery, concerning the way in which long-term economic cycles interact with short-term changes in economic policy. In examining long- to medium-term economic cycles, we must adduce the demonstrable physical principles characteristic of each phase of the cycle, and assess the local phase of the ongoing process from the standpoint of an experimentally-based insight into the systemic characteristics of that process which defines the cycle as a whole.[20]
To restate that point with an eye on the referenced work of Kepler, there is something outside, "behind" the sometimes apparently simple statistical projection of trends, which controls, and accounts for the ironical, ultimately contradictory relationship between short-term performance determined statistically, and medium- to long-term cycles. The challenge presented is, therefore: Is there some ontologically paradoxical, undeniable empirical evidence, which points our cognitive powers toward an appropriate search for a relevant hypothesis, which might, in turn, lead us to an experimentally defined universal physical principle? That "external" action by a principle is embodied within the cycle itself, that more or less in the same sense that it is the orbit as a whole which determines the short-term motion of the planet. In astrophysics, or economics, it is a universal physical principle, which is both embodied within the cycle as a whole, and which, pending the efficient introduction of a newly added long-term cyclical principle, subsumes the idiosyncrasies observable, in effect, at each moment.
Therefore, in physical science, and the methods of mathematics appropriate to that science, the secret of competent forecasting in general, is the same which Leibniz developed in his unique, original discovery, and continued refinement of the calculus. This was a discovery which met precisely the challenge which Kepler had bequeathed to future mathematicians. We must discover the cycle, first, and then assess the local action within that functional frame of reference.
It is the long-term cycles which are of the greatest importance. Therefore, in all my forecasting, I have always forecasted from a long-range cyclical standpoint, as Gauss, in his development of his general notions of curvature, and Riemann later, successively, perfected this conceptual approach for mathematical physics in general. Reliable long-range economic forecasting depends upon that conceptual approach.
Yes, the human will does intervene in this: but how? Effective intervention occurs by acting, in effect, upon the long-range economic cycle itself, rather than upon the local interval of that process! The purpose of economic forecasting, is to discover how to intervene, in the relatively short term, if possible, to change the characteristics of the long-range cycle in which events are currently trapped. By changing the characteristics of the long-range cycle, we are able to change the effect which the changed long-range cycle now imposes upon the local interval.
To illustrate that point:
When we discover a new universal physical principle, and then apply that principle intentionally to a process previously defined in terms of earlier discoveries of such principles, the addition of that new universal principle, changes the characteristic action in every interval of the process. It changes the characteristic effect of willful forms of human action upon the universe. The development of the notion, by Leibniz and Bernouilli, for example, that isochronic pathways in physical processes are implicitly those of a catenary, rather than, for example, a cycloid, typifies the mathematical-physical idea of applying a new notion of extended magnitude (i.e., a universal physical principle) to change a previously assumed characteristic of a process.
That is the key to any competent appreciation of the role of scientific and technological progress, in bringing about a medium- to long-term trend of increase in the productive powers of labor, as this effect is expressed in the short to medium term. This is, in fact, the only true source of the increase in the physical-economic rate of profit.
That, in short, is what I mean by changing the cycle as a whole, as the way to alter the characteristic behavior in the localized part of that process. That is the kind of systemic effect we are attempting to induce, when apply a new principle, expressed as a technology, to an already established productive process or product design. I repeat, for emphasis: This kind of transformation, in characteristic, is the only true source of physical-economic profitability of an economic process. The complex of principles expressed by the process, has the quality of a more or less long-range cycle. By integrating an added principle, through the medium of new technology, we transform the characteristic of that cycle, and, thus, transform the characteristic action in the local situation.[21]
A long-term cycle is the reflection of the action performed by a complex of universal physical principles upon the universe. In scientific and technological progress, we may correct erroneous assumptions from the past, but, usually, in practice, we do not otherwise change any of these principles; we bring additional such principles into play voluntarily, just as we do through the successful discovery and application of any previously unrecognized universal physical principle. Thus, by bringing an additional such principle into play, thus altering the long-term cycle, we alter the characteristic quality of action, the systemic quality of action, in the short term. In other words, we change the physical geometry of the system.[22] This alteration is a typical form of anti-entropic action. Such is the nature of the determining relationship of scientific progress to physical productivity of labor, per capita and per square kilometer.
The most commonplace foolishness practiced by my opponents, in the name of forecasting and related analysis, today, is that exemplified in the extreme by the pathetic case of the Mont Pelerin Society's Professor Milton Friedman's post hoc ergo propter hoc school of forecasting.[23] The reading of trend-line charts, for purposes of forecasting real economic processes, is a form of sheer buncombe, into which contemporary financial accountants are prone to fall all too often. The past certainly does predetermine the conditions on which the present and future will be built, but the simple statistical reading of a trend from the recent past, tells us nothing so much as the fact that the believer in such methods of forecasting has learned less than nothing from the past five centuries of scientific progress.
Thus, there is a deep scientific principle involved in that distinction of economies from mechanical systems. I summarize that crucial topic as follows.
The long-term rise or fall of economies, is determined, as I have just pointed out, by the fact that healthy economies are of a special quality of characteristic, which is defined by an intrinsically anti-entropic process. In effect, any competent measurement of the characteristic features of an economy which is increasing its potential relative population-density, is a measurement of the reflection of anti-entropy, or want of it, in the cyclical aspects of the process as whole. It is the intervention, by means of an added universal physical principle, or a technology derived from that principle, that long-range and other economic cycles are profitably transformed in their characteristics. The physical-economic profit generated locally, or in the large, is an expression of implicitly measurable local anti-entropy. Thus, competent long-range economic analysis, is focussed upon discerning functions of technological change, which either increase the entropy of the cycle, or its anti-entropy.
So, in summary of what has been said on this matter thus far: in defining any long-term or medium-term cycle, the immediate object is to determine whether the trajectory is toward an increase or decrease of the entropy of that cycle over its term. The function of informed intervention, is to take some action, either to remove an axiomatic feature of the cycle which increases the entropy of the cycle as a whole, or which, happily, will increase the expressed anti-entropy of the cycle. True profit, as defined from the standpoint of a science of physical economy, expresses a net gain attributable to anti-entropic action within that economy. No other definition of profit is acceptable for purposes of long-term forecasting of the course of physical economies. Belief in a zero-growth model of a stable, so-called "sustainable" economy, is not an option which will permit an economy to survive over the relevant long term.
In the matter of organizing a recovery from the physical-economic depression brought about through a defective monetary-financial system, as today, the essential mission must be to reverse the characteristic of the physical economy as a whole, from a state of self-aggravated entropy, to one of significant anti-entropy. This is accomplished, primarily, not through the simple sum-total of individual productive and related actions, but through changing the characteristic of the system considered as a whole. The value of production, is not the sum-total of estimated value added at local points. It is the relative anti-entropy of the economy considered as an indivisible whole.
The desired, happy outcome, is accomplished by a combination of measures. Increase the ratio of useful employment relative to the potential labor-force as a whole. Raise the level of technology relative to infrastructure, production, and design of products and processes, within the whole. In the course of this report, I shall clarify that approach to bringing about a general economic recovery.
Rather than merely describing my relevant discoveries respecting the specific point just made, I prefer that you should actually know what I am describing here. I describe the initial phases of my original discoveries in the science of physical economy, the discoveries on which all of my successes, relative to the work of my professional and other rivals, have depended. These are the principles upon which competence in economics depends today, especially under conditions of crisis, in which all conventional habits fail. These are the principles which dominate any competent discussion of the situation in the U.S. and world economies today.
The Trouble with Sense-Perception
The central, controlling issue of scientific principle in politics, and in economics, is implicitly, whether or not man is simply another animal. Most present-day economists would not, and most probably could not explain that difference competently. That is one of the several crucial reasons for the demonstrated incompetence among most of our leading economists today, the worst being the radical empiricists such as the followers of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.
The principle of natural law called variously the general welfare or common good, pivots upon the evidence, that man is not merely another form of animal life, but has a distinct quality, expressing a universal physical principle which is absent in the beasts. This crucial evidence proving the existence of this quality, is typified by fact of the power to generate valid, revolutionary discoveries of experimentally verifiable universal principles. The difference in effect, flowing from the acceptance, or rejection of this principle, is the proper basis for defining all civilized law, when the principle is efficiently understood as both a universal physical principle and a principle of equity.
This quality is, therefore, the essential referent for all investigation of economic cycles.
The basis for all proper constitutional law is, therefore, the notion that the conduct of man, and the rights of man, are to be derived from nothing other than the discernible implications of the specific quality of difference which sets man apart from the mere beast. The scientific, and, therefore, the legal conception of man, and the governing intent of law, must always be derived from the practical implications of this distinction. The substitution of a religious doctrinal tradition for science, on this account, does not provide proof of principle of law in the deliberations of a sovereign nation-state. Plausible sincerity of assertions of belief, is never rightly admissible as evidence of a witness' truthfulness.
These principles of law have axiomatic authority in the domain of physical economy, and of policies of practice which affect the outcome of practice bearing upon the physical economy as a whole. Violations of those principles of physical economy, are the principal cause of all of the economic catastrophes which a modern nation-state may inflict upon itself.
The so-called "ecological" difference between mankind and the animal species, is that the sovereign power of cognitive potential, which is specific to the human individual, does not exist among the beasts. Cognition signifies the power of an individual human mind, to form a successful hypothesis as the solution to a well-defined ontological paradox, and to verify that hypothesis by the quality of experiment required to demonstrate that hypothesis to represent a universal physical principle.
From the standpoint of animal ecology, a variety of a species of beast has a systemic ability to adapt to its environment in a way which is defined by a combination of ostensibly fixed, genetic and kindred characteristics. With mankind, it is different. Through the discoveries of universal physical principle, which are generated through the sovereign cognitive powers of the individual, mankind is able to increase what animal ecologists might describe as its relative ecological potential as a species; that, in a fundamental way, a way not found among higher apes and other beasts. This is the basis for my own central contribution to the science of physical economy, the notion of potential relative population-density.
If I use "ecology" here in the sense of "animal ecology," as I do, this is not to be read as adopting the methods of animal ecology for man; quite the contrary. It is to employ the experimental implications of the Socratic method of negation, as Pasteur, Curie, and Vernadsky, et al., did, for defining the existence of a non-abiotic class of universal physical principle, a principle which does not exist within the bounds of principles extant in an experimentally defined notion of what might be assumed, often, if wrongly, to be an originally abiotic universe. That a process identified as living, is shown to be able to produce effects in an abiotic medium, which could not be generated within an axiomatically abiotic domain, is the experimental basis for the definition of life by the succession of Pasteur et al.[24] The distinction between man and the animals, may be shown in a similar way, by showing that human behavior accomplishes a physical effect which could not occur within the axiomatic bounds of an animal ecology. Any competent teaching and practice of economics, including forecasting, is premised on an understanding of the crucial importance of those threefold, categorical distinctions among experimentally defined phase-spaces.
However, that is not sufficient. This brings us to a crucial sub-topic of my hitherto unique achievements in long-range forecasting, the functional notion that certain principles of Classical artistic composition, are also universal physical principles. Without examining economic processes from the included standpoint of the role of social relations in defining possible forms of scientific cooperation around the discovery and use of the universal physical principles of both abiotic and living organizations, it is impossible to account for the way in which long-range economic cycles, or kindred processes, have been ordered in previous history.
This functional distinction between man and the lower living species, is otherwise expressed in an essential way, by the functional distinctions between sense-perception and knowledge.
As I shall indicate here, my original discoveries in the science of physical economy, were derived from further development of the argument I crafted first as an adolescent, and which I refreshed at the close of the war, for refuting the attack on Leibniz by Immanuel Kant. I signify that attack which had been the central feature of Kant's notorious series of Critiques. Through this approach to refuting Kant, I was able to define the meaning of cognition in a fresh way, and continue to improve upon that definition later. The result was not inconsistent with the outcome of the spiritual exercises better known as Plato's series of Socratic dialogues,[25] nor with Leibniz's insight into the principle of Plato's dialogues; but my application was an original one, prompted chiefly in reaction to the influence of Leibniz upon my studies. This discovery defined a method which subsequently proved itself to be peculiarly best suited to the task of accounting for the essential features of long-range economic cycles.
As I have presented the case in locations published earlier, the action of generating a valid discovery of a universal physical principle, occurs only within the perfect security of the sovereign cognitive processes of an individual human mind. I shall explain some points on this matter of crucial relevance to economics, during this immediate portion of the report.
This fact of sovereignty presents us with a paradox: since no person can observe directly the cognitive process of another person's generating a provable hypothesis, how is it possible to organize effective cooperation in society's use of such universal physical principles? Discovery of principles, is always an individual act of a sovereign individual mind. However, this is paradoxical, in the Socratic sense, since technological progress in society does not occur through the bare discovery of such a principle by a single discoverer. The will, and knowledge needed for effective cooperation in use of any discovered principle, is a product of a social process, not a purely individual action. Thus, the demonstrably perfectly sovereign quality of individual cognition, presents us with a true ontological paradox.
This, in turn, generates a nice nest of multiply-connected, subsumed ontological paradoxes. For example: since we can know that a discovery is valid, only through its efficient effect in a social setting, how can cooperation in use of that principle be organized within society? Since the maintenance of the human species requires the transmission of accumulated successive advances in such knowledge of universal physical principles, it is the ordering of the related social relations within a society, or among societies, and from generation to generation, which defines the possibility of a society's realizing the benefit of such discoveries, and transmitting the accumulation of such cognitive experiences from one generation to the next.
Human `Super-Genes'
Consequently, the essence of human nature, does not lie in the mere reporting of sense-experiences, or tricks, as "information," from one individual to another, but rather the prompting of the cognitive processes of one individual, to replicate the cognitive act of discovery of a universal principle which has been made by another.
It is that cognitive aspect of social relations, which defines an individual's relationship to previous generations, over thousands of years, or more, and, similarly, to future generations. It is that aspect of social relations, which distinguishes the human individual, as an integral part of humanity as a whole, from the individuality of the mere beast. It is that relationship which expresses on the largest possible scale, the proof of an absolute distinction between man and the beasts.
The matter does not end there. The ability to demonstrate that transmittal of discoveries of knowledge of universal physical principle, is universally efficient in this universe, is a definition of truth. For example, what I have just written is demonstrably true, but, it is nonetheless highly debated. The empiricists, Kantians, and logical positivists, like the anarcho-syndicalists, for example, disagree most vehemently with what I have just reported here. The Kantians, for example, would deny the existence of knowable truth; the radical positivists and existentialists,[26] especially the sociologists of that curious persuasion, would go into a frenzy like that of angered rhesus monkeys in a cage, and do, if the issue of truthfulness were raised in their classroom.
The point, respecting that quality of difference between man and beast, which I have just summarized, is the most hotly contested issue of all modern civilization. It is, for example, the issue posed by the true statement, as by me, that "information theory" is one of the most monstrous, and most destructive of the hoaxes popularized during the recent sixty years. The issue arises in a general way by posing the inherently paradoxical question, whether knowledge is located within the domain of sense-perceptual experience as such, or whether human knowledge must be defined as of the form of experimentally demonstrated, cognitive generation of universal physical principles.[27]
This method of transmission of discoveries of universal physical principle, not only from one individual to another, but over successive generations, obliges us to define cognition in a way which goes beyond the argument of Vernadsky, and that in a qualitative way, rather than in degree of refinement. We are implicitly obliged to recognize the existence and role of a class of phenomena unique to human social relations, phenomena which we might best term "super-genes." For this, we resort to the same experimental method of negation, by means of which living processes are distinguished from abiotic ones, and cognitive from animal life.[28]
The relevant argument goes as follows.
Since the act of cognition occurs only within the perfectly sovereign cognitive processes of individual mentation, the act can not be transmitted in that form from one mind to another. It can be transmitted only by replication. This does not leave the equivalence of the act, occurring in two distinctly separate mental processes, a mystery. The experimental method enables two minds to be certain of the equivalence of their discovery, once the relevant, crucial form of experimental proof of the coincidence has been achieved.
On this account, we are able not only to speak with certainty of an absolute distinction between man and the lower forms of life, but to define that distinction as the essential quality of social relations among the members of our species. On this account, there is no essential equivalence between animal and human behavior, except to the degree men and women are bestialized in both their sense of identity and behavior. Indeed, the proper notion of "evil" is the notion of bestialized man, the notion of man typically associated with modern existentialists such as Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Hitler, Heidegger, Adorno, Arendt, Sartre, et al.
This notion of the specifically human quality of the cognitive form of social relations, is not limited to the isolable individual act of verification of a replicated discovery of principle. Human nature is located essentially, primarily, in the way in which the cumulative effect of transmission of discoveries is expressed over successive generations. Study of this aspect of the matter, requires that we recognize the existence of a phenomenon fairly described metaphorically as "super-genes."
The clearest expression of the function of such "super-genes," is found in the mode of transmission of knowledge of principles called "Classical humanist education." However, we must also take into account, that such forms of communication of cognitive ideas, are not limited to a formally Classical-humanist mode of education. It is readily demonstrated, if one takes the time and effort to demonstrate this, that the Classical-humanist mode is a concentrated expression of principles which have always operated among human beings, especially in the loving relationship with child and parents, as from birth, if not, as is probably the case, even while the infant is gestating in the womb.
Ask: What is happening in the cumulative social process, of transmission of cognitively generated, and replicated experiences of discovery of experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles? What is happening physically? Very well: what should we mean by use of the term physical?
Without going beyond what Vernadsky has accomplished, the rational use of the term "physical" finds an adequate basis in those qualities of experimental demonstrations of principle, which are distinguished from one another by their distinctive form of regular physical effects. Thus, we define universal physical principles of an abiotic phase-space, by physical experiments which are coherent with the notion of an abiotic sub-universe. We define living processes, the Biosphere, by means of physical effects which could not come into being in a universally abiotic phase-space. We define the Noösphere by physical effects which could not come into being within the experimentally defined confines of either an abiotic or biotic phase-space, or both combined. This is, therefore, the only rational, experimentally based method, for the definition of the term "physical."
Vernadsky's notion of the Noösphere carries us through to the notion of the physical impact of individual cognition. I carry this same approach a step further than he does, to the notion of the effect of a principle of cognitive social relations. Here, we encounter another, distinct physical effect, defined in a manner consistent with the way Vernadsky defined the Biosphere and Noösphere, to which I give the name "super-genes." This effect reflects the physical basis for what is otherwise recognized as the methods and products of Classical modes of artistic composition associated with the influence of such as Solon, Plato, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, J.S. Bach, Kästner, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Heine, et al. This is identified with the function of irony, metaphor, and the subjunctive, in both Classical modes of artistic composition (and performance), and in the work of statecraft, as in physical science.
All of these expressions of that principle of cognitive social relations, have the useful name of Classical culture. This means not only the transmission of what is explicitly and rightly distinguished as Classical forms of culture, but also all social processes which express the same principle within them, whether the culture is otherwise meaningfully definable as "Classical," or not.
The accumulation of transmitted discoveries of principle, of science and art combined, over successive generations, results in a type of individual, and society, which is more or less far removed, in physical effect, from a simple individual person with the cognitive potential in general embedded within his nature. This transformation occurs through the cognitive form of the special quality of social relationship expressed by the effective transmission of cognitively generated conceptions from one generation to another, or across cultural currents. The effect of such transformations is equivalent, in physical effect on the Biosphere and Noösphere, to the same general effect as culturally effected "genetic" change, as genetic change would be observed in the character of a lower species or variety.
Clearly, the effect of cultural transmissions of this cognitive type, produce their characteristic physical effect in terms of the capabilities and other characteristic responses of the persons in whom that experience has had its effect. There is, in short, a change in the physical principle expressed by both the individual and the social relations among the individuals of the relevant culture. This is the effect which prompts theologians to locate the immortality of the mortal human individual, as living in a simultaneity of eternity. The continuity of that continuing cognitive process, within which the mortal individual exists, is never broken.
There are also reverse effects, virtual species-downshifts, such as the pestilence of cultural decadence which erupted in globally extended European culture during the recent thirty-seven years of the so-called "rock-drug-sex counterculture."
The significance of these issues is shown more clearly, when we apply the method of very long cycles to the most crucial topics of theology.
In the Classical Greek treatment of the nature of God, as by Plato's dialogues,[29] the idea of God appears, in first approximation, as a universal principle; or, in Greek, a Logos. The experimental proof that the principles underlying both life and cognition, respectively, are universal principles, signifies that no universe existed, or will exist, without their efficient, anti-entropic presence within it. If creativity is a universal physical principle, as Vernadsky's approach suffices to define such a noëtic principle, then it was always and everywhere efficient, existing in the form reflected as cognition within the human mind.
Yet, the universal physical principle of creativity is known to mankind only in the sovereign individual form of the act of cognition. Here, we are confronted with the same kind of argument made by Leibniz, in his conceptualization of our universe as organized according to a monadology. Thus, to our knowledge, creativity exists efficiently in the universe only as an expression of a perfectly sovereign being, a being which expresses His existence in such forms as those intentions which Kepler equated to universal physical principle. [30]
It is the continuity of such a universe, through its included expression as the human species and human history, which is subtended by the physical principle I have associated with the notion of "super genes." The continuity of the cognitive creative principle has itself a sovereign identity, a quality of personality, as the Creator Himself exhibits this in creation considered in the large. So, although this is a physically efficient principle, it is also a spiritual principle, the reflection of a physically efficient power acting upon what we otherwise perceive as the physical universe. In that case, we are employing the term spiritual as a term of physical science, in the same sense that we employ the term life to distinguish the principled difference between a living and an abiotic process.
These cultural processes which I have associated with the notion of "super-genes," play a critical role in determining the characteristic features of long-range economic cycles. I shall address this effect at an appropriate point below.
Anti-Entropy vs. Entropy
To understand the functional definition of those economic cycles which increase the potential relative population-density of a society—that is, generate true physical profit—we must define the way in which individual persons are able to inject an added factor of what must be recognized as anti-entropy into the economic cycle. That brings us into direct confrontation with the popularity of the absurd, currently popularized, pseudo-scientific fad of "information theory."
This issue, whether or not man is a creature of cognition, unlike the beasts, is inseparable from the issue, as posed by Plato, for example, of whether or not sense-perception as such, affords the mind a competent representation of that actual experience which prompts our sense-perceptual images. In the history of ancient through modern philosophy and science, the effort to reach a rational form of conclusion in this matter of sense-perception, has been reduced to two general types of results.
In these systems of the first type, the believer is constantly confronted with the evidence, that the behavior of the processes in which he is situated, is not fully consistent with the assumptions deduced from sense-certainty. This persistent inconsistency within the domain of sense-certainty, has repeatedly driven the philosophical reductionist into wild-eyed mysticisms, and, therefore, sometimes, also into conducting religious wars.
Among the one type of cases, we include all superficially rational systems which sought to defend sense-perception from intrusions by cognition, such as the systems of Aristotle, the modern empiricists, Kantians, and such devotees of Bertrand Russell as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. The most typical expression of this is therefore found in those known as the reductionists. In contrast, in the second, contrary type of cases, such as my own, that same inconsistency attracts the delighted thinker with the prospect of discovering some truth which overturns shopworn prejudices.
This is key for understanding the chief characteristic error common to the otherwise incongruent systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and to the empiricist Galileo. By assuming that Aristotle's method, as followed blindly by Ptolemy, was valid, or, in Paolo Sarpi's alternative, the neo-Ockhamite versions known as empiricism and logical positivism, they degraded science to the mere attempt to describe nature in conformity with an adopted set of purely arbitrary, "ivory tower" assumptions. They did this without adducing any universal physical principle which would actually resolve the ontological paradoxes erupting from within the phenomena under examination.[31]
These "ivory tower" systems of the reductionist, include the more extremely pathological expressions, such as explicit satanism, or varieties akin to Romanticist composer Richard Wagner's ring myth, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter cult, or the axiomatically irrationalist notion of "freedom" associated with John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Dr. François Quesnay, Adam Smith, et al. In these reductionist expressions of defective mental development, the victim gropes in the unseeable. Like Marlowe's or Goethe's Faust, he yearns, as the superstitious gambler does, for some magical power, perhaps satanic, outside the universe, which is wishfully presumed to act upon that universe, if one could but win that mysterious and axiomatically mystical power to service of one's desires.
The mind of that poor fellow presumes that the imperfection of sense-perceived reality, as he misperceives that reality, is sufficient evidence of the existence of some utterly irrational form of higher authority, beyond the senses. Adam Smith did this. His lunatic notion of the "invisible hand," typifies the kind of superstition to which the wishful devotee might appeal for such beneficent interventions as fixing the outcome of the role of the dice. That sort of "invisible hand," of Bernard Mandeville and Smith, is the mystical authority to loot farmers as prey, which Quesnay's laissez-faire attributes to the aristocratic landlord. So, the pro-satanic Mandeville, the official prophet of the pro-satanic Mont Pelerin Society, saw public virtues as the fruit of private vices, as Mont Pelerin's Milton Friedman promoted drug-trafficking.[32]
The advocates of these systems, have been compelled to acknowledge the existence of some efficient agency, beyond the reach of either sense-perception or their personal comprehension, which, they fraudulently assert, as Mandeville and Adam Smith did, accounts for certain deductively paradoxical patterns in sense-perceived experience. The so-called "invisible hand," as variously presented among empiricists such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Bernard Mandeville, are examples of this. The same pathological feature appears as the crucial defect debunked by Kepler, in the flawed physics of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo. I emphasize: a related variety of obscenity appears in the laissez-faire of the radical pro-feudalist, Dr. François Quesnay, as Quesnay is plagiarized as the "invisible hand" of the British East India Company's Adam Smith.
There is a real world, beyond direct access by the simple senses, but it is in no sense an arbitrary concoction, as those reductionist fairy-tales are. It is a rationally comprehensible universe, once we have come to know what it is through the methods of scientific discovery of universal physical principles. In that aspect of science lie the efficient, knowable realities for which the images of sense-perception are merely shadows.
The same general problem is inherent in Euclidean, so-called non-Euclidean, and related formal systems of classroom geometry. In these ivory-tower systems, a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates is introduced arbitrarily, on the presumption that sense-perception, as supplemented by some antic inspiration, makes these assumptions "self-evident." Again, the attempt at making science from the vantage-point of such ivory-tower, so-called a priori assumptions, is self-degraded into yet another substituting of the mere describing of nature according to those arbitrary presumptions, as Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe did, instead of discovering the universal physical principles at work, as Kepler did.
These ivory-tower systems have often led the classroom instructor to abuse the students with such absurdities, as assertions equivalent to, "we have not yet proven that life is possible in this universe," or, the worse assumption, that "life (or, even human mentation) is a product of trillions of transactions within the framework of purely abiotic transactions within a strictly abiotic universe."
From the contrasted viewpoint, of which my own work is typical, we have the approach which leads into that world-view which is indispensable for comprehension of the origin and functional characteristics of physical-economic cycles. In this case, the recognition of the existence of ontological paradoxes in the world of sense-perception, does not lead to faith in magic, but, rather, a search to discover experimentally valid, universal physical principles.
The most famous paradigm for this second view of sense-perception, is the use of the pedagogical ruse of the "Cave" in Plato's Republic. What sense-perception apprehends, is as but the shadows cast on the irregular wall-surface of a dimly-lit cave. The task of the viewer is to discover, and learn to control, the unseen object which the shadow reflects. Today, the very existence of microphysics offers an elementary illustration of that point. Fermat's adducing a principle of "quickest time" from the paradoxical juxtaposition of reflection and refraction, is a perfect illustration of the argument of "Plato's Cave."
The role of the reductionists as the kind of lunatics which John Maynard Keynes showed Sir Isaac Newton to have been,[33] arises from the fact that, on the one side, they are fanatical slaves to sense-certainty, and yet, at the same time, as Leibniz pointed out to Newton and to Antonio's agent Dr. Samuel Clarke, they themselves premise what they offer as the most precious parts of their theory, upon intervention by an agency from outside the reach of sense-certainty. By denying the path to sanity, in the existence and role of hypothesis, they impel themselves to worship, or fear, otherworldly, purely magical and fantastic forces and agencies, for which there is no experimental proof of principle that these fantastic concoctions ever did, or ever could exist. Newton's "scientific" chest of experiments in black magic, are typical of the lunacies implicit in empiricism.
Since it is in precisely those connections, that experimental method reveals and verifies the specific distinction of man from the beasts, the impact of tolerating the influence of reductionism in education and popular opinion, is the denial of the nature of man, and, therefore, of man's God. Reductionist mysticism is, therefore, a lie, and, worse, implicitly as pro-satanic as the secondary and other pupils who turn themselves into lunatic mass-killers of the current times' spread of "new violence," through such recreations as cultivated addiction to the positivist's reductionist extremes of what are inherently de-humanizing, Nintendo and kindred games.
The fallacy of such ivory-tower viewers as the Aristoteleans and modern empiricists, was recognized in this or kindred ways, by many ancient and other thinkers. The case of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, is exemplary. The humanism of Solon of Athens, is to be contrasted thus to the psychotic image of Lycurgan Sparta and the Roman imperial legionnaire, or the Nazi Waffen-SS model which mimicked those legions. The issue served as the basis for the development of modern experimental physical science, by Nicholas of Cusa, in his De Docta Ignorantia. Followers of Cusa such as Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci addressed this. The line of development of approaches to a comprehensive form of mathematical physics, by Kepler, set into motion a process, leading through Leibniz, Kästner, and Gauss, to Bernhard Riemann's overthrow of all "ivory tower" mathematics, in his 1854 habilitation dissertation.
With Riemann, space, time, and matter, as many had thought we had known them a priori (with assumed self-evident certainty), were banned from all competent physics thereafter. There was no Santa Claus, but only real adults who bestowed loving considerations upon children. In place of arbitrary, ivory-tower sorts of definitions, axioms, and postulates, only experimentally validated universal physical principles were allowed.
To understand the anti-scientific character of concoctions such as "information theory," one must focus on the characteristic problem presented to society by the question: Do the individual powers of sense-perception represent a faithful image of the real universe around us, or not? Understanding this problem, shows us how technologies are generated. An understanding of the fuller implications of that matter, leads us, in turn, to a conception of the functional meaning to be attributed to the term "economic cycles." Are these notions of technology derivable from the interpretation of sense-perception, as Wiener's argument, and silly statisticians such as Milton Friedman and Senator Phil Gramm imply, or are they obtained, as they are in fact, by discovering ways for overcoming the fallacies inhering in a naive faith in sense-perception?
My Attack on `Information Theory'
One of the common pathologies of contemporary policies of practice in education, is the practice of demanding that the students learn, and pass an examination in a taught doctrine. That is essentially a fraudulent practice. Teaching of ideas, is properly accomplished by inviting the pupil, for example, to experience what the teacher has experienced in the struggle to discover the relevant principle. All honest teaching is biographical, and, often, autobiographical. So, proceed as I did, in making my original discoveries within the science of physical economy.
It happened during the years 1948-1952. It began with my reaction to an early 1948 reading of an advance-publication copy of Professor Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics.[34] I was, at first, entertained by Wiener's discussion of some designs, but then angered, by that book as a whole. What angered me, was Wiener's use of both Ludwig Boltzmann, and of echoed effects of Wiener's own Faustian training under the Mephistophelean Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica notoriety.[35] Wiener excluded the existence of cognition in human behavior. Cybernetics' entertaining examples aside, for anyone with actual knowledge of technological changes in physical economy at the point of production, Wiener's "information theory" dogma was a hoax, from beginning to end.[36] For anyone who had wrestled successfully with the fallacy of Kant's attack on Leibniz, as I had been seasoned in that subject since adolescence, the diagnosis and cure of Wiener's fraud, was also evident.
We must take up this matter at this point. I emphasize, that, the basis for systematic understanding of the function of economic cycles, depends upon an adequate comprehension of the way in which the cognitive development, or lack of such development, of improved technologies, determines the principal kinds of general characteristics of those cycles. My 1948 reaction against Wiener's "information theory" hoax, was therefore essential in prompting my fascination with the task of discovery of solutions for the then hitherto unresolved problem of redefining the general notion of economic cycles in a physically meaningful, functional way.
Qualitative improvements in productivity, are reflected at the legendary "point of production" through the use of what are called "technologies." Technologies, efficiently defined, can never be reduced to the form of what Wiener et al. define as "information."
The development of any valid technology, occurs as a by-product of a special kind of proof-of-principle experiment. In the attempt to test an hypothetical form of universal physical principle, a successful series of experiments qualifying, in total, as "universal," pin-points certain features of the relevant design of the experiment, as situated within the medium employed for the chosen experimental subject. By "abstracting," so to speak, this feature of the experimental design, the discovered principle can now be employed as a technology which reflects the relevant specific hypothesis's application to the relevant medium.
In addition, not only do such discovered technologies contribute an essential part to the increase of the effective productive powers of labor. It is the additional experimentation required to define ways in which previously known and newly discovered technologies might be combined, which points to the paradigmatic character of the relationship between original discovery of some universal physical principle, and the increase of the productive powers of labor, as if at the point of production.[37]
The significance of that experience of modern industrial production, is to be formulated as follows. The experimentally provable hypothesis, upon which the generation of individual and combinable technologies depends, is a product of a faculty specific to human individuals, the faculty of cognition, which the life's work of Russell and his acolytes Wiener and John von Neumann denies to exist. Immanuel Kant anticipated Russell, Wiener, and von Neumann, in Kant's famous Critiques. Russell, Wiener, et al., also went much further than Kant, into the kind of radically Ockhamite nominalism associated with those more fanatical reductionists such as Ernst Mach and Russell himself.
To understand both the anti-scientific character of concoctions such as "information theory," one must focus on the characteristic, elementary problem presented to society by the same question addressed above: do the individual powers of sense-perception represent a truthful image of the real universe around us, or not? Understanding this problem, shows us the way toward discovering how technologies are generated. An understanding of the fuller implications of that matter, leads us, in turn, to a conception of the functional meaning to be attributed to the term, "economic cycles." Are these notions of technology derivable from the raw, statistical interpretation of sense-perception, as consistency with Wiener's argument requires, or are they obtained, as they are in fact, by discovering ways for overcoming the fallacies inhering in a naive faith in sense-perception?
Contrary to the "information theory" cultists, in the history of ancient through modern philosophy and science, the effort to reach a rational form of conclusion in this matter of sense-perception, has been reduced to two general types of results. First, take a clinical look at the pathology called "information theory" from the standpoint of the transmission of knowledge of the way in which a principle was discovered and developed for use, rather than as a matter of descriptive instructions to be learned, animal-training fashion. Second, look at production, and "information theory," from the standpoint of economy as a social process.
To establish the basis for long-range forecasting, as I have done, it was necessary to define the general method for integrating all the most essential parts of the set of axiomatic-like constraints, which generate the effect to be recognized as a long-term physical-economic cycle. Since all such constraints are defined for knowledge by the processes of cognition, it would be impossible to conceive an effective functional analysis of the characteristics of such cycles, except through a rigorous examination of the most relevant features of cognition in general.
Civilized society has a convenient working-model for study of the characteristics of that function of individual cognition, in the set of Socratic dialogues of Plato. In fact, those dialogues are, so far, the only known, reasonably comprehensive model on which to premise a study of the general principles of cognitive behavior. Over the recent several decades, I have used the case of Kepler's discoveries in astrophysics, and crucial features taken from Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, as the pedagogical standpoint, consistent with Plato's dialogues, from which to clarify the import of Plato's method for discoveries of experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles.
As I have emphasized in a number of published locations,[38] my approach overlaps the views of Vladimir Vernadsky, in dividing physical space-time among three distinct, but interconnected experimental phase-spaces. The first, and crudest of these phase-spaces, is the abiotic domain implied by experiments which ignore the existence of the effects of characteristically anti-entropic living or human-cognitive processes. The second, relatively higher, is living processes and effects on the abiotic domain of those processes, which Vernadsky defines as the Biosphere. The third, the highest, is effects on both the abiotic and Biosphere domains which are uniquely products of human cognitive intervention, the domain which Vernadsky identified as the Noösphere. On the proof of the existence of the Noösphere, I accept Vernadsky's notion of the experimental proof of this; however, as I have indicated, my own views on the internal characteristics of the action of the Noösphere, differ from that of his published accounts, in a significant way.
This threefold set of phase-spaces, then serves us as the basis for a general theory of physical economy. The characteristics which define long-range cycles in physical economy, are to be comprehended as the combination of human actions, and the reactions they evoke, from among, and within each of the three phase-spaces. These cycles are determined by the (physical) differential geometry cohering with the implicitly axiomatic features of the combined universal phase-spaces.
In the immediate discussion, on the subject of "information theory," the point to be emphasized, is that, in truth, science must explain everything in terms of experimentally demonstrable principles, always relating any such principle to a certain higher class known as universal physical principles. The relatively unique kind of common significance of my own and Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere, is that this approach enables us to grasp all combined abiotic, biotic, and cognitive processes as both respectively distinct, and yet efficiently interconnected from the standpoint of a generalized notion of experimental development and application of universal physical principles. We must do this while considering each and all of these types as something commonly experienced in terms of evidence which is equally a set of physical products of the relevant activity.
Vernadsky's doctrine would agree, that it is cognitive action, as by discovery of an experimentally validated hypothesis, which generates new human knowledge of universal physical principles. His views I accept as corresponding to my own, insofar as we are considering the relationship between experimental proof of principle and the origin of new technologies subsequently introduced as effective innovations in both productive processes and product-design.
These cognitively generated discoveries of universal physical principles, from which technologies are generated as by-products, have the effect of changing the physical geometry of the physical domain in which human actions are located. In other words, we respond efficiently to our discovery that a previously unknown, universal physical principle was sitting out there, in the real universe, as if waiting for us to discover, and utilize its existence.
It is by these qualities of changes in our behavior, and in only that way, that mankind is able to increase its power to exist in, and over the universe. Indeed, we have reached the state of successful population of the planet, that society could not continue to exist without generating and applying to production, without limit, new discoveries of universal physical principle. Zero-technological growth, would be generalized attrition, and rapid extinction of most of the current levels of the human population, through the most horrible holocaust ever imagined. The recognition of these discoveries, and either cooperative action to employ those discoveries, or to abhor them, determines the general potential for increase or decrease of the effective productive powers of labor of an economy.
In my reaction against the obvious fraud of Wiener's "information theory" on this account, I focussed not only upon the cognitive features of the generation of technologies of design of processes and products, but on the matter of the mode by means of which cooperation in discovering and employing technologies, is fostered among human beings considered in the totality of their social existence as human beings.
The Role of Art in Economics and Morals
Consider for a moment, as part of the indictment of the charlatans of "information theory," a commonplace, relevant illustration of the kind of socially-expressed economic dysfunction, which the popularization of "information theory" and related practices, has introduced to the design and use of manufactured products.
Look at the degeneration in the functional qualities of material which so-called "tech writers" have inserted into the typical product description and use instructions, accompanying the delivery of a manufactured product. Consider also, a directly related pathology, exhibited in the past decade's often disastrous, increasingly widespread substitution of "benchmarking" for competent design-engineering. Then, after summarizing that case, contrast those indicated forms of cultural decadence, to the qualities of communication which the Classical English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley identified as periods in history during which there is an increase of the power for "imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."[39]
It is readily shown, that the effort to make a separation between matters of artistic composition and subjects such as physical science and economics, reveals a moral impoverishment of the mind of the would-be scientist or economist. The included result of such an impoverishment, will be, inevitably, a contribution to society's loss of economic potential.
For an example of such a pathological influence, consider the following, relative simple quality of clinical evidence.
During and immediately following World War II, there was a significant, and expanding resort to dividing the work of the scientist and engineer who designed the product, from the writing of those descriptions and instructions supplied which were prepared for the user by persons who came to be known as "tech writers." At the outset, the resulting damage was apparently minimal. The "tech writers" tended to show actual, conscience-stricken comprehension of the product they were describing. Over the years, especially with the introduction of the unconscionable fad called "programmed learning," the always fragile functional relationship between the actual design of the product and the descriptions by the "tech writer," became an increasingly troubled one.
As it is said, the competent, or relatively competent "tech writers" of the immediate post-war period, into the 1950s, "took it from the top." In the instance of information associated with the product of any reliable firm, the reader was usually given an overview of the subject being addressed, and a sense of the relevant functional relations among the sundry components and operations referenced in that report. Over time, the quality of "tech writing" became increasing less coherent. The work-product suggested something assembled from the snippets sent in from sundry places. The effect of this loss of coherence was, that reading the finished, combined result, suggested, more and more, the image of a collage of lines, each written by one of a scattered herd of separate writers, many of whom were apparently on poor speaking terms with one another. The end result has been often something akin to the "recurring nightmare of the guilt-ridden nerd."
This problem, which was merely symptomized by the case of the apparently disintegrating mind of the evolving species of "tech writer," was aggravated, catalytically, in the extreme, by three social factors. First, the accelerating degeneration in public and higher education, over the course of the recent thirty-five years. This is typified by the influence of the 1963 OECD report on education issued by the influential malthusian Dr. Alexander King. Second, the disastrous effect of the post-1963 spread of the "rock-drug-sex cultural-paradigm-shift," in destroying the intellectual and related emotional mission-orientations of dedication to competence, among secondary and higher education graduates. Third, the past thirty years' process of combining intentional ruin of the former leading sector of U.S. family farming, and de-industrialization of urban industry, reflecting rabid devotion to "free trade" in general and "outsourcing," most emphatically. The effects of these trends were aggravated by the introduction of related, novel, and extremely irrational notions of the nature of "intellectual property rights." A recent novelty expressing the same pathological trend, is the idea of the patenting of John Q. Citizen's genes; this has the smell of something invented by the notorious Dr. Mengele, or perhaps H.G. Wells' "Dr. Moreau."
Over approximately the recent decade, under the impact of the process called "globalization," even the mission expected of the tech writer, and of the user of the product, have undergone an additional, qualitative change for the worse, to the effect of continually aggravated spread and intensification of functional illiteracy. From the evidence now at hand, it is implied, that the "tech writer" usually assumes that the reader should not attempt to understand the product, but that he should obey literally, and more or less blindly, the instructions supplied. Usually, the instructions themselves are incompetent in one degree or another. Implicitly, at least, the idea that the "provider" has a moral responsibility for being either coherent, or that the instructions given should be competent, has been abandoned; the peddler of the heavily "outsourced" product, shrugs off the complaint, as if to say: "Don't blame me. I don't make the stuff; I only sell it. If the instructions don't work, accept the fact, that things are tough all over."
Consider the case of problems created by the "outsourcing" of sub-assemblies. That the latter have often been assembled from other sub-assemblies, has become typical of the packaging of the process of production and distribution. The result is expressed in ways which not merely prohibit, but virtually outlaw the intelligent user's sense that he or she has a right to know what is actually inside the package he is about to ingest. At least, the putative manufacturer ought to know, but often, apparently, he, too, does not. Try to buy a replacement part from the party under whose brand-name the product was sold; how could that putative manufacturer know where to get the part, or how to install it? He bought and installed the assembly within which that component, whatever it is, is buried somewhere, and the design of the component is in some place perhaps unknown.
Such manifest trends signify, that during the recent thirty-five years, we have passed over, from a production-oriented society, to a consumption-driven society. Ours often appears to be a society with less concern for the nature of the stuff it is consuming, than a desperately hungry rat foraging in the garbage dump. The United States has been transformed from the nation of backyard repairmen, whose stubborn determination to make things work, contributed much to our capabilities for winning World War II. Ours has become a population employed increasingly in relatively unskilled "services," of persons who are conditioned not to wish to know what they are actually consuming, using, or doing.
"Benchmarking" carries this process of degeneration to the logical extreme implicit in the "information theory" hoax. Benchmarking's nominal designer of the product, is no longer assured the means to challenge the assumptions underlying the mathematical packages he or she is combining into the design of a product. These are often products which will no longer be tested by former standards of automobile or other manufacturer's accountability, or for even the simple safety of the prescribed use of that product. It is cheaper (ostensibly more profitable) to kill people, than to lessen the current diversion from income to "shareholder value," by spending what we used to spend to ensure the safety and other satisfaction of the user. Benchmarking virtually ensures that things move in such directions. It has been a process of slightly more than a decade, in eliminating the existence of a type recognizable as a qualified design engineer.
In summary of that and kindred observations, it is to be said, that as part of the past thirty-six years shift, away from a producer economy, to a consumer society, policy-makers and public have lost the capacity for insight into the requirements of producing the essentials of civilized life. Society has come to view the world economy itself as like nothing as much as an endless nightmare, searching for bargains amid a globalized huddle of gigantic, Orwellian shopping malls. People just don't think the way they used to, forty years or so ago, and the inhumane, poverty-stricken economic policies which they have come to prefer, show it.
These and related trends, considered as a whole, are reduced to a single underlying issue. The fostering of the cult of "information theory," has defined a quality of society in which people's knowledge of what they are doing, or of what is being done to them, might remind us of those students in Jonathan Swift's tale of Lemuel Gulliver's visit to the Island of Laputa, where students learned by swallowing slips of paper on which was written the information they were to assimilate in that fashion. The slips of paper might have been written by Eighteenth-Century versions of "tech writers," who took courses in the equivalent of today's "programmed learning," instead of science and engineering. Perhaps, therefore, it was Jonathan Swift, not Norbert Wiener, who invented "information theory," that as a joke on "ivory tower" varieties of Eighteenth-Century academic asses in general. The breed of such asses has not been improved since.
The pervading issue, among all of those issues listed, and also many other leading contemporary cultural disorders, is the failure of common practice to recognize the essential features of the principled distinction of the behavior of man from that of beasts. In each of the listed, and many additional examples of the same principled social dysfunction, the pathological element is the same. That essential element, is the failure to apply the processes of cognition to the formation and communication of those ideas which are of crucial importance for sustaining the viability of an existing culture.
In his celebrated essay, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley described a renaissance, as a period in which there is, as I have stated above, a general increase of the power of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The expressions of post-1945 intellectual decadence, especially post-1962-65 decadence, which I have just sampled here, typify periods in which these moral and intellectual powers tend to vanish into a condition like that of the Seventeenth-Century Britain depicted by Hogarth, or by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or described by Cotton Mather as his observations on the period of decadence of the post-1688 Massachusetts Bay Colony.[40]
In contrast to such periods of decadence, the leaders whose influence distinguished the quality of renaissances, such as the referenced case of the leaders of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, walked the user of a technology through the cognitive experience of the passage from the initial, ontological paradox, which prompted the search for the hypothesis which would solve that paradox, through to the experimental work which proved the hypothesis. In all known cases of a renaissance, Shelley's formulation is clearly upheld. Examples of this include, the cultural renaissance known as the German Classic, which was led by such avowed followers of Gottfried Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach as Kästner, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, Wolfgang Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and the Humboldt brothers, for the German-speaking world. The examples include the Italy-centered Fifteenth-Century Renaissance earlier.
This effervescence, shown in such renaissances, in the power of communication of "profound and impassioned conceptions of man and nature," always expresses certain specific qualities, which have a common form and character of expression, whether in physical science or in Classical modes of artistic composition. It is the dominant role of those modes within certain influential currents within a culture, which warrant describing such expressions of moral and intellectual fertility as specifically "Classical," as distinct from, and opposed to the quality of the French and English Eighteenth-Century "Enlightenment," for example, or Romantic, modernist, or post-modernist effusions.
The principle of any such Classical productive experience is the same, in principle, as that of the students in a class who are each simultaneously experiencing the way in which some original discovery of universal physical principle was prompted and accomplished. The successful student had relived the act of discovery and empirical verification. Intellectually, "he now owned" the principle whose act of discovery he had replicated within his own cognitive processes.
The reenactment of the cognitive act of discovery, rather than "programmed learning," for example, must become recognized, once again, as the standard for transmission of knowledge within society. Probably, that sort of sanity about economics will become prevalent, only when the standards exemplified by Wilhelm von Humboldt's program for Classical humanist education, are restored as a model for what secondary education throughout humanity must become.
As a matter of first approximation, we may divide communications expressing the quality of explicitly "cognitive" activity into the sovereign personal act of discovery by an individual, and the process by means of which cooperation in use of those discoveries of principle is motivated in relations among persons within society. Classical modes of artistic composition typify the modes of cognitive cooperation. Plastic and non-plastic modes of Classical artistic composition, especially the non-plastic modes in poetry, drama, and polyphonic music, typify the form of the latter cognitive modes, but the significance of such art is that it also serves society as a model for understanding history, and for formulating policies of government. Examples of this include the opening paragraphs of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, and President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg address; each and all these examples are consistent with the intent of a renaissance.
Back during the 1948-1952 interval, as a result of seeing issues implicit in the difference between what we may recognize as a Classical humanist and contrary, morally defective forms of education, I came to recognize a lesson of crucial significance, to be adduced from comparing mathematical formulations used to describe aspects of physical processes, and the often contrasting mental image expressed by a rigorously composed verbal description of what might be presumed to be the same process.
On the surface, a good verbal description of the process and the mathematical representation, could be at least ostensibly consistent. Yet, a good verbal representation conveyed important included notions, which were lost in the translation, as if stripped away by Ockham's Razor, when stated in the generally accepted classroom form of mathematics. Over the course of the 1947-1948 interval, I approached this paradox from the standpoint of Classical forms of poetry, drama, and Classical settings of poetry as song. I posed the question: Why is good Classical poetry superior, as a disposition of mind, over mathematical language, in conveying important ideas of physical science? Years later, I discovered that like the greatest teacher of both Lessing and Gauss, Kästner, the best Classical poets already knew the answer.
In thinking through the apparent paradox, one should come to the eerie, but therefore truthful conclusion, that the act of cognition exists only within the limits of the sovereign cognitive processes of an individual mind; but, that the possibility of the validation and realization of that discovery for social practice, lies in an aspect of "social relations" which can be generated only, paradoxically, by human individuals.[40] When the significance of those cognitive forms of social relations are viewed in a certain special way, the individual develops a quality of personal moral character which sets him or her apart from the run of the mill among nominal leaders, as exceptionally qualified to be a leader in that society. Friedrich Schiller's follower, the Wilhelm von Humboldt who launched Nineteenth-Century Germany's system of Classical humanist education, has emphasized this same connection which I came to recognize from my own vantage-point, during the course of the 1947-1952 interval, between Classical humanist education and the development of the moral character of the student.
Up to the present time in known history, the primary distinction of the individual of truly moral character, from the more ordinary members of society, is a certain kind of impassioned attachment to his, or her personal cognitive relations to the greatest known creative thinkers of both the past and the future. By reliving the experience of replicating the act of original discovery of truly universal principles from the past, that individual brings that moment from that original discoverer into his, or her own sovereign cognitive processes. He, or she brings that cognitive moment from the mind of the original discovery to life within his or her own living cognitive processes. If the education, and related development of the young person is steered with great emphasis on this kind of cognitive act, this quality of historically determined cognitive experience affords the young person an insight into the proper definition of truthfulness.
With the ground so lain in the educational and related development of the young, that young person will soon begin to think of his, or her own future adult life as having the character of a personal mission. The child will express that sense of mission in such forms as describing the importance of the profession, or equivalent, he or she intends to accomplish "when I am grown up." This is often expressed with a manifest aura of spontaneity and passion; one senses that that child "owns" that sense of mission.
For the Christian, for example, the sense of Jesus Christ's gripping sense of mission, expressed in such ways as J.S. Bach's settings of the Passions of St. John and St. Matthew, typifies the sense of the immortality of the individual cognitive self residing within the mortality of the individual. Such a person lives for all humanity for all time, with special emphasis on the mission implicit in the society, the culture, with which he or she is immediately most closely associated.
The distinction of the leader, is that he or she puts that universal mission and interest foremost, and resists the diverting, immoral temptations flowing from a contrary passion for "my own and my community's immediate interests, in the here and now." The person who is incapable of meeting the requirements implicit in such a challenge, excuses himself in such forms as the following expression: "Yes, I care about the future of my country and the world, too, but my immediate family and community interests in the here and now, must come first!" The less moral person can sometimes lend lip-service to the words: "Of course, I know that since I am mortal, I should care about the kind of world I leave behind me, but I must work within the culture of my society"—and, there we have, once again, as in Shakespeare's case of Hamlet, the moral failure.
Hamlet is not the cause of the doom of his Denmark. He, like Fortinbras, is an expression of the fatal moral flaw which pervades the leadership, and more, of his culture at that time. His fatal error is to be an obedient participant in the "popular culture" of the realm; only a leader who could save the realm from itself, would have been of any use in that circumstance. Between being and not, he chose, explicitly, in the course of that soliloquy, "not to be." Only the leader who marches out of step, can bring that parade safely across that bridge of crisis to the safety of the future.
The true leader, as I have just summarily described those distinctions, is a leader because he, or she places the emphasis on cognitive relations, rather than merely sense-perceptual ones. Herein lies Leibniz's passion for the truthfulness which Kant and Kant's followers abhorred. There is a corrupted Faust lurking within the hide of every Kant. The Kantian, or his like, abhors the truth, because the truth might deprive him of his preference for those circus-like learned tricks. by means of which he hopes he might reap the sensual pleasures of Earthly Paradise.
It is when the individual view of society is that of a sovereign cognitive agency, maintaining the continuity of the development from past into future, that the individual has a sense of himself, or herself which is truly a moral one. That is to say, it is only in that view of the immortal self, the cognitive self, lodged in the mortal passage from the past, to the future, that that person is motivated to recognize his, and his society's essential self-interest. He finds that essential self-interest, in the outcome of the present for both that society in particular, and humanity in general. He locates himself, or herself, in personal devotion to the intention that society's self-interest will be honorably served. That is precisely the moral quality which the putative leadership of today's United States has lost, a quality which has generally withered away, decade by decade, since the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt.
Now, that summary given, take into account what has been explicitly written, or referenced in this report, up to this point. The challenge of statecraft, is to effect and maintain progress in the quality of the human condition across successive generations. That must be the orbit of our intention, in the sense that Kepler introduces intention as the notion of an efficient, universal physical principle. Against the backdrop of such considerations, the relative quality of the type and mode of communication employed to organize scientific and other forms of cooperation, becomes a subject of crucial importance in itself, as I am stressing and elaborating some essential features of that argument here.
The challenge of statecraft, especially in times of crisis, is the production and role of those qualified to be leaders, so qualified by their dedication to fostering the influence of the higher morality within the mass of a general population which otherwise can not free itself from the fatal trap of small-minded, and hence corrupting, intrinsically immoral obsession with the smallness of soul expressed by obsession with personal family and community relations.
This brings us to a crucial aspect of the matter which Shelley addressed in his A Defence of Poetry, the specific role of ambiguity in the cognitive aspects of communication.
Ambiguity As Truth
As Plato echoes Heraclitus in the Parmenides dialogue, the remedy for the fatal ontological paradoxes of the Eleatics and their like, is recognition of the universal principle of change. We must recognize that, as a matter of universal principle, nothing is constant, but constant change. Thus, cognition shows us an experimentally provable image of our universe, which is unlike a naive reading of the images of sense-certainty.
In life, and in the self-ordering of the affairs of the human species, change ceases to be a nebulous idea, when that term is defined as broadly interchangeable with anti-entropic action, as I have defined such a notion for the science of physical economy. The quality of anti-entropic change specific to the human species, to society, to the sovereign nation-state republic, is knowledge of the type of cognitive action which proceeds from ontological paradox, to experimentally defined universal physical principle.
Now, look! How is the specific quality of cognitive change expressed in language? In principle, it is through the use of the subjunctive, and in the resort to the devices of irony in general, and metaphor in particular, to impose the expression of the hint or actuality of an ontological paradox upon what might otherwise be a syllogistic, or outrightly sophistical form of "spin."
In the mouth of a moral speaker, the ambiguity of these apparent literary devices, never appears, except when it occurs truthfully. Such is the specific quality of truthfulness which sets Classical artistic composition in opposition to any other mode. We must never refer to a phenomenon as ambiguous, unless the object of the statement is itself actually ambiguous.
For example, take the case of Fermat's argument for a concept of "quickest time," as opposed to "shortest distance." When Fermat compared the reflection of light with the refraction of light, the difference between reflection and refraction was, in truth, an objective ambiguity in the propagation of light. The juxtaposition of the two cases, for the propagation of light, was thus a true ontological paradox. The solution for that ontological paradox was among the most crucial of the continuing discoveries of the succeeding two centuries, from Fermat through Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, Fresnel, Ampère, and Wilhelm Weber: all dealing implicitly with the physical principles underlying electromagnetic propagation in general.
To express a phenomenon as ambiguous, as by resort to mere tricks of symbolism, when one has no knowledge on which to premise that representation, as Romantic poets and playwrights often do, and modernists do invariably, is a more or less vicious form of lying. The ability of the conventions of language to convey those objective ambiguities of meaning which qualify as ontological paradoxes, is therefore a quality of Classical modes of poetic and related composition, on which we largely depend for those discoveries which lead to progress in the human condition, economic condition included.
This will bring us here to a point to be emphasized respecting the difference between my conception of the social organization of the Biosphere, and that implicit, to a significant degree, in Vernadsky's writings on the subject.
Throughout this report, I return repeatedly to focus on two closely related, if distinct implications of the principle, that the universe is composed of three component phase-spaces: abiotic, pro-biotic, and cognitive. In each of these three, the characteristics of the three phase-spaces are defined in terms of a common, universal standard of physical-experimental proof of universal physical principles. In each instance, in turn, the discovery of the principle demonstrated by the physical experiment, was introduced for experimental study by a preceding hypothesis. This hypothesis was provoked, in the sovereign cognitive processes of individual minds, by scrutiny of experimental evidence of an ontological paradox.
Now, respecting those processes of cognition, within which all of these discoveries of principle occur, cognition itself has internal laws, which are laws in the same sense that we define laws discovered to operate within the respectively abiotic and pro-biotic domains. The nature of those laws internal to the efficient forms of cognitive relations among individuals, are most readily identified by comparing the principles of Classical forms of artistic composition and performance, to certain intrinsic failures incurred by the very nature of the violation of an otherwise more or less indispensable and comprehensive mathematical physics of a Riemannian type.
Early during the 1948-1952 interval, my attack on the fallacy of Wiener's, and also John von Neumann's work, was enriched by reflection upon my earlier attraction to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.[42] From my special standpoint, I saw flaws in some aspects of Empson's work, but, that taken into account, it was a very good, mature, and searching piece of scholarly work. I recapitulated what I gleaned from him, by working from the standpoint of the notion of cognitive processes which I had acquired in the course of my adolescent and later pro-Leibniz attack on the absurdities of Kant's Critiques.
A truthful ambiguity, whether in the description of a rigorously defined experimental subject-matter, or in the composition of Classical poetry, has the characteristic significance of betraying the shadowy, but efficient existence of something which, in reality, exists outside the scope of a statement lacking that ambiguity.
The physical principle of ambiguity is beautifully illustrated for study, as I did during 1947, by seeking to identify the physical distinction, on principle, which sets the greatest Classical Greek sculpture from the archaic. I began to equate this, already, then, to the roles of the subjunctive, irony in general, and metaphor in particular, in poetry, drama, and Classical song-settings of poetry. This came to serve as an integral part of my reaction against Wiener's radically reductionist notion of "information theory."
There is a recognizable element of imbalance in the Classical piece. It is not an arbitrary imbalance, but, to succeed, must be credibly a body caught in mid-motion. The same is the case in Bach's method of well-tempered counterpoint, in which the development of the entire composition expresses a single conception of contrapuntal development in mid-motion. In Classical poetry, it is irony, ambiguity, especially true metaphor. All Classical ambiguity is truthful, not arbitrarily fanciful; it expresses a true paradox, for which the mind must supply a solution. It is Classical art, only to the degree that the solution to the paradox, is of the quality of a truthful act of cognition.
Try an elementary, but crucial sort of experiment. Take a mathematical expression from the domain of mathematical physics. Now, think of describing the corresponding physical process as such, which leads from an initial experimental form of ontological paradox, through the generation of an hypothetical solution, to the experiment which expresses the proof of that hypothesis. Now, express that process, as a physical, rather than mathematical form, in poetry, or prose. Best of all, if you have the skill for it, compose a compact Classical form of poem, which presents each and all phases of that paradox, hypothesis, and proof. Add nothing not relevant to that mission. No symbol-mindedness, please! No frosting on the cake! If you succeed in that mission, you will probably understand the principle of metaphor as I do.[43] Focus on the essential cognitive feature of that representation: the paradox, as I have referenced the relatively simple, but richly devastatingly significant case of Fermat's paradoxical juxtaposition of reflection and refraction.
The relative fault in the mathematical formulation, is that, when applied according to today's generally accepted classroom tradition, it lacks poetry. It lacks the obligation of the poet, to embed a truthfully stated ambiguity in the composition. It fails to compel the mind to capture the image of the idea in mid-motion, the form in which all true ideas exist. "Q.E.D." is a lie, if it is claimed on the basis of what can be demonstrated at the blackboard.
For example, the danger to the student's (and teacher's) mind, in at-the-blackboard mathematics, even mathematical physics, is that the victims lose sight of the reality of the matter, in their zeal to find a deductive or similar form of literal meaning. An elementary example of this, is the attempt to teach at-the-blackboard Euclidean geometry, in which no physical action is taken into account. Kepler's observation of the "equal time, equal areas" definition of the planetary orbit, and of the harmonic ordering within the array of Solar orbits, are examples of an ironical evidence of the existence of an underlying physical principle governing the way the geometry of the situation unfolds. The function of the catenary as the relevant model for isochronic action, is among the best pedagogical exercises for showing the relationship between universal principles of geometries (e.g., orbits, cycles) and physical action.
Ideas are communicated only as what is not said. They are imparted, as Plato's Socratic dialogues do: as the stimulation of the creative (cognitive) powers of the mind, by posing an ambiguity which impels the mind to generate the idea which replaces the ambiguity as such.
The point being developed should be restated for physical-science practice as follows. The characteristic activity of competent physical science, is the discovery of verifiable hypotheses which are generated as solutions for experimentally defined ontological paradoxes. This is the characteristic of an original discovery; it is also the characteristic of the individual's reenactment of a valid discovery of a universal physical principle. When we describe this characteristic feature of scientific activity to a Classical poet, such as a Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Schiller, or Heine, his comment would be: "Aha! We Classical poets call that the principle governing irony and metaphor!"
Think of how much effort was expended, from Fermat, through Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, Fresnel, Ampère, et al., in search for a clearer, and deeper understanding of the ironical distinction between simple reflection and refraction. From Kepler through Gauss and Riemann, the essence of successive steps of fundamental scientific progress, is the ontological paradoxes inherent in the mathematical notions of number and of geometry, which alarm the mathematician into recognizing that physics is not a product of the application of mathematics, but, rather, that good mathematics lies essentially in the paradoxes which overturn previously accepted teachings of that subject, paradoxes of such types as isochronism, least action, and so on, which ultimately reveal themselves to be expressions of something superior to mere mathematics: physics.
The physical world's existence, does not lie within the domain of sense-certainty as such. It exists as the reality which prompts those shadows we know as sense-perceptions. The prompting of a sense of reality occurs by forcing sense-certainty to reveal the fact that its objects are merely shadows. We must prove the existence of that which causes the shadows, by demonstrating the efficiency of a conception through which we, physically, can control the behavior of the ambiguity arising in the domain of shadows. That is the very essence of scientific method. It is also the essence of successful modes and forms of Classical artistic composition.
The power of Classical poetry, and of the development of language under the burden of being a medium of Classical poetry, points our attention to the origin of those qualities of such a literate form of language, which make it implicitly superior to mathematics in communicating ideas about the physical universe. Language was developed as a tool of characteristic human behavior. This is more readily seen from the standpoint of Leonardo da Vinci's attention to the tuning of voices according to Florentine bel canto voice-training. The argument is much clearer, when we examine the significance of bel canto voice-training as the basis for the development of well-tempered polyphony by Bach.
The very qualities of Classical poetry, and Classical well-tempered polyphony, which offend the mathematics student's blind zeal for strictly literal meanings, does not make the student a better mathematician, only a relatively sterile personality, and an awfully bad artist.
Take a lesson from a scientist who was a leader in Classical art, and also in mathematics, our friend, and Benjamin Franklin's, Kästner. Kästner was apparently the first to insist explicitly that we must orient future mathematics to the goal of developing an anti-Euclidean geometry, rather than a non-Euclidean one. Great progress toward this goal was made by his student Gauss, on the subject of curvature. The objective was reached by Gauss's student Riemann, as announced in the latter's habilitation dissertation. Kästner told his collaborators and followers, we must not attempt to improve upon Euclid, we must challenge the fallacy-ridden, aprioristic assumptions which underlie Euclid's principles, thus introducing an anti-Euclidean geometry.
Take the case of Kästner's most famous student, Carl Gauss. What poetry there is in Gauss's mathematics! Or, the discoveries of Gauss's most celebrated student, Bernhard Riemann.
That said, on background, apply the same principle of ambiguity to a crucial problem in economics. I refer to the hoax of "free trade."
`Free Trade' As Colonialism
Take a typical economics example of such ambiguities. Take a factory from the U.S.A. Move it to a nation in Asia, where labor is said to be cheaper, and so forth. In this case, it has been wrongly assumed among those who do not understand economics, that that sort of "outsourcing" will increase the profitability and growth rates of the world economy. The latter, foolish belief, has been the leading feature of the argument in favor of the deadly pandemic disease known as "globalization."
For a comparable case, examine Henry C. Carey's book on the slave trade.[44] The person ignorant of the ABCs of economics, tends to believe that the U.S. economy as a whole profited from slave labor. Carey demonstrates that, while the British monarchy and some Americans were enriched individually by the traffic in the products of slave labor, the U.S. economy as a whole suffered a massive economic loss as a result of the looting generated as the effects of slavery. The surge of the U.S. economy to great power status, during 1861-1876, was a result of liberating the nation from these inherent effects of slavery.
Compare the case of the transfer of a manufacturing unit to Asia, from the standpoint of Carey's study of the effects of slavery on the U.S. economy.
Should we encourage the promoting of modern manufacturing in Asian nations? Yes, without doubt. The benefits of raising the productive powers of labor there, for the consumption of the internal economy, should be obvious. Should we, therefore, substitute cheap-labor production in Asia, as a source on which the United States depends for its products? It would be folly to do so, and of no benefit, either to Asia, or, in the end, the U.S.A., either.
This is true by the nature of the interdependency among what I define as the economy's political, social, and economic characteristics: this use of characteristic is adapted from Bernhard Riemann's definition of that term, as a term of a physical form of differential geometry. A national economy is not the sum-total of its independently defined component parts, such as individual firms. It can not be competently represented, as a Euclidean geometry does, as a mere statistical description of observed motions among events. Rather, it represents a more or less inseparable sort of functional interdependency among the totality of its principal such components, the reciprocal interaction of the whole.
In other words, if two identical productive facilities, with identical designs of products, and so on, are situated in different national economies, the contribution of the average productive powers of labor, meeting identical specifications for employment, will vary according to the characteristic relative productivity of each economy as a whole. The difference will be of the significance of a difference in attributable physical-economic curvature of the space-time represented by the respective economy. For example, the proposal that developing nations rely on tourism, rather than building up basic economic infrastructure, is among the most efficient ways of ensuring that such a nation prevents itself from developing successfully up to modern standards of productivity per capita.
For example, from its beginnings as English-speaking colonies in North America, the welfare of that nation depended upon its sovereign access to the development of basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing, and technological progress in all of those categories. Among the related strategic features of the U.S.A. toward the close of the Eighteenth Century, was the advantage represented by the fact that the average real income was more than twice that of the United Kingdom. The cultural standard of literacy of the American "Latin farmer," typified the fact that the literacy of the U.S. household was better than twice that of the United Kingdom. The relative strength, and the interdependency of these kinds of essential sovereignty assets of the U.S. economy, was a characteristic of the U.S. economy as a whole. This was a characteristic of the whole which was reflected as a characteristic of the activity within the parts of the whole.
In former, saner times, not many decades ago, the prospective investor would locate the development of industries on the basis of studies of the characteristics of the labor-force, basic economic infrastructure, and so forth, of the localities compared. The level of education, and of technological aptitudes of the population generally, and labor-force more narrowly, were among the prime considerations in choosing a location for the new plant. Among these considerations, were transport of goods, in and out of the locality, the quality of the local educational institutions, and geographical proximity to relevant categories of relevant suppliers and customers.
In that practice, intelligent managements, of either government or industry, would be assessing the prospective performance of the individual enterprise, within the terms of the relative economic characteristics of each locality considered.
In assessing the potential for medium- to long-term economic development in a so-called "developing region" of the world as a whole, the same considerations are to be applied in reverse. How should the potential of the population, and of various regions, be developed, that to the purpose of optimizing the rate of improvement of the economic characteristics of the national economy?
What has tended to happen, under recent decades' trends of exporting the productive capacity of the United States to poorer nations, is that the U.S. interests involved have mimicked the approach which the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, and French colonial powers took toward their colonies. Those powers were lustfully zealous in their zeal to extract from the colonies, but usually with more or less disastrous effects respecting the possible, alternative goal of bringing those colonies as a whole up to the level of the characteristic productive potential of a modern European society.
The referenced European colonial powers, had a certain type of practice, from the establishment of that form of colonialism beginning the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries. All were dominated by the influence of the imperialist maritime power of Venice, and most of the practice by Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England/Britain, and France, was either done in partnership with Venetian rentier-financier interests, or explicitly modelled upon Venetian precedents for this practice. The leading exception, but not the only exception, was the development of the English colonies in North America. Thus, if we identify the prevailing practice of colonialism initiated by the Portuguese, Spanish, Netherlands, British, and French interests, as the Venetian or British model, we are not misleading anyone by stating that there are only two post-Fifteenth-Century models for development of colonial regions, the Venetian-British and American types. By types, we mean paradigms, not necessarily always the practices to be observed in the relevant locality. In this comparison, the practice of slavery, first introduced by the Portuguese and Spanish colonialists, is a manifestation of the Venetian-British type.
The American paradigm is otherwise known as the American nation-building paradigm. This means that economic and related policies are aimed at achieving a healthy form of what is called a "full set" economy. "Full set" should be taken to signify, among other things, that the economy is adapted to achieving and maintaining efficient technological parity with other nations generally, and aiming for parity in physical standard of living and relative productivity among the labor-forces.
By contrast, the British System, whose characteristic features were established under the direction of the British East India Company during the Eighteenth Century, is characterized by its design for a combination of colonialism with looting of nations through a system of international loans, similar to the looting of the nations of Central and South America, by the U.S.A. and others, under the post-1971 "floating-exchange-rate" IMF system. The contrast between the two historically leading systems of the world during the past two centuries, the British system, loosely termed "capitalism" and the opposing American System of political-economy, is essentially the following.
American vs. British System
The American System is premised upon the principle of promotion of the general welfare, and upon the so-called American patriotic intellectual tradition, which President Franklin Roosevelt largely defended, and of which I am a leading spokesman today. It is aimed at that social and economic result in its domestic affairs, and is inclined to promote what is termed today a "multi-polar" configuration of power, a community of principle, based upon the notion of the general welfare, within, and among the members of a system of perfectly sovereign nation-state republics. In service of the promotion of the general welfare, the American System is intrinsically protectionist.
The British system is premised upon directly opposite fundamental principles, those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, et al., as developed by the British East India Company's Haileybury School ideologues. It is based upon the predatory principle of conflict of each against all, and upon strictly predatory and hedonistic motivations on all accounts. It was, until recently, strictly protectionist in respect to its homeland market, but was the leading advocate of the predatory doctrine of "free trade" in matters of trade and international loans. U.S. circles which think and act in accord with the anti-American, British model, are known traditionally, since the American struggle for independence, as by Franklin Roosevelt, and by me, as "American Tories."
The function of "free trade," in world trade and in the matter of international loans, is to force down the prices of other nations to the lowest, and to pursue this policy as a way of ensuring their relative subjugation to the imperial interests of the British system and its American Tory co-thinkers. Thus, the recent decades' Anglo-American advocates of "free trade" and "outsourcing," have dumped upon so-called "emerging markets" the opportunity to produce, but only under terms, prices, and conditions, which will efficiently prevent those "markets" from achieving the goals of their general welfare, and will enable the Anglo-American financier interests to loot those "markets," at least for a time, more energetically and copiously in the process.
The essential premise for a policy informed by the American intellectual tradition, toward both other nations and our own, is that, in fact, the relative cheapness and quality of the product we can obtain through trade, is important to all nations. These admirable qualities are not achieved by cruelly reducing the price of labor in the vendor nations, as current IMF "conditionalities" do, but by advancing the productive powers of labor through raising the standard of living and technological practice in the vendor nations. In other words, measure how much quality can be obtained from a vendor nation, per average per-capita hour of work by the labor-force of that vendor nation. This depends upon our recognizing, that the standard of living and technology in the vendor nation will determine that nation's ability to continue to offer us that result.
The object is to increase the productive powers of labor of all nations, which can not be anything but of mutual benefit to each and all. This is accomplished by raising the standard of living and productivity, per capita and per square kilometer, among each and all nations.
Expressing the difference between these opposing roles of the American and British models, the British model assumes that the universe is a Hobbesian-Lockean nightmare, ruled by a principle of universal entropy. In this universe, one man's gain can occur only as another man's loss.
This was the assumption introduced to England by the English translation of the work of Venetian author Botero, and by the Venetian Giammaria Ortes whose English-language translation was plagiarized by the British East India Company's Thomas Malthus.
The contrary, American System, whose essential features were derived chiefly from the influence of the anti-Lockean Leibniz, recognizes the effect of man's cognitive action as intrinsically anti-entropic, as Benjamin Franklin's sometime host Abraham Kästner, the teacher of Carl Gauss, did. In the American system, cognitive action generates the effects of anti-entropy. Trade among nations which is premised upon sharing the fruits of cognition, contributes to both the importer and the exporter, more or less equally. The source of this anti-malthusian gain, is the fostering of the role of the educable creative powers of the individual human mind. This is accomplished by such means as developing the cognitive powers of the individual, and by reshaping production to rely increasingly upon forms of economic activity which incorporate more advanced expressions of scientific and technological progress.
My opposition, as an American patriot, to the generally taught, loose-boweled use of the term "capitalism," should be registered again at this point. It should be sufficient to read the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Federal Constitution of 1787-1789, the Reports to the Congress by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the defense of the American System by Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, Henry C. Carey, and Abraham Lincoln. "Capitalism," is used as the term was used by the Karl Marx who, according to a knowledgeable study of his writings, lacked any competent knowledge of U.S. history and the American System. The term is used in a similar way by not only Marx, but other admirers of the British system. That meaning is wholly antithetical to not only the American System, but the notion of the sovereign nation-state republic in general.
Instead of using the misnomer "capitalism," we should recognize the kind of division of labor between the state and private entrepreneurship described so aptly by Treasury Secretary Hamilton. Hamilton's celebrated Report on the Subject of Manufactures, is the most relevant, of early official U.S. documentation on this account. We should see that not merely as peculiarly the U.S. patriotic tradition, but as the implicit design of economy under any sovereign form of nation-state republic.
Thus, from the American patriot's standpoint, the flaw in the economic design of the Soviet system, was the lack of efficient comprehension of the indispensable, voluntarist role of entrepreneurship, and of the proper role of government in preferring entrepreneurship to that implicitly oligopolist reign of financier-controlled large corporate organizations which has looted and supplanted the U.S. entrepreneur since the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.
This distinction is made clearer by considering my own arguments on the subject of the most significant flaw internal to the non-military side of the Soviet economy as such. That is to say, that the goal of modern economy, as since France's King Louis XI and England's Henry VII, has been to promote the freeing of the creative cognitive powers of the individual for the development of those innovative practices through which scientific progress is realized as technological progress in development of both the processes of production and designs of products. However, since the individual entrepreneur, as distinct from the public stockholders' corporation, usually represents an enterprise employing between several and a hundred-odd employees, the entrepreneur can not flourish in a natural way without extensive measures of protection, measures which can be supplied efficiently by no other agency but government.
Thus, if we consider all of the costs of production of a product, the cost of producing the same average quality of product in a so-called developing nation, is higher, if all physical-economic costs, including long-term ones, are considered. As we see in the history of European colonial practice prior to 1939, the apparent development of some local parts of the colony's economy, came at the expense of the looting of other sectors of the colony. Consider, for example, the apparent development of a port-city, as in the British colonial history of rural Bengal, in light of that city's non-functional, or nearly non-functional relationship to the economy of the interior.
The general lesson to be adduced from evidence of the type presented by the case of colonialism, is that, once again, as in parts of the preceding discussion here, the value of the individual productive, or related act, lies in the relationship between the quality of the individual, or local action considered, and the characteristic of the national economy, for example, considered as a whole. This is typified by the role of the general forms of basic economic infrastructure in determining the characteristic potential of the nation, or region in which the individual's, or other form of local action occurs. The relative productivity of a national economy, lies not in the sum of its individual parts, but, rather, in the crucial relationship between the character of the individual or local action, and the characteristic of the national economy, or larger region, considered as a whole.
Thus, for example, when we permit the looting of a large region of the world, such as Central and South America since 1971-1982, or sub-Sahara Africa, we lower the productive potential of regions such as North America and western Europe. This points to the inherent idiocy of efforts to apply contemporary standard financial-accounting practice to economies, and, therefore, the intrinsic, potentially criminal insanity of current monetarist theory in general.
Developing nations should be given access to full-set capabilities, because they need those capabilities for both internal development, and to acquire the means to participate in the world economy in an equitable way. However, the real cost of production is not cheaper in those nations, except as looting of them might appear to be so for some part of the population; the average of the total social cost, which is the real cost, is higher than in the industrially developed nation.
Those observations considered, to explore the role of ambiguity in a more thorough way, consider the import of Vernadsky's demonstration that, when Vernadsky's proofs are viewed as situated from the standpoint of Riemannian differential geometry, the universe is composed of three distinct but interacting sets of universal physical principles, corresponding, respectively, to the domains of the abiotic, living processes, and cognition. The very existence of viable economies depends absolutely on ambiguities which reflect the determining role of a set of principles which today's prevalent accounting practice implicitly denies to exist: the human cognition on whose actions the continued existence of economies depends absolutely. All competent economics focuses upon avoiding the common ignorance of human reason among most practicing economists today.
On such and related accounts, there are sundry features to realizing such objectives, but one is of both overriding and underlying importance: the development of the per-capita cognitive powers of each nation, and of humanity as a whole.
The nature of these relations is made clear only when we take the nature of physical-economic cycle into account, as I have promised here. Turn to that matter now.
B. The Structure of Cycles
That much said, now, for this moment at hand, I focus the discussion on the elementary features of the functional definition and role of medium- to long-term economic cycles. I include a focus on the aspect of cycles which, as I have just emphasized above, is presently not recognized within the financial-accounting profession or related circles: the functional value of the individual's physical-economic activity, as it must be assessed from the standpoint of the cyclical form of the national-economic, and international economic processes in which that activity is situated.
From my first enterprise in forecasting, which took shape back during 1954-1957, I based my method for study of short- to medium-term processes, on consideration of the medium-term capital-investment cycles inhering in certain post-1954 changes in national credit and related features of economic policy. A study of the methods of credit-creation used for marketing of automobiles, was a central, but, yet, only a pivotal feature of what emerged then as my pioneer venture in forecasting for national economies. I assessed the relevant individual manufacturing operative, for example, as, on the one side, a participant in production, and, on the other side, at the same time, the user of the product.
The pivotal problem which I addressed by that approach, is the counterproductive tendency to assess the role of the manufacturing operative, for example, from a reductionist's cost-accounting standpoint. The role of the individual's cognitive potential in the functioning of the process as a whole, is either implicitly denied by such financial accounting practice, or is relegated to discussions held apart from the generality of the production-process as a whole.
One of the more striking indications of this, during my 1955 studies of the problems of U.S. automobile marketing, was the not uncommon problem of the coke bottle, or remains of a production operative's sandwich, within the walls, to so speak, of the automobile delivered to the retailer. Backtracking that phenomenon, showed that the efforts to design production and product according to such natural physiological characteristics of eye- and limb-movements, were already being implicitly discarded (even long before the notorious 1970s), in the effort to squeeze point-of-production cost-reductions out of the process. The cognitive factor in productivity, was being squeezed out of the operative's role in production.
It is useful to assess that kind of problem from the vantage-point of the role of Auftragstaktik in German military training since Scharnhorst (until recent decades). The touch of excellence, in tactical features of combat, as in production, is that cognitive "something extra" supplied by the subordinate leaders on the local ground, to the purpose of making the adopted mission successful in ways which could not have been anticipated at the higher levels of the command. The crucial feature of production, is the presence of a human being, rather than a programmed robot at the point of production.
Cognitive thinking, even about one's local place in the process of production, reaches outward, as if by instinct, to think of the product and its use from the vantage-point of the economy as a whole. The thinking operative is concerned about the quality of basic economic infrastructure in that locality, and recognizes a relationship of that to both the general conditions of life in that locality, and also the enhancement of the net productivity, in both quantity and quality, of the product being produced in, and shipped from that locality. He or she tends to adopt the firm for which he works as his own, and is concerned that that firm's product should be one deserving of pride. Similarly, he or she thinks of the real components of family income, not as something he or she "gets," but as something which our nation either produces, or imports. Overemphasis on financial cost-accounting, blurs or even suffocates the cognitive impulse in the operative, and others, and thus blurs the reality, that what we consume is an integral part of what we ourselves produce.
"Outsourcing" is thus, not only an affliction of the U.S. unemployed, but also a grave moral problem for the U.S. population as a whole. The sense of human identity of the present employee, and the former employee discarded onto the scrap-heap, has been attacked with serious moral effects on the ability to produce.
For example, by taking into account the known, typical span of the product's useful life, and including, for U.S. standard automobiles of that period, the role of the new-car/used-car resale-cycle, an approximation of a pervasive production-consumption cycle, expressed at every local point in the economy, was introduced. By comparing various important hard-commodity products with the case for automobile marketing, an interesting, accurate, mid-1956 forecast of an early and deep 1957 recession popped out. A modest accomplishment, but a qualified novice's good first try at professional forecasting.
Most of published forecasts by notable others from that same period happened to be badly mistaken. I considered my own success only something better than standard economic analysis, until I discovered how stubbornly wrong-headed most published forecasts continued to be over the same period, into 1958. During later 1958 and 1959, my initial success of 1954-1957 prompted me to attack a problem in long-range forecasting. What would be the challenge faced by the U.S. economy as a whole, should Arthur Burns' doctrines, or their like, be extended deep into the coming decade?
By 1959-1960, at the same time that I developed a proof, against MIT's Marvin Minsky et al., why the attempt to establish what is now called a "new economy" would be a disaster, I reached the following general conclusion about the U.S. economy of the 1960s. If the U.S. continued to follow the pattern implicit in the Arthur Burns policy-syndrome, the second half of the 1960s would be dominated by a series of international monetary crises, leading toward a breakdown of the existing Bretton Woods monetary agreements. I maintained that forecast throughout the 1960s, pointing to the 1967 sterling crisis, the January-March 1968 U.S. monetary crisis, and the 1970 Penn-Central/Chrysler crises, in turn, as typical expressions of the situation I had forecast as likely for the second half of the 1960s. Thus, with the mid-August, 1971 break-up of the fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, I was the only economist on the visible public record, whose forecast for the economy as a whole had held up over the course of the preceding decade.
My interest during all of this, was not to make a career as a forecaster. I was occupied with the development of the application of my discoveries of the 1948-1952 interval to the existential problem building up for the U.S. and world economies. The issue was: How to design policies which would enable the United States and other nations to avoid the disastrous blunders of the U.S. Truman Administration, and also the types of errors which Burns' influence had embossed on the Eisenhower Administration. As an associated effort, I included special attention to the axiomatic fallacies of assumption embedded in the doctrines generally accepted among notable Marxist economists.
When I took up regular, part-time teaching duties, during the 1966-1973 interval, and my forecasts were publicized, beginning that period, as part of the work of my associates, my forecasts began to be circulated more and more widely, both inside and outside the U.S.A., such that when the August 1971 break-up of the fixed-exchange-rate system occurred, my unique authority as a forecaster was widely recognized among relevant circles inside the U.S.A. and abroad. Among other circles—among the world's leading rentier-financier circles—my 1971 and later achievements on this account, marked me as an exceptionally competent, and therefore dangerous adversary, therefore a prime target for abuse and intended destruction. For reason of that 1956-1971 history, when I have written of my record as a forecaster, I have spoken of forecasts circulated during the recent thirty-five years, with only occasional reference to the forecasts publicized in restricted circles during the 1959-1965 interval.
From 1966, until recently, the limitation upon my published work on the subject of economic science, was the lack of peers qualified to proceed beyond an introductory level of the principles of a science of physical economy.[45] The combination of my successes as a forecaster, the attention they have received, and the severity of the presently onrushing world monetary-financial and economic crises, have recently created the circumstances under which a more intense and thorough study of my discoveries and their applications has occurred. With today's world crisis, the more sophisticated aspects of my thinking on these matters, is, in point of fact, a matter of urgent importance for many nations, including my own.[46]
Here, I summarize some of the conceptions which I have stated in the earlier part of this chapter. This time, I recast the argument from the standpoint of the crucial functional role of the individual person and activity within the production cycle as such. As I looked at the automobile industries' cycle, during 1954-57: What kinds of activity by individuals are necessary for the performance of the whole enterprise, or national economy, and how is their relative value to be determined from that vantage-point?
I emphasize once again, the point featured in the preceding section of this chapter. Kepler's method was based, as he insisted, upon his studies of the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo da Vinci. Kepler also credits a like-minded contemporary, William Gilbert, who had made important contributions to the work of Kepler's New Astronomy.[47] That was also the method employed by the discoverer of the relativistic principle of quickest time, Pierre Fermat, the work of such followers of Kepler as Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, Jean Bernouilli, and such followers of Leibniz as Kästner, Gauss, and Riemann.[48] The same methodological approach must be taken in study of the underlying cyclical determination of both the overall and internal behavior of economic processes.
The following several historical points are made briefly in review of crucial elements of the preceding section of this chapter.
The crucial principle of a science of economics, is that the increase of mankind's power to exist, is measurable in terms of potential relative population-density. This implies the measurement of the changes in that potential within the scope of a national or regional economy, and also the impact of the same process upon the economy of the world as a whole. So defined, increase in the potential relative population-density of an economy, is interchangeable with the notion of promotion of the general welfare, or common good.
Without introducing that principle of the general welfare, or common good, no rational definition of a national economy were possible. Once the principle is introduced to any governing authority, such as the Fifteenth-Century Popes associated with the Council of Florence and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and by the monarchies of Louis XI and Henry VII, all aspects of globally extended European society are defined by their relative adherence or opposition to that principle. All performance of society, including so-called economic performance, is to be judged according to the standard implicit in the notion of the overriding obligation to promote the general welfare. This means to defend the general welfare, but also to initiate changes, such as artistic and scientific progress, which raise the required standard of performance for that general welfare.
Such was also the birth of the post-Seventeenth-Century, more modern form of sovereign nation-state republic, in the 1776-1789 birth of the U.S.A. as a Federal Constitutional republic.
The Role of the Individual in History
Against that background, it is to be emphasized that the included characteristic of modern European civilization, is the qualitatively new emphasis which that civilization has placed, both in practice and in conception, on the economic and related role of the cognitive individual in history. This is called sometimes the "voluntarist" view of the role of the individual in history.
This "voluntarist" view, the compulsion to act on behalf of the common good, or agape, is expressed in many ways, but, for our immediate purposes here, it signifies that the individual person in society is able to change the course of the history of his, or her society for the better, through acts related to the original discovery of, or transmission of valid universal physical principles.[49] This includes the primary, or contributing role of that individual, in altering the character of those cycles which determine the outcome of present and future history. It is also the implied proper basis for defending the principle of entrepreneurship under the American System.
In the Christian history of European civilization, this notion of a voluntarist role of the individual in history, is associated with the image of the passion of Jesus Christ. The notion of "the imitation of Christ," as the highest calling of the individual, expresses that idea with a certain special intensity. The function of the individual, is to change the course of history, a quality of change which includes the particular matter under consideration here, the changes in the characteristics of historical cycles.
For those who knew history, this qualitative impact of Christ's ministry, under those circumstances, was no mere coincidence. Under the awful conditions defined by the preceding two centuries rise of the power of Rome, and the reign of the Mithra-cult-allied Augustus Caesar, the threatened fate of the human individual was morally a disgusting one. Christ's mission made the difference in man's fate thereafter, establishing, for the Christian, a new, higher conception of the human individual's power, and also his or her responsibility for the fate of humanity as a whole.
Thus, although the European civilization which Egypt's influence had set into motion in ancient Greece and pre-Roman Italy, is best typified to the present day, by the figures of Solon of Athens and Plato, it was the ministry and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ which made the revolution, against the evil of Rome, upon which the possibility of the modern sovereign nation-state has been premised.
The destiny and duty of the Christian was, as put by America's Cotton Mather, "to do good," not only for the moment, the locality, but, to the extent possible, for all present and future mankind, and also on behalf of the just causes for which people had lived in the past. The principle of agape, which is, as I Corinthians 13 typifies this, the central conception of both truth and law in Christianity, freed mankind from an externally imposed set of formal observances, to be self-governed by the inner quality of inspiration which agape, the meaning of the common good, connoted for Plato's Socrates, as for the Apostles Paul and John.
However, approximately 1400 years from the birth of Christ passed, before a form of society consistent with the mission of doing the common good emerged, in the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance. Yet, if that voluntarist principle, and the achievement it represents, are clear; the object was always, as now, to continue to move forward, not backward, along that continuing course.
The modernity of the introduction of this view into statecraft in general, and economy in particular, is made clearer when we consider the bestiality of the influential Code of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, and of the reactionary currents in European feudalism later: that each toiler of society must stay in the place of his father and grandfather before him, thus maintaining a fixed ordering of that society of virtual human cattle, which was the Roman and predominant feudal conception of society. All pro-feudalist ideas spread in modern times, such as the "malthusian" dogmas introduced to England by the writings of Botero and Ortes, echo the bestiality of ancient societies such as those of Babylon and Rome, and also Venetian-Norman-dominated feudal Europe. Contemporary neo-malthusian dogmas, such as those popularized in the United States by such means as Rachel Carson's hoax,[50] and the opposition to the actuality of cognitive generation of new physical principles by such Russell and Wells followers as Wiener and von Neumann, represent a clear regression to a neo-feudal world-outlook on the nature of man.
The American System of political-economy, as, for example, described by Treasury Secretary Hamilton, is a typification of the "voluntarist" conception of the economic and related role of the individual in history: the agapic devotion to the furtherance of the common good. This anti-Hobbesian, anti-Lockean, anti-Physiocratic conception of the individual, is at the core of what is rightly recognized as the American intellectual tradition of Franklin, Lincoln, et al. On that account, excepting cases such as Austria's great reformer, Joseph II, that American intellectual tradition was hated bitterly by the Central European and Iberian peninsular circles around the Habsburgs, including, of course, the Holy Alliance's Prince Metternich, and including degenerates such as the Carlists associated with the influence of the notorious Buckley family's influence inside the U.S.A. today.[51]
In respect to the process of industrial and related production itself, we may distinguish the following as of primary significance. First, the discovery of the relevant scientific or technological principle, on which that productive process, or its improvement depends. Second, the productive act which expresses that technology. Third, the administration of the organization of the division of labor, which that production requires. However, the significance of this act of production in the particular enterprise, is inseparable from its effect, through consumption, on that common good which is expressed as the increase of the potential relative population-density of the population as a whole.
The measurements to be made on this account, can not be made competently on the basis of a fixed set of input-output parameters for a national economy. The crucial factor is rate of change of those parameters, a rate of change which must be expressed implicitly in terms of changes in potential relative population-density. The driving force in this rate of change, is the cognitive action of the sovereign individual mind, in generating and replicating experimentally validatable hypotheses which are otherwise known as universal physical principles.
Restate what I have just written here, as follows.
Every case of the discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle, is made by the perfectly sovereign cognitive powers of each individual mind which either makes the original discovery, or replicates that act of discovery. In each such case, the individual generates a universal act, an act upon the universe as a whole. No other action by any person, or any group of persons has any actually universal value, except either that discovery itself, or action premised upon it.
This quality is expressed by any discovery, or other action which is subsumed by such a discovery of universal principle. This includes technologies whose existence is derived from, and depends upon such discoveries of principle.
That argument is already implicit in Leibniz's development of those universal principled conceptions associated with his monadology.
Thus, the core of human knowledge, and of the actions derived from knowledge of an imputably universal quality, presents us with true universals, which are recognizable by us as of distinct types.
Such is the intrinsic, universal truth and beauty of that which is a faithful expression of the distinctive type known as human individual life. It is from this standpoint, that the meaning of economic and related long-ranging cycles can be adduced. If my already identified correction to Vernadsky's notion of the Noösphere, is made, the concept of the Noösphere, as I have described it, affords us the simplest kind of comprehensive representation of the way in which long-ranging cycles appear and unfold in a manner fairly described as a Riemannian universe. I now proceed accordingly.
Cycles in a Riemannian Universe
As Vernadsky and his followers recognize this cyclical process, the continued existence of man upon this planet, depends upon the universal physical principle whose natural products are specifically an expression of the activity of living processes of human cognition. As I have emphasized above, this principle is not the product of some original germ of life, but a universal creative principle, an intention, in Kepler's sense of a universal physical principle, which acts upon the universe to produce what we recognize as life and its products. It is this principle, whether known as such, or not, which must be included as an underlying characteristic of all long-ranging cycles in the universe, physical-economic or other.
Thus, the student of Vernadsky's contributions to the notion of Biosphere and Noösphere, is impelled to measure the relative rates at which the Earth is producing those natural products of life on which continued human life depends, and the rate at which mankind, or other influences, are causing those products to be depleted.
The first concern of human life, is the maintenance of those oceans and atmosphere which came into existence as products of living activity, and are maintained through continued such activity. Coal is shown to be representative of those natural products of living processes which we term "fossil," whereas, there is reason to challenge the presumption that natural gas and petroleum are fossil in that same sense. There are also "fossils" of abiotic processes, although the term "fossil" is usually restricted to residues of living processes. What we term the Biosphere, contains an organization of literally thousands of known geological types of what are ostensibly pre-biotic minerals reported as not less than 4,000 known types, whose distribution and quality are either chiefly, or significantly the results of the long-term action of the Biosphere upon the pre-biotic Earth.[52]
In each first approximation, we are confronted with a volume of such fossils, including air and water, and a per-capita rate of their depletion, at varying rates, according to the level of technological development, and functional organization of that development, of entire nations, and of the planet in general. Forests, streams, and meadows, are also fossils, as are quicksand swamps.
However, society also generates, or causes the biosphere to generate, new kinds of supplies of useful fossils, as well as contributing to the replenishment of pre-existing types being depleted. Not only must society manage the depletion of fossil products of the pre-human Biosphere; the existence of the Noösphere creates new categories of what should be defined by any economist, and by national policy-makers generally, as functionally as fossils in fact. As society increases the effective level of energy-flux density of generation of usable power, and in other ways, mankind's ability to produce needed types of fossils of the Noösphere grows. New types of what would otherwise be considered as specifically abiotic and organic existence, are brought into being by man. The basic economic infrastructure of transportation, water management, energy production and distribution, sanitation, forestation, urban development, and so on, is an extension of the fossil Earth's development, bringing the "ecology" of our planet to much higher levels of anti-entropic metastability than the Earth could have achieved without us.
The principled distinction among fossils is, therefore, the distinction among the kinds of processes which have brought them into existence, essentially the distinction between willfully human and other agencies.
Therefore, we must consider these works of man as included in the array of fossils on which, taken as a category, the continuation and improvement of human life depends.
Thus, investment of economic resources in development and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, in productive facilities, in educational and health-care systems, in urban centers, are also fossil resources, subject to the threat of depletion. Sometimes, the teacher standing before the classroom is usefully described as a fossil, but that issue is a cart of a different horse than we are deploying here. However, the agency on which this entire process depends, is the human species, and, most emphatically, the progressive self-development of that species.
One of the most notable peculiarities of the process of replenishing necessary fossil resources, and of generating new types of useful fossils, is the fact, that progress is not merely an option. A zero-growth policy is intrinsically a genocidal policy, a policy which is potentially the most effective of the means by which mankind might choose to destroy itself as a species. Mankind is a species whose physical characteristic is cognitive anti-entropy. It is by raising the level of that anti-entropy, that our species obtains the increased power to replenish, or supersede the fossil resources needed for sustaining human life, such as by inventing and amassing new categorical types of fossils which supersede that which we were depleting.
Thus, we are confronted, in first approximation, with two qualities of physical-economic cycles. In crude first-approximation, we have cycles of rates of depletion and replenishment of fossil conditions necessary for current modes of the existence of our population as a whole. However, in second approximation, we have a more refined conception of physical-economic cycles. A needed fossil resource to be maintained, is defined in terms of both the change in the array of technologies required to increase mankind's potential relative population-density, and the rate of anti-entropy in that per-capita potential which is being achieved.
It is the ratios implicit in such a view of the relationship between depletion and rate of superseding depletion, which defines the meaningful physical-economic cycles reflected as the long-ranging economic cycles expressed in the terms I had described such phenomena up to this present point in my report.
The most important of these long-ranging cyclical phenomena, is the cognitive development of the individual and the society in general. At this point, in defining the basis for economic cycles—in pointing to the significance of a Riemannian universe, for defining long-ranging economic circles—I go beyond the framework of Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere, but without overturning any of the methodological assumptions embedded in his progress up to that point in his work. I simply correct for what his approach lacks.
The following interpolation makes the general principle clearer.
A Universe of Fossils
The crux of the matter, is the following. The universe according to Vernadsky's view of the Noösphere, has the following principal, axiomatic requirements.
"Universe" signifies, axiomatically, nothing outside, prior to, or after that universe. This is not an a priori doctrine; it is an expression of the experimental methods on which we depend for all validated hypotheses leading to defining a universal physical principle. This universe is defined experimentally, as by Vernadsky, as a reflection of three interacting sets of universal physical principles. These three sets are, respectively, a.) the domain of abiotic experimentation; b.) the domain of phenomena which are called products of life, because they could not occur as a result of action within the assumptions pertaining to the realm of abiotic experiments (the Biosphere); and c.) physical effects which occur, but are not specifically consistent with living processes in general (the Noösphere).
Such a universe, the only actually known universe, may be fairly described only by proceeding from the premises set forth by Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation.
From the standpoint of the physical-economic impact of science-driven progress in the potential relative population-density of society, the cumulative impact of discovery of universal physical principles, defines a sub-class of universal experimental phenomena, within the domain of cognitive action (i.e., of the Noösphere), but which depend upon the cognitive form of social processes, as typified by universal principles of Classical artistic composition, rather than individual discovery of universal principles specific to either the abiotic domain, or living processes and their specific products in general.
Typical of this latter sub-category of specifically human behavior, is the challenge of providing either a Classical humanist form of universal education, or its functional equivalent. The transmission of knowledge of the cumulative store of discovered universal physical principles, as a cognitive, rather than a mere learning experience, is an essential determinant of the ability of society to maintain the level of pre-established progress in the human condition, and to go beyond that. Thus, the approximately twenty-five-year span, from birth to biological maturation, reflects a cycle which coincides with the core of the span of the educational process on which the development of competently adult individuals depends.
Because of the importance to all human beings, of the idea of death, all ideas and motives for practice, are implicitly tied up with the implications of the respective ideas of mortality and immortality. On this account, all human beings are implicitly spiritual individuals, that in the specifically Platonic sense of spirituality. They act in response to motives which express, at least implicitly, ideas of mortality and immortality. To understand our universe, and to understand humanity's role within it, this matter of spirituality must be situated within the framework of a scientific conception of the term universe, as I have summarily identified that just above.
In physical science, spirit signifies nothing but the sovereign cognitive potential and development of the mortal human individual. Spirit is the quality of intention, as Kepler employs the notion of intention, which is usually expressed as human discovery and implementation of a universal physical principle operating from outside the control of the abiotic or Biosphere's phase-space as such. Spirit is a quality of physically efficient existence located outside the abiotic and Biosphere as phase-spaces. It is physically efficient, because it effects specific kinds of physical changes within the domains of the abiotic and Biosphere. It is physically efficient as Vernadsky defines natural consequences of the life and cognition, as experimentally demonstrable. It is not a notion of spirit existing independently of science; it is a notion of spirit which goes directly to the essence of all competent science, in all aspects of scientific activity.
We have, thus, the following picture of certain essential, implicitly Riemannian features of our universe, a universe which features a spiritual principle, the cognitive power of generating experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle, as an integral feature of the universe as a universe. The considerations we emphasize here, may appear esoteric to many, at first glance; but, as I shall indicate, they are nonetheless a highly practical, relevant matter for the understanding of what a long-range economic cycle signifies in practice.
The universe is, primarily, a multiply-connected interplay of three phase-spaces, all of which are interacting everywhere at all times and places, but which are each experimentally distinct, in specificity of principle, from the others. This much we know from the crucial experimental evidence, as evidence is defined by, for example, the work of Vernadsky on the Biosphere and Noösphere. As Kepler introduced a rigorous notion of a universal physical principle in his New Astronomy, universal physical principles are to be associated with intentions expressed by their effects, but are not themselves derived, as if deductively, from those effects. They are the laws of the universe, which we have discovered, and, if we are wise, have adopted as our intentions.
This interplay does not, however, support the notion, that a "germ" of life as such infects the abiotic universe, to produce such results as a Biosphere. Rather, what we actually know of the Biosphere, is that it is produced by the action of some universal principle, a principle of anti-entropic action which produces living forms, but is not itself limited to the array of forms whose existence it induces.
"Life" as we know it, exists only as itself a type of "fossil" of a higher ontological order. The principle expressed by life in general, life as distinct from an experimentally defined abiotic universality, always existed; it is an integral principle of the universe. Under certain conditions, yet to be determined by us, this principle generated life-forms, forms which are, in effect, "fossils" of that action; life as we conceive its expressions, is itself, collectively, a "fossil" of the principle which has generated the existence of those forms.
What we know, as a matter of principle, is that the conditions for generating what are recognized as such life-forms must have existed, at that time, within the self-development of the universe as a whole. We know very little more than that, but that much we know with certainty.
However, that much said, we also know, that the development of living forms is ordered, to such effect, that the pre-existence of some living forms, or their fossils, is necessary for the emergence of other life-forms, including, most conspicuously, higher life-forms.
The case is clearer, at least in first approximation, in examining the evidence bearing upon the natural products of cognitive action. Cognition is a principle expressed, in itself, as a sovereign function of the living human individual, but it is not to be inferred as an existently self-subsisting principle from its individual effects.
From the standpoint of physical science, the cognitive notion of the existence of God, is twofold in the following terms. First, as I have emphasized earlier here, God is universal cognition, anti-entropy per se: But! If we are to employ the term "creativity" in a way which represents experimental knowledge, rather than something like just another "self-evident" assumption, it means something we know, rather than something which is found merely convenient to believe. In the science of physical-economy, we know the efficient existence of a quality, called willful cognition, which Kant, for example, denied to exist. That cognitive action, which has the effect of increasing the potential relative population-density of a culture, is what we know as creativity. That is, as I have emphasized here earlier, in first approximation, the scientific notion of the existence of a God-principle reigning in the universe; but, that, as I have warned earlier, is not all.
Creativity, as we actually know it, exists only in the form we actually know it, as human creativity. It is a sovereign quality of an individual human mind. The idea of sovereign individuality can in no way be separated, except in a purely irrational, arbitrary way, from creativity. Thus, for science, God exists only as a universal personality, as pure creativity existing as a universal personality; our notion of God is limited to the basis for that knowledge in what we experience and know as the unique quality of the cognitive power to create.
Furthermore, the relationship of the individual person to God, is of the same nature as a cognitive quality of social relationship among persons in society. As Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa expressed the point, we may participate in God.
These matters must tend to be misunderstood by many, at first, as the intrusion of religious ideas upon the domain of science. Yet, consider the most important question underlying all matters of policy of either persons or nations, the question of intention. It is as societies, and individuals, define the relationship between, on the one side, the ideas of mortality and immortality, that the paradoxes inhering in the working definitions of personal self-interest must ultimately be reconciled. It is through the adoption of intention, ultimately an intention respecting adjudged self-interest, that choices of action in society are regulated.
In a Riemannian physical space-time which is derived, as a notion, from cognitive knowledge of both our individual and social relationship to the universe, the universe has an origin, but no beginning. It begins in its origin as such, before which no time or space existed. It is, in theological terms, a simultaneity of eternity. In this universe, we are made as in the image of the Creator of that universe. This image, expressed solely through the expression of our cognitive powers, is the immortality expressed by our brief mortal existence. In that immortality, lies the essential self-interest, the true practical self-interest, of each of us.
In that universe, life, implicitly, always existed, not necessarily as life, but in the form of the anti-entropic phase-space which produces the generation of living forms as the existing conditions make this development appropriate. Similarly, the creative power which is the human species, also always existed, but was manifest when the preconditions for the creation of its existence had been developed. The notions of development, which account for this unfolding of the universe up to the present, are, for us now, the basis for the notion of long-ranging cycles, including long-ranging economic cycles.
There is a process of consuming, replenishing, and superseding of the preconditions for the Biosphere and, also, the Noösphere. The development, through birth, youth, maturity, and demise, of the individual person, typifies such cycles. The maintenance, depletion, and improvements of the Biosphere, in ways which either accord with the requirements of progress in the human condition, or do not, are examples of long-ranging cycles. The development, maintenance, and depletion of basic economic infrastructure, including educational and health-care systems, is cyclical. And, so on.
In the course of time, the benefits and errors embedded in our management of that complex of long-ranging cycles, overtakes society, with either benefits or disasters. Thus, studies of physical-economic processes, which look ahead one to two generations, and even longer, are the way of thinking by which we should judge the performance of the physical economy (the society) in the short to medium term.
Indeed, the universe as we know it, is a fossil, in the deepest and most general sense of that term. It is a fossil of an ongoing process of development, of a continuing creation, in which new forms of processes emerge in response to the preconditions fulfilled by others. The universe is, thus, constantly producing, using-up, and superseding what it has previously produced. Herein lies the notion of long-ranging cycles. It is those cycles, so comprehended, which reveal universal intentions, as Kepler recognized intention, embedded in that self-development of the universe.
Man exists in that universe, and operates on, and changes those cycles, to the intended purpose of the existence of our species. Those relations are expressed as they are reflected in the physical-economic cycles of modern civilization, as also earlier. The way in which one cyclical phase of the process leads toward the outcome inhering in the governing assumptions of current practice, is to be recognized as the most important feature of that cycle, its systemic characteristics.
In all competent such studies, our primary concern is to define the systemic characteristics of the long-ranging cycles being considered. The first object of such studies, is to detect and eradicate the false, systemic assumptions, which are impelling society toward self-inflicted catastrophe. The second object, is to adduce the principles which must supersede the assumptions we must discard.
Those principled underpinnings of the crisis before us so considered, proceed, so informed, to the immediate, practical measures needed to pull this planet back, safely, from the present brink of a prolonged, global new dark age of all humanity.
[8] Although, as Professor von der Heydte stressed (1952), the emergence of the struggle to establish modern society dates from such points as the work of Abelard of Paris, the ideas associated with the work of Frederick II and Dante Alighieri, were not brought into their political realization until about the time of the emergence of the great Platonic school at Padua at the turn into the Fifteenth Century.
[9] The reader should be forewarned, that I do not accept the definition of the U.S. economy as a "capitalist economy." Since the close of the Eighteenth Century, especially since the collapse of the Soviet economy, the planet has been dominated by a conflict between two persisting, leading forms of national economy. On the one side, there has been what Alexander Hamilton and others defined as "The American System of political-economy." On the opposing side, the principal, perspective adversary of that American System, has been the dogma and practice of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company's Haileybury School. Today, when the term "capitalist system" is used, that usually signifies "the British system," as it did for the Karl Marx of his Capital. I recognize the contrary, American System, as the natural expression of the healthy form of the economy of a sovereign nation-state republic, as I qualify the functional significance of that definition at appropriate places below.
[10] As qualified later in this report, I define "physical effects" from the standpoint of what Vladimir Vernadsky identified as the Noösphere. I mean the measurable effects on the physical domain which are categorically attributable to either an abiotic, living, or cognitive phase-space. The standard of proof for each case, is that which has been defined at length by Vernadsky.
[11] The applicable definition of "physical" for this purpose, is broadly the same which Vladimir Vernadsky employed in defining the Noösphere. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, The Economics of the Noösphere (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 2001).
[12] E.g., "neo-Ockhamite."
[13] Cf. Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936 (New York: H. Fertig, 1972).
[14] Friedrich Freiherr von de Heydte, Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg, Germany: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952). The actually adopted form of the Roman imperial model, was the outcome of crucial, seminal negotiations between the faction-leader Octavian (the later Emperor Augustus) with representatives of the cult of Mithra, in discussions held on the Isle of Capri. It was this alliance which enabled Octavian to defeat Anthony and Cleopatra, and found the empire on that basis. The alliance of the Roman legions with the cult of Mithra was certified by the establishment of Capri as the hereditary property of the reigning Emperor, until the transfer of the title approximately a half-century later. It is this tradition among the imperial legions, which forms the basis for both the Nazi Waffen-SS and the kindred philosophy of the U.S. military utopians today. Ironically, according to usually reliable sources on such matters, it was the cult of Mithra which invented the theological doctrine of the Hell unknown to the Hebrew theological tradition.
[15] Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).
[16] In applying the notion of physical science to economics, I signify the connections between science and culture which I have taken up in comparing my work in the science of physical economy with the definition of the Noösphere introduced by Vladimir Vernadsky. See, for example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Economics of the Noösphere, op. cit. I emphasize, that Vernadsky, while defining the principle of abiotic, living, and cognitive processes, as reflections of mutually distinct classes of universal physical principles, nonetheless based the notion of scientific proof of principle for living and cognitive processes on necessary and sufficient evidence based on conclusively demonstrated paradoxes presented by effects of life and cognition on the abiotic domain.
[17] As docoumented in Kepler's 1609 The New Astronomy.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Thus, Mrs. Joan Robinson rightly ridiculed the foolish, but dangerous Professor Milton Friedman, as an apostle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Friedman is the sort of menace his victims might prefer to curse in Latin.
[20] For relevant readers: I am using the term "characteristic" here in the strict sense of the usages of Gauss-Riemann. I emphasize the highlights of some extremely relevant implications of that usage, at a relevant later point here.
[21] This defines the indispensable function of the notion of Riemannian manifolds in addressing the subject of economic cycles. The efficient introduction of a new universal physical principle, changes the physical geometry of the economic cycle as a whole, thus changing the characteristic of the system, and thus changing the value of the local action.
[22] In the sense of a Riemannian differential geometry.
[23] A characterization of Friedman deliciously served by Cambridge's Mrs. Joan Robinson. Friedman, like the typical Gila Monster, may not be an impressive intellect, but he is no less nasty on account of that shortfall.
[24] LaRouche, op. cit.
[25] This use of "spiritual" is neither gratuitous, nor cute. In physical-scientific method, the only rational definition of "spirit," is a manifest quality of an individual human mind. It is shown to exist by reason of the fact, that the individual human mind has a physically-efficient capability to accomplish what no other living species can do: discover the kind of universal physical principle, which can become known only through cognition. This implies the related significance, that the induced replication of an individual's discovery of specifically cognitive ideas, has the effect of transmitting a spiritual existence, that of the original act of discovery, for example, to future generations, as such cognitive products were transmitted to that individual from their origin in an ancient original discoverer of such a principle. Since the actions involved produce effects expressed as physical effects, the transmission of such ideas by stimulated replication of the act of discovery, is also a physical effect, and thus a subject of crucial-experimental verification. The greatest theologians known to me through my studies, employ that method of "spiritual exercises."
[26] "Frankfurt School" existentialists Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, for example.
[27] In modern European history, this conflict was centered early around the figure of Nicholas of Cusa. The cases of the irrationalist Wenck and Henry VIII's Venetian marriage-counsellor, Giorgi (Zorzi) are typical, as are Pietro Pomponazzi and, later, the author of modern empiricism, Paolo Sarpi.
[28] I have referred to this phenomenon of "super-genes" in earlier locations, but the present setting provides the medium in which to state the case in a more thorough way.
[29] E.g., the Timaeus, in Plato: Vol. IX, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
[30] The argument which Leibniz summarized as the set of theses called his "monadology" was an outgrowth of, and expression of Leibniz's uniquely original (circa 1676) discovery of the calculus. The emergence of the conception of a universal principle of "least action," in the course of his further development of the calculus, poses the notion of a monadology implicitly, as I have argued for the sovereignty of the individual processes of cognition. Hence, the castration of the Leibniz calculus by Augustin Cauchy, is to be seen as the third of a series of hoaxes by the apologists for Isaac Newton. The first was the discredited, "least action" hoax of Berlin's Maupertuis. The second attempt, after Maupertuis' fraud was exposed, was the hoax of the "Letters to a German Princess," by Maupertuis' Berlin confederate Leonhard Euler. The third, was the assertion, by Laplace's accomplice Cauchy, of the essential intent of Euler's hoax, as the linear approximation passed down as customary classroom dogma since.
[31] Typical of the error common to the reductionists on this account, are the effects of teaching secondary geometry as a subject whose principles can be adduced without taking physical processes into account. By drill and grill in such ideas about an assumed pure mathematics, the student is misled into such follies as attempting a geometric representation of physical processes, as if to explain what such "mere describing of nature" excludes from consideration. Compare Bernhard Riemann's arguments on this problem in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, with emphasis on the concluding section, and also the closing sentence of that dissertation. Bernhard Riemann, On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry, Henry S. White, trans., in David Eugene Smith, ed., A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: Dover Publications, 1959).
[32] See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and David P. Goldman, The Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman (New York: New Benajmin Franklin House, 1980), pp. 306-322.
[33] John Maynard Keynes, "Newton the Man," in Essays in Biography (New York: The Norton Library, 1951).
[34] The Paris edition, loaned by a friend who had received a copy from Wiener's daughter. The difference between the time of my reading of the advance copy, and the publication of the U.S. edition, is relevant to the way in which the sequence of ensuing developments occurred in my initial discoveries of that year and the next.
[35] The controversy between Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, concerning the way in which the Principia Mathematica was produced for circulation, and the way in which Russell's acolytes organized a decades-long, vengeful campaign against Kurt Gödel, for Gödel's proof against the central thesis of Russell's intrinsically fraudulent book, merely typify the notoriety. As illustrated by that case, Russell and his circles belonged to the school of ethics, which teaches its acolytes: "If you are caught stealing a church, and the steeple is sticking out of your hip-pocket, deny everything, but, as an added precaution, also order the killing, and perpetual, shameless libelling of all known immediate members and distant relatives of the families of the witnesses." Global nuclear-warfare zealot Russell was not only, probably, the most thoroughly evil man of the Twentieth Century, Adolf Hitler notwithstanding. In all of this, what is to be recognized, above all, is that his role in projects such as the efforts to eradicate the modern nation-state through nuclear terror, is not a trait external to his, and his acolytes' activities in academic fields; it is an expression of that satanic quality of hatred which Russell himself sometimes expressed explicitly, which motivates their role in the academic fields, to the present day. This connection between nuclear-warfare impulses and anti-scientific frauds, is of the utmost relevance for understanding the character of all the leading "Enlightenment" and later empiricists, to the present day.
[36] Whether Wiener knew that his "information theory" was a hoax, or did not, I can not tell. I have no proof that he was truly witting of the fraud on which this folly was premised, or whether, in the alternative, he was simply motivated to lie, as lackeys are wont to do, to promote the reductionist fanaticism of the Bertrand Russell whose devotee he was. Notably, Wiener was not only a youthful devotee of the dogmas of Russell's Principia Mathematica, but radical positivist Wiener's role in the Cybernetics project was a project of the Russell-founded Unification of the Sciences project, which featured the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and such particularly odious examples of Russell's devotees as the dubious Margaret Mead and her sometime spouse Gregory Bateson.
[37] The introduction of the hoax of so-called "benchmarking" to industrial design, more than a decade ago, typifies the kind of ignorance of those characteristics of technology rampant among victims of the "information theory" cult.
[38] LaRouche, op. cit.
[39] A Defence of Poetry, Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Text, Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977).
[40] H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won: America's Untold Story, Vol. I (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1988).
[41] On the subject of the form of socialized relations which develop between man and beast within the framework of social processes, my wife and I have come to share the relevant view of the scientist-theologian Nicholas of Cusa. I mean the notion, that the inferior species, the "socialized" animal of household and herd, "participates in the higher species," man. This is demonstrated, perhaps most easily, or most commonly, in the laughter-filled play between child and puppy. The puppy participates happily in the games invented by the child, and can learn those games, as animals in the wild also do, but can not invent those games, as the child does. This view of the matter encourages an impulse for humane dealings with both cultivated and wild animals.
[42] William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961).
[43] Try a famous model, Shelley's Ozymandias. Compose according to the kinds of restrictions accepted by Shelley on that occasion.
[44] Henry C. Carey, "The Slave Trade Foreign and Domestic," in W. Allen Salisbury, The Civil War and the American System: America's Battle with Britain, 1860-1876 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992).
[45] For example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics? (1984); 2nd edition (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 1995). Since first issued in 1984, this book has been published in numerous languages, and is usually the work referenced. Also widely circulated and translated, is The Science of Christian Economy (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991).
[46] Typical of more recent publications, is Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Economics of the Noösphere, op. cit.
[47] De Magnete (1600).
[48] See Abraham Kästner, Geschichte der Mathematik, 4 vols., reprint edition with included foreword by Joseph E. Hofmann (Hildesheim-New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970). Notably, Hofmann writes: "In der Tat hatte es Kästner versäumt, sich rechtzeitig von der Vorlesungstätigkeit und der mathematischen Produktion zurückzuziehen—überraschend genug, da es dem witzigen Epigrammdichter, geistreicher Spötter and ein wenig boshaften Rezenzenten keineswegs an der nötigen Selbtskritik fehlte. Dazu trat die erstaunliche Abwehr gegen die Hochleistungen der führenden mathematiker in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts wie die Leonhard Eulers (1707-1783), Jean-Baptiste Le Rond D'Alemberts (1717-1783), Joseph Louis Lagranges (1736 bis 1813) und Pierre Simon Laplaces (1749-1829)." Hofmann's passage is typical of the spirit of the fraudulent academic mythologies with which the modern positivists have saturated contemporary scientific mis-education. Kästner, born shortly after the 1716 death of his adopted intellectual predecessor, Leibniz, was the central figure in the launching of that mid-Eighteenth-Century upsurge of Classical German culture, whose role is indispensable today for understanding any of the greatest developments in Classical culture and science in Europe, especially in Germany, of that period. Kästner led the Eighteenth-Century fight, of Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, to defend the ideas of both Leibniz and J.S. Bach against the Europe-wide network of reductionists' salons organized by Paris-based Abbot Antonio Conti. He is most famous for his life-long influence on his one-time student Carl Gauss, with especially notable relevance for Gauss's treatments of the subject of bi-quadratic residues and the development of the notion of generalized curvature which contributed crucially to the central achievements of Gauss's most important protégé and successor, Riemann. Euler, D'Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace are notable as the avowed enemies of the tradition of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, and, later, of the work of Fresnel, Ampère, Dirichlet, Alexander von Humboldt, Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, and Riemann. Hofmann's praise of Euler et al., in what is typical of allegedly "scholarly" falsification of the work and character of the universal genius Kästner, is but one more example of the pathetic dishonesty pervading the intellectual life of Twentieth-Century science in particular, and academia in general.
[49] This is in contrast to the image of the Roman legionnaire, or his modern imitation, such as the Waffen-SS types or the utopian model proposed by Samuel P. Huntington, et al. The Roman legionnaire performed his function, not as a human being, but a beast. It is the role of the cognitive individual in history, which is our subject here.
[50] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
[51] The family of William F., James, and F. Reid Buckley, and Brent Bozell. This family, among its other predicates, marks, together with the legacy of G.K. Chesterton, one of the important overlaps of the historically anti-Semitic, pro-Carlist, Gnostic currents, which infest theologically unsanitary parishes of the Catholic Church, with the Nashville Agrarians followers among the most thunderous of the lunatic, "single issue," Protestant Right. These elements are an important element in the fascist right-wing in the U.S. today, the so-called "utopian" military faction associated with such intellectual progency of the Nashville Agrarians' William Yandell Elliott as Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel P. Huntington.
[52] This rough census of the Earth's minerals deposits has been supplied by the relevant Moscow institution, an institution whose existence is a reflection of the wide-ranging influence of that still-existing Freiberg Academy, in Saxony, where Alexander von Humboldt, among many other scientific notables, studied. Two visits to Freiberg, by Czar Peter the Great, while prince and later as Czar, are key to the founding of those scientific institutions in Russia, upon which much of the world's knowledge of minerals has depended. This was the scientific environment, in Russia, which contributed significantly to the relevant contributions of both Mendeleyev and Vernadsky, among other notable cases.
