`INSANITY AS GEOMETRY'
Rumsfeld as 'Strangelove II'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.This statement was released on April 4, 2003 by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee.
March 26, 2003
The first week of President George W. Bush, Jr.'s Middle East war sufficed to unmask the military doctrines of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Cheney, and their pack of Chicken-hawks, as the work of fools or, most probably, worse. Since then, the Bush Administration's current Defense Department's utopian military policies, are now ever more widely recognized among relevant professionals, and qualified other critics, as combining elementary military incompetence with several dimensions of unworldly delusion. The relevant delusions of Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Ashcroft's flock, are to be recognized as an outgrowth of the fusion of two ingredients: the first, the Nietzschean fascism of Professor Leo Strauss; the second, that imperial, and frankly satanic, Wells-Crowley-Russell-Hutchins, English-speaking utopianism of the high-flying "military-industrial complex," which has been the principal, alien adversary of the Classical U.S. military tradition in statecraft since the closing phase of World War II.
Predominant control over the present Bush Administration has been secured, until now, by a Cheney-led fusion of the combination of Chicago University's imported fascist—that Professor Leo Strauss—with Wells' and Russell's goal of world government through Hitler-like, preventive nuclear war. Speaking in terms of epistemology, the "genetically" Nazi-like ideology of a Strauss, was that of a figure whose own writings, like those of his underling Allan Bloom, recall those of the Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who influenced Strauss. Strauss's dogmas are those of a Nietzschean parody of the wicked Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic. That same Strauss is the central ideological figure of that cult of his devotees known as the current Bush Administration's "Chicken-hawks." It is these Chicken-hawks who, in Donald Rumsfeld's Hitler-and-the-generals routines, have been the controlling, lackey-like figures of President Bush's post-2001 drive toward imperial, nuclear-weapons-wielding world war.[1]
The shocking lessons of the first week of the new Iraq war's battlefields forced many to look back to the sum-total of relevant recent weeks' developments in and out of the UNO Security Council. Increasing numbers are being forced to recognize that President Bush's maddened lurch into a new Iraq war, was induced and intended by the President's current Chicken-hawk controllers, as a trigger for an enraged utopian's Hitler-like, chain-reaction-like plunge into what, unless stopped, will be spread, more or less rapidly, as a new world war. On that account, the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's UNO Security Council warning against Bush's proposed war, must be endorsed for fact, by all reasonable governments around the world, as many among them have either stated or clearly implied. Of that, I say, as I have said in various forms and locations before this: That new world war, implicit in President Bush's current Middle East policies, unless stopped soon, will have an outcome comparable, on a global scale, to something worse than what Europe suffered during the 137 years preceding the Treaty of Westphalia.
To begin to understand how President George W. Bush, Jr. came to this presently tragic state of his government, look back to January 2001, shortly before his dubiously contrived inauguration.
Just prior to the January 2001 inauguration of that current U.S. President, I delivered, from Washington, D.C., what must now seem to many as a prophetic public address to an international audience. In that address, I warned that the inauguration of that Presidency coincided with the U.S.A.'s previous entry into the terminal phase of the collapse of the world's current monetary-financial system. I warned that audience, then, that Bush's inauguration, under today's 1928-33-like conditions of terminal monetary-financial crisis, coincided with the likelihood that powerful insider forces behind the scenes would arrange a thus-threatened, early outbreak of an incident paralleling the Feb. 27, 1933 burning of the German Reichstag.
That Reichstag burning which I referenced in that address, was the incident which was used by the Nazi government to establish the Hitler dictatorship. The Reichstag event thus precluded the alternative: that the March inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt would mean that the similar recovery programs of Roosevelt and Germany's Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach might be adopted by Germany instead of Hjalmar Schacht's. Thus, by late Summer 1934, some form of World War II had become inevitable, under a world governed by the European leaderships of that time.
That new "Reichstag Fire" of which I warned in that January 2001 address, actually came, less than nine months later, on Sept. 11, 2001. Like Hitler's Reichstag fire of 1933, the Sept. 11, 2001 attack was exploited by Vice-President Dick Cheney and such followers of the Nazi-like Professor Leo Strauss as Attorney-General John Ashcroft, to unleash an attempted step-wise, fascist takeover of the U.S.A. from within.[2] That incident of Sept. 11, 2001 was then used to unleash a campaign of intended world-wide warfare, warfare modelled on Athens' tragic folly of the Peloponnesian war, and on such Classically fascist precedents as those of the Roman Caesars, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler. Thus, the ideology of that thieving, imperial outlook of Cheney and his fascist Chicken-hawks, now combines the nuclear "preventive war" dogmas of Bertrand Russell with the imported Nietzschean mode of fascist ideology of Germany's Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss.
More recently, George W. Bush, a U.S. President of starkly limited intellectual capability, has reacted in a fit of rage to the combined effect of both his desperation over a U.S. economic situation far beyond his capacity for rational decision-making, and his anticipation of a then immediately imminent political defeat of his war policy in the UN Security Council. That wildly irrational outburst of rage, orchestrated by "Svengali" Cheney, has triggered "Trilby" Bush's declaring a needless, lawless, and reckless war against Iraq, a war in violation of the relevant international code of law. Worse, this is a war for which the policies of arm-chair warlords Cheney and Rumsfeld had left existing U.S. forces both poorly deployed, and severely under-equipped for the mission assigned to them. Rumsfeld's playing "Hitler and the generals" in the Defense Department, produced the result, that within the lapse of a week of that war, signs of a new "Vietnam War" syndrome could no longer be hidden.
The President's lawless doctrine of "regime change" threatened Saddam Hussein, personally, with preventive war against Iraq, exactly as Hitler, in 1938, had personally threatened Eduard Benes with "regime change." Our poor President was moved to this action by puppet-strings of lies jerked by a special, Goebbels-like, Chicken-hawk intelligence unit in Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. So, the President invaded Iraq on the same type of pretext used by Hitler for his 1939 invasion of Poland. All this was done under the influence of a deceased German fascist emigré, Carl Schmitt-sponsored Leo Strauss, whose only disqualification for Nazi Party membership had been the Jewish ancestry which could not be expunged from his birth record.
So, the events of the first week of that war, have made undeniable the delusions under which the trio of the President, Vice-President, and Rumsfeld had been operating, going into the war. As the war entered its second week, the watching world saw proof of that lunatic disregard for elementary Classical considerations of modern warfare and strategy, which is deeply embedded in the "Chicken-hawk" utopians' "Revolution in Military Affairs." Although U.S. power could crush Iraq, even despite Rumsfeld's Hitler-like muddling, sooner or later: yet, as for the 1960s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Indo-China war, there was no foreseeable, acceptable exit from the kind of war which the Rumsfeld-Cheney Chicken-hawk set had planned. The only solution for President Bush, had he been rational, was to get out of the war, and return to the UNO process. President George "Flight Forward" Bush has so far lacked the proverbial "brains and guts" to make such a rational choice.
There would be an ultimately suicidal outcome for civilization already looming in failure to abort the Straussian Chicken-hawks' imperial strategic policies. These are the policies expressed by both the White House utopians and also kindred circles, such as the Conrad Black-backed McCain-Lieberman-Donna Brazile cabal, the cabal now dominating the Democratic Party bureaucracy. That cross-party, Nietzschean flight-forward impulse, is typified by the war-like flock of the followers of the now-deceased, professed Nietzschean fascist, Chicago University Professor Leo Strauss, whom I have identified, repeatedly, above. This role of second- and third- generation followers of fascist fanatics Strauss's and Allan Bloom's teachings, is typified by Vice-President Cheney's present brood of Chicken-hawks, the would-be "little Hitlers," or "Goebbels" such as Chicago's Wolfowitz, thieving magpie Perle, slippery Bill Kristol, and kindred Brechtian beggars-opera types.
The Nazi-like, Leo-Straussian pathology of Dick and Lynne Cheney's circles, could be, and must be described in political-historical, military, and related technical terms. Nonetheless, technical analysis of the political-strategic issue, however necessary as far as it goes, still fails to get to the more deeply determining, psychological core of the matter.
The crux of the matter is, that like a man of kindred Nietzschean disposition, Adolf Hitler, that pack of Straussian Svengalis which has been directing President George "Trilby" Bush's ongoing imperial world war, is not merely misguided; it is, morally and otherwise, functionally insane. In global terms, that pack's Nietzschean policies are as evil as Hitler's in both intent and effect.
Worse, the many, so-called "ordinary" Americans among that sizeable minority which still foolishly supports the war policies, are also insane in the strictest clinical sense of that term. As Shakespeare's Cassius warned Brutus: the popular insanity of these foolishly pro-war American populists lies not in their stars, but, in themselves, that they think as "underlings." So many leading members of the Congress have also reacted today like the "underlings" described by Shakespeare's Cassius.
The problem of that typical "underling's" mentality must be recognized and corrected, as a disorder which is spread much wider than the indicated clique of Leo-Straussian fanatics. What has impelled many wild and foolish Democratic Party figures, and others, to support or tolerate war-mongering fanatics such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, McCain, and Lieberman, is a culturally embedded tendency, in popular entertainment, and otherwise, to submit to the kind of neo-Nietzschean existentialist impulses which have taken over much of that "Baby Boomer" generation which came to adulthood during the period of the 1964-1972 U.S. War in Indo-China. That heretofore widespread toleration of such policies, is purely, simply, a case of personal and collective group-insanity shared among those sharing the relevant populist ("underling") mentality. The danger inhering in this global situation will not be overcome, unless that controlling factor of widespread, popular group-insanity is taken adequately into account, and addressed with a certain ruthlessness, as the aging Solon addressed his errant Athenians, as I do here.
I have now stated the problem. I have situated the paradoxes. Now, I shift to developing the solution.
1. What Is Sanity?
My first-approximation definition of sanity, is dedication to discovering and acting according to a principle of discoverable truth, as Plato's dialogues define truthfulness, contrary to the schizophrenic word-play of Strauss and Bloom. For example, when a typical U.S. politician says that he, or she is "going along to get along," he, or she usually means to say that one must "learn" to get along in such domains as politics or public office, in university life, in one among many public-school classrooms, using opinions expressed by major new media, or in the company board-room, or in cringing submission to some sitting U.S. Federal Fourth Circuit judges, and some Virginia judges I have known. The theme, in each case, is, one must "put the issue of truth behind us."
The categorical form of that widespread denial of the efficient existence of truth, is the central feature of the intentionally fraudulent life's work of that now-deceased Professor Strauss, the Nietzschean den-mother of today's Chicken-hawk brood.[3] It is the core of his fascist, Thrasymachian doctrine, as that of his underling Allan Bloom. It is also the dogma of like-minded truth-haters, such as Strauss's cronies among the German fascists of the Frankfurt School circles. The latter include such pro-Satanic existentialists as official Nazi philosopher and Strauss mentor Martin Heidegger, and the fascist truth-haters Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt.
The promotion, or acceptance of doctrines, such as the fascism of Hitler and Leo Strauss, or preference for popular, or learned opinion, over truth, are also symptoms of what is to be defined as a mental disease, a systemic delusion. Look at phenomena such as support for President Bush's unlawful, present war-drive, as expressing a form of mass-insanity. I point to mass-insanity such as that which, for a while, seized the majority of the German voters under Hitler. It is form of mass-insanity which, more recently, seized the political forces which reduced the list of leading 2000 candidates for U.S. President to two Chicken-hawk-linked, known incompetents, each of whom was more or less equally likely to launch world-wide war within a few years of his inauguration.
The type of mass-insanity to which I am pointing, is best understood by defining it, first, in terms of some commonly occurring mental disorders expressed among students whose judgments have been shaped through drill-and-grill in empiricist and, especially, radical-positivist mathematical physics, still today. I now proceed accordingly.
Math and Madness
For our purposes here, let us first define "insanity" as it appears in the guise of even the most elementary forms of dysfunctions in a formal mathematical physics.
Thus, in those terms, the empiricists Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, the notorious Adam Smith, and the famous René Descartes, were, like Bertrand Russell and his devotees, systemically insane, in the strictest formal use of the term "insane." That is to say, that Descartes' way of thinking about the physical universe, was based on subordination of the physical evidence to included axiomatic presumptions which, in fact, can be found only in a non-existent, "ivory tower" universe. President George W. Bush, Jr.'s and former Vice-President Al Gore's opinions on economic and military matters, express, systemically, more or less extreme versions of the insanity of that same general ("ivory tower," utopian) type.
In mathematical physics, this same clinical type of systemic insanity encountered in the follies of Descartes, is echoed by Euler and Lagrange, as the latter cases were exposed by Carl Gauss's 1799, correct statement of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. The same pathological element typical of Galileo, Descartes, Euler, and Lagrange, is pervasive in classrooms and textbooks still today. Thus, I chose the case of that short, but crucial paper by Gauss, as the pivot on which to premise the program of higher education for the participants in the new youth movement I was sponsoring. My principle was, and is, that, for reasons I shall explain here, no youth movement among the 18-25 university-age population could succeed in leading society out of the kind of cultural disorientation which grips most of globally extended European civilization today, unless the participants in that movement were to proceed from discovery and mastery of an "ivory tower"-free, empiricism-free, elementary proof of the existence of knowable truthfulness.
I explain that connection by successive stages, in the course of the following pages.
At first glance, the mathematical definition of systemic insanity which our youth movement's pedagogical program derives from that Gauss example, apparently differs from the relatively more shallow-minded notion of clinical insanity usually proffered by psychiatrists. Nonetheless, a morally competent psychiatrist, following my argument here, would feel himself, or herself obliged to nod assent to the direction of my argument, and would probably qualify that assent with an observation which would be, more or less, to the following net effect.
To understand the relevant difficulty of the professional psychologist, ask yourself, what should we mean if we say that some persons are neurotic, or worse? Should we not mean, in the case of the neurotic, a person whose judgment is often efficient in dealing with many challenges in day to day life, but who suffers from the recurrent triggering of some emotionally driven, pathological quirk, a quirk which impels that person toward acting in a way contrary to physical reality? In one setting, that person appears rational; in another, his or her behavior is functionally absurd. Typical of such neurotics, is the alcoholic or drug-user, or the ordinary bi-polar personality, who may be competent at work, but who beats his wife, or also his children, or, threatens to do so under certain circumstances, or does so more or less periodically. The empiricist is categorically insane in a similar sense and degree.
Speaking in the very broadest terms, there are two general types of practical cases of systemic disorders of individual judgment. There is, first, the case of simple ignorance, in which the subject is exposed to a challenge of which he or she simply lacks relevant elementary knowledge, like an individual reared in a jungle tribe, trying to operate a bulldozer at first sighting. In a second general type of case, the individual, or society, is reacting under the influence of axiomatically false assumptions respecting man and society. For him, or her, these false assumptions function like the "ivory tower" axioms of a Euclidean geometry, thus exerting a more or less severe, even deadly pathological influence over individual, or collective group behavior. These errors are the typical origin of insanity, or "non-sanity," as defined from a Classical Greek standpoint of reference.
In Euclidean, or Cartesian geometry, as in the empiricism of Paolo Sarpi's lackey, Galileo Galilei, the victim's mind is polluted by so-called a priori, so-called "self-evident," "ivory tower" definitions, axioms, and postulates, each of which, in fact, has no correspondence to the physical universe. In contrast to those popularized, Euclidean, empiricist, and Cartesian forms of insanity, in the pre-Euclid, ancient scientific practice of Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato, the principle of physical construction defines the universe as a domain of physical geometry, as a universal physical space-time. With the Fifteenth-Century European Renaissance's rebirth, as associated with Filippo Brunelleschi, Nicholas of Cusa, and Leonardo da Vinci, the mainstream of scientific progress returned, from the decadence of Latin Romanticism, to the Platonic tradition of Classical Greece, that tradition also typified by the work of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, and Archimedes. Out of these Renaissance origins, came the work of modern Classical giants most usefully typified by Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann. Out of this modern, Classical scientific tradition, we have inherited the notions associated with a Riemannian form of Classical physical geometry, from which we have expelled the clutter of all those a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates associated with Euclid, of the empiricists in general, and of the Cartesians in particular. Only what are proven experimentally to be universal physical principles, are allowed.[4]
This Riemannian concept of physical geometry serves not only for what today's convention signifies as "physical science"; it also applies to provable principles of those aspects of social relations which determine mankind's effective social relationship to the universe in which we live. As I shall explain below, this same principle corresponds to the distinguishing principle of Classical (as opposed to Romantic or Modernist) composition and performance of art, as it does to physical science as such.
Therefore, as a matter of scientific precision, we ought to limit the use of the term "insanity," to those sets of practiced belief which are demonstrably in efficiently systemic violation of that combined, Riemannian physical geometry which encompasses both the individual mind's knowledge of the physical universe around it, and also the efficient and valid universal principles of social relations governing society's coordination of its relationship to that same universe.
Ordinarily, the teaching and practice of psychology do not attempt to reach such a strictly scientific definition as that one. The relatively better practice among that profession, nonetheless seeks to define sanity in terms of definable principles, but usually falls far short of recognizing the functional significance of rigorously defined, truly universal principles, both truly universal physical principles and also their social correlatives.
Usually, among the least competent choices of standard for psychology, is the more or less frequent reliance upon an arbitrary standard of so-called "normal behavior." All true scientific geniuses of society today, are, by definition, "abnormal." Therefore, the only competent definition of a sick society, is, "axiomatically," one in which its prevalent standard of sanity is that set of belief which is usually considered "normal," or, as in the instance of the wrong ideas concerning economy, which are rampant in the U.S.A. today.[5] The crisis hitting the U.S. today, has been caused by what have come to be widely accepted as "normal" forms of belief and mass behavior. To escape that trap, we must discard "normal" as a standard, and choose, instead, a standard which is provably universal, without use of the sometimes useful, but always slippery notion of "normal."
For example. In Classical tragedy since the best work of the ancient Greeks, as in the modern productions of Shakespeare and Schiller, the root of all that tragedy which corresponds to a nation, a people in crisis, lies in the currently prevalent mental habits of the general population represented. Shakespeare writes, that "there is something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark." It is Hamlet's fear of that conventional rottenness of his society, his terror of the prospect of immortality, which impels him, like his successor Fortinbras, to continue the same folly of Denmark which felled the foolish Hamlet. So, it is in Schiller's Don Carlos,the real-life tragedy of religious warfare which carries the real-life Philip II, his followers, and Spain itself, as in Schiller's play, into the culturally deserved ruin which Cervantes foresaw, and which Spain thus became in the course of the Seventeenth Century. The tragic doom of nations, lies, first, as Athens' Solon warned: in the foolish norms of its current, decadent culture; and, second, in the nation's failure to nurture and select leaders who will lead a tragic people to mend its foolish customs. So, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound paints the doom of Greece under a culture polluted by the polymorphous perversity of its inhuman Olympian gods.
Therefore, especially in times of crisis, we must reject that which may happen to appear to be normal, and define what should have been adopted as normal, instead. As the aging Solon rebuked his foolish Athenians, it was always what had come to be accepted as "normal" behavior which brought about the subsequent threat of self-inflicted doom. Such is the more or less indispensable function of redefining mass insanity in society as I do here.
Therefore, for related reasons which I shall explain more fully here, I chose Gauss's 1799 paper on the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, in opposition to the empiricists Euler and Lagrange, as the best choice of standard launching-point for a modern university or comparable education.
The young American, for example, must enter adulthood with a secure mooring of his or her sense of personal identity in a valid sense of the meaning of truth. Not what is prescribed as "truth," as by textbooks, or so-called popular opinion. It must be what he or she knows to be truth, by means of nothing but the internal authority of knowledge, as the experimental validity of an hypothesized universal physical principle, a principle free of the encumbrances of "ivory tower" definitions, axioms, and postulates signifies actual knowledge of truth. The young such American must command valid certainty of at least one such universal principle, as a benchmark from which to proceed with his or her personal, life-long mapping of the universe. Thus, to define a shareable mooring-point of that quality, I chose and proposed the Gauss paper.
The 'No Future' Crisis
There were also special, contemporary considerations compelling me to insist upon that standard at this point in the globally extended history of current European civilization. I point to the conflict between the typical representative of that "Now Generation," which entered adulthood during an interval of, approximately, 1964-1972, the interval of the rise of the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture," and the so-called "Now Generation's" children. Today, more than a quarter-century later, the former "Now" generation has produced children who became university-age young adults, and adolescents, condemned to be part of a "No Future Generation." Despite the significant, smaller rations among both of these generations which are more or less exceptions to this pattern, the conflict between the two sets of generations, is widespread and deep-going; it is a conflict which must be recognized, and overcome, if this civilization is to find a civilized future during the generations immediately ahead.
Prior to the rise of "the rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture," the typical outlook of that normally moral U.S. or European adult, who was conscious of his or her mortality, was a commitment to a brighter future for the children and grandchildren of one's own generation. Most among such Americans and Europeans were scarcely saints, but they had that degree of a sense of an efficient personal immortality. Most would have tended to accept the New Testament parable of the "talents." We are each given a mortal existence of uncertain duration. That is our finite talent, called mortal life. Therefore, wisdom says, "Spend it well."
Unfortunately, that moral tradition began to be swept away with the advent of the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" of the middle to late 1960s. The resulting present moral and economic crisis of America and European society is a reflection of this change.
The "Beatniks" and earlier "rock culture" of the Elvis Presley generation already echoed the Dionysian cult-legacy of the European existentialist degeneration of Heidegger, Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and such French followers of the Nazi Heidegger as Jean-Paul Sartre. This corruption, copied from the most decadent elements of Weimar Germany's post-Versailles 1920s, was subsequently carried to an extreme by the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" of the mid-1960s. This led, more than a decade later, to the epidemics of "mid-life crisis," and kindred, pathetic bleats of "I must change my life-style," which were among the frequent lawful, middle-age consequence of joining a "now generation" imagined to dwell on the backside of a history which had come to nearly its Hegelian-Nietzschean end.
As the Baby Boomer generation's position within adult society became more and more dominant, the degeneration of the economy and other cultural attributes, into the characteristics of a so-called "post-industrial," or "consumption" society, accelerated. The economy degenerated under the increasing popular influence of post-industrial Baby Boomer fads. Degeneration of the nation's culture and economy were not recognized as the catastrophe they were in fact, because, for the existentialist "Now" generation's Baby Boomer culture, which was then moving toward the higher ranks of social, economic, and political life, their slide into decadence had become "the norm."
What, then, to do with the Baby Boomer's children? For the "Now" generation, their children, such as those maturing children entering university age, were an increasingly uncomfortable reality, just as the senior citizens, their own parents, were seen by Baby Boomers, such as former Colorado Governor Lamm, as becoming inconveniently costly to support. The maturing children of the Baby Boomers, whether adolescent or young adult, found themselves thrown on the dump of what was implicitly labelled a "No Future" generation. The latter's passion for acquiring a future, clashed increasingly with the contrary cultural norms of the "Now" generation's impulses. The resulting friction is often ugly, as it is all too often as impassioned as a racial conflict might be.
Under these condition, the apparent "norms" of the "Now" generation—or, should we say "degeneration"—are, for the "No Future" generation, worse than useless norms of belief. In this circumstance, mere custom fails as a substitute for morality; the search for a standard of truth, must replace a presently failed, traditional reliance upon invoking custom as an authority for continuing adherence to the tragically failed traditions of the mid-1960s cultural-paradigm shifts. The continued existence of civilization now depends, absolutely, upon an immediate shift away from the traditions of the "Now" generation.
What might be recognized, in functional terms, as the morality of a people, occurs in two degrees. On the lower level, it is expressed as a commitment to the betterment of the conditions and persons of coming generations of one's own, and other nations and peoples. The famous 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, on whose precedent civilized life among modern nations depends, still today, is an example of this simpler expression of morality. On a higher level, we meet the exceptional individual, as typified most simply by France's martyred Jeanne d'Arc, or the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who follows in the imitation of Christ, to spend one's mortal life wisely, for the sake of the betterment of future humanity.
The significance of the emergence of rampant, even rabid existentialism, in the cultural currents of the post-World War II U.S.A., is that it tended, rather efficiently, to uproot the simple kind of popular morality from the population, and national custom in general. The intrinsically immoral influence of the cult of the "Now Generation," the generation of President George W. Bush, Jr., has tended to uproot and eliminate that idea of progress, on which all the true achievements of our U.S. republic had depended. This form of moral corruption typified by the "Now Generation," became something like an expression of cultural cannibalism toward both that generation's own parents, and own children. The latter victims of the 1960s counterculture, are the present "No Future Generation." Thus, today's President Bush's policy-making outlook expresses in the extreme, the same ugly essence of that moral decay, as the explicit, Leo-Straussian, Hegelian-Nietzschean "end of history" doctrine of the Baby-Boomer generation's Cheney-Rumsfeld Chicken-hawks.
That implicitly awful present conflict among generations exists. How might we overcome it? My view, which is corroborated in a significant degree by the recent impact of our youth movement's activity, is: A youth movement of this specific type is capable of reawakening a sense of a meaningful future among even a large part of the generation which had been sucked into a long sojourn within the ranks of the "Now" generation. In that way, we can bridge the gap, and reconcile the two antagonistic generations around the common cause—the future—which this youth movement already represents. Therefore, we must look more deeply, and with cultural optimism, into the matters just identified.
2. Who Is Really Human?
This carries this discussion of mass-sanity into deeper issues of mass social behavior. Look again at the age-old question: Is there a fundamental difference between man and ape? What is that difference? For, example, do the parents of apes believe in future grandchildren? Therefore, is it really an exaggeration, to ask the question: Was that behavior of Professor Leo Strauss, to which I referred above, actually human, or a product of some kind of "reversed cultural evolution," into becoming something less than human?
Who, then, is really human? Should we not recognize that Professor Strauss, Allan Bloom, and their Rumsfeld-Cheney-linked Chicken-hawk followers were, and are collectively insane: human beings who, like Adolf Hitler, or the Emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, England's Richard III, Spain's Philip II, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the immediately relevant cases of G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, before him, have reverted to forms of human behavior which are essentially unnatural, forming, in effect, a type of pseudo-human species? They have become equivalent to a species whose very existence is morally, and functionally worse than that of naturally determined lower forms of life.
These are not only formal questions of science. As I am emphasizing here: The ideological connections between Adolf Hitler and those Chicken-hawks presently inhabiting Rumsfeld's and Cheney' roosts, demonstrate, that these questions I pose here, are foremost among today's issues of national security, including "military affairs."
To define, and locate the answer to such questions of both science and of national security and its strategy, we must find the answer in the axiomatic differences between the Romanticism of extended European civilization's modern empiricists, on the one side, and the Classical European legacy shared among Plato and the connection of his modern followers, such as Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, with the crafting of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and of the world-shaking Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.
The working definition of humanity which is crucial for understanding the cause and cure of that kind of imperial fascism typified by such followers of the late Professor Strauss as Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their Chicken-hawks today, runs more or less as follows.
- The crucial issue is, first: What is the absolute difference between the human species and each and all species of possible members of a class of higher apes?
The empirical evidence is: If the human species were a member of the biological class of known, or other higher apes, that species could not have achieved a total living population of more than several millions individuals under conditions associated with the ice-age cycles of the recent two or so millions years. The living human population today is estimated by some sources as greater than six billions individuals.
- The crucial issue is, secondly: Any human society's ability to achieve sustainable population-levels depends, in the first approximation, on the willful employment of transmissible ideas from an accumulation of that which contemporary notions of physical science identify as technological derivatives of known, experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles.
The supplementary, crucial answer is, as I have shown in various earlier locations: No representative of the class of higher apes can generate the Platonic type of hypothesis which leads to the discovery of a universal physical principle.
- The crucial issue is, similarly: Man's technological progress to that cumulative effect, depends on transmission of knowledge of the universal principles underlying that technology, which means the re-experiencing of the original act of discovery.
The supplementary, crucial answer is: No representative of the class of higher apes has shown the ability both to develop and use a language appropriate for transmission of such conceptions. This is an essential, qualitative distinction of principle, between the quasi-societies of higher apes, and an actual society of the type required for generating, transmitting, and employing discoveries of universal physical principle.
The knowledge of those three points is reflected in such results as geobiochemist V.I. Vernadsky's division of the universe of known geobiochemical effects, among three types of interacting, but experimentally distinct universal phase-spaces: a) the abiotic; b) the living as such, the Biosphere including its fossils; and, c) the Noösphere, physical effects, including the fossils of such actions, attributable solely to those cognitive functions of the individual human mind which do not occur in any other living species. In the language of Bernhard Riemann's celebrated 1854 habilitation dissertation, these three phase-spaces are multiply-connected, to the effect of defining the known universe, in a factual reading of the internal history of modern physical science, as essentially Keplerian and also Riemannian. The human individual's function within that universe is unique.
- Therefore, the most crucial issue is: What specific act do human beings perform, which no lower form of life can do, to generate those effects which set the human species, thus, apart from, and above all others?
The answer is implicit in Carl Gauss's referenced, 1799 attack on the willful falsifications of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra by such empiricist ideologues as Euler and Lagrange (and, notably, also Immanuel Kant).
I explain, repeating as briefly as possible what I have said or written on this subject in numerous locations.
Perception or Knowledge?
This brings the continuing quarrel between Lagrange and Gauss into fresh focus. The essential issue was whether or not man is just another, if talking species of higher ape. In the domain of physical science so-called, this deep-going issue of personal morality, is whether or not man's knowledge of the universe is limited to a combination of "facts" as defined by sense-perception, as interpreted according to a set of arbitrary, "ivory tower" definitions, axioms, and postulates, such as those of Euclidean geometry.
The empiricist ideologues Euler and Lagrange had gone to great lengths, even outright frauds such as that of Euler's associate Maupertuis, to insist that mathematical physics must be limited to a combination of sense-perceptions with a Cartesian sort of ivory-tower set of arbitrary definitions, axioms, and postulates.
The founders of modern physical science, as typified by Brunelleschi, Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Fermat, Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, Lavoisier, et al., had each and all emphasized experimental evidence which had proven man's ability to discover a class of discoverable universally efficient physical principles which are invisible to direct observation by the human senses. Typical of the latter is Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the universal physical principle of gravitation, as the details of this process of discovery are presented in his 1609 The New Astronomy. The development of the discovered physical principle of universal least action, by the successive work of Fermat, Huyghens, Leibniz, and Bernouilli, is, when combined with Kepler's discoveries, the most conclusive basis in experimental scientific discovery for the proof that the arguments of Euler and Lagrange, which Gauss attacked, were hysterical falsehoods, as Gauss's 1799 paper showed them to be.
To continue to set the stage for the relevant point to be developed here, add the following background point as a matter of clarification.
In an attempt to rebut Gauss's referenced 1799 paper, Lagrange, and also his faction, insisted, that Gauss had "cheated" in the 1799 paper, by "bringing in geometry," not sticking to deductive arithmetic. In an argument "genetically" similar to that of Lagrange, and also that of Lagrange's follower, the plagiarist Augustin Cauchy, Germany's Felix Klein came to Euler's posthumous defense, by crediting what Cusa and others had already proven, the "transcendental" quality of pi, to the successive work of the empiricist mathematical ideologues Hermite and Lindemann.
The fraud, or hysterical self-deception of Euler and Lagrange, was their evasion of the fact that the physical universe does not correspond to a deductive mathematics of Cartesian geometry. What Gauss attacked, specifically, was Euler's and Lagrange's fraudulent evasion of the fact that their false argument depended axiomatically on "ivory tower" adherence to the prescriptions of a Cartesian geometry. What Gauss had demonstrated in his 1799 paper on the fundamental theorem, is that the real universe, the physical universe, does not conform to a mathematics premised on the assumed self-evidence of Cartesian geometric assumptions, but, rather, a different universe, that of the complex domain, in which Leibniz's universal physical principle of least action occupies a central position.
Gauss's argument was not entirely original. In his 1799 attack on the fallacies of Euler and Lagrange, Gauss was restating in modern terms exactly what had been shown by such followers of the Pythagoreans as Archytas and Plato, for the distinction in powers among lines, surfaces, solids, and physical space-time. Gauss addressed the matter of relations of powers among line, surface, and solid as the Classical Greeks had, but with the context of a modern physical science as defined by such modern predecessors as Cusa, Leonardo, Kepler, and Leibniz.
That much said on that matter of mathematics as such, we come to the crucial feature of the issue at hand, the difference between man and ape.
Knowing or Feeling?
The sense-organs of the human individual are an integral part of the physiological processes within the bounds of his skin. What his senses register is, at best, not the world outside his skin, but, instead, the reactions of his sense-organs to some external stimulus. A formally Euclidean or Cartesian geometry arises from the assumption that the individual's interpretation of the arrangement of his sensory apparatus defines, "self-evidently," the physical geometry of the physical space-time of the universe outside his skin.
The scientific thinker rejects the delusion that such imaginary geometries define the real physical space-time outside his skin. The scientific thinker says, in effect: "I must assume that the real world, outside what my senses might lure me into believing, is not as my habits of sense-perception suggest. Instead of blindly imagining what that real universe might be, let me attack the problem indirectly. Let me see if I can control that outside world in some significant degree, and thus force sensible and durably efficient kinds of changes in a world which, in reality, is invisible to my senses."
Turn, then, to the pages of Kepler's 1609 The New Astronomy, the same pages from whose later English translation, the fanatical empiricist Isaac Newton and Newton's helpers forged their attempted plagiarism of Kepler's original discovery. Even their plagiarism was not original; they resorted to an action-at-a-distance fraud by the notorious empiricist, and teacher of Thomas Hobbes, Galileo Galilei, to attempt to cover the tracks of their own forgery.
Kepler focussed upon an anomaly arising in more careful normalization of observation of the Mars orbit, to recognize a common unscientific error in the astronomy of ancient Claudius Ptolemy, and also the modern Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. From study of this anomaly, which actually controlled the planetary orbit, Kepler demonstrated the existence of an efficient, but unseen universal physical principle, called gravitation, existing outside the pro-Aristotelean, "ivory tower" presumptions common to the practice of those three misguided astronomers. A similar study of an anomaly contrary to ivory-tower faith in geometry of sense-perception, guided Fermat and his successors to Leibniz's universal physical principle of least action.
These and comparable successes in discovery of universal physical principles, have each and all been accomplished by that method of hypothesis which is the central feature of Plato's method of Socratic dialogue. Any qualified experimental proof of such an hypothesis, defines that proven hypothesis as an unseen, but efficient universal physical principle. It is through the willful application of such principles, that the human species—a society—increases its power to command the universe outside man's skin.
Classical Art as Physical Science
The same principle just illustrated for the case of what is usually called "physical science," also defines the principles distinguishing the methods of Classical artistic composition from such intrinsically irrationalist modes of composition or performance as the Romantic or the sundry shades of Modernist.
The neatest demonstration of that connection, is the case of the distinction of Classical Greek sculpture from the tombstone-like, so-called Archaic. As John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn should inform us, Classical Greek sculpture, like the revolutionary approach to painting by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael Sanzio, and by such Rembrandt productions as "The Bust of Homer Contemplating the Blind Aristotle," replaces death-like "stilled life" with a living instant of continuing motion. This is no illusion, no magic; it is the same principle expressed by the use of the catenary by Brunelleschi for constructing the cupola of Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, as echoed by Leibniz's discovered definition of the relationship of the complex domain's catenary to a universal principle of least action.
In poetry and music, the principle of the Pythagorean comma is a crucial key to artistic and physical scientific composition. The comma is defined, by the account of Pythagoras' argument, by a natural difference generated by contrasting the most natural, (e.g., Florentine) bel canto singing voice to the divisions of a lifeless linear monochord. The difference between human and linear music is not a mathematically determined, but a naturally determined reflection of the difference between a living instrument and a dead one.
In Classical poetry, the role of the potentially bel canto-trained human singing voice is crucial. Similarly, well-tempered counterpoint, as defined with scientific precision by J.S. Bach, defines a distance from the pathetic, "curry sausage"-like productions of the virtually brain-dead reductionist Rameau. As Franz Schubert illustrates the point concisely and simply with his setting of Goethe's Erlkönig, it is the apposition of voicings and voices which distinguishes the communication of the intent of irony and metaphor—the which are the essence of expressed human qualities of thought—from both the monotonous run-on babbling of teletype-like text, or meaningless Romantic or Modernist boom and babble.
The common characteristic of all Classical art and its performance lies essentially, not with the senses as such, but in the shared imagination of speaker and hearer. In the well-performed Classical drama, such as that of Shakespeare, the audience's attention is quickly transported from the vision of the stage to the stage of the audience's imagination, as Shakespeare points out in the opening role of Chorus for Henry V. It is the same for the performance of great works of Classical music, where composer, performance, and witting audience meet minds together in the common domain of the cognitive powers of imagination.
The connection between Classical art and Classical science, such as that of Plato, Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, and Gauss, has the purpose of joining the cognitive powers of individual members of society together in exertions to a common end. Through the training of social relations within society, by aid of composition and performance of Classical modes of artistic composition, we are best enabled to muster individual discoveries of those universal physical principles dwelling in the unseen and unheard, into the mission-oriented common purposes of the social process through which mankind conquers external nature. It is by that means that man rises above the beasts, and distinguishes himself from the apes.
There is more to it all than just that.
Our mortal life is as but an instant of eternity. To see our personal identity merely in terms of our fragile and momentary mortal existence, would tend to promote despair whenever we were confronted with awful circumstances. However, if we see ourselves as assimilating, enhancing, and transmitting the revolutionary ideas, such as valid discoveries of universal physical principles, from past, to present, and future, and perhaps adding something to that stock, we gain a sense of our personal existence as located essentially as befits creatures of ideas, in the eternity of past, present, and future human existence.
Thus, when we think of the benefits we may be transmitting in this way, to our predecessors whose dreams we fulfill and to the children and grandchildren after us, we are justly optimistic about ourselves, about our visiting the present, for whatever the span of our mortal life might prove to be. Any person, from any past time, whose original discovery is known to me, or other universally important person of that time, such as the peasant girl Jeanne d'Arc, once known to me as a universal idea, will never die for me as long as my mind lives. I will therefore fight for their cause. That is the way the good person lives.
Here lies the undeniable importance of an upward movement of the young, even under the most threatening and depraved circumstances of society in general. It is not a matter of feeling good; it is matter of actually being good, in the manner the principles of the U.S. Federal Constitution's Preamble prescribe, being good in the sense which the depraved John Locke's chief adversary, Leibniz, defined, as the rightful pursuit of happiness. It is the happiness of living efficiently, as an historical, thinking being, in past, present, and future, all at once.
For these same reasons, the exceptional political, as well as scientific and artistic leader remains, to the present time, a crucially indispensable leader of society, especially a society gripped by a time of self-inflicted tragedy, like the U.S.A. today. It is a role, which for lack of qualified substitutes, I am obliged to fill. I present to you, the future. See, here, your children, their children, and those yet to be born. Protect them from the evil that the like of Old Wicked Witch Strauss's predatory Chicken-hawks and their wars and thieving schemes represent, for combined past, present, and future humanity today. Humanity is good. It is the best creature in the Creator's eternity. Defend it accordingly; be truly human.
[1] Cf. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler's Most Brilliant General), Presidio Press, 1994, for a devastating account of foolish fascist Adolf Hitler's comparable, Rumsfeld-like tyranny over his generals.
[2] Not only was Chicago University Professor Leo Strauss's career launched by the sponsorship of Germany's Carl Schmitt, the designer of that Notverordnung used to award Hitler post-Reichstag-fire dictatorial powers. The war policy of the Bush Administration, and the "Patriot Act" drafts and Guantanamo base and related doctrines of Ashcroft, are copies of the Nazi concentration-camp and related dogma in law developed by Carl Schmitt.
[3] We meet a related form of truth-hating insanity in the argument of U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's practiced doctrine of text. Contrary to the frankly kabbalistic textualism of Leo Strauss and his dupes, the Socratic dialogues of Plato, the principal target of Strauss's expressed hatred, are premised on experimentally demonstrable principles of construction, like the same Pythagorean tradition of Archytas and Plato which Gauss's 1799 paper puts into the form of the mathematical physics of the complex domain. With Plato, one need not debate the interpretation of the text; one must repeat the experience of the experimental construction which Plato provides. Any debates over a translation or copying of a Plato writing, are resolved solely through those epistemological methods of construction. Strauss's and Scalia's method of argument from text, are examples of specifically schizophrenic forms of radically nominalist word-play, a demonstration of diagnosable expressions, in the form of use of language, corresponding to, and often reflecting schizophrenic thought.
[4] Bernhard Riemann, Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen, H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953).
[5] Among the worst cases of popular misuse of "normal" as a standard, are instances of threatened or actual violence promoted by racial and religious bigotry.
