WHAT ASHCROFT WOULD PREFER YOU NOT KNOW
Religion and National Security:
The Threat from Terrorist Cults
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Aug. 19, 2003
This Presidential policy study on the subject of "Synarchism as a terrorist cult" was issued by the LaRouche in 2004 campaign committee.
During the 1511-1648 interval, religious warfare in Europe had been orchestrated by the Venetian faction of opponents of that Italy-centered European Renaissance which brought forth the modern nation-state republic. This Venetian faction was represented then chiefly by the Habsburg dynasty of Vienna and Spain. Since the rise of the Anglo-Dutch and French "Enlightenment" of the Eighteenth Century, the detonator of deadly internal threats to the security of European civilization has often been the provocative roles assigned to relatively small religious cults, such as millenarian, freemasonic, or other nominally Christian or Jewish denominations. These latter, dangerous sects have often included elements of the sexual freakishness which were typical of the quasi-Judeo-Christian varieties of their Manichean, Cathar, and Grail predecessors.
Since the Paris events of July 14, 1789, orchestrated by British agents Philippe Egalité and Jacques Necker, and until today, the greatest overt internal threat to the continued existence of modern European civilization, has come from the recurring public eruptions of a hybrid, quasi-Phrygian-Dionysian freemasonic religious association, known as the Martinists, which originally emerged during the closing decades of the Eighteenth Century. These Martinists have operated together with the network of family merchant-banks, which used them as instruments of political power. Britain's Lord Shelburne, then the leading political representative of Barings Bank, was a key figure behind the unleashing of the Terror of 1789-1794, for example. This is the inner aspect of that recurring threat to civilization known to history books and newspaper headlines by such names as Jacobinism, Bonapartism, Synarchy, and as the fascist regimes which proliferated in post-Versailles Europe of the 1920s through 1945. The extreme right-wing Synarchist networks left over from the fascist regimes of the pre-1945 period, figured in crucial roles in the European terrorist wave of the 1970s, and are still active in Europe and the Americas today.
Although the terrorism motivated by today's Synarchists is presently the leading subversive form of security threat to U.S. interests, I am, so far, virtually the only candidate for the 2004 Presidential nomination who has exhibited both the will and knowledge to address the explicitly religious character of this specific quality of present threat in a systematic way. There are admittedly potential political risks, from the deadly Synarchist cabals, for any leading candidate who points to these facts. Fear of those personal, as well as political risks, would tend to frighten most candidates away from bringing up this political threat from weird religious circles such as those of Texas' Tom DeLay or typical Eighteenth-Century-style Martinist ideologue Newt Gingrich; but, under present conditions, anyone who lacks the courage to do that, would not be competent to become the next U.S. President.
The Synarchist threat from the presently continuing Martinist tradition of the French Revolution period's Mesmer, Cagliostro, Joseph de Maistre, et al., is, once again, a leading issue of the current time. This was, originally, the banker-backed terrorist cult used to direct that great internal, systemic threat of 1789-1815 to France, and to the world of that time. This same banker-cult symbiosis was behind Mussolini's dictatorship, behind Francisco Franco's dictatorship, and behind Adolf Hitler's role during 1923-45. This was the threat posed by prominent pro-Synarchists inside the British Establishment, who, during the World War II setting of Dunkirk, had attempted to bring Britain and France into that planned alliance with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Japan—which would, if achieved, have aimed to destroy the U.S.A. itself by aid of that consort of global naval power. That was the enemy which we joined with Winston Churchill to defeat, in World War II.
The continuation of that Synarchist effort from during the World War II period, is not only the continuing connection behind the fascist insurgencies of 1921-45, but is that thieving, international financier syndicate behind today's role of Vice President Cheney and his Enron, Halliburton, and similar accomplices, which orchestrated the Enron-led swindle of California. That is the syndicate which has pushed the freak-show candidacy of an "Elmer Gantry"-like confidence man, the United States' imported Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a proposed head of state.
Since long before the Eighteenth-Century threat from the Martinist cult, the most notable forms of earlier intellectual combat against the influence of similar pro-terrorist cults, had come from theologians such as Philo (Judaeus) of Alexandria, Augustine, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal Mazarin's role in the crafting of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and Moses Mendelssohn. Like Cusa and Moses Mendelssohn, the best insight into this problem's continuing role within modern European civilization, has been expressed by certain devoutly religious figures who have argued, like Pope John Paul II today, for an ecumenical peace of religions; as opposed to those forces, such as today's Synarchists, which are seeking to return to a medieval, ultramontane syncretism which had been derived, typically, from such ugly precedents as the Roman pantheon and Olympus cult.
However, after taking the importance of the theologians into account, the most efficient form of weapon of defense of the institution of the modern nation-state from corruption by such terrorist cults as the modern Martinists, has been that mode of separation of church from state which was instituted within the context of the U.S. Federal Constitution. At an appropriate point of this report, I shall show why that is the case.
The Martinists were always a religious form of conspiracy, which, like their one-time champion, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, were determined to destroy actual Christianity, but were also determined in their efforts to take top-down control over the Catholic and other churches, from outside and from within. Their intent was, and is, to impose their rule, and their creepy religion, upon the churches and others, to create a pantheonic, ultramontane, imperial form of religious authority above the nation-state. This intent, to become the emergent pagan religion conquering, subverting, and superseding all other religions, is key to the mystical religious trappings of the Martinists and their present Synarchist successors.
At this point, some readers will ask: "What has this to do with catching the individual terrorists who are out to hurt the U.S.A, right now?" The reader has yet to understand what terrorism is, how it works, and how to prevent, or at least control an actively ongoing terrorist operation.
Take the case of the kidnapping-assassination of Italy's former Christian Democratic Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The known personal threat to Moro was delivered, according to an eyewitness report, by Henry A. Kissinger; that, during a Washington, D.C. meeting. The terrorist capability used for that murder included elements of the fascist circles which the Anglo-American powers had inserted, surreptitiously, into the Gladio organization established among, otherwise, Christian-Democratic, Socialist, and Communist veterans of the war-time resistance to Mussolini's regime. This "right-wing" network with which the Italian fascist component of the 1970s international "left-wing" terrorist operations was associated, still exists, as part of the Synarchist network which includes Italian, French, and Spanish fascist branches with connections to a Synarchist network presently operating in a more-or-less coordinated way in Central and South America.
Generally, what are meaningfully classed as "terrorist" operations, are usually conducted in the putative interests of governments, or groups of governments. They are customarily used as elements of what is known as "irregular warfare," as this was defined in discussions in which I participated with military specialist Professor Friedrich A. von der Heydte, during the 1980s. The killing of Moro was a political assassination by, and under control of a secret governmental capability within NATO, and motivated by Moro's association with an openly debated policy, a policy which certain factions within NATO were determined to crush out of existence. The U.S. authority associated with the relevant fascist group in Italy, was not the U.S. CIA, but a different entity, which considered itself free to defy what should have been, under U.S. law, the higher authority of the Director of Intelligence of the CIA.
The usual cause for failure of anti-terrorist efforts, is that the fact of the true, higher-ranking political authorship of the decision to arrange the attacks is suppressed, at a high level, leaving law-enforcement agencies to chase the blend of false back-trails and expendable human tools used for the events. This is also complicated by the widespread use of police-agent-controlled, ostensibly deniable varieties of smelly right-left-wing groups and grouplets, smelly things regarded by the relative government agents as part of the "necessary assets" used for covert orchestration of the society's political and related security affairs.
Terrorist action is usually either a deployment controlled at the level of secret operations of an agency of one or more governments, or is a sociological phenomenon of deniable connections to government or similar agencies, in the latter case as part of the fostering of a seeming array of remarkable coincidences, fostered to panic governments and their population generally. For example, the mere proliferation of military-grade point-and-shoot video games for children and adolescents, ensures an estimable amount of "blind terrorism" effects such as school-yard shooting sprees and kindred incidents, a pattern of incidents, so orchestrated, which will sow a predictable political reaction within the terrified, shocked larger population.
In general, effective anti-terrorism depends upon starting with the minds, at high levels, behind the orchestration of such incidents. Terrorism must be regarded as a form of conduct of warfare, or insurrection, a warfare which can be defeated only by aid of knowing and defeating the enemy who commands the deployment of such effects. Effective anti-terrorist strategies, like all competent strategy, begin with the study of the mind of the authorship of that form of "warfare."
The contributing cause for the persisting mystery in the Moro case, was that too many powerful institutions of Europe, and elsewhere, had a continuing interest in covering up for the Synarchist institutions which played a crucial part in that operation. The investigation of motivation and capabilities should have started from the top, and focussed on the building of the press-orchestrated and other diversionary smoke-screens intended to create the environment for the action and effect of the action itself. Perhaps, in some such cases, punishment of the known perpetrators is secretly delivered, later, but such covert reprisals do not solve the problem; the principal effect of the terrorist act remains, as in the Moro case, until the top-down authorship of the act is made known to the public.
Kissinger personally threatened Moro. Did Kissinger actually give the order to kill? That is not proven, presently, one way or the other. Did Kissinger have the capability of ordering the killing, or participating in the approval of that action? As in the case of the Pinochet coup, without doubt. Must we prove that he did deliver the relevant command for the actual killing of Moro to the relevant action agency? An irrelevant question! The connections, whatever they were in detail, were built into the system set up for such covert actions, when the fascist (Synarchist) apparatus was brought inside what became the NATO structure, at and shortly after the close of World War II.
Without the kind of study I present to you here, our government would remain more or less helpless to know where to begin, to defend you, and our nation, against the new wave of war and terrorism threatening us all now.
Therefore, the most efficient way to bring today's citizen to the point of understanding the specific types of terrorist, fascist, and related threats, chiefly threatening Europe and the Americas today, is by exposing the fraudulent character of certain exemplary, paradigmatic types of pseudo-Christian teaching and practice. There must be deeper understanding of why the separation of church from state, and the present establishment of a global community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation-states, is a necessary strategic, as much as moral defense against the kind of menace which Martinism and its Synarchist expressions represent, still today. We must not let the state become the tool of a religious body, nor a religious body the tool, or victim of the state.
Presently, for example, there are two exemplary such right-wing cults of Synarchist pedigree prominently placed under my counterintelligence sights. The first is a fascist Israeli group of the neo-conservative type associated with the wanted fugitive Rafi Eytan. The second, is a network of pro-Nazi pedigrees, from France, Italy, and Spain, but who, as under Hitler's Nazi Party then, are deployed throughout the Americas, chiefly under the cover of the fascist doctrine of Hispanidad, and presently associated with the cover provided by keystone Spanish fascist Blas Piñar. The first, that fascist Israeli ring, is a mixture of quasi-religious and other professed Zionists. The second, is composed, partially, of typically Synarchist, extreme right-wing, often frankly gnostic Catholics ("integrists").
Inside today's U.S.A., for example, during recent decades, nominally Catholic associates of the cult are often co-deployed with Protestants cast in the mold of the wild-eyed tradition of Jonathan Edwards and our stereotypical "Elmer Gantrys." For the purpose of this report, keep those two types in view, but only as actual cases used here as models of classroom reference. Both of these types of gnostics, and also in their left-wing costuming, differ only in degree, as different brand-label packagings by their common mother, the Synarchist cult.
To simplify the initial phase of the presentation, focus upon the common features of the systemic opposition of these types of pro-terrorist cults to Christianity as such.
1. What Is Christianity?
Jesus Christ was born during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, and was judicially murdered, on the order of Pontius Pilate, the son-in-law of that Emperor Tiberius who was then based on the Isle of Capri sacred to the pagan cult of Mithra. Despite the imperial reign of the Latin Caesars of that time, the prevalent culture of the eastern Mediterranean's region was still the legacy of the Classical Greek language and tradition, as the Gospel of the Apostle John and the Epistles of the Apostle Paul reflect this choice of culture for their presentation of what the poet Shelley would term "profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature." Hebrew did not exist as a spoken language; in addition to civilized Greek, Aramaic or a vulgar, slum quality of Greek were relatively commonplace in Palestine of that time. At that time, the view of the Roman Empire was that it was, as the Apostle John reported his dream, the hateful "Whore of Babylon," an echo of all that had been hated by Jews and Christians alike, as evil persecution incarnate, from among the imperial political-social systems of earlier Mesopotamia.
The culture through which Christianity spread from the Middle East was, principally, the medium of Greek culture, as that culture's impact was also radiated, through slaves and other ways, within the reaches of the Roman Empire. The model expression of this Christian missionary's work, is found in the Gospel of John and Epistles of Paul, in which the heritage of Plato serves as the cultural vehicle employed for the transmission of specifically Christian conceptions. The case of Philo of Alexandria's argument against the theological implications of Aristotle, is a comparable reflection of the use of that existing language-culture; the heritage of Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, Plato, and the pre-Euclidean constructive geometry which they employed, was the medium best suited to transmission of conceptions of universal physical and related principle. It is by reading the writings of John and Paul, most notably, against the backdrop of the dialogues of Plato, that the intent of Christ's and the Apostles' communication, as to matters of principle, must be adduced. That is to say, by Socratic modes of cognitive replication of the clear intent behind the written Greek text. No symbolic sophistries, syncretic or otherwise, are permitted as so-called "explanations" or "interpretations."
This Platonic view of what has come to be described as "the New Testament," if replicated in the cognitive processes of the reader—rather than as a chimpanzee might be conditioned to respond obediently to mere text—affords the thinker, even a "doubting Thomas," a living sense of the immediate, immortal presence of Christ and His Apostles, even across the distance of more than 2,000 years, a sense of a reality which no bare literal text could convey. The sense of such presence is experienced, as brought to life among those assembled for a participation in J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, or Wolfgang Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus. It is through the methods of Classical irony, as typified by the best of all forms of Classical artistic composition, that the human mind rises above the relative cognitive sterility of mere text, to insight into the efficient presence of meanings which lie beyond the bounds of the bestiality of bare sense-perception.
Contrary to the bestial doctrine, of text—that of U.S. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia—the New Testament, and the U.S. Federal Constitution after it, were composed for men and women, not for the literal edification of MIT Professor Noam Chomsky's trained chimpanzee.
From those standpoints of reference, the sheer evil of what has become known as Synarchy, can be felt and smelled as it were the presence of something Satanically evil in the atmosphere. That these are the enemies of Jesus Christ, can be sensed by the witting as a presence in the room. The Jacobin Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte, G.W.F. Hegel, the terrorist bomber Richard Wagner, and the avowedly Satanic Friedrich Nietzsche or the Nazi Martin Heidegger, evoke such a sense of a hovering evil more disgusting than Judas, the prescience of something kindred to the unremorsefully Satanic degenerates Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler.
The point of recognizing that comparison, is not as if to prepare a legal case for a mortal court. The point is to adduce, to define more clearly for oneself, the location and nature of the passion which prompts the contemporary Synarchist, from inside himself, to create the kind of evil typified by the professedly Satanic Nietzsche, by his follower Martin Heidegger, by Mussolini, as by Hitler, the pro-Satanic Theodor Adorno, General Franco, Laval, and so on. The practical point is to understand why, how, and when this depraved association is likely to strike, how it spreads its influence, and sometimes turns your once-dear-and-trusted friends, or even professed Christian priests, into a semblance of panicked Gadarene swine, or the like.
The sum-total of such considerations can be pointed out by reference to a single principle; but the hearer's comprehension is not so easily secured. The principle, expressed in the form of a corresponding question, is: What is the difference between man and beast? It is the principled question I have presented, as a centerpiece of higher education, to my international youth movement, a question I have situated in a study of Carl Gauss's attack on the fraud by Euler and Lagrange, in Gauss's 1799, original published report of the discovery of The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. That same proof, expressed as a spiritual exercise, is the key to understanding the source of the evil which all Synarchy, of either left or right varieties, expresses.
The implications of that 1799 publication—as I have based an international youth movement's higher educational program on a study of that work and its deeper implications—serves us again here and now, to point to the principles which must be known if the function of cults such as the Synarchism of today's avowed U.S. neo-conservatives (the "Chicken-hawks") is to be adequately understood. I refer to my recent publication, "Visualizing the Complex Domain" (see EIR, July 11; and at www.larouchepub.com) for its treatment of the role of Gauss's 1799 paper, and the continuation of that as later work of Bernhard Riemann, in defining the distinction of man from beast, that as from the standpoint of mathematical physics. The relevance of the Classical Greek to the work of the Apostles John and Paul is efficiently clarified for the modern thinker in that way.
Science and Religion
Speaking formally, modern science, like the modern nation-state, is a qualitative change in the human condition, the product of a giant leap upward in European culture, which was born in the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance tradition of Brunelleschi, Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried Leibniz. This revolution in science and social practice, has some traceable deep roots in known features of ancient astronomical calendars and related matters of transoceanic navigation. Ancient Vedic calendars are an example of this, as are the implications of the adducible design of Egypt's Great Pyramids. However, the internal history of science in the modern sense of that term, is traced from roots in Classical Greek culture's acknowledged debt, principally to Egypt, from the time of Thales and Pythagoras. Here lies the unique historical significance of Gauss's 1799 paper: not only in denouncing the willful hoaxes of the reductionists Euler and Lagrange, and, implicitly, also Immanuel Kant; but in exposing the systemic continuity expressed by Gauss's examining, there, the connection of the modern comprehensive mathematical physics of Kepler and Leibniz, to the pre-Euclidean Greek, astronomy-oriented, constructive geometry of Pythagoras and Plato.
The crucial distinction of the successive expressions of the specific method common to both ancient and modern science, is that this is the only method by which the absolute distinction of man from beast can be strictly defined as a matter of experimentally proven universal physical principle.
The practical political significance of that proof, is not that it proves a particular choice of religious faith; but, that it informs the modern republic of the long-ranging physical-economic importance of certain ecumenical types of moral principles which have an authority of scientific certainty comparable to that of the universal principles of physical science. Such are the three principles of natural law (sovereignty, general welfare, and posterity) set forth in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution. The neglect of those principles will lead toward self-inflicted, punishing, systemic effects for a modern nation.
So, the U.S.A. was nearly destroyed by the self-affliction of tolerating a practice of slavery directly contrary to the principles of the Preamble and 1776 Declaration of Independence. The U.S.A., in particular, is suffering now from the consequences of especially those actions of the post-1963 period to date, such as radical "deregulation," which were contrary, in effect, to precisely those scientifically grounded, Constitutional principles of natural law. In a similar way, the method associated with this proof enables us to forecast, with scientific precision, as I have done over recent decades, the awful calamities which will fall upon any society which submits to the pro-Satanic whims of cults such as the Synarchists and the networks of family merchant-banks behind them.
To understand the mind of the Synarchist (and his banker), we must recognize the root of the pathology in the way an inherently bestial, empiricist mind, such as that of Bernard Mandeville, the Physiocrats, and Adam Smith—each and all forerunners of the Synarchist cult—set out to construct what in is fact the synthetic pagan religion, such as Smith's pro-paganist, explicitly irrational, religious worship of "The Invisible Hand." Smith had presented that same hedonistic image earlier, as the hedonistic principle of purely bestial irrationalism, copied from Mandeville's notorious, explicitly pro-Satanic, 1714 The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, as outlined by Smith in his 1759 The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. That fiction which they concocted, is appropriate only for the instruction and adoration of the credulous masses of a population which is being reduced to the status of either hunted, or herded (and also culled) human cattle.
The characteristic belief of the empiricist, such as Locke, Mandeville, Smith, or terrorist coordinator Bentham, is that which he adapts from the Sophism of ancient Greece: the doctrinal assumption that man is "a featherless biped," a beast who knows nothing but that which either his senses, his purely bestial "instincts," or a priest of the tradition of Delphi Apollo tells him. Pause here for a moment, to get the relevant image of the practice of that Apollo cult, and its continuing influence within popular European culture down to the present day. According to the account generally purveyed among relevant agencies in Greece, the following portrait is supplied.
Look there! This is the site of the ancient Delphi cult of the Earth-mother goddess, Gaea, and her serpent-like consort, Python. In pops the Oriental rowdy, Apollo! In true macho style, Apollo, apparently sensing in Python a male rival for control of the neighborhood, chops the poor serpent into pieces, but, later, woos Gaea, pleading for her forgiveness.
The bi-polar Apollo tenderly lays the pieces of Python into a grave, building a temple around that grave-site.
Thereafter, a priestess who bears the title of Pythia, performs the following ritual. For a suitable payment, Pythia seats herself before the grave-site of Python, beside an urn containing balls. Depending whether the payment is small, or large, she answers each request for a prophecy, either by plucking a ball from the urn, or, for a higher price, delivering a piece of ambiguous virtual gibberish, like a fragment from a typical campaign speech by Arnie Schwarzenegger.
At this point, the confused supplicant looks to the row of seats directly across the grave-site, where the priests of Apollo, such as the famous Plutarch in his time, are seated, waiting. For a price, an explanation of the impenetrable mystery is delivered to the ears of the credulous. If the supplicant is both credulous and influential, the history of Greece and other places is shaped, in significant degree, by the credulity of that supplicant's faith in the story told by the Delphic fortune-teller.
Such is the Delphic method, the method of sophistry. Such is the religious belief of the empiricist or his dupe today. Such is the basis for the relative successes of the Martinist cult and of the bankers who deploy it for purposes of managing those herds of stock-market dupes and other human cattle which they cull, from time to time. It is, as Gauss's 1799 paper proves, the Delphic method of Euler and Lagrange, as also of the Immanuel Kant who did so much to turn so many Germans, and others, into existentialist and other varieties of cullable cattle.
The essential distinction of man from both beasts and empiricists such as Euler, is precisely what is at issue in Gauss's attacks on the Delphic hoaxes against science by two pagan religious fanatics of the cult of empiricism, Euler and Lagrange.
I explain the point about science.
The ancient Greek, pre-Euclidean notion of the physical universe was attributed, not to a Euclidean scheme for interpreting experience, but to what was known as "spherics." "Spherics" was a synonym for astronomy, or, what were better described as astrophysics. The Pythagoreans, and their followers such as Plato, looked to the heavens for evidence of what might be called "the universe." There, in that view, they sought out what might be regarded as universal physical principles, as Johannes Kepler did much later.
The typical form for universal motion was sought out, as if observable motion along the internal surface of a sphere of a great diameter; as if motion were typified by the transitions of the night-time sky and apparent motion of the Sun and Moon. The sphere, and the curvatures which might be derived from it as presumably elementary, were the starting-point for the effort to discover the lawful composition of that universe which generated the shadows of our sense-perception of observable astrophysical processes, and, from that point of reference, other observed processes as well.
In this way, a number of studies, based on the notion of a purely constructive geometry of primarily spherical action, showed us anomalies, cases in which observable recurring motion was not uniform in terms of the presumed Aristotelean clock-work of a spherical surface. Such an anomalous case is typified in the history of science by Kepler's discovery of a principle of universal gravitation. Such anomalies told us that what our senses present to us, are not the realities of our universe, but, like gravitation, were the shadows which the real universe casts upon our organs of sense.
An experimental demonstration, based upon Florentine methods of bel canto training of the singing voice, enables us to prove that what is described as Pythagoras' definition of the musical comma, is not a calculation derivable within a Euclidean manifold, but is an apparent anomaly generated by some efficient physical principle, acting from behind the shadows of sense-perception.
The cases of the doubling of the line, square, and cube, treated in Gauss's 1799 paper, also expose the falseness inhering in a Euclidean or related form of geometry premised upon a priori definitions. The case of the construction of the Platonic solids, goes toward the heart of the issues posed by the methods of pre-Euclidean, constructive geometry employed by the Pythagoreans and Plato.
Against such background of the work of the Pythagoreans and kindred predecessors, Plato's Socratic dialogues present a general solution for those and analogous paradoxes of naive faith in sense-certainty. The famous allegory of the Cave, from Plato's The Republic, typifies this. Our sense-organs are part of our biological organization. What they present to us is not an image of the world outside us, but, rather, the effect of that outside world's actions upon our sense-organs. As the point is typified in Plato's Timaeus dialogue, and other locations, it is the anomalies associated with the spherical principle of a pre-Euclidean form of astronomy, which point out the existence of physically efficient, universal principles, existing beyond the reach of direct comprehension by our senses. These anomalies enable us to define what is acting upon the sensed image of the universe, to change that universe in ways not consistent with spherics.
So, the culture of Classical Greece knew such forms of proof that the visible universe is controlled by principles which are not, of themselves, known to sense-perception, but are powers, according to Plato's scientifically precise meaning of that term, which control those recurring kinds of anomalous effects which sense-perception presents. In cases in which this knowledge of unseen principles enables mankind to increase our power in and over the universe to practical effect, we know that it is through the willful employment of such discovered, experimentally validated principles, principles from beyond sense-perception, that mankind is enabled to increase our species' control over the universe as perceived. As Plato emphasizes, this was already known in his ancient times. That already suffices to define the difference between man and beast. The emergence of modern European civilization carried the implications of that to a qualitatively higher level.
In the referenced 1799 paper, Gauss compares such ancient achievements, in defining universal physical principles, with the results of the progress in the revolutionary development of modern comprehensive mathematical physics, since Brunelleschi, Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Leibniz. On this basis, Gauss exposes the fraud of, most notably, Euler and Lagrange; and, implicitly, empiricist and positivist followers of Lagrange in the style of Laplace and Cauchy.
It should be noted here, that Gauss showed, in subsequent locations, beginning his famous Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, that the arithmetic associated with modern mathematical physics was underlain by the same deep principles of constructive geometry expressed by the pre-Euclidean discoveries of Archytas, Plato, et al. Gauss's defining the complex domain, and the work of his students Dirichlet and Riemann after him, have brought forth the deeper implications of the notion of a higher geometry which makes comprehensible the experimentally provable nature of the functional relationship between the visible and the higher, invisible reaches of the complex domain.
As simply and briefly as possible, what Gauss addressed, was the following.
Cardan's posing the problem of cubic algebraic roots, had led the empiricist ideologues Euler and Lagrange to concede the merely formal existence of certain algebraic magnitudes which they misnamed "imaginary numbers." As Gauss showed, then, and more amply latter, the inclusion of these numbers as expressions of functions of the complex domain, opened up mathematical physics to be able to deal, at once, with the relations among perceived and actual physical causes.
For political reasons created, successively, by Napoleon Bonaparte's tyranny in Europe, and the related conditions continued under the terms of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Gauss was fearful of continuing to report his related original discoveries in (not non-Euclidean, but) anti-Euclidean geometry. It was only decades later, that Gauss made public reference to such youthful discoveries he had made while a student of Kästner and Zimmerman; it was only when modern science looked back at Gauss's work as a whole from the vantage-point of the work of Dirichlet, Riemann, and Wilhelm Weber's experimental proof of Ampère's principle of electrodynamics, that the full physical significance of Gauss's unpublished manuscripts from the 1790s could begin to be adequately understood.
Man's ability to reach, through powers unique to the human mind, beyond the range of sense-perception, to discover, and to master processes lying only in the real physical universe beyond reach of an animal's senses, is the first step toward actual knowledge of that realm we know by such terms as metaphysical, or spiritual. By knowledge, I mean something which must be discovered in the same sense any universal physical principle is not merely discovered to exist, but a discovery mastered in application to a changed, improved body of human practice. It can not be discovered by animal-like instinct, nor learned as a rule supplied by an established authority. It must be experienced, by each individual, as the mind's generation of an hypothesis which conquers a real paradox, an hypothesis proven by those appropriate forms of experimental methods which European civilization has derived from a pre-Euclidean tradition of constructive geometry.
I shall return to this matter at several, relevant points in the continued unfolding of my exposition.
Man and His Nature
To understand any aspect of modern European civilization and its religion today, we must take into account the profound change in the human condition which was wrought, in succession, by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance and such crucial sequels as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the American Revolution. It was the combined hatred against all three of those successive, crucial historical developments, which motivated the Martinists and every expression of their form of evil since the closing decades of the Eighteenth Century.
First, prior to Europe's Fifteenth Century, the standard condition of humanity, as far back, and as widely as we presently know, was the brutish reign of a relatively small oligarchy and its retinues, over a mass of humanity degraded to the status or either hunted or herded human cattle. Christianity represented, implicitly, a fundamental improvement in the human condition generally, by introducing the notion of a practice premised in principle on the universality of humanity. However, the existence of governing political institutions consistent with that Christian notion waited until that Italy-centered Renaissance which brought forth the first two modern nation-states, Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England.
Even then, the victory has never been completed, to the present day. The history of the struggle, since the Renaissance, to achieve that victory, is the source of needed insights into the challenges which must be met, and the pitfalls to be avoided, if progress toward that goal could be managed.
The feudal system, under the ruling partnership between Venice's rentier-oligarchical form of imperial maritime power and the Norman chivalry, had brought itself to a state of relative, systemic collapse through that Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age" brought on by the impact of Venetian usury upon Europe under the rule of a Venetian-Norman tyranny. In the gradual emergence of a ruined Europe from this terrible holocaust, the great ecumenical Council of Florence emerged as the pivotal place of reference for an already ongoing, pro-Platonic, Greek-language eruption which became a great Renaissance. That was the birth of modern European civilization, an institution unlike, and surpassing any organization of mankind which had existed in known times before.
With this revolution came the birth of modern science, as the impetus for this was expressed by Brunelleschi, and, most emphatically the initiative of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia; and by such Cusa followers as Leonardo da Vinci, the great, direct forerunners of the founding of a comprehensive form of mathematical physics by Johannes Kepler.
The combination of steps toward the conception of government's responsibility for the promotion of the general welfare of living and posterity, was the belated triumph of the great work of Dante Alighieri. This Renaissance brought to an end, at least implicitly, acceptance of a continuation of the arrangements under which a few ruling strata in society were able to subject the remainder of humanity to that relative status of hunted or herded human cattle of virtually fixed technology of practice, which the evil Code of Diocletian had prescribed.
For the leaders of that Renaissance, it was no longer allowable, that the promotion of the wealth and pleasure of the few, should proceed at the expense of the many. Caring for peasants as if they were useful cattle to be owned and maintained, as serfs are, or peons on a latifundist's estate, was not consistent with the notion of the general welfare of human beings whose characteristic quality is the requirement of development.
The revolt in France led and inspired by the sublime Jeanne d'Arc, challenged, and led to the overthrow of the Normans' ultramontane tyranny, bringing forth France as a true nation-state under that master of the principles of strategic defense, King Louis XI. That sacrifice by the sublime Jeanne inspired the Councils of the Catholic Church, fed the process of the Renaissance, and contributed to bringing about the restoration of a shattered Papacy. The birth of England, in Henry VII's defeat of the Norman tyranny represented by Richard III, was the fruit of the preceding work of Jeanne d'Arc, the Councils, and the reign of France's Louis XI.
Under the new conception of the state introduced by the influence of that Renaissance, the government was accountable for improving the general welfare of both the living, and also, more emphatically, posterity. This was a responsibility to the whole of the population and its land-area; in other words, this accountability of the state for the whole population, required the notion of economies self-governed by universal physical principles working to universal physical effect.
So, Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, defining the mission of modern physical-experimental science, complemented his definition of a community of sovereign states, in his earlier Concordantia Catholica. What Dante Alighieri had proposed, as in his revival of the Italian language and his De Monarchia, were realized, in principle, by Cusa's typically leading part in the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. Such was the birth of the modern nation-state as the alternative to the relatively bestializing, ultramontane trappings of feudalism, the medieval system of Venice and its Norman partners most emphatically. Under this new conception of government, the concern of society became the discovery and use of those principles of scientific practice by means of which the universal requirements of entire societies might be efficiently addressed. This gave birth to a new conception of physical science, to the universal mathematical physics whose actual founding was accomplished by the witting successor of Cusa and Leonardo, Johannes Kepler. This was a new conception of man's universal relationship to nature, a new conception of science.
This revolution, which erupted in that Renaissance and its aftermath, forced intensive debates in both law and physical science, respecting the nature of the human individual. Who could be lawfully reduced to the sub-human social status of slavery, the status of virtual cattle? Who could be reduced to a status but a little higher than a slave, a Mexico peon, for example?
The Sixteenth-Century, Iberian trade in captured persons from sub-Sahara Africa, first by Portugal and then Spain, led the way; the Anglo-Dutch liberals followed, but later dumped the trade, as unpleasant and unprofitable, upon the Iberians deemed sufficiently inferior to be occupied with this unpleasant and poor quality of traffic. The troubled Isabella and Ferdinand resisted, but their decrees were impotent under the prevalent conditions of the ruling oligarchy of their new nation. From the Habsburg (Spanish: Hapsburg) succession, on, Spain became the leading butcher of European civilization, the later model of reference for the development of the Martinist freemasonic cult in France, and the object of nostalgic reference for Spanish-speaking fascists around the world still today. As the Netherlands war and the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War attest, it was the bestiality of the Habsburg dynasty of Spain and Vienna, which led in creating a medieval-like depravity in Europe not superseded until the rise of the Dutch and British India Companies. Those Companies were spawned by the depraved conditions produced by the Venice-Habsburg efforts to turn back the clock of history over the 1511-1648 period, a period which some British historians have aptly described as a "Little New Dark Age."
By early during the Nineteenth Century, Spain, which had never abandoned the slave-trade in practice up to that point, became the world's principal slave-trafficker, although under British license and supervision, past the time of the Spanish monarchy's support for the cause of the U.S. Confederacy. Then, by the latter time, the development of the internal economy of Spain, and the collapse of Spain's African-slave-trade into the U.S. slave-holders' market, had asserted its own relatively more productive, if poor habits, contrary to those of the decadent monarchy already overripe for the ashcan of history. The argument of the Spanish slave-traders and their like against the ineffective prohibitions of Isabella I and others, was of the form of seeking to demonstrate that Africans were not actually human, did not have actually human souls, but were categorically fit only to be hunted down like wild animals, and the population culled to the remnant assigned to become slaves. A similar argument was employed by the Spanish administration of Mexico, in which the argument was that poor Mexican peons were not "rational," and therefore, were virtually humanoid-like cattle, not qualified to share the respect or economic rights accorded their latifundist exploiters; an argument later echoed by Quesnay and other Physiocrats in France, and the curious pseudo-logic of the Carlist roots of the Spanish-speaking branch of the Synarchist tradition in Spain and the Americas today.
The ability of the human individual to increase man's power over nature through discovery, and through re-enactment of the discovery of those manifestly efficient universal physical principles, such as gravitation, quickest time, and universal physical least action, principles not directly visible to sense-perception as such, showed man as possessing, by nature, a power, a quality lacking in all lower forms of life, a power not attributable to living processes in general. This quality defines man as intrinsically a spiritual being, as I have referred to this above.
The physical-scientific meaning of spiritual, was pinned down by the work of the Russian scientist V.I. Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere. I have addressed this in my 2001 book, The Economics of the Noösphere. Working from the standpoint of experimental physical chemistry, geobiochemistry, Vernadsky divided the domain among three types of phase-spaces: abiotic, biotic, and noëtic. Abiotic signifies experimentally defined universal physical principles which are not specific to living processes as such. Biotic signifies experimentally defined universal physical principles specific to living processes. Noëtic signifies those creative powers unique to the human mind, by means of which the discovery of experimentally valid universal physical principles of both the abiotic and biotic domains are discovered. In other words, we divide the experimental universe among three interacting, but distinct classes of principles: non-living, living, and spiritual.
It is this latter class of principle, spiritual, unique to the human individual, which defines a reality which corresponds to a valid religious experience. It is the combined generation and transmission of the experience of discovery of valid universal physical principles, of the abiotic, biotic, and noëtic domains, which expresses the functional distinction of the human species, as a species, from all other species.
This noëtic, or spiritual quality references the power of the individual human mind to access knowledge of a class of universal physical principles, whose efficiency is experimentally valid, but which, as principles, are outside the domain of sensory phenomena.
This conception of human nature, intrinsic to Genesis 1 and to Christianity, is sometimes referred to as the Promethean conception of the human individual.
Promethean Man
As long as the scientific-technological and associated cultural progress persisted, that trend militated against the continued influence of still powerful relics of the Venetian-Norman legacy. However, this fact merely made the surviving cultural relics of past feudal traditions the more enraged, the more inclined to desperate measures to crush the Renaissance and its effects out of existence.
A resurgent Venetian power struck back; with the eruption of the already referenced 1511-1648 period of Venice-orchestrated religious wars, the new creation, modern European civilization, was in bloody jeopardy. But, the force of progress was stubborn, and survived. The Treaty of Westphalia was virtually the rebirth of modern European civilization, and the founding of the U.S. republic is the best approximation of the goal in statecraft toward which the Renaissance and the Treaty of Westphalia had pointed. Had an American-style constitution, as drafted under the leadership of Bailly and Lafayette, been adopted by the French monarchy, the model of the young American republic would have transformed the entire sweep of globally extended European civilization. Thanks to the leadership of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, the U.S.A. survived the machinations of the combined forces of the British monarchy, Napoleon III's France, Spain, and the Habsburgs, and the United States went on to become the world's most productive nation and its greatest power.
At the moment the impact of the young U.S. republic of 1789 was about to spread its influence rapidly in transforming European society, the enemy, led by Lord Shelburne's British East India Company, struck back, mobilizing those Martinists who emerged from July 14, 1789 on, as the leaders of the left-wing Terror and, as also the controlling forces of the subsequent right-wing reaction against that Terror, the first modern fascist dictatorship, that of Napoleon Bonaparte. The essence of that 1789-1815 development was a cultural revolution against the conception of man associated with the Renaissance, a conception of man then freshly expressed by the American Revolution.
Even inside the U.S.A., under a confused President John Adams, the New York City publication of British Foreign Office agent Sir John Robison's fraudulent Proofs of a Conspiracy, rallied the endemically treasonous, New England-based Essex Junto tribes to persuade the Adams government that the United States must tend to ally with the British monarchy, against the revolutionary France that Lord Shelburne's British East India Company had brought into being, all for the purpose of crushing the American cause on both sides of the Atlantic! This was that induced delusion of the Adams government, which produced the crisis of the Alien & Sedition Acts, and which led, by related means, to the disgrace and death of the Federalist Party, especially after the British Foreign Office agent Aaron Burr's killing of Alexander Hamilton, the clearest head among leading American figures on these issues at that time.
The Martinists and their Synarchist outgrowth have been the principal enemy of our republic, from outside and internally, since our War for Independence. They represent the evil that was the Roman Empire, the evil of the long reign of the Venetian-Norman tyranny over much of the history of medieval Europe. They represented the enemy of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the enemy of the creation of the sovereign nation-state republic, and were a continuation of those forces which have launched the religious and kindred wars which have so often nearly destroyed modern civilization. These are the monsters today, who seek to turn back the clock backwards, to what they call today "the end of history."
The relics of feudalism could not compete, economically or otherwise, with the progress of the emergent modern European civilization's impulse for progress. Those feudal relics might slow it, or stop it altogether, but they could not compete with it on the proverbial "level playing field." They might crush modern civilization by force, as they attempted with the Habsburg-led religious warfare of the 1511-1648 interval; otherwise, that failing, they might attack the problem along cultural lines, by seeking to uproot and stifle that new, Renaissance conception of man which had energized the coming into being of modern European civilization.
On the latter account, the Venetian Party revived Aristoteleanism and then also that legacy of William of Ockham known as the empiricism of Paolo Sarpi and Sarpi's household lackey Galileo Galilei. The degraded conception of man typified by these two assaults on the Christian conception of human nature, has been the main current of those efforts to destroy modern civilization, which are typified and more or less dominated by the Synarchist initiatives of today. The ideological center of the target for the latter attack is the notion of "Promethean Man."
The modern conception of Promethean man is traced chiefly from the first, surviving part, Prometheus Bound, of the Classical tragedian Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy. The tyrannical gods of Olympus, led by the tyrant Zeus, hold mankind in subjugation to bestial conditions of life, by denying man the access to fire and, implicitly, the discovery and development of technology generally. This mankind, so oppressed, is implicitly that of Biblical Genesis 1, man and woman made equally in the likeness of the Creator of the universe, and endowed by Him with the power and obligation to develop the world: in other words, to change it according to laws discoverable only by the mind of the individual human being. This is what the implicitly Satanic oppressor denies mankind, by oppressing us, or corrupting us, or a combination of both; this is what Prometheus fights to free man to do, a fight which Prometheus will win in the end. The tragic figure of Aeschylus' trilogy, is not the sublime Prometheus, but the depraved potentate Zeus.
In real modern history, the part of the evil, doomed tyrant Zeus, is played by the Venetian-Norman Party as an oligarchy, and a crucified Jesus Christ's redemption of man's true nature and destiny, is echoed as the Promethean role. Such is the principle of redemption of humanity expressed in the portrait presented by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.
The enemy fears, more than anything else, the possibility that the ordinary people, at least a significant ration of them, adopts the Promethean image of man's assigned role, a role consistent with the Renaissance and the subsequent expressions of progress of globally extended modern European civilization. It is against that prospect that the enemy conducts cultural warfare, including religious war, and any other means for inducing man's self-degradation. This includes, most notably, attacks against the Promethean image in the misused name of religion, as by that archetypical swine, Aaron Burr's grandfather, Jonathan Edwards.
The Evil Men and Their Economics
Trace the way in which such swinish cultural corruption of mankind was pursued by the empiricists and their Martinist outgrowth, from the virtually Satanic figure of the founder of empiricism, Venice's Paolo Sarpi, through his personal lackey Galileo, and Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. For a more accurate picture, situate the paradoxical features of the case of Karl Marx against that relevant backdrop.
The first premise of that moral depravity which is empiricism, and its outgrowth, positivism, is the denial of the existence of man's capacity to know experimentally validated universal principles existing outside the domain of sense-perception. Usually, the empiricists do not deny that something unseen might exist, but they insist, that should it exist, its existence must either remain forever unknown to man, or might be inferred as an explanation of sensed phenomena in nothing more than a more or less statistical way. To this, the empiricists add the role of allegedly self-evident, primal impulses of greed, and lust for pleasure and power, presenting thus the image of Hobbesian man.
On this basis, John Locke defines the power of the landlord over the serf, or the like, to be the principle of the rights of property, a notion sometimes translated today as "shareholder value," or, under the law of the early 1860s Confederacy as "slaveholder value." Locke's Essays on Human Understanding define this empiricist notion; whereas, Gottfried Leibniz's belatedly published New Essays on Human Understanding exposed the wickedness of Locke's design. It was the latter, Leibniz's work, which informed Benjamin Franklin and his circles; Leibniz's elaboration of the principle of "pursuit of happiness," became the basis on which the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence was premised, and the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution defined.
With Mandeville, Quesnay, and Adam Smith, the lust to do evil becomes more explicit than it had been with Locke. London University's stuffed dummy Jeremy Bentham, would make even most modern fascists blush, perhaps even the devil himself, provided they knew most of what Bentham published, and what he actually did in the French Revolution. The explicitly hedonistic principle of utilitarianism, as introduced to the practice of today's U.S. Federal Reserve's faking of the data on post-1982 inflation in the U.S. economy to date, is typical of Bentham. See Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation, combined with works such as his In Defence of Usury; see, Simon Bolívar's denunciation of Bentham's British Foreign Office role in corrupting the South American revolutions of that time.
Earlier, Mandeville, the resident Satanic object of adulation by the Friedrich von Hayek's post-World War II Mont Pelerin Society, had been explicit in his claims to be, and to promote, evil. Witness the Mont Pelerin Society's adoption of Mandeville's paean to Satan, The Fable of the Bees. Quesnay's doctrine of laissez-faire, from which Adam Smith copied his "free trade," had been premised on the argument on which the economic doctrine of the French Physiocrats as a whole, and recent decades' turns in U.S. agricultural policy have been premised: that the farmers employed on the lazy, titled landlord's estate were merely human cattle, who had no part in creating the profit of the estate, or society as a whole; rather, the landlord, by virtue of the Satanic magic of his position as title-holder (e.g., "shareholder"), was the only producer of the net wealth of the estate, and of society as a whole.
These eerie dogmas of Mandeville, Quesnay, Smith, Bentham, et al., have a root in very queer sorts of religions, such as the Cathars or Grail cult. Until Shelburne lackey Bentham's rise to power in the British Foreign Office's operations, Mandeville was the most openly shameless of that bad lot, but the other empiricists of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century were not far behind him. The Martinists went further, as they do today, but they only make explicitly religious, the evil which permeates the entirety of the empiricism of the so-called Eighteenth-Century "Enlightenment." Consider the following excerpt, which I have often quoted elsewhere, from Smith's 1759 The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Read this, or, perhaps re-read this, from the standpoint of looking at this passage as typifying an underlying, pro-Satanic form of religious belief. That is my intention in excerpting it here; read it from that point of view. I underline the most relevant elements from the excerpt.
The administration of the great system of the universe . . . the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country. . . .
But, though we are endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.
Smith's utterance belongs to a wildly irrationalist, pagan religion, not science. It is like the Cathar doctrine central to Quesnay's pro-feudalist Physiocratic dogma, a world view, and a blasphemous definition of God, derived from an a priori set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. Nonetheless, as Shelburne lackey Adam Smith's argument in his anti-American propaganda-piece of 1776, The Wealth of Nations, was largely lifted from the work of the French Physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot, this eerie, pro-Satanic dogma of laissez-faire, which plagiarist Adam Smith copied as "The Invisible Hand" of "free trade," became—together with its adoption of the Malthusian doctrine of the Venetian Giammaria Ortes—the entire basis for the British East India Company's Haileybury School of economics, the so-called English school of political-economy from which Karl Marx derived his own definitions of economics: the axiomatic assumptions of Ortes' argument, as copied more faithfully in English by Malthus et al., than in Marx's German.
The spread of this empiricist school of Bentham, et al., into the Marxian socialist movement, is underscored most luridly by the expressed influence of Thomas Huxley on Frederick Engels, especially Engels' scientifically absurd speculation on the derivation of man from apes, allegedly by the development of the opposable thumb! Engels was a thoroughly British empiricist of the Bentham school, a British manufacturer of goods produced from slave-grown American cotton, and a political dilettante, who foisted his explicit hatred of the greatest economists of his century on his poverty-stricken protégé Karl Marx—first against the German-American Friedrich List, and, later, the Americans Alexander Hamilton, and, by name, Henry C. Carey. Poor Marx was an unwitting protégé of Bentham's pupil Lord Palmerston, who coordinated both the Young Europe and Young America left-wing conspiracies of that time through such channels as Palmerston rival Urquhart's foreign-intelligence post at the British Library, the place where Marx polished his studies of British political-economy and its included Physiocratic roots. This study occurred, substantially, under veteran British intelligence handler, the same Urquhart who handled the correspondence of the Young Europe network, and also supplied ostensibly helpful advice to a duped Marx.
In an Age of Lies, which the recent three centuries of globally extended official European civilization have largely been most of that time, it were inevitable that dust-layered truth might be retrieved from that attic where unconventional opinions, good, bad, or awful, are customarily stored. The actual progress of modern economy, from its roots in Charlemagne's census, has come chiefly from the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance; was fostered by the work of Cardinal Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert; and was founded as a body of scientific work with Leibniz's development of a branch of physical science, the latter known as physical economy, over the interval of 1671-1716. The American System of physical economy was chiefly an outgrowth of the European influence which brought the work of Leibniz into shaping the world-outlook of Benjamin Franklin and his associates, into the form reflected in Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's famous three reports to the Congress, including the famous 1791 On the Subject of Manufactures.
During my own youth and young manhood, the work of Leibniz was the chief influence which I adopted for my own view of my early exposure to then-contemporary manufacturing and related practice of technology. Hence, my own original contributions, dating from work of the 1948-1953 interval, which became my own Leibnizian practice of economic analysis and long-range forecasting from the standpoint of physical economy, for which I am known in various leading scientific and other circles here and abroad today. It was the standpoint of Leibnizian physical economy, as expressed by Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, which came to reshape the thinking of much of the thunderstruck world after President Abraham Lincoln's victory over that Confederacy which had been launched by joint efforts of the British monarchy, Napoleon III's France, and others. From about the time of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial convention, Hamilton's legacy, the American System of political-economy, proceeded to transform the economic policy of practice of many of the world's leading nations, on continental Europe, in Japan, and in Central and South America, too. Later, at Harvard University, and in preparing, later, for his U.S. Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt had returned to the American System legacy of his celebrated ancestor, the New York banker Isaac Roosevelt, a key collaborator of Alexander Hamilton. So, Roosevelt rescued our republic from the follies of Coolidge and Hoover.
The history of the U.S. republic, from the beginning, has been principally a see-saw struggle between two irreconcilable philosophical systems of political-economics: the standpoint of physical economy, that of Leibniz and his followers; versus the empiricist tradition of Venice's Paolo Sarpi and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment. This has been the pivotal feature of the economic history of the U.S. itself, and our republic's past and continuing philosophical relationship to the world at large.
The cases of Marx, Engels, and their aftermath, are to be situated as Karl Marx himself declared himself a follower of the Enlightenment's empiricist school of political-economy, that of Quesnay and the British East India Company's Haileybury School of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, et al. Thus, Marx's work and its effects can be understood, only after we have situated him and his influence exactly where he situates it, within the bounds of the Eighteenth-Century empiricist adversaries of both Gottfried Leibniz and the American System of political-economy. Today's generally accepted history of political-economy is not a branch of science; it is the work of the cult known as the Enlightenment, a cult permeated by that strong pro-Satanic component of which Mandeville and Bentham are most flagrantly typical.
Mandeville, the overt Satanist, was already franker than Adam Smith; but, nonetheless, there is no systemic difference in axiomatic assumptions between Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and the passage which I have cited from Smith. Mandeville only adds the qualification, that that tyrant which Smith terms blasphemously "the great Director of nature," has crafted the universe to such effect that the unrestrained pursuit of vice and corruption are that Director's essential means, by means of which the benefits to society as a whole are produced: Mandeville's god is the great gangster who runs the infinite brothel and gambling casino, and, perhaps is the silent partner in Enron and Halliburton, too! Smith's anti-American tract of 1776, The Wealth of Nations, makes the connection between the intent of the 1759 work and Mandeville's argument explicit. The published writings, and secret practice of Smith's associate Jeremy Bentham, carry Smith's moral degeneracy into the extremes of florid detail.
The most efficient way in which to destroy a society by its own hand, is to criminalize the behavioral habits of its leaders, while making their underlings the accomplices of such perversions, and holding dissenting honorable men and women up to ridicule and to persecutions which may prompt their cowardly friends to desert them, perhaps in expectation of new benefactors for their desired life-styles and careers.
Now, that much said, reconsider what I have said on the subject of evil men up to this point, now from the comparative standpoint of a textbook course in Euclidean geometry. What are the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the empiricist systems of social thought, as a closed system based upon an uncompleted set of mechanical rules of behavior? Then, add several new rules which tend to make a distinction between the pre-Bentham "geometry" of Anglo-Dutch empiricism, and the bloody, Martinist holocaust which Shelburne's Bentham set into motion as the French Revolution of 1789-1815.
From the start, empiricism, like the influence of Aristotle and Euclid, sought to stop, even turn back the wheels of human progress, by decreeing a universe of fixed principles, ruled by a God who could do nothing to change the set of principles once he had set them into motion. This was the condemnation of Aristotle by Philo of Alexandria. This was the reactionary folly of the Sixteenth Century, which the Venetians imposed in the form of the dead astronomy-systems of a revived pro-Aristotelean hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy, and the sterile, essentially Aristotelean models of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. Those were the astronomy of a universe which left the Creator, as if handcuffed, outside reality, and degraded man to the behavioral status of just another animal. It was a universe in which a fixed set of definitions, axioms, and postulates ruled, in which history was essentially dead, without as much as the bare possibility of intervention by revolutionary, newly discovered universal principles.
It was a utopian's universe, in which the only permissible change was a perfection of the enforcement of a fixed set of rules of the game, an infinite game of chess, in which progress would mean nothing of importance in the end; the rules would not change, and the game, however the players tried, would never really change anything in the real universe. It was the hateful universe of Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. In effect, it was the universe of the Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, the world despised by Goethe's poetical Prometheus of his Grosskopta, a world in which Zeus and his lackeys played dirty tricks against a mankind allowed to do essentially nothing to distinguish itself from the beasts. A world whose imaginary god, Zeus, was a cruelly capricious bastard, a Nietzschean Superman, a virtual Satan. It was the world of Shelburne's Jeremy Bentham, who begat Lord Palmerston, who, in turn, in a manner of speaking, begat the consummately evil Bertrand Russell, who begat his altar boy, the maliciously playful monster, John von Neumann, of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
With Bentham and the Martinists, the man of unmatched pure evil, a Nietzschean beast-man, struts upon the stage of modern world history, a man like the Roman Tiberius, Caligula, or Nero, or Adolf Hitler, who would commit such monstrous crimes, on a mass scale, as would induce a terrified people to kiss his feet with their ardor, and seek to emulate their new master by excelling today in a greater evil than they had done the day before. This was the quality Shelburne sought in agents such as Philippe Egalité and Jacques Necker; this was Bentham's London-trained assets, Danton and Marat; this was the Jacobin Terror; this was the transitional part played by the thieving whoremaster Barras; this monster, this Nietzschean superman, was Napoleon Bonaparte in the role of bandit-emperor. Such a beast was the Napoleon who launched the first modern fascist empire which Cheney has presently aimed to reproduce by nuclear means. This was the Napoleon whose criminal energy prompted the crafting of a philosophy of history, and theory of the state, by that G.W.F. Hegel who had come to adore Napoleon, but would console himself later by serving the Holy Alliance's Prince Metternich and the fascist-like Carlsbad Decrees.
The cumulative impact of the succession of horrors of the 1789-1815 interval of the Martinists' rampage, was the birth of the Romantic movement. This turn away from the late Eighteenth-Century rise, in tandem, of both the German Classical tradition's revival of that legacy of human reason represented by Shakespeare, Leibniz, and J.S. Bach, and the 1776-1789 American Revolution, sank early Nineteenth-Century Europe into a renewal of the Romantic legacy of Rameau, the pro-Satanic Mandeville, and Walpole. The decadence which was early Nineteenth-Century Romanticism, rose to the surface with Napoleon's coronation and subsequent victory over not only Prussia, but, implicitly, Germany, too, at Jena-Auerstädt. After the awful outcome of the 1814-15, Metternich-hosted, and fairly described as "sexual Congress" of Vienna, Europe was chiefly plunged deeper into the cultural pessimism expressed as the post-Napoleonic Romanticism of Liszt, Berlioz, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and others. This decadence was the source from which later proliferations of Napoleonic tyrants sprang; these were, among others, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Laval, and Vichy.
The man of evil, hailed by Nietzsche as his reborn Phrygian Dionysus, had come upon the stage of history, and was determined to stay and conquer. It is that heritage against which we must contest today.
Evil As a Religion
Synarchism was not a political doctrine; it was created as a freemasonic form of pro-paganist religion, a Satanic religion, called Martinism. The influence of this Satanic religion is expressed today by, among others, Vice-President Dick Cheney and his professedly neo-conservative "Chicken-hawks." The latter degenerates typify cowardly tyrants who send others to kill, while they themselves follow the battle-torn procession like predatory carpet-baggers, like the buzzards. Otherwise, the difference between the Promethean, on the one side, and the sophists, empiricists, and Martinists, on the other, is not fairly describable as merely a difference in political commitments, but, rather, a virtual functional difference in species.
There are chiefly four axiomatic qualities of distinctions which distinguish matured, normal men and women, from the sophists and empiricists in general and the Martinists most emphatically.
This can be summarized as a series of four interdependent but respectively distinct theses, as I do, as follows, now.
First, a normal representative of the human species is distinguished from the beasts, by the capacity to distinguish objects of thought which correspond to the existence of experimentally valid universal physical principles, principles which exist beyond the reach of sense-perception as such, but whose existence is susceptible of conclusive experimental proof. The discovery and proof of these principles, first as hypotheses, and then as experimental proof of principle, is achieved through the human mind's unique capacity to recognize the footprint of anomalies in the ordering of perceived events. The term "cognition" is properly restricted to references to the process of discovery and proof of the principles which solve the relevant anomalous paradoxes.
In the mathematical physics of Gauss, Abel, Dirichlet, Wilhelm Weber, and Riemann, this defines the physical reality reflected as the complex domain. The mastery of that acquired view of the physical reality corresponding to the complex domain, has been the keystone for the educational self-development of the youth movement which I have sponsored.
Second, in many cases, man is able to apply these efficient, universal, but non-perceptible principles to the universe around us; that, to the effect of increasing the relative potential population-density of the human species, or of the particular culture which benefits from that practice. This distinguishes the human species categorically, ecologically, from all other living species.
This is the basis for my original definition of corresponding principles of a science of physical economy, a practice of physical economy which I have defined as Riemannian in essential form.
Third, the sustainable progress of society depends upon the transmission of these discovered principles, both "horizontally" and "forward," through induced replication of the relevant cognitive experience of replicatable individual discovery by individuals. This process of combined transmission and creation of ongoing new such discoveries, of both physical science and Classical modes of artistic composition, is the proper referent for the term "culture."
Fourth, the preceding three principles situate the mortal human individual in such a way, that the mortal existence of each is implicitly immortal, not as merely a living creature, but, rather, also as a cognitive being, whose existence is a contributing feature of the continuity of the culture, and of the human species in general. The images of the greatest known scientific discoverers, Classical artists, heroes, and statesmen of history, exemplify the sense of cognitive immortality potentially available to each of us. They who realize this in their outlook and practice, live in a simultaneity of eternity, within which they are immortal presences living with us today. The true interest of the human individual, the only real wellspring of true morality, is to dwell among those companions forever, even after we were formally deceased, to prize, above all other things, that principle of agape, as uttered by Plato's Socrates and the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13. The true nature of man, and the principle of agape so defined, are inseparable notions.
Therefore, in summary of those theses: The transmissible qualities of discovered principles represented by these four characteristics of our species and its societies, form a higher geometry embodying them. This geometry is of the form of a Riemannian geometry, composed of an accumulation of known, active universal principles, principles which correspond either to the individual mind's immortal relationship to nature, or to the principled aspects of the social processes through which society is enabled to cooperate in its mission for the betterment of mankind.
As the best Classical modes of artistic composition attest, the principled features expressed by those modes are as definite and efficient in their domain, as so-called universal physical principles in their own domain of immediate reference. Principles of natural law, such as those of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, are included among the category of universal physical principles of Classical artistic composition.
As Riemann writes, in his celebrated 1854 habilitation dissertation, the "geometry" I have defined here knows no principles as existing in the universe but its own. No a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates such as those of a formal Euclidean geometry, are permitted. Geometry as a whole is a complex domain, composed, in the one aspect, of the Pythagorean type of constructive geometry of sense-perception, and, on the other, the geometry of presently known universal physical principles. The efficient intersection of the two geometries defines a higher, Riemannian, notion of a Gaussian complex domain.
At this moment in the history of our planet, it is our proper destiny and potential, to fulfil the intended effects of our creation: the establishment of a community of natural-law principle among a system of perfectly sovereign-states throughout this planet, a work which must be wrought chiefly by rediscovering and invoking the noblest features of our history, by our example, by our good will, and by the influence we should exert to encourage the achievements of other republics. Remove that one bitter adversary, the corrupting worm of those alien species of Synarchist forces from within our political-economic system, and the presently crisis-wracked economic world has reached a place in history that we are ready to move into a new era in world affairs, the era of a community of principle among sovereign nation-states.
Then, were that done, the Martinists and the kind of extreme evil such sophists represent would vanish into the archives of history. That destiny of their species they are not ready to accept. They are bearers of a religion of terror, a Nietzschean form of Dionysiac, Satanic terror. That is our enemy, whom we must defeat; that is the unfinished work abandoned by the untimely death of one of the Synarchists' most hated and feared figures of modern history, President Franklin Roosevelt.
It is for that that we must fight. It is that mission which defines the only true meaning presently available for the continued existence of our nation today. For that, we must defeat the Synarchists and what they represent; it is not sufficient to defeat them once again; we must make that defeat irreversible. If we fail, their terrorism will gleefully kill us, and will punish all humanity with a prolonged plunge into the awful planetary dark age which the present intention of those Synarchists implies.
2. Religion, Passion and Politics
As I have stressed in many published locations, most recently my "Visualizing the Complex Domain," and more emphatically in the slightly upgraded edition written for publication in 21st Century Science & Technology, the usual trouble with taught mathematics as such, is that it prides itself, like a seraglio's eunuch, on its liberation from the natural passions of real-life practice. This dichotomy, respecting their view of nature, has not prevented eunuchs, or kindred spirits among mathematicians, from hating one another, or doing hateful things to one another's professional work. The expression of such moral indifferentism, typical of the "ivory tower" mathematician since the sophistries of Descartes and Euler, through the accomplices of Bertrand Russell's followers today, has been the greatest source of incompetence, and destruction, even explicitly outright evil, practiced in the name of what passes among them for science. Empiricism is but one example of this.
The presently most significant result of the influence of such reductionist disorientation, is a utopianism akin to that of H.G. Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy, and to the doctrine of "nuclear preventive war" designed by Wells' allegedly peace-loving, ostensibly Synarchist accomplice Bertrand Russell. The common clinical expression of such formal indifferentism within those professional precincts, is the utopianism of an Euclidean or other geometry subjected to a set of a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates; this is typical of such utopianism. The so-called "new math" is among the most despicable expressions of the impact of such folly upon public education today. The kind of populism, or anarchism, or anarcho-syndicalism, premised on substitution of those allegedly "common-sense" varieties of homespun "self-evident principles," which often tends toward fascism, is also typical.
To avoid catastrophic errors of that or kindred types, society requires principles of social practice which are akin to the universal physical principles of scientific practice, but which pertain to relations among persons, as distinct from those reflecting the simpler relations between persons and nature within the universe around them.
The pathological type known as the utopian, is typified by the special case of the single-issue fanatic, who would put the universe itself in jeopardy, should he, or she, fancy that such desperate measures would compel society to submit to the fanatic's choice of single issue. An exaggeration? Not really. Consider those so-called "right to life" cults which would stop at nothing to prevent an abortion, even at the price of killing the infant a moment after it had been born, a fanatic who would not flinch at the ritual execution of the probably innocent, in Governor George W. Bush's Texas, or snuffing a patient to keep health-insurance payments down. These are not exaggerations, but instances of actual controversies, sometimes bitter ones, with which I have been confronted in my role as a prominent political figure dealing with such single-issue groups of sophists.
The supporters of Bertrand Russell were, similarly, prepared to support Russell's proposal for a "preventive nuclear bombardment" of the Soviet Union, or elsewhere, as Cheney is today, all for the sake of terrifying the world into surrendering the right to national sovereignty, to an imperial dictatorship under world government. Or, the case of Moral Rearmament fanatics who found the Hitler regime attractive.
An apparently less extreme sort of fanatic, is the populist who argues, that he or she must concentrate on his or her own local family and community issues, even if that meant neglecting action to save the nation from a depression which would wipe out precisely those family and community conditions which the populist professes to protect. The populist's mind often dwells within in a fantasy akin to the assumption that the universe itself is flat. Being a populist, he knows that he can see that it is flat, even from the steps at his back door!
In economics, for example, the average productivity of labor of an enterprise in any locality, is a subsumed function of the level of development of the nation's and region's physical economy as a whole. Supply and price of electrical power, for example, is a function of the development of a well-regulated, integrated public-utility system of combined production and distribution. Deregulate, and the incurred physical cost of production and distribution must inevitably soar, while the price of a delivered kilowatt-hour must necessarily skyrocket, as it has in Enron-raped California. Getting cheaper goods from abroad through "outsourcing" and "globalization" may seem a benefit, but not if this means shutting down the places of employment and incomes of the people of our nation who can no longer buy. Deregulating real-estate speculation is no boon to the person of average income who can secure no dwelling at less than nearly $1,000 or more per month; nor is that a measure which enhances the security and public health conditions of an entire community.
This brings us to the integrated role played among religion, passion, and politics in the matter of the security of a nation, or, for that matter, the world at large. This overlaps, but is not quite the same issue as the matter of the Synarchist threat itself, but it is an extremely relevant, if only contiguous area, a topic which shows us the kind of corruption which may lead its victim toward degeneration into a sympathizer of Synarchist causes. This source of corruption reveals an additional political dimension in the security concerns which Synarchism touches. It was chiefly by means of that specific quality of popular corruption, that the U.S. was transformed from the world's most productive nation, into the fallen pleasure-dome it has become since about the time of the assassination of President Kennedy and the launching of the 1964-72 official U.S. war in Indo-China.
The issue is the mid-1960s launching, on a mass scale, of the transformation of the culture of the people of the United States and elsewhere, from the morality of a productive society, into the decadence of a "post-industrial," "feel good," "me" society. It is urgent that the citizens face the fact of the way in which this transformation of our nation, from progress to decadence, was brought about by preying upon the propensity for "littleness" within an emergent adult generation which has tended, more and more, to flee from the terrifying combined realities of a 1962 Missiles Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the launching of the Indo-China war.
`But, How Do You Feel, Mrs. Jones!?'
Consider the commonly heard expression, "I feel that . . ."; or, the complementary, "I don't feel that. . . ." The community-activist variety of populist, for example, may not "feel" that national issues should be raised in addressing a community's problem. National policy-issues of health care, education, power supply, water supply, may or may not be the direct factor shaping a corresponding local issue; but, such connections are always implicitly there, and often of decisive importance in the struggle to define a solution for the local matter immediately at issue. For example, our nation's tariff and trade policies, and protectionist measures in foreign trade agreements with other nations, do impinge, often decisively, on local employment and business of a community. The objection to making that connection, is often expressed as, "I don't feel that they do"; or, "Most of my friends and I feel that free trade is the American tradition."
The objection in those cases is not a matter of facts, but simply of a "feeling" which may or may not have any legitimate place in the effort to address the relevant practical problem.
So, during the late 1950s, the advertising world turned to psychiatrists for advice on how to give ordinary products an enhanced, intrinsically irrational appeal to consumers, or other purchasers, for purposes of marketing. A wide range of products was transformed, not only in form, but also content, in a fevered Madison Avenue pursuit of the imagined lucrative mysteries of sex-appeal. Some of us in business consulting practice then, wondered how many advertising executives were writing off their personal visits to their psychiatrists as a "business expense."
The notion of a democracy of "feeling," as distinct from reason, is a potentially fatal contradiction in terms, as the case of what was for many Germans the fatal vote, establishing Hitler as dictator of a formerly democratic Germany, expressed a large overdose of "feeling," but virtually no exercise of reason.
The same kind of emotion-driven aberrations are a major factor of mass political behavior, aberrations usually falling into the category of irrational behavior motivated by a pathological use of "I feel" as a substitute for rational behavior. "How do you feel about the sudden death of your child, Mrs. Jones?" asks the sadistically gloating reporter, while the gloating television camera scrutinizes every nuance of change in Mrs. Jones' expression. The reporter implies that the vast viewing audience "out there" would do something to Mrs. Jones to punish her, if she did not submit to that Tavistock Institute style in line of questioning.
That behavior of the way television news-reporting often defines "human interest" today, tells us something important about our population in general. The TV audience's toleration of, even fascination with the spectacle of that sort of "peek-show" perversion by the TV broadcaster, is typical of the decadence of American popular culture today! The aberrations of that sort to which I referred as illustration, above, often fit into a psychoanalytical category called "cathexis" by Sigmund Freud, the matter of emotional attachment to the idea of an object, or class of objects. The wrong kind of emotion is attached, irrationally, to the idea of some kind of object.
Cases of such pathological, object-idea fixations, more or less akin to obsessions, occurring among otherwise sane individuals, is a relevant comparison to be made in connection with the kinds of cases of political "I feel" aberrations referenced above. Much of dirty political campaigning, is based on inducing such associated, purely neurotic compulsions among voters, respecting some issue or candidate. The case of the way in which Governor George Romney's Presidential pre-candidacy was summarily ruined by play on his "I was brainwashed" on U.S. Vietnam policy, is an example of this. It was the use of the word "brainwashed," not the practical merits of his statement on the issue to which he was referring—on which he was factually and politically right—which was exploited to bring his candidacy down.
To define the problem, switch attention from the way that kind of neurotic disorder looks to the advertising executive's psychiatrist, to the case of the all-too-typical professional mathematician, or financial accountant, especially Enron-style accountants or empiricist economists of academia. That mathematician, for example, may be a tyrannical rage-ball in family affairs, but prides himself on being passionless, virtually schizophrenic, about matters of mathematical practice.
The following summary of the point touches upon my treatment of the subject of the role of passion in science, as stated in a slightly amplified form within the second edition of my "Visualizing the Complex Domain." This takes us back to the attack upon Plato by that Aristotle who wrote "energy" where Plato had written, in effect, "power." I now refer to physical geometry as I have described it there, and in other locations, such as that publication.
As I have indicated, there are two respectively distinct classes of ideas. On the first account, the human mind is approximately that of a lower form of life, a repository of sense-certainties and matching learning from experience. On the second account, the human mind is unique, relative to animal life and behavior, in the mind's noëtic capacity to form validatable discoveries of principle from the evidence of fallacies in a view of experience based on sense-certainty. The animal reacts to sense-certainty experiences with passion, or indifference. When the human mind reacts only as an animal does, that person is rightly considered as either behaving stupidly, or insane.
Sanity is a matter of the appropriateness of response to a choice between two distinct species of mental objects: the first, the objects of merely conditioned sense-certainty; and, the second, objects which lie within the domain of those efficient universal principles which exist beyond the direct reach of our senses. The latter principles are of two distinct, but interacting types. The first, subjects pertaining to the domain of those universal physical principles which exist beyond direct sense-perception. The second, subjects pertaining to principles associated with social processes, with the interaction among individual, human personalities: in other words, social processes. Classical artistic composition, such as the Classical tragedies of ancient Greece, Shakespeare, and Schiller, are typical of the nature and role of those universal principles which govern the effective ordering of responses within the domain of social relations.
Thus, at all times, we must consider both the distinctions and the relations among the simultaneously occurring, three different qualities of experience: first, the simply sensory; second, pertaining to the universal physical principles of the individual mind's interaction with the physical universe as such; and, thirdly, principles of social processes as typified by the principles of Classical modes of artistic composition. Keeping the three sorted out, such that our response to each is an appropriate choice, is the elementary challenge in defining categorically sane, as distinct from pathological forms of both the individual's, or culture's mental, and public behavior.
In this context, so described, the most common of the great difficulties generally experienced by most individuals, and within most cultures, is the difficulty of defining the existence of objects corresponding to universal physical principles. In physical science, for example, the pathological state of mind is usually encountered as the typical mental sickness of the empiricist, in substituting algebraic notions of statistics (e.g., Laplace-ian "probability") for distinct physical principles. He can not think of gravity as Kepler, the original discoverer of a principle of universal gravitation, defines it, as a specifically Platonic object; but only pathologically, statistically ("action at a distance") as the empiricist Galileo does, for example. The same pathological state of mind of Euler and Lagrange, as pointed out by Gauss's 1799 paper, also illustrates the point.
The same subject is addressed by Riemann in posthumously published papers commenting on some crucial features of the content of a series of Göttingen University lectures delivered by the influential Nineteenth-Century German pedagogue and philosopher Herbart. Herbart, a Wilhelm von Humboldt protégé, who is celebrated for his exposure of the hoaxes of the Scottish school's empiricist Immanuel Kant, made one genuinely outstanding contribution of relevance to Riemann's subsequent achievements as a leading scientific thinker of the past two centuries, the notion of Geistesmasse. Roughly translated, to reflect the practical meaning of Riemann's reference to that term, it signifies "thought-object": the object-like distinctness of efficient principles residing among the class of those experimentally-validated Platonic hypotheses known as universal physical principles.
This notion of such actually, efficiently existing objects of the mind, as distinct from those merely of the senses, is the subject of Socrates' allegory of "the Cave" in Plato's Republic. The subject is the distinction of the unseen object, which casts the shadows impinging upon sense-perception from those objects which are identified by simple sense-perception. The simplest illustration from modern scientific practice, is the case of microphysical objects which exist efficiently within a smallness beyond the powers of the light-microscope. Nuclear fission and fusion, for example, exist. The higher view of Mendeleyev's definition of the periodic table, as focussed upon by Chicago University's late Professor Robert Moon, points to an efficient physical geometry of physical space-time in the microphysical domain, which does not correspond to any physics confined within the geometrical presumptions of the empiricist method.
It is the incommensurability of the crucial anomalous, empirically defined effects which actually point toward the existence of "objects" existing, in principle, within nothing less than the complex domain, which is the most important prompting of mystification in the scientific and related work of those still imprisoned within the usual presumptions of generally accepted classroom mathematics.
So, in the domain of political-economy, the citizen uses the imagery of simple sense-certainty, and associated notions of "proximate cause," to the effect of presuming that that which is perceptibly nearby is, therefore, the most real; like the man who, failing to find employment, beats his wife—mentally, pathologically, implying that since she is proximate, not only to him, but to the costs of family life, she is the cause of his failure. He may hate Washington, D.C., but only as something strange which he wishes did not exist to confuse, or dilute his desire to solve his problems by beating upon something within his more immediate physical reach.
We see this in pathological forms of religious behavior, such as the "fundamentalist" who hopes that the Battle of Armageddon will recur in time to eliminate the problem of paying next month's rent, or to escape the lack of ecstasy which he, or she senses lacking in immediate personal life. That poor wretch has no sense of actual immortality within the simultaneity of eternity, and therefore gropes for miracles of a sensuous sort within the reach of something immediately, miraculously at hand: "God will send health and money next month."
Still today, our society is crippled by a pervasive lack of a sense of the intrinsic beauty of individual mortal life, as the opportunity to relish re-experiencing in our minds the great cognitive and related achievements of those who have gone before us, and seizing with happiness the opportunity to spend the talent of our limited mortal existence for something good in the eyes of both those who came before us, and those to come. The poor fellow who can not locate his existence in the great universe in which we live, can not comprehend the existence of a Creator who produced this universe and who embodied in us creative qualities like His own.
Not knowing our worth as persons, we sell ourselves cheaply, as it were for a bowl of pottage; or, as we were a poor Judas, who had betrayed everything good we represented, for the sake of a moment of fatal corruption.
There are principles out there, universal physical principles, and social principles of the form to be recognized in the greatest Classical artistic compositions. To the degree we can fix our mind's attention on those efficient objects lying beyond the shadow-world of sense-perception, we are free at last. Free from the pettiness which drags men and women, and entire societies, into the abyss of self-degradation to which the Martinist cult and its present neo-conservative expression threaten to doom civilization for perhaps generations yet to come.
