THE DIALOGUE OF EURASIAN CIVILIZATIONS
Earth's Next Fifty Years
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
December 19, 2004
This relatively fulsome report is required by the importance and urgency of addressing what has been a poorly understood, but now immediately onrushing threat to civilization as a whole. My purpose here is chiefly to correct a menacing lack of general awareness of certain among the most urgent, and potentially deadly of the practical implications at issue in current, probably failed efforts to conduct a needed dialogue of cultures. That need is indicated by the great likelihood that the effort on behalf of that dialogue would turn out to be a catastrophic failure for mankind today, unless certain relevant, wrong, but presently popular assumptions about that dialogue were pinpointed, and some among those errors corrected by aid of some painstaking attention to detail, as I do here.
Our plan of attack in this report, must be to define the origins and nature of the present mortal threat to civilization on this entire planet, and then provide this critical assessment of the errors and options in the currently attempted use of a dialogue of cultures as an optional remedy for the present threat.
However, participation in this dialogue can not be limited to representatives of that largely failed generation which has played an increasing role, in steering the world and its respective nations into the deadly present, cultural mess produced by developments of the recent four decades. We would fail our purpose unless we also said what needs to be said, specifically, to the presently emerging adult generation, especially those of the age-interval 18-25, to whom we are implicitly entrusting the future of mankind. We must tell this young adult generation all that they need to know, and must always say these things to one another in the hearing of that entire generation of young adults into whose hands we are intending to dump the execution of the solution of this problem now looming before us.
It is, unfortunately, now customary, to attempt to conduct a dialogue of cultures with a certain preference for broad generalities and sentimentalities, an agenda which avoids the controversial concreteness of attention to the who, how, what, when, and where of certain current problematic discussions, discussions which some among us might prefer to avoid, rather than resolve. In this case, excessive attention to courtesy unfortunately often avoids not only issues of "personalities" which need to be faced, but, therefore, for reasons of courtesy, also avoids needed precision in defining concrete, substantive remedies for problems which must be frankly addressed if durable progress is to occur. Concrete remedies, even if they are sometimes also controversial, are what the present situation requires, that urgently. Victory sometimes lies in the direction of a strenuous climb up the hill.
I now proceed accordingly.
That said, the immediate crisis dictating the urgency of a dialogue of cultures can, and must be pin-pointed with aid of some concrete and sometimes abrasive observations, in the following exemplary way.
Those products of Harvard University's late Professor William Yandell Elliott's work, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, have concocted schemes, often in concert with a former leader of the United Kingdom's Arab Bureau, Bernard Lewis, aiming to build a fascistic, world-wide, Anglo-American parody of the Roman Empire. These notables, and others, have worked around such designs for "globalization" as Huntington's sequel to the design for what would be, despite his dubious attempted denials of that fact, an international-fascist SS system, his Romanesque The Soldier and the State. His noxious repertoire includes both his The Crisis of Democracy, which assisted in giving birth to the sophistries of "Project Democracy" and the National Endowment for Democracy, and also his recipe for world-wide religious warfare, his The Clash of Civilizations.[1] The relevant publications on strategy, and continuing international practice of Trilateral Commission initiator Brzezinski, are fully consistent, in their aims and disposition for pure evil, with the work of his long-standing crony Huntington.[2]
These present schemes for a somewhat novel, global, neo-feudal form of ultramontane tyranny, are often, wrongly, regarded as peculiar secretions of the U.S.A. Just as the British Arab Bureau was a rib taken out of the British imperial India office, the devilish antics of that pair and their accomplices, are actually offshoots of the continuing tradition of that February 1763 Treaty of Paris which created the British Empire to whose service the Old Fagin of Brzezinski's and Huntington's crew of Artful Dodgers, the Nashville Agrarians' Harvard Professor Elliott, devoted what is fairly regarded as his life's work. That is the Empire against which the American War for Independence was fought, the same Empire which repeatedly attempted the destruction of the U.S.A., chiefly either by force, or by subversion of the type which Professor Elliott and his crew represent today.[3]
The same principle of evil expressed by Brzezinski and Huntington, is found in the work of such as Brzezinski-linked former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and accomplices of hers, such as Richard Holbrooke, in the orchestration of the "new dark age" recipes unleashed in the Balkans wars, during her occupation of that post. Ironically, during that same period, she delivered an address in New York City, in which she, then a U.S. Secretary of State, not only confessed to, but bragged of her own and her father's association with the fascistic British imperial utopianism of U.S. hater Bertrand Russell's confederate H.G. Wells.[4]
The importance I attribute to that cast of characters is not a quibble. Just as it became the life-long intention of Harvard Professor of Government Elliott, and his like, to digest the U.S.A. within the Hobbesian intestine of a future form of a British imperial commonwealth, so the intention of Brzezinski, Huntington, et al., in all their works, has been to destroy the existence of the institution of the nation-state throughout this planet, including that of the U.S.A. itself: all this, and more, they did in favor of a current parody of a kind of world-wide imperial order which had been proposed by Lord Shelburne's lackey Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
That imperial intention is expressed today, as an attempted return to the same type of imperial order as the European medieval ultramontane system rooted in the centuries-long partnership of Venice's ruling financier oligarchy with the Norman chivalry of Crusades' notoriety. It is the kind of world order which had been expressed as the attempted revival of that ultramontane system by the 1492 initiative of that Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada who set the precedent for both Hitler's expulsion of the Jews, and for the launching of religious war throughout Europe, all as parts of an attempt to suffocate the then just newborn modern European sovereign nation-state in its cradle. It is the form of ultramontane imperialism expressed by the drive toward "globalization" today, an anti-U.S.A. doctrine of imperialism, a drive to eradicate the tradition of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia,[5] which is expressed by the current demands from leading circles which ought to have known better, from their memory of their experience of Adolf Hitler's ventures.
As the still relevant writings of Martinist freemasonry's Count Joseph de Maistre, the designer of the predatory Gallican tyrant and Romantic Napoleon Bonaparte,[6] make clear, the model represented by Torquemada is the origin of the emergence of the modern fascism associated with creatures such as the late Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Brzezinski and Huntington march, together with the spirit of their Professor Elliott, in that same tradition.
As a part of the fight against the spread of the evil of religious warfare which Brzezinski, Huntington, and their like purvey today, forces opposed to their schemes, such as Pope John Paul II, have promoted fresh efforts toward that truly agapic, ecumenical fraternity among the world's leading religions, reviving an effort which had been launched, during the Fifteenth Century European Renaissance, by great leaders of the Catholic Church such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.[7] Others have redefined the task as an effort in support of a "dialogue of cultures," but that change in technical terminology introduces nothing actually new to European policy, beyond a more extended reach: since it merely forces the dialogue back into the same categorical form of discussion, if on a broader basis, as Cusa's original Fifteenth-Century proposal for a peace of faith among Christian, Moslem, and Jewish faiths.[8]
The same ecumenical effort launched by leaders of Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, can be better understood for its relevance to today's conflicts, by emphasizing the bloody-handed opposition by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada to the ecumenicism of the mid-Fifteenth-Century Christian church of Cusa et al.
Torquemada expressed the reliance on the same ideological weapon of hate-brimming racialism used by Huntington, et al., which had been typical of both the ancient Roman Empire and the medieval ultramontane system of the Venetian financiers and Norman chivalry and their Crusades, as Torquemada unleashed the pattern of religious warfare which is typified by the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. That latter act of 1492 led into the subsequent unleashing of fratricidal religious warfare against the existence of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's modern sovereign nation-state: a warfare which dominated the interval 1511-1648, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is, now, once again, the basis for the intention to uproot and eradicate the legacy of the Westphalian system, an intention which is the mark of what is, in fact, the lust for a fascist world empire-system expressed by the doctrines of Brzezinski and Huntington today. It is the current campaign for so-called "globalization," against the Westphalian system, which is the cultural expression of the present lurch of the planet toward its threatened new dark age.
The Present Situation
There is only one way in which the members of any chosen concert of national cultures could each competently assess its own judgment about the kind of future which that concert's currently proposed choice of impulses would bring into being. That duty would be, to track, and to judge the series of those qualitative changes in the world as a whole, by which that concert's own array of impulses would actually tend to foster the new forms of the deadly conflicts which it is our presumed wish to prevent. The question so posed is: With that included consideration in view, how must we judge, and, therefore, amend, any currently proposed concert of opinion?
The task that question implies, would be, for example: to visualize the physical outcome to be expected during an estimated test-period of not less than two generations ahead: from today's birth of the child to the birth of that child's grandchild. In today's circumstances, it were probable that any attempted ecumenical agreement among nations which existing institutions would probably choose at first hand, would tend to include elements which would lead toward a result which today's descendants would have good reason to curse, two or more generations later.
That kind of ironical outcome has been, for example, the record of the attempt to form a League of Nations, which was thoroughly self-discredited in less than one generation, and which even helped greatly to bring on World War II. A similar outcome is to be seen in the work of the United Nations Organization (UNO), which has been much more useful than the League of Nations, even indispensable at some moments, but which, at the present moment, about two generations after its creation, has now, as the case of Iraq today shows, failed awfully its presumed, primary, categorical objectives of nearly sixty years ago.
As an example of the disappointing performance of the UNO, take the example of the mid- to late-1960s decision by the Anglo-American establishment, and others, to plunge into a "post-industrial" utopian future. That decision, for what was proposed as "ecological ecumenicism," which unfolded over the 1964-1981 interval, is what has been the chief cause, the key cultural paradigm used in bringing about, now most immediately, the presently threatened, self-inflicted doom of both the American and European economies. At this moment, the chain-reaction effects of that latter decision now threaten, in and of themselves, to carry the entire planet into a new dark age.
It should be obvious, that that countercultural impulse is also a deadly threat to any effort to define a "dialogue of cultures," by drowning it in what presently threaten to become its own self-inflicted contradictions. However, that is only an exemplary aspect of the larger obstacles to the success which are already internal to presently attempted dialogues of cultures. The general obstacles are chiefly of two types.
First, in general, the mistake contributed to the discussions by, at a minimum, nearly all among the relevant varieties of utopians participating in such attempts, has been, from the outset, that their characteristic assumption was, that the choice of the best agreement would be a kind of minestrone, the fruit of combining an eclectically formed array of "democratic" forms of proposal from each. It would be an agreement which sought to raise the relatively minimal objections from the pre-existing cultural and related presumptions of the others.
Under that inclination toward sophistry which is sometimes called "democracy,"[9] the crucial functional issues, the issue of the functional quality of lack of competence of some among the customary cultural impulses of the individual nation, and so forth, was not actually challenged in any efficiently scientific way. If matters are continued in that way, this would tend to become the crafting of a pact struck by the kind of competing lawyers who proceed from no common functional principle of what I shall define, below, in my own choice of argument, as natural law. Under a dialogue of cultures so ordered, the more the conflict is apparently resolved by agreement, the more it reappears in new forms in practice. Today, the common mistake is, to attempt to judge science from the vantage-point of tradition per se, rather than the urgent work of judging tradition, and sorting its good from its evils, sorting these out from the standpoint of a competent science.
The most deadly of the fallacies perpetrated in a misguided approach to a dialogue of cultures, is the notion that religion must be counterposed categorically to science. That deadly error of assumption, respecting alleged, and, worse, widely believed conflicts between religion and science, is addressed and corrected as a special feature of emphasis in the appropriate places within this report.
However, sources of mere confusion aside, the element of pure evil harbored, however inadvertently, in these referenced, inherently erring kinds of advocacy of so-called "democracy," is typified by the depravity characteristic of the existentialist irrationalism of the pro-Nazi Allen Dulles's Congress for Cultural Freedom.[10] Merely typical of the pro-fascist quality of that Congress for Cultural Freedom, is the so-called "Frankfurt School" existentialism of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and his Jewish Frankfurt School friends Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, et al.,[11] who, together with their fellow existentialists, and their allies among the American Family Foundation and its associates, combined their efforts to justify the fascism of the notorious "rat-line" and other Nazi cronies of Dulles et al., in the guise of professing to combat the cultural evils of Communism![12]
Thus, the effort became an attempt at compromises among cultural groups, which each assumed that a core-set of their current culturally-informed desires was considered self-evidently right. Those so duped into adapting to the Congress's characteristic irrationalism, assumed their respective, conflicting notions of "right" because, in each case, it was presented by them as existing a priori. The worst of the fascist existentialist philosophers, like Nazi Crown Jurist Carl Schmitt's one-time protégé Professor Leo Strauss, and Strauss's followers in today's George W. Bush Administration, adopted the philosophical bestiality of the combined real-life and literary character of Thrasymachus, that the power to rule arbitrarily, is the quality of lawful rightness to be claimed by a usurpatious, tyrannical regime such as Hitler's or President George W. Bush's.[13]
Secondly, we must ask whether the question of whether the proposed result would actually work or not, might have been axiomatically excluded from serious consideration. The exclusion of consideration of this error was made, more or less, on grounds of mutual respect for the other's axiomatic, inherently mutually incoherent sensibilities. It was thus excluded on the ground that such consideration would mean passing judgment "from the outside" upon the relevant value-system of each, or at least some, among the participating parties. The worst aspect of such attempts, was the proposal that the intrinsic incoherence of the principles attributed to the respective cultural-value systems, such as the arbitrary conflict attributed to inhere in the confrontation of European and Asian spiritual values, be treated as a positive principle!
The consequence of such searches for relatively, painlessly unprincipled agreement to disagree on principle, is the result of avoiding the crucial fact, that if something is really a principle, it must be a principle in the same sense we associate the term "principle" with the physical laws of our universe.
In other words, we must understand "principle" in the way the Classical tradition of Plato and of the modern science of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann define scientific method: the way in which V.I. Vernadsky's experimental principle of the Noösphere defines a science appropriate for what must become a new, Eurasian culture. To evade a true principle, or to impose a false one such as the mass-murderous, Olympian "ecology cults"[14] of the recent four decades, incurs efficient penalties for all mankind, as this has been shown in the Apocalyptic results of forty years to date of the influence and practice of such deluded beliefs. World Wars I and II are useful illustrations of the lawful consequences of overlooking that connection.[15]
The result of such resort to the kinds of flawed, sentimental, a priori assumptions against which I have just warned here, has been, as in the case of the League of Nations and UNO, a misguided impulse for seeking to prevent past world wars and kindred prior oppressions, by choosing, in fact, whether by witting intent or not, to set the pre-agreed rules of play which might be, at their relative best, contrary to the assessed intentions underlying certain prior conflicts, but, which, actually would do little other than provide a new set of rules of the game under which, wittingly or not, nations would agree to tread a new pathway toward the next, new form of brutal world conflict. That result occurred, and that promptly, at the close of both those so-called "World Wars" of the Twentieth Century. That would be the result now.
Thus, the 1922-1939 run-up to World War II, was the fruit of a Synarchist International financier-oligarchy's fascist scheme,[16] a scheme premised upon the new set of Anglo-Dutch Liberal rules of the financial game, rules which were set into the Versailles Treaty arrangements by a concert of the relevant powers. It was not some right-wing fanatics, such as Mussolini and Hitler, who caused that war. It was those who had created and used both of those fanatics, and others of their like, as crafted instruments by aid of which to create the war which all who actually knew the reality of the policy, had known that the Synarchist International's financier oligarchs, the architects of the Versailles agreements, had intended should occur.
After Versailles, utopian fanatic H.G. Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy and his film "The Shape of Things to Come" served as a utopian's ideological dress-rehearsal script for both the plunge into World War II, and also, beyond that, a now immediately threatened global new dark age soon to follow the present Anglo-American Iraq war. This dark age will be the early consequence, unless the quasi-Wellsian, "neo-conservative" assumptions represented by the present pair of U.K. and U.S. governments, are soon replaced.[17] At this moment, unless those replacements are made now, a new world war and its culmination in a planetary new dark age, is already virtually inevitable, as you could have said the words "Adolf Hitler" back during the mid-1930s: however vividly the fact of that very efficient connection might be denied among today's Romantic fools.
This pattern in paradoxes has not been new to modern times. All great tragedies in the history of globally extended European civilization, such as the fall of Athens in the course of its Peloponnesian war, or the modern suffering of continental Europe since the preparations under Britain's Edward VII for what became known as two "world wars" of the past century, illustrate the same principle.[18] The long sweep of the record of the history of Asian cultures, is worse on this account than that for the case of Europe. Europe seems worse to many at first impression, only because modern European culture has been a far more powerful instrument, per capita, than Asian culture, at least up to the present time. Now, with nuclear arsenals irreversibly in the hands of Asian powers, and spreading to others, and with global asymmetric warfare now more fully unleashed, we have the prospect, not of wars between civilizations, but, as we see U.S. Bush Administration policy in action in Iraq today, a common war against the continued existence of civilization itself, a global dance-partners' war, like that on which the already dancing U.S. Bush Administration and Blair government are embarked today. It is well past time to talk about that, rather than degrade ourselves into pretending to believe today's conventional diplomatic generalities.
Those who do not understand history, excuse themselves from their own complicity by blaming a handful of leading individuals, chiefly those who have, in fact, adapted themselves all too well, opportunistically, to a currently popular culture; these excuses overlook the fact, that the source of all such catastrophes was the culture, not just the culture of the leaders, but, far more significantly, that of the people themselves. It had been the people themselves, who had usually, in one way or another, selected that quality of leadership of their leading institutions, a selection made either over objections in favor of any proffered relevant alternatives, or, worse, in the absence of a leadership which would have been an actually available choice of qualified alternative.
Admittedly, it was the combined interventions of, especially, Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi, which showed the way toward freedom of India from foreign tyranny. That experience demonstrates afresh, in an outstanding way, the power of a culture to overthrow a regime inconsistent with the ruled; that experience, and the contrary wont of the underlings to lend credence to tyranny, as in Germany after Göring's Reichstag fire and the U.S.A. after September 11, 2001, is a principled feature of the crucial dualism of known history so far. However, the uglier truth of the matter is, that the more common experience is that evil regimes, such as the rule of the Roman Caesars, are an expression of the culture of the people themselves, as Shakespeare dramatizes that point so elegantly in such places as the opening scenes of his Julius Caesar and Hamlet. In both latter cases, Shakespeare's insightful genius brings the evil of the culture on stage, as the tyrant, or simply the bloodied fool, who is the product of that evil within the people. As Shakespeare brings the character of Julius Caesar and Hamlet on stage in that way, so the culture of a people itself often brings forth the tyrants who come to rule over them.[19]
So, men and women do not think clearly, men and women who, like the Hamlet-like opportunists they are, prefer to follow something chosen from within the boundaries of what is currently acceptable popular opinion, rather than considering the actual consequences which the present imposes upon that future "from which" it was thought that "no traveller returns." Thus, it has been popular, intellectually, spiritually cowardly belief engrained in the culture itself, which has been the source of the disasters that culture has suffered. In this way, societies often create the utopian schemes, as now, whose threatened consequences are assigned, by default, or otherwise, as that which future generations are doomed to suffer.[20]
The Crucial Paradox
It has been possible to discover scientific principles, by aid of which the repeatedly foolish outcomes of utopian schemes might have been willfully avoided. I must emphasize again, that the problem to be overcome, is the usual, sometimes fatal conceit, that the principles of a desired utopia are those principles presumed to lie already at hand, principles expressed as if by a gush of heart-felt warmth, such as a tradition. These forms of moral self-corruption of peoples, are what are to be recognized as what are recklessly assumed to be more or less self-evident opinions, which even otherwise reasonable people might, presumably, adopt on sight.
The great, often fatal error, is to ignore the reality, that the desired solutions exist only, as in physical science, in discovering new principles which rightly, but also often abrasively, overturn most of everything which generally accepted opinion might have presently tended to agree to believe. Usually, unfortunately, the mistaken assumption has been made, that the previous crisis was a product of the violation of some traditional set of values, when, in fact, it was caused by a failure to carry out a needed violation of that set of values, as the case of Benjamin Franklin's Leibnizian American Revolution, like Schiller's treatment of the real-life case of Wallenstein, illustrates that principle. The false assumption is, therefore, that the solution exists within the bounds of that set of assumptions which had generated the crisis. So, the legendary lemmings express their awful tradition, by periodically marching over the edge of the cliff, onto the rocks by the sea below.
The talent of the qualified lifeguard is not to seduce the lady, but to save her life, whether she likes his personality, or not. Such is the nature of the leadership, upon which solutions for a cultural crisis, such as the present world crisis, depend. Such is the actual challenge posed by a dialogue among cultures. It is the lack of development of leaders qualified for making such changes in the accepted array of assumed principles which those cultures represent, which would be the chief source of any tragic failures of such dialogues, now, as in the past.
This crucial point may be restated for clarity, as follows. I must not permit our discussion to escape from repeated emphasis on this following point.
In the last analysis, the great enemy of civilizations, its source of its most deadly vulnerabilities, as of civilization in general, is the worship of popular mediocrity in the name of a quality of "respect for existing traditions," a behavior which mimics that predatory beast, or his prey, neither of which can escape the grip of its inborn bestial "instincts." Man should rely upon his power to behave differently than that. The tendency to suppress, even to crush the voices which threaten the deceptive, false and deadly peace of popular mediocrity, is the most typical expression of that hostile disregard for a principle of truthfulness, which leads ostensibly once-great cultures into their self-inflicted doom.
So, it was the prevalent "anti-voluntarist" culture of Soviet society, which was the single most relevant contributing factor of economy in what might be distinguished as the self-inflicted aspects of the fall of the Soviet Union. So, it was the fact that the vividly "voluntarist" impulse of Soviet military science, had lost its battle against the Soviet system's Plekhanov tradition, which remains the most crucial strategic lesson for the design of Russia's program for recovery from Soviet collapse today.[21]
In the usual case of the failures of past attempts at something like a dialogue of cultures, the crucial issue to be considered is typified by such events as the act of the assassination, imprisonment, or other rejection of such needed leaders when they actually appear. Dissent is the ferment of genius and foolishness alike, but remains, nonetheless, the breeding place where something could emerge, by aid of which a people liberates itself from the deadly grip of misguided customs. This systemic purging of that kind of dissenting voices, is the usual characteristic of that failure to overcome a systemic crisis, which leads a once powerful nation into self-inflicted doom.
So, in each case through known history, the common fault of the leaders was, that appropriate other leaders either were not chosen, or that such happy choices of actually suitable leaders were unavailable, since they had not been bred and developed by those cultures, or, had been culled from the flock as a matter of such precautions as "killing the unwanted legitimate heir, preferably in his, or her cradle," precautions taken usually by order of, or tacit consent by those in power. Such a collective state of affairs has usually, thus, brought the ultimate suffering upon the people themselves in that way. The effect of the pro-Nazi Allen Dulles's Congress for Cultural Freedom, is a prime example of the way the people of nations are deprived of access to development and choice of those qualified leaders who might have led them out of the tragic straits of self-inflicted doom.[22]
In contrast to that, all great leaders who have led a culture to safety, away from the consequences of the culture's own folly, have been, inevitably, exceptions to what that culture would have been likely to recommend, "on the average," so to speak, as acceptable choices.
Such exceptions include the election of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, or Charles de Gaulle as President of the French Fifth Republic. The principle of eliminating such exceptions at crucial moments of history, is shown in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, or the assassinations of the crucially important Jürgen Ponto and Alfred Herrhausen at respectively critical moments of Germany's history. The happier cases of apparent historical accidents, such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, were not really accidents; they were willful choices of role adopted by persons who, because they had been developed, and also self-developed to go against the current culture's accepted habits, were able, under the special conditions of opportunity which a crisis often presents, to lead toward a result which proved an exception to their culture's otherwise fatefully unhappy predilections in a time of critical choices.
So, prospective leaders suspected of harboring such lurking unwanted capabilities within them, are usually eliminated from the scene, in one way or another, as was done to me, by collaborative efforts between, among others, both my U.S. and Soviet adversaries, over the issue of my role in prompting the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposal, over the course of the 1983-1989 interval.[23]
For example, it was the election of the exceptional Franklin Roosevelt which, for that time, saved the U.S.A., and which contributed a critical element to saving the world for the time being. It was the death of that Roosevelt, which, by removing the obstacles to the succeeding reign of intellectual and moral mediocrity typified by the morally, relatively least common denominator of Harry S Truman, led into the greatest catastrophes of our planet's past half-century. It was the pandemic of monstrous intellectual and moral mediocrity unleashed by the launching, by Nazi-friendly Allen Dulles and other authors, of the U.S.-based international Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which set the foundations for the past forty years' plunge of global civilization into cultural decadence, and, thence, into today's immediately threatened "Twilight of the Gods," the presently threatened great, world-wide new dark age.
The greatest folly of known cultures has been the attempt to build the policies and leaderships of nations on a supposed political-cultural consensus, a so-called venerable tradition, as in the case of the continental powers which were leaders in the onset of World War I, when an oncoming crisis would have required reliance upon those kinds of hard truth, contrary to current trends, the kind of truth which exposes the deadly folly represented by an existing culture's currently prevalent cultural norms.
As an animal species is doomed by its genetic heritage, so, like an extinct species, civilizations are doomed by their stubborn clinging to the flaws embedded within relevant kinds of inherited cultural habits. Thus, ironically, often only a revolution in cultural traditions, such as the Benjamin Franklin-led American Revolution of 1776-1789, could have conserved, and did, the most precious of the political and other institutions which the English-speaking world had accumulated up to that time.
So, it has been the failure of continental Europe to free itself, in a revolutionary way, from the legacy of parliamentary habits and so-called "independent" central banking systems, which has been, repeatedly, since July 1789, the source of the great tragedies, and spoiled opportunities, which continental Europe has continued to impose upon itself, repeatedly, up to the present day.
In physical science, great Classical artistry, or political statecraft, it is the application of the needed, principled exception, or otherwise known as "revolutionary" exception, such as that of President Franklin Roosevelt's return to the U.S. Constitution, the exception to the error of the currently accepted habit,[24] which is the mark of a nation's achievement of greatness; and, it is the choice of exceptional leadership from among the most exceptional members of those professions, which makes possible the changes upon which not only greatness, but even survival of a culture depends. The beasts are vulnerable to nature's timely condemnation of their continued existence, because those species have a fixed nature; man is not a beast, except when he attempts to imitate the beasts, by adopting the beliefs, such as today's "radical ecology" dogmas, suited to one of those lower species of a culturally fixed set of genetic-like characteristics.
It is so in religion, too. Those religious beliefs which set the existence of the Creator essentially outside the universe, a universe defined by them as a fixed set of intended rules of a playing-field, thus commit the blasphemous falsehood of denying the Creator Himself the power of creating changes from within His universe. His real universe is that in which He Himself lives. The fool's hubristic effort, to deny the Creator of the universe this power, thus also degrades the fool who accepts that denial, to adopt the likeness of a beast; he denies the existence of the human individual, the existence of that soul which should outlive that mortal body which it occupies for a bare moment of time. By denying the individual the power, and duty, to contribute willfully to improving the universe which shall outlive his momentary mortal incarnation, we would degrade the individual, in his own estimation, to a beast, and he would then behave as a variety of beast, such as Grand Inquisitor Torquemada—as, we might see again, today, is the frequently manifest result.[25]
The discussion in the form of a "dialogue of cultures" is not only important; it is urgent. However, as history should have taught us, the danger is that the participants might go too far, too quickly, too superficially, in their adoption of attempted, and all too cheaply accepted commonplace assumptions. The danger is that the search for a new compromise, would, like the League of Nations before it, produce a quickly compromised result.
Therefore, I emphasize an outlook which I have expressed in various earlier publications. How should we attempt to estimate, beforehand, why and how no less than those two generations ahead should judge the results of our agreement to act in concert now? The implicit basis for competent foreknowledge of the competence of our choices, lies not in the experience of the past, but the competence of our experience of the future.[26] That is the crucial paradox with which this report challenges the sponsors of any dialogue of cultures; there lies the crucial paradox menacing any attempt to shape a functional quality of common agreement from within a dialogue of cultures. The best rule-of-thumb statement of the solution for the latter, crucial paradox, is V.I. Vernadsky's systemic definition of the Noösphere.
- A Future Remedy From the Past-
In this prefatory portion of the report, I limit the focus of the discussion to a broad view of the kind of solution to which that paradox, so stated, must lead us. To this end, I, once again, situate the Vernadsky outline of the Noösphere, as I have done in publications during the past several decades, against Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Orion and Arctic Home in the Vedas. Like the Classical Greek adoption of that science of Sphaerics reflected in the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and as that Classical method of science was echoed by the principal discoveries of Johannes Kepler, let us join Tilak in looking at life on our planet today, and also tomorrow, from a vantage-point thousands and more years ago. So, reading the characteristic features of what that implies from the renewed Classical vantage-point of Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere, let us define those common values for the future which we might use as a metrical standard for measuring the performance of mankind on this planet a modest two generations ahead.
Given those considerations, how then does some choice of a set of cultural parameters define the way in which today's gravely, immediately imperilled planet, must emerge successfully at a future time, such as two generations ahead? Obviously, allowing a continuation of the simple interaction among today's leading, conventional, existing cultural paradigms would be—under the extremes already represented by today's operating paradigms—not only a colossal failure, but an immediate catastrophe.
Today's problem is not that some leading nations have made mistakes; the problem is that today's global complex of cultural interactions, have produced the sixty-year, post-Franklin Roosevelt, anti-Franklin Roosevelt interplay among nations and cultures, especially that of the past forty-years history. That, in net effect, has landed us in the present state of imminent grave peril for the planet as a whole. As of this moment, while some governments, and other associations, are considering the elements of some useful ideas, individually, and in concert, none so far have taken efficiently into account the actual form of the principal, decades-long cause of the currently threatened onrush of a plunge of the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age of humanity as a whole.
For example: The key to all understanding of the modern world history of more than three centuries to date, is the recognition of the essential, true fact, that the history of the world as a whole, since no later than the February 1763 triumph of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company, has been shaped by the continued, actually globally imperial power of an Anglo-Dutch Liberal system. Yet most of the world today, foolishly, pretends, as if politely, not to notice this plainly visible fact—this veritable elephant standing and trumpeting, unnoticed, in the middle of the honeymoon couple's bed—and its profound practical implications for every part of our world as a whole, still today.
This global power, this Liberal system, is the power which has operated through control of the world's dominant, oligarchical form of monetary-financial system since no later than the establishment of that as an imperial power, in that February 10, 1763 Treaty of Paris which concluded Britain's successful orchestration of that so-called Seven Years War which had brought a common ruin upon the manipulated powers of continental Europe. That treaty thus established an empire of the British East India Company, through, chiefly, that Company's imperial absorption and looting of Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries' India, among many other locations. The present world crisis, is principally an outgrowth of the manipulations of the systemic relations among the world's nations as a whole, chiefly through the control exerted by the mechanisms of Liberalism currently axiomatically hegemonic among the components of that predatory financier-oligarchical imperium which reigns still today.
For example: It is only typical of the delusions of many of those approaching the subject of a dialogue of cultures, that, during the immediately past decades, it is the U.S.A., and virtually it alone, which has been popularly denounced as the willful agent of world domination by a body of opinion as silly as it is widespread. For those who actually know the relevant facts about the decision-making processes, that myth is the fruit of a deadly, implicitly suicidal folly by those who seek to explain matters as simply as that.
Contrary to that popular delusion, as it is met even inside as outside the U.S.A. itself, it has been the post-February 1763 hegemony of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which presently controls the U.S.A. to a significant extent, as it has done increasingly since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, and especially since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy which terrified the U.S. population into a state of relative numbness, as the events of September 11, 2001 did, later.
This alien influence is chiefly the Liberal system presently represented abroad by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Liberal-Imperialist Fabian crew, and, notably, by the Margaret Thatcher gang of the same pedigree before it. This is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system against which the American War of Independence was fought, but which has fastened itself like a parasite upon the foolish neck of the U.S.A. today, as during the regimes of Harry Truman and Richard Nixon earlier. Long before Truman, that imperial mother of the system of global oppression, the Liberal system, was served by such representatives of the Confederacy tradition as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and, after that, by the epidemic of typically Liberal theft under Wall Street creatures such as Coolidge and Hoover.
The failure to acknowledge that set of connections, would be like the honeymooners' denying the presence of the trumpeting elephant in their marital bed. That kind of denial, in and of itself, could be the most likely cause for the assured tragic failure of any attempted global dialogue of cultures.
Under the present world monetary-financial system, what controls a nation's policies, or the policies of a concert of nations, is not pin-point direction of individual choices of decision by a nation, or nations. What controls the way in which the aggregate effect expressed by pin-point decisions is generated, is the equivalent of a set of ruling axiomatic assumptions, such as today's widespread, lunatic quality of axiomatic faith in the dogmatic "free trade" mysticism of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system.[27]
This represents an extremely important, but rarely adequately appreciated problem of method in dealing with the subject of behavior in and among social systems. Consider the historical implications of four, relatively commonplace types of cases of effects of pin-point decisions.
First, there are cases in which an action expresses, in effect, a theorem of an axiomatic assumption of behavior, such that no significant change from that presently operating principle is challenged by that event. If this piece from the practice of intellectual stagnation contributes to making a situation worse, then that worse was nothing more than evidence of what had been already implicit in the previously operating habits of thinking of current "axiomatic" policy-shaping behavior.
Second, there are cases which, without changing the previously reigning axiomatic-like (e.g., systemic) assumptions, touch an extreme point in the trajectory implicitly defined by that axiomatic-like assumption. Because that intersects the vicinity of a boundary-condition of the system, this produces the singular significance of the novelty of effect associated with a crisis-in-fact, but without yet changing the relevant axiomatic-like assumptions on which the society, for example, has been recently operating up to that point.
Third, there are developments which are in axiomatic conflict with what the reigning axiomatic assumptions would have allowed, but the effect of which will probably be absorbed, as a mere flea-bite, a mere perturbation of the sleeping dreamer, with a relative minimum of temporary disturbance upon the system represented by those assumptions.
Then consider a fourth case, in which the effect of the action implicitly overturns, or at least appears to overturn, the relevant, previously reigning sets of axiomatic-like assumptions. In this case, the threat is to prompt some kind of change in the system as a whole, axiomatically. For example: Most of the actually or implicitly violent threats against my person from "the establishment" during the recent thirty-odd-years, have been very plainly prompted by the establishment's perception that my ongoing, or threatened action at that time, constituted what the relevant section of the establishment had considered as a potentially serious threat to the continuity of the perpetuation of its current system.
In all cases, it is not the individual action which is historically determining, but the system, or the interacting systems, or changes in the system itself. Thus, competent long-range economic forecasting, proceeds from viewing economic systems axiomatically, as the competent practice of physical science does, viewing them as systems, and basing the forecast on study of the system as a system, rather than wading through the swamp, and quicksands, of the careless accountant's ultimately, infallibly mistaken, extrapolations by his conventionally brutish and often wild-eyed statistical methods.
That same thing can be said in a slightly different way, by pointing to a relevant case, the related, evil dogma, that central banking systems, which are actually instruments of the collective "slime-mold"-like wills of sets of private financier-oligarchical interests, function under the protection of the systemic assumption that these systems must be free of control by elected governments. This is the peculiar system, the ideology which presently controls most nations, and it is those who control the system itself, which control the policy-shaping of relevant nations. It is such false assumptions of an axiomatic character, such as the belief in independence of central banking systems, which, by becoming the characteristic of the relevant public and popular institutions, become the way the nation functions; these, if only usually, predetermine the kinds of choices which will be made. It is not the individual decision which produces this effect; it is the way in which the evolution of an ideology predetermines the trajectory of the change in effects produced by relevant decision-making.[28]
In all cases, it is the system which determines the significance of the event, rather than, as duped people today believe, the mere statistical aggregation of events, the system. So, as the case of World War I demonstrates, in history so far, the axiomatic aspect of ideology controls the will and fate of nations most of the time, and that more effectively, more ruthlessly than any abundance of military force.
The fools' assumption, that it is the U.S.A. which is the principal source of the present world systemic crisis, would be precisely the kind of mistaken belief which, in and of itself, would ensure an inherently tragic catastrophe, that for a world which accepted such a belief. Only when the U.S.A. is recognized as itself, presently, systemically, a subject (e.g., a victim) of the "free trade" system and ideology of the British East India Company's legacy of global rule by the financier-oligarchical interests of today, can anything but foolish assumptions about essential features of the world of today be presented. Unless that point were understood, any attempt at dialogue of cultures would be doomed to catastrophic outcome from the start.
The mere size of an effect, such as the effect of the activity of the U.S.A. today, is not in itself actual proof that the size of the effect is a cause. It is that controlling influence which has steered that effect, and will steer the next, which is determining. Big footprints are not big feet. It is the system which controls the relevant behavior of the United States, which is the cause. To control that effect, we must control that system which controls the people, as long as the people do not control the system.
It was the perceived urgency that the U.S.A. itself invoke its Constitution, as President Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933, to free the U.S.A. from the yoke of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which had controlled the policies of the Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, which changed the system then. The consequence of that was the intervention into history, led by Franklin Roosevelt, which made possible the U.S.A.'s own escape from the fascism which overran a western and central continental Europe imprisoned within the control of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system.
It was that change in perception which occurred under Franklin Roosevelt, as in the case of President Abraham Lincoln earlier, which defined and generated the U.S.A.'s ability not only to accomplish a great leap forward in economy, but to contribute a decisive margin to bring about the defeat of the fascist monster, and promote the recovery of a war-depleted Europe.
The widespread, contrary, and often fatally erroneous assumption is, that by avoiding conflict with certain existing traditions at the top of society, we might improve society by installing improved rules of the game of cultural interaction within the bounds of the bottom layer of the current world system. These suggested improvements are proposed as applicable to society from the bottom up, without touching the actually, top-down determining considerations such as the toleration for so-called "independent central banking systems" and "free trade" dogmas. Defense of that wrong-headed, sometimes fatally wrong-headed practice might be expressed as the tragic popular delusion: "People are not ready for the big change; you must introduce them to that in small steps," without actually using your legs in any noticeable way. Such ugly displays of self-inflicted psychosexual impotence, make virtual political eunuchs of them all.
Our attention must, therefore, be focussed upon that fact, that the dominant feature of international relations since February 1763, has been the increasing domination of the world, not by any nation, but, rather, a modern guise for the European medieval, ultramontane system of partnership of the Venetian financier-oligarchy and the Norman chivalry: the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of international finance, especially the post-1971-1972 form of that system. This Liberal system was the international power known during by its adopted names as both the Eighteenth-Century "Venetian Party" and the "French and British Enlightenment" of Voltaire et al. It is this system which rules the world today, and, by present aid of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, holds nations' governments as its herded cattle and lawful prey, unless the nations had freed themselves from that control.
The Strategic Situation Today
Let us now prepare the way for entering the main body of this report, by the following set of summations of the points developed here thus far.
It is the international, primarily, and national, secondarily, institutions of monetary and financial affairs, which control the principal decisions, in all matters, of those nations and peoples which accept the "authority" of the 1971-2004 International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The European Central Bank is currently among the most vicious of these supranational institutions. Foolish governments and people, alike, generally see nothing significant in this arrangement; it is widely assumed among leading opinion-shaping circles, that no foreseeable alternative to the system associated with those institutions presently exists, at least implicitly so: until the point of outbreak of a relevant systemic crisis. For that reason, the ignorant opinion which predominates in the highest ranks of governments generally today, refuses to recognize that the will of governments generally, is presently controlled, not by the power of nations, but by a system of supranational financier-oligarchical interest which is more powerful than any nation which continues to submit to the rules of play associated with that Liberal system: that is the elephant defecating where the honeymooners are helplessly sleeping.
The Liberal system of today, is only a typical expression of a class of influence over the will of nations and peoples which may be called an "ideology." A person who has blindly accepted any belief of axiomatic-like implications for decision-making, is, to that degree, no longer in any relatively greater degree of willful control of his or her own mind, or behavior, than an animal controlled by the conditioning of the instinctive characteristics of its behavior as the member of a species or variety. The essential power of institutions, such as governments, or concerts of governments, today, is rarely actually free will informed by reason, but more often the oxen's yoke of specific forms of ideology.
See the statesman wiggling within that virtual "iron maiden." He threatens to act rationally, but feeling the pressures of his situation, prefers to avoid the pain, and therefore limits his movements accordingly. He is technically capable of reason; but, the like tragic hero, can not yet free himself of the relevant conventions. He is controlled by the system.
In earlier publications and public addresses, I have identified the functional nature of this problem by the term "fishbowl" ideologies. A population accepts certain selected habituated assumptions, some approximately true and others baldly false, as its ideology. Thus, the collective action of any society known so far, is a response to an implicitly imagined physical geometry which differs more or less radically from the real universe. Thus, when, in the course of developments, the pre-established cultural matrices no longer correspond to reality, even within reasonable margins for error, the victims of the ideology tend to react not to the real world, but rather to their belief in a fancied universe which is implied by their habituated ideology. That problem is what I have identified as a "fishbowl mentality": continuing to swim within the accustomed fishbowl, even after the bowl has broken and the water, and the doomed, flopping fish, are pouring onto the furniture.
Such has been recently, until now, the pathetic state of mind of a large portion of the U.S. electorate which, while experiencing the deepest collapse, a sharp collapse, of the physical economy of their region in half a century, voted for the re-election of George W. Bush, out of confidence in the success of a continuing economic recovery which did not exist! The Liberal system is a leading ideology—a "fishbowl" mentality—usually ruling over the mere nations of today.
It is the attempt of parties to define a system of cultural accommodation, as through a dialogue of cultures, producing thus an attempted fusion of inherently, axiomatically conflicting sets of a-prioristic axiomatic assumptions, which leads from a present or past catastrophe, to yet one more set of the types of conflicts leading into new varieties of the processes of mutual self-destruction, such as general warfare without efficient exit strategies, as in the U.S. war in Iraq today.
Therefore, one relevant fact is already quite clear. The attempts to effect reforms such as cultural agreements, among nations today, will fail, assuredly and absolutely, however noble and impassioned the sentiment supporting such proposed reforms, until the pathological factor of the subsuming system, the system of financier-oligarchical imperial Anglo-Dutch Liberalism—the currently reigning "fishbowl mentality"—is excised from the institutions of world power.
These reigning mechanisms of today are, "genetically," the descendants of the mechanisms which orchestrated what was known as that World War I, which then, in turn, created the continental European fascist rule between 1922 and 1945, and which are the ruling forces at play in the world of U.S. veteran oligarch George Shultz's Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and veteran predator Pinochet today. No cultural agreement among the mice of sundry colors will prevail, as long as the Anglo-Dutch financier-oligarchical cat is loose. We must not merely bell the man-eating big cat; we must first cage her.
Ridding the planet of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal tradition which also created the Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco regimes earlier, is an absolute precondition for preserving civilization today; but, there is much more to be settled. Getting rid of Mussolini and Hitler was necessary; but, putting out the noxious rubbish is not, by itself, the production of a good meal. We must build a new edifice, to supersede a sick world of today. Ask, therefore: What, therefore, should be the principles of design for an ecumenical system of cooperation among respectively sovereign nations, which shall deal appropriately with all of the phases of design and construction to be accomplished on this planet during two generations immediately ahead?
The good is never merely the negation of the bad; the good is the Sublime, which, by its own positive nature, working from outside the bounds of existing conventions of behavior, builds, where the conventional destroys by its inhering corruption. A good dramatic treatment of a subject such as Adolf Hitler, does not portray the people as good, when it merely shows how bad Hitler was. Rolling in the mucky details of hideous crime, as the intention of Allen Dulles's pro-existentialist CCF typifies great criminality, does not ennoble the viewer of a drama, but, more likely, like a Bertolt Brecht drama, will have a degrading effect on the audience and players alike. The evil of Hitler must be treated by love of that good which Hitler destroyed, not only the good in Hitler's victims, but the spoiling of the good in those Germans and others, for example, whom Hitler and the system of his Synarchist masters used for their enterprises.
The world does need urgently an image which serves the mission which the proponents of a dialogue of cultures seek to promote; but, we must do it right, such that the desire for something better does not lure us into those kinds of wishful, Romantic fantasies which have so often led toward effects precisely opposite to that which we should have hoped to produce.
Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere defines a point of sublime empirical-conceptual reference, a framework of reference within which all of the valid issues to be considered are included, including differences among cultures, as if axiomatically. What will the Noösphere be, two generations ahead? How should that happen? How does that approach provide the optimal way of both meeting the requirements of national and personal sovereignties, and also producing improvements of an urgent character and quality in the Noösphere during the coming two generations or more?
1. The Vernadsky Remedy
Competent science, or an actually efficient pursuit of a dialogue of cultures, proceeds always by presuming that the totality of present belief of any national culture, of any body of doctrine, contains a large ration of wrongness. Therefore, the first principle of science should be, to consider the problem of the systemic falseness within what may be presently even a proudly defended opinion, scientific or other. This means concentrating special attention upon those special kinds of paradoxes which lie at the boundaries of any existing body of generally accepted belief, such as the boundaries separating the abiotic, living, and human cognitive systems of Vernadsky's Noösphere, in their essential character, and respective distinctions as the universal physical systems of which the known universe as a whole is comprised: that as a Riemannian quality of an integrated system.
The permission to employ this method, must not depend upon definite prior indications of any specific wrongness in currently accepted belief. Good health is not only a matter of lack of evident sicknesses, but also of detecting and preventing the existence of a kind of disease which has not yet been recognized by us as the menace it does in fact represent, as had been the case of human retrovirus disorders. This is the method by means of which we are enabled to uncover the existence of wrongness even within what has been unchallenged as generally accepted belief. It is not a mere repair-kit to be called out only when failed opinions have been detected; it is a way of thinking which must supersede all others, on all occasions.
The method of learning from our experience of the future, which I have identified in the introduction to this report, is not new. It is ancient. Notably, it is implicit, for physical science as such, in the method of Sphaerics which the Pythagoreans and Plato, among other ancient Classical[29] Greeks, adduced from the development of astronomy by Egypt. In fact, all competently Classical currents of European scientific thought since that time, have expressed a return to that method, as a choice of means for avoiding the relevant decadent, contrary method of such as the Eleatics, Sophists, and other philosophical reductionists. This is, for example, the method of Kepler, as reflected in his tasking future mathematics to develop the kind of infinitesimal differential calculus actually developed, with unique originality, by Leibniz.[30]
That discovery, successively, by Kepler, Leibniz-Bernouilli, Gauss, and Riemann, et al., is the demonstration of the method by which mankind achieves its discovered forewarnings, and, in this way, a certain type of experienced knowledge of the yet to be experienced future. This depends upon that Classical Greek notion of powers employed by the Pythagoreans, Plato, his Academy, et al.,[31] the notion of what we may rightly regard as a universal physical principle. Vernadsky's development of the notions of the Biosphere and Noösphere, is an example of application of the same Classical method of powers.[32]
As I shall show in this report, that viewpoint offers the only trustworthy approach to the subject of a dialogue of cultures. The case of Vernadsky's referenced work provides such a needed point of reference for addressing the challenges of modern political-economy, by attacking those subjects from within the higher standpoint, the domain of the Sublime.
It has been usually demonstrated by all those fundamental discoveries of such powers in science, that the greatest concentration of wrongness is usually disguised as assumptions which the misled representatives of a faulty culture have been inclined to adopt as unshakeable qualities of traditional beliefs, including such as a priori assumptions. The empiricists' Cartesian set of a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates, or the Aristotelean scheme in astronomy of the Roman Empire's hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy, is typical of what is often not only an intellectually fatal error, but an outright fraud.[33] Thus, science must always seek a vantage-point of practical existence in the universe which is located outside the frame of reference within which the suspected error of assumption may lurk, a frame of reference outside the range of the investigator's presently customary belief. For this purpose, in dealing with matters bearing upon the nature of the human individual, and mankind in general, Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere is an extraordinarily useful, and currently most relevant point of departure for understanding the problems to be recognized and mastered in the times now immediately before us.
For example: in order that we might more readily overcome the prejudices which have created a corrupt, ideological wall of separation of art from science, let us interrupt this introduction to the subject of applied physical science at this point, to compare the case for Classical irony in English, or other poetry and drama. After all, the subject of a dialogue of cultures, is culture in the broadest scope of the term. What is true in any part of culture as a whole, must also be demonstrably true in any of its divisions.
Bringing Words to Life
Delicious academics' jokes about "grammarians' funerals," or, the same thing, a literate thinker's hostility toward contemporary publisher's style manuals, are clinically significant in calling attention to the axiomatic roots of the currently prevalent inability of popular cultures to define a congruence of notions of truth which might be common to literary and to physical-scientific thought in a systemically coherent way.[34] This defect, the grammarian's folly, in the development of the individual, presents us with a probably crippling impediment in the pathway of conducting a dialogue of cultures, and, therefore, of physical science, too.
Specifically, to conduct a dialogue of cultures, we would be fools to rely upon agreements reached on the dictionary meaning of a grammarian's dead words. We require a living subject, not the dead word upon which anyone might freely impose an arbitrary meaning of their own design. The doctrine of "text," as stated by the notorious U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, is a conveniently lurid example of such pathological behavior by morally dead minds. To achieve what might be called "intelligent communication," we must bring words to life, that in a mode of reanimation which might rekindle in any mere grammarian that special quality of Holy Terror which also struck Rembrandt's Belshazzar.
That we might better weave the actual connection between a literary or artistic form of culture into the same system as a scientific culture typified by the work of Vernadsky on the Noösphere, consider those principled features of a literary culture which provide a relevant bridge between the idea of culture in general and the referenced work of Vernadsky.
As Shakespeare knew, and as every competent playwright, poet, and philosopher has always understood: As I shall show here, truth exists, contrary to Scalia, only as if between what the poorly educated mind must see as the apparent cracks, called irony or metaphor, of the merely literal meanings previously attributed to the words by those morticians of dead minds we know as grammarians. Truth itself thus lies only between the apparent cracks of what William Empson treated as the principle of irony, as in his notable Seven Types of Ambiguity.[35] Ambiguous as the Classical irony of the great poet, for example, may sometimes appear to be, irony so grasped is the only efficient method by which utterance in a common language can break the shackles of literal meaning, to free man from slavery to dead words, and to convey precise conceptions of actual ideas and of the living words which irony animates. Thus, to the man or woman who can actually think, the grammarian is the perfect type of the functional imbecile one encounters as obstacles over which to stumble in the search for the domain of actual ideas. That is to say, that actually living knowledge can be found only within those transcendental expressions called Classical irony.
The clarification of the point is the crux of the point to be made immediately, here.
Ask yourself: Why does the competent practice of physical science require that we identify the discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle by the personal name of the relevant discoverer? Not the personal name associated with some mathematical formulation used to describe an effect of the application of the principle, but the personal name of the discoverer. This question should bestir attention to some crucial examples of the meaning of Classical irony from within us, the challenge of showing the necessity of describing the grammarian's practice as playing with dead words.[36]
By associating an original discovery of a principle with the name of the discoverer, such as Archimedes, for example, we are implicitly obliged to provoke, and thus to re-create the relevant cognitive experience, within our own mind, an experience which had occurred within the mind of an Archimedes, or the mind of Archytas in solving the task of constructing the doubling of a cube. We thus oblige ourselves to relive the inner, cognitive experience of that act of discovery. We seek thus to call into play within our own sovereign mental processes as a living person, a replication of the relevant process which occurred in the mind of that living person while he lived. That action by us defines the named discovery as a living idea, and the words used ironically to point in that direction become living words—words with a living meaning for us, to replace the dead ones. This is the meaning of the generation and transmission of actual ideas, the meaning of the animation of Platonic forms of ideas.
For example: some would commit the blunder of suggesting that discoveries of principle can be demonstrated on the academic blackboard, or by a digital computer, as the addled advocates of "information theory" dogmas propose. Gauss proved the relevant point, in his 1799 exposure of the relevant hoax perpetrated by empiricists such as D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange. Gauss thus demonstrated anew, that the discovery of a principle is not effected through arithmetic or Cartesian modes of formal mathematical constructions. The actual discovery is merely prompted by the formal paradoxes, such as algebraic paradoxes, which might be represented on an academic blackboard; but, the act of discovery of a principle occurs, neither on the blackboard, nor within the bowels of a digital computer; it can be only within the sovereign cognitive processes, the processes of hypothesizing which are the unique power, and distinction from the beasts, of a human mind.
The naming of the original discoverer, is a challenge: to experience in one's own mind the process of discovery as it occurred in that named discoverer's mind. This we can do only by generating his relevant hypothesis within the processes of our own individual mind. The otherwise seemingly, but deliciously paradoxical ontological implications of the immediately foregoing statement by me, will be made clear by appropriate concentration on what I have to report, throughout much of the following sections of this report, respecting Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere.
Already, even at this point in the report, Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere helps to make clear some aspects of the physical meaning of what I have just said. Our living brain and its accessories bring the act of discovery by, for example, Archimedes, back to life, as it lived within the mind of Archimedes, born again within the functions of our living tissue.[37] That action is of the characteristic form of the activity of hypothesizing which subsumes Plato's collection of Socratic dialogues. The physical character of this act of our present reanimation of the living idea behind the name of Archimedes, today—the living cognitive action, by the then living Archimedes, for example—is an implication which commentators on Vernadsky's work have, so far wrongly, apparently failed to grasp. Both Soviet "materialist" dogma and Liberal empiricist dogma have been among the relevant impediments to consider in treating the evidence of those failures.
To make what is perhaps an indispensable recapitulation of the argument just supplied: the irony of equating the person of the discoverer to a principled discovery, thus obliges our mind to re-create the living experience of that original act of discovery by that mind as a living experience within our own mind. That is a model, so to speak, of the function of Classical irony as the only truthful way of using forms of communication which are literally dead when treated only as in and of themselves (as by mere grammarians), to convey a living experience of truthfulness from one mind to another, even across thousands of intervening years.
Consider Classical tragedy, such as that of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Schiller, as a model, in art, for the same meaning of Classical irony as I have indicated the ironical use of the name of Archimedes, or Kepler, or Gauss, to prompt the mind of the hearer to re-experience the relevant original act of discovery of what is efficiently a universal physical principle. This, in turn, serves to show how we must define those principles which should be adopted, and to warn against those which should not be adopted, in the work of developing a dialogue of cultures.
Why Study Classical Tragedy?
For example: Why must we have Classical actors? Do the typewritten words not speak for themselves? Should not any set of raw amateurs, reciting the text of a drama, be well suited to convey the intent of a playwright such as Shakespeare or Schiller? Perhaps they lack elegance, but does that detract from the capacity to convey the playwright's intended meaning? Similarly, the sophistical pedant would ask: Is not the recitation of Classical poetry a matter of "taste"?
Contrary to such mere opinions, the accomplished company of actors, as in the case of the opening portions of Hamlet or Julius Caesar, must bring the actuality of the mind-set of Shakespeare's Rome of Julius Caesar's and Cicero's time, or Hamlet's legendary Denmark, on stage even before the principal characters of that drama are brought on directly. For reasons which I shall address below, it is almost a rule of principle in the composition of Classical tragedy, that the principal figure must not be brought upon stage until the paradoxical character of the setting in which that character will appear has been established as a species of experience, in its own right, in the mind of the audience, and, therefore, also, through rehearsals and experience of repeated public performances, in the minds of the players on Classical stage.[38]
As I shall work here to make this essential feature of a dialogue of cultures clear, the essence of the drama lies "between the cracks"; it lies beyond the literal. A true such dialogue occurs within the only domain, that of Platonic hypothesizing, where truth lies, in the universal principle of specifically human communication, Classical irony.
For example, in the opening of the two Shakespeare tragedies selected for purposes of illustration here, as the curtain has lifted, the seated audience must quickly sense an eerie feeling to the effect that the universe on stage is a different cultural universe than that in motion in the audience's off-stage world. The behavior among the characters depicted on stage, must not be an expression of the same words as enunciated by persons representing the contemporary culture of the members of the audience, nor must the members of the audience hear that exchange as an event within its own contemporary experience. Otherwise, the attempted performance would be an artistic failure from the outset.
This means that the adducible rules of interpersonal behavior in one culture, are not the same as for another culture. Since the subject-matter of Classical tragedy is the way in which the systemic characteristics of a culture, considered as a whole, brings ruin upon itself, it is what might appear to present observers as those sometimes seemingly very subtle differences of what might, wrongly, seem the same conversation repeated within the audience's own culture. The conversation must be located clearly in that different cultural setting—a different locality in physical space-time, which is the typical expression of the culture which is the subject of the tragedy itself.
We must emphasize, that, essentially, therefore, the characters of a tragedy on stage, taken as a whole, while on stage, act differently, think differently, usually belong to a qualitatively different culture, than those in the audience, or the actors themselves on the street outside. Even if they speak the same words, the meaning is different in some crucial way; after all, they have moved out of one society, their work-a-day world off-stage, into a different world, that of a past period of history, of a different culture, and different general circumstances. It is the requisite genius of an accomplished playwright, or director, to have developed a deep insight into these systemic distinctions, and to adduce those subtleties of the actual cultural matrix which frame the playwright's intended subject.[39]
The valid confrontation with such potentialities is the mark of the great playwright. His intention is to transport the audience's attention from the kind of universe in which the audience lives, as if to a different universe, in which the characteristic features of social interaction are qualitatively different than those of the audience. The actors, for example, must each put themselves, and their interactions with other actors, into that other universe, not the universe which they should have left parked in the street outside.
It is therefore urgent, from the beginning of the play, that the actor not recite lines. The actors there, as in the opening of Julius Caesar, must be Romans of that time. The words spoken in the drama do not have the same meaning as the same words as they might be spoken by a representative of contemporary society. By reacting as a live Roman of the designated station would have reacted, with all the "body language" and shadings of emotional color which that Roman would have shown in that assigned circumstance, we create an eerie sense of the difference between the way those Romans are behaving, and they way we, in our time and place, would deliver the same lines today. The effect on the mind of the audience must be that felt sense of an eerie something "different" lurking there, felt, and knowable, but just out of reach of the corner of the spectator's eye.
For an example of crucial, but seemingly minor points for criticism: how does Casca mouth the name of Cicero, for example? What is his "body language"? How would you have said the same words under today's circumstances? Here, indeed, between the Classical view represented by Cicero, and the circles of the fascist-like Caesar, we have an already highly embittered, pervasive, and tragically determining clash of cultures in that ancient city of Rome itself, as, clearly, Shakespeare understood this connection by the way he wove the richly ironical reality of Cicero's sensed physical presence into the scene. That role of the unseen Cicero is crucial for the performance of the tragedy as a whole. The members of the audience might not know the significance of that reference to Cicero beforehand, but the director and actors must make the audience feel that significance.[40]
The intent of the great playwright, is not to imply that the audience should simply adopt a supposed solution to the paradox of the tragedy on stage. Absolutely not; such folly we leave to the Romantics, who purport to explain all that history whose specificity they defile with their degradation of the issue of the fate of entire peoples and civilizations to the almost soap-opera quality of bedroom view of the attributed failures and triumphs of individual figures of heroes and villains!
Take the case of Schiller's Jeanne d'Arc: Schiller's carefully researched re-creation of the principled features of the actual time and place in history, and the actuality of the role of Jeanne. I have recently compared the effect of Jeanne's conduct in the actual situation of that time and place, as that was the actual effect of her conduct in the situation, through the moment of her death by being burned alive by the Inquisition, to the martyrdom of the Reverend Martin Luther King, as he expressed his personal understanding of that situation, in his own voice and words, up to the morning of his assassination.
Analysis situs! As Leibniz and Riemann understood that distinction. It was her action in that specific situation which Schiller conveys, as the effect of that moment of actual history inspired the process leading to such outcomes as the establishment of the first true sovereign nation-states in all known history, that of Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England. The power of the centuries-old ultramontane system of medieval Europe, the alliance between the Venetian financier oligarchy and the Norman chivalry, was broken by the essentially included effect of the real-life Jeanne as she appears faithfully represented to the intent on what would be a faithful replication of a performance on Schiller's stage. So, we in the U.S.A. today, are being judged, in practice, still today, by what we did not do in response to Martin's death. Martin was not Jeanne; Analysis situs, again! The cultures are different, but the principle of man's existence as an instrument to create the future, is the higher standpoint from which the contrasting specificities of the different contexts is to be understood.
Pause to stress that point just made. It is crucial for the success of a dialogue of cultures.
In real history, the history of living words locates the meaning of the individual human existence in past, future, and present, all at once. It is the transmission of ideas as living words, among past, present, and future, which, like the resonance of an ancient Vedic hymn on the subject of astronomy seen in Central Asia thousands of years earlier, expresses the intrinsic immortality of the individual person. It is only a decadent culture, such as an empiricist's or Sophist's culture, in which the individual is denied this connection, through living words (i.e., actual ideas in the sense of Plato's principle of hypothesis). The "educational" function of Classical drama, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture, is to evoke a sense of immortality in the individual member of the audience, through the devices of the living word. "Yesterday, my mind spoke with the mind of Archimedes. Our minds were linked by a communication system connecting us across thousands of years." The figure on the Classical stage must not be your neighbor reciting lines, but a long-deceased figure, such as Jeanne, or, our recently departed hero Martin, who is made to come alive on stage through the medium of the living words which bring the actuality of that past into immediate juncture with our present, thus bringing people from various generations together, as Raphael Sanzio portrays himself in the simultaneity of eternity in his The School of Athens.
In this way, the fellow watching from the balcony of the theater experiences a sense of actual immortality through the link to the living words radiated from the stage—on the condition that the director and actors make these words felt by the audience as living words. Here is the true secret of Classical tragedy. If one does not grasp that sense of the living word, he or she has yet to understand anything significant about the tragedies of Shakespeare and Schiller.
So, therefore, in all valid Classical tragedy, as in Schiller's treatments, the historian's strict principle of historical specificity applies. Analysis situs! Meanings can not be freely transported from one specific area of universal space-time to another. Each part of history has its unique—historically specific—characteristics. Hamlet is not Julius Caesar. Hamlet's legendary Denmark is not congruent with the culture of Cicero's Rome, the Cicero whose mere whiff of presence in the play is a critical factor of the play itself, as of the actual history of turning-points which developed in Rome during that region of history.
What is common to all, is the way in which we must develop the ability to understand the laws of the way in which history is changed, which are the proper foundation of the making and interpretation of the laws of government. We do not connect different places in history by specific acts as such; we connect them by means of the universal physical principles which are the only available, real connection with the constantly changing territory of real history. For this, for strategy, we require the specific method which subsumes all specificities. We must read history as a domain of those living words which bind the immortality of all human experience and development into the portrait of a true Classical historian's seamless unfolding of a simultaneity of eternity. Such Classical poets and dramatists are the true historians who should perform that mission.
By comprehending many historic specificities, we must avoid tendencies to "take an average," as Shakespeare's silly Polonius would have done; we need a concept which is independent, and above all attempts for hermetic compartmentalizations of historical specificities. This must become an endeavor in which the work of Vernadsky contributes something essential for our work on the subject of concert among respectively specifically distinct cultures.
In that light, take, for example, the role of the ghost in Hamlet. Now, look at the sensed, but unseen appearance of that silent, unseen ghost in the shadows of the Third Act soliloquy. See the approach to that soliloquy in that of the preceding Second Act. Feel the force of tragic doom permeating the entire culture of that legendary Denmark, as we enter the concluding scene where the motion of Hamlet's corpse off-stage, intersects the display of Fortinbras's folly of that moment, as he prances lewdly before both the horrified audience, and as, at the same time, the bemused friend of the deceased Hamlet, is looking off-stage toward, and speaking, like the character Chorus as if called in for this service, directly to the assembled audience of that theater.
Then, recall the image of the ghost, and the interplay in that early scene. Shakespeare needs the ghost, which must be silent, unseen, but a felt presence in the closing scene, without which Shakespeare could not so simply convey to the audience that uncanny feeling about the characteristic mind, the special kind of superstition, and characteristic modes of interactions, of all ranks of that culture shown on stage. "These guys are all insane!" "This Denmark is a living nightmare!"
Yes, I understand your feeling, but you must be more careful; presenting these characters as simply insane will not do. You must present them adorned with their actual insanity, the lunacy specific to their cultural fishbowl, not in your impulsive, grotesque violation of the root-principle of historical specificity. Without that sense of (thinking in terms of British history) the historically specific, or, to the same effect, specifically legendary quality uncanny in the irrationality of all of the characters of that culture, there, as in Shakespeare's treatments of Macbeth and Lear, the actual intention of the playwright is not competently delivered. It is not sufficient to perform the drama; you must witness it, and its characteristic culture, in its actually historically specific place.
The final scene and drama of Hamlet close with an appeal to the audience to recognize that force of tragedy in the culture of that Denmark as the true subject of the drama, not the figure of Hamlet himself. Hamlet's personal wretchedness is that he is all too much a loony Dane of that legendary sort of historically specific place and time. The sense of the force of doom must be established as a sense of dramatic irony, comparable to the opening lunge of Brahms' First Symphony, in the audience, before the leading character is presented on stage. Thus, by aid of that precaution, he, or she becomes a figure wrestling with the forces of doom which are characteristic of his culture, not yours. Could he have broken the spell of that doom, or will he or she prove to be merely another pitiable member of that self-doomed culture, who could not muster the will to change that culture in ways needed to save the people from the culture of which they are a part?
Yet, in Classical tragedy, as in real history, each case has its own historically specific characteristic. Each moment of history is culturally unique, but, ironically, within a seamlessly continuous, but multiply-connected Riemannian universality of a simultaneity of eternity. Different such moments can not be reduced to a reductionist's formula. Any important subject of Classical drama, requires the playwright and the players to define the subject of each drama as a whole as some unique event which could not have been produced by a formula. They must give a unique quality of life—an ironical sense of the presence of a living word—to the drama in this way. No drama is truly Classical, either in composition or execution, unless the central subject of the drama as a whole is a unique creative act of hypothesizing a solution for a problem which never occurred in history before, and will never be produced in the same way again.
Lately, I have frequently found it convenient to reference the victory of Frederick the Great over the Austrians at Leuthen as an illustration of the principle of the commander in chief in the principal office of leadership of a nation, or a commander assuming personal responsibility for the historical outcome of a war. Those examples express the essence of subject-matter of Classical tragedy. Frederick's innovation, faced with a situation where his forces were greatly outnumbered by a well-trained, and professionally deployed larger Austrian force, was a victorious solution unique to that situation. Shall we attempt to adduce some recipe for an average solution of some sort from that case? To attempt to do so would be a fraud; beyond noting that the eccentric Frederick was also a creative genius, the form of the action there was original and unique to that historical situation. Analysis situs, again.
The lesson to be learned on this account, is that it is the pathetic tendency of the pedants of our culture, and their like, to argue, as the Roman Empire's hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy did, that once God had made Creation, that Creation must be perfect, by a priori assertion. Therefore, the Sophist insists, that if we permitted the idea that God himself might introduce a change to that universe, that would be as if to insist that God Himself had been flawed, and was therefore obliged to repair his earlier mistake. That Sophist has just insulted God! God is right; it is the Sophist's Aristotle, and his follower Ptolemy who were wrong, if they were not being simply stupid.
In dealing with man and society, we are dealing with a creative being who often makes mistakes, but has been designed in the image of a Creator for whom continuing Creation is a way of life. As Heraclitus would have insisted, and the Plato of the Parmenides agree, there is nothing but change in the universe, and such is the ontological nature of the Creator Himself.
That view of creation is the standpoint from which the choice of subject is made by the effective composer of Classical tragedy. It is the creative faculty (of Platonic hypothesizing) of the human individual, which is the essential subject of Classical tragedy; it is the presence, and lack of the intervention by such hypothesizing, on which every Classical tragedy since Plato's dramas, his Socratic dialogues, were composed.
To recapitulate the immediately preceding argument, for the sake of clarity, consider the following:
It is the posing of the need for that act of creative reason and will, which is the only proper subject of Classical drama. This element, which Schiller identifies as the Sublime, whether it occurs within the tragedy, or is the implied creative act which should have, but did not occur, is the subject which the drama must evoke as an experience within the mind of the audience, just as the name of the original discoverer of a valid universal physical principle obliges us to react to his act of hypothesizing as an experience re-enacted within the living processes of our mind. It is that act of hypothesizing, Schiller's Sublime, which is the essence of the successful performance of a Classical tragedy, as this was already true with the work of Shakespeare, whose living word, mediated through the historically specific interventions of Abraham Kästner and Gotthold Lessing on this account, revived the living Shakespeare to participate in the Germany-centered Classical humanist renaissance of the late Eighteenth Century. So, as a result of the work of Kästner, Lessing, et al., Shakespeare lives again today.
This view of Classical tragedy typifies the state of mind which must exist prior to any deliberation on the matters of a dialogue of cultures. The tragedy, if that is the outcome, lies not in the leaders of society, but in what they are not. The essential force of tragedy lies primarily within the culture of which the tragic leader is all too typical for his own good.
So, Plato abhorred the relevant aspects of the Classical Greek tragedies of his time; for Plato, as he himself demonstrates the principle in his dialogues, those tragedies he attacked lack the contrast of what Schiller would define as the Sublime.
For contrast, consider some attempts to deal with contemporary historical themes, by some notables. Among the better famous examples among modern American tragedy include Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. A Classically trained actor like Lee J. Cobb could have put the ironical aspect of the leading character of Salesman across effectively, as typifying the tragic character of not the figure on stage, but then contemporary U.S. popular culture itself. The Iceman Cometh is beautifully composed in service of its obvious intent, but the tendency of the audience is to focus on the audience's projected imputable tragedy of Hickey, rather than the tragedy of the popular culture of which he is a victim. The character Hickey "took the life out of the booze"; but, it was the booze of that culture's specific ideology, not Hickey himself, which is the force of tragedy, as must be argued, similarly, for the case of Death of a Salesman. The danger is, in both examples, that the corruption of our times would prompt the audience to view the drama with the disordered mind of the typical Romantic, locating the essence of the tragedy in the central figure, rather than in the society which dangles that figure before us, like a marionette on the cultural strings of his time and place. The danger is, a lack of the sense of the Sublime which links us, the audience in the present, to ourselves as we experience, within our experience of that drama, the relevant fruitful outcome of the tragedy on stage.
Thus, since the principle of Classical tragedy depends upon that standard subject of reference, which is changes in the culture of an entire nation, it had been better of those modern tragedians to have built the tragedy around a leading figure of that society, that culture, so that we might more readily avoid the treatment of tragedy as an individual's affair, rather than the failure of the leader as an exemplary victim of his submission to the characteristics of his society's culture. The key character need not be a recent President, for example, but it must adequately reflect the fateful decision-making processes of the nation, and the corruption of the American people which permits the relevant travesty. The subject of Classical tragedy, as Plato and Schiller demanded, is the history of mankind; to adduce the living words of the Sublime experience we require an actual historical subject, either from known places in history, or forms of legend which had a kindred significance.
Therefore, the attempted use of little people, rather than major figures, as the pivot of tragedy, as by Miller and O'Neill, was, in that sense, a mistake, although a mistake which they committed by faddish popular demand of the theatrical "industry," and its paying audiences, of their time. They did their best, and I greatly admired the result as being Classical tragedy; but, I also recognized that the deeper merit of those works would tend to be overlooked by the pestilence of Romantics and existentialists hovering like predators among the critics and theater audiences.
The subject of Classical tragedy is needed changes in the culture as a whole. Therefore, the attempt to substitute a local setting within a culture for the appropriate action of change of an entire culture, can obviously be effective if the author and director recognize the problem which I have just posed in some efficient way. The portrayal of Salem witch-trials, in Miller's The Crucible, failed as tragedy, because it falsified the Massachusetts of the Winthrops and the Mathers, for the sake of a knee-jerk reaction to the Truman-McCarthy witch-hunt of the Truman years, and thus created a spectacle from which no truthfully living words could be adduced.[41]
For example:
Nearly a decade ago, I was given a tour of a famous Moscow engineering works, which I knew well by name for its role in Moscow during the perilous period of the siege by the Wehrmacht forces. At that past time, I, like many of my generation, had lived through that siege from afar. Now, in one of the rooms of a part of the plant which I visited, I watched individual men working, men whose obvious age associated them, with a strong impression I felt at that moment, with the workers producing under fire of the war-time siege. Not long after my visit, that plant ceased to exist; I wept silently at that news, thinking of particular faces of the aging men working at those machines which had now been taken away from them, thinking of the period of the siege by the Wehrmacht. Tell me then: Where is the pivotal center of that tragedy? The individual? Or the system? The society? Is not the suffering of the individual, in such cases, the guilt of the society?
Could the one particular worker who most attracted my attention, have been a pivot for a relevant drama respecting post-Soviet Russia's society today? Of course; but, it must be done with that sense of the nature of Classical tragedy, treating the top-down features of that process in the society as a whole which affects that worker's fate, as Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty did.
Think then, of the methods by which great Classical poetry or tragedies are composed. I have identified the intent which should govern such works. What, then, is the method by which that intent is served?
The Living Words
Focus on the case, that the same image, word, or phrase, appears, with a different real-life meaning, in each of several locations in which it appears, as within the same poem. Yet, the contradiction, the adducible formal discontinuity (ambiguity) among clearly distinct sets of imputable meanings of the same term in various locations within the same composition, defines that ambiguity as a distinct, uniquely single, real-life object of the quality of a potential living word, as I have developed that usage of "living word" above. This method of generating such a discontinuity, is the basis for Classical irony, as that notion is illustrated by the argument of Shelley's essay In Defence of Poetry.[42] By assigning the value of a name to the difference represented as such a discontinuity, we, as poet or sentient audience, have used the existing language to add a new concept, a new such term, to our intellectual vocabulary. Dead words thus take on a living meaning.
Such is the character of irony which defines the corresponding used language as a living language, not by its mere form, but by the ironical way in which it is used, by the way in which real living-word meanings, note here especially meanings of universal physical principles, are developed even within the current repertoire of use of a fixed nominal vocabulary. If the meaning of a term, its referent, can be defined by its place in a deductive system, it is not a living word when employed in that sense. There must be a meaningful functional discontinuity in the usage which warrants the mind's sense of the presence of such an object of thought.[43]
However, the corollary is, that a language used in this way thus generates new discontinuities which correspond to newly discovered existing states in the universe represented by that language's use. Functionally, this is the way in which we name distinct astronomical objects, discovered universal physical principles, and other real objects of the mind which are made known through their rigorous definition as defined by their existence as discontinuities. Such was the method, in fact, of Kepler, for example, who originally defined a universal principle of gravitation, or Archytas, earlier, who defined a uniquely specific solution for generating the doubling of the cube by continuing geometric action. This is also the indispensable active principle of Classical modes of artistic composition.
That is the elemental expression of the artistic creativity referenced by Percy Shelley's In Defence of Poetry: the transformation of a language effected by means of periods in the life of a people which are marked by an increase in the power for receiving and imparting profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.[44] That power is expressed as the communication of a living word.[45]
The communication of the meaning of any statement is to be adduced by the test of the presence of such living words. Only living words qualify as ideas in the strict, technical sense of the meaning of ideas. One actually knows an idea contained within a statement, by the presence or absence of that idea as an adducible living word, whose adduced meaning is the fruit of the same kind of mental process associated with the regenerating of an idea from indications of the specified problem it solves, as by a modern student's reliving Archytas's construction of the doubling of the cube.
For example, the idea of knowing the circumference of the Earth becomes a living word in the mental processes of the user, when the user has relived the experiment through which Eratosthenes measured the great circle of the Earth, circa 200 B.C., by deep well observations from two locations in a North-South alignment within Egypt, and then measured the great-circle distance from Alexandria, Egypt to Rome by the same method. The proof of the so-called "Solar Hypothesis" by Aristarchus of Samos, is a similar case, as to be compared with the known aspects of the work in the same direction by Thales earlier. The accumulation of such re-enactments of discoveries of proof of principle, is the required ordinary basis for the development of what we should aim to evoke as a resulting sense of scientific literacy in the adolescent mind.
For example, the idea at issue in Carl Gauss's 1799 attack on the treatment of algebra by D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, begins to become a living word for the modern student, when the origins of Euler's fallacy are traced by the student, through the work on cubic roots, by Cardano, et al., from the doubling of the cube by Archytas's friend Plato. This leads to an enriched insight into the origins of what Euler's hoax is really attacking: the Leibniz-Bernouilli discovery of what became known as the catenary-based, improved form of the principle of the infinitesimal calculus, Leibniz's principle of universal physical least action. This Leibniz-Gauss connection leads to the generalization of the mathematical-physical principle of the complex domain by Gauss, Riemann, and others.
I choose the former illustration to situate the way of thinking which is needed to address the matter in a way most directly relevant to the conception immediately at hand.
These ideas which exist only "between such cracks," are "living words," in the specific sense which the German anti-Kantian philosopher Herbart assigns a special meaning to his adoption of the term Geistesmasse. This is the meaning, by Herbart, which Bernhard Riemann acknowledges as being the prescience of a concept of physical science, as much as of literature. In fact, in both usages, it is not merely an appropriate technical term of the specialist; that term, although only rarely used with the same meaning today, corresponds to the most essential notion in all Classical philosophy, a term which points toward something which is, at least superficially, akin to psychologist Wolfgang Köhler's cruder notion of a mental function associated with his use of Gestalt. This takes us to a boundary-area of the most essential working-concept in an attempted dialogue of cultures.
As I have emphasized repeatedly in relevant published locations, the human individual's physiological experience of the world around him, is not direct knowledge of the real world he senses, but, rather, his interpretation of the reaction of his sensory apparatus to its encounter with the world which exists beyond that person's senses. Thus, the blind do see. The human experience of that real world beyond, produces potential knowledge of reality on two successively higher levels than sense-perception as such. Such an experience is called Platonic realism. It is the same Platonic realism which underlies the work of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, et al. It is the Platonic realism which erupts as expressed by Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere.
On the first level, we are dealing now with mental processes which Köhler proposes to be shared by apes and man. The stream of sensations impinging upon the infant's sensorium, is "decodified" as a world of nameable sensory objects. These objects are not presented to the child directly, but are the product of the digestion of sense-experience by the implicit totality of the child's human quality of mental-physical powers of conception. An unmanageable stream of sensations is organized, thus, by the infant's healthy mind, into a comprehensible array of playful objects and object-relationships.
On the second level, a similar development occurs on a qualitatively higher order of reaction, a reaction which occurs only in man, not the higher apes: the discovery of a higher order of mental object, corresponding, for example, to the discovery of an experimentally defined universal physical principle.
This higher level is found in Classical art, as Herbart's use of Geistesmasse as a technical term of educational practice, and in science, as Riemann associates this with what he terms "Dirichlet's Principle," named for his teacher and predecessor in his post, Lejeune Dirichlet. This juncture of the two uses of this meaning of Geistesmasse, is the key to a rational approach to a dialogue of cultures. The concept so associated with that usage of the term Geistesmasse, should be recognized as pointing toward the central conception of a science of culture, the science appropriate for approaches to a dialogue of cultures.
This brings us to the physical, rather than merely formally mathematical notion of the complex domain. The argument, as I have made it many times before this present occasion, may be summarized as follows.
Riemann's special reference to his use of the term Geistesmasse appears in his published collection of mathematical works only as a single topic in a series of related, partially only sketchy elements, in his posthumously published works. Nonetheless, the concept he associated with his use of that term in that posthumously published location, is implicitly essential, pedagogically, for better comprehension, as by the student today, from study of such among his principal published works as his habilitation dissertation and on the subject of the implicit physical geometry of Abelian functions. That connotation of his, and implicitly also Herbart's use of the term Geistesmasse, moves our attention immediately into conjunction with our preceding discussion of the subject of the living word. This Riemannian sense of the notion of the living word is essential for a clear insight into the very special relevance of Vernadsky's use of the concept of the Noösphere for defining the immediate, global issues of physical economy and culture.
It is that living word which is denoted by Riemann's use of Geistesmasse. It is a concept, and object of thought, whose actuality is expressed in mathematical-physics terms only by a notion of the physical, rather than merely mathematical complex domain.
We do not directly experience the objects of our environment. Rather, we experience the impact of the world around us in terms of what our minds assess as the impact of that world upon our biological sense-apparatus. We accomplish this to an effect which is not unrelated to the way in which the infant translates a stream of experienced sensations into a comprehensible realm of objects. Yet, there is a qualitative difference between the beast and the mind of the human individual on this account.
Gravitation, for example, is experienced by the senses in sundry ways, but gravitation as such is not explicitly an object of the senses, nor can it be made an object in the way in which a sane child's mind reduces a stream of sensations into sets of distinct objects. That notwithstanding, gravitation, as Kepler defines it, is an existing, and efficient object of the human mind. It becomes such a known object, when we know it by means of the faculty associated with the notion of living words. It is then an object of those cognitive, higher functions of the human mind, the domain of actual ideas, which we meet, otherwise, in the role of irony in Classical poetry or dramatic tragedy. It is, thus, the place in the human mental processes where strictly Classical forms of artistic composition and physical science, properly defined, become one and the same subject.
All true universal principles of physical science have this same character.
Here we have the remedy for C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" paradox. Here lies the indispensable key to a successful form of a dialogue of cultures.
Within that unity, there is, nonetheless, a subsumed qualitative difference between the two. In physical science, the emphasis of our attention is upon the discovery of those higher order objects of the physical domain, non-living and living objects alike, as the processes specific to those domains. In Classical artistic composition, the relationship of the Noösphere to Biosphere has shifted; it is the social processes themselves which serve as the mediation between the individual mind and society's functional relationship to the Biosphere. In the higher realm, the individual acts upon the Biosphere through the mediation of the individual's action upon society as a social process. The problems posed by this conception of the matter taken as a whole, are implicitly remedied to a very large degree merely by introducing certain of the most crucial epistemological implications of Vernadsky's development of his conception of a Noösphere.
We shall turn to that pivotal issue now, and later return, in the next chapter, to the discussion of the functions of the human individual's cognitive powers, after bringing in explicit treatment of the difficulty which has been building up tension in the mind of the reader as we have progressed this far: What is the human mind, stated in physical terms?
Vernadsky's Riemannian definition of the Noösphere presents us with a universe composed as a multiply-connected physical geometry of three experimentally distinguishable qualities of universal physical principle. Each of these three is distinguished by what Riemann points out as the unique quality of experimental method of proof associated with the discovery of any universal physical principle.
On the lowest of the three levels, the so-called inorganic, or pre-biotic, we include those processes whose known experimental proof of elementary existence neither requires, nor permits the assumption of the causative intervention by a principle of life. (We thereby consign the radical positivist opponents of such a conception of life, such as the late John von Neumann of "artificial intelligence" notoriety, to the purely inorganic ash-cans into which they have already pre-located their own existence.) The second, relatively higher level, is that of processes which occur as living processes, as the tradition of Louis Pasteur has defined the experimental approach to achieving this result. The third, is the domain defined by those cognitive processes of the creative (noëtic) individual human mind, through which discoveries of universal physical principles, such as Kepler's, occur, and without which such discoveries would never occur.
The domain of combined inorganic and living processes, is the Biosphere. The domain of a Biosphere under the creative reigning power of human cognition, is the Noösphere.
All three domains of action (powers) are multiply-connected in the Riemannian sense of that term. In Vernadsky's biogeochemistry, we apply this view to the evolving state of the planet Earth in terms of the planet's composition in terms of changing relative portion of fossils, an arrangement in which one process's waste-product is another process's capital opportunities, and the key to understanding, and mastering the so-called "raw materials" challenge of today. Such is the manifest intention governing the existence of our planet, were its self-development limited to these two terms of reference. However, then, we intrude upon that scheme, as we, mankind, enter as an increasingly significant player, as from outside and above, in the development of the planet according to that functional arrangement.
There is no raw materials crisis of this planet, on this planet today; there is only a crisis caused by the ignorance of those modern physiocrats who create a raw materials crisis among scientifically illiterate men and women with all too much financial power for their own, or the planet's good.
Against this view, there is no competent objection; the fossils, when examined from Vernadasky's standpoint, prove it so. If no tongue could speak, the fossils will have spoken this to be the truth of the existence of our planet, from its origins to the present time. This is the Creator's expressed intention, so displayed.
The most upsetting feature of Vernadsky's view of such effects, is that it refutes all attempts to account for the human creative powers' role in ways which locate creativity within the kind of brain which belongs only to the Biosphere. On that account, a kind of creeping anxiety grips the individual who begins to grasp the implications of what I have written to this effect, here thus far. For those readers who are most sensitive, a certain uncanny prescience now lurks at this stage of my account.
We, of modern society, tend to think of ourselves as embodying all our essential qualities of life and personality, too, within the bounds of a biological process as such. Yet, as the relationship of the increased accumulation of Vernadsky's higher-ranking class of fossils to human increased power in the universe attests, there is a power, not confined to the domain of the Biosphere, which accounts for all this about our human existence. Something higher impinges upon the biological processes of the living human individual, to produce the effects we must associate with nothing other than the Noösphere. This is precisely what we experience, as in action, in the transmission of an idea, as a living word, through the indicated processes of reanimation of a mark, as bequeathed to us from an ancient Archimedes long since deceased, to be reborn in the mind of a student today.
On reflection on this, it must begin to appear to us, that all of humanity, past, present, and future, is of the character of a pulsating mass of self-development as if in a simultaneity of eternity, a simultaneity expressed as a continuity through the principled processes of reanimation expressed by living words. We are properly consoled at that point in our reflections, because the notion of spiritual actuality so implied is now scientifically clear. As in the case of the real-life, historical Jeanne d'Arc as portrayed by Schiller, the sense of a real basis for the notion of human personal immortality, rather than a childishly fantastic one, shifts the sense of self upward, away from Hamlet's fear of a bourne from which no traveller returns, and thus multiplies greatly the spiritual power of the individual to make his or her contribution to the permanent advancement of both mankind and to whatever still higher purpose a beloved—of the Creator—mankind's existence is intended to serve.
Such, in and of itself, were a great boon to a humanity so perilously burdened today with leaders rendered timid by fears of a mortality more frightening than simple death, leaders, at their usual best, if not otherwise cowardly or corrupt, whose fears of immortality make them Hamlets, or worse.
Briefly then, the key to translating the point I have just headlined, respecting Hamlets, into the form of a living word, is the following.
I Recount a Page From My Existence
During the interval 1983-1989, my life was placed in danger because of the implications of my role in proposing what President Ronald Reagan later named, on March 23, 1983, as "A Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)." Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov summarily rejected even President Reagan's proposed discussion of his proffer, and, for related reasons, my life was then in danger, both from forces inside leading circles inside the U.S.A., and, by no later than early 1986, from the Soviet government of that General Secretary Gorbachov whose frequent threats had become as copious, and widely distributed, as they were ominous.
Thus, in the October 6-7, 1986 run-up to the Reagan-Gorbachov "summit" at Reykjavik, a force of over four hundred armed personnel, including a special force, equipped with armored combat vehicles, targeting me for a major public assassination, moved into Leesburg, Virginia and its vicinity, assigned to a planned operation which could have had no outcome but the assassination of me and killing of numerous others at the place where I was located at that moment. Higher authorities intervened by the morning of October 7th, such that the intended assassination-operation was aborted by the intervention of higher circles in my government. However, the ongoing effort in Justice Department and other legal frame-ups, over the 1983-1989 interval and beyond, was of one piece with the near-execution which had been intended by that abruptly aborted plan for the assassination. The message was later delivered, that if I resisted the continuing, planned legal frame-up successfully, I would certainly be killed next time.
I bring that matter up again here, because of its effectively dramatic form of exemplary bearing on the subject of that commonplace failure of political nerve among the leading circles of Europe and the U.S.A. today, an experience of those circles which contrasts with my foreknowledge of the personal risk I was taking by my role of leadership in such cases as the SDI affair.
On that point, it was a fortunate trait built into the experience of my family upbringing and larger experience of our society over the past eighty-odd years, that fear never prevented me, as an adult, from seriously considering even a mortal risk which I thought I was morally obliged to take. There were many other incidents in my life which illustrate that point, including at least one or two additional planned assassinations, each of which was presented in a far less dramatic way than the events of October 6-7, 1986, but expressing the same principled feature of public life in Europe, the U.S.A., and elsewhere today, that in a significant manner and degree. I understood such exemplary cases as those of Walter Rathenau, Kurt von Schleicher, Martin Luther King, Aldo Moro, Jürgen Ponto, Indira Gandhi, and Alfred Herrhausen very clearly, from the experience of my own several brushes with a similar fate.
Over this span of experience, I have experienced another facet of this pattern: that, largely as a result of the influence of the propaganda and related activities introduced by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we have been since that time producing a vastly reduced ration of potential leadership for moments of crisis, far less than I could observe during my youth and early manhood. The essential crime of the existentialists, including the moral depravity of the notable Frankfurt School cases of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, is that they set out to uproot the very idea of being truthful from our culture. With that effect, the capacity for true leadership is greatly impaired, if not obliterated.
Chiefly as a result of that existentialist campaign, few among the so-called "Baby-Boomer" generation, few among those typified by college entrants of the late 1960s, believe any longer in truth sufficiently to put their lives on the line for any cause for the sake of truth, as distinct from some wild Romantic impulse: their tendency, in the alternative, was either to huddle, shivering with fear, in foxholes, or to bare their chests for suicidal flight forward. Thanks to corrupt creatures such as Adorno and Arendt, they no longer really believed in the efficient existence of truth.
Thus, this common syndrome of the typical Baby-Boomer and Tweener of the Americas and Europe, is to be recognized as a special kind of expression of a "Hamlet" problem, of which the visible behavior of the incumbent President of the U.S.A. is an essentially typical, but extreme example of how far a bad-tempered, spoiled, half-witted brat may go toward expressions of extreme, apparently kaleidoscopic instability in his public expressions of moral and general intellectual depravity.
The crucial point I am emphasizing here and now, is the essential interdependency between a sense of truthfulness and of immortality, especially in the matter of society's leadership for times of crisis such as now.
The intelligent member of our culture knows that we all die eventually. It is that certainty, in an emerging and developing adult personality, which as a New Testament parable on the subject of the talent reminds us, leads to a certain kind of morally and mentally healthy kind of existential view of personal life, in which mortal life is treated as a talent which will be expended at the end, in any case. Thus, rather than clinging hysterically to the mere sensual experience of living now, the truly mature human being thinks of the importance of what he or she does with that mortal life while he or she has it, and thinks of this in terms of reference to the kind of world his or her ultimately inevitable demise will leave behind.
For the person who has that sense of human individual mortality, the greatest remaining existential fear is that one might have spent one's life wastefully, having done nothing really useful for generations to come, or for the honor of generations past. Thus, the issue of certainty in the matter of knowing truth, as truthfulness can only be associated with what I have described in terms of living words, becomes the overriding motive in conduct of one's personal life, as it has been for me.
That person has no great urge to hasten his or her own death. On the contrary, the experience of serving one's personal mission strengthens the passion for life—the so-called zest for life, a passion for shrugging off the accumulation of aches and pains which aging brings on, so that one may enjoy more of doing what one has truthfully elected to do as one's implicitly assigned life's work.
This is not to be taken as implying that I was always clear on selection of the apparent choices available to me. Of some things I have been certain since childhood, and more and more of that as decades passed. However, for all of us occupied with the concern for discovering and executing truthful choices, the search for truth, and the willingness to stake one's life, as if by mere reflex action in a situation, is the most important part of a sense of personal identity as a mortal being.
All that much said on the topic in general, the point to be emphasized, as this bears in what should be an obvious way on the matter of policy for a dialogue of cultures, is that the issue of truth is crucial, especially for a civilization as imperilled as this present one is. The spread of Hamlet-like and worse cowardice among leading circles in the world today, is therefore the greatest single source of danger to humanity as a whole. Therefore, were the dialogue of cultures to lean toward easy accommodation of axiomatic immiscibles, as is an evident tendency among relevant circles so far, a global disaster would be assured for lack of the wanted quality of courage to face the truth in high and other places.
This danger, in turn, has been increased by the spread of existentialism, and by truth-hating fanaticism expressed in such forms as varieties of "religious fundamentalism," notably that of the right-wing religious fundamentalism which is the hard-core political constituency of the George W. Bush Presidency.
He has shown himself to be a President who lies, as he has done on most of the leading issues of his time, including his lying about the Iraq war, about his responsible role in the torture of prisoners of war, and his intention to steal the U.S. Social Security system's assets away from the people, that for the sake of enriching certain financier interests among his political supporters who would share the loot. His choices of policies are a matter of substituting personal, usually irrational emotional feelings within himself, for truth. He acts so, repeatedly, to the effect that whatever seems to make him feel good in the immediate moment, is what he will do, whatever the consequences for himself, for the nation, or for humanity at large. On the fact that this most fundamentalist President of recent times has also shown himself the nation's biggest, perhaps most immoral liar on many crucial matters of policy, hangs an aura of self-inflicted hovering doom upon not only our U.S.A. today, but on every part of the world within our nation's reach.
That problem could be controlled, if the people generally, especially within the U.S.A., were willing to put themselves on the line for the truth, without consideration of fear or favor, especially leading political and related influentials. However, the fact would still remain, as I have emphasized here, that truth can prevail only when it has efficient advocates, especially leaders who embrace that responsibility with the same relative kind of commitment and care which might be expected of our nation's best choices in principal military commanders.
I can speak to you of such things, because I have earned the right, and obligation to do so. For your sakes, I wish there were more like me. Life of nations today, including our own, hangs on so few threads, so precious few who accept the duty of true leadership, its required qualifications, and its risks. It is so important that we do what is needed to uplift and thus inspire as many as possible from among the rest.
2. Vernadsky and Physical Economy
I have not proposed that we terminate the existence of money, nor do I intend to so; but, as I have said repeatedly, money is an idiot, which has no sense of what to do with itself, and, left to its own devices, has shown an uncanny impulse for finding the wrong place to go and the wrong thing to do. What I do propose, as the U.S. Federal Constitution originally prescribed, is to take away from all sources but government itself, the power to "create" (to utter) money, and, instead, to hold government accountable for the way in which the issuance and circulation of money in society is regulated. This means, to return to what was known as The American System of political-economy, as indicated by the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, and closest collaborator of President George Washington at that time, the Alexander Hamilton who was also an ally and co-thinker of President Franklin Roosevelt's ancestor Isaac Roosevelt.[46]
The time has now come, when the existing world monetary-financial system is not only bankrupt, but hopelessly so. In and of itself, that is not the cause for gravest worry among those who really understand how the modern world works, or, at the least, how it could work even under these conditions of general bankruptcy. The serious worry should be that of the leader who knows essentially what needs to be done, but thinks, "If what I propose to be this action, is not taken, the results of not taking that action would be catastrophic for the planet as a whole," but then denies that thought almost as soon as it is thought, as Hamlet did in the Third Act soliloquy.
A concert of responsible governments, if they act while my proposed action still exists as an available option for this purpose, will simply put the entire world monetary-financial system, otherwise known as the IMF system, into receivership by governments, and provide a new world monetary-financial system, modelled, chiefly, for the time being, upon the precedents of the original 1944 Bretton Woods system. Those governments, if they are prudent, would maneuver the bankrupt central banking and related institutions in a timely fashion, maneuvering them into roles as wards of the relevant governments. The adopted policy would be to create a state-run credit-and-money system which is efficiently designed to prevent any monetary-financial crisis from triggering a general breakdown of the physical economy of the nations, or causing a breakdown in the essential mechanisms of hard-commodity forms of world trade.
There are numerous special reasons—in other words, proximate influences—why the present global monetary-financial crisis has come upon us in the way, and during the interval of time this has occurred. However, causes and cures are often asymmetrical, as now. The deeper reason for the crisis, is the choice of the system of values under which the world's monetary-financial system has been operating for about four decades. This has been a system of values which has prompted governments and other relevant institutions to use the wrong measuring-rods, the wrong formulas of management, for determining the way in which the economy has, in fact, been managed. Governments have tended to respond to statistical reports, often even wishfully contrived ones, which give indications which are either not relevant to, or even directly contrary to needed actual physical developments and conditions.
For example, there is the case, as in the U.S. now, of reporting an "improvement" in the U.S. economy, at a time that a new increment of physical general collapse in the physical economy has actually occurred, as by a foolishly optimistic reading of monetary-financial data which actually reflect an increase in unpayable indebtedness as an improvement in spendable funds. Or, by shrinking the national economy through shutting down the margin of production on which a stable national balance of accounts depends in a national economy already operating below break-even levels, The latter might be done as what is celebrated as an alleged "economy measure" to improve future national accounts, but not the real economy.
Therefore, it would be foolish to attempt to fix the economy by methods allegedly intended to cause a return to healthy function, when these methods are the same design under which that economy had failed to function successfully under such policies during some time as long as recent decades. It is often that putatively "traditional" system, that set of policies, which foolish governments and others declare that they intend to improve, which is the economic-policy system whose continuation now, in any form, would ensure an early general collapse. In this situation, the only workable solution would require us to scrap that design, and to adopt a new choice of system of values by which to guide the economy's functioning. Today, the needed new system, would not be something modelled on the precedents of recent decades, but, rather, in a large degree, a return to the still earlier set of what had been the relatively successful policies which were operative in western continental Europe, Japan, and the U.S.A., under the original Bretton Woods system at a point taken from about forty years ago, or earlier.
Since the U.S. and world economies did perform rather well under the Bretton Woods system instituted under President Franklin Roosevelt's direction in 1944, and have worked badly since that system was undermined, and then discarded during an interval between 1964 and 1982, a sane incumbent government of the U.S.A., for example, would promptly re-institute virtually all of those protectionist and related regulatory measures which had become terminated U.S. practice during the recent period of nearly four decades. That sudden reversal of the relevant kind of thinking about that policy which has dominated post-1971 legislation and related agreements, would be a change now motivated by presenting those legislators and relevant others who still needed to be convinced, with a clear view of the horror the nation would bring upon itself—thanks to their stubbornness—should they succeed in resisting these urgently needed reforms.
Those are the minimal required measures. That change to a pro-Franklin Roosevelt orientation, would be good, for a beginning; but it would not be adequate by itself. The physical condition of the world has not remained constant during the recent four decades. Our world has undergone crucial changes during the recent half-century, largely changes for the worse. Although the design of more than forty years ago was a good one, it would not be adequate to meet the challenge now immediately before the changed world today. For this reason, we must move in directions which require rethinking our notions of world and national economy in a more advanced way than needed in earlier times; we must now think in ways which correspond to the implications of Vernadsky's conception of a Noösphere.
It might be argued by some, that we should introduce what might be the right system at the start, rather than reviving precedents from a successful past period. The point to be made on that issue, is that we should use a return to a relevant, tested, successful, alternative approach from past experience, such as the original Bretton Woods system, an approach which we should never have abandoned, but then, relatively at leisure, and with great care for the future over the long term, develop a thoroughly designed future system of regulation for later installation.
The policy should be, for practical political and other reasons, to act initially on the basis of the best choice of sets of precedent for regulation from a relevant earlier period of successful organizing of an economic recovery, but, then, with leisurely care work through a comprehensive system comprehension of the coherent set of principles which should shape the long-term evolution of regulation for two or more generations yet to come.
As the implications of the current importance of using Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere for effects on global management of raw materials requirements illustrate a point, in designing the relatively permanent system of economic regulation for the time henceforth, we must recognize that we are entering into the future, into a rather poorly explored territory of long-term economic practice. Decisions which must be made, and some of them involve massive amounts of value committed over decades, will affect the entire systems of real capital formation over generations to come. For the moment at hand, the mission should be to "get started," with the view that the longer-term capital commitments should be developed with that certain thoroughness which regard for the implications of an important error require. Thus, the prospect should be that we undertake preliminary steps toward reconstruction, by adopting an immediate set of previously tested transitional reforms to this effect, with the intent to integrate those present transitional reforms into a more permanent, more long-term system at some point in the foreseeable future.
Provided we adopt that view toward which I have just pointed, certain short-term measures consistent with President Franklin Roosevelt's notions of the Hamiltonian American System of political-economy, can be considered an adequate set of short- to medium-term measures for managing a transition from the Hellish mess of the world system at this moment, to reaching the platform from which the more fundamental, long-term reforms must be launched. This should be the relevant economic perspective of a dialogue of cultures.
We must not continue to allow these required short- to medium-term measures of return to a Bretton Woods policy-shaping matrix, to be misrepresented by the customary malice of hostile propagandists as "police state" or otherwise dictatorial measures, as right-wing fanatics of the past and present have lied against the government of President Franklin Roosevelt, or against Abraham Lincoln earlier. A government which acts to promote the general welfare, and therefore adopts a commitment to protect the majority of its population during a time of true crisis, is a form of popular government, as the 1932 election of President Franklin Roosevelt, or the miserably failed President Herbert Hoover attests.[47] Roosevelt saved political democracy in the U.S.A., whereas every government of continental Europe which opposed its own adoption of Roosevelt's example, lost it sooner or later.
This has important cultural implications for the short term, implications which we must now take into account. These include some shocking implications for a relevant body of largely misinformed Asian opinion today.
Those of us who have given sufficient attention to the relevant points of comparison of current and past history know, that under similar conditions of crisis, nothing breeds the proliferation of a medley of tyrannical government alternately with anarchy and terror more quickly, than a terrified or stupid people infused with populist forms of ignorance and narrow-minded, parochial ideologies, people such as our current crop of lunatic religious fanatics in the U.S.A. today.
When governments are prevented from taking necessary reforms under conditions of existential crisis of nations, one or another form of tyranny, including the tyranny of chaos, as in a recent case in Albania, were likely. A government, such as that of President George W. Bush, Jr., which simply competes for the vote by means of lies, gross corruption, and swindles such as a rape and looting of the U.S. Social Security system, or any leader who acts in a dramatic way, even for a good cause, without attempting a relevant and extended form of rational dialogue with its population, as I have attempted repeatedly over decades, is not behaving intelligently. A good leadership is one which rules, or seeks to rule, through an efficient dialogue with the people, even in face of their stubbornly wrong-headed resistance, rather than a simple, intellectually superficial sort of so-called "democratic" popularity-polling which is playing the part of the tyrant with its cheap demaoguery, as did the notorious Democratic party (the Sophists) which perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates.
We need government which wins popular support for even extensive and sudden reforms through those methods of constructive Socratic dialogue which were used to win popular support for the adoption of the original U.S. Federal Constitution. Such an approach to government, especially under times of perceived crisis, will become the basis for a popular government.[48] Otherwise, without Socratic dialogue as a broad-based political method of governing, government under conditions of crisis becomes a perilous clash of wills, rather than a rational mode of deliberative process, and the worst result may usually be expected from this.
Thus, when the brutal policies associated with the Brüning government of Germany were maintained, the Hitler regime was almost inevitable. Not only must there be a dialogue with the population in a merely formal sense; but, the government must employ the dialogue to develop and adopt the right policies through participation of the population in a true dialogue, a dialogue on those subjects which are in the long-term interest of the general welfare of the entire nation, not just policies which enjoy a Sophist variety of momentary "democratic" support from existing parties and factions.
If such reforms as I have just indicated were not made in a timely fashion, any effort to preserve the present IMF system and also defend the institution of independent central banking would bring about an implosion of the world's physical economy, and, probably, a rapid slide of the world at large into a prolonged new dark age. This would include the collapse of nations such as China and India, that for reasons the governments of those nations are perhaps not yet prepared politically to attempt to understand at the present time. Hence, a relevant preparatory dialogue on this matter is required, without which a dialogue of cultures as such could not succeed.
Therefore, if the world is going to survive this presently onrushing general monetary-financial breakdown-crisis, it will be because the kinds of reforms I have indicated above are in fact made, and that in a timely fashion. If that does not happen, then we shall have to put the matter of a politically successful dialogue of cultures off the agenda for perhaps two or more generations yet to come. If we do not open up the dialogue to put everything relevant to the outcome, including the hallowed prejudices of this or that constituency, on the table, so to speak, the present civilization will not emerge from the present crisis alive.
If the happier choice occurs as indicated, then, beyond that, there are some extremely interesting reforms in the way in which the world thinks about economy, which will have to occur, and that rather rapidly. In that case, a rational world would adopt Vladimir I. Vernadsky's defining of the Noösphere as the keystone for defining the physical-economic doctrines of management and development of all modern economies. In order to effect the necessary connections combining Vernadsky's contributions, and the structural features of modern political-economy, my own contributions to the founding of a contemporary science of physical economy would be indispensable.
That result would be a shock to many, a shock expressed by the way in which the sheaf of budgetary and other financial reports they might be holding, falls from suddenly trembling hands, to the floor, as if never to rise again. Jaws drop. Eyes seem to glaze over. This is, indeed, a revolution! Ah, but it is a very good one, and long overdue.
Therefore, let us begin this phase of the discussion with the basics which represent the vantage-point from which to see both the merits of the Franklin Roosevelt approach, and the needed additional transition to what may be fairly identified as a Vernadsky reform of the way in which we must define a long-term view of the future economy of this planet. This use of the work of Vernadsky will prove to be of unique importance in bringing forth the now urgently needed transition from a division between European and Asian cultures, to the emergence of the presently needed true Eurasian culture.
The dialogue of cultures, grounded in an agenda of such considerations, must function as a forum of general reference for developing acceptance for that process of progress toward such an emerging Eurasian culture, progress shared as a mode of policy-shaping dialogue and agreements among sovereign nations.
That said, we now proceed, with the help of reference to the work of Vernadsky, to the most basic, underlying issue of them all: the relevance of the special, rarely understood nature of our human species, its relevance for defining any competent view of the world and national economies today.
On the Road Toward Globalization
If we compare the so-called ecological potential of various species of higher apes, and compare that evidence with a study of the conditions of life for an ape-like species on this planet during the span of the known "ice ages," the planetary potential for a species of higher ape most closely resembling mankind would be in the millions of individuals. Today we have a reported population in excess of six billions, approximately three decimal orders of magnitude greater than a form of man which would apparently approximate the requirements of a higher ape. Whence the difference?
We also have studies of the Earth's human population going back into pre-historic times, with a marked up-shift in the potential population since that Fifteenth-Century Renaissance which rose from the ashes of Europe's Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age. (See Figure 1.)
Since that Renaissance, especially since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, until developments of the recent four decades, there has been an acceleration among otherwise asymmetric demographic patterns of long-term population-increase, and a tendency, coming out of Europe and the Americas, into Asia, for example, for an accompanying improvement in the physical standard of living, and the longevity of the populations.
This data is asymmetric in several respects which are of significance for our present subject of physical economy. However, the raw data's impact is itself sufficient evidence of a great increase in the potential relative population-density of the human species since the changes in policy associated with the Fifteenth-Century birth of the modern sovereign nation-state, and the rapid, science-driven changes in productive powers of labor unleashed under the impact of France's so-called dirigist (Colbertiste) policies during the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
Only during the recent forty years, has the long-term trend turned downward, a poorly understood trend which is about to overtake the poorly supported, threatened growth of some parts of the world population rather brutally, that very soon. Whence that long wave of earlier net gain?
When we review the good estimates and other statistical views of the composition of the world's population from as far back as we can trace this with reasonable accuracy, one set of facts respecting the characteristic historic differences between the demography of European and Asian cultures stands out. (See Figure 2.) Throughout this time, European civilization has been less populous, by a relatively great margin, than Asian. Yet, the power expressed by European civilization has been greater, especially since the rise of Classical Greek culture since no later than approximately the Seventh Century B.C. The second set of facts, is the revolutionary increase in the per-capita power of European civilization unleashed by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, as these effects began to be reflected more conspicuously since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia's close of the 1492-1648 interval of religious warfare which the Venetian Party of Europe had unleashed, over the 1492-1648 interval, in the ultramontane Venetian Party's effort to destroy the reforms introduced by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.[49]
During the recent forty years, the long-term up-trend in European culture generally, and in modern European culture most emphatically, has been reversed to the relative disadvantage of European culture, and to the relative, but therefore actually deceptive advantage of emerging powers of Asia.[50]
Whence the thus indicated periods of superiority of per-capita performance by European civilization, and whence, from the same vantage-point, came the recent forty-year decline of European civilization?
We know that individual human beings drawn from any of each among the local cultures of the planet show an equal potential for achievement, an achievement in which immigrants into European culture are often conspicuously better motivated to achieve creative and other excellence than the relatively more complacent members of the society which the immigrant has entered. All human beings have the same potential in this respect; the significant differences in potential quality of performance are cultural. The same study shows also that the dragging down of one part of a population drags down the moral level and capacity for net achievement of the relevant culture as a whole.
The root of the relative, long-term historical advantage enjoyed by European culture lies in the radiation of Greek Classical culture, in what historian Friedrich Schiller identifies as the moral and other superiority of the standpoint of the exemplary Classical figure of Solon of Athens, over the morally regrettable, decadent culture of Lycurgus's Sparta.
The core of the issue is to be seen reflected in the attitudes toward those relatively poorer parts of society which are treated more or less categorically as human cattle. Even a culture which practices the herding of the greater mass of the population as human cattle, but whose idea of the nature of man is contrary to the notion of a permanent class of human cattle, as in the post-Lincoln U.S.A. until recently, has a moral advantage which translates, through radiated cultural influences, into a rather large, potential physical advantage, as was demonstrated by the Italy-centered Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, by that explosion of scientific and cultural progress which was centered in Colbert's France, and by various crucial aspects within the history of the U.S.A.
Take the case for the former advantage of the U.S.A., relative to Europe generally, especially during the exemplary interval from the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln through that of Franklin Roosevelt. The poor of Europe who fled to the U.S. for economic and social opportunity, were transformed over the course of a generation or two, into a more fertilely creative, more productive population than had those families remained in Europe.
This has to do, essentially, with the special nature of man, especially the related form of induced self-image of the typical individual member of the society. This portends a potential catastrophe in Asia, even in those nations which are emerging as relatively great new world powers, unless the image of man as reflected in the condition of the great mass of poor, is upgraded from the status of cheap labor, to an intellectually enlightened, creatively innovative mass of the population. This task becomes, obviously, a crucial problem in the context of any global discussion of the matters of a dialogue of cultures.
It is important, therefore, to stress that the disgusting spectacle which European civilization has been making of itself, especially during the recent forty years, is not to the credit of Asia culture, but rather proof of the way in which European civilization has willfully disgraced and degraded itself by tolerating the resurgent global tyranny of the modern form of the Venetian Party. Frankly, the strongest single piece of evidence which could be presented, of the cultural and moral decadence of the U.S. population today, is the fact that that nation could be so collectively shameless as to, apparently, elect, and, worse, accept the election of a George W. Bush, Jr. as President. It has often been said, that those (persons, or nations) whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Globalization is madness. President Bush is, indeed, mad.
Two great issues to be set before any competent dialogue of cultures are expressed by the considerations which I have just summarized. What is the nature of man? How do we enable societies to purge themselves of that cultural baggage which accepts the degradation of great masses of the population to the relative status of expendable human cattle? These queries, as the Religious Society of Friends might wish to put the point, are also the key for defining the root of that moral depravity of the U.S.A. which is expressed by the presence of George W. Bush, Jr. and his crew in the U.S. Presidency.
Potential Relative Population-Density
How shall we define this factor of culture in a universal way, in a way relevant to all parts of our planet?
Implicitly, Vernadsky answers those questions in essential, if but broad terms. My own discoveries in the science of physical economy, referencing Leibniz's work, of the late 1950s and early 1960s, are an included key to solving the remainder of the questions implicitly posed by Vernadsky's contributions on this matter. I begin with certain essential reflections of my own work. I limit my report on that subject here to a summary description of some bare essentials, focused on the least technologically burdensome considerations which must be taken into account to support insight into the gist of Vernadsky's crucial contributions to the way in which the world economy must be organized and managed at this stage in the evolution of our planet.
The root value which provides the functional basis in my method of physical-economic accounting, does not involve the notion of money as a value taken into consideration for defining the economy as a physical process. Only essential physical values are taken into account as the primary factors in the physical-economic aspects of the cycle as such. Money, which should be created, issued, and controlled by sovereign government, I define, and treat chiefly in its normal role in a healthy form of modern society, as an end-result of physical-economic decisions and related actions of production and distribution within that more or less state-regulated form of organization of a national and world economy known to leading economists such as Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, as the American System of political-economy of U.S. Presidents Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and some others.
Why waste effort by indulging proposals to design the perpetuation of the presently terminal form of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal form of world system, an essentially outmoded, pro-feudalist money-system, at a time when an entirely different money-system must be created, one premised on the alternate foundation of a physical-economic basis? Why try to convince an ocean liner to fly into geostationary Earth orbit?
I begin this bare outline of essential elements of the physical-economic conception of the American System, with the density of population, as defined in terms of members of family households, and count these as measured per square kilometer of both the total territory available, and as the territory occupied by the relevant residences and of relevant physical activities by members of those households. I compare the consumption required to sustain those households, with the physically efficient output of the labor performed by members of those households. The primary measurements to be made, are a comparison of the output of the work of those households to the level of consumption, by society as a whole, of the same classes of products needed to sustain those households, and also the society in which they live, that in the quality of existence of those modes of production and the expression in produced output, which latter is measured per capita and per square kilometer of relevant territory occupied by these households and the activities associated with their functions in society, and, most emphatically, in the determination of the characteristics of the economic cycle.
The mission (the expressed intention) of the productive cycle must be to increase the net, physically defined productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer, while raising the level of life-expectancy within that population. This notion underlies the preliminary phase of the process of conception of a potential relative population-density per capita and per square kilometer. The central notion is that, that quality of existence of the household, which improves the ratio of production to that required increase of consumption, should not fall, but will be improved anti-entropically.[51]
In pedagogical first approximations, the primary cycle measured is a span from the consumption of product by the household until the final product of production is swallowed up by the act of final consumption, which latter is the point at which the produced material is taken out of the economic cycle of production.[52]
Other production, such as that associated with intermediate output, is treated as production and consumption internal to the cycle of production of net "final" output. In other words, to add intermediate product to final product in computing national output is often, at least in part, double-counting, especially since the rise of the influence of the so-called Baby-Boomer generation.[53] The cost of intermediate product is absorbed in aggregate cost incurred, within the cycle, that of final output. The use of the "value added" concept helps correct the potential discrepancy statistically, but does not actually cure it, since the cost attributed to intermediate production, especially in a financial-pricing system, may be either significantly in excess, or significantly less, correlated with what should be supplied to maintain the required equilibrium in technology-driven net growth of final output per capita. The case of the production of inherently obsolete components, such as buggy-whips for automobiles, is only one example of the various ways in which the relevant error of assumption might be expressed.
It were better to think in physical, rather than monetary terms, of a capital ratio of intermediate product to final product, treating intermediate product, otherwise, as a capital factor of cost in the systemic cycle as a whole. The point is, that cost should be defined in respect to rates of technological progress and related productivity-rate improvements, rather than by methods of financial accounting which are more or less indifferent to these implications. We must avoid accounting methods which tend, unfortunately, to be used as a substitute for the work of serious economic-policy shaping.
In between those two end-points, the production of intermediate values occurs. These include basic economic infrastructure, which is measured approximately in square-kilometer and per-capita terms, and capital of the production cycle itself. These two classes of intermediate product are classed as capital formation, and are measured in years of useful physical life. In first approximation, the proper measurements for capital formation are essentially the following.
We begin with the span from birth to adult or equivalent functional maturity of the newborn member of society. This is the most useful unit of measurement for defining capital cycles, and is itself a capital cycle. We are concerned to compare the useful physical life of a capital improvement for infrastructure or production with the standard period of investment represented by the development of a child from infancy to economically functional adult maturity. The functional assumption is, that the rate of net increase of the productive powers of labor should correspond to both an improvement in the standard of living within households, and the convergence of the equivalent of a school-leaving age on some optimum, such as, a proper future perspective for the U.S. today, a twenty-five-year old school-leaving age of a qualified professional.[54]
Overall, against the background just summarized, there are two aspects of the process, as roughly described in that manner, which bear upon what I shall now emphasize about Vernadsky's developed conception of the Noösphere.
One is that kind of improvement of the Biosphere as such which increases the productive potential of an area, as potential may be measured in (human) per-capita and per-square-kilometer terms, rather than other measures.
The second, is the qualitative and quantitative development of that portion of the Noösphere as such, which, in first approximation, is the product of cognitive, rather than biological functions/components of cumulative fossil-formation on the planet.
The general rule already implicit in Vernadsky's own portrait of the subject, is that the rate of increase of useful fossils of the Noösphere should be greater than the rate for fossils of the Biosphere, while the development of the Biosphere, per square kilometer, should be advanced.
The driver of this latter ratio is the cognitive (noëtic) powers specific to the human individual. Both rates combined can be expressed as one, when we take into account the fact that the willful improvement of the Biosphere, in per-square-kilometer terms, is a product of increases in productivity which have been generated by man's creative powers.
The foregoing points on economy considered from a physical, rather than a monetary-financial standpoint, converge on a concept which I developed more than a half-century ago, which I named potential relative population-density. The term seemed to me then to be one within the practical reach of industrial engineers or comparable technicians of the productive process, while nonetheless implying the higher standpoint of relevance, a specifically Riemannian view of the process which a productive form of modern economy expresses.
Essentially: given a relevant territory, the potential productivity of the whole population relevant to that territory, as expressed in demographic terms, reflects, on the one hand, the development of the productive process, including the population and its labor-force, as such; but, the level of performance achieved depends upon the development of the territory, including the production facilities and available services, in which this activity occurs.
In the final analysis, this includes mankind's management of all of those physical processes associated with our planet which are relevant to human existence and improvement of the potential relative population-density of mankind on this planet. On this account, this view from a higher standpoint, the condition of human life on this planet today, elevates the work of Vernadsky on the concept of the Noösphere from the more limited domain of selected applications of scientific research, into being, under presently emerging planetary conditions, an indispensably determining feature of any economics practice to be taken seriously by governments and the like today.
The measure of changes which foster the implied result is the anti-entropy of the relevant current policy of practice.
These indicated factors all orbit about a single central question: the nature of man as a cognitive (i.e., noëtic) being, as set apart from, and above the beasts. The key is the power of hypothesizing, as defined by Plato's collection of Socratic dialogues. It is to the extent that society is organized around the role of that creative function unique to the human individual, and to the degree that the individual member of society in general is induced to cultivate, and assisted in cultivating and employing that specific creative potential within themselves, that economies may prosper, and the cultural development and improved physical well-being of the people in those societies may be promoted.
Thus, the suppression of the cognitive development within a large ration of the population, as by customary means, results in a reduced capacity for development in the population as a whole, including the relatively more "privileged" strata. The poor may not lose their humanity under such depressed conditions, but they do lose much of their potential development as human beings. The tolerance of such conditions, in the name of traditional values, is the most deadly source of weakness in any culture.
Therefore, the objective of changes in the design of the productive process itself, must be, of course, the effect of the consumption of the product. That granted, the way in which that effect is accomplished, must also mean included emphasis on the development of the human quality of the role of the human being in the productive process. People who disdain physical labor, for example, tend to underestimate the importance of emphasis of the work-process on fostering, or tendency to dull the cognitive factor in the work and life of the operative.[55]
We shall resume that latter line of discussion, on the role of man's creative powers in an economy studied from the vantage-point of Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere, after now finishing up another matter about economy which must now be put away. That matter is the functional difference between a monetary system of the medieval type, which is the presently dominant form of the world's monetary-financial system today, and a modern monetary system of the type whose design is unique to the two original Eighteenth-Century constitutions of the U.S.A.[56]
The Modern Money Economy
The gain in productivity which occurs within the bounds of that simplified portrait of a physical economy which I have given above, illustrates the basis for a real form of profit—a form of physical, rather than monetary-financial profit, of which the former may be also termed the margin of social profit which is generated within the terms of what I have described above as a rough sketch of the rudiments of a physical economy. This social profit is distinct from the fictitious form of what is accounted as financial profit, the latter attributed by standard financial-accounting practice to the implicitly feudalist fictions of a monetary-financial system on which contemporary financial-accounting practice presently relies.
There is nothing wrong with good financial accounting, especially if it is also honest. Accounting is clearly necessary in a modern economy, especially one in which high-binders such as the predatory Enron crew ran amok in the wake of the Bush family's dynastic scheming. Within the legitimate practice of that mode of accounting, the trouble usually arises in the guise of those adopted fictions whose existence and effects the credulous or simply inattentive reader overlooks. The qualitatively more serious kind of error arises when some accountants, like Professor Milton Friedman of the late Friedrich von Hayek's frankly pro-Satanic Mont Pelerin cult, parade themselves as economists, when they are only, at their least worst, financial accountants of a sort who rely heavily for their doctrines and proffered conclusions, on knowing actually less than nothing about a real economy.[57]
Nonetheless, we must not permit the accountants, honestly qualified or not, to design the system which they employ for their trade. Rather, the accounting profession must adapt its standards of practice to the mission which the Constitution and the functions of government define as the goals and standards to be applied to the design and maintenance of accounting systems. Therefore, one of today's problems, especially under the lunatic reign of the current U.S. Bush Administration, is that we have presently very few economists qualified to provide the accountants with the mission-oriented standards of practice which the accounting profession should follow. Even those who are qualified can not operate effectively under the current reign of lunacy from the President's Executive Mansion and kindred fonts of influential opinion. Even without the added burden of that addle-headed administration, that problem of attempting to define sane standards for today's accounting practice could not be solved without overturning the rule of the presently reigning monetary-financial system.
As to the origins of today's popular monetary theory, the following point of clarification is most urgent at this time of crisis.
After my original discoveries in a science of physical economy, I engaged for a time in relevant continuing 1950s studies. I tracked the subject of the history of money and financial accounting from the interval of the rise of usury within the bow-tenure system of ancient southern Mesopotamia, through, and beyond the traffic between Mesopotamia and the Hittites, the latter a traffic which providently (for modern scholars) employed cuneiform-tablet systems (rather than perishable parchment documents) as the medium for bills of exchange which could be considered quite modern in intent and use. Against that background in samplings of ancient society, I tracked the emergence of European money systems through channels of development of those practices such as Tyre and the great usury center at the cult of Delphi, into those developments in the Roman system which have been the continuing basis for the origins of most European monetary systems. My interest included the modern forms which appeared since double-entry bookkeeping emerged in modern society from its now inherently anachronistic origins in the feudal practice of the Venetian financier oligarchy, a development which apparently occurred late during the pre-Renaissance medieval, feudal centuries of ultramontane rule.[58]
The need for a tolerable species of money economy operating as an adjunct to a modern physical economy, arises as a by-product of the special nature of man as uniquely a creative species, in which creativity, as Vernadsky defines the noëtic principle, is located as a sovereign quality of human individuals.[59] Thus, the transfer of wealth-making in progress through the social process, requires a means by which certain functions within the process can be assisted in the special way associated with the institution of a state-created money-system. The proper function of the general management of money in a modern society, is to regulate the flow of productive activity and consumption in such a way as to foster an optimal rate of that kind of growth which can be generated only through fostering the use and development of the sovereign individual creative powers of individuals. However, to fulfill that function, the generation and flow of money must be regulated, primarily by government, so as to prevent that idiot, money, from running off in lunatic directions on its own inherently inhuman impulse, otherwise to be recognized as a usurer's greed.
The axiomatic quality of evil intrinsic to currently popularized versions of feudal and even more ancient dogmas respecting the idea of money, is the assumption that money has some intrinsic physical, or, at least moral power, a natural right of usury, which should rightly act as a physical principle of the real economy. This notion of money as "filthy lucre," is something to be regarded even as inherently Satanic in nature. Money's bad reputation on this account is warranted by the fact that Mandeville, while a colorfully nasty fellow of obviously bad personal morals, was not off the mark in insisting that money, as defined by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal outgrowth of the Venetian tradition, does depend upon something nasty from outside the real universe, a kind of "Maxwell's demon," suspect as probably from Hell, who, according to Mandeville, von Hayek, Friedman, et al., rewards a nation's promotion of vice with public benefits.
However the function of money, as it should occur in a modern nation-state economy, and in relations among such economies, must be as different from the function of money in ancient and medieval society, or in expressions of the Venetian money-system in modern economies, as men differ from monkeys. There is no intrinsically lawful law which prescribes a certain rate of interest as an inherently usurious, lawful property of money per se.
What we have today, as typified by the post-1971 IMF system, is essentially a continuation of a medieval system of monetary-financier usury, the present international monetary system, which has been copied out of, and is largely a direct continuation of the medieval ultramontane tradition, to be the dominant, intrinsically feudalist form of monetary-financial system of our planet today.[60] As a consequence of the revival of the power of the Venetian financier oligarchy at the close of the Fifteenth Century, and the shift of the principal operations of that oligarchical system into the form of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism's Eighteenth-Century Venetian Party system, we have the following deadly irony in today's world economy as a whole.
So, as a combined result of the impact of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the Treaty of Westphalia, and the birth of the leading rival of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, the American System of political-economy, we have the following paradoxical form of currently hegemonic world system of today. This problem has a history which includes the following relevant highlights.
Since the counter-revolutionary changes in the U.S. economy and IMF under the delegated influence of such as Nixon Administration figure George Shultz during 1971-1972, the present, fatally disease-ridden, Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, not a U.S. system allowed under the original intent of U.S. Federal Constitution, is the world's presently reigning monetary-financial system. However, at any moment the United States might invoke the principles of the American System of political-economy embedded in its Federal Constitution, as I propose that we do this, we would have a state of conflict between two world systems, one the reanimated U.S. system, and the opposing Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetary-financial system. The principal historical ironies of those sundry actual and potential configurations, are the following.
The significance of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Classical Renaissance, was the development of the modern form of sovereign nation-state, through a sharp return to the legacy of the Classical Greece of Plato, and a shedding of much of the trappings of both the Roman imperial heritage and its Venetian-Norman medieval ultramontane successor.[61]
The revival of Venetian power during and following the closing decades of the Fifteenth Century, created a situation in which, on the one side, a form of society, the modern sovereign nation-state (the commonwealth), based on the principle of the general welfare, had come into existence together with a surge of scientific and technological progress through the continuing influence of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, even beyond the set-backs of a period from the late Fifteenth Century under the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. However, with the revival of the power of the Venetian financier oligarchy, medieval monetary-financial practices challenged and often dominated the emerging new world political order of sovereign nation-states.
The result has been a dual world system, of inherently imperialist (e.g., ultramontane) monetary-financial systems, which date from ancient and medieval political and cultural forms of society, and, opposing that, the institution of the modern sovereign nation-state which is based upon commitment to scientific and cultural progress on behalf of the general welfare.
Now, since 1776, the greatest threat to the financier-oligarchical—i.e., Venetian Party—element of world power, had been the fact that the American System of political-economy, was the chief constitutional paradigm for the modern sovereign nation-state republic. The U.S. Constitution, as a paradigm for the true modern sovereign nation-state, had threatened repeatedly, especially from the time of the Presidencies of Abraham Lincoln through Franklin Roosevelt, to lead a revolt of nations aggregating to a preponderance of combined world power and influence over the instinctively ultramontane form of Venetian Party power which became centered in the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system.
Notable are those pro-American System reforms of the economic policies of Germany, Russia, Japan, and others which occurred as reaction to the evidence presented by the 1876 U.S. Centennial exposition in Philadelphia, and the perceived threat, seen from both Europe and the financier-oligarchical faction inside the U.S.A., that Franklin Roosevelt's leadership during the 1939-1945 period of warfare, and Roosevelt's 1944 design of the Bretton Woods system, would mean a spread and consolidation of the American System of political-economy through U.S. policies of support for liberating the world's colonies to become sovereign nation-states.
On this account, the death of President Franklin Roosevelt was used, by aid of a complicit President Harry Truman, to launch the demons of nuclear and pro-colonialist warfare in such a way as to lay the basis for that future overthrow of the legacy of Roosevelt's economic polity, an overthrow which was implemented in its most crucial essentials during the 1971-1982 interval, which is to say, on the watch of Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski's tenures as U.S. National Security Advisors. As an integral part of this effort to nullify the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, important elements of the Nazi system were assimilated into what became the post-war NATO system, and other relevant positions, through aid of U.S. circles associated with the notorious Allen Dulles. The present regime of President George W. Bush, is the present state of fruitiness of that disgusting, decades-long endeavor.
Presently, that anti-U.S., post-1945 Venetian Party policy, has reached the point of crisis at which a so-called "post-Westphalian" system of world government (e.g., "globalization") is intended to uproot the last residue of not only the American System itself, but also accomplish the establishment and consolidation of a system of de facto Venetian Party, imperial world government which would, by actions such as those of the present European Commission, reverse every reform traced to the great Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. For the U.S. patriot, therefore, the existence of such a system within our national borders, is tantamount to treason. Such an enterprise, were it to succeed in that respect, would ensure the immediate plunge of the entire planet into a prolonged dark age for all humanity, from which it were inevitable that few presently existing nations and peoples would emerge in a recognizable form.
In this way, the present world monetary-financial system is both a post-feudal anachronism in principle, and an intolerable threat to civilization as a whole, should it be continued. However, in the meantime, this ugly incongruity, this wicked anachronism, this virtual legendary, blood-sucking Dracula from a dark and ugly ruin of history past, this Venetian Party style in monetary-financial system, is the incarnate form of the prevalent ideology of most existing governments and relevant international institutions. It is the parasite, a disease, which dominates our economies, and rules our national culture and life like a parasite, from within.
Yet, our economists and accountants pay regular homage at the altar of that pagan monster who preys upon the nations and peoples today. These acolytes of the Venetian Party tradition, propose to explain the economy, and design the policies of our republic in worshipful service of that Moloch of contemporary monetarism.
The other feature to be emphasized, again, is that the mere present-day existence of that monetary-financial system is not only an historical, human-blood-sucking anachronism in and of itself. It has become an integral part of our systems of government and economy, to such a degree that the host could not continue to live without now ridding itself of that parasite.
Yet, our current majority of foolish economists and accountants continue to explain how the U.S. and world economy work, or should work, according to the special interest of an alien relic of feudalism which has no tolerable function within a successful form of modern economy.
This means that we must abandon that foolish doctrine, the so-called theory taught as economics in most of our universities and other relevant locations today. We must relieve our political leaders of that alien monetarist succubus now eating at their brains. More important than that, we must free ourselves so that a sane form of economy, or economic policy-shaping, could be achieved through aid of eradicating any controlling system of thought which sought to explain an economy in terms of the free circulation of money by so-called "independent central banking systems" or their like.
The Way to Regulation, Credit and Capital
I now turn your attention directly to the matters of economic policy-design of policies of general economic regulation, credit, and capital, in and among nations. By no means, are these matters merely peripheral to the subject of a dialogue of cultures. These are matters of life-and-death importance for most of the world's population today.
Keeping the argument to be made as simple as possible: the principle of economic regulation by governments, is, in effect the following:
Begin with the matter of the regulation of prices. In the preliminary statement on this subject now, I refer to the relative money-prices; however, the argument as to principle is based not on the actual money-price, but looks at these problems from the standpoint of a physical price.
Ultimately, after we have made reasonable allowances for needed temporary adjustments during the short- to medium-term, the price of the physical capital required for employment in producing a certain quantity and quality of product, must not fall below a level at which the price of goods corresponds to what is needed, as defined in physical terms, to cover both the continued production of goods, and the maintenance, replacement, and progressive development of the physical capital needed for maintaining and improving that quantity and quality of output over the long term of capital cycles.
This level includes the cost of maintaining households of actual and prospective operatives at cultural standards of physical income consistent with not only the work which they are to be expected to do, but the always rising general cultural level required for the population as a whole. The price of goods themselves must also include the charges to that production for the maintenance of the household of the enterprise's operatives and essential staff, and appropriate support of the government and basic economic infrastructure upon which that operation's enterprises depend.
Those and related considerations determine the base-line for estimation of what has been termed a fair price. Therefore, it would appear to follow from that, that, on principle, if the price is not fair, it is wrong. Over the long term, that must become the intended and realized effect.
However, getting to a quality and quantity of short- to medium-term performance corresponding to the delivery of that intended longer-term result, is not a simple matter. In this connection, there are considerations which the world and its nations individually must now take into account, which may have been touched upon by others, peripherally, before this time, but which are presently of crucial importance, and which must be addressed, as I do now, in a completely fresh way, that in light of the practical implications of Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere for today's policy-making.
In the long run, any forced reduction of the prices of a nation's product below the fair price level is as insane as it is immoral. But—a rather large but—there are still some qualified kinds of permissible short- to medium-term exceptions, even required exceptions to this rule, during the relatively shorter term. I explain that point by aid of beginning now with a bit of relevant, sometimes curious sidelights, as illustrations from the history of this problem in policy-shaping. After that brief bit of pedagogically useful teasing of the reader's possible prejudices on this subject, to loosen up the discussion in this special topical area, I shall turn our attention to the meat of the matter which I have just described in broad terms. As I shall show summarily here, matters are not quite as simple as even most of the so-called experts were taught to understand: not at all.
Sometimes, nations have been compelled to choose, in what is virtually their own free choice of policy-shaping, to lower the prices paid for their goods, and wages, below fair price levels, as China has been doing, as a policy for the time of approximately the present quarter-century.
This policy of China and some other developing nations, is what a once-famous Soviet economist of the 1920s and early 1930s, Preobrazhensky, called socialist primitive accumulation. In his writings, that meant building up the Soviet industrial development of the 1920s, and perhaps somewhat beyond, through a transfer of part of the physical capital which might be generated, as at then current world prices, within the agricultural sector, as transfers to the industrial sector. This could be done through such devices as relative agricultural prices paid for domestic consumption set below what would have been the calculable relatively fair price level for net payments to the agricultural sector at that time. In China today, it is using cheap labor in China, to produce goods for sale on the world market, in order to accumulate advanced technology as physical capital investments for the China of a generation ahead.
The term primitive accumulation as used by Preobrazhensky, had been used to similar effect by the sanest and most gifted socialist economist of the early Twentieth Century, Rosa Luxemburg.[62] Preobrazhensky used the notion of socialist primitive accumulation to distinguish the motive for such a Soviet policy from the role of primitive accumulation in the practice of imperial financier policy as reported by Luxemburg. Otherwise, the problem he addressed in this way, was neither specifically Soviet, nor peculiar to economies classified, prior to 1989, as nations with socialist constitutions. It is a commonplace challenge, and often a menace, faced by economies of developing nations, even prior to the 1971-1972 radical changes made in the world's monetary system.[63]
Preobrazhensky saw it to be necessary that the young Soviet republic accept the use of a policy employing primitive accumulation as representing a loss of what would have been a fair price level, through the medium of its import and export activities, and also domestic policies. This was considered by him a temporary loss suffered in the interest of building up the Soviet economy toward levels of relative parity in physical productivity with other European nations. Soviet Left Opposition founder Preobrazhensky's factional attacks on the policies of Soviet official Bukharin at that time,[64] went to the core of that definition of primitive accumulation in a way which points to the strategic significance of both China's currency policies and foreign investor policies today, policies whose significance the foolish George W. Bush Administration seems simply incapable of understanding, or some worse motive, today.
As I have already noted here, Preobrazhensky's proposals and actions in this matter echoed insights provided by the writings of the Rosa Luxemburg who was perhaps the only competent economist among socialist figures of the earlier decades of the last century. Notably, she, in opposition to all of her leading socialist rivals in the world at that time, V.I. Lenin notably included, rejected the (in fact) childishly popular proposition that the emergence of "imperialism" was a lawful product of the development of industrial capital in a manner which they insisted should have been foreseen as a natural outgrowth of the "laws of capitalism" as attributed to Karl Marx, whereas Luxemburg, who suffered no such ideological infirmities of mind in the matter of Marx's doctrines on this account, studied the political history of the matter, and recognized the imperialism of that period to be a reflection of the (actually Venetian style) role of international financial loans.
U.S. State Department specialist Herbert Feis's work later documented the same conclusion as Luxemburg presented. It is a conclusion we could also draw from study of the current foreign-policy role of the U.S.'s George Shultz since the launching of the 1971-1972 collapsing of the Bretton Woods system, as well as the traditional and continuing role of the United Kingdom, as typified by the connections of its Bank of Scotland, as a leading imperialist power still today.[65]
It is impossible to understand anything important about the economic features of the relations between Europe and the former (and also, in fact, present) colonial world, without stumbling into the midst of controversies, and also wars, whose central feature is the same issue of primitive accumulation.
Look at this matter, the subject of primitive accumulation, from the standpoint represented by my work, as my own long-standing, developed views in the matter have been significantly expanded and otherwise improved by my recently increased emphasis on Vernadsky's definitions of the Noösphere.[66] This leads us, rather directly, as my reference to China implies, into the matter of shaping the policies of nations on the subjects of finance and regulation, a key feature of any competent conduct of a dialogue of cultures. Study of the topical areas brought into view by the arguments of such as Luxemburg and Preobrazhensky on the subject of primitive accumulation, would compel our attention, quite usefully still today, to a larger body of general principles of extraordinary importance for both past and present shaping of national policies as a whole, and for meeting the challenges to a cooperating community of sovereign nation-states posed by the newly leading trends now already under way.[67]
Let us now proceed accordingly, taking the subject from, so to speak, top to bottom.
There can be no competent study of economy which does not begin with focus of attention on the essential difference between man and beast. That is illustrated by the rise of the human population of our planet from the level of millions possible for the habitation of the planet by a species of higher ape, to the billions of today. This difference is the result of a factor which does not exist in any species inferior to man, that power of hypothesizing which is the foundation for the development of European civilization since Thales, Solon of Athens, and the Pythagoreans, as that power is codified for appreciation through, chiefly, the collection of Plato's dialogues.
The characteristic, corresponding physical feature of the human species' existence, is the increase of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, an increase which does occur, and could only occur through the fruits of hypothesizing as summarily defined by Plato's Socratic dialogues.
In ordinary discussion of economy, a useful approximation of the scientific explanation is met in the discussion of a margin of gain attributable to improved technology. Arguments of that form are often approximately true as rule-of-thumb explanations. It is only when we trace particular technological improvements back to the design of some unique proof-of-principle experimental apparatus, as Riemann defines unique experiments of that significance, that we can locate the place of a technological improvement in a way adequate for representing the relevant theory.
This development occurs within the context of what is already a self-developing universe. From the standpoint of Vernadsky's writings on the subject of the Noösphere, this development appears as self-development of, and interdependent development among the three categorical, but essentially interacting forms of physical existence, known respectively as what are, from the standpoint of crucial-experimental method, the abiotic, biotic, and noëtic domains. Each of these three is a developing domain, as the famous aphorism of Heraclitus points out; but their development is also interactive. Man is a willfully self-developing, rather than fixed species (as each and all of the lower species are as a definite species), who exists by interaction with each and all of these three domains. Modern knowledge shows that, as Heraclitus insists, and as Leibniz defines "the best of all possible worlds": nothing exists in the universe, but a quality of change which is of this anti-entropic quality.[68]
For purposes of illustration of that concept of a general principle of development, take the following examples.
To the best of reported knowledge to us thus far, the general picture is, that our Sun began existence as a fast-spinning solitary object, which, in accord with Kepler's argument, shed some of its matter to a surrounding disk, a disk probably forming a polarized plasma, in which latter those higher fractions of the Solar System's basic stock from the Mendeleyev Periodic Table were generated through impact of radiation on this region from the Sun. This material from that region of the disk was then "fractionally distilled," to occupy the predetermined orbital pathways of the harmonic characteristics estimated by Kepler. As Gauss argued, the characteristics of the orbit determined the condensation of the orbital material into at least most among planets and associated moons. Beyond that, the universe as a whole is also a self-developing domain. Thus, for that universe, science is not primarily a matter of fixed objects, but of lawful processes of change governing the generation of, principally, higher qualities expressed even as "revolutionary" new physical states within the universe as a whole.
How old is that universe? At bottom, that becomes a silly question. How does one measure the age of a characteristically Kepler-Riemann process outside of which there is nothing, a process which Einstein described fairly as finite but unbounded? Therefore, by what conceivable standard could we measure an absolutely fundamental rate of reaction, or a constant rate of time, by a yardstick, such as an a priori one, external to the self-contained developmental process within that universe? Contrary to the Gnostics, the Creator lives within an eternal simultaneity of what I have defined here as a system of relations expressed by the function of living words. That latter is the only universe which could be known to us experimentally, as the argument of Philo against Aristotle implies, and also against, implicitly, Claudius Ptolemy. It is, therefore, to confine dialogue to reality, the changes in state within a qualitatively self-developing universe, which should be the chosen limits of science's concern. The important point to be emphasized, is that even the ostensibly abiotic universe, which the living Creator Himself inhabits actively, is already a self-developing universe, undergoing implicitly ordered qualitative changes in ontological state.
So, as the continuing picture emerges, we see that our planet has undergone internal phase-shifts in state, all that within an evolving Solar System, a process which has left behind what Vernadsky's method regards as fossils of what was generated in previous phases. These fossils include, among other things, what are regarded as mankind's available mineral resources, on which modern economy largely depends.
The methods which Riemann associates with the notion of unique experiments, as applied to such material as the work of Louis Pasteur and his followers, including Vernadsky himself, define the existence of a physical-experimental domain of living processes and the fossils which their active existence produces: the Biosphere, without which this planet's habitation by human life had not become feasible.
The same method of unique experiments defines a class of fossils which are generated solely through the synthetic powers of hypothesizing by the sovereign individual human mind, accumulations which are, in first apprehension, the footprints of the progress of the Noösphere.
These three, so defined domains are multiply-connected in Riemann's sense of that, but in such a way that mankind stands next to the living Creator of, and within this only universe which exists. There can be no reasonable doubt by any clear-headed person existing within this, the only existing universe we know, of the wisdom of the concluding sentences, on the nature of man and woman, alike, of the first chapter of the Mosaic Genesis. This, which I have just stated on man and woman, is the foundation of all true human knowledge. This conception of mankind, mankind so situated, is the only sound notion of the meaning of the term experimentally validated universal physical principles; this is the foundation of that which is worthy of the name of science, and of Reason.
With the recent developments on our planet, we have reached the point at which we can no longer rely upon what, in the past, has been often called "the bounty of nature." We can no longer assume that the planet's abiotic and biotic processes, as these might have been in existence without man's assistance, are sufficient to maintain a human population which is both expanding and developing. We have reached the point already, that merely containing the expansion of the human population's numbers would be a worse response to this approaching apparent limitation, than spending most of the waking hours, day and night, of all of our individuals of fertile ages in copulating to breed more individuals. Only the development of the condition and quality of the human individual can equip us to meet the challenge of apparent boundaries imposed by the presently approaching state of relations with the domains of the abiotic and Biosphere. We must now commit ourselves to develop the supply of abiotic and Biosphere resources on which an expanded and improved human life will depend.
This just-stated requirement is reflected in the domain of political-economy as an additional factor of physical cost which must be met, implicitly, as a growing part of the proverbial "cost of goods sold" in every part of this planet, therefore throughout this planet as a whole.
Here is where the combination of the failure to accomplish a balanced development of the entire populations of the various Asian nations, for example, and the destructive effects of the past forty years' rampage of that so-called "cultural paradigm-shift" known as the post-industrial "ecological counterculture," has brought the world into an accelerating state of ruin of not only an economic crisis of the present world system, but into the imminence of a threatened physical breakdown-crisis of the human population of this planet as a physical system. If that fact does not condition the conduct of a dialogue of cultures, then the attempted dialogue will be no benefit, but, rather, an apocalyptic catastrophe for all mankind for generations yet to come.
That is the first rule of the game for dealing with the challenge of urgent needs respecting the regulation of money, credit, prices, income, and capital-formation.
3. A Fixed-Exchange-Rate System
Given, the presently onrushing general breakdown-crisis of the world's monetary financial system, it is not possible that civilization could continue on this planet for much longer, without an immediate return to a system of relatively fixed exchange rates among perfectly sovereign nation-states, a return to a world whose economic affairs would have been organized in a mode akin to the original Bretton Woods system under U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. The only rational response to that crisis would be a general reorganization-in-bankruptcy of the present system, a reorganization relying upon the principled approach taken by President Franklin Roosevelt in March 1933.
Any dialogue of cultures which does not recognize the indispensable role of that responsive set of arrangements, would become the endorsement of an essentially immediate global catastrophe, that for all humanity, given the onrushing conditions of general breakdown-crisis of the world today. In the absence of the principled type of emergency measures which I have just summarized in the preceding elements of this report, a dialogue of cultures would rapidly degenerate into a minestrone of eclecticism, and the dialogue itself would, therefore, soon virtually go off the agenda of serious efforts in progress.
The crucial conception, on which the design and effectiveness of a fixed-exchange-rate system, such as that on which the original Bretton Woods arrangement's successes depended, is the concept of the perfectly sovereign nation-state republic. Unfortunately, this is a conception which is, to say the least, a poorly understood idea outside the leading currents of Classical thought in European and American history. These conceptions, which are significantly alien, axiomatically, to Asian culture until recently, must be clearly understood, and embraced by all partners to a dialogue of cultures, if that dialogue is to succeed in reaching its goals.
For example, the tendency toward thinking, that, because the European culture's role, notably that of the U.S.A., has currently failed, that Asian thought must now take over, at least to a very large degree. Views tending in that direction are to be viewed as, at best, a reflection of an unfortunately widespread, Romantic misunderstanding of world history considered in the large, a view which has yet to grasp the point that history is determined by processes, rather than the individual's simple passions.
The present problem on this point, is the failure to grasp the historical fact that it is not any nation, but rather the 1971-1972 version of the Venetian Party-created, present world monetary-financial system, which has created those conditions to which all parts of the world have adapted themselves, the failure to recognize what should be the obvious fact, that all parts of the present culture of the world are more or less equally guilty by reason of their decades-long participation, whether reluctantly, or not, in the intrinsically evil, 1971-2004, present world monetary-financial system and its correlatives. The problem is not so much the sickness of any one nation, as the prevalent current agreement of all to share this disease.
Therefore, before turning to the concrete features of the needed design of such a fixed-exchange-rate system, we must bring into perspective the unifying, therefore implicitly monotheistic element in the cultural basis for the possibility of a founding and existence of a truly self-subsisting system of sovereign nation-state republics on which a successful design of a dialogue of cultures would ultimately depend.[69]
This means, at least implicitly, that the efficiently sovereign nation-state republic should not, and, under present world conditions, can not rely upon its own autonomous will, as the madmen of the U.S. Bush regime have continued to attempt to do. True sovereignty depends upon the nation's conscious, willful commitment to the common good of all nations and peoples.
As the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia illustrates this principle of natural law among nations: The sovereign must come to the table of world affairs concerned with the consequences of decisions for all the nations of the planet first, and its own special concerns second, as was understood in the adoption of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. That was the difference between the achievements of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who saw his nation's destiny in the future of the whole world, including the freeing of those subjected to colonialism, and the miserable failures of his neo-colonialist, immediate successor. Otherwise, with the principle reflected in the Westphalia treaty, any agreement will degenerate into a sea of heteronomy more or less rapidly. I proceed immediately along that principled line of argument now.
First of all, we must bring to an end the delusion that issues of what is called "culture" could be competently separated from the issues of economy, or that principles of economy might be competently adduced from whatever were chosen as a set of ecumenical cultural values. Admittedly, the current policies of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism do, unfortunately, coexist with the residual best of European Classical culture; but the two co-exist as deadly adversaries. This is an arrangement in which a tortured Classical European culture lives, Liberally shackled; it is a culture which dwells, and sometimes sings beautifully, like figures of "The Prisoners' Chorus" in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, but the song is the anthem of the inhabitants of Liberalism's dungeon. Nonetheless, whatever might be said about world conditions of the past, without a society organized in a way coherent with the principles which I emphasize in this report, as in other relevant locations, as expressed by the American System of political-economy, there is no possible way in which a happy product of a dialogue of cultures could become an actuality of this planet today.
What might be regarded as the mysterious, hidden connection between Classical culture and economy as defined by that American System, is a matter which lies within the domain of the "living word," as I have presented that topic in an earlier chapter of this report. That subject, "the living word," touches the universal essence of human nature, and defines, therefore, what is, and is not the proper ordering of human relations in all parts of human existence, that in various times and places, past, present, and future. Economy as the American System implicitly defines it, is essentially nothing more exclusive to any culture, than being the principled difference between man and beast. It is a system of relations whose function depends upon that which is merely typified in expression as that scientific and technological progress which is the indispensable outer boundary, within which the potential scale and quality of existence of each and all parts of the human population are determined.
This conception is, of course, quite distinct from, and opposed to that Hobbes-Locke misconception of man adopted by the Liberals, and others, too. It is, in fact, the Promethean conception of man, at least implicitly so. It is a conception on which the future well-being of mankind depends, absolutely, under the perilously crisis-ridden conditions of the planet today.
The fixed-exchange-rate system, is, admittedly, not a principle of nature; it is only the adaptation of the application of the principle to a concrete situation which existed in the time of the original Bretton Woods system, and exists today, until now, as the only practicable expression of that same principle under the immediate conditions of the world at this moment. It is nonetheless, a practical current reflection of a true, underlying principle of nature, to which the ultimate victory therefore belongs, a point which must be understood in exactly that way.
However, since the relations among nations and peoples will be determined by the adoption or avoidance of establishing a system like that projected by President Franklin Roosevelt's Administration, there can be no efficient dialogue of cultures, without conditioning the understanding of that definition of culture in general in a way which is consistent with the urgent requirement for establishing a fixed-exchange-rate system. No efficient clock was ever designed to operate internally on the basis of the appearance of the exterior it presented to admiring spectators. That understanding is now an unavoidable point of reference for steering the way to a successful outcome for the dialogue itself.
That return to such a fixed-exchange-rate system, would be only a beginning. In addition to such absolutely imperative immediate reforms of the world monetary-financial system, the world is presently undergoing profound changes, whose implications go far beyond anything that presently leading institutions have been previously willing to consider. The reestablishment of a new fixed-exchange-rate system, should be considered merely a more or less permanent cornerstone on which successful further, sometimes radical adaptations to oncoming changes must be built.
In opening thus, this present chapter of this report, the reader should be forewarned, but not in the sense of being alarmed by this, that as we turn now to the subject of the internal dynamics of a new world system of separate, but cooperating, sovereign nation-state republics, we are dealing with a subject, which in its perfected expression, has a certain elegantly sublime unity of effect, but also an apparent simplicity which could be achieved only by what might appear to be a wonderfully complex counterpoint.
In the end, after sufficient reflection on this paradoxical side of the matter, we should recognize that this counterpoint also reflects the way in which the human mind functions at its best, a state of mind which is reflected by Leibniz's "the best of all possible worlds (universes)." The mechanism by which this sense of individual participation in that universe is realized, is reflected in Leibniz's attack on the wicked falsehood of John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. Leibniz's prescription is that the existence of society requires a fundamentally principled commitment to the promotion of the human happiness of an essentially immortal being: as I have outlined that case for the constitutional principle of the general welfare, above. Thus, the concept of the functional unity of a community of respectively sovereign nation-state republics, expresses the natural unity of effect which the design of human nature, as the expression of the species of an immortal being, were implicitly intended to achieve.
It is therefore of crucial relevance to note, that the American System of political-economy was the result of the rejection of that opposing Liberal system, the which is typified, still today, by the same Lockean argument of the Confederacy's slaveholders then, the pro-slavery doctrine of so-called "shareholder value," the same Lockean principle of usury under the post-1972 IMF today. It was the anti-Locke (e.g., anti-Liberal) culture represented by the leading role of Benjamin Franklin, a culture strongly influenced by, most emphatically, the personality of Gottfried Leibniz, which gave birth to that design of the American System described by Treasury Secretary Hamilton.
That is to say, there is a natural, principled reciprocity between the humanistic notions of culture and economy, a connection rooted in that distinction of man from beast which is expressed by what I have defined, above, the function of "the living word."
Thus, to understand what must happen now, it is essential to recognize that although the institution of the modern sovereign nation-state was established in Europe only a few centuries ago, the requirement of that institution for the modern world, was already embedded as a universal physical principle, in the notion of the original, specific nature of the human being as that of an immortal personality. The fact, that the institution of the sovereign nation-state is to be seen as a very late arrival in the development of our species, reflects nothing as much as that humanity's prolonged earlier sojourn in pathetically childish states of cultural development. Consequently, the underlying challenge of a dialogue of cultures today, is the urgency of bringing the leading layers of influence of humanity as a whole out of the grip of cultural habits which have been regarded as the virtual "childhood diseases" of human culture to date.[70]
The scientific premises for that view, which some will mistakenly regard as a debatable assertion, have already been developed to a significant degree of approximation in earlier portions of this report, especially in treating the notion of "the living word." However, we have now reached the stage in this report, at which the most crucial of the practical implications of this principle are to be made more perfectly clear, even as presented now to an audience including persons who might wish to disagree, even passionately.
The principled key to this requirement of the sovereign nation-state republic, lies, as I have just emphasized this once again, in the intersection of the universal physical principle of cognition by individuals, and the function of what I have identified as the living word, the latter as the medium of communication of ideas of universal physical, and related principles within society. That intersection defines the Noösphere as associated with the argument by Vernadsky.
For the reason of this distinction, although man has the mortal attributes of an animal (a mammal), the human individual's existence, as human rather than bestial, is nonetheless defined by, and depends for its continued existence upon the immortal aspect of man, as expressed by his cognitive powers. Despite the hostility to the idea of the existence of those cognitive powers, which, admittedly, reductionist doctrinaires have passionately denied to exist,[71] the existence of the human species must be defined by us as the view of a human species which is to be placed, functionally, absolutely outside and above the category of animal life. It is the immortal aspect of the life of the human individual, the creative powers of the individual, the soul whose existence is to be comprehended in this light, which sets man apart from all other living species.[72]
Therefore, the form of organization of society which is suited to the requirements of the human individual, and therefore his (or, her) species, is a form organized around the concept of what I have defined, earlier in this report, as the living word.
That is the principled basis for a successful dialogue of cultures.
This means that society should be organized around the way ideas (living words) are rendered communicable among the users of a specific language, a specific language of increasing literacy, situated in respect to other cultural specifics, such as that scientific and technological progress in the economy which is associated with the use of that language.
The native ground of irony for the members of a particular culture, is the commonly accessible allusions shared among the users of that language, the heritage of the accumulation of actualized and also potential ironies in the use of a language, whose use is concentrated, as a type, within a certain area with certain customs. These are the ironies, including those of a people's history, which express the experience more or less commonly accessible to the speakers of a national language at a certain time, which provides the common ground for a rich sharing of a certain quality of ironical communication among them. This specific set of ironies accumulated within a particular culture, forms the principal source of the paradoxes employable for the generation of ideas which have the qualities of living words.
Languages as we know them are, in their intellectually inferior aspects, objects of the senses of sight, hearing, and so forth. However, the human content of those languages is the cognitive content of language, as located in the medium of the living word, as distinct from the speech of trained parrots, certain varieties of Mynah birds, mere grammarians, or, some might say, the followers of Professors Norbert Wiener and Noam Chomsky. Here, in that body of the living word, lies the commonality of all mankind.
However, the way in which those living words emerge as an expression of actual knowledge, depends upon the functions of what is describable as Plato's Socratic dialectic, as each particular has its own way of developing such dialectics. Knowledge is the common mountain which all cultures must climb, but each, by a different pathway, from a different point of departure. The potential for an ecumenical convergence on commonly agreed principle, lies in the domain of the living word, not the aspects of what might be comparable to the humanesque prattle of parrots or of computer-synthesized sounds, or grammatical algebras.
The separation of national cultures, thus becomes essential, as living words are produced in the mind through attention to those paradoxes which are found, waiting, within a specific, such as spoken, language culture. If we were to cut off any part of the human family from experiencing the process of developing knowledge of living words in this sovereign way, we would be cutting that part of humanity off from access to the means available to them by which knowledge of the common truths represented by their sharing of living words can be acquired.
The idea of empire, or, virtually the same thing, globalization, is, in and of itself, a denial of the humanity of all parts of human culture.
To say that in another way, the issue of culture is the issue of truth, as the Platonic dialectical method provides a formal standard of truthfulness: not the "absolute truth" of particular ideas of the moment, but the truth of freedom from the effects of reckless disregard for those notions of truthfulness which are best identified with that conception which I have labelled throughout this report as "the living word." By "truthfulness," we should intend to say, " A quality of that which is presently knowable." Even if what is argued were formally correct, without a standard of truthfulness, there is no truth in what is believed, and, as a consequence, society may freely careen from one Sophists'-like catastrophe of uncertainty to another. Thus, the idea of truthfulness in policy-making depends upon engaging the populations of each culture in the kind of process I have summarily outlined here. We bring cultures together, by evoking a common experience of living words by means specifically appropriate to the background of shared, or, at a minimum, shareable experience.
The object must be, therefore, not a compromise among differing opinions, but a search for the higher truths, which exist as living words, on which different cultures must converge to a common purpose. This point may be restated here, in the following terms.
These ideas may be accessible to the speakers of a different language, or in that speaker's familiarity with a different language-culture, but the way in which they are formulated in the mind of the user finds its necessary basis in the ironies which can be generated in his or her language. However, the ideas which are valid, will be susceptible of being recognized, afresh, as valid in every language-culture, provided that culture is a sufficiently developed one.
Without access to that accumulation of actualized and potential ironies, the development of shared living words is aborted, at least to a functionally significant degree. Similarly, a population which is not accustomed to those functions of irony within the bounds of its own usage of its language, will lack a well-developed capacity for functioning effectively as a citizen of that nation, or for coping with the kinds of ideas which are prerequisites of competent expressions of citizenship. In effect, the member of society lacking that degree of potential cognitive development may be described as "dumbed down."
This kind of distinction within and among culture, represents connections which have a history. These connections among cultures are history. Look briefly at some relevant, crucial implications of that fact from recent history. Start with one of the more important of the unpleasant facts.
'Information' Against Humanity ...
This quality of communication, whose characteristic is properly expressed by communication through the ironical medium of living words, enables a people to rise above the relative bestiality of that mere "sharing of information," to which the malicious dogma of "information theory" has sought to degrade them. This is to speak of such malicious, reductionist dogmas which have tended to bestialize the individual and his or her social relations over the course of the recent, approximately three generations, since what is known as "The Second World War."
That doctrine of "information" was intentionally designed, as by the United Kingdom's Bertrand Russell and his devotees, with the intention of destroying this capability of access to use of a literate language, and to return the practice of human social relations to conditions akin to those typical under Europe's ultramontane medieval system. The intrinsic cultural evil done to civilization, and to recent generations of Europe and the Americas, by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), is typical of this hateful intention still today.
Take the case of contemporary Germany.
All of the positive achievements of German culture, as typified by the Cusa, Leibniz, and Bach legacy, were embodied essentially in the Classical humanist tradition typified by Kästner, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Mozart, Schiller, Beethoven, and the celebrated Humboldt brothers. The post-1945 revival of the Humboldt reform in Classical human education, is typical of the successful efforts at reconstruction of Germany under leaders such as Konrad Adenauer. However, the destruction of Germany's post-war moral renaissance by a pack of hyenas mustered from inside the U.S.A. and the U.K., and deployed back into Europe, under the direction of the likes of High Commissioner John J. McCloy, as the CCF, has resulted in the virtual destruction of a living culture in Germany today.
Exemplary is the recent fifteen years of history of the portion of Germany formerly under Soviet occupation. The Soviet occupation did not interfere with, but encouraged the promotion of Classical education and culture. However, once the notorious Berlin wall was down, the apostles of CCF invaded eastern Germany like carpetbaggers, like the hordes of Genghis Khan, thus destroying the productive potential of that portion of Germany to such a degree that that which was done thus to the eastern part of Germany, such as Saxony, in this way, has had effects which threaten the collapse of Germany as a whole today, unless the necessary correction were made. To those who know something of the relevant history, we are reminded of the epidemic of counter-cultural moral and intellectual, existentialist decadence, within pre-Hitler, Weimar Germany, which paved the way, culturally, for the Nazi tyranny.
Today, that kind of moral-intellectual destruction of the Classical culture of continental Europe, coincides with the effects of Bertrand Russell's and H.G. Wells' utopian schemes for a destruction of civilization. Those schemes recall the Olympian Zeus's condemnation and torture of Prometheus. The spread of that syphilis called "information theory," is a crucial element of this destruction of the intellect and morals of a once thriving, if admittedly tainted form of civilization.
As I have indicated in an earlier portion of this present report, the foundations of Russell's argument were perfectly consistent, axiomatically, with the doctrine of empiricism as introduced by that avowed follower of William of Ockham, Paolo Sarpi. This doctrine, which Russell later purveyed in a more radical, even more decadent form, had been spread throughout modern Europe through Sarpi's personal lackey Galileo Galilei, and through such acolytes of Sarpi and Galileo as Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Russell would have proudly agreed with me on that fact of the matter, if only as my being his mortal enemy on this immediate point of the conflict between us.
As I have indicated, the difference between the Venetian neo-Aristoteleanism of that marriage counsellor of England's Henry VIII, that hater of Nicholas of Cusa, the Venetian "Old Party's" Francesco Zorzi, and the "New Party's" Sarpi, is that Sarpi recognized that the existence of the modern nation-state, as established by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, could not be overcome by simply attempting to turn the clock back explicitly to the medieval, ultramontane system which had crashed during the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age.
As I pointed out here earlier, Sarpi recognized that, for reasons of strategic requirements alone, the effect of the scientific and technological progress unleashed by the Renaissance could not be simply "pushed backed into the bottle," so to speak, as his right-wing Aristotelean rivals of Venice's "old party" had prescribed.[73] Sarpi and Galileo agreed, that technological progress would have to be tolerated against those creatures of the cultural swamp which had remained devoted to the memory of the hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy, but that, nonetheless, knowledge of the way in which fundamental principles of science might be generated, must be kept out of the hands (and minds) of even those working with the materials of technological progress. Empiricism, as typified by the work and legacy of Descartes, thus became the relevant religious dogma of the French and Anglo-Dutch Liberal Eighteenth-Century Venetian Party, the latter the factional current which dominates European Liberalism politically, still today.
The jumping-off place for what Russell did to launch the hoax called "information theory," was British ideology, which is to say the empiricism of those followers of Paolo Sarpi otherwise known as the Anglo-Dutch Liberalism associated with Britain's Eighteenth-Century Venetian Party.
Russell, with his accomplice H.G. Wells, went beyond Sarpi et al., with their determination not merely to hold back history, as the usual empiricists did, but to begin turning back the clock of history toward a virtual stone age, that as rapidly as might be possible. The characteristics of their view were the elimination of a principled commitment to scientific progress by sovereign nation-states, but, ironically, with the aid of use of super-weapons of destruction, such as both biological warfare, nuclear warfare, and assisted natural catastrophes, as this was proposed by both Wells, first, and, even more emphatically, by his archly aristocratic accomplice Russell, later. Their policies on these accounts were presented by them as the power through which to bring about that reversal of the direction of modern European and world history.
The intellectual kernel of Russell's practical contribution to evil, was his development of what became known during the period following World War II, as "information theory." The principle underlying this design by Russell, appeared in its first approximation, as a principle, as Russell's part in production of the Russell-Whitehead Principia Mathematica. The continued development of that design emerged during the period of the 1920s Solvay conferences as a continuation of the brutish attack on physicist Max Planck by the followers of the logical positivist ideology of Ernst Mach. This quarrel which erupted in war-time Germany and Austro-Hungary, was continued later under the rubric of the issue of "completeness" in Russell's scheme for design of the universe, the issue which divided the circles associated with Kurt Gödel from Russell and such Russell devotees as John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and their accomplices and followers. One notable outcome of these swindles, in addition to Russell's authorship of the doctrine of "preventive nuclear war,"[74] was the hoax known as "information theory," a hoax derived from the radically positivist views expressed by Russell in his part of the Principia Mathematica.
What Sarpi followers such as Russell et al. did, was to suppress the existence of the notion of a universal physical principle which identified such principles as an expression of the cognitive act of actually generating a principled solution to an ontological paradox, such as Kepler's discovery of gravitation. Russell's method in mathematics, was to carry to an extreme the attack on Leibniz's discovery of the universal infinitesimal calculus by, especially Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, et al., who had denied the physically efficient existence of what D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al. had rejected as the allegedly merely "imaginary": in effect, the rejection of the physical actuality of the complex domain in favor of an ivory-tower numerical formalism explicitly hostile to Russell's named targets Leibniz, Carl F. Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, and Bernhard Riemann.
The serious damage by the "information theory" dogma to the mental powers of the portions of the population receiving higher education, was concentrated in the spreading loss of the ability to develop and express actual ideas: in other words, to impair, even hopefully destroy the ability of the more highly educated classes to develop and communicate in terms of what I have defined here as living words. This kind of dementation of the educated classes and others of the post-World War II period, was continued in this fashion even within the teaching of physical science, in tandem with the organized campaign of willful virtual brain-damage known as CCF.
The tendency of even the least brain-damaged victims of such conditioning in this legacy of Russell's influence, is that such victims know, as Lagrange and Cauchy did, the mark of the place where the discovery of a universal physical principle should occur; but, they insist that we are not able to conceptualize that discovery itself. The followers of Lagrange and Cauchy knew the algebraic formula which could approximate the number associated with a physical-functional singularity to a finely honed degree, but not the actual physical principle as such. That represents a state of mind in use of language and related thought which is comparable to clinical schizophrenia in its formal aspects. This is a more vicious form of the same virtual brain-damage for which Gauss's 1799 dissertation attacked Euler, Lagrange, et al.
Within the orbit of the strenuous propaganda activity by the CCF, no part of Classical artistic composition was left un-raped by such brutishness. For example, take the way in which the Boston Symphony Orchestra[75] was often deployed into Europe, on behalf of the CCF cause, as part of the effort to drown the Classical musical tradition in modernist and post-modernist noise-making. The effect of such broad-spectrum mass indoctrination, has been to cause a population to become self-degraded, more and more, into mimics of the Yahoos, or Beatles, good for little but rutting like decorticated baboons in a ditch (either with somebody, something, or into the open air), of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels: modern U.S. mass-entertainment culture.
In the meantime, the followers of Russell's devotees Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, such as Professors Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) RLE, and like souls in numerous other like-minded places, work, like the H.G. Wells' fabled Dr. Moreau, on attempting to synthesize "human intelligence" in machines, or that poor, tormented chimpanzee, "Noam Chimsky"!
People who accept such behavior as that typified by Wells, Russell, and their followers, are obviously not to be considered as contributors to any attempt to define the objectives of a dialogue of cultures. The dialogue must be restricted to what might be termed "card-carrying human beings." Others may be observed, if as we might observe monkeys in a zoo.
... Versus Language for Progress
The explicit definition of the principles on which the modern sovereign nation-state republic's design has depended, are known to us today chiefly through that Classical, so-called Greek tradition associated with its foundations in the work of such figures as Thales, the Pythagoreans, Solon of Athens, and Plato. However, as India's Tilak, as a kind of "Dante Alighieri" of modern India, has illustrated the point, the principles on which the modern sovereign nation-state have depended, have been traced, most convincingly, by him and others, from the study of the ancient Vedic. Indeed, to the best of our explicit knowledge on this matter, the foundations of what we might recognize as the emergence of modern civilization today, were lain in the interrelated, ancient development of the foundations of astronomy as defined for us today by fragments of ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese sources, by related matters of transoceanic and related astronavigation, and by the manifestly ancient origins of the use of the principles of irony associated with Classical poetry as a mnemonic instrument of collective memory of a cultured people.
However, the roots of the European discovery of concept of the sovereign nation-state based on the principle of the submission of the will of the ruler to the principle of the general welfare of all of the people, have a different aspect, a European idea.[76]
The origin of this idea is rooted in the way the conception translated from the Greek as powers, defines ideas in a way comparable to the Herbart-Riemann use of the German term Geistesmasse, a term whose significance is rather crudely approximated by Wolfgang Köhler's Gestalt Psychology. This notion, traced into Greece from Egyptian astronomy (Sphaerics), is implicitly inseparable from the concept of monotheism. It is, as I have emphasized repeatedly in this report, the concept of the living word. It is the concept of "The Unknown God" of Greece, the God of Prometheus's universe, who is implicitly the adversary of Olympus and the nominally pro-satanic (e.g., Python) Apollo cult of Delphi.
These ancient developments, as typified by the role of the ancient Egyptian astronomy to the ancient Greeks as Sphaerics, provided the foundation for the progressive emergence and continuing development of modern European civilization around those notions of the knowable concept of the universal, typified in their origins as knowledge for man by the Egyptian legacy associated, in European tradition, with the work of Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato. This set of constructive-geometric notions of physical universals (powers), as distinct from mere algebraic formulas used as surrogates for the principles, is the product of a process which I have defined as the generation of living words, a notion coinciding with the applicability of Riemann's use of Geistesmasse for science.
For the purpose of teaching the relevant rudiments of principle, the clearest examples to use are those associated with the influence of the Egyptian methods of astronomy adopted by the Pythagoreans, such as Archytas, as these examples were employed by Plato, in his Socratic dialogues, to convey the notion of what the conventional English translation from the Greek names as powers. This notion of powers is the same meaning expressed through which I have described here earlier as living words, and as the use of the concept of a physical, rather than merely mathematically formal complex domain. The latter distinction is that which Riemann makes clear, in that distinction of that use of Geistesmassen which, in fact, appears in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, and in a more extended form in his elaboration of the deeper implications of Abelian functions.
By starting with that approach to the definition of universal physical principles, we equip ourselves to represent the role of principle expressed by irony in Classical artistic composition with far greater effectiveness than otherwise today. The chief difficulty which this approach to art incurs, is that once we have recognized the function of Classical artistic principle in this way, contrary notions of artistic composition are implicitly relegated to the bordellos of one kind or another, including the academic varieties.
It is the application of the principle of Classical poetic irony, as I have outlined this in earlier portions of this report, which has enabled mankind to develop a mode of deliberate communication of the notion of the universality of man, as expressed through the medium of what I have defined here as the living word. It has been the arbitrary separation of these principles of poetic irony in Classical art from the notion of universals in physical science, as C.P. Snow observed this dichotomy, which has been the great curse repeatedly inflicted upon the development of European civilization, as the latter achievement is typified in the Pythagoreans' and Plato's use of the Egyptian tradition of Sphaerics in defining the notions of universals and their types.
Our subject at this point, is the origin, in a Classical artistic conception of language itself, of the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic. Although that objective is implicit in the reforms led by Solon of Athens, and the rebuke of the same Solon, later, to his erring fellow-citizens, the means by which the modern republic was brought into being during Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, is a far more complex matter than the reading of a translation of Solon's inspiring poem would encompass. This point is especially important here and now, because Asian cultures generally have no efficient conception of the way in which this notion was developed within European civilization. That lack of that conception tends to foster dangerously simplistic notions respecting the European origins of the sovereign nation-state, of which we must disabuse our relevant partners in dialogue.
In today's modern European Classical culture, the successful launching of modern civilization is traced, to a very significant degree, from Dante Alighieri's argument on the development and use of the Italian language, which is the base of his argument for the sovereign nation-state in his De Monarchia, as this concept of language was continued by, notably, Petrarca. This is an outstanding example of the importance of forms of irony which are best suited, by far, to carry the communication of living words, as Latin as a Roman imperial lingua franca could not have done, and, in fact, had failed to do.[77]
The idea of the modern European sovereign nation-state, as it emerged in this and related ways which I have described in this report thus far, is also a living word. That word expresses the processes which are characteristic of the form of society as I have described it summarily here. It expresses the counterpoint of the ironies which are the living, rather than merely formal aspects of the culture of a sovereign people. It is a conception of the living-word aspect of a culture which is in correspondence to the principled idea of monotheism. This is not the notion of an unworldly God hovering outside the universe, but of the personality of the Creator within the universe which He continues to generate. Hence, the appropriateness of that English translation of the Gospel of John, which declares, at the beginning: "In the beginning was the Word." It is the notion of a convergence of the development of living words upon the transfinite totality of the process of generating valid living words. It reflects, as theology, the recognition of that creativity as it occurs in successful human experience of ideas of the quality of living words. Creativity as we know it, is specific to the inviolable sovereignty of the individual creative will. It is therefore unavoidable that we recognize the in-dwelling, living Creator of this universe as a personality, as an individual, efficiently creative will, dwelling in the domain of what I have identified as living words.
Thus, the authority we might rightly attribute to a nation-state is of this form, an authority which is conditional upon conformity with the implication of this form. The result of that is the notion of universal natural law, as the repository of the principle underlying the expression of society's struggle to bring itself out of the childhood of humanity, into a matured reflection on itself, its origins, its obligations, and its intentions.
A Community of Principle
U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' advice to President James Monroe, on the subject of a treaty proposed by British Minister Canning, was that the proposed treaty must be rejected because there existed no community of principle between the U.K. and the U.S.A. Instead, Adams proposed, as this was reflected in the argument written by him, which was presented by Monroe as the so-called "Monroe Doctrine," that the United States must envisage an emerging community of principle among the republics of the Americas, from which the contending alien, predatory forces of that time (the British imperium and the Habsburg forces) must be forcibly excluded, as early as the United States had the efficient power to compel that exclusion, by assistance to the defense of the fellow-republics of the Americas. As Adams stressed, on this matter of policy, no community of principle existed between the U.S.A. and the imperial United Kingdom (or, the reactionary system associated with Prince Metternich et al.).
Despite the present proliferation, internationally, of academic and other lies about Adams' doctrine, and about President Franklin Roosevelt's revival of that policy through the time of Rio de Janeiro treaty and other vehicles, that is implicitly the principled heritage of the U.S.A. since before 1776.[78] It is still the only self-interested principle of true self-interest of the U.S.A. as a republic today. It is, for reasons of principle, a principle scientifically defined as the self-interested policy of the U.S.A., as applicable to a growing global community of sovereign nation-state republics, today.
Adams' original formulation of the Monroe Doctrine's principle belongs, in historical actuality, to a period, from the July 14, 1789 siege of the Bastille, to the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, during which time the self-interested concern of the wisest circles of the U.S.A. continued to be, chiefly, to keep away from entanglement with the corruption which had been prevalent among those hegemonic powers in Europe typified by the more or less rival British versus Habsburg-centered interests.
Later, since the victory of President Abraham Lincoln's leadership over the British puppet, the Confederacy, and especially since Europe's reflections on the accomplishment displayed at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, the U.S.A. has not only been a power in the world at large, but has incurred, more and more of the responsibility of a leading role in the way in which world affairs went, even outside the more immediate vicinity of the Americas. Since that time, the leading issue of world relations has been the question whether the American model, or the British model would serve as the leading catalyst for a system of international relations, not only regionally, but globally.
For sundry historical reasons, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal, financier-oligarchical interest, as distinct from the power specific to the individual European states, has been the increasingly dominant global monetary-financial system since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Since the aftermath of the developments of 1962-1964, especially since 1971-1972, even the U.S.A. has become today's virtual mere province of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal supranational imperium which is the present IMF system of private financier-oligarchical power. Although the U.S.A. has been the most powerful nation-state on the planet, it has been, at the same time, increasingly a virtual satrapy of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire-in-fact, as I say, once again, the empire of the international financier-oligarchical forces controlling the post-1971 IMF system. If that essential fact is not acknowledged, no safe exit from the presently onrushing general monetary-financial collapse were likely. The difference is, that the U.S.A. is the nation best qualified and situated to lead in breaking the power of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperium.
That is the hard fact, against which all objections are either merely impotent, or even outrightly malignant. That fact is the sticking-point, upon which the chances for a successful dialogue of cultures might succeed, or surely fail.
Presuming that sufficient forces discover the wisdom to act in ways consistent with that perception of recent centuries of world history, the question then posed, is: What is the concrete form of organization among nations, which defines the immediate first step of general organization toward a permanent, global community of principle among a world composed of perfectly sovereign nation-states? The revival for application of the model of the Bretton Woods launched by the sponsorship of President Franklin Roosevelt, is the cornerstone of launching the first phase of that new world system.
The notion of a fixed-exchange-rate system, as modelled upon the original experience of that Bretton Woods system, is the model for a presently indispensable arrangement for the present world, and for at least a number of generations yet to come. When I say, "At least a number of generations," I have foremost in view the character of certain kinds of indispensable long-term treaty and related agreements on essential capital formation, especially in basic economic infrastructure. Since we must be prepared to honor those agreements, covering a span of fifty or more years to come, the system we establish now must anticipate the fulfillment of those contractual obligations.
Later, as the initial array of those obligations approaches maturity, improvements in the world system will naturally be considered. In the meantime, prudent governments will focus on the next two generations as guides for making the relevant agreements under which the new world system of the immediate future is crafted and installed.
The issue of the fixed-exchange-rate system is defined accordingly, principally as follows. First, I address the role of so-called raw materials policy, and, after that, the issue of population policy. These are the preliminary, relatively new global developments which give the idea of a fixed-exchange-rate system more crucial importance than ever before.
The combined effect of the development and application of technology, together with the increase of population and the rise of the acceptable standard of living among those populations, have brought the planet to the foreseeable point of developments, that we can no longer proceed on the assumption that the natural resources, so-called, on which civilization depends, can be treated as if this were the simple bounty of nature. We must now take responsibility for maintaining and increasing the supply of those resources of the abiotic Earth and Biosphere on which the continued increase of population, and improvement of conditions of living life depend.
The presently lunatic, philosophically Physiocratic lust for raw-materials as loot, a lunatic, implicitly homicidal lust which is merely typified by Henry A. Kissinger's NSSM-200 draft dogma, has become the leading feature of the world's monetary-financial oligarchy's zeal today. This lunatic zeal must be checked by a concerted regulation of this matter among sovereign nation-states. As Vernadsky's legacy makes the needed remedy clear in broad terms, the development of mineral resources and their management must be considered a factor of capital cost shared as a charge against each and all of the world's economies. We must assure a sufficient supply, at acceptable prices, of all basic such raw materials, for the future of mankind. With the aid of progressive scientific development, this challenge can be mastered, even rather comfortably; but, it must be managed.
This change in the management of raw materials, a change which is now forced upon the world as a whole by the growth of the populations of Asia, especially those of China and India, requires the immediate establishment of a universal fixed-exchange-rate system. This requirement adds the factor of creatively active raw-materials management to the essential agreements on which the new system must be founded.
The planet is finite. We have reached near to the end of the possibility of a form of society which lives by depleting the planet with efforts to compensate for these effects. We must establish a system which increases the supply and accessibility of what we treat as natural resources, by means which include the generation of such resources, rather than merely extracting them. We must manage the mineral resources in this way, as we must develop the Biosphere through large-scale water management, development of desert areas, and so forth.
To absorb these implicitly very large categories of capital costs, we must accelerate the advancement of technology of production and product design in at least a degree sufficient to absorb the added cost of global raw-materials management and related environmental development without reducing the standard of living of any population. This requires greatly increased rates of gain in per-capita physical productivity throughout the planet, and the elevation of the income-levels of presently poor nations through such promotion of technological progress. These costs can be estimated with reasonable accuracy.
This requires accelerated emphasis on very high "energy flux density" technologies, including nuclear-fission and thermonuclear fusion processes. The principal dedication of low-energy-flux-density resources should remain the role of solar radiation in the motivation of living processes, especially plant life, both as a source of useful materials, in water management, and in moderation of the Earth's climate.
The added point of the global economic agenda which I have just summarized: Before turning to the issues of relations among the member-states of a fixed-exchange-rate system, we must dispel certain myths respecting the so-called "population bomb."
The Welfare of Populations
As the required level of development of the quality of the population rises, the birth rate must be expected to decline, not as much as we have seen catastrophic such declines in the population of Germany, for example, but at a much slower rate of increase of population as scientific and technological progress lowers the rate of simple fecundity of populations, under conditions of practiced scientific and technological progress.
The increase of the equivalent of a "school-leaving age," toward a quarter-century for graduates with relevant professional pre-qualifications, combined with a changing role of women in the economy, mean lower rates of child-births per household, with increased emphasis on quality of development of the individual, rather than the raw number of births. This shift is, in the main, a natural reaction to such changes in the economic process, which will be the tendency, whether or not efforts at official regulation of the matter were employed. The tendency fostered by the social effects of scientific and technological progress, is an increase of the physical-economic value of the individual per capita and per square kilometer, and increased emphasis on fostering longevity and prolonged good health.
The complementary issue, is the problems which would be caused by permitting a continuation of a situation in which a large ration of the population were kept in the relatively extreme poverty associated with low levels of physical productivity per capita throughout much of the planet today. Large-scale poverty bestializes both the victim of that ignorance-plagued condition, and the other part of the population which tolerates the perpetuation of that condition.
These matters of population should not be the subject of direct political management. They should be addressed indirectly, but therefore all the more effectively, through economic management of the relations among nations.
For example, "cheap labor" is a long-term menace to the welfare of the planet, because of the effects and side-effects on populations of nations, and the behavior of nations. The upgrading of the technology of production and quality of products should be promoted by cooperative agreements aimed toward fostering scientific and technological progress among nations and their populations.
Among the leading sources of waste of the labor and life of the populations during the recent sixty years, has been the trend toward "suburbanization." The achievements of European civilization in developing the notion of the city and other urban communities, has been destroyed by a pandemic of suburbanization and related effects, as promoted by parasitical, financier-driven modes in real-estate speculation (so-called "development"), and in shifting emphasis in production away from closely-held industries of two hundred employees or less, to giant conglomerates dominated by motives of financial speculation, rather than technological and related improvements in quality of product and modes of production.
These evils reflect chiefly the effects of the superimposition of feudalistic financier-oligarchical interest and its predatory, speculative characteristics upon the modern nation-state economies.
A global system based on a fixed-exchange-rate monetary-financial system can effectively promote desirable effects in the characteristics of employment and personal life, by aid of simple measures of regulation of tariffs and trade of the type employed under the original Bretton Woods system.
The newly leading dimensions of global and national policy-shaping required by the related pressures of materials management and necessary development of the conditions of life of populations, point our attention upward, to the role of space-oriented science-driver programs as the most appropriate form of organization of national technological development and international cooperation under conditions already existing and rapidly emerging today.
We have entered into a time in which management of our planet and its conditions, is a clear imperative; but, the problems and opportunities that imperative implies do not end at the upper limit of scramjet ascent. All of the scientific and related challenges before civilized humanity today are inseparable from the growing field of extraterrestrial exploration. The existence of the Solar System is a product of a process inhering in the nature of the Sun's existence as a former solitary star. The past, present, and future conditions of life on our planet, Earth, are determined by ongoing processes of development associated with the continuing evolution of the Solar System. That system, and its relationship to the broader parts of the universe it inhabits, include matters which ought to be of concern, as either problems or potential advantages for human life on Earth.
To some degree, the scientific investigations which that perspective implies for any intelligent governments on Earth today, must lead to manned exploration, and some development of operating systems placed on relatively nearby parts of the Solar System. The development of new systems whose sheer power per capita and per cross-section of operation vastly exceed anything employed today, is also a necessary goal, for related reasons.
However, the greatest immediate practical impact of a space-oriented science-research function, will be the provision of knowledge essential for improvement and security of life on Earth. There is very little which might be developed in promotion of space research, which does not have a powerful application for human benefit back here on the surface of our planet. Hence, the principal public efforts in support of scientific research and development now, should be located in space-research-oriented programs which, by their nature, touch every area of interest for science to be practiced here on Earth.
This neither presumes, nor prohibits more or less global proprietorship over some relevant projects. It does strongly suggest limits on extending private patent rights beyond traditional categories of protection of actual inventors. In some cases, there should be setbacks of lately introduced novel kinds of proprietary claims in this area. There must also be a more extensive sharing of access to promotion of technologies generated through cooperation among nations, or by supranational agencies. The idea of patenting of naturally pre-existing genetic types is an expression of naked financier-oligarchical rape which goes much, much too far.
The result to be expected from the rather inevitable role of space-oriented general scientific research and development, under a newly established form of fixed-exchange-rate system for the present time, would be a rapid psychological shift in outlook, toward thinking of ourselves as people living in the Solar System, rather than as huddled fearfully back in some local part of the surface of Earth. The conception of man must change to shift in that direction of self-image.
A Final Note
The reestablishment of the core of the original Bretton Woods system as such, requires no extensive treatment here. The system worked, and would have continued to work, had the will existed to make the adjustments in gold price, and other reforms needed to keep the system functioning in principle. The objectives of that included type and form must be to set currency values as near to realistically defined current relative prices as feasible, to choose an appropriate starting-price for reserve gold, and to create an international credit-mechanism equivalent to drawing-rights for borrowing by members.
One function of the reestablished system of leading importance, is its proper relationship to a system of long-term treaty-agreements of the type which would be most appropriate within Eurasia today, as among western and central Europe, Russia, China, India, and so forth. The principal drivers of general physical economic recovery of the planet from the present situation, will be long-term investments in basic economic infrastructure, and bundled lines of long-term credit for packages of investments by certain categories of relevant private borrowers. The physical life-cycle of basic economic infrastructure in the first category ranges between a normal range of a quarter- to a half-century. Power, water, mass transportation, and long-range area development as for new municipalities, recovery of arid territories, mass forestation, and so on, are typical. In a second general category are investments in physical capital formation associated with the market being created by the installation of large public projects.
Investments of these types can be financed through credit created in the form of treaty agreements, or as capital extended under arrangements provided by treaty agreements.
One of the essential functions of the fixed-exchange-rate system is to ensure that rate as assurance of the integrity of credit-extensions at predetermined rates for credit extended over long-term periods.
Under present conditions of massive bankruptcy-in-fact of most among the private financial agencies of the planet today, only the combination of state-backed created credit under the protective cover of a fixed-exchange-rate system could permit a significant generation of credit. Without that system, the presently inevitable collapse of the existing world monetary-financial system, would mean an immediately threatened plunge of the world as a whole into a prolonged new dark age.
That mode of recovery from the present crisis could not succeed, unless the conditions of a regulated economy, such as those of the U.S.A. prior to the developments of the 1969-1982 interval were abruptly reversed in total in the U.S.A. itself, and related former methods of regulated economy were reestablished in continental Europe. International debt obligations of Africa and Central and South America, must be either cancelled or suspended pending future action, and all debt associated with financial derivatives treated as gamblers' side-bets, and therefore simply nullified.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have no other options. Given the present situation, we take these indicated and related measures, or consider ourselves assembled here barely in time to kiss civilization goodbye for a fairly long time to come.
[1] Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957); The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
[2] Brzezinski's current operations, as out of the North Caucasus, into Ukraine today, are a continuation of his role, as National Security Advisor during the U.S. Carter Administration, in launching that war against what he defined "as the soft underbelly" of the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. That operation, and the greatly amplified international drug-trafficking which it produced as part of the operation's logistical base, is being continued as the presently continuing effort to destroy Ukraine and Russia through a terrorist mode of operations based in the North Caucasus region. One could describe Brzezinski as a madman, but madness did not lessen the significance of the genuine menace to civilization represented by such thoroughly mad Roman emperors as Caligula and Nero.
[3] For the purposes of this report, it must never be forgotten, that the Confederacy was created through an operation by the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham and Bentham's leading protégé Lord Palmerston. The core of the formation of that Confederacy was the Young America branch of the Palmerston agent, and head of Young Europe, Giuseppe Mazzini. President Theodore Roosevelt was trained by his uncle, the head of the Confederacy's London-based intelligence service, and President and British Liberal Woodrow Wilson was a die-hard proponent of the Ku Klux Klan, which he led in reviving, from the White House, while President. The Nashville Agrarians, of which Harvard's Elliott was a leader, had been formed during the 1920s by, chiefly, a circle of grandchildren of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.
[4] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speech to the Institute of International Education in New York City, Oct. 14, 1999. Cf. H.G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (1928). Excepting the British-Japan plot of the early 1920s for the Japan attack on Pearl Harbor, President Abraham Lincoln's victory prompted Britain to abandon its former intentions for a direct military attack on the mainland of the U.S.A., and relied on subversion of the type expressed by Bertrand Russell's, H.G. Wells', and Professor Elliott's doctrines, instead.
[5] It is also represented by the British Liberal Imperialist connections of that echo of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mrs. Lynne Cheney, who, in turn, virtually created her gum-chewing Frankenstein monster, her rabidly imperialist neo-conservative Golem and Vice-President Dick Cheney, out of the mud scavenged, so to speak, from a football field.
[6] See, The Children of Satan, LaRouche PAC, 2004. The resemblance of the Gallican church of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to that of "Sun King" Louis XIV, remains a notable element of recurring, Romantic, one might say "Fronde-like" taint of corruption in the culture of France to the present time.
[7] Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, De Pace Fidei. The quality of agape expressed by the Socrates of Plato's Republic, is the same agape of the Christian apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13, and of the constitutional principle of Leibnizian "pursuit of happiness," as found in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the subsuming Preamble of the 1787-1789 U.S. Federal Constitution.
[8] Cusa's De Pace Fidei is part of the same package as his launching of a European campaign for transoceanic outreach across the Atlantic, and into the Indian Ocean. It was the work of Cusa and his immediate collaborators, personally, which inspired and guided Christopher Columbus's design of his rediscovery of the Americas. For related reasons, the Venetian oligarchy has hated Cusa from then to the present day, as the writings of Francesco Zorzi, the Venetian marriage-counsellor to England's Henry VIII, attest.
[9] The Classical example of the equation of "democracy" with "sophistry," is the case of that self-styled Democratic party of Athens which perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates, a murder done in the name of defense of the "fundamentalist" religious beliefs of that time and place.
[10] Cf. The Children of Satan, op. cit.
[11] The sheer Satanism of the Frankfurt School, Brechtian tradition of existentialist irrationalism, is carried into Allen Dulles's Congress for Cultural Freedom by the policy set forth in T.W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).
[12] It is readily demonstrable in an assessment of the aftermath of 1989 today, that more severe and extensive, and enduring moral and material damage was done to the culture of today's post-Soviet world civilization by the attempted legitimization of existentialism through the networks associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) than could be conceivably alleged against Soviet Marxism. Indeed, the worst features of cultural influences under Communism were those ideologies, such as those of those formerly professed Marxists of CCF who played a leading part, as intellectual ditch diggers, in crafting CCF's propaganda campaigns. The worst of the philosophical Marxists followed Britain's Engels' dogma of ape-like "objectivity," in denying the existence of cognition; the existentialists of CCF, such as the systemically truth-hating Adorno and Arendt, did not ignore cognition; they gang-raped it, to death.
[13] Relatively few U.S. citizens, from among those who are not certifiably insane members of lunatic religious cults in the Jonathan Edwards, Nashville Agrarian, or Torquemada traditions, actually like the person of President George W. Bush, Jr.; but, since 9/11 and the Patriot Act, many terrified and cowardly, cringing moral weaklings, are devoutly terrified of being seen as not worshipping him, as had those Germans who had despised Hitler, but were won to his support after the most singularly terrifying events of 1933-1934. This is the Thrasymachus principle as worshipped by Leo Strauss and his neo-conservative followers: the principle of evil exposed by Plato's Republic, exactly.
[14] Cf. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. "Olympian" references the ban on man's knowledge of universal physical principles by the brutal Zeus of Aeschylus's Prometheus Trilogy.
[15] Although the monetary-economic policies associated with the continued practice of the Trilateral Commission's 1970s doctrine of "controlled disintegration of the economy," have been the fundamental change in monetary-financial policy which has created the presently onrushing world depression, it was the systemic destruction, by the influence of ecology cults, of the policy of capital formation based on the economy-driver principles of scientific and technological progress, which gave the present world monetary-financial crisis the attributes of an impending general breakdown-crisis of the present world system as a whole. Clearly, nature has demonstrated, loudly and brutally, that it will not tolerate ecology cults kindly.
[16] On Synarchism, see The Children of Satan, passim.
[17] See reference to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for insight into the Balkan wars which were launched following "Desert Storm."
[18] Contrary to the popular fairy tales of diplomacy still today: In the aftermath of the defeat of Lord Palmerston's interest by the U.S. victory over the Confederacy, it was clear that the continental U.S.A. had developed a dynamic which made reckless the British Empire's resort to new direct, or surrogate attacks upon that republic. Therefore, new British imperial strategies were developed in ways typified by the gradual emergence of that Fabian Society's form of Liberal Imperialism which is currently ensconced as the Tony Blair government. The Palmerston-trained "Lord of the Isles" and later Edward VII returned to the origins of British imperial power, her orchestration of the Seven Years War which had led to Britain's imperial triumph of February 10, 1763. The result, which occurred as the gift of Edward VII to his heirs, became known as World War I, which was then redesigned to become World War II, and, then the so-called "Cold War" of 1946-1989.
[19] "The fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Who does not get that point, as Shakespeare intended it, has yet to understand anything essential about politics, history, or the spiritual nature of man.
[20] Cf. Hamlet, Act III, Hamlet Soliloquy.
[21] This was the basis for the prophetic warning I delivered, in February 1983, to the Soviet representative of the 1982-1983 back-channel discussion I conducted in the interest of U.S. President Reagan. The subject was my outline to the Soviet government of the proposal which I had recommended President Reagan adopt, the exact proposal which the President himself was to deliver publicly a few weeks later, on March 23, 1983. I stated, in summarizing the contrast between that policy and the alternate doctrine of the Soviet government, that "if the Soviet government were to reject the offer, if it were made by my President, the Soviet economy would collapse in about five years." On March 23, 1983 President Reagan delivered that proffered option publicly, but Soviet General Secretary Andropov rejected it out of hand, and the Soviet system began to disintegrate visibly about six years later. It was my insight into the economically suicidal consequences of Soviet anti-voluntarism in the non-military aspects of its economy, which enabled me to develop that uniquely vindicated, prophetic insight into the history of Russia today.
[22] "Pro-Nazi" here is no exaggeration. The Dulles brothers were an integral part of the international financier-oligarchical apparatus which had created the fascist developments of the post-Versailles period, and had been explicitly part of the international faction which brought Hitler to power in 1933. For sundry reasons, it was chiefly Hitler's mid-1930s decision to lunge westward first, which set into motion the decision by Britain and France to bring the U.S.A. into the game. Under those circumstances, many in the U.S.A. and Britain who had been backers of Hitler earlier, came over, temporarily, to the opposing side. However, in the midst of the process of defeating Hitler, elements such as Allen Dulles went into full swing in bringing essential elements of the Nazi apparatus into what became both the NATO system, and the coup and murder potentials, such as those associated with the history of Chile's Pinochet regime, and the associated mass-murder operation "Condor," deployed into Central and South America. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an integral part of that covert "re-Nazification."
[23] This included massive armed deployment intended to bring about my assassination during the overnight interval October 6-7, 1986, an intent designed to pre-empt the discussion of SDI at the imminent Reykjavik meeting of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachov.
[24] The 1901-1932 habit expressed most plainly by the Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, for example.
[25] The issue here is expressed, inclusively, by that Gnostic doctrine of evil, as implicit in such Protestant cults as that of the grandfather of the traitor Aaron Burr, North America's Jonathan Edwards. Man is not evil by nature, but, rather, becomes evil only by rejecting his own nature, which is to develop as a creature worthy of the Creator's love, a creature of agape as defined by Plato's Socrates, as in The Republic, and as by the Apostle Paul, as in I Corinthians 13. Theologically, those who deny Philo's and kindred notions of a Creative God in the universe, are claiming the right to do to the Creator himself, what the Zeus of Aeschylus's Prometheus Trilogy did to Prometheus. That Gnostic doctrine of a "tamed" post-Creation God in a universe under Satan's realm, is implicitly a Deism of Satanism, like that of the cult of Bernard Mandeville in the Mont Pelerin Society of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, like that of the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky's novel.
[26] In the history of modern science, the notion of the experience of the future is characteristic of the leading, uniquely original achievements in astrophysics by both Kepler and Gauss, and the general principles of relativity grounded in the work of Bernhard Riemann. This notion of universal physical principle as an expression of a power efficiently extended into the future, was already inherent in the concept of powers as presented by the Pythagoreans and Plato. Gauss's original discovery of asteroid orbits conforming to Kepler's premises for the prior existence of a self-exploded planet lying in an orbit between those of Mars and Jupiter, is a remarkable demonstration of the actual experience of the future in the present, an experience which is physically actual, in addition to being intellectual. This notion appears to be paradoxical to the usual modern reader, because it is essentially contrary to the pathological precepts of forms of philosophical reductionism such as empiricism.
[27] Lord Shelburne Lackey Adam Smith's doctrine of "free trade," first presented in his 1776 polemic against the American Revolution, The Wealth of Nations, was essentially plagiarized from the highly suspect authority of the leading French Physiocrats, Dr. François Quesnay and Turgot. Although the principal source looted for this purpose was Quesnay's mystical doctrine of "laissez-faire," the acceptance of Smith's plagiarism in England was conditioned largely by the precedent of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, in which the public benefits enjoyed by society as a whole are, according to Mandeville's curiously Gnostic intuitions, produced by the fostering of private vices. Smith himself defended such specifically Gnostic lines of infertile deductions in his 1759 The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, with the same enthusiasm for sheer irrationalism which formed the doctrinal basis for that curious sexual behavior of the Cathars which led to the French usage of the term condom. Professor Milton Friedman does not offer even such exotic surrogates for reason in his version of the same nonsense. Friedman argues in the fashion of a classroom's dolt copying a lecture into his schoolbook, as Cambridge's Mrs. Joan Robinson pointed out, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
[28] Some decisions are crucial, because they have the distinctive character, even by themselves, of an implied change in the ruling culture. Otherwise, it is the pattern of decisions, rather than one or several of them, which determines the forecastable trajectory a nation's decision-making will follow.
[29] The term "Classical," as used throughout this report, has nothing to do with the popularized notion of the merely traditional, as in the illiterates' use of the term "Classics" in the U.S.A. today. The combined standard of Pythagoras, Thales, Solon of Athens, Plato, and Classical Greek sculpture, as distinct from the Archaic, are exemplary, as in the case of Italy's Cicero and the Fifteenth-Century pro-Classical Greek Renaissance, against the vulgarity otherwise characteristic of Latin culture, especially Roman imperial culture and its tradition.
[30] The claims of the followers of Venice's Abbé Antonio Conti, that their adopted foil, Isaac Newton, had discovered a calculus, are not only baldly false, but also inherently absurd. A typical case of a Classical proof of the Leibniz calculus, as opposed to the claims by the dubious admirers of Newton, was supplied by Gauss's discovery of the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, a discovery which was a forerunner of Gauss's general principles of curvature, and is a rigorous demonstration of the need for the actually infinitesimal calculus which all of the perverted Eighteenth-Century and later apologists for the Newton's claim, such as D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, rejected, as not corresponding to anything existing in the real universe. The claim, by the admirers of Newton, to have discovered the existence of something, the infinitesimal, which they and their credulous followers still claim not to have existed, is a remarkable piece of sophistry, one truly worthy of charlatans such as François Quesnay, or that plagiarist of Quesnay, Adam Smith.
[31] Such as Aristarchus of Samos and Eratosthenes, and Nicholas of Cusa (e.g., De Docta Ignorantia) later.
[32] Cf. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The Economics of the Noösphere (Wash., D.C.: EIR, 2001). It is therefore most deliciously ironical that perhaps the most significant of all Soviet scientists, Vernadsky, the most notable successor of Mendeleyev, and the founder of applied Soviet nuclear physics, should have been one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century's scientists, a scientist who is therefore, by Soviet "diamat" and "histomat" nomenclatures, an idealist of the Platonic tradition, where Soviet philosophical "objectivity" in the Engels tradition failed so utterly miserably, with their systemically vicious errors in the domain of economic practice as applied to its civilian sector of production. This demonstrates, among related points, that crisis of Twentieth-Century culture which Britain's notable C.P. Snow identified as a "two cultures" paradox, the dichotomy which separated social thinking hermetically from that of physical science. In a culture dominated by the co-existence of reductionist physical science with inherently irrationalist modes of anti-Classical thought, breakdowns in the process of civilization are to be expected, not only in the U.S.A., but as occurred within the Soviet system, too.
[33] The "solar hypothesis" referenced by Nicholas of Cusa, was already famously demonstrated, and this documented by Aristarchus of Samos before the time of Eratosthenes. Claudius Ptolemy knew of these records, and wittingly faked the evidence used in support of his plea for that Ptolemaic fantasy which was finally destroyed again scientifically by Kepler.
[34] Compare C.P. Snow's Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 reprint).
[35] William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961). This is not a blanket endorsement of Empson's argument, but to emphasize that his work, whatever errors it includes, must be taken seriously.
[36] In a November 9, 2004 webcast address, I referred to an hypothetical mathematician who married a plastic dummy out of admiration for her measurements.
[37] Note here, already, a point whose significance for economy I shall address later in this report. The cognitive processes of the human mind, which Vernadsky defines as noëtic, are of an order higher than the principle of life itself, just as living processes interact with, but are not non-living processes. However, the noëtic process requires a living process, the human mind's, to reanimate the idea of principle formerly generated by an Archytas or Archimedes. This is the nature of the communication of such actual ideas in both contemporary society or across the spans of centuries, or even millennia of history.
[38] Please, therefore, bring back the Classical repertory theatrical companies. Do not worry about so-called business efficiency; the necessary cost were well spent. Film actual performances by that theater? Excellent: so that the director and actors may be aided in assessing the progress in perfecting actual performances before live audiences. Let the best product be reproduced, thereafter, for mass audiences, using the same repertory teams: all as part of refining a produced product of increasing appropriateness, including the development of actors more capable of achieving the higher goals for society's benefit, as implicit in the author's and players' combined intention.
[39] Among the most striking effects in experiencing the work of Shakespeare and Schiller, is the fidelity of their representation of the actual historical period and place represented on stage, their finely honed sense of historical specificity. Shakespeare's English histories, for example, touch the most crucially determining features of the period of the medieval, ultramontane alliance of Venetian financier oligarchy and Norman chivalry. Once one's attention is focussed on that historical process as the subject of the drama, rather that some cute tourist-guide sort of commentary on dates, persons, and places, the power of Shakespeare's creative genius stands out. On the Schiller I have considered, he is even more passionately exacting in this respect, historical specificity, than the best of Shakespeare.
[40] Only an illiterate in history could argue that I am mistaken about this matter of Casca's reference. Shakespeare's character as a playwright reveals a personality defined at root by the same Fifteenth-Century Italian Platonic Renaissance expressed by that Sir Thomas More who was the principal mortal target of the Venetian financier-oligarchy represented by Francesco Zorzi, Cardinal Pole, Thomas Cromwell, et al.
[41] The Salem witch-trials were, on the historical record, an operation used by the avowed political adversaries of the Winthrops and Mathers to promote what became, over the long term, the political base for the treasonous Hartford Convention, e.g., the Lowell-Perkins "syndicate" constituency of the early Nineteenth Century. Thus, there is a parallel to that Harriman-Russell-Truman-Allen Dulles complex which created the witch-hunt ferment of the period preceding the Eisenhower Presidency. The attack by these forces, was against the deceased President Franklin Roosevelt, an attack which continues to the present day. Without the heroes of Massachusetts, who represented the later founding of our republic, those who were the principal target of the operations based in Salem, the dramatic treatment by Miller makes no sense.
[42] My own and Shelley's sense of this notion should be compared with the arguments of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, as referenced earlier here.
[43] Just as the use of representation of a physical function by a term of the mathematical complex domain, as by Gauss or Riemann, for example, references the efficient existence of a physical principle not directly represented competently, as an object, by sense-perception. See, for example, Gauss's attack, in his 1799 dissertation, on the empiricists D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al. who had, in fact, attempted to deny the existence of the Leibniz infinitesimal calculus (i.e., the principle of universal physical least action), which was, in fact, the location of the complex domain as developed by Gauss, Riemann, et al. Compare the Ampère-Weber principle of electrodynamics, as developed by aid from Gauss and Riemann's role as an experimentalist.
[44] Shelley's most relevant reference in that particular location was not only the American Revolution of 1776-1789, but the entire sweep of the Classical humanist upsurge which erupted in Germany, and spread more widely in European culture, around the figures of Abraham Kästner, his pupil Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn. This was the Classical humanist upsurge which was attenuated by the horror evoked by the Jacobin Terror and Napoleon Bonaparte's rampages, with a resulting spread of cultural pessimism expressed as the Romantic reaction to Napoleon's tyranny, the ensuing Congress of Vienna under the tyranny of Metternich, the proto-fascism of Hegel's theory of history and the state, all the way to Adolf Hitler and beyond. Shelley and the Heinrich Heine who denounced "The Romantic School in Germany," were caught in the season's ebb tide of the Classical humanist ferment in art, despite the later achievements of Schumann and Brahms, for example. It was not yet a cessation, but a very significant degree of attenuation. The deaths of Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann, during the 1850s and 1860s, coincided, similarly, with the close of the period of greatest rate of widespread scientific fertility in Europe during that century, leaving the reductionists in the ascendancy until the present day.
[45] The location of the idea within a statement, marks the existence of a discontinuity. The mark corresponds to the place of occurrence of an act of generating an idea conforming to Plato's notion of action according to the principle of hypothesis. The experimental demonstration of the unique efficiency (i.e., a Riemann unique experiment) of such an hypothetical idea establishes a universal physical principle.
[46] The dating of this description of that aspect of the relationship between the President and Hamilton, is December 1791, the period coinciding with the date of Hamilton's Report to the U.S. Congress On the Subject of Manufactures. As I have emphasized in reports published earlier, the combination of the death of Benjamin Franklin, and the London-orchestrated French Revolution, had eliminated many of our friends in Europe, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, from their earlier positions of influence, and put the control of Europe chiefly in the hands of our republic's mortal enemies, chiefly the combination of the enemies of Lafayette among the Habsburgs, London, and France of the Terror and Napoleon Bonaparte. With some notable exceptions, that was the general state of U.S. relations with Europe until the victory of the U.S. Lincoln government over both London's Confederacy pawn and its Maximilian puppet-government in Mexico. During the 1790s, what had been the solid coalition of U.S. leaders hewn under Franklin's leadership, largely slid into confusion under the emerging influence of factions which leaned either toward France or London in respect to seeking U.S. points of useful influence in Europe. So, the confused administration of President John Adams, manipulated by enemy agents such as the British Foreign Office's Sir John Robison, led in the disintegration of the Federalist Party, while Jefferson and Madison followed Adams' failure by leading in the ruining of their own Democratic-Republican Party. In this emerging circumstance of that time, Hamilton's close collaboration with President Washington was crucial for the survival of the young United States at that time. Contrary views on that portion of U.S. history, such as the reckless wish to believe that New York banker-owned President Andrew Jackson was a defender of the people, are pretty much fairy-tales made up for the ideological consolation of one or another of later political parties and factions.
[47] Admittedly, President Herbert Hoover did not cause the 1929 stock-market crash which he had inherited from the policies of Andrew Mellon and Calvin Coolidge, but he did succeed in halving the U.S. national income between October 1929 and March 1933. For the latter accomplishment Hoover was very kindly rewarded with his popular removal from office. Admittedly, some governments have adopted legal commitments to submit to the rule of so-called independent central banking systems. However, if the U.S. takes the lead in breaking the system in ways congruent with its own Constitution, other nations would have no option under those circumstances, but to save their own necks by prompt cooperation with the United States.
[48] The Federalist Papers, for example.
[49] My choice of turning-points and trends is premised on the methods of the Leibniz calculus, e.g., those of Gauss's discovery of the asteroid orbits, rather than what are, unfortunately, the inherently misleading usual, essentially linear, contemporary statistical methods. The former rely on demonstrating what will be observed, whereas the latter emphasize what has been observed: the latter, as Joan Robinson put it, Friedman's method of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The former method measures the future; the inferences from the second are usually characteristically unreliable when any crisis in progress is to be considered.
[50] The shift toward Venetian-style ultramontanism, since George Shultz's 1971-1972 role in wrecking the Bretton Woods monetary system, prepared the way for the destruction of the science-driven agro-industrial systems of Europe, the Americas, and also Japan, by means of a process now usually termed "globalization." The effect of this has been the looting and bankrupting of domestic economies of Europe and the Americas, that done by the Venetian methods known from the process leading into the Fourteenth-Century collapse of Europe into a new dark age. This has been combined with a shift of employment, from Europe and North America, into the cheapest-labor areas of Asia and Central and South America. The European historical precedent for this implicitly genocidal world model, is centered in the Venice-directed Holy League and associated Crusades of the Thirteenth Century, which led, as typified by the cases of the House of Bardi's picaresque Biche and Mouche, into the genocidal, great new dark age of the middle of the Fourteenth Century. The included result of applying that European medieval model of ultramontanism to the world of today, includes the temporary, deceptive effect of a significant improvement of some parts of the Asia population, by looting and otherwise destroying the great mass of the poor of Asia and the Americas. This is called "globalization," which some misguided souls in Eurasia think to be to Asia's advantage, simply because they have so far refused to understand their own actual long-term situation.
[51] In accord with a note supplied earlier here, the currently conventional use of the terms entropy and negative entropy, as commonly used today, refers to effects, not physical principles. Anti-entropy, in contrast, like Kepler's definition of gravitation, refers to a self-subsisting universal principle which causes the relevant kind of effect. Life and creative cognition, are inherently expressions of the effect of a constant principle of change, of anti-entropy.
[52] This stipulation must be emphasized as a precaution against being taken in by pseudo-scientific economic dogmas such as the notion of an economic process as being "the production of commodities by commodities."
[53] Baby-Boomer economics and management practices tend to think only in the short-term framework of the so-called "Now Generation," whose values tend to confuse economic values with the impromptu sexual and related gratifications of a pleasure society: a modern form of Roman imperial "bread and circuses" culture. In contrast, not only is capital formation long-term, but even the production-cycle itself for large categories of products depends upon a medium-term cycle, from conception of a product-line, until the result begins to be sold. Therefore, they think of intermediate products as rivals of final products, and will tend toward such lunatic notions as pushing the sale of the intermediate product at the expense of the expanded delivery of that final product on which the combined income of the "whole shebang" depends.
[54] Lest some readers be shocked by the very idea that I suggest a ceiling on the rise of the standard school-leaving age, I call their attention to that difference between knowing and learning which is typified by my discussion of the case of ideas of principle, such as those of Archimedes, Gauss, et al., above. Reliving the crucial-experimental experience of discoveries of principle, rather than learning, increases the power of the student's mind directly, rather than hoping that such powers might appear, as if by osmosis, through drenching exposure to a litany of mere learning. The latter is both awfully inefficient, and must, by its nature, produce more failures than successes in the end. I have referred, frequently, to the late Professor Lawrence Kubie's The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process and related writings as an illustration of the principled nature of this distinction.
[55] For example: "Don't complain, you dumb banana; you should be thankful that you have any work at all."
[56] The first was the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, in which the functional constitutional principle is the anti-John Locke "pursuit of happiness" specification which Benjamin Franklin's circle adopted from Gottfried Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding. This was in opposition to that Locke dogma of "property" which U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and other constitutional degenerates have introduced under the trade-style of "shareholder value," an anti-constitutional notion in direct violation of the clear intent of the "general welfare" provision of the Preamble of the Federal Constitution. Hence, in aid of such frauds as his own notion of "property," anti-equity fanatic Scalia introduced the lunatic, Venetian-style contract-law dogma of "text."
[57] Von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society cult-figure was the notorious Bernard Mandeville of a rabidly Gnostic "private vices, public benefits" religious persuasion. Von Hayek accomplice Friedman expressed his devotion to that same Netherland deity in an April 1980 interview with television's Phil Donahue, during which Friedman proposed legalization of the narcotics traffic as an "economic good." Friedman's career as a dubious sort of economist began as a student of accounting, where Arthur Burns acted to transform him, as by a kiss, into a so-called economist. Cambridge University's Mrs. Joan Robinson summed up Friedman fairly as the economist of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, As a certified advisor to economic ne'er-do-wells such as President Richard Nixon and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Friedman's economic counsel might be translated by some astute commentators as "let's go back to the stone age."
[58] A relevant common attribution by scholars has been that the double-entry system associated with the Medici, was derived from earlier development of this by the House of Bardi.
[59] This bears upon the crucial systemic weakness to which I have already referred, earlier here, in the thinking of the Soviet system. The materialist dogma, as typified in the relatively strongest aromas by Engels' version of "materialism," denies the existence of the cognitive processes which distinguish man from the apes, as it promotes distrust of the "intelligentsia." Hence, the military-technological expediencies of the Soviet system, where the creative powers of the individual, as typified by Vernadsky, or my late friend Pobisk Kuznetsov, could not be despised, were a social factor which became the principal source of strategic strength of the Soviet system, and a crucial heritage of Russia to the present day.
[60] Indeed, the function of international loans within the post-1971 IMF system of Bechtel's George Shultz et al., has the same type of beneficial effect for the borrower as a monkey might secure from a Malaysian farmer's monkey-trap. The banker eats the borrower-nation for dinner.
[61] Implicitly, the development of the idea of the modern sovereign form of European nation-state is traced to Charlemagne, as this process of struggle for its development was continued through the Emperor Frederick II (Hohenstaufen). The explicit proposal of Dante Alighieri, as on the subject of the Italian national language and its use, and his De Monarchia, was the most significant immediate proposal for the modern nation-state until that was superseded by Nicholas of Cusa's Concordantia Catholica and Cusa's series of writings which founded modern experimental scientific practice, such as his De Docta Ignorantia. The first modern nation-states were that of France's Louis XI and the follower of Louis XI's revolution, Henry VII of England.
[62] Rosa Luxemburg's related views on the economic nature of imperialism are still of current relevance for historical studies by policy-shapers today. She was the only leading socialist figure who understood the folly of both Lenin's and the Social-Democracy's bungling attempts to explain "imperialism." The latter proceeded from the utterly incompetent assumption that this was a phenomenon of industrial capital's expansion, whereas she, like the U.S. State Department specialist Herbert Feis later, showed that the root of modern economic forms of imperialism lies in the domain of international financial loans, as shown afresh in a savage manner by the performance of the IMF and World Bank since 1971-1972. These issues of imperialism and international financier oligarchy, as she treats the referenced crucial issues to which I have just referred here, are crucial points of historical discussion for defining the challenge of defining a principle of equity for a Eurasian policy today. Rather than defining issues according to the shopworn ideological categories of the Twentieth-Century strategic conflicts, the dialogue must bring together source material reflecting each and all of the leading experiences, especially from the Twentieth Century, which are elements of a dialogue on the internal cultural experience of Asia during that century. This must be given special emphasis in treating those ostensibly ideological issues which were embedded in the legacy of today's passed-down experience from over the past hundred years or more.
[63] The Anglo-American interests (principally), such as those associated with Manhattan's 120 Broadway operations where George Shultz's father had been employed, had sought to use their influence over the world-marketing of the product of, among other things, certain of Russia's farmers (the kulaks) as a profitable way of bankrupting the young Soviet Republic. Preobrazhensky proposed to defeat that foreign operation and its domestic effects by programs which would channel a significant portion of agricultural income into industrial development. The late-1960s forced reduction of the value of India's rupee, is but one rather important illustration of the similar ways in which developing nations have been forced to defend themselves, often unsuccessfully, often unwillingly, but unavoidably, in a post-Franklin Roosevelt, Anglo-American world.
[64] Contrary to myth, L.D. Trotsky was not the founder of the Soviet Left Opposition; Preobrazhensky was, essentially. Trotsky joined it, as if by surprise, through a then celebrated lecture outlining a "Scissors Crisis," and thus used his reputation as director of the Red Army's civil war operations, to coopt the Left Opposition into his personal political train. Always tending toward alliances with anarcho-syndicalist sentiment at heart, Trotsky was a brilliantly insightful publicist and agitator, but never a competent economist; Preobrazhensky was.
[65] The predominant expression of evil in the world's society today, the most essential expression of the principle of tragedy, is the outright denial, or evasion of the fact of a principled difference between the human species and all other forms of living processes. The result of such an evasion, is typified by the combined outright silliness and scientific absurdity of Frederick Engels' assertion that the difference between man and higher ape is a function of the opposable thumb. Engels' anti-scientific babbling on that account was, at that time, an accommodation to the anti-humanistic dogmas of H.G. Wells' master-to-be Thomas Huxley. The absurd, social-democratic doctrine of "historical objectivity," of Kautsky, Plekhanov, et al., is a natural outgrowth of the specifically anti-scientific point of view of the British empiricists generally, and Britain's Engels in particular. It has been the British empiricist influence on the version of "materialism" associated with Marx et al. which we see reflected in the contrast between Rosa Luxemburg and the near incompetence of all of the other relevant Marxist economists and the like of that time.
[66] My interest in and sympathy for what I then knew of Vernadsky's work, especially in the domain of the defining of life (e.g., as in contrast to the arguments of Oparin et al.), dates from the late 1940s. My current emphasis on the physical-economic implications of that work as such, date from the post-Soviet period when the implications of Vernadsky's work for the reconstruction of Russia's economy as a keystone of Eurasian development, became for me of obvious leading practical importance for the world today. This was re-enforced by my association, beginning the late 1990s, with Pobisk Kuznetsov and his work.
[67] In comparative economic studies dealing with the impact of Karl Marx and related doctrine on the practice of what were referred to as "states with socialist constitutions," the key to comparing so-called capitalist economies with so-called socialist economies lies in understanding the way in which a profit-function is treated, both philosophically and in practice. In neither of the customary academic and related treatments of either, is their competent insight into how profit might actually be generated, rather than merely taken out of the total proceeds. From my standpoint in the science of physical economy, no such difficulty occurs. See the discussion in the text below.
[68] Entropy, as also negative entropy, is an effect, not a cause. Anti-entropy signifies a principle which generates its characteristic effects. Similarly, non-Euclidean geometries are a modified form of Euclidean geometry, whereas the anti-Euclidean geometry of Gauss's teacher Kästner and of Riemann, represented the revival of a universal physical principle, derived directly from the Classical notion of powers, as associated with the underlying physical principle of Pythagorean science of Plato, of Kepler's original discoveries in astrophysics, and the method of Leibniz's discovery of a truly infinitesimal, anti-reductionist calculus cohering with a universal physical principle of least action. Riemannian physical geometry is a more richly developed expression of the implications of this concept.
[69] Those of us familiar with the interior of European civilization, recall that it was the pantheism and proclivity for religious warfare, which imperial Rome and its Pantheon imported chiefly from western Asia, which has been the most deadly of the cultural infections suffered by European culture since Europe's birth in post-Homeric ancient Greece. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, De Pace Fidei. Also see my earlier remarks here on the Gnosticism of Claudius Ptolemy, which had related origins.
[70] This notion of "childhood diseases" is, notably, also a specifically Christian conception, the conception of the redemption of mankind from the errors of its "childhood diseases," such as empires, feudalism, and the like, or worse, that mankind, whose nature is intrinsically good, could rise to a condition of redemption of that goodness of its species, a state of development consistent with the original intention of the Creator for our species. Evil is rejecting the good within ourselves for sake of submission to the bestial features of that animal body we happen to be inhabiting at the moment. It is the true principle of political and related leadership, such as Jeanne d'Arc or Martin Luther King, that we must use our bodies, not be used by them. Either we use our bestiality wisely, as the principle of agape implies, or it will use us. Nonetheless, this is also recognizably a universal idea of yearning for union of intention with that of the Creator, as the Classical scientific method from Plato through the best of the moderns attests, which is the intrinsic common basis for an effective dialogue of religions.
[71] As Immanuel Kant did, for example.
[72] That is to say, that the behavior of the human species, especially our species' ability to increase its potential relative population-density willfully, is not located in our species' mortal (e.g., animal) nature, but the cognitive powers unique to the human individual. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa has said that the beast participates in man, as man participates in God. So, the beast, which lacks immortality, participates functionally in the existence of the immortal being, the human individual, as man, through the principle of the living word, participates in God as the living person of the Creator.
[73] E.g., the prescription by Venice's typically "old party" Francesco Zorzi (aka Giorgi), the Cusa-hating marriage-counsellor of England's Henry VIII.
[74] Russell, who was the leading figure of a relevant circle of scientists, was the principal author of the doctrine of use of nuclear weapons in "preventive war," against the Soviet Union of the 1940s. He proposed this as echoed in an article he published in the September 1946 edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. After the Soviet discovery of a deployable thermonuclear weapon, Russell dropped preventive warfare, but shifted, with a relevant application to Soviet General Secretary Khrushchov which was announced at a public conference in London, to a doctrine of world government (e.g., the Russell-Wells doctrine called "globalization" today), through threat of mutual and assured thermonuclear destruction.
[75] Capital of the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
[76] As the uniqueness of this discovered principle is summarized by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address.
[77] On the history of the medieval struggle for the establishment of the sovereign nation-state prior to the Fifteenth Century, see Friedrich von der Heydte's Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg, Germany: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952).
[78] Despite the fraud of attributing the Monroe Doctrine to the concoction of that filibuster's nephew Theodore Roosevelt.
