MEMO ON `THE PERICLES SYNDROME'
The Case of
A Vice-President's
Mass Insanity
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
July 10-22, 2005
President George W. Bush, Jr.'s stubbornly repeated insistence, that U.S. government bonds are merely "I.O.U.'s," is, by itself, a typical, highly relevant, and clear-cut example of the President's incompetence to continue to serve in that office. especially under presently onrushing world monetary-financial conditions. Unfortunately, the solution for that actual issue confronting the Congress is not as simple as that premise for the removal of the President might imply. Consider, for example, the shudder which would pass through the ranks of the Senate, and elsewhere, at the thought that the resignation of an ailing President Bush might bring Vice-President Cheney into the Presidency.
On this matter of this George W. Bush Presidency, psychiatrist Jerrold M. Post is known for his work on the subject of the constitutional challenge a President's present mental condition might represent.[1] Some of the crucial evidence to be considered in assessing the mental condition of President George W. Bush himself, has now been addressed afresh in the updated, current paperback edition of psychiatrist Justin A. Frank's eminently relevant professional's opinion on that subject.[2] Dr. Post's own earlier study of the broader background of problems of an ostensibly similar type, was addressed, emphatically, to the implications of the 1967 Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, Post's work, while rather widely regarded as authoritative within the profession, does not measure up to the special kind of challenge which the mental condition of the presently incumbent President actually poses to Constitutional law, under the actual, special, global circumstances confronting the Congress, and others, today.[3]
Justin Frank's extremely useful study of the case of that incumbent President, has crucial importance in itself, but it does not pretend to address the most crucial, broader strategic issue with which the U.S. Congress is actually confronted in the Bush-Cheney case. The essential issue is not that of Bush himself, or even the Bush-Cheney pair: The crucial issue is the way in which this qualitatively increased threat to our republic's existence came about, over a period of about forty years to date. How did we reach the perilous state of affairs in which the increasingly dysfunctional quality of a President Bush, who is certainly no Pericles, might be simply replaced by the would-be modern Thrasymachus Vice-President Dick Cheney? By what means did Athens ruin itself with the Peloponnesian War? How are we, in a meaningful sense, repeating that kind of folly, as in Iraq, for example, today?
The problem of statecraft which the case of the Bush-Cheney pair presents today, does not neatly match the implied, mechanistic assumptions of that Twenty-Fifth Amendment, nor what some might mistake for the obvious precedent of the removal of the Nixon-Agnew Presidency. While President Bush himself represents a mean-spirited, even viciously sadistic sort of defective personality, his culpability is as much that of a pitiably foolish creature, as a case of an habitually, intellectually and morally defective behavior. It is obvious today, that he simply should never have entered that office. However, we must face the fact that the case of this President is paired almost inextricably with the high crimes and misdemeanors of Lynne Cheney's pet sociopath, Vice-President Dick Cheney. When we reflect on the history, over decades, through which that pair was brought into the offices of the President and Vice-President, and take into consideration the context of the recent decades of drift into the presently onrushing breakdown-crisis of the world monetary-financial system, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment by itself can not be treated as if it could rise neatly to the relevant issues of the present and onrushing occasions.
However, as I shall show in the concluding portion of this memorandum, our Constitution, taken as a whole, does provide, at least implicitly, optional remedies for the cases of both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney as such, a choice of remedies which could apparently leave the intent of the Constitution superficially intact: such as, relieve Cheney of his office, first. But, that is only part of the problem in this case. The deeper, complicating challenge, is that of defining the larger and deeper implications of the issues which Bush and Cheney represent, as an immediate threat to civilization as a whole, in the setting of today's mounting, existential quality of world crisis. Therefore, definitions of the personal incapacitation of an individual President, as of the type projected by the intrinsically anti-historical standpoint of Dr. Post's book, do not fit the darker reality of the situation with which we are confronted now. Dr. Post's approach, if applied, would become merely a complicating feature of our national tragedy, not a remedy for our Presidency's affliction.
Expediency, "textual" or otherwise, should not be allowed to enter as the premise for introducing a Procrustean sort of attempted solution for this constitutional crisis. As I show in the course of the following pages, if we are to avoid that peril for our nation and its posterity which the Bush-Cheney pair implies, the unifying, underlying, scientifically principled intent of the totality of the U.S. Constitution must be applied to the totality of the present, existential threat to the nation, rather than merely seeking the removal of some among the admittedly important, currently defective elements of the current Presidency.
1. The Systemic Failure of Modern Psychology
From the standpoint of relevant scientific method, our republic's principal constitutional doctrines, those of our 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1789 Federal Constitution, do not contain, but, rather, are adumbrated by the actually universal, more deeply underlying principles of a coherent and universal, living body of expanding natural law, upon which the design of those doctrines is premised.
Thus, in properly defined constitutional law, as in the body of a valid mode of physical-scientific inquiry, the body of a valid constitutional practice is subject to an endless, constant further development, through discovery of those new particular principles which preserve the integrity of the originally intended notion of natural law under changing universal circumstances, such as the changed circumstances with which the Bush-Cheney developments confront us today.
By saying "originally intended," I am emphasizing the fact that the congruent significance of the actual use of the terms "pursuit of happiness" and "promote the general welfare" by the framers of these Constitutional documents, has a unique, knowledgeably intended significance as a constitutional statement of a reflection upon a universal physical principle.
This notion of a body of law premised on verifiably underlying universal physical principle is called natural law. Natural law is in principled opposition to a notion of a merely positive law, the latter as, typically, a negotiated set of terms of agreement among an otherwise anarchic order of individuals, nations, or small family-like groups.
In this respect, constitutional law expresses its principled, hereditary likeness to those notions of physical science which define an expanding self-development of a body of natural law, a natural law expressing principles which are specific to a European civilization traced chiefly from ancient Egyptian precedents. This explicit development of a more broadly defined body of European law premised upon the idea of natural law, is traced, despite, chiefly, much contested opinion and practice, from the relevant, exemplary work of the Pythagoreans, Solon of Athens, and Plato.
Despite the persisting tendencies to make a categorical division between the ideas of science and Classical artistic composition, as such a division was described by C.P. Snow as a Two Cultures paradox,[4] the notions of law upon which the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution rest, essentially, is the Classical Greek tradition in both physical science and Classical artistic composition, especially that traced from Plato.
So, in the history of the Classical European culture which emerged in the ancient Greece of the Pythagoreans, Solon of Athens, and Plato, there is, the fact that, despite intervening periods of regression, the foundations of a civilization an ascertainable, underlying, seamless continuity of expansion of validated principles of Solon, the Pythagoreans, and Plato, of the general body of Classical scientific and related progress, of what is known as a principle of higher hypothesizing.[5] Just as the progress of experimental scientific method in discovering new universal physical principles of our universe (as principles needed for newly discovered universal types of conditions), is the characteristic feature of progress in physical science, so there is an expandable, kindred body of discoverable knowledge respecting the adducible, constitutional principles of modern statecraft. These latter are the principles which are best reflected, to date, in the manner of the roots of the birth of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution in the Fifteenth-Century's great ecumenical Council of Florence, and, also, later, in the central principle set forth at the outset of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.[6]
Thus, in all aspects of scientific practice, actual history has shown that there is a method of generating and validating a scientific discovery of new universal principles. Whenever a situation arises, as in the singularly anomalous circumstances represented by the brutishness of the Bush-Cheney regime, we must go behind the principles and circumstances from which our Constitution was derived, to craft a principle which coheres with that historical root in principle, from which, again, the original Constitution was derived.
So, on the one hand, the immediacy of the present existential threat to planetary civilization would put impeachment or kindred action on the agenda for remedial action now. Yet, regard for the kind of action which must occur to such effect, shows us that we are not yet prepared, at least not most of our relevant representatives, to define how and when the needed remedial action should actually occur, and to what intended effect. We must think of taking such action, even very soon, but we must be careful, nonetheless, to ensure that we save the life of the patient, our constitutional system, rather than risk killing it in a panicked resort to hasty surgery. We must think carefully about the unprecedented quality of immediate anomalies in an onrushing breakdown-crisis of the world's present monetary-financial system, the context within which the presently threatening condition of our Presidency is situated.
The organ, the Presidency, is presently diseased by what may be described as the Bush-Cheney regime, but the disease lies not merely in either of those admittedly extremely defective individuals, nor in the combination of Bush and Cheney as individual office-holders, but in the systemic features of the world's current, existential quality of crisis-situation which has brought such an inappropriate pair as that into those offices. The cases of Bush and Cheney, taken both as separate and combined, are a product of a special set of historically specific conditions; it is those conditions, which produced them as they are today, which must be cured. Our primary objective must be curing that condition which brought that ill-chosen pair into playing their current, pathological role, rather than treating them merely as scapegoats for the condition which brought that pair into its present, perverted role in office.
The Relevant Fallacy in Practiced Psychology
In both cases, the acts for which the impeachment of each of that pair, and both together, might be sought, are of the class of mental disorders: the President's manifest mental incompetence for his present public office, and the Vice-President's public conduct which is fairly described as that of a vicious sociopath. However the process of removal of either or both from office might be conducted, the underlying theme of the relevant inquiry will be consideration of the evidence of the relevant mental disorders. Although the relevant behavior of both is distinctly "abnormal," this choice of language can not be permitted to imply that what might, presently, constitute evidence of so-called "normal" behavior, would provide the needed yardstick against which to judge the relevant implications of their incapacities. Only exceptional behavior, as typified by the genius shown in an individual's discovery, or re-discovery of a universal physical principle, will suffice.
On precisely this point, Dr. Post's referenced method of argument breaks down for such cases; contrary to Post's method, in reality, the individual exists, and is developed in a specific historical setting, such that it is that setting, rather than the notion of some abstract personality floating in empty historical space, which presents us with what must be the controlling features of any appraisal of the conduct of leading figures of any historically situated action.[7]
We are dealing with the present slide into collective sickness, of a nation, our U.S.A., which had emerged earlier from World War II, under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, as the most powerful, most productive economy which had existed on this planet. This achievement under that President, depended in a crucial degree upon the relative uniqueness of his personality in that position of leadership. He accomplished what he did over the opposition of our British ally in the relevant war, and over the menace of those skulking hyenas in our political-financial system, hyenas later referred to by President Eisenhower as a "military-industrial complex," who were prepared immediately, to destroy Roosevelt's work at the first moment he was taken out of office, as by death. The characteristic feature of the entire period since the death of that President, has been the immediate launching of a campaign to defame that President, a defamation which favored that thinking of the two remarkable models of a failed President, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, who had misled the U.S.A. into its participation in a great economic depression.
Subsequently, two decades after President Roosevelt's death, during the latter half of the 1960s, the United States underwent the beginning of a decades-long "cultural paradigm-downshift," which led the nation into becoming, over approximately four decades, the virtually bankrupt U.S. economy of today. The characteristic of the most recent, approximately forty years of U.S. economic history, has been an increasingly vigorous effort to uproot each and every principle on which the successes of the Franklin Roosevelt Administrations had been premised. The "military-industrial complex's" sponsorship of the campaign by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, against the "authoritarian personality," was an expression of that "complex's" hatred, and fear of the memory of President Franklin Roosevelt which they shared with former Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
As a consequence of that mass-misbehavior of this nation, in rejecting the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, in that way, we are ruined today. The performance of the Bush-Cheney Administration has been awful, but those ruinous policies, and the electoral victories of those candidates, and the selection of such candidacies by that party, and the behavior of the citizens in the election, came about as a product of decades-long, downward trends in our national culture, trends by which we, as a nation, have ruined ourselves, especially since the late 1960s.
We are dealing, thus, with a situation in which the selection of the Bush-Cheney Administration has occurred as the consequence of a cultural pattern of increasingly sick quality of mass-misbehavior, implicitly by effects of the combination of the moral decline among a growing majority of our population, over a period as long as four decades, or, from a higher, longer-ranging view of that process, since the untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt. This decline was chiefly the net result of either active decadence or political abstention among the majority of the population.
With those historical facts now taken into account, two related, but distinct types of errors would be implicit in an ordinary person's reading of Dr. Post's argument. We must think carefully about the nature and the required prevention of those errors. Sometimes, as now, even the best of currently accredited, expert psychopathology usually fails to diagnose the functional nature of the problem adequately. As I shall point out here, below, the frequent failure of the relatively best current practice of psychology, is that it is premised upon an axiomatically mechanistic (e.g., Cartesian) misconception of the place of the function of the individual in society, rather than appropriate insight into the functionally determining, reciprocal, dynamic relationship of the cognitive individual to society as an historical process undergoing continuing change of its characteristics.
So, it was the centuries' long history of the Habsburg house, since Venice appointed it to use marriage as a weapon of dynastic rape for destroying the heritage of the Emperor Frederick II, which produced that pathetic fool of an Austrian Kaiser who made possible the unleashing of the plan for World War I crafted by Britain's utterly despicable Edward VII. The individual psychoanalysis of that admittedly pathetic Kaiser, has no relevance unless it is situated within the historical process which gave birth to such a pitiable, self-doomed monstrosity as the Austro-Hungarian regime of that time. It was, in general, the culture which tolerated the post-1815, reactionary system of "the crowned heads of Europe," which made possible, with the aid of so-called parliamentary systems, the persistence of that embedded cultural tendency for the self-inflicted ruin of Europe, which, in turn, made possible the way in which today's Europe has, once again, lurched toward the precipice of self-destruction.
It was for such reasons that the Seventeenth-Century colonization of Massachusetts was launched from Europe, to free the best achievements of European culture from the oppressing, rotten legacy of the presently reigning European tradition. It was the grounding of our struggle for independence, in that tradition, which enabled us, with admittedly great difficulties among ourselves, to craft the truest model of a modern republic as our constitutional system,
From the standpoint of the relevant correction, away from Cartesian-like. mechanistic models of the individual in society, such as that on which Dr. Post's mechanistic rationalizations have largely depended, and, into the relevant dynamic view from the standpoint of historical development of cultures, and within cultures: the basis for all competent systems of law is located in the subject of that specific quality of immortality which sets the human individual apart from the category of Hobbesian-like, Thrasymachus-like beasts, beasts such as those of our contemporary so-called "neo-conservative" followers of Chicago University's malignant protégé of the Nazi "Crown Jurist" Carl Schmitt, Professor Leo Strauss, or the Bush-Cheney pair.
This quality of immortality is expressed by the notion of the idea by such followers of the Pythagoreans as Plato, and most emphatically by the Christianity of the Apostles John and Paul, as by the devoutly orthodox Jew, Moses (Dessau) Mendelssohn, who played a leading role in catalyzing the Classical renaissance of Europe's late Eighteenth Century. This ecumenical conception of personal immortality of the human individual, has been, for example, the essential standpoint of all my discoveries as a follower of the Gottfried Leibniz, who contributed a crucial, central premise of both our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution. Thus, as I have shown for a science of physical economy, the proper notion of self-interest of the mortal human individual, is located in the immortal aspect of individual human existence, an immortality typified in the individual's role as a generator and preserver of society's access to experimentally validatable universal physical and related principles.
The relevant systemic problem of today's mass behavior, is that the notion of a distinct creative act, such as the conscious, willful act of discovery of a universal physical principle, rarely occurs even in today's customary secondary and higher education in physical science. Instead, the benefits of use of a discovered principle are often merely learned, as by such means as textbooks, or abstract mathematical schemes, rather than actually discovered in a way which is a replication of the original act of discovery.[8]
To clarify this issue, I interpolate the following discussion.
The Education of Our Young Citizens
Several years ago, as the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) was being formed, several of the spokesmen for those young adults challenged me, at a meeting in Reston, Virginia: How shall we gain our education? I replied with a twofold programmatic proposal. "Start with Carl Gauss," I said, referring to Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation, in which Gauss exposed the hoax of the empiricist ideologues D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al. on the subject later referenced as The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. "From studying that work of Gauss," I continued, "you will discover what is meant by an idea. You can then study history as the history of ideas." Since that time, the result of that program has been notably successful, on the average.
The empiricist ideology of Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, and the Newtonians, denies the actually discoverable, actual ideas, in the sense that Gauss's life-long adult work defines ideas, but, like Lagrange, substitutes merely formal (algebraic) mathematical formulas within a mechanistic domain like that of Descartes' defective system, for physical principles. The empiricist thus departs from the actual practice of physical science, to a perverted method of interpretation of physical phenomena according to an arbitrary, mechanistic system of avowedly "self-evident" definitions, axioms, and postulates. That Cartesian method is not the practice of science, it is the practiced ritual of a Delphic, pagan religious cult of ancient Babylonian implications![9]
Once the concept of the idea is established through working-through the implications of Gauss's 1799 attack on the hoaxes of the empiricists D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al., the student back-traces the roots of Gauss's argument to its origins in the work on the concept of powers by ancients such as Archytas and Plato, and then traces the implications, forward, of the span from Archytas to Gauss in their outcome in the work of Riemann on, for example, Abelian Functions. Similarly, we treat the same notion of the idea as it is expressed in history studied from the standpoint of the development of Classical artistic composition.
The hard core of Gauss's attack on the empiricists, is found in his rejection of the arbitrary treatment of the subject of cubic roots by the relevant empiricists. The problem of cubic roots is correctly approached as a problem in constructive geometry, the problem of constructing, geometrically, a cube double the size of an existing cube. This challenge was famously solved by the Pythagorean Archytas, a friend and collaborator of Plato. The issue was attacked from the standpoint of arithmetic, by Cardan and others, in the Sixteenth Century, with the result of showing a set of what the empiricists came to refer to as "imaginary numbers" among the roots. If one examines the geometrical doubling of the cube by Archytas, there is, contrary to D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al., nothing merely imaginary about these attempted solutions.
In the work of the Pythagoreans, as of Plato, a line can not be generated deductively from a point, nor a surface from a line, nor a solid from a surface. The generation of upgrades such as the precise doubling of the square and cube, occurs through what the Pythagoreans and Plato define as powers (dynamics). These powers have the same connotation as the original discovery of universal gravitation by Kepler, as the discovery of the physical principle of least action (as opposed to shortest distance) by Fermat, and as the catenary function of Leibniz's universal principle of physical least action.
In the work of the sundry opponents of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the notion of powers is pushed aside in favor of schemes such as the alleged self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates of a reductionist's Euclidean geometry, or Cartesian system. Leibniz's use of the notion of powers (dynamics) in his celebrated exposure of the fundamental error of Descartes in the domain of elementary physics, and in his, Leibniz's, founding of the science of physical-economy, signifies mankind's discovery of the capacity to employ a discovered universal principle as a source of mankind's increased power (higher potential relative population-density) to maintain, and increase the fruitfulness of humanity's existence within the universe.
In European science since the Pythagoreans and Plato, the use of discovered powers is the manifestly characteristic quality of the human individual which sets that individual apart from, and above the apes, and all other forms of animal life. The generation of this knowledge of powers, and the perpetuation of this knowledge within the physical practice and culture of society, is the characteristic of the human species which sets man apart from the beasts, as V.I. Vernadsky distinguishes the work of mankind, the Noösphere, from all lower forms of life. It is the creative powers of the individual human mind, so defined, whose existence the empiricists and other reductionists deny, which is the characteristic distinction of humanity, and therefore of society and its cultures.
We identify this principle otherwise, as that principle of immortality which sets man apart from the beasts. The characteristic activity of the individual members of the human species, especially as part of society, is the power of creativity (dynamics) whose existence the empiricists, among other reductionists, deny.[10] It is the transmission of the replicated act of discovery of such principles, which is the uniquely proper basis for a scientific psychology. It is the accumulation of such discovered principles, which defines a human culture, as Vernadsky defines the distinction of the Noösphere from both the abiotic domain and the Biosphere.
Thus, the human individual is primarily acted upon by the relevant culture, but the individual, especially the creative individual, acts upon that culture. The relationship between the two is dynamic, rather than a mechanical sort of interaction between society and the willful individual. Lack of recognition of this interrelationship, is the most common defect of taught and practiced psychology.
I have addressed the implications of these facts in my recent "Vernadsky & Dirichlet's Principle."[11] The method underlying Vernadsky's discovery of the elementary quality of the principled distinctions among the domains of the experimentally abiotic principles, the Biosphere, and the Noösphere, illustrates the continuity of a method of fundamental discovery of universal principles, which we associate with the Egyptian origin of Sphaerics, which is continued as the scientific method of the Pythagoreans and Plato, of the revival of Classical Platonic scientific method by the Fifteenth Century's Nicholas of Cusa et al., and the continuation of the approach presented by Cusa in his De Docta Ignorantia as the work which opened the doors for the general continuing development of modern European science through such most notable followers of Cusa as the anti-reductionists Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, and Leibnizians such as Lazare Carnot, Gauss, Arago, Wilhelm Weber, Alexander von Humboldt, Dirichlet, and Riemann.
The Ontology of Creative Action
The common characteristic of the rejection of the form of scientific illiteracy which is known as the reductionist methods of phenomenology, is overturned in exemplary fashion in what I have emphasized, in an earlier published location, for example, as the implications of the definition of the Biosphere and Noösphere by that celebrated follower of Mendeleyev, Pasteur, and Curie, Russia's biogeochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky.[12]
Vernadsky's method is a consistent expression of the method of Nicholas of Cusa's founding of modern experimental physical science, as the method of such explicit followers of Cusa as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler, and also Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann. I summarize the relevant argument once again here, because it provides essential insight into the way in which proven universal principles of natural law are defined, that in the way which comprehension of the issue of constitutional law requires. The crucial issue which must be addressed in this way, for that purpose, is the matter of the precise, ontological definition of creativity, as this notion of creativity applies only to two known classes of phenomena: the absolute distinction of the human individual from the beasts, and the scientifically precise basis for the attribution of that quality of a universal personality, the personality of an individual known as the Creator.
It is upon this rigorously scientific notion of the distinction of the human individual from the beasts, as in the image of the Creator, that the notion of the actual existence of a body of natural law uniquely depends. The dynamic (e.g., anti-Cartesian) method of the Pythagoreans, Plato, Cusa, and Leibniz, is expressed in a uniquely relevant way by Vernadsky's development of the concepts of Biosphere and Noösphere.
For the sake of economy here, I limit this part of the report to those most indispensable considerations sufficient to make the point of my argument clear.
To begin with, understand that scientific method as such deals with the discovery of the efficient presence of forms of existence which cause, but are not perceived within the bounds of sense-perception. Gauss's 1799 attack on the hoax of the alleged mere "imaginary" quality of mathematical roots which reflect the action of efficient powers, is a typical point of reference. Gauss's 1799 work was a defense, in fact, of the way in which evidence of Kepler's astrophysics, and of Fermat's principle of least action, had led into Leibniz's enhanced development of the ontologically infinitesimal calculus, with his catenary-cued universal physical principle of least action. The implication, since the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, has been that universal physical principles are not directly objects of sense-perception, but are the efficient principles known for their effects in generating certain crucial types of phenomena within the scope of sense-perception. Since no later than those ancient times, science has meant the discovery and willfully effective employment of those efficient higher principles which cause effects known to the senses, but principles whose existence are not themselves directly objects of sense-perception.
In the founding of modern physical science, this was the principle on which Cusa premised his De Docta Ignorantia and subsequent works in this domain. Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation, Fermat's discovery of the principle of least action (e.g., "quickest time"), and Leibniz's catenary-cued principle of universal physical least-action, are prime examples of this principle.
The study of the successive work of Pasteur-Curie and Vernadsky greatly expanded the experimental basis for the application of this principle. The general form of the result is as follows.
Begin with the principle of life. Just as Kepler defined gravitation as a universal effect lying outside the bounds of the reductionist method of Aristotle's follower Claudius Ptolemy, gravitation is a principle which does not exist as a systemically scientific conception within the bounds of simple phenomenology. So, the universal physical principle of life is defined experimentally by existing states of organization of non-living matter which are never generated by non-living processes. So, in other words, life is defined by its manifest, singular efficiency in generating accumulations of fossils which can not be attributed to non-living states. So, cognition is defined by the generation of accumulated fossils of a type which can not be attributed to the same processes which produce the fossils of the Biosphere.
Creativity is therefore defined as the principled generation of increase of the power of generation of fossil products of the Noösphere. The mental action which accounts for this can not be attributed to living processes in general, but is expressed in the form of a change in the power which the human individual is able to generate as a quality of upshift in the characteristic rate of qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, growth within a phase of the Noösphere.
This power appears only within the human individual intellect, and never by any merely living processes, nor by collective action of human individuals. This power lies outside the human biological individual, but interacts, efficiently, with it. It appears only in a certain species, man, and has never been known to occur in any other living species. We say, therefore, that the living human form is appropriate for the propagation of this distinctive quality of individual human beings. It is a universal principle which, as a universal principle, seizes, as if infectiously, upon the appearance of the biological conception of the human individual.
As a result, the termination of the life of the human individual does not terminate the existence of the aspect of the human individual which distinguishes that person from the existence of the beasts.
The distinguishing feature of this living human individual, is his, or her generation, or other propagation of communicable knowledge of discoverable universal physical principles, such as those of competent physical science, and contributions to the body of Classical modes of artistic composition. This action within society renders the human individual immortal, just as empirical knowledge of the transmission of such creative actions presents us certainty of the immortality of that quality of deceased individual within society.
This quality of individual creativity is not expressed as a mechanical-like action, but with a quality of passion which the living body is induced to express during the interval of action in which a relevant act of discovery occurs as either an original discovery, or a replicated experience, or even personal re-experiencing of such a discovery. The replication of valid such acts of discovery, as in defensible programs of education, evokes the specific quality of passion we associate with the "illuminating" sensation of an act of creative mentation. This is the quality embedded in such exemplary, simpler choral compositions as J.S. Bach's Jesu, meine Freude and Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus.[13]
Here lies the distinction between bestial ("erotic") and agapic love. It is that principle of agapic love which, implicitly, defines the driving principle of universal natural law. All typical mental diseases express the pathological effects of domination of the personality by the bestial quality we term the erotic.
The Pathology Called Empiricism
The notion of natural law's relationship to human individual creativity, was the quality of the Platonic tradition, as in the Apostolic Christianity expressed by the works of the Apostles John and Paul. It appears as the central feature of the conceptions of natural law and use of language by Dante Alighieri, and is the central characteristic of the Fifteenth-Century, great ecumenical Council of Florence. However, the revival of the power of Venice's financier oligarchy, with the Fall of Constantinople, unleashed the tradition of hate associated with the Roman Empire and the alliance of the Venetian financier-oligarchy with the Norman Chivalry during the period of such crusades as against the Albigensians and by the Norman conquest, an evil which persisted into the medieval Europe's Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age." The medieval religion of hatred, which was unleashed under the banner of Spain's Grand Inquisitor, almost crushed the founding of the modern nation-state out of existence, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. During the middle of this 1492-1648 interval of horror, there was an internal shift within the ranks of the Venetian financier-oligarchy, with the emergence of the so-called "New Party" of Venice, which was led by Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi was the founder of the "New Venetian Party" which became the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of empiricism.
Through the Anglo-Dutch Liberal Party's success in luring France's foolish "Sun King" Louis XIV, and through the British monarchy's subsequent orchestration of the fratricidal "Seven Years' War" among the crowned fools of Europe, the British East India Company, under the increasing domination of Lord Shelburne, established itself in 1763 as an empire with the February 1763 Treaty of Paris.
The characteristic feature of Sarpi's legacy, known as empiricism, was the upholding of the essential, inhuman feature of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Zeus went so far as to condemn Prometheus, the friend of mankind, to eternal torment, this as a penalty for the office of providing knowledge of fire to human beings. Paolo Sarpi's followers did not go quite as far as Zeus. The degree of forbearance by Venice's New Party was dictated not by kindness, but strategic realities.
The Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, as typified by the work of the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa who had specified the policy which guided Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic, and as typified by the genius of Cusa's avowed follower in science, Leonardo da Vinci, had unleashed a ferment of strategically significant technological progress, most notably, by the founder of France's nation-state, Louis XI, and by Louis's admirer and follower, Henry VII of England. Under these conditions produced by the impact of the Fifteenth-Century reforms, the new realities of modern warfare did not permit a blanket suppression of scientific and technological progress, a suppression like that which had been the "zero growth" impulse of the medieval old party of Venice.
So, instead of simply banning scientific progress, the followers of Sarpi's "New Party" attacked scientific progress at its root, by suppressing the science of Leonardo, Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz. This attack became the systemic mystification known as the Cartesian method and its offshoots, as spread, into the middle of Eighteenth Century, by the network of "Newtonian" salons orchestrated by the Paris-based Venetian agent, Abbé Antonio Conti. The circles of Mazarin and Colbert, including Colbert's sometime protégé Leibniz, were, until the death of Leibniz in 1716, still a mightily powerful force of resistance to this New Venetian Party attempt to cripple scientific and technological progress.
So, with the approaching death of England's Queen Anne, the Anglo-Dutch Party of the tyrannical William of Orange and Marlborough emerged for a time as the dominant political force in Europe, until the beginnings of the American resistance, during the years immediately following the February 1763 treaty of Paris.
It was the American and European resistance to the new vigor of Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperial tyranny, which defined the environment of the Classical European renaissance of which the American struggle for independence became, more and more, the central feature. It was during this late-Eighteenth-Century renaissance, that the revival of the scientific tradition of Leibniz occurred.
Science had not died with Leibniz during that interval, but was merely set back significantly after his death. Earlier, in the wake of that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which was made possible largely by the role of Cardinal Mazarin, France under Mazarin's protégé Jean-Baptiste Colbert had remained the leader in fundamental progress of European science, until Germany assumed leadership from approximately the late 1820s onward, coinciding with shift of Alexander von Humboldt's protégé Lejeune Dirichlet from France, to Berlin. The circles of Monge and Carnot had typified the stubborn persistence of the Colbert legacy in France, through the suppression of the most vigorous period of the work of France's École Polytechnique, prior to the decline set into motion by Napoleon's adoption of Lagrange, and the ruin of the École under Laplace's protégé and suspected plagiarist Augustin Cauchy.[14]
Gauss, as adopted by the influential Alexander von Humboldt, typifies the continuing, Leibnizian renaissance, which, on balance set, the pace of progress into the middle of the Nineteenth Century. However, with the rise of the British-led orchestration of the destruction of the standards of rigor set by Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, Dirichlet, and Riemann, German science was significantly undermined in the manner typified by the savage campaign intended to drive Georg Cantor mad, and the subsequent World War I-period's fanatical attack on Max Planck by the positivist followers of Ernst Mach.
Today, with the extreme cultural decadence and relative hegemony of the influence of the radical positivists and existentialists, scientific fertility in respect to matters of physical principle has died out, since the passing of the leading figures of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and the catastrophic cultural impact of the assumption of leading positions by the "Baby-Boomer" generation whose cognitive faculties had been severely, systemically impaired since as early as the 1950s influence on children and adolescents of the rabidly existentialist, Roosevelt-hating Congress for Cultural Freedom. The collapse of a mass constituency for Classical artistic excellence in music, drama, and literature, as also the plastic arts, is part of the present pattern of virtual extermination of the habits of scientific and other creativity. Thus, empiricism today has reached the point that its methods for crushing creative potential within the population at large, have succeeded all too well in bringing about the self-destruction of the cultures which it has inhabited too long,
This decadence, rooted in the influence of empiricism, has not only largely uprooted the capacity of nations to understand the concept of natural law, but has made the self-destruction of national cultures almost a suicidal goal to be passionately desired by the inhabitants of that decadent culture. The loving passion to do good for its own sake, that passion which is the appropriate motive of economic and every other important practice, has been as if ripped out of current public opinion.
2. The Case of Pericles:
The Dynamic Evolution of Cultures
Admittedly, unlike our current President, Pericles of Athens could not be classed meaningfully as personally insane; he was an intelligent, accomplished public figure, who had the historical misfortune to be an integral part of the imperialistic, Sophism-polluted culture of ancient Athens at that time. He was part of the ruling culture of Athens, composed of accomplices in the decision, nearly two and a half millennia before Prescott, George H.W., and George W. Bush, to impose an arbitrary imperial authority over its allies, like that which the Anglo-American Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush governments claimed at the point of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact alliance.
The decline of Athens from its moral high point under Solon, to its descent into political ruin under Thrasymachus, with the launching of the ruinous Peloponnesian War begun under Pericles, is an image paralleled by the folly which overtook the U.S.A. in the transformation which led, from the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, to the post-1989 new imperialism of President George H.W. Bush's partnership with the governments of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her party's virtual ownership of the French government of de Gaulle-hating, Germany-hating François Mitterrand.
The wild-eyed fantasy of the "The End of History" dogma of neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama, expresses a worse than Athenian imperial lunacy, one which had reached its stretching of limits of historical obscenity under the lunatic partnership of Britain's true successor to Maggie Thatcher, the infinitely depraved war-lords, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his would-be-Nero partners in crime, the Bush-Cheney pair.
Consider some related clinical cases which typify the evidence which must be considered to understand the reciprocal relationship between the individual's action to introduce changes into the culture, and the way in which changes in the culture are effected: not only the way in which the behavior of the individual members of society is changed, but how that changed behavior of individuals, especially leading individuals, may change the characteristics of the culture. It is the implications of changes in culture, not personalities as such, which are to be treated as the primary concerns governing the way we must read our constitutional law.
As in the case of Pericles, the hysteria of a mass of people which has been caught and seized by a torrent of moral decay, grips all but the most exceptionally strong-minded men and women of principle, with a force bordering upon mass-psychosis. We witnessed this in the capitulation of the Senate to the torrents of lies from Dick Cheney, in authorizing an anti-constitutional launching of the United States into the presently hopeless, rapidly worsening quagmire of Iraq. In other words, to understand why the Senate was panicked into capitulation to Cheney's lies, we must take into account now, as in the case of Pericles, how all but the most exceptionally strong men and women of character are all too easily victims of a popular panic which grips most of a population with a force like that of mass-psychosis. We must not be so childish, as to overlook the dynamic characteristics of social processes, within which the individual acts as both the source and interacting consequence of the actual dynamics of the historical-cultural process as a whole.
As in the case of Pericles' Athens, the name of the moral corruption which played the role of a virtually psychotic panic was the same disease of Sophistry expressed by that Democratic party of Athens, which accomplished the judicial murder of Socrates. This was a Sophistry akin to that reborn within the children of those U.S. family households of the 1950s and 1960s, which were bombarded by the combined influence of the terrifying late 1940s mobilization for "preventive" nuclear war, and "McCarthyism," and the impact of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF's campaign of wild-eyed lying about history and its promotion of the corrosive form of Sophistry associated with its leading German expression, the so-called "Frankfurt School," typified that indoctrination of the children of terrified suburbanites and the like of the 1950s and 1960s, resulting in the spread of moral and cultural depravity among what is called the "Baby-Boomer generation" of the middle to late 1960s and the 1970s.
The result of this conditioning of the affected portions of the general population, is a variant of what I have often described as "the fishbowl syndrome." The affected population adopts a set of mixed reasonable and absurd assumptions as more or less axiomatic elements of "self-evident" patterns of belief. Any reality which is experienced from outside the range of such adopted assumptions, is ignored, or actively rejected in a way which tends to mimic what we would recognize as hysterical flights from reality like those associated with actual functional psychosis. This set of belief-structures excludes the possible existence of anything which does not fit within the bounds of what the "fishbowl syndrome" allows to be considered as "credible."
In the case of a form of mass-psychosis such as Sophistry, the characteristics of the Sophists' or kindred expressions of disbelief, are largely shaped by the fact that the excluded evidence denies the Sophist the ability to actually prove any of those of his propositions which has been excluded, on principle, by the logic of the "fishbowl syndrome." Thus, the Sophist finds a substitute for truth in what he assumes to be popular opinion, on the assumption that the Sophist's delusion is shared, more or less actively, by other lunatics like that Sophist himself. For example: "I didn't see that in the media," therefore means, for the Sophist, "it never happened." For the poor Sophist, the U.S. economy lurching into a general, increasingly, physically impoverished state of national bankruptcy, is worshipped as on its way to ever-mounting riches, if only because the latest batch of fraudulent "market reports" insists, like the 1931 election-campaign propaganda of President Herbert Hoover, that "prosperity is just around the corner," with "a chicken in every pot." (After 1968, the comparable slogan would be: "there will soon be pot in every chicken.")
So, that type of syndrome which had led, earlier, into the Peloponnesian War's collapse of ancient Greek civilization, as, now, the current Bush-Cheney regime, has apparently led the U.S.A. now into needless, self-ruinous, spreading warfare, as already in Iraq and Afghanistan, from which no true Anglo-American victory could be secured. That Bush-Cheney regime has played a leading role, together with Liberal Imperialist Blair's controlling financial establishment, in leading the planet as a whole into the implicit doom of the presently onrushing collapse of the global Anglo-American system of shared hegemony.
So, the not-so-surrogate war in Afghanistan, launched under the auspices of the Trilateral Commission's Zbigniew Brzezinski, and fought, as by Vice-President George Bush and Britain's Jimmy Goldsmith, against "the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union," has become the virtually hopeless, permanent state of drug-traffic-financed irregular warfare pouring out of the "failed state" of consequently ruined Afghanistan, into neighboring Central Asia and Transcaucasia, and into Ukraine and beyond. This warfare is still backed by the U.S. and British not-so-really-covert forces. Meanwhile, all the Anglo-American irregular warfare in progress sucks the U.S. military and other capabilities dry, while a concert of firms which virtually own as much of the soul as the Bush-Cheney Administration has, such as Halliburton, suck the U.S. Treasury dry.
So, the post-1989 triumphalists, such as President George H.W. Bush, who claimed credit for the break-up of the Soviet bloc-system, after it had already occurred, had been the same crew which proclaimed such a development as that breakup, as not in sight, even just months prior to that development as a completed fact.
That case of the SDI has pivotal importance, still, for understanding the situation of the world as a whole today.
The Lesson of the SDI
I can say what I say about George H.W. Bush and the SDI case with special authority, since I was the author of what President Ronald Reagan had named his "Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)," and I was the one who forewarned the Soviet government, in a meeting in February 1983, through the back-channel I was conducting in the President's interest, that if the President were to offer the Soviet government the proposed negotiation which I had outlined to the Soviet government as under consideration, and the Soviet government were then to flatly reject that offer by the President, then the Soviet system would collapse, for chiefly economic reasons, "within about five years." The President made the offer a few weeks later, and Yuri Andropov rejected it, without discussion. The Soviet Union soon collapsed, approximately as I had forecast the probability that this would occur.
I was thereafter hated by the Soviet government, by most of the opponents of the SDI within the Reagan insiders, and by the leadership of the Democratic Party. I was hated so, because I had succeeded in carrying my proposal so near to success, that had the Soviet government simply agreed to explore the implications of what I had proffered and what President Reagan had officially affirmed, this would have reversed the disastrous course of those factions' long-standing, conflicted, but impassioned emotional investment in the post-Franklin Roosevelt, so-called "Cold War" great game. My various opponents' investment in hatred of one another had become far more precious to them than the continued existence of civilization. This opposition to SDI from within much of the Reagan Administration itself, and the wild-eyed opposition from leaders of the Democratic Party, was despite the wide support I had gained for my initiative, not only in relevant circles within the U.S.A., but among senior military circles in the U.S.A., France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.
Consequently because of my stunning near-success in my collaboration with the relevant inner circle associated with President Reagan in this affair, I became a target of the circles of Vice-President George H.W. Bush, within the U.S.A. It was the fear of my demonstrated potency, combined with this hatred, which was the sole cause for the way I came under attack in the end of March 1983 through 1989. For that reason, and that reason alone, the secret "internal security" apparatus within the Justice Department, bent and broke virtually all rules, over more than a decade, debating whether it were more advantageous to have me simply assassinated, or, to hope that a successful, fraudulent conviction, and prolonged, early imprisonment, on either one concocted pretext, or another, would eliminate me as a significant factor in our national life. So, for that reason, and that reason alone, during a time from no later than late 1983, and beyond 1989, I was, for the same reason, the target of proposed assassination, or imprisonment by elements of the United States, and, at the same time, the target of frequent, blatant, widely published, 1986 demands for such action, issued by the Soviet government of General Secretary Gorbachev.
I was sent to prison after a series of attempted legal frame-ups in January 1989, little more than six months before the Soviet system collapsed. Thus, just a little more than six years after my February 1983 forecast of "about five" years, the Soviet system began its disintegration. It is also notable, that in a Columbus Day press conference in Berlin's Kempinski-Bristol Hotel, on October 12, 1988, I had warned of an immediate threat of a collapse of the Comecon states, beginning with Poland; that press conference was broadcast, as presented, on a national TV network later that same month.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. government itself, President Ronald Reagan had become, quite independently of my initiative proposed to him, sincerely in support of what I had proposed he proffer to the Soviet government. Over a long time, World War II veteran Reagan had been passionately, and publicly opposed to the system which he associated with the Henry A. Kissinger, whom he openly denounced and despised on this account. That was the coincidence of belief and related commitment on which the Reagan Presidency's acceptance, and subsequent support of my proposal had been based, in opposition to the Heritage Foundation's Daniel P. Graham's technologically lunatic, "spoon bender's" concoction, High Frontier. The President, in effect, bought what I proposed, which he named SDI, because that represented a verified way of achieving a goal which had been long-standing with him: the end of the Satanic lunacy of a system of terror based upon what he denounced as "revenge weapons."
The SDI was, in fact, the only existing option with a reasonable expectation of both avoiding the nuclear-warfare threat, which was an active military threat into 1989, and for also reversing those downward trends in the U.S. and European economies which had been unleashed by the Nixon Administration's wrecking of the Bretton Woods system, This was the only actually presented means for actually reversing the 1977-1981 wrecking of the U.S. internal economy under Brzezinski's role as successor to Henry Kissinger in coordinating the wrecking of the protectionist system which had been the secret of U.S. economic success, both under Franklin Roosevelt, and in the success of President Dwight Eisenhower in staving off the worst of the measures proposed by elements of the "military-industrial complex" within his own administration.
The palpable "secret" behind the SDI, and of my unique role within that project, was not so much weapons of warfare, as the kind of plain, old American principles of agro-industrial scientific-technological progress and fair trade, which had repeatedly brought the U.S.A. to a position of world leadership among national economies. The palpable "secret" of the SDI was, therefore, not really a secret, but was a well-established fact of the superiority of the Hamiltonian aspects of the American System of political-economy which had been copied to great advantage by Bismarck's Germany, Meiji Restoration Japan, and others, from approximately 1877 on, based on admiring studies of the demonstrated superiority of the post-Confederacy, American System of political-economy, as of Hamilton, Frederick List, and Henry C. Carey, over all the rival economic systems of the world.
As France's Louis XI had demonstrated so brilliantly, the best-won wars are those which were not fought, because one cultivates and deploys one's margin of advantage to be generous, to bring the actual or potential adversary into cooperation for reason of no explicit inducement but his advantage in accepting that arrangement. That is real strategy, which the present Bush-Cheney and Blair governments, in their devotion to virtually brainless folly, have effectively outlawed for as long as their incumbency were tolerated. Make one's nation superior in the matter of the good things of life, and be thus generous in ways which are to the common advantage of all involved. Outlaw Thomas Hobbes, and learn the wisdom of Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Avoid, as Colbert advised, the colossal folly of Louis XIV's embrace of the decadent, and implicitly treasonous Fronde.
In the case of the Soviet Union of the post-Franklin Roosevelt era, the proverbial "Achilles' Heel" of the post-Stalin Soviet Union was the virtual technological "Oblomovism" of the bureaucratized, hyper-ideologized, civilian sector of the Soviet economy under the reign of the reductionist folly of "Diamat," as contrasted with the virtual scientific-technological miracles of the Soviet science-driven military capabilities. The crucial point of my argument, from late 1977 on, was that if the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union harvested their joint potential for developing scientifically feasible modes of effectively high ratios of effectiveness against the net strategic success of any strategic ballistic missile launch, an agreement to that outlook would turn the U.S. economy back from the precipice of technological stagnation and collapse, and would channel the Soviet economy's civilian sector into defeating the Soviet population's worst internal enemy, the wide spread of anti-progress "Oblomovism" in its civilian production and basic infrastructure sectors. The sharing of these new, forcibly developed technologies for civilian purposes world-wide, would result in a revolutionary transformation of the condition of world society in directions consistent with the achievements of the American System of political-economy.
This option, which the now recently deceased Dr. Edward Teller described, on one 1982 occasion, as a shift from conflict into service to "the common aims of mankind," was the purpose of SDI. The special political problem we faced from inside the Soviet apparatus itself, is that the Andropov regime's leadership no longer embodied what pragmatic old socialists would have regarded as human objectives respecting peace and the task of improving the general conditions of life throughout this planet. The seeds of massive corruption later expressed by those Andropov-sponsored, British-trained young apparatchniks who became typical of the billionaires looting the post-Soviet system, were already an expression of the deep moral corruption which prompted Andropov's out-of-hand rejection of President Reagan's generous proposal, a proposal which expressed that President's long-standing hatred of the system of "mutual and assured (thermonuclear) destruction (MAD)," which Mr. Reagan had associated loudly, passionately, and appropriately with the exemplary, rather hateful personality of the predatory Mr. Henry A. Kissinger.
The defeat of my own and President Reagan's effort to get us all out of the nightmare, automatically ensured a Soviet crank-up of military options such as the Ogarkov Plan. It was that on which I focussed attention in warning my Soviet discussion-partner against the rejection of a proffer of a crash program of strategic nuclear anti-missile defense, in warning him, in February 1983, that a rejection of such an offer made by the President would result in a military-expenditure-driven collapse of the Soviet system "in about five years." By that time, the Soviet Ogarkov Plan as such was dead, but the folly it had expressed had lived on. The Soviet folly of keeping the World War III option on the program, was actually more on the side of the U.S. factions which opposed the SDI, than the Soviet government. Had we pressed the proposal originally presented by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, we could have won acceptance to SDI from the Soviet side.
When the can known as the East German Communist regime's plans and capabilities was opened, after the close of 1989, our side discovered that the plan for the Soviet attack overrunning Germany in a very short time, was on the virtual launch-pads, at the time of the fall of the Wall, for the immediate period ahead.
The stupidity of those who did not back President Reagan in this matter of SDI, and the worse stupidity and corruption of the Andropov regime, is now, factually, outstanding for all who will honestly reflect on the evidence now in hand. The rejection of the President's proffer to Andropov, and the aggravating factor of sabotage of that effort from within leading circles inside the U.S.A., was the turning-down-point, after which the internal situation of the U.S.A. has become consistently worse in the long term, ever since.
However, stupidity of a quality verging upon criminal qualities of willfully reckless folly, such as the rejection of SDI, is nevertheless an included characteristic of certain phases in the evolution of culture, as was the case with the history of Athens, from Pericles through the original model for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Straussian pack of "neo-con" chickenhawks, Thrasymachus.
The next big step downward from the Thatcher and Bush of 1989, was the Blair and Bush-Cheney of January 2001. To understand how this phase of the post-Roosevelt pattern was shaped, we must look back to the time that the grandfather of our incumbent President, Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers, Harriman, in concert with the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, led the pack putting Adolf Hitler into power in Germany.[15] This support for Hitler from among Anglo-American bankers, who, like Harriman, later turned against him, is of crucial importance for understanding U.S. politics today. This Anglo-American financiers' early 1930s enthusiasm for Hitler, had been prefaced by Winston Churchill's accomplices, when they used a British intelligence asset from Young Turk days, Venice's banker Volpi di Misurata, as the intellectual architect of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's crafted rise to power in Italy. History is a process, and that process has a history.
So, the British imperial crown prince, later Edward VII, played a leading role in a replay of the London-orchestrated Seven Years' War which had established the British East India Company of 1763 as an empire in fact. Edward VII thus followed precedent in pre-organizing what became World War I.
Nevertheless, to answer the question posed by some: "Does history repeat itself?" The answer is, "Never; history is a dynamic, not a mechanistic process."
The Dynamics of Culture
It is absurd to speak of a culture of apes, or, as implied by the account which First Lady Laura Bush delivered to the 2005 Washington White House Correspondents' dinner, of the incumbent President. (According to accounts of observers, the President himself received his wife's bit of attempted humor with a quality of desperately feigned aplomb which shrewd and enlightened observers might have attributed to his attempts to resist the lure of an attack by aggravated crotch-itch.) In polite conversation, even on ceremonial occasions, one does not speak publicly of "the culture" of our nation's highest-ranking dirt-triker, President George W. Bush, Jr., helicopter beanie, and all.
The distinction of the individual member of the human species is the power of reason, the ability to generate an act of discovery of a universal physical principle whose existence as an entity lies beyond the shadowy bounds of mere phenomena. The degree to which the human species' behavior has risen above the level of imputable culture of a rutting, adult male chimpanzee, what we may properly identify as culture is entirely a product of that creative mental faculty uniquely specific to the species of the human individual.
The individual mind's creative action, through discoveries of universal physical principle, is expressed, simultaneously, in four types of ways. First, man's actions in successfully changing abiotic processes in ways which define these changes as an integral part of Vernadsky's Noösphere. Second, man's changes in the ordering of the Biosphere, changes, such as mining the fossil accumulations within the Biosphere, which are then also changes within the Noösphere. Third, man's changes in the principled ordering of the Noösphere itself, including man's changes in himself, and changes in the principled orderings of social relations, such as social systems as such, within the Noösphere.
These changes include the reciprocal effects of the reaction by the abiotic domain, the Biosphere, and Noösphere on the condition of existence of the society, and the individual person within society. These relations are ordered, in fact, by underlying, discoverable universal physical principles of a class which are not phenomena from within the domain of mere sense-perception as such.
All of these and related kinds of changes, effected through voluntary choices of modes of action, including avoidance of appropriate modes of reaction, are an integral part of the Noösphere. This is the proper choice of meaning for the term "culture." Outside this set of relations, there is no existing expression of culture. The ultimate measure of the effects so generated, is the physical standard of rate of increase (or, decrease) of the long-term potential relative population-density of the human species considered in part, or as a whole. Culture is a dynamic, not a mechanical system. Culture is, essentially, the reflection of the interaction of discoverable universal physical principles.
So, the past, as a part of, or complement to the accumulations of basic economic infrastructure, acts upon the living individuals. Those accumulations are the premises which shape the challenges to which the present moment of society must respond. So, the individual, in one time and place, stands upon ground which is never the same ground on which earlier generations stood; only incompetents would be foolish enough to base thinking about the individual in history on the silly presumptions of Plutarch, that Delphi priest of Apollo's comparisons of the lives of famous persons from widely differing times and places. Here lies a key to bear in mind when confronted by the method used by Dr. Post. Every responsible, competent leading figure in history is responding to a history which is always different in species than any significant chunk of preceding history, in his or other person's cultures. History is essentially dynamic, never mechanical, as Dr. Post's method implies the latter.
Since these conceptions which are presently demanded of us by circumstances, were developed as products of European civilization, with only some included effects from outside European cultures as such, taken into account, it is necessary, and appropriate that a person who is himself chiefly a product of European civilization, limit his claims chiefly to comprehensive knowledge of a scientific quality respecting culture, to the evolutionary process of millennia of the relatively well-known European culture since about the time of Solon of Athens and the Pythagoreans.
How valid are the conclusions which might be obtained within the scope of that approach? A competent answer to that question can be supplied only to the degree that we limit the premises of our conclusions to "factors" which can be securely defined as knowledge of the quality which astrophysics, for example, demonstrates by presently known discoveries of universal physical principles. By physical principles, we mean principles expressed as reflections of universal types of physical effects.
No more in the nature of preliminaries need be added at this point of the account. Shift our attention now, to the principal features of the evolution of European culture over the period of somewhat more than about 3,800 years, a period encompassing the time of the interaction, including that by wars, among Egypt, Babylon, and the Hittites of central Anatolia, but with all of these overshadowed by the still more ancient, towering culture of the great pyramids of Egypt.
The development of European culture against that background is, characteristically, a continuing conflict between the struggle for the cultivation of the freedom of human reason within society, and the opposing, brutalizing effects of the kind of imperial systems which are traced, in European history up to the present day, in the recurrent efforts to loot and oppress the majorities of populations through practices known as "imperialism," or, today, the form of neo-Venetian imperialism known as world government, or as "globalization."
The reactions of ancient Greek culture, with its own internal cultural conflicts, to the pressures of imperialism, are associated, chiefly, with the struggle against the principal enemies, the Persian Empire and Tyre, and later the Roman imperial systems and their successor, the ultramontane system based on a curious partnership of the Norman Chivalry with the Venetian financier oligarchy. The British Empire, and the present floating-exchange-rate form of the IMF and World Bank, and the drive, as by the Siena Group's Robert Mundell, toward the revival of medieval ultramontane tyranny in the form of replacing sovereign nation-states by "globalization," are typical contemporary outcomes of neo-Venetian depravity.
To set the stage for the emergence of the role of the Classical phase of Grecian culture, it is sufficient to say for our purposes here, that the clearer continuity of the history of European civilization begins about 700 B.C., by which time a revived Egypt defended itself by patronizing the Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean, as allies against Tyre, and the Etruscans in the western, as allies against Tyre's colony based in Carthage. See, in the backdrop, the legacies of the Babylonian and Persian empires which menaced Egypt and Europe from the east. From the standpoint of culture, the leading positive impulses into ancient Greece of this period, and beyond, come from Egypt, as the role of Sphaerics in Greek culture attest; whereas, prior to the rise of the power of Rome in the Mediterranean generally, the menace comes chiefly from Southwest Asia, from the living legacy of Babylon and the Achaemenid Empire.
3. Science, Love, Culture, and the Individual Mind
The root of Classical European civilization, is the principle that the mere phenomena which the illiterate person associates with "sense-certainty," may be real experiences, but, at their best, are no better than essentially shadows cast upon sense-perception by the action of what are, for him, chiefly unseeable agencies. Ignorance of competent methods of science are as deadly on this account as any ignorance of today's usually neglected realities of political history.
On the contrary, unlike today's usually poorly educated intellect produced by our schools, universities, and mass media, the Classical Greek thinkers, such as the Pythagoreans and Plato, were influenced, on this account, by ancient Egypt's definition of science as what those Greeks termed Sphaerics. This Egyptian conception, rooted in the development of the conception of cycles adduced from astronomical exploration of the universe around the Earth, supplied the birth of Classical European science with the crucial conception on which the possibility of a physical science depends: the concept named universality. This notion of universality is approximated by thinking of the unseeable real universe known through its projected effects upon the depth of the spherical envelope which is the subject of thorough astronomical study of that great, oceanic-like shadow-world our senses consider as the universe which envelops our existence.
The idea of universal physical principles occurred to our known evidence of the explicit opinion of civilized mankind with the discovery of that which modern mathematical physical science commonly refers to as geometrical "singularities," or what Gottfried Leibniz defined variously as "power" or as "dynamic" processes. A few illustrations of the significance of singularities, so defined, have crucial importance for the reader here, as examples of what we should mean by referring to the quality of the individual's social-mental activity which absolutely distinguishes the human mind from the behavior of the beasts.
Don't Monkey with Mankind
Remember always, that in all evidence of known discovery of the idea of universality as an object, universality always had a well-defined physical significance, always expressed in the mental language of geometry, rather than mere arithmetic or algebra. Scientists tend to use arithmetic and algebra for certain purposes, often useful ones. However, only physical-geometrical thinking, rather than any form of mere mathematics otherwise, can actually define the existence of a physical principle in an experimental way.[16]
For example, take the fact that a sane mind could never derive the existence of a line, abstractly, from a point, nor a surface from a line, nor a solid from a surface. Physical reality is always expressed essentially—that is to say, ontologically, physically—as motion, exactly as Leibniz's presentation of vis viva exposed the pervasive incompetence of Descartes on this matter. It is the motion of a point which is a line, the motion of a line which is a surface, and the motion of a surface which is a solid. Such was the notion underlying the argument of Heraclitus and Plato, that nothing exists but a principle of continuing change.[17]
Generally, although the legacy of the Platonic Academy kept these notions of science as a continuing practice, especially through the time of the deaths of Eratosthenes and Archimedes, the emergence of the Roman Empire, out of a process associated with Rome's closing triumphs during the Second Punic War, was a cultural catastrophe for all affected mankind. The judicial murder of Jesus Christ by order of the nominal son-in-law of the Emperor Tiberius, and the wave of crucifixions and the comparable acts of genocide, and related horrors perpetrated by Nero and his followers, were the expression of a satanic quality of evil and relative intellectual brutishness. So was the period of the domination of Europe by the ultramontane co-regime of the Venetian financier oligarchy and the Norman Chivalry. It would therefore be difficult to regard as, in any degree, an exaggeration, the use of "Renaissance" to characterize the Fifteenth-Century birth of modern Europea which led the planet into the generally upward development of modern European culture.
Nor, even considering some heroic achievements by European culture within the dark medieval age, can the developments leading into the great ecumenical Council of Florence be regarded as anything less than the greatest set of events in all modern centuries since. Nicholas of Cusa's Concordantia Catholica, which superseded Dante Alighieri's De Monarchia, was indispensable in the founding of the modern commonwealth form of sovereign nation-state, just as Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia was the founding work of modern experimental physical science. The comparison of these developments, and their outcome, with the grandest achievements of the Greece of the Pythagoreans, Solon, and Plato, is in no way an exaggeration. Rather, it is a necessary comparison on which we today depend for a confident appreciation of the potential excellence of a mankind which is the only living creature whose essential character is developed in the image of the Creator.
For example: One of the least known, but most crucial aspects of Cusa's contributions to the modern experimental physical science, appears among his sermons, where he reports an important discovery of a universal principle of physical science, his correction of the error in Archimedes' famous attempt at completing the chores of squaring of the circle. This discovery by Cusa was crucial in developing the method by which he laid the methodological foundations for all competent work in modern experimental physical science.
While it is, admittedly, important that the child should be freed from the lunacy of so-called "Euclidean" notions of "self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates of 'three-dimensional' space," the mastery of the subject of a spherical physical geometry, is only the virtual blackboard on which the actual constructions of physical principle might be demonstrated. Cusa's recognition of the error of Archimedes' approach to squaring the circle was the foundation on which Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation depends: from adducing the implications of an elliptical orbit, Fermat's discovery of the principle of a quickest-action pathway of physical action, and Leibniz's overturning the absurdity of Descartes' pathetic notions of momentum, were recognized in Leibniz's explicit statement of the relevant, catenary-keyed universal principle of physical least-action, as powers in the sense of the concept of dynamis specific to the Pythagoreans and Plato.
At first approximation, this approach to the concept of universality, implies patterns of the circular action subtended by the notion of a spherical universality corresponding to astronomy. However, according to the relevant Classical Greeks, the Egyptians had conveyed an additional notion to them, the notion of universal powers (dynamis) which is the central conception of scientific knowledge in the work of the Pythagoreans and of Plato. Kepler's discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, is, like Fermat's discovery of a universal principle of least action (e.g., "quickest time"), among the most convenient illustrations of the notion of universal powers by the Pythagoreans and Plato, and among the representatives, such as Eratosthenes, of the Academy of Athens later. It is this principled distinction which distinguishes science from the "flat-Earth" mentalities of Enron styles in both bookkeeping and currently fashionable styles in common gossip.
In addition to such relatively elementary arguments as those, the Pythagoreans (e.g., Archytas) and Plato, demonstrated the physical significance of the principle of continuing motion by elementary cases in constructive geometry, such as the geometric constructions of the doubling of the square, the cube, and the uniqueness of the derivation of the so-called "Golden Section" from the construction of the regular dodecahedron.
One of the most easily accessed examples of this notion of power, is Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation. Kepler's correction of the measurement of the Mars orbit, demonstrated that the orbit was not only elliptical, but that the orbit was constantly changing in each most infinitesimal interval of action, that according to a standard of "equal times/equal areas" of the subtended sector. Kepler's "violations" of the Aristotelean concoction of the Roman Claudius Ptolemy, demonstrated the existence of a universal principle of the quality of what modern usage since Leibniz defines as a power (Greek: dynamis).
This demonstration of what Leibniz defined as power (German: Kraft, for the science of physical economy), and, for physical science generally, as dynamics (as opposed to mechanics), is identical with the notion of power in the work of the Pythagoreans and the dialogues of Plato.
However, in this location, we are not focussed primarily on matters of physical science, except as such material is an indispensable aspect of the task of defining the natural law which must guide the hand of society's shaping of its political life. We must keep a firm grip on the notion of power and dynamics, as those notions pertain to matters of physical science, and, most emphatically, physical economy; but, our emphasis here is on natural law as such, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the composition of our original Federal Constitution bear on the subject of the importance of natural law for a world in crisis today.
Power and Passion
These universal powers are associated, primarily, with the emotional experience of an act of insight corresponding to a validatable, replicatable act of discovery of a universal principle by an individual human mind. These specific kinds of emotional experiences also occur with the re-enacting of that experience, and with states of mind associated with a condition of being on the verge of experiencing such a discovery. This experience is associated with the act of love, as defined by Plato's writings, as opposed to the notion of eros, and as associated with the principle of agape, as also defined by Plato, and also identified, famously, with the Christian significance of agape in the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13. This is also the opposition of Classical artistic composition, the expression of agape, to the erotic pleasure of Romanticism in art. This emotion, corresponding to agape, is also the correlative of the sense of immortality.
That must be acknowledged, in practice today, as the fundamental principle of natural law, and, therefore, of competent constitutional law. That must be always the driving passion guiding decisions bearing upon the notion of required constitutional law, for any specific historic situation in life within and among nations.
These powers, the discovered cause of the shadow-like patterns observed as sense-phenomena, locate the real universe in the unseen, but efficient realm of those powers which are known to the mind in the same way as Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation. Therefore, the lawful ordering of that universe which generates the phenomena of sense-perception, lies within the domain of those discoverable powers. It is the emotion of discovery of the existence of such powers, which provides us a notion of certainty—and, an emotion of certainty—respecting the lawful ordering of the universe which underlies the relevant phenomena. This quality of emotion, which is also characteristic of Classical artistic composition, is the correlative of a natural lawfulness, as distinct from the notions of a merely positive law.
In religion, this distinction of agape from eros, has been the characteristic division among nominal expressions of "Christianity" in the American experience since the witch-trial obscenity of Salem, and the obscenities of Jonathan Edwards' ranting and raving up and down large lengths of the Connecticut River. It is said of the latter, "Elmer Gantry" type of so-called "revivalist," that more souls were created by the preacher behind the tent, than saved during the service inside. Christianity, as distinguished by emulation of the Creator's love of mankind (agape), as expressed by Jesus Christ, is to be distinguished from the sheer bestiality of the mobs of ranters-and-ravers at a Ku Klux Klan ceremony, an auto-da-fé, or the "Elmer Gantryism" of Karl Rove's political merchandising of religious belief as merely a matter of tradition, rather than actual knowledge of the individual person's relationship, in his or her capacity as a member of a creative species, to the Creator.
There is no way in which this matter of the society's loving relationship to the Creator is more clearly expressed within the body of universal law, than the commitment to subordinate all law to that central, subsuming feature of our Federal Constitution, the promotion of the general welfare, otherwise named "the common good." In no place in the history of modern European law is this expressed more clearly than in the central principle of agreement on which the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia was premised. Consider the following historical setting of that Treaty.
After millennia of the Olympian, Delphic, and kindred subjugation of most living persons to the condition of human cattle, the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance had brought forth, in Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England, a new form of society, called a "commonwealth," so named in celebration and affirmation of the establishment of a form of self-government by a people in which government subordinated itself, its will, to the service of the general welfare of all of the people and their descendants. Then, the predatory financial-oligarchical forces centered on the medieval residue known as Venice, unleashed religious warfare throughout Europe, from the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, through the persistent horrors of religious warfare throughout the interval concluding with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
The purpose of that orgy of religious warfare, was to return society to a caricature of a medieval ultramontane order, an order like that under the medieval partnership of Venice's maritime financier-oligarchy with the Norman Chivalry. A similar intention, to suppress and eradicate the institution of the sovereign nation-state, is still the intention behind the present lurch toward stateless "globalization" under financier-oligarchical ruling systems at the present moment of history. This has been, indeed, the intention of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of financier-oligarchical rule since the imperial triumph of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company at that Paris treaty of February 1763, which launched London's escalating assault upon the existing liberties of the North American English-speaking colonies.
The simple Lutheran hymn which J.S. Bach transformed into the higher form of his Jesu, meine Freude motet, captures an essence of the rejoicing of Europe's liberation from the horrors of man almost everywhere acting as a beast to man, during the course of that 1492-1648 interval. The principle of that Treaty so celebrated, is the individual's subordination of his or her passions to the imperatives of the love of the people of, especially, the other faith, the other nation.
It is upon that foundation, expressed in Classical Greece of the Pythagoreans, Solon of Athens, and Plato, and the place of that principle of agape in Christianity as presented so emphatically by the Apostles John and Paul, that the ecumenical principle of constitutional law, the promotion of the general welfare, created the specific, principled, historical foundation for the establishment of our constitutional Federal Republic as a conception in law.
This does not eliminate the function of positive law from the decent practice of a society; but, it subordinates the imputable authority of the positive law to the higher, true authority of natural law. A well-crafted constitution should be the projection of the higher authority of natural law upon the domain of crafting of positive law. The application of that notion to any crisis-situation, such as the present phase of a decades-long wave of degeneration of our national culture, should be considered mandatory.
We are implicitly obliged to define the evolution of culture in the same mode.
4. The Threat to the U.S. Constitution
It is this underlying conception of immortality, as associated with our Declaration of Independence's and Constitution's explicit rejection of the reductionist doctrines of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, which defines the outstanding contribution of the establishment of our Federal Republic to civilization as a whole, as in the crucial role of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in making possible the defeat of Benito Mussolini's, Adolf Hitler's, and Francisco Franco's lunges toward an "integrist" form of fascist world-empire.[18] The prevalent lack of political Europe's adherence to this constitutional principle of government, a principle served by our greatest Presidents, left continental Europe susceptible, still today, to the kind of Synarchist International's fascist and related plots which Europe suffered during the 1917-1945 interval. Now, that same kind of sickness which has already overrun various parts, or all of Europe at sundry times, over centuries to date, has now also become an immediate, existential quality of threat to our constitutional republic, that threat now tending to appear among us in a degree not matched since Appomattox.
Essentially, fascism, as the cases of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, and so on typify this, is not a thing in itself. There are typically fascist modes of behavior, but these are the scabs and pus of political infamy, not the infection which produces fascism as among its symptomatic effects.
I explain the infection, in the following summary of the historical foundations of the conflict which threatens the existence of our U.S.A. rather immediately today. The specific threat to our nation now, is an outgrowth of developments which began with the take-over of Britain in 1688-1689 by William of Orange, and the rise of that Ireland-based portion of the British aristocracy which was developed as a crucial element of future, internal expressions of British oligarchical power during that and the following decades.
The substance underlying the symptomatic features of fascist movements, represents, predominantly, an outgrowth of the Anglo-Dutch Liberalism which was developed as an outgrowth of the emergence of the financier-oligarchical party in its guise as the Anglo-Dutch India companies' "Venetian Party" of the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It was that financier oligarchy's reaction against the threat to the kind of ultramontanist revival of a Venice-style, world empire of financier-oligarchical rule, such as that variety of what is called "globalization" promoted by the Siena Group's Robert Mundell, et al., today.
The essential features of that relevant bit of today's history are as follows.
The successful American War of Independence against the post-February 1763 oppression by the British East India Company, brought Lord Shelburne and his crew into direct control over the attempt to defend the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperial system against the spread of the influence of the American model throughout European civilization. Shelburne's first notable action in service of that purpose was his 1782-1783 role as Prime Minister in segregating the principal allies of the struggle for American independence, the U.S.A., France, and Spain, from one another, through separate treaties with Shelburne's government. Shelburne's principal target was Louis XVI's France.
However, while the fact that France was a great power of that time prompted Shelburne and Bentham to target the U.S.A.'s former chief ally France as the principal enemy to be destroyed at that time, it was what that new nation, the U.S.A., represented, which was the longer-range threat which impelled Shelburne's Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialists to focus their attack on France as the pivotal target for the attempted ruin of all of continental Europe.
Already, in 1763, Shelburne had coopted the presently notorious "Scottish philosopher" Adam Smith to his retinue, and had assigned Smith to conduct inquiries which would lead to development of means to destroy the liberties of the North American colonies and the economy of France, as the legacy of Adam Smith has, in fact, ruined the United States—royally!—during the recent four decades. In 1782, Shelburne led in establishing the British Foreign Office, giving his lackey Jeremy Bentham a key position as head of the dirty-tricks department conducting operations against the Americas[19] and continental Europe. Among Shelburne's key agents in this business were Benjamin Franklin adversary Philippe "Egalité" of France and Shelburne's lackey, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker. It was the bankrupting of France's monarchy through the British imposition of the free trade policies of Adam Smith and Physiocrat Turgot, which created most of the leading, ruinous environmental pre-conditions for the French Revolution of 1789.
The way in which Shelburne et al. contrived to bring that French Revolution about, is a key to understanding most of the leading features of world history since the British Foreign Office operations which set into motion the run-up to the events of 1789. British assets Philippe "Egalité" and Jacques Necker,[20] were the authors of the events of July 14, 1789. Danton and Marat were agents of the British Foreign office, trained in London and deployed into France under the direction of Bentham. Robespierre, London agent and the ancient enemy of Benjamin Franklin, brought the Terror, and Jacobin Napoleon Bonaparte, as the original model for the fascism of Mussolini, Hitler, et al., a model of Napoleon which was invented, by Inquisition enthusiast and Martinist Joseph de Maistre, to play a role like that of Bonaparte the dictator and emperor.
The Napoleonic Roots of Adolf Hitler
Those exotically un-French, British-orchestrated developments in France, have been a central feature of the ugliest pages of world history, over a period from prior to 1789, to the present day. The pivotal feature of these developments was the London-sponsored creation of a cult from among the admirers of Voltaire, the London-backed, Martinist freemasonic order which orchestrated the affair of the Queen's Necklace and kindred ventures leading into the events of July 1789, the Terror. It was this operation by London which was responsible for the creation of the prototype for the later Adolf Hitler, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, a Bonaparte who, with Murat, was a significantly influential factor in pre-shaping the military (e.g., Jomini) and relevant other policies of the London-sponsored U.S. Confederacy insurrection of 1861-1865. Lord Palmerston's British puppet, Napoleon III, was a product of this Martinist freemasonic cult, a cult which produced the anarcho-synarchist cult known as the French Synarchists, and, later, the Synarchist International, which was the cabal of private bankers, which orchestrated the post-Versailles rise of fascist regimes on the continent of Europe.
Count Joseph de Maistre, a key figure of that Martinist order of that time, was the devil's brew-master who, quite literally, created the future model for Adolf Hitler, not out of mud, but a left-over Jacobin follower of the brothers Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte. This is a fact plainly acknowledged by Napoleon himself. Napoleon served as a destroyer of continental Europe, as the British East India Company had orchestrated the Seven Years' War which brought Britain to imperial power at the Paris Treaty of February 1763, just as imperial Britain's financier oligarchy, with its U.S. and other fellow-travellers, orchestrated the unleashing of two wars of similar implications, on continental Eurasia, and beyond, during the Twentieth Century, and also steered the unleashing of the age of nuclear terror from 1945 through 1989.
The original Martinist freemasonic order behind the France affair of the "Queen's Necklace" and both the Jacobin Terror and Napoleon's terror, evolved as the Synarchist movement of the late Nineteenth Century, and the Synarchist International cabal of private financier-oligarchical interest behind the bringing of such creatures as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco to power during the immediate post-World War I decades.
The radical anarcho-syndicalist "countergang" circles behind "globalization" today, such as the Siena Group's Robert Mundell and his far-flung network of associates, and such others as Teddy Goldsmith, the veteran confederate of the U.S.A.'s John Train in the old Paris Review "spook" operations, are an ideological extension of the same Synarchist syndicate of private banker interest which gave the world the earlier dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and the like.
That Synarchist precedent, which gave us the exemplary Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco tyrannies, is the root, within what President Eisenhower identified as "a military-industrial complex," of the crisis encompassing those aspects of the roles of Bush-Cheney today which are a presently leading threat to the constitutional order.
The present threat to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financial-oligarchical-imperialist interest, the threat which our republic's constitutional order represents, is expressed by the presently continuing campaign, by those Liberal interests and their accomplices, against the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt. This presently continuing campaign was launched, at the close of World War II, at the behest of the same financier-oligarchical circles which had initially supported the installation of the Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco regimes, but had later opposed Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes solely over the issue of Hitler's shift to attacking westward, rather than eastward, first. The notorious "rat-line" of notable fascist criminals, conduited largely through Franco's fascist Spain into the Americas, typifies the complicity of the circles of Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, and others, in resuming the Anglo-American financier circles' support for the first modern fascist regime, that of their Benito Mussolini.
The grandfather of President George W. Bush, Jr., Prescott Bush, is typical of the right-wing financier circles which made these successive, pro-fascist, anti-Mussolini-Hitler, and pro-Franklin Roosevelt turns.[21] This does not mean that President George W. Bush is mentally capable of grasping the perverted sort of role, as a symbol of his family's caricature-dynasty, the role he is actually playing on stage today. For those miscreants who put that poor, sick fool on stage to be "used up" in the fashion of a failed race-horse doped up for its last race, it was not necessary that he understand the role he was selected to play; it was sufficient that he play it. If he is presently an embarrassment to those who placed him in office, he represents nothing much worse than what they should have expected of him to begin with. So much for the importance of breeding in today's so-called establishment families: sic transit Gloria who?
Cheney as a Monster
Given, that historical background for those world wars and related events of the last century which set the stage for the present world crisis, place Vice-President Dick Cheney and his cabal on that stage, the stage set by the indicated transitions of the recent hundred years and more.
The key to understanding the constitutional crisis of the Presidency confronting us today, is a study of the way in which many people in positions of influence have continued to underestimate the power which Vice-President Dick Cheney represents in the present national and world crisis, as they greatly overestimate the power inhering in Cheney himself. Neither Gila Monsters nor gangster bosses are necessarily feared for their actual intellectual powers. In and of himself, Cheney ranks far, far below a Rasputin among the modern black museum of conspirators and assassins, as Rasputin, in turn, ranked far, far below Savoy's evil freemasonic master Count Joseph de Maistre. Cheney must be recognized as a mere tool of the Synarchist schemers of today, a tool of approximately the rank of hit- man. His importance lies in the function he performs as such a mere tool.
To understand that Synarchist International of financier-oligarchical and related circles which orchestrated these successive turns to which I have referred above, it is necessary to recognize that it is an outgrowth of a special operation organized around the circles of Britain's Lord Shelburne and Shelburne's lackey Jeremy Bentham, during a period which began with the February 1763 Treaty of Paris, which established the British East India Company as an empire, and which launched that campaign to suppress our liberties which led into our 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1789 Federal Constitution. The relevant operations by Shelburne, were an immediate, increasing, and always intended threat to the preservation of the earlier liberties secured among the English-speaking communities of North America. He hated us, Liberally!
Since no later than 1789, the principal, continuing long-term strategic objective of those outgrowths of the 1763 Treaty of Paris has been to destroy that American System of political-economy on which the U.S. constitutional republic was founded, and to uproot the seeds of our republican culture world-wide. With the U.S. victory over London's puppet, the Confederate States of America, and the triumph of the U.S. economy at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the principal long-term strategic conflict within globally extended European civilization has been to destroy the American System of political-economy, in favor of what the ever-Orwellian imperialist British East India Company defined as the service of the freedom of trade, their definition of "capitalism."
The essential issue of what Henry A. Kissinger defined, in a May 1982 address to London's Chatham House, as the conflict between Franklin Roosevelt and the Prime Minister Winston Churchill whom Kissinger praised, and devoutly admired on that occasion, was precisely this issue.[22]
As I have emphasized repeatedly on many earlier public occasions, the most obvious difference between the political-economic systems of continental Europe and the U.S. constitutional system, is that the governments of Europe are subordinates of so-called "independent central banking" systems, central banking systems based on the Anglo-Dutch Liberal version of the Venetian financial- oligarchical system. As Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt echoed the prescription of the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the U.S. system is, constitutionally, a system based on a government monopoly on the creation of currency and related credit. Although modern law of many European nations, such as Germany, defends the principle of the general welfare, it is only the U.S. Constitution which explicitly makes that principle supreme over all other authorities and contradictory interpretations of law.
Since the U.S.A. had become too powerful to be destroyed directly, after Lincoln's victory over Palmerston's puppets, the Confederacy and the Emperor Maximilian, subversion was emphasized, and direct attack deemed a worse than fruitless strategy. The Churchill gang's handling of President Truman, once Roosevelt were dead, is merely typical of what some in London, and their American lackeys, considered discretion in these matters of British Liberalism's long-ranging, grand imperial strategy. Kissinger's referenced May 1982 address at Chatham House typifies the strategy of subversion, as the current Bush-Cheney regime has led the U.S.A. in ruinous wars and, now, the onrushing collapse of the global Anglo-American system of shared hegemony.
That much said on background, it is now time for our citizens to discard their populist's illusions, and to face the ugly fact that we must look at Cheney himself as someone best understood by noting his remarkable resemblance to characters from the 1922-1945 stage such as Mussolini, Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler. Cheney is admittedly more of a dumb brute than any of those predecessors, but, what is nonetheless important about the role he plays, is that he shares the same kind of passion, even without the burden of excess intellectual powers. He is a brutish caricature of the Torquemada as seen by the creator of Napoleon, Joseph de Maistre; he is the would-be, rug-chewing parody of Hitler modelled on de Maistre's Satanic image of de Maistre's own creation, Napoleon Bonaparte; he is a Bertolt Brechtian type of caricature of Dostoevsky's character, the "Grand Inquisitor." He is something from the bottom of a barrel of modern history's Nietzscheans. He is dumb; but, he makes up for the shortfall in intellect with his brutishness. He is evil, but also, as the Celtic legend would have it, fey.
He is not a powerful intellect, but a kind of mad dog, a vicious caricature of Professor Leo Strauss's Thrasymachus. He seeks to compensate for his lack of wit, by relying upon his lust for savagery. Vice-President Dick "Bugsy" Cheney expresses, for our constitutional outlook today, a tell-tale symptom of the fag-end of a process of decay of a once-great power, a warning symptom of the onset of something no less ominous than that which overtook Pericles' Athens in the end. In the end, he will destroy himself, but, that would not really frighten him; his being forced not to be a mad dog which is his true self, would be like telling the fabled Rumpelstiltskin his true name. He is not much,—after all, Mrs. Lynne Cheney did pick him up from a sort of social rubbish-bin, and saved him from the Vietnam draft, but he is therefore a true follower of Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysus, and a caricature of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.
Like the Weirdos of Guantanamo
Sometimes, as in the case of Dick Cheney, the truth is closest to reality when it is the truth best told as a myth based on a certain verisimilitude. Sometimes, as in the case of Cheney, the blend of fantasy-life and the like has more to do with the way he acquires and maintains the part of a certain kind of character, than any of the plainer sort of biographical details. It is so with moral failures, like Cheney, who adopts the habit of acting out what he probably imagines to be the grandeur of a fictitious character which actually exists, as a person, only in his own imagination.
So, take a failure like Dick Cheney. Now, lately, everything seems to be going downhill for the gloomy figure of the former hulking football player of his later-wife's high school campus. One day, the glamor girl of that high school campus, his wife-to-be Mrs. Lynne Cheney, picked poor Dick off the street, secured him the college degree he could not muster otherwise on his own, and, in a pinch, provided him with the pretext for one of several draft avoidances which kept him out of the ongoing war in Indo-China. It is not known, and actually virtually irrelevant, whether or not, on nights when she parked him outside, she tied his studded collar to an unbreakable leash, or, on other occasions, his wrists to the bedpost. The true tale of a future "neo-con" chickenhawk. She is his immediate connection to power: to the circles of Chicago University's Professor Leo Strauss, who is, although long deceased, still, today, the virtual "den mother" of "neo-con" chickenhawks.
Mrs. Lynne Cheney is a different type, more what she actually is, which is already bad enough. She is the more influential figure of the family, who has managed her brutish stud's career at crucial points.
These days, it is fashionable to speak, in sneering tones, about so-called "failed states." Dick Cheney is a real-life failed state of being, and not the only one of that kind. That brings us to the subject of the predators who reportedly managed the U.S. "Clockwork Orange" prison at Guantanamo.
The arrival of the nuclear weapons era, which began at Hiroshima, fostered a proliferation of a certain type which the witting soon came to refer to as "the spoon benders," and that for very good reasons. The General Daniel O. Graham to whom I referred here earlier, was one among those types; his lunatic bit of science-fiction called "High Frontier" is an example of this. Some were much wilder than my knowledge of Graham even begins to suggest him to have been; but, he was, nonetheless, a "spoon bender." The Aquino case and the LSD experiments run out of the London Tavistock Clinic, are closer to the core of the type. This is what we are looking at when we consider the reports coming in from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and locations of similar provenance.
For scientifically clear reasons, which it would not relevant to detail within the assigOSned scope of this report, the stress of the rise of the decades of so-called "preventive" nuclear, and, later, "thermonuclear" warfare, caused something to "snap" within the personalities of a certain stratum within our intelligence services and military. The horror stories from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib do not surprise any of us familiar with some case-studies of those portions of our national-security services which leaned more noticeably toward the "spoon bender" side of mental, and professional life.
The point about those cases which is relevant within the scope of this present report, is the kind of organization of mental processes which lures the susceptible into becoming the personality-types which the "spoon bender" variety of "Cold War"-vintage spook represents. Look at the special MIT-RLE operation associated with the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation's "Cybernetics" project, which included such obscenities as the tortured chimpanzee, dubbed "Noam Chimpsky," by the "spoon-bender" body-snatchers and Professors Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, is a relevant example of this. Look, for example, at old volumes of John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Look, in those and kindred productions, at the themes of "Buck Rogers" types riding a six-legged or something reptilian thingamabob across the terrain of a distant planet's feudal-like culture, or the same worse-than-infantile perversion, the film "Star Wars." For many of the fans of this sort of stuff, "science fantasy" was not merely the entertainment of childish minds; it was more or less a religion. For those lured into such directions, becoming a "spoon bender" was, as it is said today, "a big deal," especially if it involved participating in a "Q-this-or-that" ultra-secret romp in the protected zone of an ultra-secret other identity, especially when that poor pervert was protected from sensibility of reality within a special place of high military or comparable security.
Put the image of that sort of "spoon bender" into the context of what I have identified, earlier in this present report, as a "fishbowl syndrome." There, I wrote of a state of mind of a reductionist whose definitions, axioms, and postulates are a mixing of the real and non-existent worlds. Look at the class of "spoon benders" to which I have just made reference, against the background of a "fishbowl syndrome."
Weird? No more weird than what you should have recognized as the weird state of mind typical of a really passionate admirer of Lord Shelburne's Adam Smith, or Professor Milton Friedman, for that matter. Take the following passage, which I have frequently quoted, from Adam Smith's 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, published just four years before Smith received his assignment as a spy from Lord Shelburne himself.
The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.... But though we are ... endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.[23]
The "spoon bender" of the Locke, Mandeville, Quesnay, Adam Smith, or utopian Jeremy Bentham type, divides his universe into two separate universes, the one above the floorboards of sensory phenomena, the other below the floorboards. Somehow, by magic spells, the creatures under those floorboards are ordering the fate of mortal man; above the floorboards, the credulous are performing rituals which, while intrinsically absurd, or worse, themselves, are believed to propitiate the unseen monsters who control the universe above the floorboards, from below. Imagine Donald Trump, as Satan, where he resides in Hell, pointing with menace while shouting wildly at an applicant for the post of local cell-master of the damned, "You're fired!" As Trump insists, it is the willingness to be truly vicious in one's evil doings, which, according to Mandeville's doctrine, produces what should please a society of Mandeville's tastes as a whole.
Recognize the not-so-hidden inner mind of the potential "spoon bender" in this, and in related weird cases of famous economists such as the follower of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville based the economic doctrine enthusiastically worshipped by today's contemporary, rather far right-wing Mont Pelerin Society on the presumption that a ban on society's interference with the practice of private vice, would ensure the relative optimal benefits for society in the large.[24] Or, the case of the Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay, from whom Adam Smith plagiarized the most celebrated formulation, "The Invisible Hand," of his own 1776 anti-American propaganda tract known by the short title of The Wealth of Nations.[25] Quesnay's argument was that of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia—a bit of a devil himself—that, since the serfs on the aristocratic landlord's estate were only human cattle, whose income should not exceed the feeding and other care due them as a form of cattle, the only source of the profit of the estate must be the magical powers of ownership (e.g., "shareholder value") expressed by the award of the title to the landlord.
The common characteristic of the relevant beliefs of all of these typical empiricist "saints" of the pagan Pantheon of Anglo-Dutch Liberal political-economy, is what is fairly described as their common conviction, that some unknowable agency, operating from under the floorboards of the universe, is dictating, and that rather capriciously, defining thus what is allowed to the inhabitants of the world above. One hears the rattle of the superstitious gambler's dice, as the player cries, worshipfully: "Baby needs shoes!"
As in all cases which lie within the bounds of the notion of the "fishbowl" syndrome, there are three principal facets of the particular ideology to be considered. First, there is the matter of the practical significance for that society of that which the participant in that syndrome does not know, but should for his or her own good. Second, there are adopted notions of principle which may be defective in the respect that they are not without some merit, but are flawed in that they represent reductionist forms of implied belief. These notions, which are characteristic of the deductive ideology, have the effect of tending to suppress the functioning of those creative mental powers which are the characteristic distinction of the human species from the beasts. Third, there is the aspect of belief which is outrightly contrary to relevant real-universe principles.
In the case in which the relevant leading challenge is implicitly constitutional in character, a reasonable approximation of the appropriate distinctions among those three components of a popular "fishbowl" syndrome, should be regarded as the area of leading concern for constitutional law. The emphasis must be, as I have adhered to that precept in this report, on constitutional law in its aspects as natural law, rather than being drawn into the moral swamp of the pathological effects of obsessive belief in positive law (e.g., "common law"), as by our typical populists.[26]
In the following, concluding portion of the report now before you, our attention is focussed on two distinguishable kinds of implicitly constitutional consequences of the situation which the Bush-Cheney case represents now. I explain.
In the New Venetian Party's Anglo-Dutch Liberal practice of what they call, curiously, political-economy, it is the same notion of the "magic" governing the circulation of money which is resonant in the crap-shooter's cry, "Baby needs shoes!" that the desirable determination of the price of everything, including money itself, must occur in that magical, spoon benders' way argued by Mandeville, Smith, Jeremy Bentham, et al. Every believer in such doctrines of economy, therefore should be recognized as clearly just another variety of true-believing admirer of the spoon bender's magical art.
The same, spoon bender's quality of lunacy, is functionally implicit in all varieties of what I have described as a "fishbowl syndrome." However, common opinion rightly suspects that there are qualitative distinctions to be made among differing varieties of those who share belief in lunacies of the type familiar to us from the Physiocratic and other doctrines of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal types. One might say, that one variety belongs to the department of "white magic," and another includes the "black magic" of "Enron" and "Halliburton" economics, or those who fall into the same general category as Mrs. Lynne Cheney's creature.
That distinction between "white" and "black" magic is debatable, but only in respect to the common practice of distinguishing the hardened criminal from the rest of the practitioners of sundry vices. Cheney fits within the bracket of the "hardened criminal" mentality, as more or less distinguishable from the relevance of the usual "true believer" in Mandeville's dedication to the proliferation of private vice.
So, in proceeding now to the concluding portions of this report, I divide the treatment of the constitutional relevance of that broad distinction. First, I concentrate on the "hardened felon" characteristics of types such as Vice-President Cheney, and, after that, focus on the constitutional challenge presented by the way in which Liberalism in general creates the opportunity for the ruin of society by creatures who fall into the more extremist category which Cheney may be meaningfully said to typify.
Cheney, or Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor?
Recently, there was a discussion among my immediate circles, in which the pivot of the deliberations was a focus upon the matter of: How much did Cheney himself fully recognize the sheer criminality of that of which he was involved, in the way he participated in concocting the fraudulent pretexts for bringing off the launching of the presently continuing, worsening war in Iraq? The crucial role of Cheney's office in coordinating the involuntary public "outing" of CIA secret operative Valerie Plame was a point of concentration in our discussion on this matter of degree of "wittingness" on Cheney's part.
It is not necessary, in such a case as that, to set out to determine whether or not what Cheney et al. did should be prosecuted as a crime. It is sufficient to determine, first of all, whether the role of the relevant parties was intentionally wrongful. Was the intended action wrongful? Was it intentionally wrongful, not only by virtue of the action intended, but also by the foreseeable consequences of that intended action in the mind of the relevant person, or persons? Or, is his role in the concerted operations of Cheney's office, the White House, and others, in that far-flung conspiracy, to be seen as associated efforts in a fully conscious intention to craft a vast effort at obstruction of justice, in instances such as the Valerie Plame case?
Does his case mimic, at least, the pure evil of Dostoevsky's image of the Grand Inquisitor?
In probing those questions, our intention, at that point, does not permit us to cloud the investigation's character as a scientific investigation, by complicating the scientific investigation with decisions as to lawful criminality of the intentions of the relevant subjects: it is the fact of his state of mind as expressed by his behavior which must shape our intention in this initial phase of the inquiry and assessment. The act is an action, but the intention motivating that action is a matter which must not be clouded by reckless use of deductive argument. We must consider this matter as a study in dynamics, not psycho-mechanics.
We must never be so impelled to escape from our present dangers, that we plunge carelessly into unforeseen consequences. Meet no appointments in Samara! That is the great principle of constitutional law which must not be violated. When the impassioned desire to punish outranks consideration of the deadly changes in constitutional principle for the future, which the lust for revenge usually tends to engender, future civilization is put in danger as a consequence of our lust to punish the past.
Putting aside, for the moment, all issues of criminal law as such, were Cheney et al. proceeding with a consciousness of their actively malicious intent to attempt to carry through an action whose consequences should be prevented in the vital interest of our nation, or others? Prevention of what must urgently be prevented, not punishment, must be our sole concern at that point. From the standpoint of our team, prevention, not punishment, is the only allowed motive for our work. If what some would wish to consider punishment were required as a measure of prevention, so be it; but, my concern, especially at this point, is not to punish, but to prevent. Our sole concern must be remedies and justice, never revenge. Our mission is to assure the offender of the virtual certainty of detection and prevention, not to terrify society with the diversionary nocturnal screams of the convict and his family.
Personally, my experience makes me familiar with exactly what both Cheney and his patsy, President Bush, represent. I know their wormy, mean little minds, as you might know the proverbial "back of my hand." I can tell you more or less exactly, of the most relevant features of what passed through the minds, such as those minds are, of those in the Executive Mansion and the Vice-President's office, as the crime against Valerie Plame was being crafted and perpetrated. These were not blindly impulsive blows; they were thoroughly calculated, regurgitated, and recrafted conspiracies, aimed to promote a fraudulent pretext for an unlawful war, by the connivance of a vast apparatus, reaching directly from Cheney-centered circles in Washington into such foreign locations as neo-conservative Michael Ledeen's penetration of Italy's SISMI, and, formerly, the office of John Bolton at the State Department. Always lurking in this was Marc Rich's associate "Scooter" Libby.
At the top, around Cheney, this was a witches' cabal.
In light of the evidence pointing to those features of the conspiracy by Cheney et al., there is no doubt that the actions of Cheney and his principal accomplices, those who motivated the action and its persistence, as distinct from those who might be considered merely accomplices, were wicked in intent, and monstrous in intended consequences. They were consciously and intentionally betraying our own and other nations, as in any plot to overthrow a legitimate government, as they were doing in this case. In this ritual, there were slavering as if ecstatically, as in a collective war-dance among the higher-ranking insiders of the scheme, at each step of their actions to induce a fraudulent decision to go to war, and to perpetrate acts of some monstrous implications, such as, in particular, the Valerie Plame case.
Is Cheney really a character in the image of Dostoevsky's figure of the Satan he portrays the "Grand Inquisitor" to be? In my estimate, not quite; simply, Mrs. Cheney's pit-bull Dick, is "not that smart." He is not a master criminal, but a "hit man" brought in to conduct evil deeds against our own and other nations. He slavers with his variant of a lust for sexual gratification in doing the evil things he does, an evil parody of a thug playing "Oliver Hardy" to an infinitely naughty and malicious President Bush's "Stan Laurel." Recognizing the brutish shortfalls of Cheney's intellectual development, the role of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" will be found at much higher levels of direction than the role of mere underlings which Cheney and Bush play in the scheme as a whole.
Get such wretches out of office while we still have a constitutional republic, as soon as feasible. Do this out of a sense of the need to stop the crime while it is still in progress. However, it is saving the republic, not punishment of the clearly culpable scapegoats, which must be the controlling, constitutional objective of the choice of remedial action. Let them plead that they did these things, not as sane men and women, but as spoon benders. That plea should be entertained, all in the interest in getting to the bottom of the pathology which steered them in the commission of their crimes against both our republic and mankind.
The Constitutional Issue
Government, like science, is never perfected. To stop the flow of scientific and technological progress, would imply the impulse to halt what must be the intrinsically endless process of perfection of constitutional government.
At bottom, the underlying issue posed by developments such as the case of Mrs. Cheney's dirty Dick, is nothing but another example of the consequences of living in a society in which the individual still only rarely comprehends the nature, and consequently, constitutional requirements of human society. The underlying principles of our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution, are such as the coincidence of anti-Lockean intent expressed by the Leibnizian "pursuit of happiness" and the Preamble's "promote the general welfare," must be applied. The chief problem to be overcome in attempting to apply those constitutional principles, is the lack of comprehension of the actual meaning of those words among most of the U.S. population.
These principles are fairly described as being, immediately, leading reflections of the most deeply underlying beliefs of modes of monotheistic outlook associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, an outlook fully coincident with the methods of the Pythagoreans and Plato. The problem is not so much frequent disagreement with some stipulated definition of the nominal terms of, for example, Christian belief, but the contorted interpretations of those terms which persist because the individual believer does not believe that he, or she, is actually immortal in the sense I have described this common sort of difficulty earlier in this location, as elsewhere still earlier.
The problem takes the following form.
To the degree that a person sees himself or herself as essentially a "featherless biped," or talking animal, the experience of human existence within the bounds of what the typical believer identifies as "this life," prevents that believer from seeing himself, or herself, as a personality whose existence is rooted, not within the domain of biological mechanisms of sense-perception, but within the same ontological (e.g., "spiritual") domain of supra-biological immortality as the fully efficient existence of the Creator. That individual fails to grasp that it is the role of ideas of the ontological quality of experimentally provable discovery of hypothesis, which, contrary to poor, foolish Isaac Newton and his duped followers, is the ontological actuality of the human individual's efficient existence within that real universe, for which the perceived universe of phenomena is merely a reflection as if seen, in a mirror, darkly.
From the standpoint of physical science, as the work of Vernadsky on defining the Biosphere and Noösphere defines modern physical science, the physically efficient experience of individuals' and societies' human existence, lies within the subsuming domain of the discovery and practice of those fundamental discoveries of universal physical principle which are expressed in the general practice of physical science so-called, and artistic composition developed and performed in a rigorously Classical way, such as Bach's, Mozart's, and Beethoven's compositions. The great figures of society, who are clearly deserving of the term "immortals," express this aspect of the mortal existence of the living individual, and may continue to do so long after they are biologically dead.
We, such as Christians, who grasp the practical implications of this notion of human immortality, as in the same ontological realm as the existence of the Creator, are already immortal while we are still alive, and will simply remain so after we are biologically dead. So, the Christian notion of being with the "resurrected Christ," expresses a passion, a source of inner creative strength, like that, for example, expressed by the real-life case of Jeanne d'Arc, as Friedrich Schiller captures that specific truth in her case. We shall all die biologically; what we must avoid is that death of our immortality, when we refuse to discover, and rise to the sense of self as being already an immortal, dwelling in the same domain as the efficiently, fully willful, and innovative Creator of this universe Himself. If we achieve that, our prayers should be that we might discover His intention, and contribute, as spiritual, immortal beings, to its realization, rather than impose our more poorly informed intention, and usually a relatively petty one, upon Him. The worst are those, as among our contemporaries, who perpetrate the sacrilegious assumption that immortality lies "over the fence," as the empiricist, such as the Cartesian Quesnay, or the Liberals Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant divide the universe between actually experienced phenomena, on the upper side of the floorboards of experience, and, below the floorboards, eerie, assumed to be very powerful presences of which they have no actual knowledge. For the typical professed believer, such as the all-too-typical self-proclaimed Christian believer as the gnostic preacher behind the revival-tent, making souls with some ladies of the congregation, "immortality" exists only on the same other side of the same floorboards where Mandeville's gods of private vices lurk.
To the degree our citizens lack comprehension of those ontological implications of the constitutional principles of "pursuit of happiness" and "promote the general welfare," they must tend to fit their practical interpretation of the making and application of our law to a popular—often even populist!—misapprehension of the meaning of such constitutional terms.
As a consequence of the kind of ignorance of universal history which I have just summarily described here, the victim of that ignorance, commits the following type of sacrilege against the underlying intent of our most deeply underlying Constitutional principles. He or she tends, as the populist fanatic does, to "interpret" the Constitution as a kind of Faustian business contract with either the Creator, or the Devil himself. He or she then "interprets" that Constitution from the standpoint of his essentially unprincipled, feral view of the so-called "common law," this in the fashion of negotiations over matters of territory and vengeance among talking beasts.
The case of a persisting failure to grasp the notion of immortality in a scientific way, points to both the origin and cure of the usual person's inability to cope with the most essential existential challenge of human mortal life, the inability to conceive of immortality except in a spoon bender's way, as something on the other side of the known universe's floorboards. It is here, in this connection, in this way, that the most essential conceptions of natural law are to be found.
I use my own case as a pedagogical.
For about fifty years, I have been, in practice, one of the most reliable medium- to long-range economic forecasters on record. During the more recent of those decades, I have been, at least according to the known record, the only reliable long-range forecaster. My fascination with relevant phenomena of the historical process in general, over a span of more than 2,500 years, and into a couple or more generations yet to come, provides me excellent insights into the way in which an active sense of personal immortality by a mortal individual, me, causes me to behave differently than people who have not yet grasped the implications of what I am saying here in a practical way.
I think primarily of the way in which past generations, including more than three generations of my own mortal life, have created the present, and how what we do, or fail to do now, will largely predetermine the quality and direction of the future. I extend my practical experience of economy and related matters to the way in which discovery of universal scientific principles from even the distant past have shaped the present, and how the principles with which I have become familiar have already predetermined the available options for humanity for several generations yet to come. I, therefore, act in the present, on the basis of my knowledge of a past which extends far beyond my birth, and a future visible to me, as a matter of principles, for a pair or more generations yet to come.
I am not only living as an observer of this span of past and present; I am acting in response to the future, for the sake of the effects this action could have upon making that future. Decisions I have made will have consequences at times beyond my death. I am living now, in this mortal existence, as an immortal being. For me, it is the only way to live a decent mortal life. It is, in fact, the only decent way for any human being to live, as an immortal.
The all too typical poor fellow meets the idea of death as a "floorboard." He, or she, may wish very strongly to believe that something good lies on the other side of that floorboard he conceives as death, but he has no actual knowledge of it, and his faith of what that might be is therefore uncertain. He may cling to a certain belief about what might lie beyond that floorboard, because he needs to believe in it; and, since his belief is tenuous, and probably false, he must try to believe in his belief all the more passionately, and even be willing to kill to eliminate persons who might arouse doubts about this belief within him.
Or, in the extreme, his despair might prompt him to hate God, as Nietzsche and the followers of Nietzsche, such as Hitler's crew, have done. As truth will tell, this hatred shows clearly in the face of the so-called evangelist for whom the passions of the revival meeting and the Nashville Agrarian "thunder" echoing in a Ku Klux Klan rally are much the same.
Therefore, let us bring this report to a close with the following concluding thought.
The progress of mankind so far has always depended, to the degree we know the actuality of history, on that relative handful of the living who qualify, by exception, as true leaders of mankind in their time. By leaders, we should intend to say: those for whom the past and future are as real an experience as any immediate present experience in the short term. On this account, Jeanne d'Arc was as real in actually known history as Friedrich Schiller presents the principle of her sublime role on the Classical stage. She saw, and helped to make the future by refusing to betray it even to avoid the terrible pains of the evil forces known as the Inquisition. She was one of those who, as martyrs, or not, could devote their lives to the future. They could do this only because their self-interest lay in a future outcome of their mortal life, an outcome which was their most compelling sense of self-interest as a consciously immortal person. It is the same with the great scientific discoverer, and with all persons, even in the relatively simplest condition of social life, who live for the future they are committed to bringing forth for the future of mankind.
Such are the true citizens of the world, and it is upon them that knowledge of, and faith in the natural law and its reflection as constitutional law depends.
What Dick Cheney is doing today is disgusting. He is a threat not because he is disgusting, very disgusting, but because his actions are a threat to the future of mankind, to the immortality of our citizenry. We should therefore take no pleasure in punishing him for the evil he has done, but rather be satisfied that the evil he has represented is brought to an end, and he is replaced in any leading position by those to whom the future can be entrusted. Simply to punish him, and no more, is to scalp a scapegoat, not to correct the error which allowed him to occupy that position for as long as he has done.
The guiding lesson in constitutional law for the present occasion of crisis, must be this. We must develop a greater incidence of potential and actual leaders who will bring a better future for mankind. This means to instill in our young, and, hopefully, some older fellows as well, the practical sense of a living immortality in themselves. For, it is among those who have, as Wordsworth, in his better moments, tried to say, "an intimation of immortality," that the only durable attempts at morality could be found.
Therefore, the most important contribution you, personally, must now make, as an individual, is to become self-consciously an efficiently immortal human being. It is even the often pathetic attempt to reach something in that direction, which has helped us to progress as much as civilization has done. Even a serious attempt touches immortality. Immortality, so conceived, is the essential feature of our republic's constitutional law. It is that law which must be served.
[1] Jerrold M. Post, M.D. and Robert S. Robins, When Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of The Captive King (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
[2] Justin A. Frank, M.D. Bush on the Couch—Inside the Mind of the President (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004; 2nd Edition, HarperCollins: 2005).
[3] Within Post's and Robins' account, there are important, obvious sorts of factual-historical errors, including the general, methodological defect expressed in his lack of functional-historical perspective, and his general tendency toward rather wild fallacies of composition in his treatment of some of the biographical topics within that book. Post's importance is that he has become regarded as a leading standard of reference on psychological studies of leading present and historical individual cases, if not a consistently reliable one.
[4] C.P. Snow, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 reprint).
[5] Otherwise known as that principle of Sphaerics which the Pythagoreans, Plato, and relevant others adopted from the principles of Egyptian astrophysics. Mathematically, a universal physical principle arises in Sphaerics by the methods of dynamics associated with the constructive doubling of the cube, and in the way universal gravitation is expressed by the added physical-geometrical singularity of an elliptical planetary orbit, as in Kepler's original discovery of the principle of gravitation. The modern development of this approach is by Bernard Riemann, as in The Theory of Abelian Functions. This approach is what is known to Plato and others as the method of hypothesizing associated with Nicholas of Cusa's introduction of the modern scientific method of experimental physical science.
[6] "... each part is to promote the others' benefit, honour, and advantage." so that a "trusting neighbourhood and the secured maintenance of the efforts for peace and friendship can be strengthened and blossom anew." Heinrich Steiger in Essay Volume I: 1648 War and Peace in Europe, Klaus Bussman, Heinz Schilling, eds. (Münster/Osnabruck: 1998), p. 438.
[7] This refers, inclusively, to the commonplace, pervasive error of judgment also encountered in the referenced Post-Robins text.
[8] This is the issue which is typified by Carl F. Gauss's 1799 attack, in his doctoral dissertation, on what he later named the subject of The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, on the reductionist hoaxes of D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al.
[9] Once the implications of a reductionist Euclidean geometry are recognized in the method of Descartes, the extent of corruption of modern scientific and other education by the influence of the application of the Cartesian method to virtually every area of contemporary education, since approximately the last decades of the Seventeenth Century, becomes a source of deep insight into the way in which the mental faculties of our educated strata in general, and the hysterical fanaticism which that conditioning has imbued among our professionals. The progress of the LYM implies the unleashing of a vast intellectual potential within our population, if the systemic corruption of Cartesianism were removed from public education.
[10] In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of empiricism, the denial of the functional existence of a distinct quality of ontological event rightly named creativity, takes the form of asserting that "creativity is whatever I choose to define it to be on any occasion of my personal, capricious choice." For them, it is only a matter of a "difference in opinion," an hysterical assertion which is intended to outlaw any critical assessment of the matter, as, perhaps, rejecting reason in the name of service to "democracy."
[11] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Vernadsky and Dirichlet's Principle," EIR, June 3, 2005.
[12] Ibid.
[13] When these choral works are performed according to the composer's intention, there are passages which prompt a sense of exquisite beauty in the audience—and the director. This effect is a reflection of the same principle of modality most famously associated with Beethoven's Opus 132 string quartet, and is associated also with the same modality, the pivotal Lydian modality within the Ave Verum Corpus. The manifestation of this experience of agapic passion assures the director who has crafted the performance that the interpretation of the composition is correct. It is, reciprocally, the function of those modalities which defines the way in which a well-tempered composition must be performed, in order to produce both that moment of passion, and to discover that the crafting of the subtler, model adjustment of tonalities within the performance of the work has been correct, and has caused the entire piece to be experienced as a single seamless idea, from beginning to end. It is that effect which proves to the musicians, and the sensible audience, that the interpretation is a correct reading of the way in which to conduct, as Wilhelm Furtwängler prescribed, "as if between the notes." The principles of the Bach well-tempered system have nothing to do with reductionist mathematics of the scale, but the obligation to evoke the relevant moments of passion in a way which generates that unity of effect.
[14] One of Niels Henrick Abel's crucial papers on his contributions to mathematical physics, was taken and suppressed, and some of its content copied without acknowledgment by Cauchy as his own work. At the death of Cauchy, the putatively "lost" Abel paper turned up, in Cauchy's personal files.
[15] One would not say that President George W. Bush, Jr. came by his lunacies "honestly."
[16] The unwarranted assumption, that the "Golden Section" is the principle which generates life, is not implied here. As I have emphasized in summarizing Vernadsky's definition of the Biosphere, above, the Biosphere as an archeological or related phenomenon of physical chemistry, is known as an effect, not as the principle of life which the essentially systemic phenomena of Vernadsky's Biosphere express.
[17] The devastating principle underlying the refutation of reductionist sophistry, as by the Eleatics, by Plato, in the Parmenides dialogue.
[18] In a relatively widespread contemporary usage under certain rather far-right constituencies, the use of "integrist" means a state like the notorious Gallican churches of France under Louis XIV and the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, which modeled their law on the Roman Empire Constantine's legalization of Christianity as an approved religion within the Roman imperial, pagan Pantheon, but on the condition that he, the emperor, appoint the bishops. Hence, the fight of Christians, such as by the Augustinian tradition, against this condition which Constantine claimed to have affirmed at the 325 A.D. Nicean Council. The integrist doctrine of medieval times asserted that that Emperor Constantine had donated the imperial authority over western Europe to the Pope, the mythical doctrine of "The Donation of Constantine," which was proven, during the proceedings of the mid-Fifteenth-Century great ecumenical Council of Florence to have been a hoax. This hoax had been used as the legal basis for the ultramontane medieval system of "globalization" under the tyranny of an imperial alliance between Venice's financier oligarchy and the Norman Chivalry. Among today's right-wing organizations built around the Nazis who fled into Ibero-America and elsewhere along the "rat-line" managed by largely Spain-based circles associated with Allen Dulles and the sons of William F. Buckley, Sr., the "integrist" legend is kept up as basis for the errant right-wing Catholics typified by the adversaries of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. Under modern law, legitimate religious bodies have the common, protected right of members of an ecumenical set of autonomous, voluntary associations operating within, but independent of government. "Integrism" today occurs predominantly as an expression of fascist associations and ideologies, but the concept underlying "integrist" belief tends, otherwise, to appear in various guises.
[19] Aaron Burr was a leading British Foreign Office asset deployed by Bentham inside the U.S.A. for subversive operations, including the Bank of Manhattan, and the operation into which Andrew Jackson was lured by Burr. See Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman, 2nd ed. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985).
[20] Jacques Necker was the father of the notorious Madame de Staël. Necker's wife (Madame de Staël's mother) had been the marriage prospect of Edward Gibbon, Lord Shelburne's propagandist of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire notability. It is notable that Gibbon's book was intended to provide a design for a British world empire. Madame de Staël herself played the part of a spy against the French Royal family, operating as a close confidante of the same Queen Marie Antoinette who had been targetted by Shelburne's asset, the Martinist freemasonic order's Count Cagliostro, for the affair of "The Queen's Necklace" which Martinist asset Napoleon Bonaparte famously avowed, later, had been the key to bringing down the French monarchy.
[21] It was in his capacity as a chief executive for Averell Harriman's Brown Bros., Harriman, that Prescott Bush moved the financial assets which bailed out Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in time to prepare for Hitler's dictatorship. This was done on behalf of the Bank of England's chief Montagu Norman, and in conjunction with Norman's asset Hjalmar Schacht and the Bank for International Settlements.
[22] Henry A. Kissinger, "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary," May 10, 1982, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. The full text is in EIR, Jan. 11, 2002.
[23] As this excerpt was first quoted in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and David P. Goldman, The Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980), p. 107. Emphasis added to the original.
[24] Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (London: 1714).
[25] Quod Erat Demonstrandum! Actually, in practice, as by Enron and the like, "The Invisible Hand" groping inside your pockets, even as you sleep.
[26] In dealing with populists, and related expressions of kindred pathologies, it is important to insist that the assumptions underlying the populist's argument are what must be debated, and nothing else, until the underlying issues of the axioms on which his proposition depends, are treated as the real issue of the discussion, and the populists' theorem, based on this assumption, are put aside until the axiomatic assumptions of the populist's diversionary argument have been treated effectively, first.
