HISTORY AS DRAMA
The Transit of A `Cold War' Liberal
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
August 8, 2006
Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
by David S. Brown
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006
320 pages, hardcover, $27.50
As reviewed by the New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhous, "The Education of Richard Hofstadter," Sunday, Aug. 6, 2006.
If the presently imperilled U.S.A. is to be saved from that virtual state of bankruptcy, and worse, which it has permitted itself to enter today, the relevant lesson from the history of ancient Athens must be applied to not only our own citizenry, but that of western and central Europe. The recently revived attention to the case of ex-Communist and "Cold War Liberal" Richard Hofstadter, is a relevant case in point. Thirty-five years after his death, the effects of the influence of this "Cold War Liberal" and other ideologues of his type, are erupting like an old volcano on our world of today.
A philosophical Liberal, such as Hofstadter became, is one of a species of follower of Venice's New Party founder Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623): a figure like the Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was the student and follower of Sarpi's lackey Galileo (1564-1642), and who belonged to a category of ideologue which never breeds exactly true to its type. It is for reason of his slippery lack of a well-formed moral character, that such a brutish figure as Hobbes is rightly classed as a Liberal. It is ironical, that in the self-doomed ancient Athens whose Democratic Party perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates, these types were known as the Sophists, the ancient name for our Liberals of today.
These types, such as Hobbes, the pro-slavery John Locke (1632-1704), and the more notorious purveyors of irrationality, such as Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) and Lord Shelburne-appointed British Foreign Office agent Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), all play, in their adopted role of the eternal pimp, one who veers, on the one side, toward night-time reverence for Satan; but, in his customary, subsequent daylight hours, demands exculpation for crimes of the preceding evening, by showing the more sanctimonious side of the Sophist: expressing his, and Quesnay's, Walpole's, Adam Smith's, and Immanuel Kant's Liberal dogma, that, after all, they insisted, we owe all public virtue to that which grows inevitably from the seed of an underlying freedom of the individual to do evil.[1]
Our present-day Liberals are consequently dominated by the lust for an exculpatory, assured "happy ending." They express deluded blind faith in a coming time when all retirement funds and "hedge funds" will be richly paid (perhaps) to the Liberally deserving, and that, however miraculously, on time: however, delivered by no accepted means excepting that of the magic of the marketplace. Thus, they avoid reflection on the terrible tragedies of so many failed cultures of mankind like their own; they do so on the assumption, that believing hard enough in the eternally inevitable happy ending, is a substitute for the moral commitment which the typical Liberal lacks, even among some relevant clinical cases of my own past and present associates.
In today's crisis, faith in a "happy ending," the self-doomed, foolish and fraudulent faith of Karl Rove's "fundamentalists" and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Liberals alike, is the mark of that self-deluded, immoral fool who brings the worst outcome upon both himself and the proverbial innocent bystander, as our avowed DLC Liberals of the present time have been doing of late.
So, according to the account purveyed implicitly in the descriptions given by reviewer Tanenhous's view of David Brown's account, Richard Hofstadter wrestled within the constantly shifting moral—and immoral—standards of his century's American Liberalism, throughout his years as what was considered, ironically, a certified, if morally shifty-eyed, modern historian.
Hofstadter, born six years before me, was among those liberal ideologues who epitomized what I came soon to recognize, and deplore, more and more, as typical of the post-war, lionized Liberals of my own generation. Hofstadter's notion of "consensus," as Tanenhous arrays evidence of that slippery trait in Hofstadter, is precisely a contemporary expression of that particular strain of Sophistry which plunged Pericles' Athens into its self-inflicted doom in the Peloponnesian War. That strain of Liberalism, echoing the Democratic Party of Athens' judicial murder of Socrates, has been the essential quality to which the academic Liberals of Hofstadter's successors, the upper twenty-percentile of the Baby-Boomer generation's income brackets, have given an increasingly prominent, and more virulent expression, in our national intellectual and economic life.
At this moment, the current U.S. Democratic Party is gripped by what is, in fact, an existential form of moral crisis: whether or not, under conditions of a presently onrushing general collapse of the world's present financial-monetary system, that Party's national leadership will continue to sell out the existential interests of the lower eighty percentile of the family income-brackets of the U.S., as they have done in the case of Felix Rohatyn's looting of the Delphi corporation. Would they continue doing such misdeeds in the avowed interest of slavish delivery of tribute to the imminently bankrupt upper three percentile?
This folly among the Democrats who mimic the dictates of the DLC, has been no accident. It was the "consensus" Liberalism of Hofstadter's generation, which allowed our nation to be lured into that echo of the Peloponnesian War which was the U.S. War in Indo-China. It was the so-called "Cold War Liberalism" which infected the relatively advantaged spawn of the "White Collar" and "Organization Man" generation, and which has, thus, given the world the asymmetric-warfare nightmare now spreading from the former nightmare of the Indo-China war, into, and beyond the cockpits of Southwest Asia today. It was the same Liberalism as expressed in the specific forms of the 68er generation's typical, Ivy-League-led influentials, which has virtually destroyed the U.S. economy and our nation itself, over the course of the cultural-paradigm-downshift of the 1968-2006 interval to date.
At times, Hotstadter's writings, as I could never entirely avoid them during his adult lifetime, were provocative enough to be treated, clinically, as thought-provoking, and were always, nominally, treatments of a subject of matters occurring within history, but were, nonetheless, never themselves an honest, or otherwise rigorous account of the process specific to any part of actually human history. To sum up this introduction to his case: Hofstadter was essentially a Sophist. His significance today is that he thus typifies the cultivated, post-Franklin Roosevelt ideology of those, still thirty-five years after Hofstadter's death, whose consciences have betrayed the Democratic Party's Franklin Roosevelt legacy, again and yet once again, that mostly in a remarkably inelegant fashion.
That much said to set the stage, my assigned task here is to get directly to the crux of the deep moral issue of principle posed by encounters with the legacy of Hofstadter's type: What is man and woman, contrary to the slippery dogmas of Liberalism, as Genesis 1:26-31 confronts us with that question? The practical political issue posed for today, by the immorality of the kind of Liberalism which Hofstadter more or less typifies, is: what can replace Liberalism's admittedly strong present influence in all of today's upper social strata among the principal denominations of U.S. electoral politics? What common principle, for example, should unite today's patriots, which is neither right-wing lunacy nor the philosophical Liberalism of Hofstadter et al., in defining a common national cause for the coming November 2006 elections and beyond?
What is the nature of mankind, that mankind could be considered as represented by a clear principle of actual human self-interest which must replace the sophistical corruption known as Liberalism?
The Nature of Mankind
For me, as I have often emphasized since mid-adolescence, and since my young adulthood more emphatically, the image of mankind was defined implicitly, as for Percy Shelley, by the middle portion, Prometheus Bound, of Aeschylus' Prometheus Trilogy. The crime of Prometheus, as alleged by the figure which I identified as the hateful, Satanic figure of the Olympian Zeus, was the charge that Prometheus had committed the offense against the oligarchy of the pagan gods, of providing mankind with knowledge of the use of fire, or, as we might say today, nuclear power. I had promptly rejected Euclidean geometry at first encounter, on principle, and adopted Leibniz as my principal mentor, instead. Hence, the subsequent, life-long issue posed for me by the Prometheus Trilogy has been, that principled distinction of man from beasts which is typically expressed by the truthful discovery of the existence and use of a universal physical principle.
As in the time of the trial and judicial murder of Socrates by the Democratic Party of Athens, the pursuit of truth makes Sophists and their modern descendants, the Liberals, most uncomfortable. Yet, as the case of self-doomed Athens attests, without that emphasis on truth which was specific to our cardinal foes of Sophism, Socrates and Plato, as also their Pythagorean friends and predecessors, the Sophist tradition of the Democratic Party of Athens would make the indefinite survival of the society adhering to Liberalism most unlikely. Truth must triumph, or, as the present, seismic rumbles under the economies of Europe and North America are warning the sensible, the society which avoids truth for the sake of pleasure, must perish, sooner or later.
From the closely related standpoints of valid European physical science since the Pythagoreans' reliance on Sphaerics, and also from the standpoint of Classical polyphony, as reflected in the notion of the Pythagorean comma, the expressed categorical difference between man and beast (as Genesis 1:26-31 poses the issue), is located in the expression of this power of creativity which the Pythagoreans and Plato defined by truthful use of the term dynamis. This is the same notion of Classical dynamis expressed by Leibniz's introduction of the term of modern, anti-Cartesian, anti-reductionist, anti-statistical-mechanical physical science, dynamics.
That distinction, as by Plato and Leibniz, is the kernel of the systemic issue posed by the Sophistry also called Liberalism, then and now. It is from this vantage-point that the pathological element in the character of Liberals such as Hofstadter can be understood in systemic terms today.
Put most succinctly, the challenge which Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound poses, is the Delphic Olympian Zeus' and modern Liberal's want of any systemic sense of a crucial distinction of man from beast. In the broader span of known history of human cultures, that Delphic doctrine is the keystone of what the ancient Greeks knew as the oligarchical principle of the Olympian Zeus, as this oligarchical principle is also associated with both Lycurgus' Sparta, with the sundry cultures of Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, Byzantium, the medieval reign of the partnership of Venetian financier-oligarchy and Crusading Norman chivalry, and the presently damned pleasure-domes of the 68ers.
Since the collapse of the medieval system of feudalism into its New Dark Age, during Europe's Fourteenth Century, the effort to free modern mankind from the oligarchical system's hegemony, was centered in the mid-Fifteenth-Century's great ecumenical Council of Florence and in the consequent establishment of governments under constitutions adhering to the commonwealth principle, such as Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England.
Unfortunately, the retort of the pro-medievalist Venetian oligarchy against Louis XI and Henry VII, was typified by the role and legacy of what Dostoevsky was to rightly recognize as the essentially satanic quality of the evil Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. That was the Torquemada, the butcher of Christians and Jews alike, whose satanic policy unleashed the 1492-1648 reign of religious warfare, from which Europe had to be rescued by Cardinal Mazarin's crucial role in crafting the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia on which civilized life in European civilization has depended to the present day. The practice of African chattel slavery, in Europe, as introduced by Torquemada's Spain and also Portugal, was implicit in the Satanic quality of that which Torquemada unleashed. This legacy of Torquemada's Hitler-like policies, was combined with the overlapping role of both the Habsburg dynasty and resurgent influence of the Venetian financier oligarchy.[2]
The resulting, dynamic combination of circumstances, created a situation of a divided European civilization, a division between those nations, on the one side, constitutionally committed to the anti-Olympian principle of human freedom, as in both the Declaration of Independence[3] and the Preamble of the Federal Constitution of the U.S.A.,[4] and, on the opposite side to that, the European faction of those among whom the legacy of oligarchical hegemony persisted through both the poisonous awe for the relics of titled oligarchy and the continued supremacy of "independent central banking systems" over governments, as this latter condition has prevailed throughout western and central Europe. That elementary division within globally extended, modern European civilization persists, still today. That has been the principal root of the presently erupting crisis of global civilization in general
This has been the same division between two opposite poles of culture, as that reflected in the division between the U.S. system of freedom embodied in constitutional government, and the London-steered enemy of the U.S. represented by the philosophically Liberal, slave-holders' Confederate States of America (CSA). That latter was the Confederacy served by President Teddy Roosevelt's uncle, mentor, and Confederate spy-chief James D.Bulloch, and by the Ku Klux Klan enthusiast, and leader of the relaunching of the KKK from the White House, President Woodrow Wilson personally. Underneath such apparent, categorical distinctions of types encountered as lurking still within cultures, there lies a single, opposing, all-embracing principle: the universal principle of the absolute distinction, as emphasized in Genesis 1, of man from beast.
For example: were the human species a member of the category of higher apes, the population of our species could not have exceeded several millions living individuals under the generally known conditions of any part of the recent two or so millions years. We are presently a population of more than six billions, a level reached, globally, chiefly since the Fifteenth-Century birth of modern European civilization, as distinct from the periods of ancient and medieval European civilization.
This distinction of the human species from all lower forms of life, the ability to willfully increase our species' potential relative population-density, is typically expressed by the discovery of universal physical and related, Classical modes in cultural principles. Our present knowledge of the works expressing this uniquely distinguishing principle of the human intellect, is best typified by study of all of society's valid conceptions of science as the legacy of the ancient astronomy reflected in the ancient Egyptians' and Classical Greeks' universal physical principle of Sphaerics.[5] This distinction of the human species from all lower forms of life, is the basis for the separation, defined by the scientist V.I. Vernadsky, of the higher order, called the Noösphere, from the relatively lower order of ordinary living processes and their fossils, called the Biosphere.[6] This distinction of human from animal life, is what is recognized by the Pythagoreans and Plato as the principle of dynamis. This, for example, is the fundamental issue of economy, which separates my own commitment to truth from the prevalent, Liberal, views and practice of political-economy today.
The enemy of that principle of actual, as distinguished from relatively bestialized human existence, is what was known to ancient Greece as Sophistry, and is expressed in modern mass behavior in such typical forms as Liberalism and empiricism. This same principle of Sophistry is also expressed, in a relatively more degenerate mode than simple empiricism, as both the radical empiricism known as positivism, and in a still more decadent expression as that existentialism from which the modernist and post-modernist social doctrines of radical anarchism and fascism have sprung.
To understand the moral disease of so-called Liberalism, which the case of Hofstadter only typifies for his public influence over the 1945-1970 interval of his life, the negatives to be considered can not be made apparent in any efficient way without proceeding from the affirmative standpoint of the essential morality which has been lacking among the typical Liberals of the post-Franklin Roosevelt generations of Hofstadter and, especially, the upper social brackets of the 68ers.
So, in Classical tragedy, the meaning lies outside, and, so to speak, above what is performed on stage. So, the remedy for the tragedy lies in the intention of the author and in the insight of the spectator and author into the systemic failure of the entire society represented on stage, as in Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy, or Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Everything on Classical tragedy's stage is rotten, because rottenness is an integral feature of the society depicted, as we might consider the state of the U.S.A. hovering on the edge of threatened self-inflicted doom today. The function of Classical tragedy, as Friedrich Schiller stressed, is neither to moralize about the microcosm of personal life, nor to seek potential heroes among failed fools,[7] but to prompt the spectator to rise above his own narrow concerns in life, to rise to assuming a relevant degree and form of responsibility for the quality of his or her society as a whole: to rise above the morally failed individual who says: "Yes, it is very bad, but there is nothing you or I could do about that, except to learn to live with the system as it is." History is not the psychoanalysis of individuals, but, like the Classical drama of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Schiller, the matter of the functional character of the leading individual as the active expression of a culture and its process.
The only relatively exculpatory qualification of the behavior of these Liberals, is that their views are not reflections of the actual free will, but of the sometimes virtually Pavlovian conditioning which brought about such expressed results. The "brainwashing" of the typical post-war Liberal employed a method typified by the way in which the ancient Greek Sophist, Euclid, crafted his fraudulent, post facto reconstruction of discoveries in geometry which had been made a half-century or more earlier. Alleged "self-evident" definitions, axioms, and postulates were drilled as habits of a victim of virtual brainwashing, a victim who therefore interpreted everything, without question, on the basis of presumed standards for deductive consistency with those arbitrary assertions of "self-evident principle." It was chiefly Liberal sophistries which filled the role of allegedly "self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates." Such are the alleged "self-interests" as perceived by the petty, Romantic, and therefore irresponsible minds of the failed citizen, and typical theater critic, of his or her society.
What can we say, therefore, of the victims of Liberal indoctrination, but: "Forgive them, Lord, for" these half-brained Liberals "know not what they do."
This I know first-hand; I was there, as a pained and disgusted observer, when this sort of "brainwashing" was under way at about the time that President Franklin Roosevelt died.
1. The Future Genesis of Mankind
Today, at the same time that mankind is inflicted with the onrushing general collapse of the present, absolutely foolish world monetary-financial systems, the cumulative physical effects of the work of preceding generations, most notably since the Homeric legends, has brought us to the condition, that mankind's definition of its relationship to nature must now undergo a series of radical changes, those changes which are now required as bearing on the principal considerations which must now be taken into account by governments. The nations of the world are now confronted, immediately, with a new reality which will be the dominant set of considerations for all nations during the remainder of the present, young century of this planet's history.
To complicate that matter, considerably, although an increasing number of governments, and other circles, have declared their intention to cope with what are called the challenges of depletion and pollution of planetary resources, most of the globalist policies recommended and actually implemented thus far, have been treatments worse, even far worse than the alleged disease. In fact, the systemic implication of the modern Delphic, neo-dionysian cult of "environmentalism," is that such attempted impositions of law place man on the same categorical level as the beasts eaten for food. The present, bestial view of mankind advocated by the current crop of neo-malthusians, must be replaced with a view which is actually in accord with the reality of nature, the reality of the absolute, mental distinction, and qualitative superiority of the human species, the distinction from, and absolutely above all other forms of life.
Heretofore, civilized forms of existence have, admittedly, depended on the delusory working assumption that human life is bounded by the limits of consumption of so-called natural resources drawn down from that aspect of our planet's existence which the great biogeochemist V.I. Vernadsky defined scientifically as "the Biosphere." The popular lunacy known as "environmentalist" policies today, is based on radically anti-humanistic delusions. Still, until recently, freshwater supplies, the production of essential foodstuffs, and minerals could be obtained, as if from nature's bounty, and that in quantities and qualities sufficient for improving conditions of life, per capita, for an increased total human population. Despite all of mankind's errors of commission and negligence up to a recent time, we had been able to meet this challenge.
Now, the cases of relatively diminished sources of suitable freshwater supplies, and oncoming depletion of the Biosphere's best choices among stores of mineral resources, require mankind to turn to managing the planet as a whole, rather than managing what have been treated as virtually no more than so-called "raw," pre-existing, finite resources. Now, as the rate of depletion of pre-existing types of natural resources, such as potable water and relatively high grades of accessible ores, has overtaken the supply of pre-existing such resources, mankind must now assume the active responsibility implicit in the functions of nuclear-fission and thermonuclear fusion: the responsibility for creatively regenerating the quality of resources which it had previously thought to merely extract from pre-existing states of nature, and to go beyond that, to create needed states of nature which had never been known to exist before.
Thus, now as Genesis 1:26-31 may be read today, it is time for mankind to measure up to the challenge which those verses present. We are now the laborers in the field, who must accept our assigned chores in maintaining the continued Genesis of Mankind. It is not sufficient that we till the field; we must now create the field we would till. The work of V.I. Vernadsky has added richly and profoundly to the following reading of the mark of the Creator and His Creation.
In physical science today, we know directly of three distinct domains, or, in other words, categorical phase-spaces, each distinguished from the others by a single universal principle. The lowest order is occupied by non-living processes; the next highest order, is composed of living processes and their fossils; the highest of the three orders, is composed of that creative mental life, the Noösphere with its included specific fossils, which exists only in human individuals, but not in the lower forms of life. The distinction among these three domains has been made, as by Vernadsky, on the basis of a relevant quality of crucial experimental evidence.
So, the Earth as we know it, is composed of those three domains. First, the so-called abiotic, or prebiotic part of the Earth. Second, what Vernadsky defined as a dynamically ordered mass of processes, including the fossils of living processes. which he named the Biosphere. Third, the portion of the mass of the planet whose origin is the activity of the human mind: the Noösphere. Of these three, the Biosphere has been an increasing ration of the total mass of the planet, relative to the so-called pre-biotic, while the Noösphere is a mass not attributable to the Biosphere as such, but only the human mind and the "fossils" of human creativity.
These represent three distinct phase-spaces, each distinguished by its own, subsuming distinctions of universal physical principle. Theology then comes in through the physical scientist's open window, through the concentration of the function of creativity, unique to the human individual. Man's creativity, as mortal man, defines a fourth, higher domain, a domain higher than man in particular: that of the work of the universal creative principle, known as the God of Philo of Alexandria's insistence, that, contrary to the Aristotelians, God did not make Himself impotent by uttering a completed Creation at some point in earlier time.
Thus, our mortal life is not a mere testing of us, as we were the Biblical Job; our life is the duty to contribute to the creative process of developing the universe to the degree that the challenges presented to us on this account, are the need for us to make our immortal contribution to the development of the Creator's universe. Our immortality as living persons, is not a freemasonic rite of passage; it is a mission on which we are embarked, a mission in which our contributions persist beyond our deaths as part of the divinely directed work of the Creator's continuing development of a living universal creation under the reign of a universal creative-cognitive principle.
The situation now before all humanity, presents us with that view of the matter of our moral commitment: as mortal individual persons who, through our uniquely human cognitive powers as individual personalities, as souls, also participate in universal immortality, as Apostolic Christian teachings, as of John and Paul insist. It is this efficient feature of the blessed human individual, which is the expression, ontologically, of the soul which remains after death.
From this standpoint, it is clear that the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, is mankind's enemy, the veritable Satan whose evil will we must resist and conquer.
The Mission Before Us
As a matter of principle, there is no conceivable limit to mankind's duty, as a species, in our universe. Since as Albert Einstein emphasized, the existence of provable universal physical principles, such as Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of gravitation, defines the universe as finite and not bounded by any external principle. Einstein's argument signifies that the Creator is in the universe, and ordering its creative development, never beyond His reach.
For the moment, since the turn into the Seventeenth Century, science, and human practice on the universe at large, has been limited to the implied range of the Solar System itself. We are dwelling, thus, within the range of Kepler's "farm," the Solar System whose principles of organization he was the first to de-mystify scientifically, through the discovery of the universal physical principle of gravitation.[8] On this account, Einstein and others have recognized that the related work of Kepler and Bernhard Riemann represent the outer limits of what is presently efficient comprehension of man's active role upon the universe around us, the portion of the universe into which interplanetary exploration is reaching today, the Solar System as such, and what Kepler defined systemically as its inner set of planets, inward from the asteroid belt which is the remains of what Kepler identified as an exploded missing planet, most emphatically.
Over the course of the Twentieth Century, an increasing ration of physical scientists and relevant others, have been taken up by the idea of exploring the interior of the Solar System beyond Earth's atmosphere. The Moon was the first significant objective adopted on this account, and the planning of the development of a Solar System-exploration base on the Moon, opened the way for a clear vision of the routes of scientific exploration for reaching man's exploration of the surface of Mars. These and related developments signify that the human psyche has begun to shift the definition of human existence, from that of man on Earth, to man inhabiting the Solar System. I made proposals in that direction during the middle 1980s, and summarized the point in a half-hour nationwide, 1988 Presidential campaign broadcast, "The Woman on Mars."
There are serious concerns about possible future perils for human life on Earth, and these concerns prompt forethought: how might we prepare to become capable of coping with such dangers? These known and possible threats for the broadly foreseeable future, oblige us to prepare to fend off such possible catastrophes. However, those types of concern for probable and possible catastrophes, while important, are only a subsidiary aspect of the subject as a whole.
We are mankind in the Solar System, and, that means, that somewhere beyond presently visible objectives for exploration, we are on the way to becoming mankind in the Galaxy and beyond. These are not fantasies, but very practical, and, now, very necessary, long-range scientific thinking about objectives and means. We must educate the presently developing generation of young adults and adolescents in a view of man within the Solar System, and prepare to enter the future which that implies: The Future Genesis of Mankind. In this view, we do not leave Earth behind us, but now conceive of Earth as a phase within a larger domain, the Solar System. It is from the standpoint of treating the Solar System as our immediately primary environment of reference for today, that we define both the problems of life on Earth, and the solutions for those problems within the larger framework of our increasing efforts to master the Solar System of which Earth is a part.
In the meantime, we have a looming immediate crisis on Earth itself. To begin with, we must make the wastelands bloom; but, we must now assume responsibility for managing the development of the Biosphere, rather than merely adapting to it.
The Challenge of This Century
I have presented today's indispensable view of this Twenty-First Century as a whole in terms of the immediate political-economic challenges posed by recognition of the fact that the future of mankind now depends upon a certain kind of cooperation of our United States, with an emerging perspective for the cooperative development among the sovereign nations of Eurasia. This view of the U.S.A. as a prospective partner with Eurasian development, implies a corresponding global approach, within which a U.S. relationship to the sovereign nations of Central and South America parallels and intersects U.S. cooperation with the role of Europe in the development of Eurasia as a whole. These steps of development in these regions, provide the platform for the global commitment to the development of Africa.
The notion of Eurasian development leaps inevitably, and clearly from reflection upon the growing billions of the Asian population, most among whom are desperately poor. This spectacle of vast poverty compels us to think in terms of an initial half-century-long, future perspective of capital improvements, largely in basic economic infrastructure and the development of a physical-capital investment in a science-driver approach to a two-generation drive toward upgrading the scientific-technological potential of the population as a whole.
The included feature of this development perspective must be the development of raw materials, a development which will depend on a forced-draft development of nuclear-fission sources of power and the development of an isotope-economy associated with the development of modes of thermonuclear-fusion power and related technologies.
The vast, extremely poor ration of the population of Asia, requires a rapid technological and cultural transformation of the orientation and opportunities of life, even for such relatively more modest objectives as meeting the material requirements of an energy-dense economy with a greatly increasing requirement for relatively cheap raw materials of production. We are now exceeding the rate at which essential "raw materials" can be drawn down at relatively low physical costs, while meeting both the urgent needs and rising expectations of what are presently very poor populations. Therefore, the future of Eurasia, in particular, depends upon a revolutionary intensity of commitment to synthesizing a growing margin of our raw materials supplies through very-high-energy-flux-density modes.
This will require "re-energizing" Europe's economies, tearing down the policies and structures of the recent four decades of "post-industrial" economy, and shifting the employment of the labor-force more and more into science-driven, capital-intense "crash program" orientations in meeting the requirements of, notably, the development of Asia. This will require vast amounts of long-term credit, in large part through long-term treaty-agreements of a quarter- to a half-century maturities, this at simple interest-rates below two percent per annum.
This will require immediate return to a regulated economy of the type pioneered in a modern economic form under U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. It will require long-term, fixed-exchange-rate stability in international finance and trade, for an interval of a quarter- to a half-century. It will mean a shift away from "cosmopolitan super-corporations," to emphasis on a dense distribution of smaller, largely closely-held enterprises which feed into meeting the requirements of the larger enterprises which combine the specialized output of their numerous vendors into the relevant types of products of the larger enterprises.
It must be emphasized, that individual creativity of the quality typified by the discovery of universal physical principles, is the primary source of all non-inflationary forms of growth in net physical output of nations, per capita, and per square kilometer.
The most essential requirement, is that of ripping out those lunatic, anti-scientific, so-called "post-industrial" fads which have done the most to destroy what had been the happier times of economic life.
On this account, the U.S. economic tradition, the American System of political-economy, as fundamentally opposed to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetarist, pro-oligarchical financial-economic dogmas prevalent in Europe, is the only model of policy-shaping which is in accord with the actual needs of both Transatlantic and Eurasian society today.
It is little understood, even inside the U.S. today, that there is no axiomatic agreement in principle between the American System of political-economy, as reflected crucially in our Federal Constitution, and those morally and technologically inferior systems of Anglo-Dutch Liberal models of monetarism under which governments in Europe are controlled by so-called "independent central-banking systems."
The crumbling of the U.S. dollar system, through Liberal influences, during the period beginning 1968-1972, placed the U.S. itself under the thumb of not the European governments, but, rather the Venetian-style private financier consortia represented within the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, the same system embodied, systemically, in the pathological Liberalism of circles such as "Cold War Liberal" Richard Hofstadter. It is this virus of Liberalism, so enthroned under President Richard Nixon and his followers, which transformed the U.S. from the world's leader in real (e.g., physical) economic progress, into the wasteland we have become, increasingly, during the recent four decades since the outbreak of the U.S. war in Indo-China.
For anyone alive today, who remembers and supports the U.S. Constitutional implications of the American System of political-economy, the remedies for the presently onrushing U.S. economic-breakdown crisis are clear. Unfortunately, for most Baby Boomer Liberals, the attachment to the ideology of Liberalism is much stronger than the forces of economic sanity. In that sense, Hofstadter typifies the ideological enemy among us today.
The American System model, as the relevant circles of the Franklin Roosevelt recovery programs understood this, was the key to saving civilization over the course of the 1933-1945 period of world crisis. The Bretton Woods system, crafted by President Franklin Roosevelt and his circles over the resistance of the Anglo-Dutch Liberals of Europe, continued to ensure the economic progress of both the U.S.A., non-fascist western Europe and central Europe, and other places, during the initial two decades of the post-war period. This system was successful for President de Gaulle's France and for the Germany of Adenauer and Erhard, as for the U.S.A. and other places. It was the 1964-1968 shift in cultural paradigms, with the rise of the 68er generation, and the consequent ousters of Erhard and de Gaulle, which marked the beginning of a long-ranging downshift in the physical economy of the U.S. and Europe, per capita and per square kilometer, which has brought the world to the state of ruin which prevails in these areas of earlier recovery and prosperity today.
It was chiefly the influence of the "Cold War Liberalism" typified by the likeness of Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Abba Lerner, et al., which made the ruin ideologically feasible.
We must now rebuild, and be about it very soon, or there is little chance for the world as a whole during the decades immediately in progress. We of the U.S. must mobilize our consciences to lead in the needed return to economic recovery, but, as in the central, opening principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, we must act out of compassion for the others, for the nations and peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and our own Hemisphere. Our proper intention lies not in our advantage as such, but in the advantage of being a nation-state republic whose role in this global crisis is important for the benefit of present and future mankind as a whole.
2. The Factor of Liberal Decadence
According to the story told, a poor Italian workman, after begging repeatedly for employment at the statue of his favorite saint, St. Joseph, threatened the saint by warning that if prayers for help were not met soon, the poor workman would smash the statue of the saint. The church's priest, overhearing this threat, discreetly replaced the valuable statue with a smaller, much less costly one. The poor workman, at his next visit, protested, threatening the small statue: "Hey, where's your big brother?"
Most simple-minded believers, such as, in the worst case, the Gnostics who call themselves "fundamentalists," view their relationship to God as akin to a peasant's relationship to François Quesnay's feudal landlord. That selfish, scarcely Christian attitude toward the Creator, is often punished as a consequence which the peasant's action brings upon himself. By habituating himself in the role of a poor beggar, that peasant denies himself and his family the role within society by which the remedies he requires would become available. That poor fellow clearly thinks of God Himself, not as The Creator, but as like just another landlord, as an oligarch, to whom he comes, cap in hand, demanding favors in an appeal to the principle of noblesse oblige.
Although there is a rising ferment against recent and current policy among increasing portions of the population today, it is still the case, that even most of the lately discouraged lower eighty percentile of nominal U.S. citizens today, including most worn-out Civil Rights leaders and kindred sorts, are like that peasant: "What can you give me?" not, what can we do for the future of mankind. As a notable eyewitness has testified: it was not the middle-class victims of racism who first rallied to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was the children and have-nots. Since we must all die, the wise person spends his mortal life, even puts it at risk, whether paid or not, to make something worthwhile of his having lived. To walk in the image of the Creator, one must ask oneself, as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia prescribes: "What am I doing for the other?" Be like an Angel. You are a victim of white racism? What, therefore are you doing for your brothers, the immigrants from countries below our borders?
On a deeper level that is the valid, but too simple an illustration of the crucial point.
Consider the fact, that you shall die, sooner or later. What then is the outcome of your having lived? What are you, that we should even trouble ourselves to ask, let alone answer such questions? Ask, then, if you were a Liberal, what is the relevant, elusive point of distinction between you and the likeness of a thieving, bad-tempered chimpanzee who was directing an enterprise such as Enron?
The essential moral differences at issue, when we pose such questions and parables as those, are of relatively trivial importance when our attention is focussed on a truly important question: the poor fellow's lack of a clear sense of an actually human identity, rather than of a member of a herd of virtual cattle, seems to typify a species of talking animals.
Beast or Man
Were man a beast, his species' potential relative population-density would be fixed, as an animal's would be, by the biological, interpersonal dynamics of the setting within which the relevant community of persons existed. The potential relative population-density would be relatively fixed by those considerations. Man is unique, in the most notable respect that the human will is able to change that potential, through the discovery of those universal physical principles which the Pythagoreans and Plato associated with the term dynamis. No beast can do that.
These discoveries of principle are exemplified, both, by the discovery of universal physical principles, and by principles, of the type of principles of Classical artistic composition, of ordering of social relations. In the discovery of physical principle, the individual's mind is focussed on man's relationship to the physical universe around us; in the discovery of Classical artistic principles, the mind is focussed upon the subject of human social relations as such. The function of Classical irony, as distinct from so-called "literal definitions" in the use of language, as in Classical poetry and drama, typifies the second aspect of the creative potential of the individual mind.
These kinds of discoveries of universal principle, both what we term "physical" and Classical artistic, are powers within the sovereign bounds of the individual's cognitive processes.
These creative powers, which do not exist within the bounds of mechanical processes, such as digital computer technology, nor in literal meanings of words and signs, define the human individual as immortal in principle. This is most simply illustrated by the case of a single discovery of a universal physical principle, such as Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation. Although the expression of these powers requires the medium of the living body of the human being, they are not powers within the phase-space domain of biology per se, not within the phase-space domain of the Biosphere, although they do act efficiently upon the Biosphere.
The processes of human creative thought, as typified by Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the universal principle of gravitation, lie outside the phase-space of the Biosphere as such, just as living processes change the chemistry of non-living material, qualitatively, in ways which do not occur with the same elements in a non-living environment. The greater rate of growth of the volume of throughput of the Noösphere, relative to the rate of growth of the Biosphere, shows cognitive life to be a higher principle than is found otherwise in living creatures. Hence, the argument of Genesis 1:26-31.
Otherwise, from psychological experience itself, we know that the sensed physiological state of mind of an act of creative discovery of principle, is of a different quality than ordinary thought. This same distinction is also experienced in the expression of lawful irony in poetry and musical composition, as also in types of humor which excite the same feeling.
The notion of immortality associated with the discovery of valid universal physical principles, or Classical artistic composition, is located, in its explicit effect on the thinking process, in the explicitly dynamic role of such discoveries within the processes we know as the history of the self-development of the human species. The ideas which correspond to such discoveries can be transmitted as efficient instruments of the future development of mankind. Thus, this aspect of the human individual, which is distinctly human, not animal, has the potential of its immortal service to future mankind after the author of the discovery were deceased. He cares for who he will be when his mortal life has passed.
In my own extensive conscious attention to the relevant distinctions among states of mind, as I experience this internally, and recognize the presence or absence of such creative moods, both in cases of persons with whom I am familiar, and also in diagnosing a "type" of chronically stultified personality, the distinction in expressed states of mind, the difference between a creatively insightful and a habitually blocked person, is a matter of clear qualitative differences in type, the type which tends toward adapting to adopted popular opinion, rather than actually thinking, who tends to become nasty, vindictively resentful when dealing with creative personalities. He tends to be the Sophist whose hatred of creativity turns as homicidal as the Democratic Sophists of Athens did, when confronted by the existence of a creative mind like that of Socrates.
So, the functional distinction in results of these contrasted states, is the kind of playfulness which is typical of the creative personality, and the tendency toward mechanical deductive moods which lean toward the gloomy side.
The creative personality does not wait to walk through some "pearly gate," but lives as an immortal in the course of daily life, knowing that when death takes him, he will remain immortal. Being immortal in that way, is everything of greatest value for him. His greatest satisfaction is doing actually creative things, for the sake of future mankind.
He is already at peace with the Creator, at peace with the conception expressed by Genesis 1:26-31. It is this quality of the human individual which is in the image of the Creator. Thus, for the case of the human individual, and for no other known living species, the human individual has an immortal personality. For example, every student of science, who is familiar with the experience of re-enacting the original discovery by great predecessors in physical science or Classical art, is immortal in that degree. When we re-enact an original discovery, we bring forth that which occurred within the original discoverer; the future of mankind is dependent upon such modes of radiation of discoveries in physical science and Classical artistic composition and performance.
Therefore, what is the true interest of the poor peasant threatening the image of St. Joseph? Is it his mortal flesh, which rots, or is it that spiritual part of his personality which is radiated in effect to future generations?
What is the difference in personal character between the peasant who menaces the image of St. Joseph, and his neighbor whose beautiful soul, expressed as science, or in the form of Classical artistic expression, enriches the society which lives after him? Where, then, according to this outlook, does the true personal interest of the human individual lie?
Can a Sophist be truly human? Can a Liberal of Hofstadter's expressed outlook, be truly human? The Liberal, because he is human by the nature of his birth, is human in one sense, and potentially human in a higher sense; but, can a Liberal be functionally human in the sense that the idea of immortality of the personality conveys? Normally, that would not be possible for him.
I have already, implicitly, answered those questions here. The issue to be considered is, what difference does this distinction make in the way society's destiny is arranged?
Faith, Mortality, and Morality
The Liberal's faith is, essentially, his fear of lacking the power of suggestion to "win friends and influence people" honestly. He is often stickily gregarious, but never really friendly. He sells a product, not with the intention to benefit the buyer, but to enrich himself, or to extract the experience of egoistical triumph, learned from Dale Carnegie classes, such as pleasure, or money, gained from exerting some form of animal-like control over other persons. He comes in various shapes, sizes, and professions. He might be poor Willy from The Death of a Salesman, Hickey from The Iceman Cometh. He might be some of those very shallow personalities I have known, who considered themselves successful salesmen, who would swear on all the Bibles in rooms at Las Vegas, that salesmen and masked-like croupiers made the world's economy work. He is the mob's enforcer who confides that his function performs a service for the community.
The insightful observer sees the great hollowness within the skin behind the mask-like face of that fellow speaking. Such is the pitiable face of that desperate faker, President George W. Bush, Jr. There is no immortality anywhere within him. Such a Bush would talk about immortality, because talking like that makes him feel like he did when he had had a load of booze within him, or when he enjoyed a luscious sadist's moment of pleasure at the podium of a White House press conference.
Those poor fellows have no human purpose in living, but live out their anointed time, seeking a place to while away the boring hours; for they have no purpose in living as cognitive human beings. A sense of pleasure for its own sake, and Enron-like power over others for its own sake, is their substitute for the alternative of a purpose in living as a person. There is nothing immortal within them, and very little within your typical middle-class Liberal generally.
True joy lies within the bounds of that quality of creativity which sets the human individual apart from the animal world. True joy is helping to make the world better, in that fashion, for people of times to come. True joy is building a nation, or resuscitating a ruined nation which will be fit for creative human beings to inhabit, or simply mustering the insight to do a kindness.
The problem is, as with the poor, brutalized peasant menacing the statue of St. Joseph, that the tradition of that virtual Satan known as the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, by his banning the expression of the creativity (dynamis) which the Pythagoreans and Plato, for example, represented, has been all too successful in impelling subject simple-minded men and women to degrade themselves in the bestiality which that poor fellow expresses in that way, a condition which our modern Sophists, the "environmentalist" fanatics of the windmill cults, express more viciously, more Liberally.
Good-Bye Hofstadter
What was always lost in the Sophist's and Liberal's search for meaning, was essentially the desire for truth. In place of truth, the Liberal, as Mandeville, Quesnay, and Adam Smith illustrate this point, relies upon Mandeville's devilish assumption that little green men under the floorboards of reality, are casting dice to determine who wins, and who loses in the gaming rooms above. The doctrine of the modern Liberal is, that mysterious social currents determine the flow of opinion and practice. This form of Liberally lying was licensed by the preposterous assertion of the charlatans of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that "I don't believe in conspiracy-theories." Almost anything and everything in social behavior is reduced to the radical Machian's percussive theory of behavior of statistical gases. This swindle is often called "sociology."
Not only do these modern Sophists, those Liberals, seem to eliminate the voluntary elements of human knowledge and will from the behavior of banker and robber alike. Their doctrine, however absurd it is in fact, is not without its own self-interested motives. By reducing virtually everything to percussive theories of statistical mechanics, even the Liberals' own actions in concocting these swindles, are attributed to the magical role of random numbers.
By permitting large masses of human beings to allow themselves to be degraded to the intellectual condition of virtual human cattle, the leading forces in history have allowed the degraded kind of society associated with the culture of Sparta, of the Roman Empire, of Byzantium, of the medieval partnership of Norman chivalry with Venetian financier-oligarchy, the Satanic quality of a Torquemada, and the Liberal followers of Paolo Sarpi's cult. This is what is reflected in the form of Sophistry expressed by Liberals of the stripe of Richard Hofstadter, Liberals of the stripe of those degenerates of the Democratic Party of Athens, who were the mob which perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates. The Sophist/Liberal appears to worship the mystical powers of popular opinion, and seeks to explain almost everything in those terms, and does so with seeming indifference to the fact that arguments to that effect are usually factually absurd from the outset, as Hofstadter's were.
So, for example, as Tanenhous wrote in his review: Hofstadter "was much impressed by 'The Authoritarian Personality' (1950) ... a survey compiled by a team of researchers under the direction of the German emigré Theodor Adorno. Hofstadter adopted Adorno's 'social-political categories' in his essay 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,' an attempt to uncover the hidden sources of McCarthyism." In real history, that McCarthy was a synthetic personality created out of the Senate's "Pepsi Kid," by the circles of J. Edgar Hoover and Roy M. Cohn. Hofstadter's attempt to evade the reality of police-state styles of orchestrating half-baked fables which he passed off as revealing this or that variety of what were fraudulently presented as spontaneous sociological products, reflected nothing as much as the fact that Hofstadter himself belonged to the same type of "Cold War" synthetic politics as Sidney Hook's and Abba Lerner's post-war pig-pen, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. His theories were essentially infantile rubbish. He had his quarrels with his Liberal rivals, but so do old sows of the same descent in a common pen.
There are two great sins which have played a leading part in destroying our civilization, and our nation, up to now. The lesser evil is mediocrity; the greater evil, which makes a Hitler's ascent to power possible, is the form of Sophistry known as Liberalism today. Poor Hofstadter, like the German existentialists of the circle of Adorno, Arendt, their dear friend the Nazi Party member and Freiburg Professor Martin Heidegger, purger of Jews, the "Cold War Liberals" such as Professors Sidney "I Am a Communist" Hook and Abba Lerner, and their fellow-travellers, typify that generation of literaryish Liberals which opened the gates before my eyes, for my clearer view of sundry sorts of Hellish tyrannies which I have witnessed in those times past.
Like Hofstadter himself, their doctrines, when not frauds conceived in malice, were essentially rubbish, the one usually more absurd than the other. He belongs to the age of those Liberals who attempted to out-Goebbels Goebbels in their time, and who succeeded, during the post-World War II decades, in making a significant contribution to the Sophist style of destruction of the minds of so many of the confused Baby Boomers running much of the affairs of both the U.S. and western and Central Europe today.
[1] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason. See the argument, on the negation of the negation, under the "Dialectic of Practical Reason."
[2] The association of Hitler with Torquemada is scientifically precise. Torquemada was the model used by the Martinist freemason Count Joseph de Maistre, who, directly and personally, supplied former Maximilian Robespierre hack Napoleon Bonaparte with the hand-crafted design for Napoleon's new personality as First Consul and Emperor, which was also the specific model later used for crafting the synthetic personality we came to recognize as Adolf Hitler. The central feature of the frankly Satanic de Maistre's design is the adducing of the image of the brutish mass-murderer, that of what de Maistre defined as "The Executioner," from the example of Torquemada. Hitler's genocide against the Jews of Europe was literally an extension of the anti-Semitic policies of Torquemada, and of the use of the "Executioner" as a state-terrorist, according to the model of Torquemada's Inquisitional methods.
[3] The insertion, under Benjamin Franklin's supervision, of Leibniz's rejoinder against John Locke: "... the pursuit of happiness."
[4] "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America." Contrary to false interpretations taken from the pro-slavery dogma of John Locke and the pro-slavery Confederacy, this Preamble, which features the inclusion of the principle of agape from Plato's Republic and the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13, is the fundamental law under which the intent of the Constitution in all respects is constrained. This principle of agape is also the root of that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia on which all civilized notions of government in Europe and the Americas have been premised to the present day.
[5] This evidence is conveniently highlighted by the two works of Bal Gangadhar Tilak on this subject: Orion (1893) and Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903).
[6] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. "Vernadsky and Dirichlet's Principle," EIR, June 3, 2005.
[7] As Schiller emphasized in his scathing criticism of the personal character of the Marquis de Posa of Schiller's own Don Carlos.
[8] The bounds of modern physical science are found within the benchmarks of chiefly the founder of modern experimental physical science, Nicholas of Cusa, who inspired Kepler in physical science, and such outstanding successors and their leading collaborators as Fermat ("quickest time"); Leibniz who, uniquely, accomplished Kepler's specification for an infinitesimal calculus; Carl F. Gauss; and Bernhard Riemann. Hence, Albert Einstein's location of valid modern physical science to date in the connection between Kepler and Riemann.
