How Not To Play Chess
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.October 9, 2006
Out of the lesser true-to-life legends from the U.S.A. of World War II, came the story of the security guards at a war-time defense plant, who were perplexed by their failed attempts to discover what might be buried in that sand conveyed out through the plant gate by employees regularly pushing relevant wheelbarrows through the exit check-points.
The story runs: years later a former guard asked one of those employees: "Tell me, between you and me, what were you guys stealing?"
The answer came: "Wheelbarrows."
Déjà vu!
For me, who knew that generation of war-time defense-industry employees, and the rationing system of that time, the story of "wheelbarrows" had verisimilitude. But, consider another story with a similar point, for which I can account of my own direct knowledge, a story of my experience with the game of chess.
Anyone who knows the secret of the game of chess, would understand why the game became, eventually, too boring for me to play with zest any longer, He or she will therefore also understand what I see as the failing in strategic intelligence-skills shown in an otherwise worthwhile piece of current journalism by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the co-authors of Hubris.[1]
I had been introduced to the game of chess by a memorably generous teacher, Lew Thistle, during my Junior year at Lynn English High School. My notorious lack of competitive spirit, then as now, meant that I was never the best across the board, but was able to excel on a relatively higher scale of performance in other ways, as in blindfold chess games, with fair performance at the Prussian game of Schachspiel, and with great success, relatively speaking, in dealing with up to eight tyros simultaneously, while I was blindfolded, but highly amused, in the course of a return voyage from abroad, on shipboard, at the close of my military service.
But, I lost my zest for treating the game seriously when I discovered, a few years later, that the Eighteenth-Century Newtonian mathematician Leonhard Euler had discovered the mathematics of the knight's move in chess. As the old drunk said to Hickey, near the close of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, "Hickey, you took the life out of the booze." For me, the game of chess was not really fun any more.
Did Euler take the life out of my game? On the contrary, I suddenly recognized that it had never really been there. I have just had a similar reaction in reading the book of Isikoff and Corn.
That kind of reaction against chess, prompted by the Euler case, had not been an isolated experience for me. In a closely related matter, I had already been an antagonist of Euclidean geometry since my first encounter with the subject in a high school classroom; on the matter of Euclidean geometry, I had recognized, then, at the start, from the study of the ironical way the relationship between form and mass functioned in the work done at the Charlestown, Massachusetts naval base, that a purely formal geometry, such as a Euclidean geometry, had no place in that real universe where the alternative, physical geometry, is functionally supreme.
Chess, like the sterile game of Euclidean, or Cartesian geometry, is a game premised on a set of fixed, axiomatic, and actually arbitrary presumptions called "sense-certainty." The acceptance of any set of such arbitrary presumptions, generates a blind faith in a false, or merely temporary state of our experience of the universe: expressing, thus, a mistaken faith which is the commonplace cause of intellectual failure among university graduates in science, or honest specialists in political intelligence investigations, today.
In physical science, the great mistake would be to assume that the physical universe is governed by mathematical systems derived from the arbitrary, actually false set of definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Babylonian-like set of academic priestly canons, as typified by a so-called Euclidean, or Cartesian geometry.
As the Apostle Paul warned in a famous passage from his I Corinthians 13: we see with our senses as in "a glass darkly." The real universe is governed by universal physical principles which, as the Apostle warned, are undeniably effects, but not objects of the senses in and of themselves. Like Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of that universal principle of gravitation which already defines a self-bounded, finite universe, they are experimentally demonstrable as universal physical principles, which we must discover, experimentally, as Kepler discovered gravitation.
It is the power of making, and acting upon such discoveries efficiently, which sets the human individual apart from, and absolutely above the mere animals. It is this which sets competent scientific practice absolutely apart from such foolish trinkets of infantile fantasy as a Euclidean or Cartesian geometry. It is that power of discovery of universal principles, principles which could never be discovered by those methods of mathematical deduction, associated with Euclid or Descartes; it is an exciting power of discovery which distinguishes the species of man from mere imitators of monkeys and great apes.
No animal could achieve that distinction of man, but only a human being—or the Creator Himself. Man is able, as the case of Kepler's discovery of gravitation illustrates the point, not only to discover a universal physical principle, but to change the universe by acting appropriately on the basis of that kind of discovery. That is the root of the difference in the actual increase of the human population to billions today, as contrasted with the mere millions which would be the highest level of population attainable by species of great apes.
Those considerations typify the prompting of my disappointed reaction to what I have examined as the admittedly useful exposure of the Bush-Cheney Iraq hoax by authors Isikoff and Corn. Unfortunately, no act of creative insight was required by them; they sought no clear experience of that quality of discovery of principle which distinguishes the human individual from the ape. Even a rhesus monkey could sense, and protest wildly, that it had been cheated![2]
For me, in my day-to-day work as a strategic analyst, investigation itself is an indispensable duty; but, as long as it is limited to that merely deductive form, it really isn't fun any more. The discoveries made, as by investigating journalists like Isikoff and Corn, are often necessary chores, up to a point, but they miss something very important, the only truly important issue; they do not reach to the real story which needs to be told for the good of humanity. They identify the body of a crime; but, they provide no key to a real-life remedy for the practice of that murder itself. They leave us trapped in society's problems, as if we were fish in an aquarium. Thus, for all the merit of the work done by Isikoff or Corn, and many like them, the real story, which needs to be told, just isn't there.
I explain. I tell that real story here and now.
1. History As Classical Drama
Would you attempt to explain the character of the Roman Empire, by the personality of the Emperor Nero, in his time; or, would you be inclined to explain the role of Nero according to the rules which you presumed to be the ostensibly unchanging characteristics previously built into the formation of the Roman Empire? If you are really intelligent about political affairs, would you not prefer to find the origins of the presently continuing Iraq fiasco by looking back to such tell-tale clues as the crafting, under George P. Shultz, of what became the George W. Bush administration? Would you blame the bomb-explosion on the bomb, or the set of persons who had, respectively, designed and deployed that device?
Or, to understand the origins of the Roman Empire, look back to a relevant earlier time, to the self-destruction of Athens by the change in character, induced by the spread of the Delphic cult of Sophistry, in shaping the character of the Athens of Pericles. Who enveloped the opinion-making of Pericles' Athens within the bounds of that cult of Sophistry which has been revived today, among, especially, the upper twenty percentile of Baby Boomer brackets, as notably, between the ages of approximately fifty and sixty-five today? Where and how did the culture originate, which controls the interaction of the characters, such as both President Bush and the U.S. Congress, and also journalists such as Isikoff and Corn, on the stage of history today?
The most obvious fault in the numerous published works which purport, as Isikoff and Corn do, to explain the issues of President George W. Bush's reverberating strategic catastrophe in Southwest Asia, is that they proceed under the influence of a kind of "flat Earth" sort of deductive view of history, an implicitly "flat Earth" view which Isikoff and Corn, like most other news and related commentators, bring to the entire category of issues of the U.S.A. under the George W. Bush administration, during the 2001-2006 interval to date.
The effect is, that the abused slave blames the cruel master, but continues to serve that master, that he might enjoy the opportunity to continue to complain.
So, today, when the presently onrushing general collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system, is the principal imperative accelerating the Bush-Cheney drive toward immediate launching of new major wars, the typical critic of the current war-policy of that Administration, refuses to take the actually determining onrush of the presently threatened, global economic breakdown crisis itself into consideration, in assessing the war-danger as such.
Shakespeare already knew better. Perhaps if Isikoff and Corn had been advised to pay proper attention to Shakespeare, they would have understood how the issue of the currently continuing Iraq war, the great, intrinsically impeachable lie, should be approached for analysis. Look, for example, at the opening, the monologue assigned to the actor playing the part of Chorus, in Shakespeare's King Henry V.
Chorus serves Shakespeare's purpose in stating certain of the assumptions of a living physical geometry, which Chorus is assigned to prompt the audience to recognize as the reality behind those shadows which shall comprise the visible performance on stage. Do not be trapped into simple, Euclidean-like assumptions, when dealing with a subject which is peculiar to the specific geometry of a living social process within the real universe.
Or, hear that rumbling of the coming doom of both the George W. Bush administration and of those who would still defend it, which echoes in the celebrated passage from Cassius' counsel to his companion Brutus, in Act I, Scene II of Julius Caesar:
"Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings ..."
President George W. Bush, Jr., Vice-President Dick Cheney, and all their crew, are, like most of their commonplace critics, merely such pitiable underlings. Bush and Cheney are admittedly very brutal underlings, killers; but, they remain, all the more, like those who tortured for Tomas de Torquemada, like those of the Inquisition against Jeanne d'Arc before him, or like Pontius Pilate. Bush and Cheney are merely damned underlings.
The question in all such cases should be: underlings of whom, or, of what?
Must we not take into account, that Bush and Cheney, for example, are, most immediately, merely underlings of those circles of the George Shultz et al. who summoned them on to this present stage of the history of our nation's Presidency? Should we not recognize, therefore, that all those who believe that Bush and Cheney are independent agents, are merely dupes of a force which also controls their own disoriented, and usually disgusting opinions about the currently skyrocketting world crisis? Is the greatest crime of Mrs. Lynne Cheney, perhaps, not merely the execrably poor taste she demonstrated with her choice of a marriage-partner? Or, that he was debased enough to accept that destiny she provided him? Or, ask: of whom, or what, is stage director Shultz himself a mere underling?
To understand the mortal existential crisis of the U.S.A. under the current Bush Administration, it were prudent to trace current history from roots found no later than the birth of the Roman Empire at a meeting, on the infamous Isle of Capri, between Octavian, the then future Emperor Caesar Augustus, with the priests of the cult of Mithra.
Nero was a creation of the Roman imperial system whose existence was negotiated, so, on the Isle of Capri. From that same island, Augustus' successor, the Emperor Tiberius, unleashed the judicial murder of Jesus Christ, that done through the special powers of judicial murder with which Tiberius anointed his putative son-in-law, Pontius Pilate. Nero was another such underling of the same system within which virtually all of the principal actors, in real life, or on the stage, including Julius Caesar and Nero, were reacting in their respective places and times.
They were reacting as mere underlings, like the pathetic poor madman George W. Bush, slaves to the political-ideological geometry of the system which contained them as fish are contained within an aquarium. All were doomed, as our U.S.A. might be doomed today, because so many leaders and others have been playing according to the rules of the game of doom for underlings, rules for "go along to get along," which had been handed to them by certain higher powers. They are implicitly doomed because they became integrated working parts of the system which controls them and their fates. They were doomed for as long as they chose to continue to swim within the bounds of that mental-cultural aquarium.
So, Isikoff and Corn, as underlings of the contemporary press, have failed in their reaction to the prescribed circumstances in which their investigations were situated. They speak of significant perils seen within the aquarium in which their minds swim, but they refuse to get their minds out of the prison of that aquarium. Therefore, they may describe some sharks and other terrors of their situation, but they would, so far, never do anything which would actually suggest a way in which our nation might actually escape from that fatal trap.
Beneath all this, they expressed the habits of a contemporary culture which is ignorant of the science of history, because they were ignorant of that principle of social organization which finds its elementary expression in the history of the European science on which the common achievements of ancient Classical Greek and modern European civilization are premised. In that fashion, what they did, in effect, was to disregard that essential, principled difference between man and ape, the which is the foundation of healthy modes of human social organization, the principle which is savagely violated by the ideology which the enemies of a then recently deceased President Franklin Roosevelt introduced as the form of Sophistry used to condition, above all others, a certain middle-class and upper-class generation born during the first decade of the World War II interval.
The problem which made possible the brutishly pathological Bush-Cheney Administration of 2001-2006, was a policy imposed on the social setting and development of a generation of middle and upper economic-social strata born during the first decade following the death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. The conditioning of that generation, in modes associated with a cult of "White Collarism" and the "we generation" of the corporate orientation associated with the cult of what was called "The Organization Man," produced a replica of the same systemic disorder, known to the ancient Athenians as Sophistry, among those entering the universities of the middle through late 1960s. The intention and effect of this conditioning of that generation known as "The Baby Boomer Generation," was to induce a cultural type of personality which lacked a controlling conception of the essential, absolute distinction of the human individual from the monkeys and higher apes.
The possibility of the existence of a U.S. government as wildly corrupt as the 2001-2006 Bush-Cheney Administration, would be recognized by relevant Classical scholars as being essentially the result of that conditioning of the presently hegemonic "Baby Boomer" generation. The dubious victory of the 2000 Bush candidacy, would not have been possible without the comparable same cultural folly of the Gore-Lieberman ticket which, quite conspicuously, blew the election in a way which was embedded in those defects in its own moral and intellectual character, moral defects which it shared more or less equally with the Bush candidacy. Fish do not choose to swim in water.
To understand the effect of this problem, as merely reflected in the kind of ignorance shown by otherwise intelligent persons, such as authors Isikoff and Corn, we must understand a problem made famous during the post-World War II period by the publication of a small book by British author C.P. Snow, under the title of Two Cultures.[3] Snow effectively documented the prevalent, vicious dichotomy between physical science and Classical culture, which had arisen in the culture of the British Isles, as elsewhere.
The dichotomy is, on the surface, essentially, an inability of recently taught mathematical disciplines to deal with the challenge of the subject of Classical irony treated in the celebrated William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.[4] However, any well-informed study of the history of European science since ancient Classical Greece, points directly to the intrinsic absurdity of that apparent dichotomy. The mental state of the mind generating an experimentally validatable discovery of a universal physical principle, is precisely the expression of the same mental faculty, unique to the potential of the human individual, which is expressed by truly Classical irony in artistic composition in both plastic and non-plastic media. This connection is shown most clearly, as a principle of method, in the principal works of Johannes Kepler.
The problem which C.P. Snow addressed, is therefore not a problem which is inherent within the span of European Classical culture, from ancient Greece to the present; it is a reflection of a mental disease which has polluted our institutions, and crippled the expression of the creative powers which are specifically inherent in the distinction of the human individual from the beasts. To save our republic, our civilization, from destruction by its own putative leaders, we must change ourselves, change those most popular mental habits which lead us to destroy ourselves. That is the subject which I treat in this present location.
I have treated that subject in locations published earlier. Here, I address it from the vantage-point of the cultural crisis in strategic outlook which is typified by the systemic errors of Isikoff and Corn. Recognize what is lost in their approach, and see this fault of theirs not as a personal idiosyncrasy, but as typical of a pervasive disease in practice, one permeating, and now threatening the very continued existence of our present global civilization.
Science & History
Look at the method of Classical scientific work, first, and then trace the implications of that to the quality of social processes which is most clearly shown in Classical modes of artistic expression.
If, for example, we seek out the origins of the principal theorems of the fraudulent Euclid's Elements, we are confronted by two immediate facts about the principal features of that collection as a whole. First, that all of these theorems, are parodies of original discoveries made by the circles of the Pythagoreans and Plato a half-century or more earlier than Euclid wrote. In their original proof by the Pythagoreans, Plato, et al., those so-called theorems were described by a method directly contrary to that represented by Euclid, or by the Aristotle on whose influence Euclid appears to have depended considerably.
The original discoveries, made long before Euclid, were accomplished by the method known as Sphaerics, which the relevant Classical Greeks had adopted from Egyptian methods of astrophysics, which those Greeks had developed as the astrophysical premises for the development of the practice of physical geometry on Earth.
Looking back to the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato from modern European times, we recognize the Classical Greek method of Sphaerics as that which was revived during the middle of modern Europe's Fifteenth Century, where it served as the basis for modern science introduced by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his De Docta Ignorantia and subsequent writings on the principles of physical geometry. This method of Cusa was, in turn, the avowed basis for the work of the founder of modern European physical science, including modern astronomy, through the original discoveries of an explicit follower of Cusa, that Johannes Kepler on whose pioneering all of the most essential features of competent modern physical science has depended.
All competent modern physical science, from Kepler through Riemann, including Gottfried Leibniz's uniquely original development of the infinitesimal calculus, is based upon the foundations established by the work of Cusa follower Kepler. Those achievements of modern European civilization depended, in turn, on the ancient foundations in science and knowledge generally traced in European civilization from the ancient Pythagoreans, Thales, Heracleitus, and from Plato and his Academy up through the deaths of Eratosthenes and Archimedes.
Admittedly, many professors in fields of science, either simply do not know these actual roots of competent forms of modern European science, or have been heavily brainwashed into ignorance of these facts. Such was the tradition taught by the satanic Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. For the terror-stricken dupes of the Olympian Delphic tradition, such as today's proliferation of academic Sophists, the act of actual discovery of a universal physical principle either does not exist, or is simply prohibited by those who have substituted a mere, pathetic exercise in mathematical deduction for actually thinking. That is the fault which Isikoff and Corn have shared with most currently ploughing those same fields which their book addresses.
The lesson to be learned from those reflections on the perils of allowing oneself to remain an underling, as Isikoff and Corn, among relevant others, do, is that true human freedom lies only in the individual's and society's reliance upon development of those creative mental powers which are merely typified by the kind of process of discovery of universal physical principles represented by the ancient Pythagoreans, Plato, Cusa, and Kepler. These are, as I have already emphasized above, the same powers expressed by the great Classical art whose drama, such as that of ancient Aeschylus, or modern Shakespeare, Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Schiller, has served as the great foundations of the needed arts of both statecraft and the general development of the individual within the social processes.
From the standpoint of physical science, in particular, the primary metrical characteristic of those events which make history history, is society's benefit from the influence of fundamental discoveries of universal physical, and Classical mode of artistic principle, discoveries made in the only way in which they could have been made, by the sovereign intellectual powers developed in individual persons. That is the principal, proper definition of history in its purest form, its form as a process of development of the quality of the human species, through the development of the quality of the mental-creative powers of the young individual. From that standpoint, we derive other views of history as either the failure to discover a relevant universal principle, or to suppress it, or to turn back the clock of progress by introducing false assumptions where valid principles were needed.
As the ancient Heracleitus and Plato emphasized, and as Bernhard Riemann has clarified this fact for modern physical science, history is the expression of the Creator's, or man's discovery of efficient forms of universal physical, or comparable principles.
A "zero technological growth" culture is a stinking graveyard, as is the case of the presently impending destiny of the current, purely parasitical money-grabbers of the Bush Administration: it is a place where the dead history of a failed state, a continued George W. Bush Administration, would be buried next to Cheney in the grave of Nero. A culture in which the experience of discovery of universal physical and Classical-artistic principles is not the characteristic feature of social life, is a dead culture, a form of failure of that form of human social existence which has men and women degenerating into the loud and pointless beating of drum-like objects, to the point that the tongues flopping in their open mouths drool in a meaningless expression of brain-dead ecstasy of a culture whose existence has become worse than pointless, a culture which stands in peril of being so judged by history.
Do I offend someone? I would hope so, for their sake.
In other words, human cultures do not stand still; they are either progressing, or retrogressing. Unlike the game of chess, there are no fixed rules in the existence of society. There is either retrogression, or the discovery and assimilation of new principles of current practice, that in the sense that Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle represents such a discovery. At the same time, history is a social process, within which a manifold process contains both a principled progress and retrogression, anti-entropy and entropy, which are usually occurring at the same time.
The birth of a generation, or an individual, does not begin human life with a blank slate at birth. The development of the new individual, even entire generations, occurs chiefly as the impact of an ongoing, always evolving, multi-generational process of cultural evolution, which embosses its specific imprint, for better or for worse, on each newborn individual, and also upon the set of social relations within which he, or she has been cast. The form of development which occurs within the new generation, is not a mechanistic process like the statistical-mechanical systems of the followers of the foolishly clever René Descartes. It is what Leibniz defined as a dynamic process, using dynamic in the sense of the Classical Greek dynamis, or that notion of dynamics as developed to a high degree by the work of Bernhard Riemann.
This notion of dynamics, as associated in modern science with Bernhard Riemann's specific notion of the tensor, is a term of physical hypergeometry (rather than mere ivory tower sorts of mathematical formalism). It is, notably, ancient; it is a term, known in Greek as dynamis, dated in European civilization as a term of the science of Sphaerics associated with the Pythagoreans, such as the famous Archytas, and Archytas' friend Plato. It is the name of the underlying conception of all of the work of Plato and of the leaders of his Academy through the death of Eratosthenes. It is the term, translated by Leibniz as dynamics, which Leibniz introduced to modern usage, to distinguish the methods of competent modern physical science from the statistical-mechanistic fantasies of René Descartes. Witness the fact that Descartes' Eighteenth-Century followers are familiar to us as expressed in such forms as the failed methods of certain long-range forecasters, such as Morton Scholes, the pathetic method, virtually that of the scientists of Gulliver's visit to Laputa, employed by the majority of university-trained economists today.
However, in this review of the implications of the Isikoff-Corn book, I am avoiding the technicalities of economic forecasting as such, in order, as much as possible, that our attention here might be focussed on the shaping of history as a subject of culture. My attention is focussed on those principled, hereditary characteristics of the specific cultural roots and impact of the Roman Empire, and, more emphatically, more immediately, the medieval ultramontane, Venetian financier-oligarchical system of empire, which are the precedents for what is called "globalization" today, a heredity which is expressed in a crucial way in the presently accelerating, global, existential crisis of global civilization as a whole. There is a difference in emphasis over the ages, although the principles are ultimately the same.
2. Zeus & the Concept of Satan
The greatest of the ancient Greek dramatists, Aeschylus, wrote a celebrated Prometheus trilogy, of which only the text of the middle portion, Prometheus Bound, is claimed to be fully known. The crux of that middle portion of that trilogy, is the Satanic Olympian Zeus' condemnation of the hero, Prometheus, to virtually perpetual torture; the charge was of having enabled mortal men and women to know of the use of fire (we would say, "nuclear power," today).
That is the issue which defines the greatest continuing conflict within the history of globally extended European civilization, from the time of Aeschylus to the present day. That is, at the same time, the key to that paradox which is posed by the game of chess, as I identified that as the theme of this report.
The issue so posed, throughout the entire sweep of globally extended history of civilization since ancient Greece, is the struggle to free the generality of humanity, in various cultures, and in civilization as a whole, from the suppression of that quality in them, the ability to discover, to know, and to act upon universal physical principles, the quality which distinguishes the human person from the ape, the power of creativity which is "the life within the real game of human existence."
The issue which Aeschylus presents in that fashion, is the issue of what was known then as "the oligarchical principle." This was the doctrine, as practiced against the bestialized human helots of Sparta under the Delphic code of Lycurgus. In other words, this was that system of rule over humanity at large, which degraded the mass of humanity to virtual animals, virtual cattle. This practice of slavery, serfdom, and comparable modes of bestialization of masses of subject human beings, had been the more or less prevalent practice of the known cultures of earlier times, and would be until the emergence of modern European civilization in the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. This is the pivotal issue, the most essential threat to the continued existence of the U.S. republic today, which the currently prevalent Sophistry among the upper twenty-percentile of the post-FDR Baby Boomer generation represents for both our republic, and civilization globally.
The threat which this oligarchical principle constitutes, is recurrent over the known sweep of actual history. Thus, even after the high-point of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the practice of slavery was again introduced, this time in its most brutal form, by the Venetian-backed, hateful opponents of the mid-Fifteenth-Century's great ecumenical Council of Florence. It was thus introduced under Hapsburg Spain's leadership, in creating the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a practice which the Spanish monarchy resumed, under specifically British and other Anglo-Dutch Liberal protection, during most of the Nineteenth Century, especially until the Union victory over the British Confederacy puppet, a victory over slavery which was accomplished under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln.[5]
This practice of treating the majority of populations as virtually cattle, was known throughout the region of Europe at that time as that same oligarchical principle. This practice is still currently expressed widely, today, in the idea of private financiers' dictatorship over the economic management of governments: a dictatorship exerted through such instruments as so-called "independent central banking systems."
No people is sovereign which tolerates the tyranny of such a central banking system. In the times of ancient Greece, oligarchical tyranny was the system represented by that Satanic figure, the Delphic Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, a tyranny which was continued after the fall of foolish Greece, as the characteristic of the Roman, Byzantine, and medieval, Venetian-Norman ultramontane forms of imperialist systems.
Although the physical side of the slavery systems associated with ancient through modern European history, was brutish in itself, the worst aspect of these systems was less emphasized in the usual reports on such matters. The worst aspect, the most essentially inhuman, was the emphasis placed, as by our antebellum southern slaveholder class, on subjecting the masses of subjected social strata to a dehumanized, virtually bestialized mental-cultural life. This was expressed nakedly by the banning of literacy among slaves, as typified in the extreme by the slave-holding states of the U.S.A. itself; but, even after the abolition of slavery, it was also expressed after 1865, in the policies of education of children of former slaves, by influential, nominally anti-slavery, but anglophile U.S. liberals: the policy of "not educating the children of former slaves above their expected station in life."
Even the seemingly less deprived strata, of typical university pupils today, are subjected to a similar form of cognitive deprivation: Teach them "how to," not "why"; "teach them to get by in whatever game we allow them to play."
As part of the same policy of treating our own people as virtually merely animals: the anti-science cult of "environmentalism," popularized among the nominally leftist 68ers of the Baby Boomer strata, is an explicit ideological extension of the pro-Satanic efforts to suppress Classical science and culture, an effort deployed under the influence of such agencies as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as by the so-called "environmentalist" movements today. "Environmentalism," associated with the ancient cult of Dionysus, is now expressed as a modern form of intellectual and moral, cultural corruption, whose ultimate objectives are effects on the human mind tantamount to those of enslavement.
The "mind-slaves" of the so-called "environmentalist movement," are not enraged by the fact that they have been made relatively stupid, made effectively helots under the same rule uttered by the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. They defend their induced stupidity as "our own conviction," just as culture after culture of the world in other places and former times have defended the induced cultural habits by which they shackle themselves, daily and nightly, in the accustomed habits of intellectual self-oppression.
This same relic of ancient and medieval oligarchical culture, is echoed in the disgusting behavior of even some notable figures of today's U.S. Democratic Party, whose fawning deference to the so-called "elites," especially the oligarchical layer of the upper three percentile of family-income brackets, echoes that oligarchical principle which would relegate the lower eighty percentile of the income-brackets of our U.S. population to squabbling over the gobbets cast from the lordly financier's table of the upper three percentile. It was precisely this pro-oligarchical factor of corruption, which was a leading consideration in preventing the Democratic Party from acting in 2005, to save the U.S. auto industry, and, during 2006 thus far, failing to defend the Constitution from appointment of ideological followers of Nazi Crown Jurists to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Was this abomination, perhaps, "Jacksonian Democracy"?)
Returning to ancient society contemporary with the emergence of the European culture associated with the rise of ancient Greece, we have the following expression of the diseased principle which the practices of slavery, serfdom, and imperialism present.
For this purpose, the Delphic image of the Olympian Zeus and his entourage of Olympian gods and demi-gods, typified the image of the oligarchy. This image of rule by a financial or other mode of oligarchical "elite" over a mass of human beings degraded to the life of subject cattle, was sometimes known in those times as the model, such as that of imperial Rome, and of life under the reign of the Roman imperial Pantheon: a Roman Pantheonic model which was identified by the Christian Apostle John as associated with the image of the Roman imperial "Whore of Babylon."
The issue of the interval of ancient Greek history during which Aeschylus composed his dramas, had been this issue of the oligarchical principle, typified then by Lycurgan Sparta and the Delphic Apollo cult. That legacy still threatens all humanity today, in its expression as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal, revived form of medieval, ultramontane imperialism called "globalization." This issue, of the oligarchical principle, as specific to the current political practice of the nations of western and central Europe, the ultramontane, Anglo-Dutch Liberal principle, which was copied from the financier-oligarchical imperialism of medieval Venice, has been, with some precious exceptions, the prevalent pestilence of all European civilization, over a span from that period of ancient European history, to the reflection of the same imperialist root-ideology by the present George W. Bush Administration.
Specifically, in the context of the Peloponnesian War, the issue, as summarized by the poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller, is identified as typical conflict between the Delphic system of oligarchical dictatorship associated with Sparta's Lycurgus, and the freeing of man, under the leadership of Solon of Athens, from virtual serfdom and slavery: the Solon of Athens whose legacy underlies the crafting of the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution of the U.S.A.
So, during World War II, the Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt produced a series of training films for the U.S. military, a series entitled "Why We Fight." That is the American anti-oligarchical tradition, the legacy of Solon for which we have fought for a system of freedom from Anglo-Dutch Liberal and other forms of oligarchical tyranny since the founding of the Plymouth settlement and the Massachusetts commonwealth under the leadership of the Winthrops and Mathers.
To bring about the ruin of the Athens which had once been the legacy of Solon, the forces of the oligarchical model, as centered in the Gaea-Pythian snake-god cult of the Delphic Apollo, introduced a process of subversion of the sons of the leading families of Athens which is known as Sophistry. Similarly, that cult of Sophistry is the underlying principle of modern Anglo-Dutch Liberalism, and was the method of corruption aimed at the new-born offspring from the upper twenty percentile of those U.S. individuals born between approximately the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and the deep economic recession of 1957. These young victims were selected, partly by intent, partly by effect, as the children of the generation of "White Collar" cults and "The Organization Man," children who became "The 'We' Generation" sometimes better named "The We-We Generation" of Orwellian Group-Think.
That mass-brainwashing of the generation of middle-class youth born during approximately the 1945-1957 interval, is the key to understanding the process of willful moral corruption which has led to the Nietzschean-style "transvaluation of values" which came to the surface in Europe and the Americas within the so-called "68er" phenomenon, and which has launched the process of cultural-economic suicide, heralded by the revival of the ancient Gaea cult as the so-called "environmentalist movement" and "rock-drug-sex counterculture," by means of which a cultural and economically suicidal U.S.A. and Europe have virtually destroyed trans-Atlantic European civilization—chiefly from within, as Sophistry destroyed Athens—today.
Foolish Americans today, thus seek the cause of our afflictions from without, when, in fact, the real enemy is mustered, thus, chiefly, among us, in the habits which have been induced in the unsuspecting, from within them.
This method of destroying what had been the once-powerful, proud, and widely admired U.S.A., under President Franklin Roosevelt, was the means by which we were induced to corrupt and destroy our own nation, step by step, over the more than sixty years since the death of that President. The Anglo-Dutch Liberals, who, in the immediate aftermath of the February 1763 Peace of Paris, launched their attempts to destroy the freedoms and economy of the English colonies in North America, have usually preferred inducing intended victims, such as our republic, to destroy themselves from within, rather than depleting the Liberals' own resources in attacking directly by force.
Destroy the victim by encouraging him in his own folly! This was the usually preferred Anglo-Dutch Liberal method, the method which induced France under foolish Louis XIV to ruin itself. This had been the Seven Years War, concluded by the February 1763 Peace of Paris, which established the world empire in fact of Lord Shelburne's East India Company through Britain's exploiting the folly by which the nations of Europe ruined themselves in that induced and orchestrated war, as our U.S.A. has been rotted out, near to destruction, by the games which the influence of the Anglo-Dutch Liberals, both domestic and foreign, have induced our people to play since the death of FDR.
That has been the method, since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, by which the Europe-based Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-oligarchical interests, using the chronically treasonous pack of "white shoe" Liberals among us, have ruined us from the inside, over the course of these sixty-odd years.
What is now in progress, is a threat to the nations of Eurasia, too, but is not primarily a U.S. threat to nations of Eurasia. Cheney's policies do mean the intention for a virtual state of warfare with serious obstacles to imperial globalization, such as Bush Administration targets Russia and China, but, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal interests, whose aim is the establishment of their one-world empire called "globalization," are primarily occupied with using the fools in high places, and elsewhere inside our own U.S.A., to destroy our own nation, by ruinous internal economic and cultural policies, and by foolish wars, such as those being spread by the silly Bush Administration and its dupes, still spreading in Southwest Asia. Thus, our civilization's enemies aim to leave the rule over the world as a whole to those so-called financier and related "elites" of Europe who are now, as formerly, essentially stooges of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of Venice-modelled, ultramontanist imperialism.
Now, look at the effect of this same economically-suicidal ideology in the domain of the presently fabulously corrupt, taught practice of science and technology:
The Predators Who Steal Men's Souls
Despite the widespread beliefs now rampant among that "We Generation" and its emerging successors of today, it is clearly stupid, and also frankly evil in effect, to do as those incompetents specializing in so-called "benchmarking" do, to eliminate recognition of what was formerly recognized, by the now departed, competent corporate managements of the past, as the need to prove an untested physical principle by what Bernhard Riemann defined as a unique experiment. Violating the need for crucial-experimental investigations, will probably cause newly designed planes and their manufacturers to crash, sooner or later, as similar experience with benchmarking has previously affected rates of design failures in automobile manufacturing, and so on.
There are deep scientific reasons for this, but "We Generation" types are not likely to be persuaded by that sort of rigorous scientific evidence; they are more likely to be attracted by what they consider a pleasing smell encountered in the desired object's upholstery, or the desired effects of starvation in producing the desired degree of nudity exhibited by bulimic, super-skinny fashion models. If we put aside foolish fellows of that sort, we are left with two types of outlook to consider.
Freaks of the cult of benchmarking aside, one type of the relatively saner fellows, nods acceptance of the proposal that strict standards of experimental proof-of-principle should reign in economy once more. However, that acceptance takes us less than half-way to the real issue. Let us put that second issue in the following terms, what we might label "the moral issue" at stake.
Just as it is the universal principle of gravitation which determines the planetary orbit, not the orbit gravitation: action does not occur, in nature, or in human willful practice, without the guiding role of the relevant motivation of that action. Which deserves priority: the action required, or the motivation to perform that action? In real life, it is the appropriate choice of motivation, which is primary, and the action, however, necessary, is secondary, and is, itself, essentially a product of the action of will.
It is this motivation, the willful motivation of the human individual's mind, which moves the process represented by the intended application of discovered universal physical principles. The discovery of a valid universal physical principle, is potentially the willful motivation of a change in society's relationship to the universe, by means of which a willful increase of the power of society as a whole over nature may result. That factor of human individual will, so defined, is crucial.
To understand how this apparent paradox arises in general practice, we must recognize that most people, especially those conditioned to think of themselves as underlings, do things—which is to say, act—because they are under the influence of something such as a need for money, a need which has no intrinsic connection to the action presumably motivated by that desire for money. For money, if nothing else worked, prostitution would serve as well. In other words, they think and act as underlings. Underlings are prone to mistake coincidences for causes.
Take as a contrasting case, the machine-tool-design specialist of an automotive or relevant other enterprise. The essential motivation, which prompts successful performance by the machine-tool-design specialist, is of the form which might be described by an observer as "pride in work." He, or she, is not "doing it just for the money." In such special cases, the motivation often springs primarily from a moral, rather than a merely pecuniary consideration. Here, on the latter point, we touch on the notion of a sense of immortality; the actor is motivated by an interest which lies outside the domain of biological or like motives. He, or she is motivated by a sense of being a mortal human being, as both Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin emphasized; he is motivated by the moral need to do good for both present generations, and those yet to come, as the primary moral motive for the individual's actions in society.
His motivation may be to revive something important which humanity had lost in the past, even the ancient past, or, more often, it is something which pertains to a future time when the mortal individual will have died. The desire to rescue the actual intention of a J.S. Bach, or Beethoven from the abuses perpetrated by current opinion, to rescue the intention of an important original discovery, in physical science, or, as many space-pioneers have done, to work through the steps to be taken to prepare for events to occur decades, or even generations ahead.
This quality of motivation which, like the discovery of gravitation by Kepler, partakes of immortality, is expressed in the least undeniable way, in such forms of activity as the devotion to discovery of a universal physical principle, or the realization of a principle of Classical artistic composition which reaches across successive generations, and leaps the borders which separate nations and cultures from one another. In these sorts of activities, the mortal individual person touches upon immortality, thinks in terms of a sense of immortality which leans toward devotion to mankind as a whole, and, to the obligation of mankind to assist to make the universe itself better than it could have been without his, or her creative intervention.
Given, then, the two types of persons who tend to be creative, in the sense that discovery of universal physical principles implies this, the first, the merely useful designer or researcher, thinks of himself, or herself as having the identity of an underling, a faithful servant, whose motives are those of the faithful servant. In the second case, the person who is motivated by the creative work of fundamental scientific progress for its own sake, as Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Riemann, et al. have been, or J.S. Bach, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Schiller, or Abraham Lincoln, have been; these latter persons are motivated by a sense of an immortality locked up within the frailty of an animal's sort of mortal body: a personal intimation of immortality. He, or she is motivated to act for humanity, and to reach thus beyond all borders of past and future, as the chosen intention may require this.
These reflections should prompt us to recognize, that the known history of mankind is dominated by conflicting characteristics of essentially opposing types of persons and human institutions. On the one side, there is the type of the pro-Satanic cult of Apollo, the Apollo who ministers to the female Satan Gaea, and who is the servant of the Satanic Olympian Zeus. On the other side, is the person who finds his or her identity, and essential self-interest, in living in the likeness of the immortal Creator of the universe, in finding an identity in the notion of the creative human soul incarnate, as participating in the work of that Creator in developing the universe to reach higher states of its own existence through the participating, immortal role of the mind of the mortal human individual.
3. Man in His Image
At the outset of this report, I reported my shock in recognizing Leonhard Euler's formal-mathematical solution for the knight's move in chess as proving, so to speak, that the game of chess was a dead thing, that it, inherently, lacked a soul. Chess is a schlimihl! Instead of choosing the game of chess to illustrate the conception, I might have spoken to the same effect, by choosing the contrast of two performances of Franz Schubert's great C-Minor Ninth Symphony: an inspiring London performance conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, and a terribly dull, soulless performance in New York, under the direction of, indicatively, Ana Mahler's friend Bruno Walter.
On the occasion of a pertinent radio broadcast, Walter, who had ruined the performance of the Schubert, and had probably bored the audience with a deadening recital of the symphony's second movement, swamped the ears of the credulous with his silly Nietzschean drivelings about Beethoven as "Dionysian" and Brahms as "Apollonian"! Such was, and remains, if somewhat more decayed than then, the decadent soul of the schools of modern arts. Contrary to Walter, the Schubert can be competently performed under direction; Furtwängler had proven that that Schubert symphony expresses the life which the composer had intended in the composition's design. Schubert was no Schlimihl.
The contrast, between intellectual life and death, separating the work of those two conductors on that account, points toward the reality, that real science and real art share the quality of lying beyond the domain of simple sense-perception, and so does the human soul.
This soul is not something outside that universe which ignorant people associate with their mistaken notion of a self-evident world of sense-perception. It is, as Kepler's discoveries, for example, illustrate this fact, an efficient actor within the universe which is, after the expressed view of Albert Einstein, finite but not bounded. It is actually a self-bounded, finite universe, bounded by the specificity of demonstrable, universal physical principles such as gravitation. It is not a fixed universe, but a growing universe, growing not so much in scale (how can one measure the size of an unbounded finiteness?), as in what appears as complexity, as the Sun spun out the Solar system as its extension and lawful companion.
The quality of experience which bespeaks the ontological actuality of the human individual soul within the real universe, is associated with the quality called ambiguity. Often, of course, ambiguity is associated with the notion of indecision, of doubt; but, it is expressed, as in the competent practice of physical science, by the presence of a principle, as Kepler's rigorous, successive steps in his New Astronomy discover a universe which rules the world of mere sense-certainty, as if from outside the credulous ignorant mind's dream of sense-certainty.
As I emphasized at the outset of this report, if this quality of ambiguity which is comparable to Kepler's discovery of gravitation is absent, we have the game of chess, as played by persons pretending to be dead at their chessboard, in New York City's Washington Square Park, or as Leonhard Euler denied the existence of the ambiguity called the "infinitesimal" in the Leibniz calculus. Go back from foolish dead-soul ideologues de Moivre, d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and their like, to Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation. As Albert Einstein echoed Riemann, the real universe is Riemannian, expressing the foundations of all competent modern physical science in the orderable succession of discoveries linking the work of Kepler to that associated with the work of Riemann.
These universal physical principles which mathematicians with dead souls call non-existent "infinitesimals," are actually, like actual gravitation, an object as big as the universe (a finite, but self-bounded universe), which act upon every infinitesimal part of that universe, and can not be recognized as an object akin to one of sense-perception, because they are much too big.
Thus, when Euler closed the gap in chess, by showing the knight's move to be also existing within the domain of the dead souls, Euler showed that the game of chess, or the kind of thinking which chess required, could never be an investigation which could lead to the discovery of the real principles which run the universe.
Therefore, through the ability of humanity to discover universal physical principles, man is able to increase our power in and over the universe. This shows us the soul as an efficient actor within that universe. Its mortal companion may be in the past, but the efficient substance of the soul is immortal, because it is, in substance, the active expression of a power which is essentially universal.
There is, thus, a category of experience, knowable to the individual human mind, through which man touches those creative powers to change the universe, which are otherwise found only in the Creator Himself. To call this a "spiritual" quality is misleading, if, by that, we intend to suggest that it is something outside the universe, rather than what it actually is, a power within the universe, over the universe, a power, as Heracleitus and Plato agreed, the principle that only change, only the power of change, is universal.
Thus, the most important topic in all pursuit of knowledge, scientific knowledge pertaining to the welfare of the universe most notably, is the means by which the human individual soul, a soul tied to a mortal husk, may act efficiently, and immortally, in and on the universe. For those among us, who have come to understand that point, the most important thing in human mortal existence, is discovery of efficient means, a principle, by means of which the individual may demonstrate to himself the power to alter the universe in a beneficial way.
This distinction of the mortal human individual from perpetually snarling, ape-like creatures such as the unfortunate Vice-President Dick Cheney, is the recognizable feature of the human individual which touches that quality of immortality within, but is not bound by the mortal body. This is expressed as the ability of certain higher powers of the human individual mind to produce meaningful physical effects in the universe, or great art in the strictly Classical tradition associated with the typical work of Plato, effects which are beyond the means of the higher apes, means which are rightly associated, as that giant Moses Mendelssohn understood Plato, with the notion of the immortal existence of the human individual soul.
Those concerns were embedded in the design of the development of a program of self-development for the participants in the LaRouche Youth Movement.
For example:
Kepler & Bach vs. Euclid
In the pedagogical program which I outlined for the self-development of the university-age LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), I focussed on the complementarity of two, converging approaches. On the one side, the reliving of the crucial discoveries of universal physical-scientific principle by, successively, the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato and the modern science of Johannes Kepler. On the other side, the challenge of developing the not so obvious ability to perform the J.S. Bach motet, the Jesu, meine Freude. The two, science and art, are brought together, where they always did belong, in the domain of musical harmonics: the connection is expressed by the usually misunderstood notion of the comma in Pythagoras, and the realization of the principle of the comma in Kepler's harmonics of the Solar System. The young adult who has understood the comma from the standpoint of the requirements of a Florentine-Bach standard of bel canto performance of the Bach Jesu, meine Freude motet, and also the way in which the comma confronts us in Kepler's astrophysics, has grasped one and the same conception.
The combining of the two sets of work is necessary, is indispensable for competence of the participants, and it requires impassioned concentration, and reworking the attempts over and over, in repeated sessions, until the false dawn has passed, and the morning of true insight has begun. The proper object of Classical education, higher education most emphatically, is to ensure that the student emerges with a clear idea of the distinction between the mere shadows of reality which sense-perception represents, and the reality which is expressed for that human mind which can recognize the subject which casts the shadows on the senses.
Therefore, the most essential thing in education, especially higher education, is that the pupil have an efficient sense of effective participation in generating, and controlling an effect which is associated with a sensible action by that student, but which touches an idea which is efficiently existent, but not an object of sense-perception in itself. (No benchmarking permitted in our school!)
The object is to get beyond interpreting something which is merely observed, to producing a controlled effect which demonstrates the ability to employ an idea of principle to control an otherwise unavailable effect in the universe of sense-perception. The achieving of the right tone, the right intonation, in a passage of polyphonic performance, the right approximation of the required comma for that purpose, provides a link between the human will of the singer in the chorus and the eerie effect of "getting it right." The polished string quartet is the best pedagogical medium for such controlled clinical demonstrations, but very few performers can match the abilities of the late Amadeus Quartet, with the virtually perfect placing of intonation by the late Primarius, Norbert Brainin. Beethoven is the continuation of Bach, and the Grosse Fugue demonstrates the principled connections; both command the same method of eerie access to the reality of the divine, to the real universe on the other side of the fence of sense-perception.
On this same account, the program of Sphaerics, associated with both the Pythagoreans, such as Archytas, and the other circles of Plato, by rejecting the silly set of so-called definitions, axioms, and postulates of the dubious Sophist Euclid, obliges the student to experience the discovery of the physical meaning of the ontological gap of physical action which separates the point from the line, the line from the surface, and the surface from the solid.
On this account, Archytas' doubling of the cube, as praised on this account by the Eratosthenes who was a contemporary and correspondent of Archimedes, is crucial, as is the treatment of the regular solids by Plato's associated Theaetetus. These discoveries, like the discovery of the Earth's Solar orbit by Aristarchus of Samos, provide the students who experience these discoveries as their own, a peek into the powers to be actually human, the powers to see, and to employ universal physical principles which lie outside the bounds of simple sense-perception, principles which control those shadows of reality we experience as sense-perceptions.
The lesson to be learned from this aspect of the legacy of the best from ancient Greece, is the deep significance of the great fraud perpetrated in the name of Euclid's Elements.
The Root of Dynamics
As I have merely indicated here thus far, but have elaborated the relevant argument in earlier locations, the great crime which continues to cripple the attempted practice of science today, is the widespread influence of the form of Sophistry known, variously, as Euclidean, or Cartesian geometry. This brings our attention to focus on the ontological issue set forth at the outset of this present report.
In reality, as the relevant Greeks, such as the Pythagoreans, adopted the lesson from the experience of Egyptian astrophysics, the starry universe which appears to envelop our Earthly existence, is apparently spherical. Since we are obliged to measure the passage of events in terms of cycles of apparent motion of the celestial Sun, Moon, and nighttime stellar array, the notion of universal, in all of the relevant connotations of that term, is associated not so much with astronomy, as with astrophysics, with the discovery of the calculable effects which disturb the ordering of the observed nighttime sky, especially the nighttime sky of the ancient navigators who settled upon the relevant littorals and lower riparian regions of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea.
Such at least, is the evidence adduced from study of known ancient sidereal calendars, as these discoveries were noted by the great Indian scholar Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
The primary concern in study of astronomical events, was the occurrence of departure from simple regularity, to a higher order of regularity conceived as implicitly lawful change. Hence, the relevant legacy of Egyptian physical knowledge transmitted to the Greeks of about the Seventh Century B.C., is properly viewed as a matter of astrophysics, rather than simple astronomy. This transmission to the Pythagoreans, in particular, is known as Sphaerics.
The opposing current which Sphaerics encountered within the relevant ancient Greek civilization, is what is known broadly as reductionism, and in the form of reductionism most relevent for attention as an hereditary source of morbidities within modern European culture today, is the Sophistry associated with the effects of the pernicious influence of the Delphic Apollo cult upon the Greek civilization which nearly destroyed itself in the orgy of the Peloponnesian War.
The legacy of this practice of sophistry is most luridly typified in European civilization today, by the widespread, academic and related moral corruption associated with the so-called Anglo-Dutch Liberal, or empiricist view associated with René Descartes and the present-day hegemony of a mental disease known as the statistical-mechanistic method which is used commonly as a fraudulent substitute for actual science. The traditional root of Cartesianism is identical with that of the fraudulent cult of Ptolemaic astronomy which is derived from the influence of another fraud known as Euclidean geometry.
The alternative to that hoax is derived, as a matter of assumed scientific method, from the ancient Greek practice of Sphaerics.
The issue, as implicitly introduced at the outset of this present report, is that the degradation of the self-image of the human being into the semblance of a mere higher ape, is rooted in arbitrary acceptance of the notion that the definitions derived from simple-minded sense-perception, the notions of definitions, axioms, and postulates associated typically with a taught Euclidean geometry, are self-evident truths. What this fraudulent, but widely accepted hoax does, is to serve precisely the same purpose which the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound prescribes: the banning of practical knowledge of universal physical principles from the knowledge and practice of the human beings condemned to live out life as merely virtual human cattle.
This latter, Olympian doctrine is the key to understanding the characteristic features of the method employed by the oligarchical tradition, from Babylon to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal ideologies and systems of the present day. This is key to the suppression of those natural potentials for creative insight, a suppression which is only typified by failing to recognize the inhuman irony of the knight's move in chess.
Once we eradicate the aprioristic, Sophistical assumptions of Euclidean and Cartesian geometries, including those which underlie the so-called Newtonian persuasion, the progress of modern experimental physical science, and related experience, offers us no alternative to recognizing that it is provable universal physical principles, as typified by the founding of an extended form of modern physical science on the work of Kepler, which must replace the arbitrary definitions, axioms, and related impedimenta of a Euclidean or Cartesian system.
That was the point stated clearly enough by Bernhard Riemann in the opening paragraphs of his boldly revolutionary 1854 habilitation dissertation.
This view did not begin with Riemann; Riemann's work developed the implications of work in the same direction by his predecessors dating from no later than Thales and the Pythagoreans. This is the essence of the work of Plato. It is the kernel of the founding of modern European experimental science by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia. It as, as Albert Einstein recognized, the pervasive, essential implication of the founding of an extended modern physical scientific practice by Cusa's follower Johannes Kepler.
Science & Politics
To make this point as clear as possible, look at the way in which Kepler defined the methodological kernel of valid forms of modern European science after him. I summarize the relevant, principal elements of continuity of this history, to enable us to come prepared to deal with the crucial point of relevance which I must treat here.
The pivot of modern scientific development, as this is reflected in my profession, the science of physical economy, is located in two crucial points supplied by Kepler, and one by Fermat, as follows.
Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation defined two branches of leading work for those who followed him in the development of the fundamentals of physical science. First, the discovery of a universal physical principle of gravitation as being expressed as an ontological infinitesimal instant of a process, prompted Kepler to assign the development of an infinitesimal calculus to "future mathematicians." That assigned discovery was effected, uniquely, by Gottfried Leibniz, as this discovery, of a universal principle of physical least-action, "the catenary principle" of the physical complex domain, was treated by Leibniz's collaborator Jean Bernoulli: the uniquely original discovery of the infinitesimal calculus.[6] The second branch was Kepler's assignment to his successors, to develop a general physical conception of the significance of elliptical functions.
These signal contributions by Kepler, were supplemented in a crucial way by Fermat's leading, physical-experimental demonstration of what proved to be the physical principle of relative time. As Hermann Minkowski would proclaim famously in 1907, with the implications of the notion of physical relativity implicit in the work of Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz, the reductionists' categories of quasi-Euclidean, Cartesian notions of space, time, and matter, were uprooted and put aside by the concept of physical space-time.
In the course of development of Kepler's second assignment to future mathematicians, Carl F. Gauss and his relevant contemporaries conducted an energetic development of the notion of elliptical functions, a study which was centered empirically on the leading role of Gauss in astronomy and in geodesy and Earth-magnetism. The treatment of this subject of elliptical functions, by Abel, served as a stepping-stone for Bernhard Riemann's lunge beyond physical-elliptical functions to that more general view of physical-hypergeometric functions which is the basis for the modern principle of dynamics, as these connections, from Kepler through Riemann, were to be recognized by Albert Einstein.[7]
At first glance these developments of modern science, from Nicholas of Cusa, through Kepler and Riemann, seem to the scholar of ancient Greek science as almost throw-backs to the work of Thales, Heracleitus, the Pythagoreans, Plato, and the followers of Plato's anti-Aristotelean method among the Platonic Academy through the death of Eratosthenes. That is a broadly valid, and important view of the matter, but the connection must not be over-simplified. The connections, and differences which this line of development of a view of the physical universe describes, must not be degraded into an apolitical, ahistorical conception of the processes at work outside the academic classroom. The conception of the physical universe and the conception of the nature of man, and of man's Creator, defines a set of functionally, inseparably common, functionally combined issues of science, history, and politics.
To wit:
As I have already emphasized, any reference to the history of influence of the oligarchical principle expressed by the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, is inescapably a reference to the connection between a society's choice of conception of political view of man's nature, and the nature of the physical universe in which the human species' nature and active presence is situated. As you view the nature of man, so you view the universe; as you view the universe, so you view the nature of man.
The connection between the seemingly identical conceptual features of Pythagorean-Platonic Sphaerics and the modern physical science of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, et al., is an historical pathway of development, traversing millennia of the struggle to wrest mankind free from the bestiality of the oligarchical principle, as that is typified, in succession by the outstanding, benchmark cases of ancient Babylon, the Delphi cult, and the Roman, Byzantine, medieval, and modern expressions of imperialism. It is the interplay of struggle between man's humanistic conception of man's role in the universe and the conception of man expressed in the practice of cultures, that the bridges between the ancient standpoint of Sphaerics and the liberated physical science of Bernhard Riemann are to be found.
Look on the streets of the cities and towns of North America and Europe. Present the humanist conception of man which ennobles Solon's Athens, the struggle of Christianity against that "Whore of Babylon" which was Rome, against feudal bestiality, against the forces of religious warfare, against the rise of the new Venetian program expressed by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal form of modern imperialism. Look at the effect of the relevant general conditions on the mind of the child and adult in the street. Who is prepared to embrace, as policy, the conception of man and nature which I outline summarily here? Look at the struggle to defend even simple academic freedom against the virtually Satanic, actually fascist alliance of Mrs. "Dirty Dick" Cheney and radically right-wing banker and inveterate political spook John Train. Look at the historical process of struggle of the good against the seemingly overwhelming power commanded by the expressed popular and other ideologies of practice by the evil, the corrupt, or, the simply stupid.
Thus, as on virtually every university campus in the U.S.A. and Europe today, all science is really political science in its roots.
Dynamics As Such
If, as I have already indicated above, we must eradicate the mind-deadening shackles of Euclidean and Cartesian geometrical ideologies from man's view of himself and the universe, what shall fill the void we shall have created by eradicating the hallowed lies of Euclid and his like?
The typical modern answer is found in the working concept of the tensor, on condition that this is the concept of physical-space-time represented by Riemann's notion of physical hypergeometries, rather than some new ivory-tower concoction of the abstract-mathematics classroom. We should mean, essentially, as Riemann emphasizes, that we must fill the apparent void left by eradicating Euclid and his kind with nothing but what a uniquely appropriate quality of experimental method defines as a set of universal physical principles. These principles replace, conceptually, the abstract dimensions of a Euclidean or Cartesian concoction.
The relations among these "dimensions" of physical space-time are defined experimentally, as Riemann's treatment of the subject of a so-called "Riemann Surface" suggests.
To view what Riemann has explicitly accomplished in his written reports and some records of his lectures, it is indispensable to look back to the work of the Pythagoreans and Plato, as Gottfried Leibniz did, in bringing forward the Pythagorean conception of dynamis under the modern name of dynamic. The essential thing, of course, which Leibniz himself makes clear by aid of relevant points of illustration, is to eradicate from science everything which radiates the stink of Descartes, everything which radiates the stink of quackery associated with belief in the so-called statistical-mechanistic method.
Think like Kepler, with an eye to the roots of Kepler in the work of Cusa, and, in turn, the roots of that in the scientific world-view of the Pythagoreans and Plato.
Rome, the Embossed Image
It would be impossible to present a competent strategic assessment of the impulses behind the queer opinions and actions of the current U.S. Bush Administration without tracing the underlying idea controlling the masters of the mentally deranged, Nero-like figure of President George W. Bush, Jr. from the precedent of the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus dealing with the cult of Mithra on the Isle of Capri, and without dealing with the motivation of Augustus' successor, Tiberius, in the matter of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, as Nero did similarly with the Apostles Peter, Paul, and so on.
There is nothing actually sovereign about the Presidency of George W. Bush, Jr. He is like a gibbering puppet on a string, the Bozo of all contemporary, contemptible Bozos. The strings are the marionette masters who prompt the wiggles and jerks of that virtual Gollywog. He is a poor witless tool, albeit a conspicuously malevolent one, a wicked sort of mental and moral dwarf, and a source of infinite embarrassment to the future generations of the students at Yale.
He being what he is, and also what he is decidedly not, what is controlling the U.S. Presidency while that poor lunatic rattles about within the cage called his Oval Office? The answer, most briefly, is the embossed image of the Roman Empire's legacy.
We are all born into a kind of cultural complex, a complex which is a kind of legacy of history from ancient times up to the present. It is not a simple history, not a monotone; there are significant branches in the highway of history, such as the choice presented to the generation of returning U.S. veterans of World War II, whether to choose the route, leading from that junction, which had been chosen by President Franklin Roosevelt, or the darker way followed by the minions of Harry S Truman.
For example, President Eisenhower saved us from the horror which would have ensued had Truman not been dumped. President John F. Kennedy stuck his flag on the hilltop and said, "Franklin Roosevelt," but they killed him, and covered over the track of the murder, probably for that reason.
What has prevailed over the course of the time since President Johnson was buffaloed into capitulating to demand that he plunge the nation fully into the U.S. Indo-China War, is a long, bitter road downward to the present ruinous moment of crisis. We should ask: "What is the destiny to which we are being delivered? What is next? Who is misleading us into the quicksand of follies?"
"Who" is that fellow, called Octavian, negotiating for an empire with the priests of Mithra, on the Isle of Capri. Our society, all of globally extended European society today, is controlled by the embossed image of destiny left behind by the Roman Empire. It is a dynamic image, not exactly what it was in the days of such as Octavian, Tiberius, and Nero, but, rather, the British imperial model, a model called Anglo-Dutch Liberalism, whose proximate hereditary features are essentially those of the ultramontane system associated with the medieval alliance of Venice's financial oligarchical rulers and the bestiality of the Norman chivalry.
Who is the predator who imposes this evil scheme upon our will? Aha! We shall know as we know the predatory tiger, or, more likely, hyena. We shall know him by his spoor. He is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of financier-oligarchy, the hyena-like pack of creatures who intend to eradicate the authority of the sovereign nation-state, to establish a empire of financier hyenas, cast in the memory of the ultramontane sort of "globalization" called the "middle ages" which collapsed into Europe's New Dark Age. He is the enemy. It is his embossed ideology which has taken us over, as slaves might mimic the ideology of their slave-master.
When you look, thus, into the face of Felix Rohatyn or John Train, you are seeing the embossed ideology of evil which is the true enemy of the existence of our United States, and of a civilized order among the nations of the world. If you like the policies of Train and Rohatyn, look in the mirror and behold, there you meet your Doppelgänger, the image of your personal enemy. It is yourself.
If you wish to survive, it is you who must change, and that now quickly.
Thus, through the dynamics inherent in the evolution of cultures, the past delivers our present, and, when that has occurred, it is up to us, what we decide to do about the predicament which grips our destiny: to change the rules when the old, familiar ones would destroy us.
[1] Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006).
[2] This is the crucial issue between the real-life scientific method of the successful sleuth, the Cincinnati society member and counterintelligence professional Edgar Allan Poe, and the silly synthetic concoction called Sherlock Holmes. Poe, crippled by chronic epilepsy, was retired from West Point on that account, but served as a U.S. counterintelligence operative in company with noted veterans of that service such as James Fenimore Cooper, with whom he, for example, participated in a Paris assignment on behalf of a project by the Marquis de Lafayette. He was much maligned on account, especially after his death, by the publisher and hoaxster Griswold and others, for reason of his intelligence role, by the American Tories who were greatly offended by his capable patriotism.
[3] C.P. Snow, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 reprint).
[4] William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961).
[5] In a time following the ouster of Norman Anjou by the Sicilian Vespers, Venice gave the Habsburgs control there. The Habsburgs then pursued a policy of imperialism by use of the marriage-bed, in taking over the leading Trastamara family in Spain, a cousin-family to the Staufer of Frederick II. This use of the marriage-bed as an instrument of political rape of nations, was of crucial significance in the launching of the religious warfare of 1492-1648 throughout most of western and central Europe.
[6] Black magic specialist Isaac Newton, as so exposed by John Maynard Keynes' opening of the chest of Newton's papers, discovered less than nothing on this account.
[7] The effect of this development through the work of Riemann, was reflected in the turmoil about the subject of physical relativity which erupted toward the close of the Nineteenth Century, until the early Twentieth-Century savagery against Max Planck by the bestial adherents of the radically positivist Ernst Mach cult and their allies from the intellectual pigpens of Bertrand Russell's science hoaxes.
