This article appears in the November 23, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
FROM MILKEN & ENRON TO PERUGIA
`Extreme Events'!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
There is an epoch-making quality of common historic thread, which ties together recent events typical of New York's and London's financial center, with both the Jokela High School massacre, and the very ugly death of a young English woman, in Perugia, Italy. All three of these and comparable signs of these, our present times, mark these reported events as sharing the characteristic of the events which a judge in Perugia reported, as driven by an ostensibly uncontrollable yearning for an "extreme" quality of existentialist experience, by at least some among the surviving participants. These are experiences which, when combined, might be described as a kind of dionysian event expressing some particularly worrying characteristics of our presently onrushing, global "new dark age." All three of these, and many other, related kinds of extreme events, are, like Rupert Murdoch's MySpace and Microsoft's Facebook, or Microsoft's and others' killer computer games, all to be combined as signs typical of our wicked and deadly present times.
It would seem, therefore, that the awesome Erinyes of Ibykus's Corinth are descending upon our presently very wicked world![1]
The time has come, now, as the Walrus said, for me to point to the eerie experience which had crept over me years ago, while my wife and I had been seated on a grassy slope, looking down, across the Arno, into the streets of Florence. I had suddenly realized that I had been seated in approximately the same place where author Giovanni Boccaccio of the Decameron had described himself as seated, while he, according to his literary account, had been viewing scenes from what he presented as typical of the earlier times leading into the depths of medieval Florence's experience of Europe's Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age.[2]
Therefore, you may now inform U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson among others, that that is a lesson which he should have learned.
What we have as now presented to us for our study, here, is a cluster of three recent acts, a set of acts which, as I shall show, expresses products typical of a relevant form of mass-insanity, a set of contemporary acts congruent in effect with that New Dark Age within which the real-life subject of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was situated.
1. Foremost, is the mass-insanity expressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's flop, his tragically impotent reaction to fear, like that of a frightened rabbit, to what has been, in fact, the onrush of a general breakdown-crisis in the world's present monetary-financial system: a crisis which is already comparable in its implications to the period of the outbreak of medieval Europe's Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age.[3]
Paulson's case is not to be treated as if it were merely some expression of a personal bit of insanity; it is an expression of a form of mass group-insanity shared among most of his political class. It as an expression of his participation, like that of helpless chaff carried by the surf: he is swept along by a tide of fully tragic mass-insanity, as the specific expression, and product, of a dynamic form of social, mass phenomenon. We have thus, in fact, a case of a tide of mass-insanity among both an entire political class and its virtual lackeys in current social-political life, rather than a merely individual behavior which might be seen as similar to certain other individual cases.
2. Similarly, the second case to be included here, is a MySpace-, Facebook-related event, what has been described by relevant law-enforcement officials, as the setting of what the evidence presents as a case for charges of the murder, in Perugia, Italy, of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England.
It is not the guilt, or relative innocence of any among the participants in that grisly event which is at issue in our treatment of that case here; what is crucial for our purposes, is, as in many apparently similar cases, the circumstances in which the event is shown both to have occurred and have been reported. It is the prevalent potential (e.g., threat) of the dynamics expressed by the actual situation, which is crucial.
3. Similarly, the third case is that of yet another ominous killing, which occurred as shootings at Jokela High School, about forty miles north of Finland's capital, Helsinki. The shooting was reported as perpetrated by an addicted video-shoot-and-kill-games fanatic, an 18-year-old student at that school. In this case, as in a similar, worse case of an habituated computer-games fanatic in Blacksburg, Virginia, we have, yet again, and again, and again, the homicidal rampage of yet another individual addicted to the form of insanity associated with induced habituation to such computer games, ended with the willful suicide of the perpetrator.
The essential details of each of these, the latter two grisly cases, are being reported massively, with a relatively high degree of compelling verisimilitude, throughout much of the international press. The behavior of that press, itself, has become an integral part of the pattern of these reported events; however unwitting that press might be, it, itself, is a component, contributing element of the tragic situation overall, that as much for what it should do, but does not, as what it does.
Before returning to the case of the strange aberrations of Secretary Henry Paulson, continue, for now, to focus, briefly, upon the two cases of aberrant youth behavior itself.
The crucial common denominator of the evidence presented, is marked by its common ideology, the unifying factor of MySpace, Facebook, and mass-killer point-and-shoot games, as this is illustrated by the case of Facebook proprietor Microsoft. In any competent effort to understand the three exemplary cases identified above, we must always seek out a dynamics which subsumes each and all of the cases systemically, and that in a relevant, dynamic fashion.
To grasp the significance of the interrelations among these and kindred phenomena, we must consider three matters. First, the form of social organization which provides the situation in which these developments occur. Second, the method by which such specific kinds of relevant effects are induced. Thirdly, the effects which those factors produce when they are situated in present general social and physical-economic conditions.
To illustrate that point: in two cases, the common denominator of Rupert Murdoch's MySpace and Microsoft's Facebook, on the one hand, and killer computer games on the other, the connections are immediately obvious. In all three cases, the common feature is, first, the method of Sophist group behavior; this is behavior closely related, as if genetically, to the sociology defined by the dominant role in today's society of today's particular "Baby Boomer" ("white collar, middle-class") heritage. These are, second, cases of a radically existentialist behavior, behavior organized in defiance of the existence of a real world, as in that behavior organized insular defiance of the existence of a real world, as in William Golding's 1954 The Lord of the Flies.[4] Such cases themselves express a well-known characteristic of such forms of group mass-insanity as both are expressed separately, and by the same dynamic in their combination, as the three referenced events of this set include an exemplary third feature, the present case of the clear consequences of Paulson's deadly folly.
For example, there is no competent basis for denying that the kinds of killings recently experienced at Blacksburg, are the specific consequence of the promotion of killer computer games. However, not only are these games a massive source of post-Y-2000 revenue for such financially and politically powerful interests as the relevant Silicon Valley interests, but the development and promotion of the sale and use of these games is an expression and by-product of a vast financial empire of investment by military-industrial and related establishments, which are committed, as Vice-President Cheney is, to what is termed "a revolution in military affairs," associated not only with Vice-President Dick Cheney and such financier interests as those associated with George Shultz and Speaker Nancy Pelosi's close acquaintance Felix Rohatyn.
Therefore, since powerful special interests are behind the actions which cause the relevant effects, virtually nothing has been done, in net effect, to halt a rising incidence of slaughters such as that which occurred recently at Blacksburg, Virginia, and at Jokela High School most recently. The press is generally intimidated into lying by silence on the known facts of the matter, and our political establishment, as in the U.S. Congress, is fully as corrupted on this issue as our press, perhaps even more so.
This brings our attention back to the three propositions I identified above:
Now, consider Secretary Paulson's behavior itself from that standpoint. He is certainly not to be classed as an adult youth; but, he is involved in the same genre of insane game of interdependent mass effects. He appears in his role as performing, actually, a childish form of political game of monetary affairs,[5] often played today by adults who ought to have known better. Most important: it is a game played outside the proper rules of cause and effect in a real universe, a form of mass-insanity cohering nicely with Myron Scholes' emblematic 1998 role in the game of mass-insanity known as LTCM's forecasting: a mode of forecasting rooted in a radically reductionist form of monetarist dogma and practice which is, itself, not only a fantastic belief-system alien to the physical real world, but intrinsically existentialist in its sociological implications (Figure 1).
Then, consider the common characteristic of all three types of cases: each case, and all combined, represent a specific, common form of mass-insanity akin to that of the Flagellant hordes of the Fourteenth-Century European New Dark Age. Without understanding the axiomatic-like factor of mass-insanity steering these three successive phases of the process, the threat to civilization which this involves, would neither be recognized, nor solved.
Zombies From Cyberspace
Begin this next stage of the report with the subject of the role of Secretary Paulson. It is the same characteristics of the Anglo-American trans-Atlantic financial community whose habits Henry Paulson brings with him to the position of U.S. Treasury Secretary, which are key to all of the causal factors which are responsible for the current outbreak, since late July 2007, of the general financial bankruptcy of the U.S.A.'s and other financial systems. This is the influence which underlies both the methodological insanity of, especially, the ever-worsening post-1987 international financial system, and, the sociological characteristics, including gambling manias, of Cyberspace looney-bins such as MySpace, Facebook, and killer modes in computer games.
A world economy dominated by such a monetary-financial system is inherently, like the Weimar bubble of 1923 created by Versailles Treaty conditions, a self-doomed system. As long as the inhabitant of the system might be enabled to believe that he, or she, has a real interest in maintaining the continuity of the system, a certain uneasy social stability may be maintained, if only temporarily, even though the system, if continued, will come to an early point of doom. In fact, often, this impulse to resort to denials, as Paulson has done, to evade the truth of the matter, has led, like Paulson's expressed stubbornness now, to bringing on the very catastrophe which could have been averted had the truth been accepted.
For a time, the relatively older adult generation clung to the dwindling relative advantages of the upper twenty percentile of family-income brackets; but, the majority among the younger adolescent and adult generations, being locked within a system which proffers it no credible future prospects, has become increasingly estranged. Now, over the course of the recent approximately ten months, all generations tend to reflect one or another kind of the political and moral effects of the resulting mostly widespread demoralization, the adolescent and young-adult generations (the adolescent most emphatically) more intensely.
It is not accidental that the current trends among the generation presently under thirty-five years of age reflect its experience of the changes which have occurred since the Spring of 2000, which is to say: about the time the U.S. government-sponsored Y2K bubble collapsed, when Al Gore was running for President, and Dick Cheney's patsy, George W. Bush, Jr., was about to be sworn in as U.S. President. The collapse of the bubble impelled the computer and related investments into a new direction, into the acceleration of production and marketing of computer and related technology which had been defined for the shift to "a revolution in military affairs," into a boom market represented by adolescent and young-adult war-game players.
Today, seven years later, Finland's functionally YouTube-related cyberspace killer, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, is 16 years old, Facebook cultists Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox were 21 and 20, respectively, while Amanda's Italian boyfriend is 23. Veteran of the Nixon White House, Henry Paulson, who represents the same mathematical ideology for financial affairs as do relatively expert players of killer computer games, is U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
Under these conditions, the lack of perceived significant resistance to this worsening state of affairs in society, prompts strong impulses toward what is, more or less popularly, called "alienation." Thus, the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush was demoralizing; and the aggravation of the demoralization caused by the leadership of the U.S. Congress, from February 2006 onward, especially during 2007 to date, has engendered marked "pre-revolutionary conditions," especially among the adolescents and the young adults. The flight into the expressed rage of killer computer games, and the flight from life into cyberspace, produces, thus, the tendency for the convergence of the two. Call the result "Zombies in Cyberspace."
Add to this, a regard we should have shown for Secretary Paulson's indicated behavior as sharing certain features related—so to speak, "genetically"—to the not so well hidden, crucial characteristics of a Southwest Asian mass-suicide fanatic. We should also recognize that the types of adolescents and young adults drawn into the kinds of withdrawal from reality which the MySpace, Facebook, and killer-computer-game addicts alike, are exhibiting in common, their submission to pathological mental states akin to the actions of suicide-bombers from Southwest Asia.[6]
Psychologically, the denizen of Cyberspace, whether in MySpace or Facebook, or killer computer games, is being moved, bit by bit, toward a common residence in the contemporary equivalent of a Nazi Nuremberg rally, as the case of the kernel of neo-Nazi and Antifa warriors of today's Germany should have reminded us. That tendency toward something equal to a fascist mass-phenomenon, could be turned around, but not as long as the folly echoed in the present case of Henry Paulson is allowed to continue.
See all this as a matter of dynamics.
Human Dynamics
We must now shift the emphasis in our report, briefly, to crucially relevant matters of science.
Think of the difference between species of marsupials and mammals. Compare the range of varieties of species in a part of the Earth where, and when marsupials once prevailed, and where mammals have largely displaced marsupials. Think of an area dominated by marsupials in dynamic, rather than mechanistic terms. Think of the slots which each species of marsupial occupies as corresponding to a category of the successful job-applicants for the role performed by that species. See mammal species, other than mankind, in a comparable way.
In a certain way, mankind's existence changes the ordering principles among mammals as mankind changes its potential relative population-density willfully, as no other mammal can. Yet, the fact is, that man, despite his animal body, is not essentially a mammal; man changes his environment, and changes the nature of his behavior, as no regular mammal can do that. That difference, as Academician V.I. Vernadsky defined it for physical science, is those developable creative potentials of the human individual which do not exist in any lower form of life than mankind.
Vernadsky defined this difference scientifically, by placing mankind as a member of the phase-space known as the Noösphere, whereas mammals generally are members of the phase-space known as the Biosphere. The distinction lies in those specific creative powers in the human mind which do not exist in any lower form of life. Those changes in culture and related practice which are responsible for the rise, or decline of societies' potential relative population-density, act integrally, in terms of unifying dynamics of the social/physical-economic process, as species of marsupials or mammals interact, within each, and among each, dynamically, as species-types.
Man, as a part of the Noösphere, is defined by those sovereign powers of the individual human mind, which generate the factors of change as the work of "discoveries," or the like, of the individual human mind. These discoveries are not happenstances, but are limited to those types of discoveries which correspond to discovery of universal physical principle, such as Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of gravitation.
It is the fruit of these powers, never present in any animal, which has enabled the human species to reach a level of population of about six-and-a-half billions living persons.
The fluctuations in potential relative population-density are implicitly determined, primarily, by the degree to which the members of a society generate such uniquely human discoveries of principle, and also apply them. Thus, the maintenance of any given level of potential relative population-density of any nation, or any part of society, depends upon the determining, functionally subsuming role of those creative powers. These are not the power to discover mechanical gimmicks, for example, but are expressed only as discoveries of universal physical principle comparable to Kepler's unique discovery of gravitation and Leibniz's uniquely original discovery of the principle of the infinitesimal, which had been prescribed by Kepler as a product of Kepler's uniquely original discovery of not merely the effect, but the principle of gravitation.[7]
Since human activity necessarily seems to deplete what had been previously considered essential resources for maintaining a certain quality, life-expectancy, and level of human existence, it is only through progress in ideas corresponding to discoveries of universal physical principles, that mankind is enabled to sustain a presently given level of habitation (potential relative population-density) as it were indefinitely, or to improve mankind's potential relative population-density.
Not only is it essential that society maintain progress in respect to continuing discovery of fundamental physical principles, but to enjoy the benefit of existing such discoveries, we must employ them to mankind's advancement. Exemplary is the role of applied discoveries of universal physical principles, when applied to society's practice, in making possible an increase of the potential relative population-density of the human species. The ration of the total population engaged in such employment will then control the way in which societies' increase or decrease of potential relative population-density occurs. Whether this kind of improvement occurs, or whether it might be reversed, as through the influence of those malicious fellows called "Malthusians," not only determines the practical conditions for improvement of the human condition; but, a reversal of science-driven, relatively capital-intensive progress, has a destructive effect on the relative mental health of both the individual member of society, and the society as a whole.
The generation among us now between fourteen and thirty-five years of age, is experiencing the effects of a deep depression of the potential relative population-density of the U.S. population (per capita and per square kilometer) relative to the level represented on the day President John F. Kennedy was shot down. For example, at the time the U.S. manned landing on the Moon had occurred, the U.S.A. had already begun to lose some of the working science and technology which had been essential to that Moon-shot!
While some fat fools believe themselves made mightily richer by physical-economic trends of the recent forty-odd years, the actually sustainable potential population-density of the populations of both the U.S.A. and western and central Europe has collapsed, at a generally increasing rate of collapse, since about 1967-1968.
In the case of such calamities, as we should recognize this in the patterns of decline of the U.S. economy since the cultural paradigm-shift of 1968-1971, the change for the worse appears first as a lowering of potential relative population-density; the decline which is engendered by that lowering of potential will be reflected "statistically" later, over the course of subsequent decades, as is manifest in the situation of the U.S.A. and other nations today. Thus, as in the case of the U.S.A. today, the leading institutions and populations react too late to recognize the folly intrinsic to what they foolishly consider an immediate period's successful change in policy. This point is crucial for understanding the intrinsic incompetence of the generality of U.S. private and governmental forecasters over the recent forty years.
Thus, the physical potential relative population-density of the U.S. in terms of net U.S. margins of physical output, has been in an accelerating rate of collapse over the period since the calamitous inauguration of Richard M. Nixon, but the corresponding relative mental potential of the U.S. population has also collapsed disastrously. Worst of all, our present population is less capable of serious thinking, and by that standard much more poorly educated than that of the time President Kennedy was shot.
This kind of relatively temporary or long-term decadence of national cultures, is commonplace in retrospective views of relatively longer intervals in known history. The effect of such decadence, is invariably a corresponding increase of ugliness of the souls of the typical member of society, as Dante Alighieri emphasized this consideration in his Commedia, and Boccaccio in his Decameron.
The conditions of the combination of World War I and the rise of German fascism, and similar effects in other nations, were such a period of decline, from which the initiative of our President Franklin Roosevelt rescued mankind for a certain time. We are now, I repeat, in the fourth decade or longer of a steeply accelerating physical-economic and moral, intrinsic decline in trans-Atlantic culture.
This decline did not generate, as if mechanically, the terrible decadence reflected by the "extreme events" considered in this present report; but, it did foster the preconditions for such awful moral and intellectual demoralization and decadence.
Permanent Revolution, Permanent War
This connection should be quickly recognized in close study of the already extensive sample of evidence of withdrawal from social reality, into "virtual space," which is the trend, among other addictions, to habits like U.S. cases ranging from the "genetically" kindred MySpace, Facebook, into the homicidal maelstrom of computer games.
In my view of anomie, which differs in some crucial respects from that of Durkheim et al., the cause for anomie is expressed in the domain of more or less schizophrenic expressions of ontological nominalism, as schizophrenia has been recognized by relevant specialists as expressed by certain formalized uses of language. I refer to cases like the use of certain phrases as if they were, ontologically, "magic spells," or the like, in which the object of the term, or phrase does not correspond to the real-life role of man's interaction with the real world, but, rather a game which has no systemic correspondence to the life of the real world, but is presumed to operate through magical (e.g., schizophrenic) powers of symbol-mindedness.
Gambling manias are, presently, an extremely significant expression of mass insanity of this type. Indeed, the present financial systems of Europe and the Americas are, predominantly, not practiced as economies, but as lunatic "the magic of the marketplace" gambling systems which have become a dominant feature of the mass-insanity of the majority of our population at all income-levels. Wealth measured in terms of gambling successes, is the form of mass-insanity which has done the most to prompt our population to accept the lunatic changes in policies of national economic and related practice since the U.S. Nixon Administration's installation.
Extreme forms of reductionism ("symbolism" as a substitute for reality), are an example of such pathetic mental behavior. The characteristic "ideology" of MySpace and Facebook, or relevant "computer games," expresses that pathetic kind of relative schizophrenia: flight from an abhorred experience of reality, like an enraged Rumpelstiltskin, tearing himself apart (suicide!) out of rage against the futilities of those impossible dreams called infantile fairy tales.
However, statistical economics of so-called "information theory," like that of Bertrand Russell devotees Professor Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, or the methodology of the devotees of the mystic Ernst Mach generally, share the same formally mathematical pro-schizophrenic features.[8] Witness the introduction of the radically nominalist views of the types of Wiener and von Neumann to the subject of economic processes. That same type of pathology is specific to the causes for the presently crashing world monetary-financial system.
So, the typical big-time financial player in globalization, is undergoing what is "genetically" the same sociological effects of alienation, as anomie was described by France's Emile Durkheim and his followers. The treatment of the subject of children's games among the Franco-Swiss followers of Durkheim, is relevant for study on this account.
Unless we change our present ways, we are, in fact, on the verge of experiencing, as within the Americas and western and central Europe, the same problem of mass-suicide mixed with terrorist aggressions, used as a weapon of warfare, as a method of combat in civil strife, a method of "terrorism," including suicide, as at Blacksburg and Jokela, which we profess to abhor in Southwest Asia. That will be the case for us, here in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, too, unless we make, not mere palliatives as "reform," but relevant kinds of systemic changes in our general forms of social and related policy at home, now.
In that sense, the prevalent trend in taught and practiced shaping of national and international economic policies since the inauguration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, has placed increasing emphasis for today's policy-shaping, on the matter of the destruction of an economy which had been based on the American System's traditional emphasis on growth in net physical production per capita and per square kilometer; we require a dramatic shift, away from the presumptions, like those associated with the Nixon Administration's wrecking of our economy, that the symbolic value associated with nominal monetary and financial wealth is the scale for measurement of both moral and physical values.
What I have presented as what the three indicated examples of ruin typify, is not simply a spontaneous sort of social mass-phenomenon. It is a correlative of a more than a century-long, complex process of pathological change affecting trends in Anglo-American military policy in particular, a change whose effects were already clearly implicit, even decades ago, even earlier than the lunatic plunge of the U.S.A. into Indo-China, in the reaction of certain forces to the 1945-1946 emergence of the threatened, Anglo-American use of nuclear weapons as characteristics of warfare.
Thus far, the most notable recent result of that change, has been what has become known as a "revolution in military affairs," a form of moral degeneracy associated with such current advocates of this as George Shultz, Vice-President Cheney, and Middlebury College's Felix Rohatyn, a strategy which is also to be recognized as comparable, in some circumstantial features, to a very special approach to what traditional Soviet military-strategic practice named, and practiced, as "asymmetric warfare." It was also, most emphatically, the doctrine of several works of Samuel P. Huntington, including his The Soldier and the State and his Clash of Civilizations, a dogma which is also to be associated with the policies of practice facilitated under George Shultz's and Felix Rohatyn's backing for Chile's Pinochet, in the Nazi-like methods applied, during the Nixon Presidency's period, in the Southern Cone of the Americas.
It is a practice now running at full tilt under former Defense Secretary and current Vice-President Dick Cheney in Southwest Asia, where subjects of the Bush Administration's tyranny, as in the U.S. Congress, have consented to continue the game of global doom which a worse than silly, current policy of the Bush-Cheney Administration has been playing, since that administration used the pretext of the "9/11" incident for unleashing the wave of mass-insanity which has dominated the Administration and most of the U.S. Congress and press since that orchestrated 9/11 event.
Russell as a Grand Inquisitor
To understand the policies of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and of the Bush-Cheney Administration throughout the 2001-2007 interval, we must look back to the roots of that current mass-insanity in the crafting of these long-range policies in the British Empire's so-called geopolitical aims, back during the course of the Twentieth Century, especially to those around the British circles of H.G. Wells, Lucifer-worshipper (Lucis cult) Aleister Crowley, and Bertrand Russell.
It is the reflection of precisely that ideology which we are meeting today in the phenomena of MySpace, Facebook, and killer computer games. What you are seeing in the anomie of MySpace, Facebook, and killer computer games, is the anomie expressed in the existence of its fresh-hatched, if already smelly egg. The mature specimen will be a much more seriously evil proposition, if we allow it to mature as a force within society.
The same qualities of a mass-criminal mind now shared among Shultz, Rohatyn, et al. were also expressed, and that most significantly, earlier, as the vision of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things To Come. It was the same policy-paradigm as that of the Bertrand Russell who was crucial in shaping the policy behind the otherwise militarily absurd nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the Russell who was the overt proponent, as in September 1946, of the launching of "preventive nuclear warfare" against the Soviet Union. Russell, at least the most damnably influential among the literally Satanic figures of his century, was a notable, and probably the most evil such personage of the Twentieth Century; but, as Satan is a fool in the end, Russell, was, also, a kind of silly fellow, and science incompetent, over-confident that the Soviet Union could not develop a timely nuclear weapons competence of its own.[9]
What Wells, Crowley, and Russell expressed was the outgrowth of a policy of practice commonly expressed by the British Empire since 1763, as in the use of private armies of the British East India Company, and its successors, in India and in western and Central Asia. This has been the precedent for the operations run as their games, to the present day, as in Tony Blair-style extensions of the intentions and practices of the same Sykes-Picot Treaty, now being expressed anew, today, in the London-orchestrated and Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recently attempted favor to London, to employ its controlled assets among Kurds to blow up the entirety of the region now.
Russell's case is to be emphasized as being of crucial, clinical relevance in studying the unifying characteristics of the three cases of tragic folly referenced at the opening of this report: Paulson's folly in reaction to the already onrushing collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system, and the subjects of the Perugia killing and the Jokela High School shooting.
Paulson: Lunacy as Economy
Consider the young adults and adolescents who are being drawn into the un-world, "alternative, virtual space" of "Lord of the Flies" models such as MySpace, Facebook, and acquired mad-killer mental habits of point-and-shoot computer games. The victims of those induced delusions have fled from reality in hordes, like legendary lemmings; they are currently fleeing, further and further away from the real world, into the characteristically infantile strain of emotional, judgmental state of mind associated with emotional membership in a synthetic, non-existent world, like that of "Star Wars," "The Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter," and the like. What we witness in the victims of these cults, is a special kind of what is fairly labeled "mass-schizophrenia as a social phenomenon."
The dupes of this modern dionysianism are the mass of the rat-pack-like dionysian followers of Friedrich Nietzsche, and are Nietzsche's Nazi devotees in the slightly different cultural world of today.
The tendency produced by such mass-delusional habits of practice as those of the associates of such groups as both the neo-Nazi and Antifa cults of Germany today, is the kind of mind we might associate with a very clever, but thoroughly insane pack of fanatically aggressive rhesus monkeys, or the very dangerous creature, with matching sexual behavior akin to that reported from Perugia, represented by an even much cleverer adult male baboon or chimpanzee.
The expressed "cleverness" of such ape-like, or virtually schizophrenic human creatures, is that they may develop advanced technical skills in manipulation of symbols, but appear to have virtually lost the quality of cognitive insight into the actually dynamic arrangement of cause and effect in the real world.
We are thus confronted now with a certain special sort of product of this same type of group-sociopathology, in the instance of the role of symbol-minded pseudo-economists such as the Myron Scholes of LTCM notoriety. The outstanding fact of that matter, is that Scholes and like professionals appear to have learned much less than nothing from the experience of the catastrophe they orchestrated through the forecasting methods which they had employed in creating what became known as the 1998 LTCM case. In the more recent trends in the forecasting behavior of such types, since the experience of 1997-1998, they have gone much further in their "mathematical models," with the result that hedge-fund practices, and kindred pestilences, have converged on what are more "perfected" mathematical versions of the same lunacies which produced the 1998 crisis.
Now, extend this picture to include the membership of Secretary Paulson in a psychopathological delusion of a financial group formation riddled with the influence of the same underlying sociopathic characteristics. Today's nominal assets, representing claims which had become more ferocious in their expression than that of the baboon defending his baobab nuts, is demanding full payment for income which was never actually earned in any real-universe sense of assets, and demanding that each other be paid in full, or as nearly so as might be imagined.
Such a mentally deranged person had merely calculated that he had earned a profit, when there had been no net increase in other than purely symbolic, relatively content-free forms of presumed gains in amounts of what are, under relevant U.S. constitutional law, counterfeited financial utterings. These delusory "earnings" might be expressed as of the type of "My accountant will warn you, that you can show the sum indicated by my check to you on your balance-sheet, on condition that you never attempt to actually cash that check."
Then, the day arrived, when the speculators in fraudulent utterances presented their fraudulent checks for payment: Ka-Boom!
Now, the entire world system has entered, recently, into a chain-reaction collapse of the world's financial-monetary system, through what has become, since the pre-October 1987 days of Michael Milken, a mutation of the same infectious practice of fraud, which is expressed in the form of a frenzied orgy of ferociously competing attempts to cash fraudulently uttered equivalents of checks. The equivalent zoo's adult-male rhesus-type financial monkeys have gone absolutely mad.
We live in a world in which we sense that "Almost everyone among our wealthiest is doing it."
The systemic effect of such types of habituation, is a diseased moral and formal-intellectual state of mind which echoes the criminalized state of mind which impelled Pericles' Athens into its Peloponnesian War. Athens never regained, to the present day, what it had lost through that folly, then. We, fortunately, have inherited the advantage of the greatness which the tradition of Solon of Athens expressed as the heritage of the Pythagoreans and Plato's other circles.
It must be an advantage we are resolved to use.
[1] Friedrich Schiller, "The Cranes of Ibykus," Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom (New Benjamin Franklin House: New York, 1985).
[2] This work of Boccaccio's is to be read as echoing significant familiarity with Dante Alighieri's Commedia, that as an expression of what I have identified as The Force of Tragedy ("The Mask of Nancy Pelosi: The Force of Tragedy," EIR, Vol. 34, No. 44, Nov. 9, 2007). It would have been read so by the contemporary Florence readers of Boccaccio's account.
[3] Was this Secretary Paulson's virtual "appointment in Samara," a fateful echo of what he had fled from, back in the days of the Nixon Administration's "Watergate" crew?
[4] "BBB": "British Baby Boomer" sociological type. Although the "Baby Boomer" syndrome was a form of Dionysiac existentialism introduced to the U.S.A., it was introduced by European channels centered in the figure of Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, the leader of post-World War I British psychological warfare operations, using channels centered upon the London Tavistock Clinic.
[5] E.g., the board game called "Monopoly."
[6] See Peter Popham, "Murder in Perugia: Dangerous Games of the Facebook Generation," The Independent (London, U.K.), Nov. 11, 2007.
[7] This role of uniquely human creativity, as typified by Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of Solar gravitation, is a quality of action in the universe which is unknown to reductionists such as the ancient and modern followers of Euclid, or the modern empiricist. The philosophical reductionist resorts to the description of the effect of a principle, as in the form of mathematical formulas, rather than cognition of the relevant act of discovery itself.
[8] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley, 1948), and The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954); or John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), with Oskar Morgenstern, The Theory of Games & Economic Behavior, 3rd edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). Both Wiener and von Neumann were devotees of Bertrand Russell, especially Russell's Principia Mathematica, Alfred N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, reprint of 1927 edition), and both were expelled, at different times, from Göttingen University by David Hilbert on well-founded charges of persistent incompetence, and, in the case of von Neumann, on the nastier charge, of plagiarism, as well.
[9] The key to the Soviet development of a nuclear arsenal much earlier than the Anglo-American co-thinkers of Russell had hoped feasible, was a Soviet scientific capability typified by one of the greatest scientific polymaths of the Twentieth Century, Academician V.I. Vernadsky. However, as Russell himself put it, he never regretted his campaign for "preventive nuclear" assaults on the Soviet Union, to, as Russell stated: pummel it into submission to world government, or, in other words "world government," or "globalization" today.
