FROM SHAKESPEARE'S PRINCIPLE OF TRAGEDY:
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
July 3, 2008
The British Daily Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reacted suddenly, on July 2nd, against my proposal for certain actions, including a rise of U.S. Fed prime rates to 4%, a rate at a level marginally under the then current European rate. This was a proposal which I had already uttered for the advance information delivered to select circles on Saturday June 28th, but which I released for general publication on Tuesday morning distribution on July 2nd. Curiously, on that same latter date,[1] Evans-Pritchard opened with his incredible assertion, that he was reacting against what was already the currently standard practice of the European Central Bank's Jean-Claude Trichet. There was nothing credibly news-making in the fact of Trichet's evolving, already ongoing policy at that time. So, one might ask: to whose proposed 4% rate was Evans-Pritchard actually reacting so suddenly, and so violently?
Admittedly, my proposal was, and remains a direct threat against both the foolish U.S. policy which had been fostered by the effects of both Trichet's ECB, and that currently continuing British policy of wrecking the U.S. economy. This was an ECB and London policy of giving both Britain and the ECB a "free hand" in driving the value of the U.S. dollar ever-deeper into the cellar, that with the help of the floating-exchange-rate petroleum oligopoly of BAE et al. Reading the full text of Evans-Pritchard's howl of July 2nd, against the backdrop of my just-uttered, proposed defense of the U.S. dollar against both the ECB and British policies, leaves no room for doubt about the issue which has suddenly shaken nervous Evans-Pritchard so mightily.
Those professionals who recognize the implications of my proposal for relevant European interests will have no difficulty in recognizing from what I report here, the relevant implications for anyone in Evans-Pritchard's position.
For purposes of comparison: What, for example, would be the effect of an announced ruble-based energy market on the present virtual Anglo-Dutch Liberal monopoly?
Contrary to the referenced, recent silliness of the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, if relevant U.S. authorities adopt my proposed stop-gap measures, which I identify, again here, the worst features of the present collapse of the U.S. economy could be brought, subsequently, under much-needed, if only temporary control, thus providing breathing-space for necessary, more durable corrections shortly down the way.
This temporary stabilization, done to block the presently hyper-inflationary practice of the U.S. Federal Government, the U.S. Congress, and the Federal Reserve System, would tend to force funding of investments to be shifted back to regular chartered banks operating with assistance from the Federal Government, while tending to promote the flow of funds into solid investments which will tend to strengthen presently shaky regular Federal and State banking systems. It will not be a cure, in and of itself, but it will supply some of what is presently, some desperately needed maneuvering-room.
The immediately crucial issue prompting my indicated proposal, had been to bury the ruinous policies of former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, while the U.S. still commanded the price of the shovel needed to bury them.
To identify the immediate issue posed by Mr. Evans-Pritchard's folly in this case, it is essential that I begin by identifying the actual issue of the policy against what I have referenced as his relevant, July 2nd Telegraph blog. For clarity's sake, I quote the relevant Tuesday morning release of mine, in full, as follows:
"LaRouche Proposes Emergency Stop-Gap Measures To Prevent Total Financial Chaos
"June 28 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche today proposed emergency action by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, to prevent social chaos, in the face of looming collapses of some leading U.S. commercial banks and other financial institutions.
"LaRouche presented two emergency measures, aimed as stop-gaps, to prevent chaos.
"First, he called for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to four percent, in order to assure that institutional depositors maintain their deposits in the banking system. Right now, the average two percent interest rates are significantly below even the official inflation rates, thus creating the dangerous proposition of a pullout of deposits, at a time when a number of leading American commercial banks are facing collapse.
"Second, LaRouche called on the Federal Reserve to make it clear that whenever any commercial banks face insolvency, they will be put through bankruptcy reorganization under Fed protection. This is a fundamental shift from the bailout of Bear Stearns. LaRouche emphasized that the amount of leveraged debt in the banking system can never be bailed out, and that the only way to avoid social chaos, caused by the total collapse of the U.S. banking system, is for the Federal Reserve to oversee an orderly bankruptcy restructuring of any insolvent commercial banks.
"LaRouche emphasized that, in themselves, these actions will not solve the problem of the bankruptcy of the entire post-Bretton Woods financial system. Those who argue that such interest rate hikes will trigger a recession, fail to comprehend that we are facing an imminent collapse of the total global financial system. These stop-gap measures are just that: stop-gaps to avert the social chaos that would follow immediately from the insolvency collapse of major American banks.
"LaRouche further emphasized that the Federal government must immediately enact legislation, to massively increase credit for vital infrastructure projects. He cited the ongoing crisis in the Midwest, with the flooding of the Mississippi River basin, as the most immediate example of the kinds of priority infrastructure projects that must be funded, through capital budgeting."
By British standards, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is to be considered a clever lad, but when he begins his Telegraph blog of July 2nd with what we are witnessing as the sort of strategic errors that turned the recession of 1930 into a global catastrophe, he is, if inadvertently, announcing his stubborn determination to cling to the presently self-ordained doom of the British Empire for which he apparently intends to speak.
It must be noted, that in that piece, Evans-Pritchard speaks in print with a certain trembling in his literary voice. He is shrewd enough, and also experienced enough, to know that the U.S.A., once aroused from a long political slumber of decades, is a terrible force which the British empire has had to learn to respect with fear, again and again, as, possibly, now, as it had such occasion under the U.S. leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt. Notable pro-fascist financier-ideologues operating from inside the U.S.A., such as Felix Rohatyn and his cronies, have already recognized, and declared their sense of such a serious potential threat to their special interests which they have seen in my present role.
As Jeffrey Steinberg reported today: "Two developments dominated the strategic front on Wednesday, as we move into the Fourth of July celebration of our nation's independence. First, like clockwork, just 24 hours after Lyndon LaRouche publicly issued his statement, calling on the Federal Reserve to boost interest rates to 4%, in order to avert a total collapse of the dollar, and the bankruptcy of a number of major U.S. commercial banks and investment banks, the London Daily Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard published his hysterical diatribe—demanding that Ben Bernanke cut U.S. interest rates to one percent! Ostensibly attacking European Central Bank head Trichet, for raising European interest rates to 4.25%, the article actually had nothing to do with Trichet or the ECB. Evans-Pritchard, and his masters, are totally aware of the systemic crash under way, and they are totally flipped out over the fact that LaRouche has been spelling out critical stop-gap, and overall recovery measures that are based on a revival of the system of sovereign credit and sovereign nation-states."
During recent decades, no other U.S. individual figure has evoked such a specific kind of fear and trembling which my actions have bestirred among certain leading British circles and their U.S. puppets, on this account, as I have done. The word is, as spoken by Felix Rohatyn, especially since Spring 2005, that I am seen by them, as almost the aroused specter of President Franklin Roosevelt. I detect some of the same trembling in the voice-print of an Evans-Pritchard with whom I have earlier crossed words, but not swords, in the U.S.A. itself.
Their present fear of me is, that despite their efforts, over decades, to prevent this, under presently developing economic-crisis conditions, my policies could arouse the U.S. population again, and, if that were to occur, that effort of mine might succeed, again, as similar resurgence of our American tradition has on notable past occasions. Such has been the direction of my commitment for decades, since prior to my 1946 return to the U.S.A. from overseas military assignment, when I would to seek to return my republic to the standpoint of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The true force of history lies not in the armed fist, nor in numbers rallied to the cause, but in the commitment by individuals. It lies in the power of ideas whose time has come, now, as in the past.
Usually, those who think the contrary, know essentially nothing about human history. Thus, in these troubled times, those who can not pray, must bray, as Evans-Pritchard has done.
Then, as Now
What had, in fact, crashed in 1929-1933, was the international system which had been steered, largely, by the same Bank of England's (and Brown Brothers Harriman's) Montagu Norman. This was the Norman who had played a leading hand, together with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), in orchestrating both the simultaneous collapse of the British gold standard and the establishment of the BIS, and, subsequently putting Adolf Hitler personally into power. That had been the central feature of the process which had led into the January 1933 installation of Adolf Hitler as appointed Chancellor of Germany, and dictator in the next month, a process aided by the same Anglo-American hands which had deployed Bank of England protégé Hjalmar Schacht for this Anglo-American Hitler project.
The underlying cause of all of this, during the course of the 1920s and beyond, was that Versailles Treaty arrangement which has been more recently echoed by the actions of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Francois Mitterrand, in their imposing, under virtual threat of war against Germany, their now infamous and systemically ruinous Maastricht conditions which the British system imposed upon all of post-Soviet-era, continental Europe. There is no large part of the former Comecon territory of Eastern Europe which is not much poorer, per-capita and per square kilometer of territory, than it was in late 1989 or early 1990. Similarly, there is no part of what had been pre-1989 western continental Europe west of former Comecon borders which is not presently in an already ruinous, and rapidly disintegrating, physical-economic state, relative to that of earlier time.
For that, blame Margaret Thatcher and those who followed her.
Like two separate, ugly car crashes driven by drunken drivers, no two events of the same general class are ever exactly the same; but, they are, nonetheless, to be fairly compared as of the same type, as we might, fairly, compare the past 1929-1933 depression, and the presently ongoing great world-wide financial breakdown-crisis of the existing world monetary system.
My essential point, the point which must be emphasized if the reader is to make any sense of the global calamity now descending upon our entire planet, is that the present world crisis is to be regarded as nothing other than as, chiefly, the very present "Götterdämmerung" of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which had been first launched by Venice's Paolo Sarpi during the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries.
Sarpi's system was, inherently, a morally decadent system of what is called Liberalism, which was later bestowed upon the London of William of Orange, and of the British East India Company, as the British Foreign Office launched in 1782 by the fiendish Lord Shelburne and Shelburne's "sorcerer's apprentice," Jeremy Bentham. The British Empire as it has existed in fact since the 1763 Peace of Paris, has now arrived at its own tragic "Twilight Zone."[2]
The Tragic Physical Implications
Call the crisis which Evans-Pritchard views with so much literary trembling, the tragedy fit to be named "Shakespeare's revenge." This crisis is the long overdue doom of the globally stinking Anglo-Dutch Liberal legacy of such pawns of Paolo Sarpi as Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and slave-trading (in captured Africans) John Locke. What is descending upon the world at this moment, is the collapse of that British imperial system which had resumed the top position in world power, step by step, in the 1970s aftermath of the succession of events traced from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the advent of those outgrowths of the riotous events of 1968 whose effects unfolded during the interval of the three U.S. Presidents who did the most to ruin their republic during the interval 1969-1981.[3]
In fact, since the U.S. Federal budgetary shock of 1967-68, the net physical output of the U.S.A. has declined, in actual fact, per capita, and per square kilometer of its territory, during the entire interval, 1967-2008, to the present day. Since the adoption of the Maastricht rape of continental Europe under Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a similar rape of the physical economy of all continental Europe, has prevailed there.
Therefore, while we must not overlook financial and monetary considerations as such, it is the physical effect, not the nominal, so-called monetary value, which must be studied to determine the actual future toward which current national and international economic policies are leading, or misleading nations.
It is to be noted, that the relatively greatest decline in net physical output of the U.S. economy (per capita and per square kilometer) since 1968-1971, was initially concentrated in a net collapse of essential basic infrastructure, continuing the downward trend in railway capital and operations since the 1950s. Since major capital improvements of production and basic economic infrastructure have a useful half-life in the order of ten or more years, a current net collapse of physical capital which began during the late 1960s would not be felt with full force until later, after a lapse of a decade to a generation later, that during the 1970s or even the 1980s. In the meantime, much of what is accounted for as current profits of enterprises in such cases, is not actually earned income, but rather like eating one's own foot, or leg, as a source of nourishment.
Similarly, the "out-sourcing" of production from North America and western Europe, under a program of globalization, fails to meet the standard of a net transfer of productive output from the already developed agro-industrial regions of the world, into the new markets of nations with significantly lower typical physical output and income per capita and per square kilometer.
So, the Telegraph speaks a wee bit truthfully when its Evans-Pritchard poses the headlined question as the title of Evans-Pritchard's July 2nd piece: "Will Trichet drive the world over a cliff?" There is no reasonable doubt that Trichet's policies, if permitted to continue, would do exactly that; but, it must be said, it is the current policy of the British Empire which, by means of Mrs. Thatcher's Maastricht, virtually created that inevitable Trichet in his present role as a lackey in present service of her past policy. The implicitly horrible effects of Trichet's systemic disregard for the evil consequences of his policies of practice, should be obvious, despite his denying any interest in discussing this now crucially important subject-matter.
In competent economics practice, it is the physical values as such, not monetary values, which are to be counted as the ultimate values in an economy. A money-system is functioning competently when its predetermined effect is the assured increase of the productive powers of labor of a nation, or nations, as measured per capita and per square kilometer of the economy's total territory. Since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the net physical output, per capita and per square kilometer, of the economies of North America and western and central Europe has moved in downward direction during most of those decades, since 1968-1981, during the same time that the general estimate was what was foolishly esteemed as a profitable increase in money-values.
Thus, a great, global tragedy has been in the making until now. Every time it is reported that the economy is on an upward track, it has actually been declining in real terms, and that now catastrophically. What, therefore, should we mean by such a tragedy?
1. The Thesis: The Tragedy
In Classical tragedy, there were so-called gods, like the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, who played with mortal men and women as an evil child plays cruelly with dolls. In Classical Greek, such a system came to be known as the oligarchical model, a model typified by the Babylon of legendary Belshazzar, and by the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian-Anjou, Venetian-Habsburg, and neo-Venetian, British (Anglo-Dutch Liberal) empires, such as the British empire which has dominated most of the world, through its mechanism of usury, most of the time, from February 1763 to the present day.
The essential characteristic of all such empires, is that it is only he, or she who performs a function equivalent to that of "the Emperor" and the Imperial Pantheon, not mere kings, who dictates the reigning code of imperial law, as Roman law typified this, and as the code of Liberalism (e.g., the Anglo-Dutch Liberalism derived from the neo-Venetian design of Paolo Sarpi) typifies the dominant current in actually imperial international law, especially since 1971-1973, today.
Again, Aeschylus' presentation of the Olympian Zeus, as in the Prometheus Bound of his Prometheus Trilogy, and as Friedrich Schiller presents the Wallenstein trilogy, is an appropriate subject of comparative reference for grasping the essential characteristic of the global tragedy of the British Empire today. It is also the best standpoint from which to understand the more ominous implications of the present existential, global crisis of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperial system.
What confronts that currently dominant Liberal system of imperialism, can only be understood adequately historically, that from the standpoint of a rarely understood, underlying principle of Classical tragedy, as such is typified by the work of Classical Greek, Shakespeare's, Gotthold Lessing's, and Friedrich Schiller's drama. Contrary to Romantic chatter, tragedy is not located within a particular individual character, but with the enveloping principle of failure of the culture (the society) within which the characters are often situated as merely virtual appendages.
For that reason, any truly Classical tragedy is situated in an historically specific setting, such that the tragedy can not be defined except within the terms of its specific place in history. The tragedy is always the tragic failure of a culture (such as a nation), either on stage, or in the processes of the current society, in which, in either case, the individual's inability to break free of the grip of that culture defines his mission in life to be a failure.
So, the British empire, having recovered its power through the combination of such included means as its orchestration of two "world wars" and subversion of the United States over the course of the post-World War II period to date, has now reached a relative pinnacle of its regained imperial power in and over the affairs of the world at large. It is that empire, as a social process, which is the tragic personality (so to speak) represented by such typical individuals as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
The proposition thus posed, runs as follows.
The tragedy, on stage or in real power to govern, inheres, not in any individual character, but in the specific culture to which the particular drama, on stage, or in an afflicted government, is devoted. The failure is located in the inability of virtually any of the relevant characters, such as the principal one, to break free of the range of mental habits which he, or she has acquired as a member of that self-doomed culture. It is this quality of effect, when it occurs, which expresses the lurking tragedy inherent in that drama's society as a whole. The particular achievement of the author is to make that tragic end clearly seen by the audience as inherent in that society, that of the drama on stage, or that of the society outside the theater.
Classical Tragedy
Friedrich Schiller provides a special qualification, that of introducing two "children of the house" who are outside the mainstream of the Wallenstein trilogy, or as in the case of Shakespeare's use of "Horatio" in Hamlet. The contrast so introduced, as by "Horatio's" part, shows that folly inheres in the system as a whole, not the so-called tragic figure of the drama.
Thus, the tragic individual character expresses a typification of the characteristic folly of that society as a whole. It is that folly which compels the tragic individual figure to act in a manner consistent with the society which his behavior expresses. So, the off-stage presence of "Cicero" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is introduced by "Cassius," as an element of real-life, real-historical irony: to sense something in the light of what it is not.
In all of the relevant cases, the playwright has crafted a truly dynamic image of a fatal, self-inflicted doom of that society, especially of its panoply of leading figures. The great playwright crafts the drama in such a fashion, that a well-directed, well-acted performance conveys what must be described as a sense of a dynamic principle which envelopes the interaction of the wills of the participating essential characters, a sense of a society which is inflicted, from the top down, with a catastrophic outcome lurking among the reigning social forces of the case.
It is like a bad marriage, in which both combine efforts to achieve a worse outcome than could be generated as the sum-total of the action by the same persons as separated individuals. Such is the case where neither is as much at fault as their being together has become the fault.
Indeed, all the world's a stage!
Those relevant characters of the drama interact in ways which foretell their resulting mutual doom. We have, thus, the spectacle of a governing force of a nation, whose actions are committed to effecting their own mutual doom. This set of dynamics is the essential tragedy. Wallenstein himself is not, despite the commonplace, Romantic misrenderings of his part, the tragic figure of the drama; his problem is that he lacks insight into the method for dealing with the trap which grips the drama (and its expression as the real history of the matter) as a whole. In Wallenstein's camp, the smell of doom piles up, extended to the point that nothing seems capable of preventing that common ruin on which all the various actions converge to a single effect.
Let us name that sense of a single tragic effect as "the force of tragedy," the force which grips the seemingly almost all-powerful, imminently triumphant British world empire of today. Like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, each doomed figure of that system is gripped, obsessively, by a compulsion to actions which contribute to ensuring the lurking doom—"the force of tragedy"—shared, diversely, but to a common end, among them all. The part which Evans-Pritchard has chosen, is implicitly that of a self-doomed, pompous fool, contributing to the self-inflicted torment of his entire tribe; but, nevertheless, it is the part he has chosen to play for himself, all the way to the end. Such is the force, or farce, of tragedy.
The Force of This Tragedy
The specifically Dionysian quality of this British imperial tragedy, springs from the most essential characteristics of the Delphic system which encompasses the intrinsically Romantic character of both Delphi's Apollo and Dionysus. Just as the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound bestializes ordinary men and women by forbidding access to the principle of human creativity, the Delphic Romantic may sometimes seek the pleasures of experiencing Classical artistic composition, without expressing that principle of creativity, called irony, which sets Classical human creativity apart from Romantic folly.
Tragedy is not inevitable in and of itself. What makes today's potential tragedy as an actual one, is precisely that rejection of Classical modes in art and science, a rejection which characterizes the typical modern Liberal, especially those of a certain stratum within the "white collar" generation born to trans-Atlantic society during the 1945-1968 interval.
Such are the types of Liberals who, as for example, existentialist creations of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, campaigned as enraged, Dionysiac rabble in the streets during 1968 and beyond. They hate what symbolizes, for them, "blue collar," "nuclear power," modern scientific agriculture, Classical artistic composition, and what they hate as "the shackles of reason." They are the people of "The Cities of the Plain," of "The Tower of Babel," and the carnage of perpetual warfare.
Such unfortunates are those who are characterized by a commitment made, like an oath under the eyes of their companions, to cling to those fetishes of neo-malthusian and other typically existentialist beliefs which have characterized a certain "Baby Boomer" type since the riotous events of 1968 and beyond. This pact to which they share implicit allegiance, grips them, and binds them together, with the force of tragedy. They just can not walk away from it, even if it would doom them.
For them, the script of their tragedy is already written, the lines and actions on stage rehearsed, each committed to playing his own part. They are doomed; they are thus doomed by the force of tragedy.
The essential root of the oncoming, self-inflicted doom of the British Empire lies in its being that British Empire. The Empire has triumphed over sundry nations and peoples through turning the U.S.A. into its financial lackey, and dealt similarly with those nations of continental Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. This has reached the point that the British empire appears to have triumphed in the end of centuries past. Yet, the force which now threatens it the most, is none other than itself.
By the very design of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, it is presently doomed in any case; the practical question is, "How many others will it take down with it?" Were it sane, it would realize that the game has ended thus, and it were time to cease playing that imperial game. Yet, they can not. The habit is too old; and the old rules of the predatory game are too cosy to give up. It will continue, against all reason, to play the game. It is, thus, gripped, probably terminally, by those dynamics of the force of tragedy which would doom it.
2. To Be Immortal
The irony which underlies much of the tragedy of the world's history, is that so-called religious believers profess faith in immortality of the individual human soul, but many of these simply do not know what they are talking about. It is not the soul which abandons the body, but the body which abandons the soul. That very thought, they would find too frightening to consider. In serious political science, this is a cardinal point of distinction.
The creative faculty, as expressed by the discovery of efficient universal physical principles, or by kindred discoveries in the domain of Classical artistic composition, is the only known case in which a member of a living species has an efficient form of willful role in changing the future which he or she, in death, may contribute to change the future of mankind, or bring to life the completion of the uncompleted work of someone who has passed on before the present time.
This carries over into the practice and teaching of physical science, in which the progressive evolution of the universe proceeds, in European civilization, from roots in ancient astronomical navigation, and related ancient calendars, through the Sphaerics of the Egyptians and the Pythagoreans, through Plato, Eratosthenes, Archimedes, and modern Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, Abraham Kästner, the Monge-Carnot Ecole Polytechnique, Carl F. Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann, into such leading figures of the last century as Max Planck and Albert Einstein. True science is grounded in the reliving of each step in such a sequence, each time discovering an added universal physical principle. The effect of that approach, as opposed to the more careless and decadent methods popularized today, is that the participant in such a program relives the history of European science from its beginnings in astronomy as a tool of transoceanic navigation. The student does not learn "tricks." The student relives the history of science in himself or herself; the student relives the experience of the original discovery, as by either the original discoverer, to the same effect.
It is the true nature of man to acquire knowledge in that dynamic mode.
To restate that point, the question is: Where do you locate your personal interest in living? Once you have held yourself accountable for a part in the outcome of the life's work of those departed persons before you, and also the future you shall not see directly, your personal sense of self-interest as a human being is defined in a new way. What past generations have a right to expect from us, and what future generations have a right to expect from us now, become an enlarged sense of one's personal self-interest. Since we are human, it is not sufficient that we afford the likeness of animal comforts to past and future members of our species. We have a vital interest in the role of those powers of creativity which are typified, in their expression, by the discovery of universal physical principles, as Johannes Kepler did (for example), and in the realization of the incompletely realized work of similar qualities of discovery of those who have preceded us.
Most essential is that conception of beauty which subsumes both such cases: to do something good because it is beautiful in the sense that creative insight is the inherently true nature of what should be perceived as beauty.
The nature of the relevant quality of beauty associated with individual human creativity as such, is still largely obscured from us, but not entirely. We know it as something efficient existing beyond the capabilities of any other known living species. We see the effects of that same quality of creativity in the accumulation of a mass of products of human creative activity which is growing in its amount relative to both the inorganic mass of our planet, and of the mass of other living creatures and their products.
Those creative powers of the individual human mind are the source of that increase which we should associate with the idea of some function associated with the human brain, but we find no trace of such a function in the mental-perceptual apparatus and associated processes of animal life. It is a quality of something in the universe to which some function of the mind of the living human individual is attuned, but we have no biological trace of this specific function in the design of the brain. Let it suffice for the moment that the human mind is tuned to the creative processes of the universe, whereas individuals of other species are not. After that, we still have so very much to discover.
For as long as we fail to take these higher matters of individual human creativity into account, our sense of self-interest remains faulty, crippled. What lies beyond such limits we wrongly impose upon ourselves, remains a world which is alien to our sense of self-interest as merely biological individuals. Then, just because our motivations, as individuals, are crippled in that way, we have great difficulty even in acting for humanity, other than by simple self-interest as individuals, and have little more than a weak and uncertain grasp of the notion of our accountability for the immortal and universal.
However, when our human creative powers, such as those employed for a validated discovery of physical principle, are applied to the interest of humanity, as to our nation and its past and future generations, the creative power is greatly increased in its effective power for improving the general human condition. To achieve that state of development becomes, then, a higher sense of self-interested motivation. We have, then, a sense of what Raphael Sanzio's The School of Athens portrays as "The Simultaneity of Eternity."
With respect to politics, and political-economy today, it is the moral mediocrity which is tolerated as a sufficient commitment, which allows people to attach themselves emotionally to petty wishes and fears in such a fashion that they group together, as if to gather in little better than a kind of variant of animal warmth. This tends to promote those relatively degraded social attachments which bind a victim, not only one such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, to the cause of a kind of social process which is not only doomed, but alien to the very idea of humanity in the effects such a bonding promotes. Here, in this state of affairs we find those qualities of affinity expressed as what I have termed here as "the force of tragedy."
That much said, may you have had a happy Fourth of July weekend!
[1] The release was actually composed on the preceding Saturday, but was held back from general publication until the following Tuesday morning, July 2nd, to provide relevant advance warning to relevant policy-shaping U.S. circles. It was uttered on Tuesday morning with the prudent use of the exact same language which had been used in its original composition on the preceding Saturday.
[2] It was the effort to crush the economies of the English colonies in North America, which came as an integral, immediate aftermath of that 1763 Treaty of Paris, which divided the future United States from the British Empire, and led, thus, into the sundry succession of steps leading into the war of 1776-1783 and the subsequent adoption of the U.S. Federal Constitution. With those developments of 1763-1787, the English-speaking world was divided into culturally warring camps, of republic versus empire, a state of affairs between two warring camps which, in fact, taking into account the actual and virtual traitors among us, persists to the present moment.
[3] In fact, I had a hand, fortuitously, in prompting the lunatics associated with Mark Rudd et al. to abandon their proposed, Dionysian celebration of triumph over the 1968 death by political assassination of then leading U.S. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. This case was a part of the evidence which warned me that the current within SDS associated with figures such as Rudd was truly fascist (of synarchist-like leanings) in the strictest sense of the term. I did not read this then as the Rudd and similar types wish to do harm to the Senator, but as their exultation over the calamities of the system they wished to see destroyed. The fascist character of the anti-nuclear-power campaigns in Germany of the 1980s, and similar neo-Malthusian outrages among some leading U.S. Democrats associated with former Vice-President Al Gore, exhibit the same clinically Dionysian traits of such "68er" relics, still today.
