TORY IDEOLOGUE SPEAKS!:
What's Left For Evans-Pritchard?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
November 3, 2008
Despite the disgusting figure he cut in Washington, D.C. during the late 1990s, the "Torygraph's" Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had come to appear to be a well-informed observer of current financial-crisis-events, until lately, when the financial crisis turned really serious, and he appeared to be stunned and confused by that effect. Since then, apart from my very brief, probing, passing glances in his direction, his comment on economic developments had not been worth reading by serious people, nor comment on his apparently changed mood from me. However, for good reason, I now break that earlier silence on Evans-Pritchard's recent output, to refer to a piece by him which appeared in the Telegraph's November 2nd edition.[1]
Within that Telegraph piece, he makes two points to which I should respond here. One, the leading topic of his piece, is that the present global collapse threatens to turn the planet back, in desperation, toward something, in effect, like the pre-August 1971 Bretton Woods system under the influence of President Franklin Roosevelt, a system which Evans-Pritchard implies as being a likely, epochal turn toward the "left," a use of "left" which is, frankly, misleading to the point of being absurd. The second point is one which he himself summed-up fairly within his closing, interesting sentence: "... I, for one, will take the enlightened socialism' of Barack Obama any day over the Hegelian broth nearing the boil in Europe."
There is, I admit, a certain, and even useful coherence in his presentation of those latter two points, especially his well informed selection of the term "Hegelian."
His use of "Hegelian," there, to identify what the literate will recognize as actually signifying the fascist tradition of Adolf Hitler, is to his credit. Unfortunately, his categories do not include what would have been a specific, highly relevant reference to the matter of the despicable George Soros' colleague Lord Mark Malloch-Brown and the horror show which British interests expressed by what were better named "Moloch-Brown," are currently staging against Africa's Congo.
As I have emphasized in my recently published, and presently highly relevant " Today's Brutish Imperialism," when one speaks of the "Left" today, avowed Adam Smith disciple Karl Marx was, after all, essentially an ideological creation of that British Foreign Office which Lord Palmerston had inherited from his patron Jeremy Bentham.
Therefore, in speaking of the British "Left," we must not overlook the still very relevant significance of the fact, that Karl Marx himself entered British service under the patronage of a branch of Lord Palmerston's operations run by Palmerston's Giuseppe Mazzini, the Mazzini who, on one celebrated occasion, publicly displayed his asset, the same Karl Marx who had, on an earlier occasion, denounced their proprietor, Lord Palmerston, as a Russian spy.
Worse, to bring Evans-Pritchard's readers up to date, what has passed for "the left" since events of 1968 in the U.S.A. and Europe, has most often been fascist types, Dionysians such as the Weatherman organization, or the comparable Baader-Meinhof Gang, as post-modernist sorts of Dionysian cults crafted as an echo of Sorel's and fascist Benito Mussolini's cult of "purgative violence." Notably, some of the worst fascists which I recognize as of kindred sort, are concentrated, within the United Kingdom, in Fabian elements found among leading figures of the presently governing Labour Party.
After all, G.W.F. Hegel was not only a fascist in fact, but came to that as, once, a passionately wet, Romantic worshiper of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and later, with the same enthusiasm, an early fascist ideologue, and, as relevant letters attested, a virtual Metternich spy.
After all, what were the once-avowed fascist H.G. Wells and his "Open Conspiracy" companion Bertrand Russell, but, in fact, clearly fascist authors of Orwellian doctrines of general nuclear and thermonuclear warfare? "Left" as a name for a residue, yes; as a political-scientific category, that term has become virtually meaningless in the world of today.
The Politics of Dynamics
After all, I possess certain, special credentials in speaking on that subject. The point to be made on this account, is that assigning political pigeon-holes such as "right" and "left" was always a tricky business, or worse, even at its relatively best.
To ridicule the silly way in which some people today speak of political ideologies, I am, philosophically, a hardened adherent of the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Bernhard Riemann, but also, similarly, an adherent of the legacy of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt; I have been that, consciously and consistently, since nearly seventy-four years ago; yet it is no contradiction that I have also been among the best qualified internationally in the assessment of Karl Marx's work as an economist, and have been associated, occasionally, with nominally Marxist ventures. However, despite my early 1943 assessment of the Marx of what became known as the first volume of his Capital, as admissible for legitimate consideration among reasonable people, I was, and have remained, essentially, what I had already become years earlier, a follower of both Leibniz, since my adolescence, and, later, of Riemann since early 1953.
I have fought many intellectual wars, including political ones, since my concluding months in overseas U.S. military service in India, the latter during the early months of 1946, where I came to understand the meaning of "British imperialism" in full, then, as to the present day. As a U.S. patriot, I am an opponent of the British empire and of the far-reaching, brutish imperial tradition which it presently represents still, as in Congo or Zimbabwe, today.
Such, are the credentials of my serious political dedications. My politics has the systemic quality of dynamics, as Leibniz and Riemann adopted the dynamics of such ancient Classical predecessors as the Pythagoreans and Plato. Real politics, as I define politics, is not a matter of something like a pupating caddis-fly which has packaged itself in assorted litter; competent and serious political thinking, which is admittedly rare among individuals these days, expresses a coherent systemic outlook on the way the universe is, and should be organized.
Thus, in politics, as in other matters, I regard the mind-set of most among expressed political opinions which I have encountered, as a pitiable basket-full of whatever odds and ends a member of some political faction has happened to drag home with it. Political converts usually tend to become impassioned devotees of whatever some assorted pranksters have dropped into their political shopping-bag.
On that point: in point of fact, most of the new breed of professed "leftists" since 1968, have belonged to anarchoid formations spawned by violence-prone, existentialist brain-washing projects such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, including such projects as the U.S. Weatherman cult, or the German hordes of extremely violent, leftish fascists, virtual warriors against nuclear technology of the 1970s and1980s. The beliefs of such poor creatures are usually what has been dropped into the basket of bric-a-brac they carried, often as fascists-in-fact. Like animals, these poor fools can and must be labeled, although, like the nasty beasts which their behavior tends to mimic, they rarely have a sensible notion of what the labels which they have attached to them - - like proudly borne dog collars - - actually signify.
All of these considerations just catalogued here, have a clearly defined role in any competent method of long-term economic forecasting. I explain, as follows.
The Matter of Expertise
What is most notable about me, politically, and internationally, at this moment, is that I have, not at all accidentally, a unique record as a successful long-range economic forecaster, a fact illuminated most brightly by events since my international webcast of July 25th 2007. This kind of international celebrity has been largely the fruit of my refusal to accept what are considered the conventional methods of statistical economic forecasting. This accomplishment of mine has, as one might put the point, "everything to do with" my commitment to the specific meaning of dynamics as associated with the names of Gottfried Leibniz and Bernhard Riemann. What I mean by that is essentially identical with the refined definition of a competent physical science by Albert Einstein's clarification of his locating himself as a product and follower of the founding of the only competent strain of applied modern physical science, that of the work of Johannes Kepler.
This method, as described summarily by Einstein, is that Kepler's great discoveries had demonstrated the properly assigned meaning of "universal physical principle," a meaning which is at the core of Kepler's discovery of a general principle of gravitation, respecting the organization of the Solar system. This was to be conceived, as in Kepler's addressing the ironical juxtaposition of two, mutually exclusive human senses, sight and sound, in locating a principle external to both senses, but an irony defining the principle which subsumes the evidence of the two, as if from beyond each.
This case, by Kepler, was recognized by Einstein as defining any actually efficient universal physical principle as expressing our universe as finite, but also self-bounded by the common intersection of its negentropically expanding roster of discovered universal physical principles. Einstein's insight to this effect depended, as he had emphasized, on Bernhard Riemann's treatment of the challenge of insight into the principles which generate mathematical forms, rather than the erroneous method of defining principles as if they were to be derived explicitly from within the confines of mathematical forms.
In Classical terms since the ancient science of Sphaerics, this is the same principle of dynamics, which had been revived, by Leibniz, during the 1690s, from the ancient Classical Greek dynamis of the Pythagoreans and Plato, we have the following.
To restate that point in a manner required for this discussion, if we trace the origins of ancient calendars which can be verified experimentally today, ancient transoceanic navigators had been impelled to "objectify" the ironies of long spans of records of transoceanic navigation by a method not essentially dissimilar to Kepler's first general solution for the Sun-Earth-Mars orbit. The method is to uncover a higher rule of qualitative action which transforms a general quality of paradox of global observations, into the notion of an ontological actuality of an efficient principle of action.
In actually scientific work, the object of thoughtful experience is not the image of the sense-object, but of an object of the form of a universal physical principle, such as Kepler's uniquely original definition of the object known as universal gravitation. Thus, the commonplace intellectual failure experienced even among what are otherwise quite respectable scientists of today, is that they are self- victimized by being systemically reductionists of the form of such followers of the irrationalist, Ockhamite schools of empiricism, Ernst Machian mechanics, or the wildly schizophrenic lunacies of the followers of the ultimate nominalist Bertrand Russell. They attribute the quality of a physical principle to its mere shadow, a mathematical formulation, rather than that which casts the shadow which is merely that formulation.
Science, as in the founding of competent modern physical science by Kepler, is adducing the object, which is the cause of the phenomenon, from an experimentally demonstrated meaning of the mere shadows. Hence, Einstein's finite, self-bounded, Riemannian universe of Johannes Kepler. This is the only competent method of approach to effective, long-range economic forecasting.
Why Long-Range Forecasts?
If one wishes to become an accomplished forecaster in the domain of political-economy, as I have become outstanding as a successful expert in this field, one must, similarly, break from all semblance of a Cartesian ideology, to think in terms of dynamics as the successive work of Leibniz and Riemann defines such qualifications. The human mind is essentially dynamic, as are all forecastable trends which the actions of the human mind generate within an economy.
I refer you to the LaRouche Youth Movement's (LYM) monumental treatment of Johannes Kepler's The Harmonies of the World,[2] for what is actually, in academia today, a little known proof of Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the harmonically ordered principle of Solar gravitation. There, we have a relevant example of the way in which the universal principles of the real physical universe are distinguished from the merely adumbrated form of mathematical shadows.
To apply that lesson to any economy, we must take a kindred approach to discovering the relationship between principled scientific progress and the decline, or increase of the potential relative population-density of human cultures (e.g. nations, groups of nations), as distinct from any comparable function within the domain of animal ecological systems.
The "ecological" progress of the human species, unlike any other living species, presents us with a human species (e.g., societies) which successfully outruns, vastly, the kinds of ecological functions which bound ecological sets of other living species. Nonetheless, for any human culture, this increase of the potential relative density, per square kilometer, of the human species does deplete, relatively, the preconditions of the Biosphere on which the access to an increased potential relative population-density depends. So, the remarkable progress of the human population to an estimated six-and-a-half billions living individuals today, reflects improvements in the ecology of society vastly beyond anything "mere nature" could have effected.
Thus, it was necessary, scientifically, as for Academician V.I. Vernadsky, to elaborate a specifically Riemannian concept of the Noösphere as a universal physical principle distinct from the ecology of the Biosphere otherwise.
The source of mankind's power not only to increase, but even to maintain our species' potential relative population-density ecologically, against attrition in the Biosphere, in this way, is, principally, the human mind's uniquely distinct capacity to discover universal physical principles of the distinct quality comparable to Kepler's uniquely original discovery of a principle of general gravitation, a principle lying outside the domain of formal mathematics as such. Thus, in order to transmit the knowledge of these principles which lie outside the reach of what is taught as mathematics, the human mind must decode the existence of these principles from knowledge of those footprints' authorship in the non-mathematical powers which are that potential of the individual human mind absent in all lower forms of life.
The presentation of the concept of the infinitesimal, uniquely, by Leibniz, was therefore crucial, on precisely this account. The principle does not lie in the mathematical formulation, but in the development of the mental powers of the scientist to generate the actual concept to which a certain place in the mathematical map points. Thus, the Leibniz infinitesimal is not a magnitude in Euclidean or Cartesian space, but an ontological principle of action which has no smallest magnitude, as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had insisted in the founding of modern European physical science, but which is a pure discontinuity in the simply sensory domain, which marks the control of the relevant process by the relevant "outside," higher physical principle.
Therefore . . .
Therefore, why the problem? Answering that question, now, will brings us now, by way of physical science, to the matter of the tragic principle in mankind's history. This will lead us, then, to the scientific relevance of the Iliad and its reflection in later Classical Greek tragedy.
All competent physical science today, is premised on those efficient, universal principles which are defined as being principles through the same types of methods employed by Johannes Kepler in his uniquely original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation. The combined effect of the relevant array of these physical principles bounds the limits of mankind's potential relative population-density.
In this process, the potential relative population-density of any society is both depleting and expanding its potential relative population-density at any moment. The discovery of new qualities of principled practice, allows us to increase that potential; the failure to continue to progress in such applications of scientific principles, has tended, since the rise of influence of the predominantly anti-science, even anti-reality, white-collar-spawned Baby-Boomer generation, to bring society toward a potential, "ecological" decline - - all in the name of "defending" the ecology, or even collapse of its potential relative population-density.
For example, one of the most significant measurements of a relevant, principled character is the increase of the qualitative level of energy-flux density, from raw sunlight, which defines the lowest form of human life, through increases in that density through combustion of charcoal, coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, synthetic hydrogen-based fuels, nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, and, somewhere in the future, a manageable resource which corresponds to what we would describe today as "matter-anti-matter reactions."
This parameter, conveniently termed "energy-flux density," or cross-section of flow of power per square-centimeter of cross-section, and the way in which that quality of power is used, or not, defines the most obvious of the parameters which define both the limits of human sustainable, ecological population-density, and, in this way, the collapse of societies which fail to increase this cross-section into a reduced population-density, and more debased condition of both biological life and mental-cultural life.
Thus, by examining the direction in which current habits, and their expressed policies, respecting potential relative, human population-densities occur, we are enabled to foresee where trends in policies and habits are carrying a contemporary society. Since 1968-1973, the direction of potential relative population-density of the planet as a whole, has been consistently downward, especially as the unpopularity of physical-scientific revolutions defines an attrition of the planet's potential relative population-density.
That set of relatively raw, physical parameters as such, is controlled by the shift in social parameters which are associated with cultural trends, including physical ones, and with relevant features of the political outlooks which control the physical choices, more or less top-down.
In a competent economic forecasting, those political and comparable parameters of policy-shaping which affect - - and effect - - education and life-spans of physical-capital investments in the factors of potential relative population-density, are the most crucial, since they determine the way society will find itself inclined to choose its policies affecting education, physical-capital factors, and so on.
Since the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the trend has been definitely down. The downward trend has been not only in the U.S.A. and Europe, but, in net effect, global. Since Spring 1968, a cultural trend has set in, which has ensured that in continuation of trends which were set into motion by the rise of the "Baby Boomer" generation of the "68ers," there has been no competence within the majority of our political-cultural establishment, for effecting the needed reversal of cancerously self-feeding downward trends in society's general ability to select behaviors which would enable society to survive.
A competent science of physical economy is therefore based on study of the controlling factors of cultural-political trends which are governing the way in which choices of "capital" in policy-shaping are leading society. It is sufficient, once this pattern is determined, to correlate those patterns of trends of direction in society affecting the physical potential of society, to forecast the principled types of breaking-points in a culture trend which will tend to bring the society into a severe existential crisis, even a breakdown crisis like that reaching its end-game status, globally, right now.
It is the combined effect of such trends, and of the mental habits among the sundry cultural strata of the society as a whole, even the planet as a whole, which lend what might appear to be "predictability" to one observing my unique degree of repeated success, since 1956, in long-term forecasting.
Note, however, that no short-term forecast is competently formulated, except as it is an expression, for the short-term, of a long-term pattern of more or less habituated decision-making, The failure of virtually all forecasters to accept my approach to forecasting, has been the most crucial factor in all of the relevant catastrophes of recent decades.
Friedrich Nietzsche's Horrid End
All Classical Greek tragedy, as echoed by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, can be traced in known European culture to the tragic principle of the Iliad. We have all of these awful gods and demi-gods ever-whispering in the ears of the poor ancient mortals, instilling those fears of the whispering gods which are impelling the mortal members of that culture to do the things by which they destroy themselves. We meet the same principle of tragedy in the subsequent Classical Greek tragedies, in the relevant dramas of Shakespeare, and, treated from a still higher vantage-point, by the great modern poet and historian Friedrich Schiller.
The idea of the personal tragedy of the important leader, or comparable figure, was always utter nonsense. A true tragedy is that which a people has brought upon itself, a tragedy which was unleashed not because of a certain leading figure such as the Romantic's deluded fascination with the notion of the "tragic individual," but because of the lack of the quality of leader in place needed to guide the people away from their own foolish ways.
We should recognize this in Friedrich Schiller's presentation of the true-to-life case of Jeanne d'Arc. France destroyed itself by abandoning its only competent leader, the real-life Jeanne d'Arc, but France was saved under Louis XI through the reverberation of the torture of Jeanne d'Arc within the council of the Christian church, the reverberation which brought forth that great ecumenical Council of Florence which made the great Louis XI possible, and also England's Henry VII after him.
The root of real-life tragedy lies in the whispering of the evil pagan gods, as the case of the Iliad, and the best of Classical Greek tragedy illustrates this point. Genius never lies within popular opinion, but within the quality of leadership embodied within the individual who is capable of rising above the evil which is the whispering of those evil gods and demi-gods against which Athena fights, in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Who, if such individual heroes are the instruments for rescue of a society from the popularity of its own folly, is responsible for the evil which returns, again, and again, to impel a society, such as the nations of the U.S.A. and western Europe, for example, today? Aeschylus presents us the case of the Olympian Zeus, who serves in Prometheus Bound as the embodiment of the evil otherwise identified with Moloch (or, perhaps "Moloch-Brown"?), or the Delphi cult's Gaea, Apollo, Dionysus, et al. It is the prohibition of mortal man's knowledge of the "fire" of science, lest man risk the displeasure of the pagan gods, which is the expression of the enemy of mankind within the body of mankind, a notion of the true evil on whose combat we have, thus far, relied to rescue societies from the perpetual whispering of those malignant gods and demi-gods of the Iliad.
There should be no mystery in this need for man's redemption from the willful grip of such evil as that. The notion of a Messiah, of the Christian God, reveals what is not actually a secret from the true history of mankind. In the meantime, we depend upon leaders with the knowledge and courage to act for the rescue of societies from the self-destructive habits they harbor within their popular opinion, on which we must rely as instruments for rescue of nations from the horrid flaw of the people of the Iliad.
Such necessary individual men and women are of the class of those poets of whom Percy Shelley writes in the conclusion of his In Defence of Poetry.
This is a necessary principle, respecting the role of the individual in society. The science of physical economy, as I express this in my own work, is the relevant expression of that needed principle, in the present world crisis, the present threat of doomsday, now. The names for that evil, are legion; they include "environmentalism" and "free trade," which represent a set of beliefs specific to a society which has willfully abandoned the moral fitness to survive, and which, at this moment, is hovering near the precipice of extinction for precisely such crimes as those.
Satan is the Olympian Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus, or the emissary of both as Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Work of Our Devils
So, of course, in such matters as those, we must remain aware of the distinction of the persons who operate the house of prostitution, and those who merely dropped in for the evening's occasion.
For example, I recall, vividly, eyewitness accounts delivered to me by observers of the swapping of affiliations between Nazi Brownshirts and Communist supporters in the famous Berlin trolley-car strike preceding the successful backing of Hitler's cause, by the Bank of England's Montagu Norman. We must recall the content of John Maynard Keynes' introduction to the first, 1937 appearance of his General Theory, in German, in which he professed German political trends of the Nazi period as a more hospitable habitat for his economic dogma than even Britain itself.
Looking at modern European history over a longer term, as since 1789, the relevant comment on today's ideological confusion is the warning that we must learn from the French Revolution that social-political principles can not be competently defined, as to principle, by the assortment of seating arrangements in the French parliament of the time of the modern Dionysian ferments of the Martinist plots of such as Philippe Egalite, the brothers Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Napoleon Bonaparte.
In summary, to understand the world's crisis of today, we must recognize the depravity of the methods of strategically-significant cultural and other policy-shaping habits of most of humanity during more than four recent decades of cultural decadence, globally.
To rescue humanity from its present lurch into a global dark-age over two or more generations to come, we must recognize the factors which I have sampled, and emphasized in these pages today.
[1] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, :"Revenge of the Left across the world," http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance, Nov. 3, 2008.
[2] See http://wlym.com/~animations/harmonies/index.php. The usual academic pretenses in this subject-matter of a principle of general gravitation, as in the case of claims for Newton, are not a different opinion, but purely a fraud.
