April 13, 2000

Information Society: A Doomed Empire of Evil

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR, Vol. 27, No. 17, April 28, 2000. Embedded links have been added.

For as far back into pre-history as our present knowledge can reach, the most efficient way to destroy a human culture, is the sneaky way, to induce it to doom itself. Writer Oscar Wilde describes such a process of corruption, in his allegorical The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Such, according to evidence against the leading authors of what is called today “Information Society,” or, “The New Economy,” has been the purpose of the cult of logical positivism, which was set into motion by a group of persons gathered around three among the most consummately malevolent figures of the Twentieth Century, the so-called Vienna Circle’s Ernst Mach and Rudolf Carnap, and their ally, British, self-styled “radical empiricist” Bertrand Russell.[fn_1] Hopefully, the backlash unleashed by the oncoming, systemic collapse of the Nasdaq index, will produce that popular reaction, which helps to save humanity from the grip of a delusion which Mach, Carnap, and Russell led in crafting. Our subject, is the effect of that spreading, positivist mass-delusion of recent decades, which is commonly referred to, variously, as “Cybernetics,” “systems analysis,” “information theory,” “New Economy,” or “Information Economy.”

A quick, introductory glimpse into the morbid ironies of that so-called Information Economy, has been provided by one of its currently notable dupes, Sun Microsystems co-founder, and copiously self-described radical positivist, Bill Joy, in the April 2000 edition of Wired, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”[fn_2] There, Joy quotes a long passage from the Manifesto of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, as excerpted in Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.[fn_3] Joy comments on his shock of recognition in reading Kurzweil’s excerpt:

Kaczynski’s actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it. . . .

I started showing my friends the Kaczynski quote from The Age of Spiritual Machines. . . . [and from] Hans Moravec’s book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.[fn_4] Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University. Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends—material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski’s argument.

At the close of his piece, later, Joy concludes that leading feature in that issue of Wired, with a rather typical Faustian’s confession. His argument coincides with the imputed motive of his own and Vice-President Al (Earth in the Balance)[fn_5] Gore’s Malthusian co-thinker, and terrorist, Kaczynski; but, being a modern Faust, who gains his pleasures in certain ways, Joy confesses his sin with weary mea culpas worthy of a lecherous Bible-thumper, while relishing the right to continue to enjoy the sin, and its hoped-for financial rewards. Like Lot’s wife, he prefers to remain a pillar of his community: the presently reigning degeneration of today’s logical positivist’s financial community.

Bill Joy’s Faustian rants of mea culpa, touch base with names from the usual-suspects list of Russell cronies. These include such figures as nuclear-preventive-war advocate Russell’s Leo Szilard, Szilard’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Princeton environment of Freeman Dyson, and others among the confessed sinners from the age of the bomb. Thus, having crafted no nuclear weapons to feel guilty about, late-comer Joy is left with the option of presenting himself as a proud sinner of that hellish, and doomed domain, euphemistically styled as “Information Society.”

The proximate origin of the spread of Joy’s delusion within the U.S.A., is a 1938, founding meeting of nuclear bomber Bertrand Russell’s Association for the Unification of the Sciences, convened at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania. This project, launched by Russell in association with the University of Chicago’s Robert Hutchins, included what must be described as such wretched creatures as Margaret Mead and her sometime husband Gregory Bateson, and featured the work in linguistics by former German Communist leader, Frankfurt School-linked Karl Korsch, and Korsch’s linguistics collaborator, ultra-radical positivist Rudolf Carnap.[fn_6] This defined a current which included Princeton-area celebrities such as Russell lackey, and Szilard associate Eugene Wigner, and Freeman Dyson. This was the same current represented by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, featuring Mead and Bateson, John von Neumann, the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer, and a long-running subversive project—against the human species—gathered around the so-called “Cybernetics” project of Russell acolyte and MIT Professor Norbert Wiener.[fn_7]

One of the principal centers for the propagation of the Cybernetics project, was a Kurt Lewin-founded project at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).[fn_8] Assembled there, over the course of the post-war 1940s and 1950s, were such figures as Hutchins’ asset from Chicago, Macy Foundation figure Professor Warren McCulloch, and McCulloch’s unfortunate Walter Pitts. Soon, Professor Marvin Minsky arrived to participate in the MIT side of what become known as the “artificial intelligence” project.[fn_9] Karl Korsch lurked in that precinct, where he came to be close to Pennsylvania-trained linguistics specialist, Russellite Noam Chomsky. Early on, already during the late 1940s, the RAND Corporation sponsored some projects at MIT’s RLE, and, with the establishment of the U.S. Air Force, that section of the Pentagon took up some of the work. [box: Gore Pal Calls for Jihad Against Science]

Out of this same panoply of radical positivism, came the infamous MK-Ultra and related psychedelic experiments on, often, unwitting victims. These programs, which were imported from Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees’ and Eric Trist’s Rockefeller-funded London Tavistock Clinic’s work, are typified by the revival of hallucinatory rituals dating to no later than the ancient Phrygian cult of Dionysus-Satan, as shown in the development and use of synthetic ergotamine, now popularly recognized as LSD. All of this deeply involved Russell and H.G. Wells crony, Hollywood figure, and Aleister Crowley cultist Aldous Huxley.[fn_10] In the midst of this, were symbolic contributions from the mystical circles of C.J. Jung. Lines of activity such as “spoon bending,” psychedelic romps, and the search for “artificial intelligence,” shared a common parentage with the broader environment of decadence which had exploded to the surface in the so-called intellectual centers of Europe during the 1890s.

Those pre-World War I romps of Dr. Sigmund Freud and other cultural pessimists of that period’s Vienna-Budapest countercultural set, typify the frankly Eros-oriented, Dionysiac fads, which exploded to the surface during that pre-World War I interval, and which flourished like fungi under the moral and economic ruin left in the wake of both that war and the cynical triumph of hatred known as the Treaty of Versailles.[fn_11] Such varieties of projects supplied by such existentialist and related kinds of cultural degenerates as Anton S. Makarenko co-thinkers Georg Lukacs and other Frankfurt School influentials, such as degenerates Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, contributed both converging and complementary roles, in the general effort which these philosophical Romantics, such as neo-Kantian Karl Jaspers, shared with their fellow-existentialist, Nazi rivals such as Martin Heidegger, to undermine and destroy the Classical form of modern Judeo-Christian civilization as we had known it.[fn_12]

In this setting, of the moral and intellectual decadence associated with two World Wars and their post-Franklin Roosevelt aftermath, and under the growing influence of the Hellish hagiolatry of Russell-Wells-Crowley satanism,[fn_13] Wiener and another veteran Russell acolyte, John von Neumann, came to share an increasingly popularized, perverse sort of canonical authority, as the putative authors of the notion of “artificial intelligence.”

The ape project of Minsky and Chomsky, who presented the mass media with the spectacle of the abused, experimental chimpanzee which they named “Noam Chimsky,” typified the efforts, both in Britain and North America, to demonstrate that man was nothing but another higher ape, whose intelligence could be synthesized by the same methods employed by quack-economist von Neumann’s claim to model any economic process, by no more subtle means than solutions for simultaneous linear inequalities—in a phrase, by simple, linear, digital flip-flop methods.[fn_14] The really far-out radicals, such as Minsky, and Bill Joy and his friends, and such Joy co-thinkers as Vice-President Gore, followed Wiener and von Neumann all the way. This led some among them to insist, in their rewriting of the utopian themes of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that there was nothing about man which a new generation of “thinking machines” could not do better. From among such circles, there were those, like Unabomber Kaczynski, who declared, that mankind itself would come to be deemed a pestilence of useless eaters, so judged by the machines which would come to rule in the Orwellian nightmare of a nationless, perhaps also apeless, globalized planet.

Thus, Bill Joy argued, that poor lunatic Unabomber Kaczynski, being merely a professionally trained mathematician of the same general, logical positivist background as Joy himself, knew no better than to believe in the Wiener-von Neumann gobbledygook about “information theory” and “artificial intelligence.” To sum up Faustian Joy’s argument on this point: allegedly, impassioned by a well-informed concern to stop humanity’s impending extermination by “thinking machines,” terrorist Kaczynski struck out to save humanity, by striking the threat to mankind at the source, those who built the machines. As Joy characterizes a quoted passage from Kaczynski’s Manifesto, the Unabomber, like virtual Nashville Agrarian and Vice-President Gore, was a modern Luddite, but with a new—very twisted—twist. The twist was supplied by the influence of Bertrand Russell’s Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.

What, then, is the lesson to be learned, from the onrushing collapse of the Nasdaq, about the looming doom of what came to be known as “information theory”?

On Bestiality Since Babylon

The logical positivists’ sophistry called “information theory,” carries an old folly to a new extreme. That folly is much older than the ancient Greek beginnings of globally extended European civilization. Specifically, it has persisted, to the present date, over no less than about six thousand years, as a recurring appearance of it, in sundry old and new forms of by-products. Such recurrences, have been among the most deadly causes of crises experienced by our civilization over the course of the intervening millennia. We must, therefore, recognize that pattern as expressing a propensity of a kind which might be described metaphorically, as a reflection of an almost genetic quality of weakness in the moral and intellectual character of all civilization, until now.

A study of that propensity, leads to two principal conclusions here. First, that we can not account for the occurrence of susceptibility to the lunacy of widespread acceptance of “information theory,” as a mass phenomenon, except as we are able to show that this phenomenon is rooted in a deeply embedded propensity within our civilization, as that civilization has existed and developed up to the present time. Second, that this propensity is nonetheless alien to the axiomatic nature of the human species, and is therefore, axiomatically, implicitly, a curable sort of alien infection. Those two considerations are, therefore, crucial for understanding and treating the mental mass-aberration which Al Gore’s ideology, as correctly defined by his admirer Bill Joy, reflects.

The alien infection in question, is best identified, summarily, as the legacy of oligarchical forms of society, those various forms of society which, like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, are on record as implacably antagonistic to the republican principles of the opening paragraphs of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the 1789 U.S. Federal Constitution. Those currently imperilled, republican principles, appeared in the history of European civilization, as the Greek Classical principle associated with Plato, and Solon of Athens before him. It is the same principle, that each and all members of mankind, are made equally in the image of what Plato, in his Timaeus, identifies as both the Composer and continuing efficient principle and personality of this universe. It was the renaissance of the Mosaic tradition of Genesis 1:26-31, as expressed by the world-evangelical mission of the Apostles Peter, John, and Paul, and, the writings of John and Paul in the Platonic, Classical-Greek literate form, from which today’s best features, of that legacy of modern, post-Roman Empire civilization, have arisen, out of a millennia-long, perilous gestation.

So, Paul’s I Corinthians 13, is the most typical expression of the Christian recognition of Plato’s principle of agapē, rather than any formal, and therefore intrinsically hypocritical “rule of law.” It is, as Paul writes, the only universal principle upon which a true morality may be premised. It has been the persistence of that Christian use of the Platonic principle of Classical Greece, upon which the long struggle for the emergence and survival of our U.S. constitutional form of republican form of government, has depended absolutely.[fn_15]

It is the persistence of forms of government and lawful practice contrary to republican principles, as expressed by the excessive power of corrupt Wall Street and pro-Confederacy elements within the U.S. political system, and also within the United Kingdom and the states of continental Europe, which has harbored the persistence of those anti-republican impulses, and, often, not only openly, but rabidly anti-Christian hostility to the republican’s agapic notion of man expressed by the opening paragraphs of our 1776 Declaration of Independence, man as a species set apart from and above the beasts. It is the specifically anti-Christian, pro-paganist impulse of creatures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, et al., which implicitly colors the positivist delusions of not only the paganist British royal consort Prince Philip and his son, Prince of Wales Prince Charles, but also Vice-President Gore and his co-thinkers, as Earth in the Balance and Bill Joy’s argument attest to that fact.

Examine the phenomenon of oligarchical tendencies from this vantage-point.

That form of society known to history as “the oligarchical model,” “is premised, implicitly, on the practiced assumption, that the mass of human beings was fated to live as human cattle, herded, selectively bred, used, and culled, as a farmer might herd, breed, use, and cull cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs, or the way in which British oligarchs, and picaresque, Anglophile, Wall Street fools, used to breed with Hollywood or other professional actresses of certain attributes designated as eugenic. The determination of the fate of such human cattle, was left, conventionally, to the ministrations of either the relevant oligarchy itself, or to the mass of lackeys—such as today’s breed of HMO-controlling and kindred, all-too-typical chief executive officers—who performed such and related functions for that oligarchy. Such had been the genocidal habits of that ancient priest-caste, which ruled and ruined Mesopotamia, from the founding of the Dravidian maritime colony of the “black-headed people,” known in today’s textbooks as Sumer, or Sumeria, until the conquest of the Achaemenid (“Persian”) Empire by Alexander the Great, on the plain of Gaugamela.

That Mesopotamian form, was not the only oligarchical model existing during that period. The Moloch-worshippers of Tyre, for example, were a rival, and sometime partner of Mesopotamia in such practices. However, it was the Babylonian model, which the Christian and certain Jewish currents denounced as the Rome of the Caesars, as the so-called “new Babylon” or “Whore of Babylon.” Those epithets referenced the Babylon known and hated from tortured centuries of Jewish captivity, which was still the dominant foe, now known as Rome, to be faced at the dawn of that now globally extended European civilization, a civilization whose roots were to be found in the legacy of ancient Classical Greece. Inside Classical Greece, the influence of the obscene Mesopotamian religious beliefs, had been felt in such forms as the Phrygian cult of Cybele-Dionysus, and the closely related, Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo.[fn_16] To go directly to the crucial fact to be considered here, this is the Delphi cult, as typified by the Lycurgan law of Sparta, which had been the principal enemy of Classical Greek civilization inside Greece itself, which created pagan Rome and its quasi-Sparta culture, a role played according to a doctrine congruent with the Babylonian and Canaanite principle, that in the Delphi cult’s own image.

There, from those origins, in the subjugation of the higher level of civilization, by the relatively, morally and intellectually, degenerate Roman culture, we must trace the history leading into the shared logical-positivist delusion of Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Walter Pitts, and Marvin Minsky, and also of Bill Joy and Theodore Kaczynski. So, the historian must trace the highlights of the evolving struggle, of republicanism versus the oligarchical model, since Solon’s reform at Athens, and since the subsequent revolt of the Ionian city-states against that renewed Babylon, which had been brought forth in the guise of the Achaemenid Empire.

In today’s schools, even if a semblance of history is rarely taught in those classrooms, the usually purported source of explanations for anything which happened in history, at any time, or in any place, is still the English and British empiricists’ dogma of immutable “human nature.” Usually, especially in today’s English-speaking classrooms, that is the traditional, modern British definition of human nature, pretty much as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, described it, and, as the doctrine of Kurt Lewin is taught in the form of the rabid irrationalism of the “sensitivity” cults, in ever more U.S. classrooms today.

In reality, contrary to such simple-minded explanations as those popularized, statistical notions of the empiricists, the most important distinction among cultures and leading currents within cultures, is to be found in the differences among the ways in which each of these defines what it identifies as “human nature.” In the sweep of the rise of globally extended European civilization, since ancient Greece, the differences among working definitions of human nature, fall into two general classes, several sub-classes, and, finally, specific types within the bounds of classes and sub-classes. The most important subject-matter of such historiographical studies, is located in the transitions which move a society from one such type, or class of axiomatic definition, to another. The evolution of the conception of human nature within ancient Greece itself, as shown by tracing this evolution from the Homeric epics to Plato, is the most crucial example of those processes of change—e.g., transitions—which bring the underlying principles of history-making—e.g., epistemology and statecraft—into focus.

The modern radical positivist’s perverse definition of human nature, is a case in point. [box: The Unabomber Speaks, and Silicon Valley Listens]

The general classifications to be considered are, essentially, a division between those who insist, as Mandeville and Adam Smith did, that man’s nature, or some men’s nature, is that of merely another beast, as opposed to that of the Christians, and others, who define man as, by nature, of a higher order than any and all of the beasts. Hence, the Mesopotamian polymorphic, pro-bestial images of their pagan deities, for example, tell us much which is most essential—and essentially disgusting—about that culture. Hence, those who, like unreconstructed relics of the Confederacy, argue that “black” persons of African origins are an inferior species of beast-men, are intrinsically immoral believers in the bestial nature of man, themselves included. Similarly, those of the sub-class who argue that man is evil in nature, as some pseudo-Christian cultists (e.g., gnostics[fn_17]) do, are therefore to be promptly recognized as members of the axiomatically bestial category.

Thus, for example, today’s cult of logical positivists, such as the utopians who think like Kaczynski, Bill Joy, and Gore, who assert a belief in the “artificial intelligence” implicit in the teachings of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, are representatives of a type belonging to a sub-class of the bestialists. That sub-class includes the empiricists, Cartesians, and Kantians, among which the logical positivists representing a type located genetically, under a sub-class of empiricist followers of the Venetian, avowedly neo-Ockhamite, ideologues Paolo Sarpi and Antonio Conti.[fn_18]

Such classifications are indispensable, but not necessarily simple. For example, a form of serfdom is typical of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, in the form of what modern specialists have termed “bow tenure.” The farmer held a plot of land under conditions which included rules like French corvée, and the obligation to deliver himself and his weapons to military service of the rulers. Elements of financier oligarchy are typical of ancient Mesopotamian and Hittite culture, as exemplified by two-layered baked clay cuneiform tablets exhumed from ancient sites within the former Hittite cities. State and theocratic forms of bureaucratic oligarchy, as castes, are typical of early Mesopotamia, and continued as the control of the magicians, a pagan priestcraft which maintained the continuity of Mesopotamian imperialism from Babylon through the Achaemenid rule. Or, to make a related point, there are presently no true republics, comparable to the U.S. constitutional form, existing in Europe today; what are called governments there, are democratic reforms in the role and practice of the form of parliamentary institutions which had developed under feudalism.

However, when we examine such apparent anomalies from the standpoint of a functional view of historical processes of development, the classifications themselves become more or less clear, and are also clearly necessary. For example, the increase of tax-farming practices in Mesopotamia, was a recurring cause for the collapse of civilization there. The increase of the intensity of the looting by the regime and tax farmers, resulted in the bankruptcy of the fragile, irrigation-based agricultural system of that culture, and the recurring tendency to replace bow-tenure landholding by hired labor, and then by slaves. The collapse of the agricultural system, under such conditions, was a recurring pattern, to as recently as the collapse of the Baghdad Caliphate into moral, intellectual, and economic degeneracy, under the impact of combined tax-farming usury and an increasing power assumed by the Turkish enforcers employed by the tax-farmers. A journey up the Euphrates, during April 1975, presented me with vivid, indelible eyewitness evidence of just such a process of ruin of what had been, formerly, the relatively more prosperous region of the great Baghdad Caliphate of Charlemagne’s contemporary and ally Haroun al-Rashid.

I have referred frequently, in earlier published locations, to the significance of Raphael Sanzio da Urbino’s painting of The School of Athens. If we understand, as Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael did, the significance of the fact, that all validated physical and artistic principles, are verified products of the individual’s sovereign powers of cognition, or what are strictly defined as Platonic ideas, all of the most precious contributions of ideas from other cultures and earlier generations, are to be relived by us, as experienced discoveries of principle. So, persons from many different generations are assembled together in Raphael’s painting, as if in the dimension of a simultaneity of temporal eternity, exchanging there the cognitive experience of both the concurrent and opposing ideas associated with each. Similarly, nations and cultures are linked together in sequences as if across time, as if in a simultaneity of temporal eternity, in which a notion of efficient sequence, including reversible sequences among elements, persists, but not the simplistic, linear notion of time, as simpletons associate that with mere sense-perception.[fn_19]

Real history is so ordered. The order is not always determined sequentially by valid ideas, but also, often, by the intervention of bad ones. Thus, in the realm of ideas, we have those notions of the orderings of social relations within and among otherwise distinct social formations and sub-formations. So, like notions of universal physical principle (false or valid), so cultural formations and sub-formations exert their impact across generations, and across otherwise distinct cultures. To understand a society, is to recognize this kind of multiple-connectedness of sundry classes of ideas: ideas corresponding to physical principles, valid or false, ideas corresponding to artistic principles, valid or false, and ideas corresponding to social formations and sub-formations, similarly. These are not to be read as if they were mere dots on the screen of sense-perception, but as functionally ideas, ideas in the sense of the paradoxes and their solutions appearing in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. These are ideas which can be judged, competently, only from the standpoint of an intrinsically non-linear form of comprehension, as ideas whose efficient expression lies behind and above the realm of mere sense-certainty.[fn_20] The relations among such ideas, are historical and functional in their determination, a reflection of a sequence of ebbs and flows in the development of, and relations among cultures. The most essential of all such cultural and scientific ideas, are those pertaining to the definition of human nature.

Those precautions taken into account, the analysis of notions of statecraft bearing upon the nature of man can, and must be reduced to a meaningful array of the kinds of classifications and types to which I have referred here. The history of the problem leading into the emergence of the articulated notion of human nature embedded in our Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of our Constitution, is rendered most readily comprehensible by, first, defining a few crucial benchmarks of the recent five thousand years of the emergence of what became globally extended European civilization.

So, turn your attention now to the roots of what became European civilization, as presented in Egypt of the middle of the third millennium before the birth of Christ. The main current of cultural progress, is found in the culture associated, then, with the great pyramid-builders of Egypt. According to Egyptian sources, the roots of what became European civilization, are to be found, as typified in the relationship between Egypt and the city of Athens, Greece, as the ancient quality of that connection is corroborated by the role of an Egyptian goddess-figure, as Athena, in the Greek pantheon. The recurring roles of Athena in the Homeric epics, and the related importance of the figure of Prometheus, are the guiding stars for mapping the emergence of the Classical Greece of Solon, the great Classical tragedians, the Greek Classical revolution in sculpture, and the emergence of the central idea of European civilization, in the figure of Plato’s Socrates, and in the Platonic tradition of the Athens Academy, that through the Hellenistic time of Eratosthenes.

So, in the span of Egypt’s reciprocal relationship to the rise of the culture of Classical Greece, including the figure of Moses, until the time of Eratosthenes, are located the principal among the ancient roots of the Classical legacy, as embedded within globally extended, modern European civilization still today. That is the needed, pivotal benchmark for mapping the subsequent development of what became European civilization.

What we witness, in tracing the Homeric legacy through the prism of the succession of Solon’s reform, the great tragedians, and Plato’s work, is essentially an emerging new conception of man, with increasing emphasis upon those processes of cognition, by means of which Platonic ideas are willfully generated and validated.[fn_21] We have the transition from a view of man as virtual cattle of the Olympian gods, through the emerging view of man, as the latter is typified by the figure of Ulysses, often befriended by Athena, freeing himself from the evil tyranny of the Olympian oligarchy, man allied with Prometheus in this struggle for his liberation as mankind, as a creature of cognitive reason, as the great Classical tragedians portray this, especially Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. We see the notion of cognitive man, as portrayed by Classical Greek sculpture, its emergence from the death-like bondage of archaic forms of Egyptian and Greek sculpture. We see the notion of cognitive man liberated, as if from Aristotelean shackles of the mind, in the Socratic dialogues of Plato.

Then, as Rome subdued Italy, at the close of the third century before Christ, and moved outward to subjugate Greece and to loot and ruin the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean, as Venice did later, all of civilization was plunged, by the Romans’ quasi-Spartan predator culture, far below the level of culture achieved under Greek and Hellenistic civilization earlier. It was through the emergence of Christ and the Apostles, upon the platform of the body of Greek-speaking, Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean, that the Mosaic notion of man expressed in Genesis 1, expressed afresh, as by the Apostles John and Paul, in the language of Platonic ideas, became, as Christianity, a universal, anti-oligarchical notion of the essential nature of mankind. Thus, there appeared the notion of a universality of human nature, as a being endowed with qualities of the Creator, a notion which had never existed in earlier known cultures. Thus, against the background of the Mosaic legacy, the Christian Apostles appeared, bearing thus the image of the perfected Jew of that Mosaic legacy of Genesis 1. On this account, both Jews—especially Jews in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn and the Yiddish Renaissance—and Christians, have been hated by such modern pagans as Nietzsche and his Nazi followers.

The self-destruction inhering in the Roman culture of its so-called republic and the Empire, an axiomatically predatory culture, was expressed by the notions and practices of vox populi, as by the philosophical populism of Kant, the Jacobin Terror, Savigny, et al. This meant, that the Roman oligarchical system, with its specific form of oligarchical misconception of human nature, stretching the limits of its conquests and looting, must then turn its predators’ cultural instinct inward, cannibalistically, upon the body of the realm it had subjugated, even upon itself. The worst such effects were concentrated, initially, in the western part of the Empire, while the surviving residue of the relatively superior, Greek-Hellenistic culture of the eastern portion, came to represent, clearly, the relatively more viable, more populous region.

Hence we had the division of the Empire by Diocletian, an echo of the time of Aristotle’s mentor, the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, who proposed division of the world between a western and eastern part, both predicates of a common, Babylonian, oligarchical model. Diocletian’s division, which separates Croatia from Serbia to the present day, appeared as a parody of that oligarchical scheme of the circles of Isocrates, Aristotle, et al., which had been foiled, for nearly two centuries, by the victory of Aristotle’s enemy, Alexander, on the plain of Gaugamela. Europe was subjected, thus, to Diocletian’s Code, and, its implied sequel, the emergence of Constantinople as the new, similarly pre-doomed, capital of the self-depleted Empire as a whole.[fn_22]

Unless an appropriate quality of revolutionary change, might be introduced into the social system there, the continuation of the Roman Empire, in this eastern form, had, of necessity, the same ultimate outcome as the collapse of Rome in the west. Thus are all oligarchical cultures ultimately self-doomed ones. The more predatory they are, the more certain their self-inflicted doom, a doom like that of the Olympian tyranny, as the tragedy of the false god, and oligarchical tyrant Zeus, is implied, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

Thus, the conflict between Christianity and the pagan legacies of Babylon, Delphi, and Rome, as these latter were embodied implicitly in the social and related prescriptions of Diocletian’s oligarchical code, became a co-determining feature of the subsequent course of extended European civilization, from the time of Augustus and Tiberius Caesar, through the hegemony of modern financier oligarchies of the contemporary British type, until the present day.

Since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the germ of the same oligarchical culture, of Babylon, Tyre, Delphi, and Rome, has continued its existence within extended European civilization in chiefly two forms: the form of oligarchical society associated with European feudalism based upon the social institution of serfdom and landed aristocracy, and, a successor form, that of the Venice model of financier-oligarchical rule, the latter typified today by both the British financier oligarchy and its Wall Street BAC partner.[fn_23] The social base for this BAC faction’s power inside the U.S.A., has been the Anglophilic alliance between Wall Street and the traditions of the Confederacy. The dominant cultural current of both of these two successors (European feudalism and financier-oligarchical rule), has always been the tradition of pagan Rome, or, what is otherwise identified as Romanticism. That axiomatic, Romantic misconception of human nature, remains essentially constant, although attached postulates may differ in either type or degree.

In the sweep of European civilization since approximately the date of the Roman murder of Archimedes, the essential conflict within European civilization as a whole, has always been the conflict between the Greek Classical and the Romantic cultural legacies. Since the time of the Roman Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, the principal expression of the Classical Greek legacy within extended European civilization, has been chiefly the legacy of Christ and His Apostles, the teachings of John and Paul most emphatically.[fn_24]

The essential issue of this conflict within extended European civilization, has always been the conflict between the republican conception of the universality of human nature, and the opposing, oligarchical notion of man in terms of variously real or merely imagined relations between human beasts and their rulership of those designated as human cattle, such as the constitutional class, called in Latin populari (the Latin term for predators), of ancient pagan Rome. Such is the oligarch’s notion of what he perversely names, hypocritically, “democracy,” called rule by support from vox populi: the voice of the dumbed-down, blood-maddened populari in the seats of popular mass entertainment’s original and emulated Colosseum and Circus Maximus, then and now.

In the circumstances defined by this continuing conflict, since the long period (1513-1648) dominated by the religious warfare which financier-oligarchical Venice unleashed against the Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance, the effort to establish the form of nation-state expressed by our Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of our Constitution, has made the success of that American Revolution what was sometimes rightly viewed as the temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind—at times when Wall Street and the unrepentant scions of the Confederacy’s tradition were not in the saddle of government.

Thus, the various efforts by the Venetian model of financier-oligarchical rule, to either crush or subvert the United States, have been a pivotal feature of all modern history of the world since, and the determining cause for the most deadly conflicts internal to our republic itself. Thus, the U.S. republic, conceived as a reflection of the Christian, anti-Romantic legacy of Classical Greece, is a creation of that legacy, which is European-wide. In its creation, as in the great work of our most heroic Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, our republic has represented, during all its best times, as under war-time President Franklin Roosevelt, not a prospective world-empire, but a beacon of hope, around which other nations might be rallied, to constitute a community of perfectly sovereign nation-state republics, united in their cooperation by a common cause, by that republican legacy.

The presently chief internal enemy of that Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt legacy, the Luddite form of oligarchical world-outlook expressed by decadent, neo-Luddite Vice-President Al Gore and the “cybernetics” mafia, is but one more instance of the legacy of subversion expressed by circles rooted in the institutions of Wall Street and John Locke’s slaveholder/shareholder tradition. The collapse of the financial bubble, dooms Gore’s own personal ambition, but, at the moment, the Republican candidate Bush put to one side, Gore’s candidacy remains a model threat, both to the United States, and to civilization as a whole: the threat of a would-be Gore Presidency modelled in the image of such treasonous and kindred creatures as Aaron Burr, Albert Gallatin, Martin van Buren, Polk, Belmont, Pierce, Buchanan, Tilden, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Ku Klux Klan fanatic Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Mellon. Apart from the putative alternative of current Republican pre-candidate Bush, the spread of the common, linear ideology of Mandeville (Mont Pelerin), Adam Smith, and the Luddites of the Cybernetics mafia, is to be understood efficiently in that same way, as but another variation on the same theme of evil.

Now, the recent three decades or so of developments in Europe and the Americas, have brought us to the brink of a situation akin to that which the Welf League’s triumph of globalism brought Fourteenth-Century Europe, that threatened crash of the existing institutions of extended European civilization, into a protracted new dark age, or worse. As the “Information Economy” totters at the brink of something awful, that is the most urgent issue most immediately posed to us all.

Globalization in the name of “New Economy” could never exist except as an ultimately self-doomed Empire of Evil, whose presently, already imminent collapse, could doom us all, if we allowed that fad to be continued. I shall now indicate, summarily, why that is so.

Physical Economy and Cultures

The essential tragedy embedded in the character of any culture, which is based upon practicing an oligarchical conception of human nature upon the greater ration of its subjects, is that of a culture which is, in effect, oriented to relatively zero-technological growth in the mode of production practiced as the quality of employment assigned to the greater mass of the population, as chattel slavery was. As the legacy of ancient Sparta typifies the situation, because the ratio of the, predominantly, economically parasitical ruling oligarchy to its total population, has the inevitable, self-limiting effect, of promoting a stagnant average technological development of its broad population-base; Sparta, like ancient Rome, therefore, represents what it must ultimately show itself to be, a doomed and dying culture, even if that were not otherwise apparent, from superficial factors, from the very outset of its existence.

The Code of Diocletian expresses such a policy of self-doom, as law; just as the axiomatically characteristic features of the notions of Information Society express the same principle of a self-doomed, more or less frankly “Luddite” culture. The efficiency of this principle, is to be witnessed in the doom of Babylon, of ancient Rome, and of the “globalist,” anti-nation-state form of the European feudal system.

This has also become the effect of the changes which emphasize so-called “shareholder value,” in economic and social policy, in the U.S.A., and elsewhere, over the course of the recent thirty-five years. This has been, most emphatically, the case, since the 1971-72 establishment of a floating exchange-rate monetary system, as that was compounded by the barbarous and disastrous ideology and practice, which was introduced under David Rockefeller’s and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s puppet government, the U.S. Carter Administration.[fn_25]

The crucial, underlying principle, is this. Any species of genetically fixed, or equivalent traits, has fixed potential relative population-density, and related demographic characteristics. This condition is imposed upon it by that very characteristic of itself; as being, axiomatically, a species delimited by a characteristically fixed range of behavior. All such sub-human species, whatever their differences otherwise, are implicitly, like Theodore Kaczynski and Al Gore, avowed Luddites in what passes for the equivalent of their political and cultural dispositions. The absolute size of that population of sub-human species, may be variable, and also the life-expectancies and other demographic features; but, those variable limits are determined, and thus bounded, by what may be loosely identified as the ecological conditions under which the species lives, including the effect of the activity of that population upon its ecological conditions of existence.

Thus, once mankind ceases to behave as a representative of the human species, and, instead, behaves as a Luddite—as Theodore Kaczynski degenerated so, as Al Gore continues to avow his political commitment to policies in that direction, as if mankind were merely another higher ape—then, the serious trouble begins. Once our species’ population-levels exceed a mere few millions living individuals, the expansion of the human population of that society has reached a boundary-condition. When that boundary condition is reached, the human species could no longer live as it were just another animal; the species must then rise above animal ways, and begin to live as cognitive, technologically revolutionary man. At whatever level, a society attempts to resume bestial ways, such as the culture of pagan Rome, it will then tend toward converging, as if asymptotically, upon values which are, more or less, its long-term, ecologically determined, upper limits. If it persists in that bestial way, it is threatened with the doom it deserves, the price of preferring a bestial notion of human nature, to that suited to relations among cognitive beings.

Such quasi-asymptotic convergence, is the most common cause of the appearance of either the virtual vanishing of cultures, or prolonged dark ages. The latter alternative is typified, by the effect of approximately a hundred years of the Venice-directed Welf League’s efforts, to maintain a form of globalization, in opposition to the then-threatened emergence of the modern nation-state. The domination of western and central Europe by the Welf League, led, lawfully, into the new dark age of mid-Fourteenth-Century Europe. Such have been the implications of the determined ecological potentials available on this planet, during a period estimated to be about two millions years of regularly recurring ice-ages.

On this account, the distinguishing characteristic of the human species, as a species, is its richly demonstrated capacity to increase its potential relative population-density. This is accomplished by means not available to any other species, except through human intervention into the life of the members of such a species, as if from above.[fn_26] Such increase is brought about through the processes of cognition which set the human species absolutely apart from, and above all other species, whether that increase occurs within the human species as such, or among the plants and animals into whose destiny mankind intervenes. That quality of change in ecological potential, expresses the specific quality of human nature. The governance of human practice by an implied motive consistent with that view of human nature, is the precondition for continued progress in the general welfare of our species as a whole.

The form in which this efficient principle of human nature is expressed, is most readily recognized as the capacity for mankind to generate and implement successive, validated revolutions in applied universal physical principles, and in the correlated development of what are to be recognized as Classical forms of universal principles of artistic composition, principles consistent with the Socratic method of defining truthfulness and justice. This is typified by the combination of scientific and technological progress, as recognized by French Minister Colbert, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew and Henry Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln. It means also the notions of Classical humanist education, which used to be the standard of excellence in our best schools and cultural activities, prior to the changes introduced to mass culture about thirty-five years ago.

As I have repeatedly elaborated the relevant argument, as in the referenced March 31, 2000 item, there are two means by which a civilization can sustain increases in potential relative population-density indefinitely. One is a continuing process of validated discoveries of new universal physical principles. The second, complementary, essential means, is progress in the development and application of universal principles as expressed in the form of methods of Classical artistic composition and performance. That includes the domains of poetry, music, drama, use of literate Classical forms of language, and those forms of plastic arts, in sculpture, painting, and architecture, which express and are governed by the cognitive principles expressed in the form of Platonic ideas. Classical art also includes the study of history, and of the principles of statecraft, from the vantage-point of the development of Classical practice in physical science and art generally.[fn_27]

By these willful means, mankind is enabled to increase man’s power in and over the universe, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area. This occurs not only as application of technological advances in physical practice upon nature, but in changing nature itself to better meet the requirements for our increased potential relative population-density.

This, no oligarchical form of society can continue to do indefinitely; the reasons for this difference, are axiomatic. Thus, the very existence of such forms of society, such as those of ancient Mesopotamia, or ancient Rome, dooms themselves, and those unfortunate persons who live within them, just as the collapse of the Nasdaq will soon wreak sudden and appalling misery among a greater part of persons presently classed, or mistakenly self-esteemed, as among the upper twenty-percent of U.S. family income-brackets—as in Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut, and in Loudoun County, Virginia.

To maintain an increasing potential relative population-density, requires a corresponding physical-economic development of the individual member of the entire population, and of the physical-economic and related practice of that population. This can not be accomplished if the mass of the population is being stupefied, as by the “bread and circuses” methods of manipulation of vox populi, by the Caesars, or by the changes in educational, economic, and mass-entertainment practices which have been introduced, over the course of the recent thirty-five years, here in the U.S.A.

In general, the present labor-force of the U.S. has, in the main, lost much of the intellectual development and physical skills which are indispensable, without which it is not possible to sustain the level of physical-economic standard of living an earlier generation was able to achieve, successfully, thirty years ago! The changes in education and economic policies, including the replacement of retiring teachers by those of much poorer educational and moral qualifications, are important features of this downshift in the quality of the labor-force. The de-industrialization of the employment of the labor-force, a lowered standard of living among industrial employees, the willful, and also even criminal policies of looting our farmers, in the name of globalization and free trade, are also part of this.

The decrease of the percentile of the households representing the upper half of our nation’s total family income, combined with a dependency on credit from abroad, as expressed by a soaring rate of national current account deficit, and by a sky-rocketting flow of credit into U.S. financial markets from foreign sources, expresses a collapse in the well-being and ability to survive, of the population as a whole. These losses are each and all, chiefly, a result of changes introduced, first, in the form of the rock-drug-sex counterculture, the floating exchange-rate monetary system, the rise of the irrationalist cult of what has become known as “ecologism,” and the savage and lunatic wrecking of the U.S. economy under the Carter Administration.

The myth of “information society,” is nothing other than a mass delusion, like the infamous tulip-mania and John Law-style financial bubbles of the past. The notion that “information technology” is “high technology,” is the most pathetic of the expressions of exactly such a culturally, and economically suicidal mass-delusion. The mere acceptance of that term, is in itself proof of the precipitous quality of general intellectual decay among university graduates of the thirty-five-to-fifty-five age-range today.

Sum up that point this way. Imagine the results of the Wall Street, junk-bond takeover of a formerly productive, high-quality manufacturing firm, now renamed Blivets, Inc., whose new management had the firm’s production of physical product reduced savagely, to become, instead, a reseller of slave-labor products imported from abroad, sending former manufacturing operatives out to make a living taking in one another’s laundry, or in related forms of make-work employment in financial and personal services. Now, within the cannibalized firm’s new administration, it has increased greatly the size of the accounting, bookkeeping, sales, and related clerical functions of administration, and increased greatly the sheer quantity of the number of administrative calculations made each day, by use of modern computers as accounting machines. This would then be called an “information economy.” The use of such accounting machines, for such purposes, in such ways, might be called (using one’s hand, in an act of discretion, to cover the sadistic smirk on one’s lips) a new “high-tech industry,” by means of which the old agricultural and industrial economy has been turned into a superseded relic of the past.

If you think Blivets, Inc. typifies the success of a new kind of economy, see a competent psychiatrist immediately, if you can still afford one (after the ongoing turns in the financial markets); but, make certain, that the putative psychiatrist’s personal financial management, does not show him to be one of those lunatics, who has joined in taking over the asylum, a lunatic spreading the very tulip-bubble style in mental illness, from whose effects you need, most urgently, to be liberated.

The crucial measurement to be made in any economy is centered around the following proposition: 1) what percentile of the total labor-force, is engaged in either a) applying new physical principles to increase mankind’s per-capita power over nature, or b) generating the new physical principles and technologies being employed “at the point of production”? 2) What is the rate of net increase of physical output per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area, as being expressed at the point of physical production of basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing? Those factors, situated within the context of the composition of the employment of the entire labor-force, and of the composition of the entire population, are the rule-of-thumb measure of physical-economic performance, to be employed. Do not confuse prices with physical reality; rather, assess the meaning of prices, by subjecting them to the standard of physical reality. Such is the point of view of sane men and women, the point of view from which the lunacy of “Information Economy” is to be assessed rightly by sane accountants.[fn_28]

The Sovereign Nation-State

Another way of stating the same point I have summarized immediately above, would be to say, that all of the economic and related societal models based upon oligarchical principles, are intrinsically entropic models. The risk in using that popularized language of reductionist mathematics, is that the commonplace classroom and related use of terms such as entropy and negative entropy (negentropy) today, carries the burden of certain, unfortunately popularized assumptions, which are not only inflammatory, but are about as scientific as the arguments presented by the prosecution at a typical Seventeenth-Century witch-burning.

While the term, entropy, has a meaningful, and useful place in study of mechanical systems, such as ordinary, mechanical gas-systems, it is clearly not a universal physical principle, and by the standard which was set by Bernhard Riemann for multiply-connected manifolds, has certainly never been experimentally validated by the kind of unique experiment which is required for the adoption of any newly proposed universal physical principle.[fn_29]

The notion of entropy, as this has been proposed by Clausius, Grassmann, et al., is derived mathematically from the application of mechanical axiomatic assumptions, derived from reliance, a priori, on an Ockhamite misconception of Euclidean geometry, for supplying the mathematical interpretation of physical systems.[fn_30] The popularized presumption, that thermodynamical entropy is a universal physical principle, as Clausius was first to suggest, and as Ludwig Boltzmann supplied a more refined mathematical interpretation of gas systems, represents a misinterpretation based upon those same types of arbitrary, a priori axiomatic assumptions. It is the reliance on those unsubstantiated, a priori (e.g., “ivory tower”) axiomatic assumptions, which is the root of currently popularized delusions on the subject of entropy.

At its best, all of the now-standard textbook argument for a notion of universal rather than merely local entropy, is based upon an easily recognized type of fraudulent representation of the relevant evidence, a fraud of the type known as fallacy of composition of argument, as the characteristic feature of Clausius’ wishful misreading of Sadi Carnot’s work.[fn_31] Exactly that fraud, but in an extremely reckless application, supplies the essential premise of Norbert Wiener’s misuse of the term negentropy, in his Cybernetics,[fn_32] and of the systems analysis of John von Neumann.[fn_33]

The particular frauds by Wiener, von Neumann et al., which we have referenced here, fall within the bounds of a common error of the practice of those mathematicians, who seek to define physical systems from a formal-mathematical, aprioristic (“ivory tower”) standpoint, as the late Professor Wassily Leontief once denounced such practices by the Operations Research circles of Tjalling Koopmans. In contrast, competent mathematicians, such as Riemann, have always judged mathematics itself from the geometrical standpoint in physics.[fn_34]

For example, if it is demonstrated that living processes violate the presumed principle of universal entropy, then the physical existence of living systems within the universe, demonstrates that universal entropy is a false principle.[fn_35] Similarly, one can not proceed to define the laws of the universe, by ignoring the existence of the human beings conducting the investigation, i.e., the investigator, and then, having decided upon certain axiomatic presumptions respecting mechanical systems, later presume to interpret living systems solely as mechanical ones, as both Wiener and von Neumann do, and as their followers do.

Indeed, the precedent for the reductionists’ frauds perpetrated by both Wiener and von Neumann, is that childish quality of purely political-factional exercise, Leonhard Euler’s 1761 Letters to a German Princess, a work, modelled, in spirit, genre, and quality, on silly Francesco Algarotti’s notorious Newton for Ladies. Euler, an impassioned member of the German branch of Antonio Conti’s network of salons, wrote this work as an attack on a posthumously published work of Gottfried Leibniz, the Monadology. In this, Euler’s central assertion is, that any non-linear ordering can be reduced to interpretation, from the standpoint of the assumption, that the universe is axiomatically only linear in the infinitesimally small. This nonsense was taken up by Lambert for transcendental functions, and copied by that notorious plagiarist and scamp Augustin Cauchy, for his decortication of the Leibniz calculus by aid of the so-called Cauchy “limit theorem.” The same algebraic tactic, derived from Euler’s hoax, was later applied, successively by the continental British school of Hermite and Lindemann, to supply an Eulerian explication of the transcendental magnitude π—which had already been recognized as such, using geometric methods, by Nicholas of Cusa, in his work launching modern experimental physical science, De Docta Ignorantia.

Russell, and his acolytes Wiener and von Neumann, carried this sleight of hand to an extreme. The doctrines of so-called information theory, systems analysis, and artificial intelligence, each and all depend absolutely on such charades. Wiener’s swindle, is to simply ignore the existence of cognition, and baldly assert an interpretation of ideas, including universal physical principles, as a mere epiphenomenon of statistical methods. Von Neumann does the same. All of so-called information theory, systems analysis, and artificial intelligence dogma, rests crucially upon the presumption that non-linear processes can be so fully explained in such ways, that nothing else need be taken into account. Theirs is the “ivory tower” method carried to a lunatic extreme.

Just as the principled existence of living processes must be included, to define the physical universe as a whole, the ecological behavior of the human species violates every attempt to fit human existence within the bounds of the empirical evidence bearing upon the characteristic behavior of inferior living species. Man’s increasing mastery of nature, through willful application of validated discoveries of universal principle, overturns the definition of the axiomatics of any physical space-time manifold which rests upon considerations, the which exclude consideration of the distinctive characteristics of human cognitive action, within and upon the universe at large. Thus, just as the universe as a whole is defined by included consideration of the existence of living processes in that universe, so, both the principle of living processes, and of the universe as a whole, can not be competently defined, without taking into account the efficient existence of the human cognitive principle, that within the domain of living processes considered in their universality.

In Riemann, following Gauss in this matter, the characteristic feature of any multiply-connected manifold, is its physical space-time curvature, as that may be experimentally determined for the entire phase-space under consideration. Thus, as the founder of modern experimental physical science, Nicholas of Cusa, specified, mathematics must evolve, as physics requires this change. As the successive work of Abraham Kästner, his student Carl Gauss, and Gauss’s and Dirichlet’s student Riemann, shows, it is in the domain of geometry, not arithmetic, that the paradoxes of number must be comprehended, and it is in experimental physics, that the meaning of the paradoxes of geometry, is to be found. These paradoxes must, ultimately, take into account the efficient presence of both living and cognitive processes within the physical universe as a whole.

When mankind validates the discovery of any universal physical principle, and then acts to apply that principle to the universe in a manner different than has been done before, a new, expanded quality of mathematical-physical phase-space, has been defined for the system which includes man’s interaction with the universe as a whole. As I have repeatedly elaborated this point in locations published earlier,[fn_36] the only source of mankind’s anti-entropic increase of our species’ power in and over the universe, per capita, and per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area, is the application of those new technologies which are derived from an expanding array of validated universal physical principles.

As I have also, similarly, emphasized, the ability of the human species—i.e., society—to transform individual such discoveries of physical principle into social practice, depends upon an elementary form of action peculiar to those sovereign, individual’s cognitive processes, by means of which, ontological paradoxes of existing knowledge of the physical realm are resolved, that in the form of validatably universal physical principles.

The only way in which such individual cognitive actions, can be made known to other persons, is the replication of the same cognitive experience, as it were an act of original such discovery, within the cognitive processes of another person.[fn_37] From such pairwise cognitive relations, there arises the notion of ideas and of social relations, upon which the capability of developing those forms of cooperation depends, through which forms validatable discoveries of universal principle may be transmitted in society, that to the effect of increasing society’s power over nature, as measurable per capita and per square kilometer.

Those forms of cognitive cooperation are to be recognized in their primary form, as the validated principles of Classical artistic composition, in the sense of the Classical Greek legacy of Leibniz, J.S. Bach, Aeschylus, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, and Friedrich Schiller. It is through the study of history, as the study of the combined impact of scientific and artistic progress, in the Classical sense, upon the institutions and conditions of life of nations, that a rigorous meaning of a science of history is defined. From that, in turn, we must derive a competent notion of the natural principles of law and other statecraft. Thus, the combined manifold of Classical scientific and Classical artistic principles, must be taken into account, as a single, evolving, multiply-connected manifold. A science of physical economy depends upon these combined considerations; no other notion of economy could be a competent one.

Although investigations in this direction were already embodied, or implied, in Gottfried Leibniz’s 1671-1716 founding of the branch of physical science known as physical economy, it was my attention to this matter of cognitive cooperation, as part of my initial refutation of Wiener’s “information theory,” which formed the kernel of my own original discoveries in the field of economics. It was my application of the principle introduced by Riemann, to the definition of multiply-connected manifolds, which transformed my original discoveries into a general method for an applicable form of theoretical physical economy.[fn_38]

The included benefit of my discoveries, a matter of essential relevance to our topic in this present publication, was a fresh view of the functional characteristics of a science-driver mode of national economy. By looking at the history of the modern sovereign form of nation-state, since its founding during the Fifteenth Century, and by contrasting the principled features of that form of national economy with the principled features of notable earlier forms of society, I was enabled to throw important new light on the reasons a nation-state economy is indispensable for maintaining even the existing levels and quality of world-population.

From this vantage-point, it was but another important step to show, that a) the present world system, as it has developed from the watershed-event of the 1971 inauguration of a floating-exchange-rate monetary system, has been an implicitly doomed, systemic failure from the outset, and b) that, without the protectionist model of sovereign nation-state economy, as the dominant feature of the world’s economy, the world as a whole must be careening presently toward descent into a generalized new dark age, analogous to the catastrophic collapse of economy, population, and conditions of individual and national life, during the middle of Europe’s Fourteenth Century. In that, there was nothing in my own results which came to conclusions contrary to the earlier work of such leading economists as Leibniz, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew and Henry Carey, and Friedrich List, and the work of the American System economists generally. I qualify as a true Clay-Carey-Lincoln Whig on this account, with or without considering the important novelty of my special contributions on these matters.

Those introductory observations on the issues implied by the term entropy, lead us to the following crucial points respecting a) the role of capital factors, and, b) the related, protectionist functions of the nation-state, in rescuing this planet from that now looming threat of a new dark age portended by the oncoming collapse of the world’s present financial and monetary systems.

To this effect: the existence of modern economy depends upon three types of prior capital investment: a) investment in the development of basic economic infrastructure of the relevant land-area and related areas as a whole; b) investment in the immediate preconditions of agriculture and industry as such; c) investment, most notably in the forms of organization of education and health care, and of protected minimum family-household income-levels, in the development of the existing and future labor-force. All three such notions of capital investments, are excluded, on principle, from any economic models devised according to the notions of “free trade” and kindred forms of superstitions.

To understand the impassioned qualities of objections to my argument, so often emitted from the ranks of the rabid followers of Mandeville, Locke, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Bentham, Malthus, and John Stuart Mill, as in encounters with any troublesome mental case, one must look into the epistemological interior of the mind-set of such deluded persons.

Each and all of those who are noted for their attempted, systematic defense of free-trade and related delusions, start from a pathological notion of individual human nature as such. Typical are the arguments of Galileo’s mathematics pupil, Thomas Hobbes, of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Quesnay, David Hume, Adam Smith, et al. The so-called Robinson Crusoe “model” employed by von Neumann and Morgenstern, and many other earlier sophists in the field, typifies that pathology. Each begins with the isolated individual qua individual, and seeks to explain that individual’s individual and social behavior, that entirely within the bounds of the passions which are attributed to such individuals, each of them as being fixed elements of an axiomatic, and essentially inalterable mind-set.

Typical, is the resort of fugitive ex-empiricist turned neo-Aristotelean, Immanuel Kant, in the mechanistic logic of his Dialectic of Practical Reason:[fn_39] the notion of the negation of the negation. According to Kant, or, one might say, pure Kant, the pack of populari—vox populi—applies aversive pressure to the individual, who, in response, perceives the inflicted pain as a proper cause for pleasure in relief from such hostile circumstances, and adopts the demanded response as an integral, positive part of his ethic. Dr. Sigmund Freud had a different name for this process of perversion by inversion; the Tavistock Clinic would prefer the usage “aversive behavioral modification,” or, perhaps the creation of Orwellian democratic utopias through mass brainwashing. On this account, Heinrich Heine was most insightfully correct about the Romantic School, and about the wicked legacy of Kant for the future Germans.

Thereafter, the apostles of democracy, who, like Kant, turn out to be the assassins of Socrates, also turn out to be the authors of murderous modern tyrannies masked as vox populi, or, simply, as in the ancient Colosseum, as a Romantic’s lynch-mob. It is the individual person, so misconceived as, intrinsically, a feral individual, naturally a wild wolf-boy, which is the axiom underlying free-trade and kindred popular delusions.

In reality, the newborn infant is born as a spark of socially determined cognitive actuality. Take away appropriate forms of family nurture, and you make that individual into a beast-like creature, a wild dog, ready to turn wolf, or worse. Yet, even the developed cognitive potential of the individual, can not function to produce social effects of a human quality, unless that person enjoys intellectual relations which are of a specifically cognitive quality, with other individuals. The ability of such pair-wise assemblies of individualities, to function as a social process, depends upon their development, and the development of the conditions in which they live and act upon the world around them.

What else could that mean, but that the characteristic feature of successful forms of human existence, is located essentially in the kinds of social relations subsumed by those pair-wise modes of cognitive relations.

Similarly, for society to act effectively on behalf of its own physical existence, it must not only cooperate according to the rule of cognitive forms of social relations, but it must develop the preconditions of family life, of production, and of the general land-area, which are prerequisites of producing the needed conditions of production of the social and individual conditions of life. Indeed, the very existence of the individual qua individual, is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of cultural transmission, essentially the cognitive transmission of ideas, a transmission, situated within the simultaneity of temporal eternity, whose net result is the production of the individual personality and of the society in which that individual participates.

Thus, a civilized form of society must ensure to the household, a physical and related condition of life needed for the supply of the relevant quality of productive labor-force. A civilized form of society must supply the preconditions of production, and also the basic economic infrastructure, upon which both production and the productive labor-force depend. To accomplish this, society must spend capital costs before those costs are fully reflected, as consumed, in the current costs of production. It must spend for the development of the adult individual, over the decades of childhood and adolescent development of that individual; this, too, appears as a current capital investment for the continuation and improvement of future production of wealth. It is the same for improvement and maintenance of the land-area as a whole.

There exists no possible way, in which frictional, percussive interactions among individuals in current society, could determine what the present payments must be, to ensure the continued, future, successful existence of that society and its members. Indeed, on this point, all of the apostles of free trade, permissive licentiousness, and laissez-faire, offer no rational justification for their confidence in the policy they propose. They are all to be considered either simply swindlers, or lunatics, in their adopted rhetoric on this point. Similarly, Wiener proposes a heuristic principle of quasi-random, statistical predeterminism, just as Quesnay imitates the Bogomils, in proposing the mystical doctrine, that some mysteriously diabolical essence of the Elect landlord secretes the wealth gathered for his benefit, that by those human cattle known as serfs.

In a rational society, such as that predescribed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the fixing of prices and tariffs, to ensure that the capital costs of future life and production are met out of current output, defines what Hamilton defines as the American System of political-economy. That demands a certain quality of monetary and banking system, a matching system of national and other credit, certain determinations of rates of taxation and their fair application, and a general disposition for creating an environment in which fair trade dictates prices, and tariffs protect the development of that agriculture and those industries on which the future general welfare of the republic and its people depend.

The only kind of institution which can provide these protective measures on behalf of the national security and general welfare of its people, is the sovereign nation-state republic, a kind of institution which first appeared in the monarchy of France’s Louis XI, and, thereafter, the English monarchy of Henry VII. As I have elaborated this point, repeatedly, in locations published earlier, the success of Venice’s financier oligarchy, in arranging the defeat of the League of Cambrai, led to conditions in Europe in which the great initiatives of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance were significantly, although not entirely, aborted. Thus, Europe’s republicans resorted to a project for establishing pioneering forms of true republics in the American colonies, with the intent that the success of these would lead to outflanking of the oligarchical parties still relatively hegemonic in old Europe. On this account, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, and the revivals of the original intent of our republic by Monroe, Quincy Adams, and, especially, Lincoln, repeatedly demonstrated the superiority of the American model of sovereign nation-state republic, over that of any other form of institution yet conceived in practice.

In accounting for that success of the U.S. model, during those former, happier times of its existence, it is the principle of the sovereign nation-state, and its inhering, protectionist economic policies, which accounted for the way in which the U.S. rose, under the Lincoln-Carey reforms of 1861-1876, to emerge as the most technologically advanced, leading nation-state power in the world, by the time of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Every notable period of our national economic achievement since that time, has been predicated upon imitations of that 1861-1876 model, the model most copied, beginning 1876, in Russia, Germany, Japan, and many other Nineteenth-Century nations of both the Americas and Eurasia. It was the model upon which President Franklin Roosevelt drew, to pull the nation up out of the Wilson-Coolidge-Mellon Great Depression, and through World War II. It was the model which President Kennedy invoked, up to the time his life was cut short. It is the only model of reference, still, which could bring the world back from the brink of a now-looming new dark age.

To accomplish that, we must scrap every significant change in U.S.A. policy which has been instituted since 1971. In that process, we must first rid ourselves of the suicidal impulse known as an “Information Society.”

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Gore Pal Calls for Jihad Against Science

Bill Joy, chief scientist at Silicon Valley’s Sun Microsystems, borrowed a page from H.G. Wells in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine, the pop-cult cybernetics journal of Royal Dutch Shell Corp.’s Global Business Network.

Warning that the next generation of scientific discoveries in the fields of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and robotics spell doom for mankind, Joy called for suppression of scientific work in these areas, and for the creation of a world science police, to ensure that scientists, in the next decades, do not produce “thinking machines” that replace human beings, and might eventually exterminate the human race:

The twenty-first century technologies—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)—are so powerful, that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. . . . I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, one to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Joy specifically called for the revival of Pugwash, the Bertrand Russell-Leo Szilard world government forum, to take the lead in the suppression of GNR research.

Joy’s insane underlying axiomatic assumption, which he shares with the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, is that of the original Cybernetics Group of the 1940s and ’50s: Man is nothing more than a complex machine, devoid of any divine qualities. Human creativity is a purely mechanical process that will, eventually, be replicated by “smart” computers and robots, capable of superior thinking and, unlike human beings, capable of living forever.

Joy’s Wired magazine propaganda piece in support of putting a straitjacket on science, in order to ward off some imagined, sci-fi future holocaust, has been given broad coverage in the Washington Post. Joy is part of the Silicon Valley friends of Al Gore.

—Jeffrey Steinberg [back to text]

The Unabomber Speaks, and Silicon Valley Listens

In his Wired magazine article, Bill Joy referenced the following citation from the Unabomber Manifesto, which appeared in Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. While condemning Ted Kaczynski’s terrorist acts, Joy wholeheartedly endorsed the sections of the Manifesto published below.

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. . . .

On the other hand, it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.

Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. [back to text]