October 13, 2004

ON STRATEGIC THINKING

Moths, Mice, and Men

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article by Mr. LaRouche was first published in EIR, Vol. 31, No. 42, October 29, 2004.

The urgency of the following report is defined by the fact that I am relatively unique on this planet, currently, in my capacity to provide the following, crucially needed assessment of the most crucially determining features of present world situation. The essential nature of that evidence fully supporting my claims to relatively unique competence on this account, will be made sufficiently, if succinctly clear in the following, compact report.

I will only add the prefatory observation, that the writing of this advisory on current strategic issues is prompted by a report given to me on certain specific matters reported by a European associate earlier today.

To begin at the beginning, the most fundamental of the failures of strategic thinking among even the world’s leading specialists today, is to be recognized as the result of overlooking what ought to be the most obvious of the distinctions separating the human mind from the genetically determined perception of the world among lower species such as moths and mice.

A solitary bee finds its way to fly to the targetted type of flower by reading the electromagnetic radiations of a specific type of molecule which has been caught in the relevant cavities of its body. It follows an optimal choice of search pattern not much unlike that used by a World War I or II spying aircraft or anti-submarine task-force, but along a course which is defined by increasing density of encounters with the “desired” type of molecule.

A mouse, or a cat, relies on sensory organs which have a different structure than those of human beings. Yet, all three types of cases—bee, mouse, or man, inhabiting the same vicinity—are each engaged in a successful mode of employment of sense-perception inhering in its species. The environment of each and all may be the same environment, but the reality which the creature’s nervous system adduces from the same environment, differs in ways largely determined by the specific differences in the composition of their respective sensory systems. All are in the same universe; yet, each sees that universe in a different way: and, yet, mentally, none of their respective perceptions of that universe is the same in effect.

That illustrates a crucial point which must be taken into account to understand how and why even otherwise reliable and gifted strategic analysts will overlook the kinds of discoveries which this report is designed to introduce to the current practice of U.S. strategic assessments of the currently onrushing global situation.

Knowing vs. Perception

As I have often reported this, my own first inkling of the importance of the kind of fact I have just illustrated, came as a reaction against the doctrine with which I was confronted on the first day of my exposure to a secondary course in Plane Geometry. My mind refused to accept the notion of definitions, axioms, and postulates which were central to that notion of geometry, and were also more or less the same aprioristic assumptions, each central, and rejected by me, in every course in mathematics to which I was exposed in school, university, and general textbook instruction thereafter.

The idea that a universal principle could exist independently of the physical reality expressed as perceived forms, proved to be my correct rejection of what I encountered at first encounter with the teachings of secondary plane geometry, and in related matter thereafter. My commitments to a notion of a physical geometry, in opposition to a formal one, ultimately led me, with much help from Leibniz, to my original, 1948-53, discoveries in the science of physical economy.

Admittedly, the greater portion of what I have discovered on that account, has represented matters of rediscovery of what I was to learn from, chiefly, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, as also Nicholas of Cusa and Kepler, and, through them, the Pythagoreans and Plato before them. However, within all that I have rediscovered in that way, there is a certain small core which is, to be the best of my present knowledge, uniquely my own.

Within that portion of this body of acquired knowledge which is my own original work, the notable distinction of my work is chiefly in the field of an applied science of physical economy. Nonetheless, these discoveries have depended upon my reliance upon a unique quality of connection between principles of strictly Classical artistic composition and principles of physical science: my solution for what Britain’s C.P. Snow famously presented as the “two cultures” paradox of modern higher education.

My point here, is that the principle of what Kant foolishly, and fanatically libels as “synthetic judgment” (i.e., hypothesis), or noësis, which is the process of generation of experimentally provable qualities of universal physical principles, is the same quality of individual’s mental activity which is expressed by valid principles of Classical artistic composition in plastic and non-plastic art-forms (as absolutely opposed to Romantic, Modernist, Post-Modernist diversions). In the former, the noëtic powers of the individual mind are applied to the individual’s relationship to nature itself; in the latter, the same quality of individual cognitive powers is applied by the individual mind to the social processes of cooperation by means of which society is enabled to apply discovered physical principles effectively, as in the case of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s non-British, American System of political-economy.

The significance of this principle of physical economy which I have just broadly described, is that this defines the specific quality of essential superiority of man over ape. Were man an ape, as Friedrich Engels claimed himself to be, never more than several millions of the human species would have even existed at one time on this planet. Man repeatedly changes his species, in effect, first, by making discoveries of universal physical principle, and, second, by those methods, such as music, poetry, and drama, through which society develops those systems of cooperation which are essential to successful application of discovered physical principles through which man’s potential relative population-density is increased.

Thus, man comes to recognize the difference between an object which he calls a “rock,” and a similar, or identical object called an “ore.” Only a human individual could make this quality of distinction.

Thus, the relatively most elementary considerations of the progress of society in determining the conditions of individual human life, show us that different species perceive the same environment in different ways, but, we know, as man, that that environment of each and all of them is the same environment. Science shows us that man’s sense-perceptions do not supply us a direct representation of the real universe we are experiencing. As the Apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13 echoes Plato on this point, we perceive as in a mirror, darkly. The effect of universal physical principles is undeniable to sane men and women, but those principles themselves are mental objects, not sensory objects, objects existing outside the powers of mere sense-perception.

The foregoing, these discovered principles, improve our minds, qualitatively, such that we perceive reality differently than minds of less developed cultures. Animals have specifically determined perceptual capacities. Mankind is able to transform its perception of the universe presented to its relevant biological powers.

Thus, the followers of Cusa, Kepler, and Leibniz, such as Gauss and Riemann, defined mathematical physics in terms of what was called “the complex domain.” In this view of experience, the sometimes so-called “real” component of the mathematical function corresponds to sense-perception, whereas what some name the “imaginary” component refers to the role of those unseen universal physical principles. It is the ability to see the principle (the mind-object) as primary, and the so-called “real” (the sense-object) as the mere shadow of reality, which is the distinction of the truly civilized individual mind. As Plato emphasized, perception pertains to the shadows of the impact of unseen, but efficient universal principles upon our sense-perceptual apparatus.

An understanding of the deeper implications of this feature of the physical domain of Riemannian physical geometry, sets the stage for an understanding of the kinds of strategic factors underlying and determining the presently onrushing threat of our planet’s self-inflicted plunge into a new, generations-long period of a “new dark age.”

What I Came To Know

My first sense of what was about to happen to our republic, came on the evening we, in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II, had received word of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. I heard the relevant message on the significance of that death, first, from my own lips.

A group of GIs came up to me, asking: Will you meet with us to discuss something this evening? I had nodded assent and suggested a location. Their question was: “What do you think the President’s death means?” My reply was that I did not know, but that I was greatly worried by the replacement of a great President by such a little man. When I returned to the U.S. about 14 months later, the U.S. was changing from the U.S.A. I had known before and during the war years under Roosevelt. As I was enabled, later, to pinpoint the change exactly, the day after the President had died, the U.S. had turned back to the right, as typified by Allen Dulles’ bringing a section of the Nazi SS apparatus into what became that Nazi element of the Gladio secret system in Italy, which assassinated Italy’s former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and represents a part of the still-existing Nazi international apparatus in Spain, Mexico, France, Italy, and elsewhere in the world today.

It is often that, in hearing what we ourselves utter, we first come to recognize a concept which we had already developed up to the threshold of recognizing that concept by some definite name. (The implied concept of science here is typified by the use of the German term Geistesmasse by, first, Herbart, and then Riemann. The Riemannian concept, as developed by him in treating the subject of Abelian functions, must be contrasted with the defective attempt at approximation of the notion of Gestalt by Wolfgang Köhler.)

Since my 1946-48 experience of my growing resistance to that right-wing turn toward what is called today the “military utopian” (e.g., neo-fascist) faction of the Americas and Europe, I have maintained a deep commitment to defending civilization against that relic of the Nazi past in our midst today. That impassioned commitment led me to coming to know as much as what I know of such matters today.

In that time, I already knew that behind the Nazis were certain powerful family interests, the same set of financial-oligarchical interests behind the 1922-45 wave of fascist insurgencies, and lodged in relevant right-wing financier and associated circles of the U.S.A., Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere, still today. In the course of time, especially after my 1983-84 receipt of declassified U.S. intelligence reports on the development of the 1935-45 Nazi threat to the U.S.A. from Mexico and elsewhere, I now know at least the hard core of the history of fascism from proto-Hitler, Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada’s anti-Semitic and related crimes, to the present day. I know the essential features of the interconnected internal and external threat to our Federal constitutional republic today.

Naturally, I am by no means alone among the many, but still relatively few, who share this classification of knowledge. However, my scientific qualifications equip me with the power to develop crucial insights into certain aspects of what are, in fact, those chief internal and foreign threats to our republic of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a more conspicuously visible reflection. I do not know how much Cheney actually knows of his own role, or even of exactly who is really behind him. If President George W. Bush is essentially Cheney’s puppet, Cheney himself is a puppet on a slightly higher echelon of power; but, Cheney himself probably shuddered in stark fear at discovering what his secret masters had done on that fateful day, Sept. 11, 2001, and is probably shuddering still, to the present moment. Since then, to the present day, that recurring, haunted man’s shudder, is probably the most honest thing about the otherwise essentially dishonest Cheney.

The essence of our republic’s most urgent counter-intelligence problem is to understand the controlling motivation not of Cheney, but of those ominous forces which control him, and which he himself (quite visibly at times) devoutly fears. Cheney is a crude, larcenous bully, comparable to an organized-crime thug, a mere tool of the type that the higher-ranking financier circles caused to be eliminated on a whim. What Cheney thinks is of no more than third-rate importance; any professionally trained investigators could discover the essentials of that. It is what Cheney’s actual masters think which ought to be our concern. This latter concern takes us now into the highest realm of strategic studies and thought.

This is where my particular specialty in scientific thinking comes into play in an essential way.

How Men Perceive

Contrary to reductionists such as Euclid and Descartes, human knowledge is not limited to the fishbowl boundaries of a fixed set of allegedly self-evident, a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates. Rather, as Riemann’s work provides the keys to the application of this to the domain of mathematical physics, and also to a science of physical economy, it is necessary to discard all a priori notions of definitions, axioms, and postulates, and to replace these with nothing but experimentally proven discoveries of hypotheses which we then term “universal physical principles.” These are not limited to the principles of physical science so-called, but also include those comparable principles of Classical artistic composition which make society, as well as nature, comprehensible for our efficient practice.

However, not all of those mental objects which might be regarded as principles are also true. That is a subject-matter in itself. It is sufficient here, to put the emphasis on one issue, the issue implicitly posed by the second part of the Prometheus Trilogy, Prometheus Bound, of Aeschylus. In this, the immortal Prometheus is condemned to eternal torture by the relevant financier-oligarch, Zeus, for the alleged crime of having taught human beings the use of fire. Think of that legendary criminal Zeus as a Doge of Venice, the chief criminal of a gang of usurious financial oligarchs, a gang of ancient organized-crime families.

Since no later than Solon of Athens, European civilization has sought to establish true republics, in which the creative powers of all persons are developed to bring about those changes enshrined in the Preamble of our own Federal Constitution: perfect sovereignty of the republic; promotion of the general welfare of all of the people; and, security of the posterity in the enjoyment of the benefits contributed by their predecessors.

The contrary faction within the history of European cultures is typified by the evil oligarchy of Zeus’s Olympus. The great struggle in all cultures, most emphatically European culture since it first bloomed in the shadows of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, has been to free humanity from governments under which the majority of the population is degraded to the status of human cattle, such as the herded human cattle of Quesnay’s code of “laissez-faire” and Adam Smith’s “free trade,” or the hunted cattle of Brzezinski crony Samuel P. Huntington’s target, Islam. The collateral form of the oppressor of mankind has been the reigning oligarchy. Since ancient imperial Rome, the leading expression of that abomination known as financier-oligarchy has been Venice and Venice’s clone and successor, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of predatory usury. Among the latter, neo-Venetian Liberals, the most feared and hated adversary of financier-oligarchical power, has been the American System of political-economy as associated with the work of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the latter the foe of the treasonous Aaron Burr, of the Bank of Manhattan, who was himself an intelligence asset of the British Foreign Office secret committee head Jeremy Bentham.

When all of Western and Central Continental Europe, fell under the control of fascist tyrannies, during 1922-45, it was the U.S.A. of President Franklin Roosevelt, the Roosevelt who had freed the U.S. from the fascist danger inherent in a Hoover re-election, which provided the crucial margin needed for rescue of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the world in general from global fascist tyranny. It was Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods design, based upon the Hamiltonian tradition, which enabled the U.S.A. to organize the recovery of ruined Continental Europe, and led the U.S. to its highest point of achievement as a producer nation, during the two postwar decades.

What has happened, is that the same financier-oligarchy, the so-called Synarchist International, which had launched the fascist movements in Continental Europe, and in Mexico, survived the defeat of Hitler almost intact in its financial power. The so-called “right-wing” turn in U.S. policy which came to the surface on the day after FDR’s death, has now reached the point it has destroyed the role of the U.S. as a producer power, over the recent four decades, and is now moving, in concert with its financier-oligarchical allies in Europe, to launch a new effort to wipe even the memory of the existence of the U.S.A. from the pages of history.

When we understand this, and what it means in practice, there is no real mystery about the trends being unleashed on this planet at this time. Were [George W.] Bush to be re-elected, new wars would occur, such as attacks upon Syria or Iran, perhaps even before Nov. 2, 2004, which would make the Nov. 2 election more or less irrelevant, and would go on to ensure the plunge of the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age, during which the level of the Earth’s population would drop to about one-sixth, or less, of today’s.

I know of a series of measures, now deeply embedded in the policy-shaping structures of the U.S.A., Europe, and elsewhere, which have prepared such a monstrous outcome for humanity now.

1. Apart from the seizure of power by the so-called “utopian” faction at the point of FDR’s death, the most significant long-term factor in the destruction of civilized culture of the U.S.A., Europe, et al., has been the pernicious countercultural program of the fascistic Congress for Cultural Freedom, the pioneer in the cultural decay which erupted in such forms as the “rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture” of the middle to late 1960s. The goal of this Congress for Cultural Freedom, better named the pro-Nietzschean (e.g., existentialist) Congress for Cultural Fascism, was the uprooting of the European Classical Humanist culture upon which the very existence of the American Revolution had depended.

2. The plunging of the U.S.A. into a 1964-72 hopeless quagmire in Indo-China, lured the U.S.A. and others into a replay of the asymmetric folly of the Korean War from which President Eisenhower and others had extracted us, and prepared the way for the Brzezinski-led adventure in Afghanistan (“the underbelly of the Soviet Union”) which unleashed the now-burgeoning druglord rampage of Central and South Eurasia today, including the Anglo-American launching of the career of Osama bin Laden during the Vice Presidency of George H. W. Bush and Oliver North.

3. The destruction of the economies of Western and Central Europe through the treaty agreements dictated to a united Germany by Thatcher, Mitterrand, Bush, et al.

4. The destruction of the U.S. economy at home through “deregulation,” “free trade,” and “globalization.”

5. The destruction, under Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, of the solvency of the world’s present banking system through the hyperinflationary virus of financial derivatives.

But, those are only some of the more significant included actions responsible for the present threat to global civilization.

Prior to 1971-72, the principal factors of rot introduced to the world system were the post-FDR launching of the “utopian” right-wing, with its included leftover Nazi assets, and the role of the cultural degeneracy promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The launching of the rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture is to be seen, like the launching of the U.S. official war in Indo-China, as essentially an outgrowth of effect of the moral decadence propagated through the “Congress for Cultural Fascism.” Now, turn to crucial developments since I came onstage in an increasingly significant political role internationally.

Why the Oligarchy Fears Me

Take the following series of developments. Then, from my personal role in these developments, and the reaction to them by the relevant right-wing financier-oligarchy, observe the emergence of a pattern of reactions by those enemies which define the global strategic threat to all humanity which those right-wing forces behind Cheney et al. represent for the human species for generations yet to come.

1. When President Richard Nixon collapsed the Bretton Woods monetary system, on Aug. 15-16, 1971, he also confirmed my outstanding long-range economic forecast of the preceding decade: That, if the corrupting tendencies associated with the influence of Arthur Burns’ role during the 1950s, were continued into the mid-1960s, the second half of the 1960s would see a series of critical monetary crises, leading toward a break-up of the existing Bretton Woods monetary system. All other leading economists had denied this as even a possibility; many had ridiculed me for suggesting it. When it happened, I rightly denounced the principal figures of the economic professions as “quackademics,” and challenged them to debate the evidence on which I based that charge against them. They chose a champion to meet me in debate, Professor Abba Lerner. I won the public debate, hands down, but, as the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Professor Sidney Hook insisted: Since I had thus proven an effective adversary, I would be treated with silence, or simply ridiculed.

Why should they have been so terrified of me?

2. During the middle 1970s, I was engaged in a) forecasting the epidemiological effects of 1971-72 monetary policies on the Sahel and other vulnerable regions; b) working for Arab-Israeli peace; and, c) launching an effort which resulted in the adoption of my proposal for a “just new world economic order” by the August 1976 Non-Aligned Nations Conference at Colombo, Sri Lanka.

It became clear, later, that what I was proposing was directly counter to Henry A. Kissinger’s NSSM-200, under which the mineral and other strategically crucial raw materials of the world would be effectively seized by a concert of U.S.-led potencies, using measures deployed to prevent existing indigenous populations (e.g., of Africa) from consuming those materials either by technological progress, or simply maintaining present levels of populations. [See Documentation.]

They were terrified of my role to contrary effect, lest what I was proposing might catch fire with broader forces.

3. In 1976, I discovered documentary evidence of the commitment of Trilateral Commission associates of Zbigniew Brzezinski, such as James R. Schlesinger, to revive the Committee for the Present Danger, including nuclear-confrontation adventures with the Soviet Union. This I exposed on national TV during October 1976. Immediately following, I pursued the matter of devising alternatives to the existing nuclear strategic posture of the U.S.A.; this led to my Summer 1979 proposal for what later became known as SDI. This latter was later taken up for study by the Reagan Administration, involving my back-channel discussion, on behalf of the Administration, with the Soviet government. This proposal was presented by President Reagan on March 23, 1983.

This proposal of SDI, based on “new physical principles,” was considered anathema by the right-wing in the U.S., as typified by the Heritage Foundation’s expressed personal hatred of me, and led to an open Soviet demand for my elimination during the months preceding Oct. 6-7, 1986.

What is under way presently, is, as various sources emphasized, a four-way system of bargaining over control of the principal raw materials of the world, among the U.S.A., Western and Central Europe, Russia, and China. This involves the raw materials (minerals, including oil) of South America, Africa, Northern and Southwestern Asia, and China. There is an emerging bloc between Western Continental Europe and Russia, a distinct role by China, and the U.S. faction.

Two Conclusions

Faced with considerations of the sort I have indicated here, most people, including many in privileged positions, would either deny that such policies are afoot as leading policies, or would, on the other hand, insist that such ambitions will be successful. Both of those assumptions are false. This can be best understood from the standpoint with which I began this report.

For the ingenuous true believer, the motives of powerful forces must be explained in “common sense” terms, treating existing institutions and traditions as, more or less, both self-evident truisms about institutions and the force of popular opinion. It does not occur to them that virtually every leading bank of the world is currently bankrupt, and without the aid of FDR-style measures, hopelessly so. “But, that’s my money,” the credulous fellow shrieks! “They will never let it happen!” another shouts! “Nobody will ever believe you!” the most irrational of those hysterics responds.

To understand how another responds to a change in his environment, you must first recognize the way in which his special set of adopted ways of perceiving reality shape his reaction to stimuli. The usually good strategic thinker, thinks in terms of the rules of the game defined by the kinds of institutions taken into account; that strategic thinker fails, usually, only when he blinds himself to the way in which a different kind of institution perceives that same reality.

Among lower forms of life, it is biological heredity which determines how perception is shaped into ideas for practice. Among human beings, it is different. Animals can not change their heredity; with humans, cultural evolution, and cultural differentiation, are determining.

The fatal error of those who think that four-way partition of control of raw-material resources can succeed in superseding the existing financial-economic order, is that they refuse to see the inevitable doom which is ensured by what they foresee as their intended success. That is, for example, the terrible mistake currently adopted by President Putin’s Russia, to say nothing of the rest of Europe and the U.S.A. itself.

But, nonetheless, be cheerful. At least one among us understands what this is all about.