August 23, 2006

SCIENCE: THE ESSENCE OF ECONOMICS

How the Liberals Tried
To Make Engels’ Monkey Into a Man

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 33 No. 35–36, September 1, 2006, pp. 28-39.

Foreword: Engels and the British Myth of Karl Marx

One of the most striking of the direct insights into the continuing, inherent, systemic incompetence of Anglo-Dutch Liberal approaches to economy, is provided by examining the thinly disguised, anti-American leaning of a manufacturer whose income came chiefly from English production of slave-produced cotton. His name was, Frederick Engels.

During the relevant part of the 1870s, Engels took the occasion to express his customary prejudice against the channels through which U.S. influence contributed to the improved social and economic policies of Bismarck’s Germany. Engels’ lurch, was published, most notably, by nominally Marxist circles, under the rubric of Anti-Dühring. This piece of propaganda was directed by Engels against, implicitly, not only the German-American economist Frederick List, but, also against the world’s leading living economist of the 1870s, the U.S.A.’s Henry C. Carey.[fn_1] This connection to Carey is not identified explicitly in that published piece; however, the targeting of Carey was readily recognized by those circles against whom the literary tract was directed.

The particular attack to which I refer here, occurred in the context of Carey’s connections to the role of the German philosopher Eugen Dühring, the Dühring who was among the notable political factors in discussions leading into the Bismarck government’s adoption of essential features of the economic and social policy of the American System of political-economy for Germany. Engels’ tendentious prose for that occasion, chose Dühring as the featured, named target of his rage against the American influence behind the Bismarck reforms. The principal, actual target of the attack was not Dühring, but the world’s leading economist of that time, the Carey who was also the principal U.S. figure participating in the U.S. advice to Germany on the Bismarck economic reforms.

This piece by Engels was perhaps the most widely circulated of several published, related polemics referencing that same general topical area. The subject of the piece was not the knock of the fictional “monkey’s paw”; but part of a continuing series of so-called “scientific” writings by Engels, in the course of which he directly, in one case, or implicitly, expressed his proudly arrogant, and also ridiculously ignorant display of what he, on one occasion, described as his own, ape-like, “opposable thumb.”

Still today, the corrupting influence of the anti-Americanism which has been spread in western and central Europe, notably, during approximately the recent decade and a half, coincides with the failure of continental Europeans, generally, to grasp the continuing, unique, strategic historical importance, for the world at large, of the original founding and continued role of the U.S. constitutional republic.

While Engels’ piece referenced here is particularly egregious, we must take into account, that, still today, we frequently meet scientifically incompetent formulations by Europeans which are, hereditarily, systemically coincident with the implication of the radical reductionism expressed by Engels, in his scientifically illiterate doctrine of “the opposable thumb.”

The more recent prompting of that intensified, largely ignorant, anti-American tendency, to which I have just referred, was exemplified by the effect of the sudden demoralization which struck Germany, after Germany’s submission to the rapacious attacks by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her accomplice, Britain’s anti-de Gaulle asset of decades, President François Mitterrand. I refer to an attack launched in the course of, and following the 1989 –1990 reunification of Germany, a reunification which I had foreseen, and defended publicly in a Berlin press conference held on October 12, 1988.[fn_2] Also notable in this connection, is the effect of the complicity of another Margaret Thatcher accomplice, U.S. President George H.W. Bush, in the matter of the reunification of Germany, in permitting that betrayal, and, to a large degree, the abortion and reversal of what I and others had contributed so much toward accomplishing, especially during our efforts, including a period of collaboration with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, of the early 1980s.

The crucial issue which Europeans and others must recognize now, is the present continuation of the recurring, failed models of those parliamentary systems which persist in Europe, still today, under the corrupting influence of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, a system which places national governments under the thumb of privately controlled, so-called independent central banking systems.

The foolish sort of European victims sharing those misguided sympathies for “independent central banking systems,” respond to this mistreatment by those very systems, by defending their customs of peasant-like submission to that oligarchical master, by blaming the U.S.A., sometimes most bitterly, for what they suffer, in fact, at European financier hands. In fact, the essential culpability of the U.S.A. in the matter of Germany’s reunification, was that the U.S. government had failed to counter the betrayal of vital U.S. interest in the preservation of adherence to the Westphalian principle by England and France. On this occasion, the particular issue was that U.S. interest at stake in respect to the ruinous and, essentially, brutishly predatory influence of those British and French governments, in setting the permitted conditions for Germany’s reunification.

This casts the light of modern history on the significance of the way in which an often confused President George H.W. Bush had thus contributed, on that particular occasion, to wasting the realization of the occasion of what would have been this remarkable opportunity to accomplish the rebuilding of both the western and eastern economy of continental Europe as a whole. This was, probably, the most crucial of the failures of the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, a failure which contributed, in its effects, to Bush’s defeat, on account of the global economic effects of this Anglo-French folly, in the next general election.

Presently, the time has come, when the worst existential crisis since the run-up to two earlier World Wars now challenges Europe and others to unite, urgently, around the application of the precious Westphalian principle, affirming the commitment to a new system of cooperative economic development by the sovereign nations of the continent of Eurasia. It is in the urgent long-term interest of the U.S.A. to cooperate with that latter undertaking.

That perspective brings our attention to what many intellectually timid souls would tend to regard with a shudder, as—“Oh! Horror!”—radical changes in the underlying philosophy of economic policy-shaping. Actually, these urgently needed reforms are not radical when their character and import is gauged against the original intent of the U.S. Federal Constitution; but, times and mores have changed since the death of the greatest of the world leaders of the Twentieth Century, President Franklin Roosevelt.

The essential, correlated issue of the moment, on these accounts, is, as I have often emphasized, that the shape of future events can not be competently estimated by the statistical-mechanistic methods usually employed to project significant trends in history as extrapolations from recent, local patterns of statistics. History proceeds, essentially, in long waves which must be assessed by the same kinds of methods employed by Carl F. Gauss to adduce the orbital cycle of the asteroid Ceres; this means, through appropriate methods of insight into the relationship between data reflecting the characteristics of a cycle, rather than the simple, mechanistic forms of statistical projections usually published in these present times.

As I have demonstrated repeatedly, by the relatively unique success of my long-range forecasts, as against all indicated rivals: overlapping, coincidental long waves, some reaching, as cycles, across centuries, are the keys to understanding how the popularity of a wrong method, expressed decades or longer ago, may impact current developments in a critical way. So, the world is now experiencing the ruinous effects of trends in economic policy of the U.S.A., and of Europe, which have prevailed since, approximately, the still unsolved assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Viewed in that light, weighed in the long view of history, Engels’ Anti-Dühring was not a startlingly exceptional show of the roots, in the Sophist tradition, of habitual British anti-Americanism. The latter trait was exhibited by Engels, sometimes slyly, but repeatedly, throughout the record of his association with Marx.

Marx Became a British Economist

In the course of a long and beneficial experience of life, many earlier uncertainties respecting the actual history of mankind have been cleared away. While not every fact of Karl Marx’s history, and its outcome, have been clarified, all the most essential points of historical and continuing immediate practical significance have now been made clear. For example, consider the following background to a relevant crucial feature of German-American relations today.

Whatever else Trier’s Karl Marx represented, Marxism, as an ideology and doctrine, was, in its cultural characteristics, an outgrowth of the emerging British Empire whose power, established in the Paris Treaty of February 1763, had been consolidated by the outcome of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Marxism as a doctrine was a phenomenon whose axiomatic features had been pre-shaped by the British Foreign Office’s Jeremy Bentham, and, more immediately, by Bentham’s successor and British asset Marx’s actual owner, Lord Palmerston.[fn_3]

However, there is a contradictory side to that part of history. Marx never actually understood history, but the history of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism understood Marxism.

The crises endemic to the increasing domination of the world by the imperial lunges of the globalist Anglo-Dutch Liberal system,[fn_4] seized upon the existence of Marxist and related factors as elements which, sometimes, took on the role of an apparent, or even somewhat independent factor in contemporary world history, as thus representing an option which could be employed by a people, by a nation, or by a combination of national forces, to resist, and perhaps repel even some among the sundry actual, or merely perceived injustices even among those being wrought by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which had given spiritual birth to the Marx of Marxism. The existence of the Soviet Union itself, was an expression of this global historical irony of the recent two centuries.

It is principally in what history did to shape the destiny and content of Marxism, rather than Marxism’s writing of its own history, that we find the true meaning of the often ambiguous Marxist phenomenon, and discover the lesson to be learned from its role in the events in which it was a factor, during, especially, the recent century of world history. The relevant residue of nearly two centuries, and its still resonating influences, such as Marxism, have yet to be understood fully and competently by all but a tiny few, to the present day.

On that account, certain aspects of the existence of Marxism, and, to a much lesser degree, some lingering effects of Frederick Engels’ role, must now be freshly examined, and understood, as I touch on that matter here.

Marx’s three-volume Capital itself is a clever work,[fn_5] but only when that subject is treated within the bounds of those British Liberalism’s assumptions, which Marx had swallowed, like the student’s crackers from Jonathan Swift’s story of Laputa, from the British intelligence circles which had virtually owned Marx’s soul from no later than the period of his transfer to studies under the Romantic ally of the then recently deceased G.W.F. Hegel, F.K. von Savigny, at Berlin. That contains the essence of that subject.

For example, Karl Marx’s first professional appointment, as editor, had been his being placed in that position to prevent the appointment of the notable rival candidate, the leading German economist of that period, Frederick List. Marx’s foolish rejection of Heinrich Heine’s personal warning against the Mazzinians, is a notable correlative on this account.[fn_6] Mazzini dupe Marx’s rejection of the work of the German patriot List, came at a time before Marx had any inkling of even the foggiest conception of economics, an example of the frequent instance of stupidity-in-fact by Marx prior to his famous frolics at the British Library. This incompetence was promoted repeatedly and directly by the sophistries of Britain’s Engels.[fn_7]

On that account, it is sufficient to indicate the influence of mentor Engels over Marx’s views on subjects such as the U.S. Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick List, and Henry C. Carey. The influences came, otherwise, from sundry sources; but, as in the case of Carey’s connection to Dühring, it is the dominant control over the then recently deceased Marx the person, both living and deceased, which is expressed most consistently by Marx’s putative heir Engels.

The key to understanding this factor of ignorance in Marx’s work, is the fact that the principles of economy applicable to the emergence of physically successful forms of modern European economy, had their scientific and technological basis, chiefly, in what is specifically classed as the commonwealth form of state launched under France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII.

For example, the relevant principles of economy of the modern, commonwealth mode of post-Westphalia sovereign nation-state, were rooted in the economic development of France under the influence of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, while the principles of the science of physical economy were laid down by work of Gottfried Leibniz over the interval 1671–1715. Similarly, the actual industrial development in England was led by the American scientist Benjamin Franklin and his British and French scientific collaborators.

Whereas the development of what London asset Marx came to recognize as a system of British political economy, occurred chiefly under the impetus of Britain’s notorious Lord Shelburne, after the February 1763 Treaty of Paris, with Shelburne’s assignment to his lackey Adam Smith: to scour France for intelligence on economy which might be used against the already significant development within the North American English colonies, and in France. Hence, Adam Smith’s 1776 tract against the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Smith’s so-called Wealth of Nations, was largely a work of plagiarism, by Smith and others, of the doctrines of the French Physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot.

Marx’s work shows the influence more of mere gossip, than serious knowledge of the actual roots of Nineteenth-Century modern European civilization. Marx’s lackey-like view came to be, essentially, that the British had won global supremacy, and history must be treated, therefore, as a post hoc affirmation of that British victory. No comprehension of the significance of the pre-1763 development of the form of economy associated with the development of the modern commonwealth form of nation-state, from the great ecumenical Council of Florence and the impetus of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia onward, was taken competently into account. In the matter of truth and morals, Marx was, essentially, a Sophist.

So, like most influenced by Marxism still today, there is virtually no comprehension of the notion of a physical economy: hence, no sense of economy as a matter of science. Whereas, the emergence of the British Empire in fact, was defined under the post-February 1763 initiatives of Shelburne, as through the time of the death of Shelburne’s lackey Jeremy Bentham, in 1832, Marx’s work exhibits virtually no comprehension of the functional distinction of the modern sovereign nation-state as existing prior to, and during the interval 1763–1832. Therefore, Marx, who regarded the British system as the nearest thing to an atheist’s God, rendered himself incapable of understanding phenomena such as the U.S. constitutional republic, a U.S. economy as differing, thus, from the intrinsically financier-imperialist form of the neo-Romantic Anglo-Dutch Liberal system built on the foundations established by Paolo Sarpi.

In matters of method, Marx was, in large degree, a Sophist of the type which Heinrich Heine recognized as the temper of his times, a kind of Sophistry which I have encountered as a conditioned behavioral trait often echoed as characteristics of, especially, pre-68er varieties of Twentieth-Century veteran professing Marxists. When we examine the actual dynamics of the history of Europe and the Americas during the period immediately prior to, contemporary with, and just beyond the time of Marx’s adult life, and compare with this the world as viewed from the interior of a world as Marx described it, the discrepancy between the two views, on the leading issues which Marx seemed not to know from his own time, was vast and profound.

What is usually taught as economics in contemporary academic specialization, is, therefore, fairly described as the spectacle of skua swallowing others’ and their own spit, their own adopted gossip about the past, rather than actually studying the physical principles to be adduced from the management of the physical economy as such principles are defined, for example, by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s ground-breaking reports to the U.S. Congress.

The New Palmerston’s Zoo

There have been many reasons for Europeans to complain of some of the effects of the corruption represented by, chiefly, London-based, Anglo-Dutch Liberal influences in and over U.S. policies; but, the attempts to blame these effects on allegedly characteristic traces of the internal life of the U.S.A., rather than effects of corruption introduced, variously, through Anglo-Dutch Liberal and Synarchist assets, from pro-oligarchical Europe, has led many influential and other Europeans into erroneous forms of belief which would be presently fatal to today’s crisis-stricken Europe itself, unless the relevant, misinformed prejudices against the U.S.A. were effectively removed from policy-shaping considerations.

When we take into account the influence of the European social-democracies, and kindred ideological factors, the instanced case of the moral corruption shown by the hoaxster Frederick Engels, is of singularly useful relevance for understanding an important, continuing, related, systemic feature of the continuing problems of the present instant of world crisis.

The issue posed in that publication, Anti-Dühring, by what became the Fabian-Society-linked Engels, was the role of Dühring in the discussions associated with Bismarck’s American-like reforms, featuring the included voice of Dühring among the relevant deliberations. This was the issue which prompted Engels’ diatribe, a diatribe aimed chiefly against his designated adversary Carey’s negotiations, on German ground, with Bismarck’s circle of relevant advisors. These were the discussions which produced those famous economic reforms by the philosophically already pro-American, Friedrich Schiller-influenced Bismarck, which launched those American-influenced measures which led Germany into becoming a world power over the following decades.

These reforms by Bismarck, which London viewed, correctly, as reflections of the success of Carey and Lincoln, among others, in the Union victory over London’s Confederacy tool, drove the British monarchy of the Prince of Wales into a geopolitical fit, a fit which would culminate in such events as the assassination of France’s President Sadi Carnot, France’s Dreyfus case, the first Sino-Japan war, the Russo-Japanese war, the Balkan wars, and World War I.

As soon as the British could emplace a German Kaiser more emphatically from the British royal family’s breeding-stock, on the throne of the Reich which Bismarck had virtually created, the new, pompous, and very foolish incumbent showed his gratitude by dumping Bismarck, and destroying those Bismarck policies which probably would have prevented the calamity which has been named World War I.[fn_8] That geopolitical legacy of Britain’s Edward VII persists as the continuing, leading, and repeated threat of general warfare on this planet, as in the case of World Wars I and II, and the so-called “Cold War,” up through the threats of nuclear-armed, global asymmetric warfare through the present day. It is the destiny implicit in the Anglo-Dutch Liberal geopolitical operations in the manipulation of the nations and ethnic and religious factions of the Southwest Asia cockpit of global asymmetric warfare today.

Notably, during the relevant time, Engels came, as the young H.G. Wells did a bit later, strongly under the ideological influence of T.H. Huxley, the Huxley who is the notorious grandfather of Wells,’ Bertrand Russell’s, and Aleister Crowley’s notable protégés, Aldous and Julian Huxley.[fn_9] During the early 1880s, the Engels who had largely distanced himself from the “used up” Karl Marx, until Marx’s death in 1883, now appeared as in the role of London’s custodian of the shambles of the deceased Marx’s literary legacy, and a cardinal figure of the continental outreach of the strategic intelligence operations of what became the British Fabian Society.[fn_10]

Although Engels, on the one side, distanced himself from the advocacy of the British Malthusian cult of population-control, he emerged, otherwise, on the one side, as a nominal opponent of T.H. Huxley, but, on the other side, of the same kind of intrinsically reductionist views on man and nature as Huxley’s circles.

The implications of Engels’ views to this effect, for science, especially for physical-economic policy, are the exemplary issue of economic policy addressed in the body of this report.

‘The Opposable Thumb’

The most crucial, and, scientifically, most relevant, systematic demonstration of the depraved moral character of Engels, was his implicit following of T.H. Huxley, in proposing that the intellectual achievements of mankind were the by-products of the biological evolution of man from ape, as in the form of the emergence of the role of “the opposable thumb”! Obviously, anyone familiar with actual apes, including, perhaps, any ape which might have become as sensible as Engels’ man himself, would view Engels’ fraud as it deserves. However, Engels’ argument was not merely a sort of silly error of the Sophist which Engels clearly was. Engels’ fraud, in this instance, was the willful outcome of an evil motive, the same evil motive which permeated the work of T.H. Huxley and his followers, through and beyond the systemic evil which permeates the life’s work of H.G. Wells, Crowley, and Bertrand Russell, still today.

For anyone who knows much of anything about the systemic features of the actual history of European civilization, there is nothing in Engels’ motive which differs from the Satanic motive of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: the banning, by that Zeus, of the knowledge of universal physical principles, such as knowledge of the use of fire, then, and nuclear fission, today, from the practice of mankind. Thus, in the matter of the opposable thumb, the Engels whose sophistries the more credulous Marxists have usually swallowed, presented an expression of radically reductionist outgrowths of the modern empiricism of Venice’s Paolo Sarpi, the empiricism of Galileo, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and (actually) the Hegelian Romanticism associated with the Martinist freemasonry’s Romantic cult of Torquemada, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.[fn_11]

This same argument is embedded, systemically, in Karl Marx’s foolish choice of the axiomatic assumptions of British Liberalism’s Haileybury School in political-economy, an Anglo-Dutch Liberal’s intrinsically pro-imperialist, empiricist dogma, which is in most direct opposition to the physical-economic science of Gottfried Leibniz and the American System of political-economy.

That dogma, which the Marx educated in the Haileybury tradition swallowed virtually whole, is in the philosophical tradition of the ancient Greek, “materialist” reductionism associated with Sophistry. This was not surprising for a young Marx born, in 1818, to the legacy of the Napoleonic Romantic’s sophistry of those such as G.W.F. Hegel, Marx’s law professor, Hegel crony F.K. von Savigny, and the Metternichian Carlsbad decrees. Marx, like most other Romantics of his time, was as if sprung from the roots of what Heinrich Heine identified as the Romantic School of Hegel and Savigny, from which the architect of the Hitler dictatorship, Carl Schmitt, came. This was the same Schmitt, the Kronjurist of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, from which the doctrines of Chicago University’s Professor Leo Strauss and Chicago’s Federalist Society would emerge.[fn_12]

However, as much as I have blamed Engels, quite justly, for his part in his “opposable thumb” fraud, Engels’ hoax is merely typical of the characteristic beliefs and practice of modern economists, in universities and other settings today. This is not merely a hoax in itself. Engels’ case is one of the important keys for understanding those most common and widespread causes rooted in policy-shaping, for the presently ongoing collapse of the world’s economy, most clearly those of the U.S.A. and western and central Europe, today.

This is not to suggest that today’s conservative anti-Communists, such as the so-called “neo-cons,” are products of Marxism in Marxism’s putative role as an adversary of capitalism. This is to emphasize that it was the British monarchy of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, which, following the pioneering of Lord Shelburne, used the Bentham-trained Palmerston’s Mazzini organization in the manner which Simón Bolívar had exposed the control of his movement by Britain’s Jeremy Bentham. That was the Bentham who had played a leading role for the British Foreign Office’s secret intelligence “secret committee” operations orchestrating the French Revolution. The movement of which dupe Karl Marx had been a part, was an operation, chiefly by British intelligence, conducted in the perceived interest of the reigning British (i.e., Anglo-Dutch Liberal) oligarchy.

The essential characteristic of this role by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier oligarchy and its more frankly French fascist Synarchist partners, is the use of the methods of the same Venetian financier oligarchy of Paolo Sarpi and his predecessors, by which the leader of the Venetian intelligence service deployed its own chief, Francesco Zorzi, against the commonwealth legacy of France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII. Zorzi deployed himself, on behalf of the Venetian financier oligarchy, as marriage counselor to England’s Henry VIII, in aid of Venetian agents Thomas Cromwell and Venice-backed heir to the Plantagenet succession, Cardinal Pole, as Archbishop of Canterbury.

These powerful forces of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal oligarchy and its Synarchist “Sancho Panzas,” are neither infallible nor invulnerable, of course. Nonetheless, what they deployed under intelligence covers such as [Giuseppe] Mazzini, was, and is intended to promote the imperial interests of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system. Hence, those who speak of the motives of British, or French interests, for example, are usually exhibiting their own ignorance of history, their lack of strategic intelligence skills, and express the type of stoutly defended prejudices worthy of the pathetically ignorant.

In respect to that fact, I have taken this occasion to, in a manner of speaking, “pin the tail on the donkey,” using the case of Engels’ fraud as a convenient choice for illustrating precisely that just-stated point respecting the Venetian heritage of Bentham, Palmerston, and the chief actually guilty architect of geopolitical World War I, Edward VII.

A Double Error

There are two, successive, systemic errors underlying virtually all academically accepted modes of attempts to lay down the essentially underlying principles of modern economic processes. The first, is the failure to take into account the role of fundamental physical and related discoveries of universal physical principle, in defining the physical successes or failures of an economy as a system. The second, is the lack of recognition of the relevant distinction between a statistical-mechanical view of each of those principles, and the indispensable, dynamic conception of the functional characteristics of the process as a whole.

Thus, we must correct a double error of principle here, in our exposing those implications of Engels’ referenced fraud which are relevant for estimating the respective perils and opportunities of the post-Soviet world of today. If we are to develop a competent strategic intelligence estimate of the underlying forces at play in current history, it is, above all, the distracting mythology rooted in the fanatically reductionist aspect of the widespread influence of the intellectual life’s work of Britain’s Frederick Engels, which must be excised from the current readings offered by intelligence services on the subject of the Marxist and related legacies, incompetent readings which the present has inherited, like chronic diseases, from the past.

I have already treated both matters in other locations, but, to communicate little known, important conceptions of relatively universal importance, it is indispensable to present the same essential conceptions in a cumulatively rounded way, in separate writings each composed from some varying vantage-point, as I follow that practice here.

As what I have often referenced as the most convenient example of Johannes Kepler’s uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation, the representation of any discovered universal physical principle, can never be competently represented ontologically as a discrete object of sense-perception. This is no defect in respect to man’s accessible knowledge and use of a discovered such principle of science. Rather, as I, as others, have emphasized on this account, the perfect illustration of this point of fact, is the implications of Kepler’s actual definition of the ontological characteristic of a universal principle of gravitation.

As I have repeatedly emphasized elsewhere, this ontological implication was stated emphatically in a remark, late in his life, by Albert Einstein. He emphasized that the universe in which we exist is finite, on principle, and yet without external boundaries. He located this conception in the modern outcome of the combined work of Johannes Kepler and Bernhard Riemann. To that, I have added the qualification, to which, I believe, Einstein would not have objected, that the unbounded universe is functionally self-bounded, that is, as Philo [Judaeus of Alexandria] contradicted Aristotle in theology: without external boundaries.

This signifies that the “size” of the self-bounded universe is equal to the extent of the reach of a universal principle of gravitation, and also of any other provably universal physical principle. To that we must add the qualification, that mankind’s voluntary use of a newly discovered universal principle, changes the universe as a whole, implicitly, as Philo’s defense of the Creator’s reputation, against Aristotle, implies. Hence, the local expression of any valid definition of a universal physical principle, is infinitesimal, as Leibniz followed Kepler’s instruction to “future mathematicians” explicitly, in defining the infinitesimal of his own calculus. Contrary to the reductionists of sundry varieties, the local expression of the action of the functionally “infinite” object, is, as Leibniz showed, functionally, ontologically infinitesimal.

The relevant argument, as I and others have noted earlier, and I have repeated that fact here, is the same which Philo of Alexandria made as a point of theology, in his refutation of Aristotle.

Man’s discovery of universal physical principles is often the active source of mankind’s increased power to exist, per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area, and with increased longevity and productivity. No monkey, no higher ape, nor any other living species, excepting mankind, can accomplish this effect by act of will. This gain is driven, essentially, by the discovery and consequent use of universal physical and related social principles, as Kepler’s discovery of universal gravitation typifies universal principles. Man’s successful, willful application of these discovered principles, increases man’s power in the universe, and thus changes the finite, but boundless universe, as Einstein’s argument implies, and as Philo’s defense of the continued efficiency of the Creator’s will insisted for theology, as, implicitly, also for physical science.

Thus, we have the argument of the rabbi following Philo, who warned that “the Messiah will come when the Creator chooses, not according to any man’s interpretation of some selected texts from scriptures.” God did not surrender His power of will by His creating a perfect, developing universe. God might make promises, in a certain fashion, under certain circumstances, but, otherwise, makes no contracts with anyone; simply, after all, as Philo insisted, He is God.

We, made in the likeness of our Creator, are assigned to change the universe, to expand it, transform it, develop it to higher states. It is the creative powers which generate experimentally validatable universal physical principles, such as Kepler’s discovery of gravitation, which typify the way in which man, as the Creator’s instrument, is assigned to participate in the work of expanding the conceptually finite universe described by Einstein.

Man’s power of discovery of universal physical principles, thus changes the universe physically. Although the extent of such changes has been limited in effect, up to the present point in history, mankind’s entry into nearby Solar space and development of transuranic elements and their isotopes, has what should be obvious, and obviously potent implications respecting not only mankind’s powers, but also mankind’s responsibilities for the future of the universe.

Those implications should be recognized as telling us something of crucial importance respecting a much more modest implication: the essential principle of physical economy. This, in turn, also tells us something of crucial importance about the nature and role of the human individual in the universal scheme of things.

Take, first, the implication of this point for defining the role of the human individual in the physical economy. After that, consider what this means for our practical knowledge of the entire physical economy in which the individual acts. After taking those two considerations into account, estimate the kind of moral depravity which Engels’ fanciful folly, respecting the “opposable thumb,” represents for shaping the policy of actual political economies.

Yes, Mabel: There Is Metaphysics

The elementary incompetence of opinions which treat sense-perceptions as self-evidently physical, as real in that simple-minded sense, has impelled our civilization to make a certain treacherous, often dangerously misleading sort of distinction between what is regarded, naively, as “physical,” and what is regarded as important, but as existing outside the domain of what naive opinion regards as “physical.”

Actually, in a sane view of the matter, what we regard as sense-perceptions are not considered by us as simply “physical,” but must be regarded, as the Christian Apostle Paul points out in his famous I Corinthians 13, as shadows cast on our powers of perception by something which is real, but which is not itself recognized directly by our naive readings of our senses as such. However, there is another class of objects, which are not themselves directly represented as sense-perceptual shadows of discrete sense-perceptual objects as such, but which may have demonstrated an undeniable effect on the behavior of the shadows which are in the adumbrated form of sense-perceptions, but are not themselves discrete objects in that sense.

These latter “objects” of the powers of the human mind, are expressed either as the manifest efficiency of universal physical principles, or in the form of the proper role, and virtual physical-scientific authority, of the principles of Classical artistic composition, as typified by the role of the Pythagorean comma in the matter of the properly sung performance of the well-tempered counterpoint of J.S. Bach.

From as much as is known to me, or credibly reported to me otherwise, the animals are faced with a paradoxical kind of sense-perceptual relationship to the universe, like our own. However, the idea of a universal physical principle, does not occur to them. We can be certain of that distinction, because there is no evidence that any animal species can willfully shift its relative potential population-density as man does characteristically.

It is what we should distinguish as the cognitive powers of the mortal human individual, which makes the absolute difference between the actuality of the mere Biosphere as defined by V.I. Vernadsky, and the higher state of existence which he distinguished as the Noösphere. Thus, we must recognize that the quality of humanity is not contained within the Biosphere, but reflects the intervention of a superior principle, not encountered in lower forms of existence, which operates efficiently on the biological human individual, as might be defined otherwise, to produce physical effects in and on the universe, which no lower form of life could accomplish.

On that latter account, we are obliged to regard the existence of the human individual personality, as metaphysical. However, at the same time, for the same reasons, we must recognize the kind of danger to sanity which a naive use of the term “metaphysical” must tend to foster.

Modern science is capable of distinguishing two states of physical existence efficiently: non-living and living processes. This can be done, according to Vernadsky, from the standpoint of the differing products of living from non-living chemistries, as is done in the currently practical view of isotope economies. Yet, by the same critical standard, we can also distinguish human life as belonging not only to the Biosphere, but as distinguished from lower forms of life, by the location of the human mind’s expression of cognitive powers, such as the discovery of experimentally proven universal physical principles, in a higher domain; that is, the properly conceived metaphysical domain, which Vernadsky defined as the Noösphere. All of the human individual’s distinction from inferior forms of life is located in that higher, metaphysical domain, which is otherwise occupied by the Creator.

For modern science, that distinction is best illustrated, as I have already emphasized the fact here, by the practical implications of Johannes Kepler’s uniquely original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation.

In known European and related physical science, as known in various ways for tens of thousands of years, or even more, before the present, the apparent paradox so implied, arises in the effort to comprehend the functional connections among the separate metaphysical powers of the interacting mortal individuals, the metaphysical individualities interacting efficiently within the domain of human biological individualities. In other words, the interaction located within the domain of universal physical principles, is a metaphysical domain, whose interactions are essentially metaphysical, but are metaphysical effects represented as an ironical set of effects, like footprints of an unseen creature, being generated in the visible domain.

The mystery, even the perplexity, with which such considerations confront the sense-perceptual world-outlook, are efficiently demystified by a competent grasp of the implications of Riemann’s shift of the primary standpoint of science, eradicating the last vestige of Euclidean mental masturbation, for a life in the happier domain of physical hypergeometries.

The Riemannian Tensor

The principal accomplishment of Bernhard Riemann’s life’s work, was to free the human individual mind from the chains of reductionist assumptions, as he set forth that mission in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, and went on from there to supply the correct, non-reductionist conception of the elementarily hypergeometric physical systems associated with his notion, rather than the rival, reductionist interpretations, of what is termed the tensor. Riemann presented us with the concept of the tensor as an expression of physical geometry, rather than a merely formal mathematics.

The discovery of a universal physical principle, is never competently represented by a mathematical formulation, nor a derivation of one mathematical formulation from an ingenious manipulation of another. Any actual discovery of principle occurs, primarily, as a physical action by the individual human mind. The shadow of that physical-experimentally-determined discovery, may be expressed, in useful approximation by a mathematical formulation which, in turn, is a representation of a physical-geometrical event. Such is the distinction of Riemann’s concept of the tensor, from certain formalist readings in the matter.

Therefore, there could be no competent approach to the categorically crucial problems of modern physical economy in today’s world, which were not based on that notion of hypergeometrical physical functions introduced by Riemann.

On this account, the internal educational and research program of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) of young adults in the age-range of 18–25, as might be continued to 30, is focused on a prescribed re-experiencing of the main line of development of European science, from the Classical Greek foundations in Pythagorean Sphaerics, avoiding the disorientating waste of time which Euclidean and kindred reductionist dogmas represent, and aiming for a personal reenactment of the discovery of the implications, for modern society, of the discovery of the tensor as the tensor were properly defined as within the bounds of Riemannian physical hypergeometry, rather than mathematical formalism. This locates the humanist view of the challenges presented to society today within the domain described by Russia’s great figure V.I. Vernadsky, as the Noösphere.

This assignment of this role to the work within the LYM, is a reflection of the great damage done to the U.S.A. and Europe, in particular, by the intentionally Sophist orientation adopted for the brainwashing of the family households representing what had been foreseen as becoming part of the upper twenty-percentile of the future influential adult social stratum, those expected to emerge from the ranks of those born between approximately the end of World War II, 1945 and the crucial 1957 economic recession: in short, the “68ers.”

The typical brainwashing U.S.-based agencies devoted to such corruption, are typified by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the American Family Foundation (AFF), and the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The intention of this brainwashing effort was that expressed typically by the “68ers”: the transformation of the economies of the Americas and Europe, from the standard of priority of scientific and technological progress in the productive powers of labor, to the form of “globalized,” “post-industrial” society which has destroyed the hope of a future for most of our planet, apparently almost irreparably, over the course of the recent thirty-five-odd years.

It is, of course, not untypical of the progress of a civilization periodically so engaged, that the rescue of a culture from a deadly decadence like that reigning over governments and other relevant institutions today, depends upon a revitalization of national and world culture by an enlightenment associated with a movement among young adults. Such modern renaissances are typified by that of Europe’s mid-Fifteenth Century, the post-1648 renaissance in Europe, the period of the American Revolution itself, the great Transatlantic industrial revolution spawned by the Union victory over Palmerston’s Confederacy, and the role of President Franklin Roosevelt in making the difference which saved the planet from the otherwise virtually certain prospect of a global Nazi tyranny.

Such renaissances are never simply spontaneous pulsations of nature. They occur because some people cause them to be attempted voluntarily, and because some of those attempts have succeeded. The essence of human individual and social life, is the creativity absolutely absent from the lower forms of life. This is clear in instances such as great scientific upsurges. It is clear in the rise of Classical Greek civilization, in the great attempted renaissance led by Charlemagne, the Fifteenth-Century great ecumenical Council of Florence, the outcome of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the role of [Gotthold] Lessing and [Moses] Mendelssohn in sparking the late Eighteenth-Century Classical renaissance which included the American Revolution, and the role of the leadership by President Franklin Roosevelt.

This essential role of the voluntary principle in bringing about a renaissance of what is often an otherwise self-doomed culture, is an expression of the principled difference of man from beast.

This means freeing the existing, decadence-ridden culture from its self-ruinous habits of behavior, by seizing the state of self-inflicted failure as the opportunity to lead a failed generation toward a place of safety, an attainable place to which either the acquired habits of the disoriented older generation in power would not permit that older generation to move, or which that older generation had lost the intellectual power to discover as an existing option.

The commonplace, rather stupid belief of the stultified academic or the like, is that progress occurs only in a reaction against violations of pre-existing rules. In reality, human progress occurs chiefly through actions which had been unknown alternatives, such as the case typified by the discovery of a new fundamental physical principle. Progress is not negative, but positive. Like a sound marriage, it is based on the discovery of durable love, or, similarly, the discovery of a new physical principle.

In history generally, the main highway of progress of the human condition, is the original discovery of what are either relatively, or absolutely new universal physical principles for the guidance of mankind’s generation of useful changes in the behavior of individuals and societies. This principle which causes the traditional Marxists to shudder in fear and trembling, is called by them the “voluntarism” which they treat more or less as a “dirty word.” All important revolutions in human history are accomplished through the same, academically “un-Marxist” pathway of “voluntarism”; such was Lenin’s principled break with the German Social-Democracy, without which, ironically, the Soviet Revolution of 1917 simply would never have occurred. So, as in the founding of modern European physical science by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, for better or for worse, all important changes in the course of history, including all the great steps forward, are products of actions which occur through the discovery, or rediscovery of principles which lie outside the bounds of currently practiced conventions.

Such changes are made, typically, either by young adults, or by senior figures who have never grown old spiritually.

Thus, the possibility of leading society effectively out of the morass the currently reigning generation has built for itself, must come as a creative innovation from, chiefly, a young adult generation, as the U.S. struggle for independence and the U.S. Federal Constitution attest.

It should be the obvious question: Why did the U.S. constitutional system appear in the U.S.A., and not in Europe, where repeated attempts on behalf of the same principles repeatedly failed? The difference was old Europe’s cultural burden, the burden of the deeply engrained tradition of oligarchical institutions, combined with the stultification associated with the general population’s sense of its natural inferiority to that reigning oligarchical tradition. Hence, the persistence of inherently failed parliamentary relics of feudalism in Europe today. Europe can govern itself by parliamentary means under ordinary conditions; but, in crisis, parliamentary systems habitually fail; they fail because of the habits of obedience to working within the bounds defined by a tradition external to the powers granted to the system of parliamentary government itself. This is the lesson of the American Revolution, and of similar developments of constitutional forms within other states of the Americas.

Thus, the development of comprehension of the significance of the Riemannian tensor, which has precisely that revolutionary role within scientific progress, is an instrument most usefully to be found among young future leaders today; it is the needed foundation for establishing the new approach to physical-economic and related policy-shaping which is indispensable for enabling the world to build itself out of the hellish ongoing general collapse of the world economy considered as a whole today.

Dynamics and Tensors

The, unfortunately, more popular view of the role of the tensor, is that it represents a mathematical replacement for a Euclidean, or neo-Euclidean geometry. The most direct way of addressing such academic blunders as that, is to proceed from a deep-going reflection on Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation.

The obstacle to be overcome on this account, is usefully illustrated by reference to the intrinsically stultifying effect of a corrupt, pseudo-scientific practice called “benchmarking”: the scientifically stultifying practice of substituting the mere mathematical form of technology for the physical experience of making a crucial physical experiment as a test of principle. In the case of the attempted interpretation of Riemann’s development of the notion of the tensor, the obstacle to be feared is the conditioned tendency reflected in the image of the student steeped in obedience to the tyranny of modern education’s at-the-mathematics-blackboard standard, the standard of the reigning Babylonian Priesthood of the peer-review oligarchy.

The reign of that particular “Babylonian Priesthood” in science, was typified in the experience of the Fusion Energy Foundation by the rather riotous opposition to considering those foundations of all competent modern physical science which must be traced to the seminal role of Johannes Kepler. In each instance, the objections to Kepler were wrong, even terribly wrong from the practical standpoint of modern achievements of physical science, but they were very “Babylonian,” reflecting the terror which the virtually Laputan science-priesthood of the peer-review committees exerted over even otherwise brilliantly accomplished experimentalists.

The systemic character of the problem of scientific practice and education so demonstrated by that and related experience, is comparable to the debate between Albert Einstein and Max Born as represented in their published correspondence. That is the ontological difference in method to which I have referred as systemic, above. The problem is the same reign of terror in which the brilliant Kurt Gödel, Einstein’s associate of the later years, found himself victim, to the end of his life at the Princeton Institute, since his break with such pathetic devotees of the depraved Bertrand Russell over the issues of Gödel’s 1931 On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.[fn_13]

Notably, Gödel’s work was written as a critical piece worked up within the terms of the notorious Austrian schools of the period of the post-World War I Solvay conferences; it proved the incompetence of Russell and his devotees on their own ground, and in their own terms. The importance of that piece, is what it does not say, but what its conclusions imply must be the search for the alternative for the entire system of radical empiricist reductionism which had been the leader in the savage attack on Max Planck during the period of World War I.

The issue was the difference between the practice of real science and the Babylonian Priesthoods of the Sophist peer-review committees.

Put aside the formal-mathematical practices of masturbation at the blackboard, as typified by the Laputan acolytes of the peer-review committees. The authority lies with that self-critical, dirty-hands approach to the unique physical experiment which is so elaborately typified in the reports of Kepler on his own founding of the essential basis for all competent, experimental approaches to modern physical science.

Get away from the blackboard for a moment. Get back into the real world, as the work of Gauss’s and Dirichlet’s follower, Riemann, typifies this return to the tradition of the Classical Greek Pythagoreans, and of Cusa, Kepler, and Leibniz earlier. Focus upon the act of an original discovery of a physical principle, and relegate mathematics to the function of displaying the shadows cast by the reality of the universe defined by the mind of a human individual who has learned how to think in the image of the Creator who created the physical universe on which the mathematical priesthoods prefer to comment.

The challenge to the young adults of today, is to think and act as persons made in the image of the Creator, and devoted to acting, accordingly, on behalf of the assigned destiny of mankind.

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