The Rules by Which Games Are Played
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The following statement was issued by LaRouche's Presidential campaign committee, LaRouche in 2004.
May 7, 2002
The fool who said, "I don't believe in conspiracy theories," was the Roman gladiator who died according to the rules of the game, later that same day. Among all Romantics, "conspiracy" is practiced in the form of relying upon other people to play by the rules which the credulous accept. In that case, often, the dupes do not describe wanton killing as murder, or genocide; the victims of such conceits believe that they are simply "playing by the rules of the game." In effect, they are conspiring to deny the existence of conspiracies, a denial which makes them appear very foolish in the eyes of sane observers.
Thus, Old Fagin would not simply ask one of today's adolescents to join the U.S. military forces; he would offer that prospective Artful Dodger a habit-forming game, in which the dupe comes to adopt the identity of a modern gladiator, like "Terminator II," not on a stage, but in real life. Read St. Augustine on the subject of the Roman games,[1] and you understand the recent slaughter in the Erfurt high school, or that earlier at Columbine and Littleton.[2]
Why would anyone in the U.S.A.'s presently revolting condition of military affairs, have participated in an operation which produced such results as the killers at Columbine? Why would they have played "Old Fagin" by luring susceptible youth into playing habit-forming, Nintendo-style killer games? What was the calculable effect of putting those games on the market for children and adolescents to play? What game were some within the U.S. military establishment playing, when they played "Old Fagin" in that way? Was Columbine, perhaps, one of a series of "test drives" of a new product intended for mass military production of that kind of killer adolescents, who would kill one another as readily as their explicitly assigned targets?
If you wished to recruit an army of such stone killers, who would kill both according to the prescription of Samuel P. Huntington's text, The Soldier and the State, and more, besides; where would you go to find suitable recruits, right out of high schools, today?[3] In Germany, officials estimated there are, presently, approximately 170,000 such potential recruits;[4] how many more than that are there in the U.S.A. today? How many U.S. regiments of an international Waffen-SS-style force of would-be "Terminator II's" would that number represent today.
Did you allow your adolescent son to turn himself into a video-games-brainwashed zombie, in your cellar, or his bedroom? Is he soon going to die like a faceless Roman legionnaire, fighting decades-long, perpetual "wars against terrorism" in the mountains of Central Asia? Did you do that of "your own free will"? Or, were you just "going along to get along" with "the way things are these days"? Maybe, mercifully, you will never live to see that happen to him; he might just kill his parents, for practice, first. Is that what you call "family values" today?
Don't call it "conspiracy." Call it a "revolution in military affairs." Or, just call it, "playing by the rules of the game."
"Senator Joe Lieberman! When I see your face, I see images of the slaughter at Columbine. Why, then, did you do the evil that you have done in pushing through that legislation which effectively protected the purveying of those deadly games?"[5] How many will die as a result of that legislation?
"Remember Joe, that you did that in the same year I, as a candidate for President, campaigned against such evil, while you, as a candidate were intervening to head off effective action against this evil."[6]
Did those who joined Lieberman in pushing through that bill, think, perhaps, that promoting mass murder by adolescents might divert those youth from sexual wantonness, and thus promote "family values"? Is the new slogan which Baby Boomers are to teach their children, "Make war, not sex!"?
'Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch'
While more and more of the U.S. military are being dispersed into more and more places around the world, what is happening back in the economy? It is coming down, don't you know? It is coming down now, even as we speak, while new layers of dust settle on the piteous spectacle of those credulous dupes of Dracula waiting for the promised midnight recovery. This collapse was done by means of a certain kind of parlor magic, such as that performed in the kitchen of the Senator Phil Gramm who did so much to craft Enron as the abomination he and wife Wendy helped make it today.
As I have shown, repeatedly, in earlier lectures and writings, the thirty-five-year long wave of U.S. economic decadence, following a successful process of 1933-1965 economic recovery, was the imposition of the axioms of a radical form of monetarist dogma on the direction adopted in shaping economic policies of practice. This unfolding array of pro-monetarist axioms functioned as a set of rules of the game, in much the way Nintendo and related gladiator games brainwash those who are governed by such arbitrary sets of "ivory tower" rules.
The cause for the present, extremely distressed condition of the present world monetary-financial system, is that that economy itself was played as a kind of game, in which the ruling standard of performance was not the actual effect on the real economy, but was a game played according to scores reflecting a childish sort of made-up rules. The increasing degree of sheer fraud and other fakery which the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the Federal government have applied to their reports, most notably since about 1983-1984, merely typify the flood of, shall we say, "innovative" score-keeping concocted in the same spirit of exuberant financial fakery as the Federal Reserve's hoaxes.
Some, but only some, among the axioms invoked for bringing the U.S. and other economies into this present, long wave of decline, were the same notions of "free trade," and the like methods of score-keeping, which had led the world of Coolidge and Mellon into the Great Depression of 1929-1933. Two kinds of deadly lunacy have to be added to the lists from Coolidge's days. One of these is the addition of a qualitatively more radical philosophical positivist method of combining and applying the particular axioms adopted to shape both Federal laws and other economic practice. Second, has been the addition of replacing more and more of the earlier standards of physical performance of a national economy, by a new, extremely decadent set of axiomatic goals.
Some of these additions, such as those utopian military trends which President Eisenhower denounced as representing a "military-industrial complex," were under way during the post-Franklin Roosevelt years 1945-1961, but exploded to the surface of U.S. and world affairs, as waves of assassinations and so forth during the 1961-1965 period. The qualitative shift in prevalent practice came with the adoption of a pro-malthusian policy, which was promoted with the asserted and practiced intent, beginning the mid-1960s, to transform the United States from a productive society, to a pro-Malthusian type of consumer society. The Nixon actions of August 1971, and the ensuing establishment of a floating-exchange-rate world monetary-financial system, have virtually sealed the doom of the economy of the Americas, and elsewhere, during the course of the ensuing three decades to date.
Three supplementary, post-1971 changes in the rules of the economy-game must be emphasized.
The first of these supplementary changes came into play during 1977-1981, in the new quality of intentional wrecking of the U.S. economy by the task-force directed by Presidential controller Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since that time, U.S. monetary-financial policy has been under the predominant control of the succession of Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve System.
The second supplementary change was the crucial strategic decision reached through 1989-1991 agreements among, chiefly, Britain's Margaret Thatcher, France's François Mitterrand, and President George H. W. Bush, which launched the 1990s process of working to eradicate the existence of sovereign nation-states through a program called, alternately, by such names as "globalization" or "world rule of law." The intention behind this change, was to use the occasion of the collapse of Soviet power, to proceed toward eliminating the existence of the sovereign form of nation-state, thus working to establish an English-speaking world empire as a parody of the military practices of the ancient Roman Empire of the Caesars. In other words, the goal of the measures introduced by the screeching Thatcher et al., was what is known, in the modern professional historians' technical term of precision, as universal fascism.
The third such change was launched on the late evening of Sept. 11, 2001, following the assaults on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon: the unleashing of the U.S. military utopians for their long-intended "Clash of Civilizations" war, a war launched in tandem with the current fascist, Sharon government of Israel.[7] This war coincides with what had been the intent of the utopians since the 1950s, when the "Artful Dodgers" of Harvard's "Fagin" William Yandell Elliott produced Artful Dodger Kissinger's pro-fascist dissertation, and Artful Dodger Samuel P. Huntington produced his military plan for a U.S.-run international Waffen-SS, his The Soldier and The State.
"Back at the ranch," the question is: Given the fact that the build-up of the Nazi war-machine was possible only in industrial Germany as one of the world's leading producer societies, and that the U.S. military build-up depended for its success on Franklin Roosevelt's revitalization of the United States as a producer society, could a George Bush administration produce a successful military-driven economic recovery, given the present state of the United States as an extremely decadent form of consumer society, a state run under policies of the present set of reigning leaders of both major parties? Take into account, that these are parties which, under their present leaders, have adopted the decadence of a fanatically monetarist, pro-Malthusian consumer society, as virtually the essence of their political being. Meanwhile, to add to that problem, the present world monetary-financial system itself is trapped at the fag-end of a long process of pure rot.
Under that presently prevalent set of policies, the U.S. imperial drive could never really succeed. The doom of the U.S.A. under a continuation of these policies, would be inevitable, and, by historical standards, not far distant. The question the world faces is, could the rest of the world survive the self-inflicted death-agonies of the decadent thermonuclear power known as today's U.S.A.? The only sane option for the U.S.A., and the rest of the world, is: End the damned game! Or, perhaps better said: End the game of the damned!
Playing Games for Real
As I have taught for decades, the actual performance of a national or world economy must be judged by the strict standards of a science of physical economy, not in financial-accounting terms. We may, and often must employ financial accounting, but the methods of accounting practiced must always be consistent with, and checked against physical-economic, rather than the pathetic, presently prevalent system of "ivory tower" accounting standards. The yardstick used to set the standard for competent accounting practice, must be what I have defined and prescribed as potential relative population-density: measured per capita and also per square kilometer.
If that rule is violated, explicitly or otherwise, the result must tend to be an uncontrolled margin of accumulated delusions in tendered financial accounts. The characteristic expression of this delusion is what is termed fictitious values. The point is illustrated by reference to the application of my "Triple Curve" to the 1966-2002 trends in the U.S. economy. Nominal values, typified by monetary emission and fictitious financial assets, soar, while the real economy is precipitated into ever deeper decline, as the result of the self-same policies which cause reported financial and monetary aggregations to climb. The difference between those upward and downward trends, illustrates the nature of fictitious values. Any self-feeding trend of a similar type, unless stopped arbitrarily, will proceed to the point that the economy of such characteristics collapses into a devastating economic depression, or even worse.
Under present policies, all efforts are concentrated on increasing the level of fictitious values, with a consequently ever more aggravated looting of the physical realities of national economy. Therefore, by objective standards, the leading managers of today's U.S. economy, including most in the leadership of the two major political parties, are, collectively, clinically insane.
The effect is comparable to the case in which a driver intends to stop to avoid a crash, but reacts, in each similar situation, by stepping on the accelerator, rather than the brakes. Some brief illustrations of that point are needed here.
The standard of comparison for the notion of fictitious values in modern economy are the various financial bubbles, such as the Seventeenth-Century tulip bubble and the John Law-style bubbles of the early Eighteenth Century. The biggest bubbles in recent history include: the global financial-derivatives bubble, essentially an ultimately worthless mass of gamblers' side-bets; the related "junk bond" bubbles launched by the combined effect of Garn-St. Germain and Kemp-Roth legislation; the largely collapsed "New Economy" bubble of 1995-2001; and the gigantic U.S. real-estate bubble brought nearly to a bursting-point by Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan's morbid follies.
As I have written earlier, and also referenced this in my May 1, 2002 webcast see Feature in this issue), the spectacles of post-1975 trends in New York City real-estate prices, and the giant ground-rent bubble built up by Federal Reserve and other trickery around the Washington, D.C. Beltway, represent the use of real-estate titles for the primary purpose of inflating a purely fictitious valuation of the land-area's use to whatever the limit might prove to be. The estimated rental income-flow through the constructed facilities of the Washington Beltway and adjoining counties, serves as an investment, not primarily in the construction as such, but, rather in the ground-rent inflation of the nominal value attributed to the mere property titles per se, of the fields, forests, and so on, onto which that construction is dumped. When that Washington, D.C. bubble pops, as it will, the effect will be analogous to, but far worse than the collapse of the John Law bubble in early Eighteenth-Century France: not the shot heard around the world, but, rather, the sickening thud felt throughout the planet as a whole.
The general principles of sound economy are chiefly two.
First, a sustainable pattern of economic growth requires scientific-technological progress. The principal, indispensable source of mankind's ability to maintain and improve a pre-existing population-density and well-being, is the application of technologies derived from discoveries of universal physical principles.
Second, the realization of the progress implicit, as potential, in discoveries of universal physical principles, depends upon the level of intellectual development of the members of society, and the existence of institutionalized forms of culturally determined cooperation on which sustained scientific-technological progress depends. Thus, although education produces virtually no physical product of value explicitly, it is indispensable for developing young human beings into adults capable of effecting material progress. Even though Classical artistic composition yields no physical product, without it, society's capacity for efficient cooperation would be crippled. The institutions of government prescribed by the actual intent of the U.S. Federal Constitution as understood by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, especially the fundamental law expressed by the Preamble, are, when applied, the most appropriate forms of government yet devised anywhere for fostering the quality of cooperation prosperity requires. Those institutions have, thus, a clear, functionally defined physical-economic value.[8]
Among the indispensable such contributions to the nation's real economy, is the power of the state, under the original intent of our Constitution, to employ methods of national banking, to generate credit used for expansion of productive activity of the real economy. That credit-creating capacity, is a physically efficient real value of the economy.
Think of the jokes which have spread about the fellow who won the board game called "Monopoly," and then tried to trade his Monopoly winnings for legal tender at the local bank. Or, the gamblers who played weeks on end, and whose financial accountants considered the winnings taken from that "less-than-zero-sum-game" as a properly taxable addition to the U.S. national income! In both cases, a fool has regarded a purely fictitious gain as a contribution to the nation's economy. In one case, the fool is the player trying to cash in Monopoly money at a bank. In the second case, the fool is the U.S. Government, which considers income from gamblers' winnings as an addition to the national wealth.
Both fools were likely to accept the proposition, that the nation whose households' income came from all taking in one another's laundry, had achhieved the happy state of full employment. Indeed, they would calculate, that by simply raising the prices for laundry washed, they would increase the national income. Chairman Greenspan is the currently reigning U.S. King of Fools—soon, perhaps, to acquire the additional honor of being crowned the King of Beggars, thus giving a deeper, richer sense of literal meaning to the words "Beggars' Opera."
Reconsider the foregoing examples from the standpoint of the notion of games played according to sets of axiomatic-like rules.
Claudius Ptolemy's Foolish Economy
Until the revolutionary return to the legacy of Plato's Classical Greece, during the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-pivoted Renaissance, medieval European civilization had been virtually an also-ran among the cultures of the world. The dominant influence of ancient Rome as a rising power in the Mediterranean and adjoining areas, since about the time of the close of the Second Punic War, had been a moral and overall cultural and demographic disaster for the humanity so afflicted. Although some significant reconstruction along Classical lines had occurred, in Moorish-influenced Spain and elsewhere, during feudal Europe's history, the heritage of pagan-Roman decadence, or what is known as Romanticism still today, ruled and ruined. Lunatic Crusades and other expressions of Romantic depravity, culminated in the lawful consequence of that Romantic lunacy, the mid-Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age."
That "New Dark Age" had weakened and discredited the imperial maritime power of Venice's financial oligarchy to the degree, that the Apostolic tradition of Christianity found a belated opportunity to assume a leading role in statecraft, resulting in such expressions as the great mid-Fifteenth-Century ecumenical Council of Florence. Typical of this revolution in Europe's affairs, are two most influential writings of Nicholas of Cusa from that period. These are his Concordancia Catholica, a design for establishing a community of principle among sovereign nation-states, and his De Docta Ignorantia, the founding work of modern experimental scientific practice. Typical of the result, are the revolutionary discoveries of Johannes Kepler, a follower of the method of Cusa and the founder of a comprehensive approach to modern mathematical physics.
This reflection on that history brings our attention back, once again, to the matter of games. To locate the root of the kind of galloping depravity amok in the decadent U.S. culture and economy of today, it is more or less indispensable to glance back, for comparisons, to the axiomatic features of Kepler's revolution in physical science. Once again, on this occasion, I turn your attention to the central fact of Kepler's 1609 The New Astronomy, in which the detailed account of Kepler's original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation is provided by its discoverer.
The point is, that all of the prevalent doctrines of astronomy prior to Kepler, since the Caesars, were intrinsically failed derivatives of the same Aristotelean "ivory tower" game-playing expressed by Claudius Ptolemy's Romantic hoax.[9] The systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, suffered the common affliction of an explicitly anti-scientific method, degrading science to a set of arbitrary, axiomatic mathematical rules, rules which had no basis in an honest scientific method. In other words, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and kindred dupes of Aristotelean method, interpreted or simply disregarded that need for the kinds of crucial empirical evidence already richly defined by Classical Greek science, from Pythagoras and Thales, through Plato, to Eratosthenes and Archimedes. They acted in ignorance of the crucial concept of power defined by Plato, the conception on which the existence of a true physical science depends absolutely. They did this to the effect of inventing a mythical universe at the blackboard, and excluding all physical evidence which did not conform to that powerless, ivory-tower fantasy.
Like most of today's conventional financial-accounting practice, and the relevant law currently governing that practice, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe merely described observed events in terms of their adopted, "ivory tower" system of accounting. They described movement in those terms, but, unlike Kepler, either simply ignored the reality of the power which was needed to have caused the movement, or invented the existence of some magical force, operating as if little green men from under the floorboards of the universe, to explain the motive for the observed motion.[10] Kepler recognized the determining function of power as what he described as the intention of the Solar system. He pin-pointed that intention in his original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, a discovery which was the first successful step in founding a comprehensive mathematical physics.
Thus, the characteristic quality of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance for physical science, was the revival of that Classical Greek and Hellenistic science which had been largely suppressed under the millennial depravity, from c. 200 B.C. to A.D. 1400, of pagan Rome and feudalism. It was the reawakening of the scientific method of Classical Greece, especially of Plato, his collaborators, and his scientific followers through Eratosthenes and Archimedes, which defines the Renaissance birth of modern European civilization. It also defines the original emergence of both the sovereign nation-state and true political-economy, during the course of that century. Kepler's revolution in science, based explicitly on the foundations provided by Plato, Cusa, Pacioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, typifies the great achievements of modern European civilization's physical science and technology.
Unfortunately, that great revolution has never been completed. Venice-centered forces struck back, beginning their role in the Fall of Constantinople, as their Fourth Crusade earlier, drowning Europe in Venice-orchestrated religious warfare during the interval 1511-1648, launching a Romantic revival in the twin, rival forms of Aristoteleanism and the empiricism of Paolo Sarpi and Sarpi's lackey Galileo. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia stopped the tide of evil, and made possible the later achievements of Classical forms of modern European culture; but, the rival legacies of Habsburg tyrannies and and Anglo-Dutch empiricism have sustained, with their reflections still today, the diseased cultural environment afflicting our young United States from its birth, especially since the loss of our principal European ally with the successive catastrophes of the Jacobin Terror and the world's first fascist tyranny, that of Napoleon Bonaparte.
This thus-historically-determined state of cultural affairs in European civilization as a whole, is the principal source of all the foolish games we as a people have been trained to play. The functional root of this disorder, is a still prevalent, depraved conception of the nature of man entertained by the opponents of our revolution. Typical of this depravity, are the empiricist and related conceptions of mankind associated with modern empiricism and the pervasive reductionism of that Eighteenth-Century British and French "Enlightenment" expressed in the continued influence of the empiricist reductionism of Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, Kelvin, et al. in the secondary and university classrooms of today.
As many have shown repeatedly, as in Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere, man is distinguished absolutely, on grounds of universal physical-experimental principle, from all other forms of life. This universal physical principle is what is properly recognized as cognition, as distinct from merely learning.
For example, the evidence is conclusive, that mankind has existed on this planet, as we know man essentially today, for more than hundreds of thousands of years. From that evidence, we make the informed assumption that mankind has existed for some millions of years. Were man merely something comparable to a higher ape, the human population of this planet would never have exceeded a relatively few millions living individuals.
The source of this qualitative difference between people and apes, is the power of cognition. Mankind is able to generate discoveries of physically efficient principles, principles which the senses as such could not perceive, by means of which we are able to increase our willful power in, and over the universe. This increase of power has been to the effect, that the sustainable human population of this planet has risen into the billions. This growth has been accompanied by, and is dependent upon increases in the life-expectancy, intellectual development, and productive power of the typical member of the population.
The most essential distinction of modern civilization from ancient and medieval, is the elevation of the political and social condition of the majority of human beings, from the status of virtual human cattle, as slaves and serfs were. This transformation was first efficiently defined by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, as typified by the implications of Cusa's Concordancia Catholica and De Docta Ignorantia. The combined effect of this definition of the principle of a system of sovereign nation-states dedicated to promotion of the common good (general welfare), defined the legitimacy of government and associated social systems as conditional upon efficient dedication to the promotion of the general welfare of all persons, both the living and their posterity.
The significance of this characteristic of civilized forms of modern nations, is shown more vividly by examining such attempted throw-backs to feudalism or worse typified by the closely related doctrines of the Physiocrat François Quesnay and the British East India Company's Adam Smith: the doctrines of "laissez-faire" and "free trade." Quesnay based laissez-faire on the assumption that the persons employed on the titled landlord's estate were human cattle, who, being animals, could have produced no greater wealth than that required to feed and house them. Therefore, Quesnay argued, the remainder of the wealth of the estate must have been magically bestowed as a reward for the landlord's possession of a feudal title to that estate! Adam Smith's doctrine of "free trade," largely a plagiarism of the writings of Physiocrats such as Quesnay and Turgot, has a similar import as both social and economic policy of practice.
We see that same inhumanity expressed in the United States under Nixon, Carter, et al., as a continuing decline of the share of national income represented by the total reported income of the lower eighty percent of family-income brackets. More and more, since Presidential aspirant Nixon met with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, in 1966, the progress of the condition of the people of the United States which had been expressed in the famous Federal Civil Rights legislation of 1964-1965, has worsened to the point that the nation tolerates Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's shameless doctrine of "shareholder value," taking the U.S. backwards in the history of law, to the plight of mankind in Europe's terrible Fourteenth Century. The economic policy of today's consumer society, has shown itself, thus, to represent the intended degradation of our citizens to the status of human cattle.
Yet, we hear from the mass media and kindred sources of corruption, that the U.S. economy has become "more efficient" through the wreckage made of it under Kissinger's Nixon and Brzezinski's Carter. Let us drive the appropriate stake through the heart of that bloodsucking delusion. Take the total basket of physical consumption of the U.S. and its population. Include under consumption, the wear and tear represented by lost farms, lost industries, lost basic economic infrastructure. Now, of the total consumption by the United States, including the using-up of basic economic infrastructure and production work-places, what portion is the net per capita output of the U.S. labor-force itself? Ah! We have exported jobs to countries where the labor is much cheaper!
Actually, under the definition of "increased efficiency" supplied as propaganda of our politicians and mass media, we produce much less per capita than we did formerly; but, therefore, we are more efficient. "More efficient in precisely what?" How do we pay for the imports of products of cheap labor? By building up a huge current accounts deficit, and by muscling foreign nations, such as Japan, to flood our financial markets with the money to drive up—now, with increasing futility—the prices of marketed financial holdings of those enterprises which are now collapsing in droves.
The point of all this is the following. To maintain a relatively dictatorial form of power, such as that sought by the universal fascists of our nation's utopian faction, the people must be relatively stupefied. To do this, one must lower the intellectual level of the population, as the ancient Caesars used "bread and circuses" to stupefy the mass of nominal citizens, as our mass media and popular mass entertainment has stupefied the U.S. population today. To maintain technologically progressive forms of employment, one must have a population whose cognitive potential is being built up in ways consistent with scientific-technological progress. Therefore, to stupefy the U.S. citizens into the state of mind consistent with universal fascist overlordship, the former commitment to scientific and technological progress must be uprooted, transforming a producer society into a consumer society tending toward the depravity which gripped the so-called "citizens" of imperial Rome.
One delightful day, when "globalization" and "free trade" have produced utopia, a dirty, scabrous typical citizen, perhaps more than slightly radioactive, will buy some imported rag at a fashionable flea-market, and, holding that garment up, in a gesture of triumph, shout with joy: "Hallelujah! The price was right!"
So, these past thirty-five years, the rules of the game have been changed, from those consistent with the modern sovereign nation-state, to a parody of feudalism which converges, as Scalia implies, upon universal fascism. Such are the foolish games which people play.
True Freedom Is Sublime
Man's nature, as distinct from the nature of the beasts, is to increase our species' power in and over the universe, by discovering and applying universal physical principles. The development and exercise of that power, to that purpose, is the true obligation, and principal source of true happiness of the human individual and of his or her society. Human freedom is not arbitrary choice; but a successful expression of the quality of truthfulness inhering in the cognitive power to assimilate, generate, and apply true knowledge. In short, true freedom is as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin recognized it, the power, obligation, and joy of doing good. It is the escape from the nightmare of the feral jungle, through contributing to increasing mankind's power to exert effective dominion in the universe, and, gaining dominion, to act as the benefactor of the domain we inhabit.
This is no mere play with the meaning of words. Consider the following argument, and thus come to recognize the truthfulness and joy to be derived from contemplating the evidence which I now set before you.
That victimization, through games, by means of which people are subjected, and self-subjected to the condition of human cattle, depends upon submission of their personal will to seemingly axiomatic principles which have an epistemologically arbitrary character. I mean, for example, the usual definitions, axioms, and postulates of customarily taught classroom and textbook mathematics. Freedom is found in the development and use of the powers of cognition, to come to believe in virtually no axiomatic assumption which one does not know to be truthful, a sense of truth which could never be achieved except in a cognitive way.
As long as you are compelled to believe axiomatically in rules to which you are pressed to submit arbitrarily, you are not free. You may be at liberty to make arbitrary, even absurd choices, such as supporting the chubby Presidential candidacy of former Vice-President Al Gore, but that is the act of the slave putting shackles on himself each morning, not a stroke for true freedom. Freedom is the act of discovering the truth, and being self-governed by that sharing of cognitive experience of truthfulness as a mode of cooperation with one's fellow-creature. What you have merely learned to believe, you do not know, and, therefore, neither you, nor your choices are truly free.
A study of the history of mankind should lead us to look at the matter of education in this light.
The first twenty-five years of life, are the most crucial in the development of the new individual person in modern society. This is the period during which the individual comes to biological and, hopefully, personal maturity. In this interval, the passing from adolescence, as a legalized form of insanity, to the relative mental adulthood reached by about eighteen to twenty-one years of age, should be a time at which the young individual has assimilated the most essential axiomatic knowledge accumulated by mankind up to that point.
This was the goal of what was named a "Classical humanist" standard of education. Unfortunately, that quality of education was never enjoyed by the majority of the young, even in Europe and the U.S.A. In effect, under the relatively best circumstances, a kind of class distinction in educational "tracking" prevailed among those presumed to become members of the respectively professional, middle, and lower classes of the population as a whole. Not educating students "above the station" they were foreseen as occupying in adult life, was emphasized as a way of keeping those dumped into the lower classes from experiencing the discontent of being educated above their assigned station in life. Not to oblige students to expose themselves to the work of "dead, white European males" to qualify for graduation, is to render them ignorant of the historically determined characteristics of both the world's science and technology, and the roots of the world-culture on which sustaining a population of significantly more than six billions persons depends. Nothing is more irrelevant to the securing of freedom, than limiting education to what is considered "relevant" in generally employed educational-policy jargon today.
Thus, in the policy-shift of the U.S. away from a producer society, to a consumer society, significant numbers of intelligent people were not desired; therefore, today, even most university education is tracked to the purpose of keeping the students stupid, if not otherwise fat and happy. However, as the zooming prices of education attest, although education is designed to keep most pupils stupid, even at very high prices, tracking distinctions are maintained, as social positions tend to be distributed to graduates on the basis of, not the quality of education they received, but rather what their parents paid for it.
The point is, that all the young should be "exposed to" nothing less than a Classical humanist education. Furthermore, this should not be an experience tucked away in classrooms, but should be the commonplace feature of everyday life as an extension of the Classical humanist mode of education. Restated: a Classical humanist education, is a pivotal element of a Classical form of culture of the society as a whole.
The primary object of such Classical educational and related policies is simply "freedom." This means freedom from being the victim of those games which enslave most of the world's population, notably the majority of the U.S. population right now, the shackles of arbitrarily adopted definitions, axioms, and postulates of a mass-produced "belief system."
This is not merely an educational policy for a national economy such as our own. It is a way of life. It is therefore the principle of design which must govern our economic life, our national economy.
If we come to know what it is to be truly human, a creature set apart from and above all other forms of life, then being human ought to be the center of all aspects of individual and social life. We must never limit our progress in science and technology to perceived material necessity. We must progress simply because it is human to do so, even if there were no other kind of material imperative to do so. To progress is to be human, as life is natural to all living processes. Not to progress, is to reject our true nature, as rejection of the nature of life is known as death. The primary goal of the sovereign nation-state is to make its people truly free, as I have described such human freedom here.
A Classical humanist education, and a matching Classical culture, are the foundations of freedom in a truly free society. That is also the standard by which economic policy must be shaped, just as the true entrepreneur makes progress, not merely for profit, but because it is in his or her nature to do so.
[1] Famous characters from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
[2] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions,
[3] Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier And The State: The Theory And Politics Of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957).
[4] The German Federal Ministry for the Interior, on May 2, 2002, issued a report regarding the Erfurt school killings, estimating that as many as 170,000 German youth were so deeply involved in the culture of video-game violence and pornography, that any of them could repeat the Erfurt massacre.
[5] Senator Lieberman's "rating and labelling" legislation, known grandiosely as the 21st Century Media Responsibility Act, was passed after the April 1999 Columbine High School killings. The Act merely codified a voluntary ratings system by Hollywood producers, as pushed earlier by Lieberman, who successfully protected these producers from anti-trust regulations and the popular uproar after Columbine. The result of Lieberman's legislation was that the sale of violent video and computer games spread from video stores to many new locations, including large chain stores; the rating labels merely helped teens identify the "bad videos" if they wanted them.
[6] Lieberman's amendment exempting the entertainment industry from anti-trust laws was introduced in April 1999, just after the Columbine shootings, and passed in May. His fraudulent "ratings" legislation with its "Appeal to Hollywood," was introduced and passed in July of that year. In September 2000, Lieberman was able to collect $4.2 million in Gore-Lieberman campaign funds, at a Hollywood fundraiser, for his efforts.
[7] The use of "fascist" is precise, referring to the professed fascism of the Benito Mussolini ally Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose movement supplied the ideological basis for the Likud party of Israel today.
[8] It is implicit in Plato's use of the parable of the "Cave," that sense-perception does not show us the real universe directly; rather what sense-perception perceives is as shadows on the irregular surface of the wall of a dimly firelit cave. The Apostle Paul points out that we see as in a darkened mirror. Thus, we are obliged to come to know the objects of the real universe through their physical effects on the way in which the shadows behave. In mathematical physics, the simplest expression of this principle of physical science are Carl Gauss' rescue of the physical reality of complex variables from the "imaginary" domain, in his fundamental theorem of algebra, and Riemann's development of a true physical geometry from the root of Gauss continued development of the principle expressed by that 1799 theorem. So, Vernadsky, in developing, successively, his definition of the Biosphere and Noösphere, defined the principles of life and cognition as categorically universal physical principles, distinct from the abiotic, by conclusive evidence of their unique and efficient physical effects.
[9] The heliocentric view of the Solar System was developed in ancient Greece, as by Aristarchus. Despite the known evidence of his time, Claudius Ptolemy had fraudulently contrived what became known as his astronomy, solely on the basis of what Rome had revived as the formerly discarded writings of Aristotle. This travesty persisted until Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa emphasized the evidence of the heliocentric system. However, the Venice-organized reaction gained a political upper hand in Europe about 1511, when Spain joined the cause of a Venice-led "little dark age" of the 1511-1648 period of religious warfare. This is the period of Spain's history to which modern Carlists, the Spanish-speaking branch of fascism, adhere. Venice and its reactionary allies fought savagely to uproot the Classical revival of the preceding century. It was this pro-feudalist reaction which shoved the Aristotelean hoax down the throat of Europe for the remainder of that century and beyond.
[10] This was, in effect, the devastating argument which Carl Gauss delivered in 1799, in his original report of the discovery of the fundamental theorem of algebra, against D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange. Gauss' attack on Lagrange in that location is the most notable for its attack on the unfortunate, continuing effects of Lagrange's dogma on the modern university classroom. Lagrange, committing the same general error as D'Alembert and Euler, is chiefly responsible for the widespread delusion in scientific practice still today, in insisting, most pointedly, that the principles of physical action can be reduced to subsidiary features derived from an ivory-tower form of mathematics, thus degrading physical science itself to a mere describing of nature. Gauss' 1799 theorem, adopting Plato's principle of power, provided the basis for all competent forms of anti-Euclidean physical geometry extant today, Bernhard Riemann's most notably.
