The State Of Our Union:
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
August 3, 2007
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The following document is presented as an urgently needed draft of what must be crafted to serve as the Platform for the coming U.S. General Election. It has been prompted by the fact that none among the putative leading pre-Presidential candidates has shown, so far, any recognition of the kind of reality which will face the voters in the coming November 2008 general election, and no sense of the issues which will have become decisive at the point of the January 2009 inauguration. It were said fairly, that all of the putative candidates, thus far, are treating the future as a continuation of assumed conditions which have ceased to exist, therefore showing little sense of what must be faced, or of what must be done, if our republic is to have a future during even the relatively few years immediately ahead.
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As I spoke in my Webcast, now more than a week ago [July 25], the present global financial crisis has now erupted: "... at a time when the world monetary system is actually, now, currently in the process of disintegrating."
As the relevant Germany press describes the situation, the crisis at the Industriekreditbank (IKB) arm of the Germany's Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, involved the use of IKB to attempt to sustain the overstretched and trembling Germany banking system. Apparently, the attempt at a clean stop-gap action failed at some point in the chain of arrangements. Such a development within the Germany banking system blows away the credibility of the efforts of the U.S.A.'s Henry Paulson and others to maintain the illusion that the U.S.A. side of the current global financial panic is only a marginal moment of crisis within the limited domain of a subprime mortgage-backed-securities market.
The fact of the matter is, at the one end, there are the respective mortgage-based securities markets, and, at the opposite end, the world-wide, British Cayman-Islands-centered operations of the "hedge funds." These are the "book-ends" of a global systemic financial crisis whose most notably complicating feature is the role of the Japan "carry trade." The inability of the banks, at the one end, to play their assigned part in passing along margins of money now not being supplied to the current rash of hedge-fund takeovers, means a general breakdown of that system as a whole.
Therefore, to understand the current phase of this global financial crisis, we must not let our attention be distracted by chatter which seeks to draw attention from the crucial significance of the failure of the current world system at its "book end"-like extremes Such, figuratively speaking, are the "horseshoe nails" whose failure ripples, chain-reaction-style, to the loss of the rider and kingdom alike.
A combination of developments, heralded by events such as the catastrophe in some Bear Stearns accounts, a political eruption in Japan's parliamentary elections, and the crucial developments reported by Germany's IKB on Monday, July 30, 2007, have been combined, thus, with related developments, to signal entry into a terminal phase of the global crises now breaking out, chain-reaction-like, in the Transatlantic and other leading financial markets. Stubborn refusal to face essential facts has caused a long on-coming, virtually inevitable, great, global financial crash either as early as 2007, or slightly later. This has brought us to such a point of crisis.
Although the world's present financial system could not be rescued, a crash of the world's physical economy could still be prevented. I have explained this repeatedly over the course of the recent forty-odd years, but that rescue of the real economy could not occur under the conditions defined by an effort to maintain that present, floating-exchange-rate, world monetary-financial system which was launched under the administrative initiative of the U.S. Nixon Administration's George Shultz during 1971-1972.
As a result of that stubborn clinging by current political authorities to misguided policies, especially the now-failed U.S.A. and British monetary, economic, and warfare policies of the recent three decades, the world's present world monetary-financial system has thus begun its death-agony. A new, reformed monetary system could survive; the presently existing one could not. What dreamers and false prophets said could never happen, has now happened. I repeat: Whereas the world's physical economy could be rescued from the presently inevitable bankruptcy of the failed, present monetary system economy itself, the presently dominant world monetary-financial system, is now as doomed as the legendary Dodo.
That system was already threatened with a future crisis by the shifts in policies adopted under President Harry Truman, during the post-Franklin Roosevelt interval of what is generally referred to as "World War II." However, it was only two decades after that war, with the U.S. entry into what became a long war in Indo-China, that the long-term economic dangers in Truman's actions became clear. Today, without a return to the U.S.A.'s constitutional, anti-monetarist, American System of political-economy, a return to those principles which informed President Franklin Roosevelt's recovery from the 1930s world depression, the worst outcome imaginable were about to happen to the world at large.
Therefore, it were necessary to preface the outline of the proposals for the needed sweeping form of current reform, by a review of some of the most significant history of the problems which have been accumulated since the death of that great President, Franklin Roosevelt, who authored a wonderful recovery from those earlier follies of the 1920s which had been promoted under Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, and also under Andrew Mellon.
The first, March 4, 1933 inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt, led our United States of America from the despair of 1929-1932, into which it had been misled by the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, into our triumph as a nation, a triumph which had not only made possible the defeat of the Adolf Hitler dictatorship, but had built the U.S.A. into the concentration of the greatest physical-economic power which the world had ever known. But, then, with the death of that President, on April 12, 1945, under the administration of President Harry S Truman, our U.S.A. changed its sense of long-term direction, to become what has proven to be, now, a Classical tragedy of that named type associated with those of ancient Aeschylus, and of modern Shakespeare and Schiller.
In terms of physical-economic facts alone, for all our short-term troubles, we did remain, on balance, a powerful, growing economy, until the time of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It might appear to be the case, that our economy's plunge to its present state of ruin was begun with the prolonged U.S. 1964-1972 war in Indo-China; but that war, alone, does not account for the fact that, it was as that Indo-China War was ending, that we made the most ruinous changes in direction of policy-shaping. The pattern of these revolutionary—or, should we say, counter-revolutionary—changes which were made under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, have been the core of the causes which have sent our economy down, down, down, plummeting into that presently catastrophic state of physical-economic decadence from which the majority among our citizens is suffering today.
Until the effects of that U.S. War in Indo-China, the economic-cultural outlook of our republic continued to be, approximately, a continuation of that experienced under the President Roosevelt's leadership, as expressed in both his recovery program and his mobilization for the defeat of Hitler. The adult generations which had experienced the Depression, the recovery, and that war, had that experience embedded as if in their bones. I can say, today, as eyewitness, mine was the generation of the young adults who, in the large, rallied to President Dwight Eisenhower and to the vocal renewal of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy by President John F. Kennedy. As long as my generation lived, the echo of that experience remained, as for me, embedded in the conscience of many among us.
The assassination of President Kennedy, and the launching and continuation of the Indo-China War, created the social chemistry under which the already simmering radical and ruinous changes in the leading cultural outlook of the nation were induced. These were changes of the type which President Dwight Eisenhower had already named a "military-industrial complex," changes which were, in fact, already in progress virtually from the moment after President Franklin Roosevelt died. The turn against our science-driven farming and industrial traditions, was typified by the Carter Administration's adoption of the programmatic outlook of the Trilateral Commission: a wrecking of the very foundations of our internal economy, a wrecking which found its political support chiefly in the "white collar" sentiments among the young adults of the so-called "Baby-Boomer" generation of today.
Thus, the combined, corrosive moral and economic effects of a long war of 1964-1972, the lunacy of the wrecking of the Bretton Woods agreements, and the "post-industrial" insurgency of 1968-1981, wrecked the house which Franklin Roosevelt had built, and plunged the political processes of the nation into a kind of Sophistry which should have reminded historians, ominously, of the social forces responsible for the self-destruction of Athens in the Peloponnesian War.
So, to summarize this immediate point: It was the commitment to the Liberal monetary and economic, and social reforms of the 1969-1981 interval, which have become the policy-matrix which has ruined our republic during the decades then and since. The changes which have ruined us, began as a kind of moral corruption, under the administration of President Harry Truman; but, what threatens us with ruin, unless we change that now, is the effects of the more radical changes introduced as a set during the 1969-1981 interval. These changes have wrecked us. That cultural-paradigm shift, has been the principal immediate cause for the state of ruin which continues to grip our republic today. It is those policy-changes which we must now reverse, and that suddenly and to immediate and pervasive effect, if our republic is to survive the already onrushing global breakdown-crisis of the presently existing world system.
This, in summary, is our present national tragedy.
Therefore, to save our republic from a presently immediate and continued economic and related threats to our constitutional system, we must return our attention to the point at which the relevant moral corruption of our policy-shaping processes was germinated, not only from the moment of President Kennedy's assassination, but back to the time when the seeds of the dragon were sown, at the time of President Franklin Roosevelt's death.
To understand the causes for the ruined state of our economy today, we must look more deeply into the long-term implications of the original turn against the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, the turn which President Truman's accession began. The significance of Truman's accession became clearer, as Truman's popularity plunged during his second term. The nation turned wisely to Dwight Eisenhower to rescue the nation from Truman's folly. (I was there at that moment, and understood it rightly, already at that blessed time.) Despite the well-deserved popularity of President Eisenhower, and of President John F. Kennedy, the presently ruined condition of the U.S. economy is a fruit of a long wave, a decades-spanning change in overall direction, toward increasing power of what President Eisenhower would identify as a "military-industrial complex," a change which had actually begun, already, virtually on the day Harry S Truman entered the Presidency.
So, despite the relative, average increase in per-capita physical prosperity during the 1945-1963 interval, the radical changes, away from the global and national policy-matrices of President Franklin Roosevelt, were already the characteristic direction of long-ranging change in the economy during the entire span of the long-ranging trends in policy over the entire interval from April 12, 1945 to the present date.
This concept is crucial, in the sense that, without this notion of our 1945-2007 history, as a time of an unfolding, post-Franklin Roosevelt, Classical tragedy, our republic would now fail in a way which would not only doom our nation, but would impel the world as a whole down, into the same general fate. The greatest threat to world civilization today, is not the present problems of the U.S.A. under nominal President George W. Bush, Jr., but our republic's failure to make the sudden turnabout to the kind of the leading role on which the welfare of the planet as a whole now depends, that for decades yet to come.
The Classical European paradigm for the kind of failure of statecraft which has been experienced by the U.S.A., so often, during the period since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, is the same cultural decadence which prompted the collapse of Pericles' Athens into what became the ruinous Peloponnesian War. What I have just described, above, as the change from the creative optimism of President Franklin Roosevelt's revival of our Constitutional tradition, is that long reign of Sophistry, like that of self-doomed ancient Athens, which grabbed control of our destiny, increasingly, under President Truman and beyond.
It is essential today, if we are to locate the root of our present calamity, that what the U.S.A. has done to itself since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, but also, more noticeably, since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is a full-blown tragedy in the strictest understanding of the principles of the Classical drama of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller. The meaning of "tragedy" is not limited to a case of a death or suffering which could have been avoided; in its strict, Classical meaning, it treats the case in which the victim, which may be an individual or an entire society, destroys himself, or itself, as a result of a generally accepted belief, or, the same thing, a habituated tradition. In that strict use of the term, "tragedy," the recent behavior, or, lack of appropriate behavior by the campaign-money-conscious U.S. Congress, has been truly tragic in the full meaning of the term.
In applying that conception to the specific case of our presently crisis-stricken U.S.A., we must refer to the role of what both ancient Classical Greek and modern Classical-scientific culture recognize by the strict use of the term "dynamics," as a term of Gottfried Leibniz's scientific method, the method expressed by the insertion of Leibniz's concept of "the pursuit of happiness" into our Declaration of Independence, and the premising of our Federal Republic's policy-making on the same great principle of "happiness," under which notion of the "general welfare" was inserted into our Federal Constitution.
This use of "dynamics" by me, here, means, that contrary to the dogmas of the academic and kindred ideologues of Romanticism, there are sometimes prophets in history, but there are no effective heroes among the typical, incumbent leaders of a culture which has entered a truly tragic phase of its existence. I speak of that tragedy into which the U.S.A. entered upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt. In all Classical tragedies, such as those portrayed by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller, it is the current form of culture of the society as a whole which has failed, a systemic failure of a culture, which grips all incumbent leaders of the society's characteristic institutions, and also the great majority of the population in general. I know this very well; I was there, and I recognized that fact immediately, at that time.
In a truly tragic period of a culture's history, such as that inaugurated in ancient Athens under Pericles, or that which has dominated the U.S.A.'s and world history as a whole since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, it is also the popular opinion shared among a great majority of the population, but especially the great majority among its leading social and political classes, which brings the doom of that afflicted society upon itself.
Often, as it was for the U.S.A. under President Truman, as in the early stages of the show of riches under Athens' Pericles, there is a period of initial prosperity and sense of triumph, which snares the leaders of the society into that same kind of surge of misguided overconfidence which led into the fated doom of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, or which led the foolhardy U.S.A. into its suicidal plunge into both the 1964-1972 Indo-China War and, now, the present cauldron of Southwest Asia.
This has been the characteristic pattern leading toward the ultimate failure of the U.S.A. under all Presidents, from Harry S Truman through the worst so far, Dick Cheney's puppet-President, George W. Bush, today. We have enjoyed a few relatively good Presidents during this tragic span, but they were chosen to lead a society which has continued to show, more and more, the characteristics of a living tragedy, despite their personal impulses to the contrary.
To halt a tragedy, reforms are never sufficient; since such tragedies are the fruit of mass-delusions, from the higher social ranks of society, on down, it is indispensable that we change the entire system's relevant set of prevailing axiomatic assumptions. Those are assumptions such as that belief in "free trade" which has been a crucial factor in the mass behavioral factor impelling popular opinion into the self-destruction of the U.S. economy which we have experienced during the recent three-and-a-half decades.
Every known culture of mankind in history so far, whether a happy or wretched one, presents us with a people who, at large, are engulfed within an intricate mass of axiomatic-like assumptions. Some simplistic opinion would describe such a population as "programmed." Others would refer to sets of false beliefs which either are, or pretend to be universal physical principles, as the so-called "laws of our universe." Against this reality, the virtual idiot is the man who insists that his judgment is not affected by such cultural-environmental "fences" around the range within which his mental processes are permitted to wander. We sometimes speak, for example, of "accident proneness," or of an individual controlled, like an enraged dog on a leash, by his, or her most gripping obsessions.
Although these matters are sometimes discussed, the individual's awareness of that kind of pathetic relationship usually vanishes during the span of the proverbial heat of the moment of decision. What are the powers which control your reactive decision in "the proverbial heat of the moment"? How can a population whose majority has supported mass-insanity in its top ranks, such as the U.S.A. of recent decades, be induced to cease being as foolish as its majority has shown itself to be during recent decades?
Such is the force of tragedy, or, in the Classical Greek tradition of the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Leibniz, dynamics. It is that matter which justly fascinates the reflective sort of cultured persons when the subject of their attention is ancient Classical Greek tragedy, or of Shakespeare's English history collection as a single work, or, the more advanced insight into the same principle of tragedy which is met in the work of a Friedrich Schiller as Schiller proceeded from the implications of relevant predecessors such as those.
What is too often overlooked about the crafting and performance of Classical tragedy and its like, is, that the subject of the drama is not on the perceived stage, but, as Schiller emphasized, the reaction of the mind of the fellow in the balcony of the theater to the way in which the action in the shadow-land on stage is brought to life, as if within a memory, within that member of the audience. As Friedrich Schiller emphasized: the object of the drama is to induce a person who has entered the theater, to leave that theater, thus, a better citizen than he, or she had entered, thus to take charge of those compulsions of ignorance which threaten him from within.
In a certain degree, on that just stated point by Schiller, therefore, the historian and intelligent ordinary citizen, alike, profit greatly from a good presentation of the prescribed opening of a well-staged performance of Shakespeare's Henry V, of the monologue by the Chorus.[1] So, on all occasions of Classical drama since the ancient Classical Greek stage, the actors on stage, and related trappings, must dissolve into the reality of that other scene and cast which those mere appearances of the actors on stage call forth as in the guise of the mental images seen and heard, on a higher plane than that mere stage, within the mind of the member of the audience. The drama must evoke the appearance of the vision, sound, and action to which the image of the performance on stage performance refers. The actors and the scenery must not distract the attention of the member of the audience from the intended, historically specific, relevant sights and sounds of the drama itself, rather than the mere images now seen and heard on the stage as such.
The transformation which such a Classical drama's performance, or the real-life stage must evoke, has the same characteristics of action as an original discovery of a universal physical principle, or a creative insight of the qualified performer into a work of art. The essential thing in such necessary transformations of the axiomatic premises of thinking, politically or otherwise, is shift in focus of attention from local actions, to the matter of a choice of principle expressed by the process as a whole.
The truly Classical art of politics, is to see ourselves as an actor in that drama of the society as a whole, on that stage. It were prudent to think, in this way, of European culture's now global history over a span since about 700 B.C. In that way, by understanding the critical aspect of the underlying changes and their outcomes in this span of history, the needed essential ideas come into view.
That is the approach which we must now summon among ourselves, that we might accomplish the needed transformation from the form of human cattle recognized as persons who are merely voters, to those who think and act as true citizens of a republic like our own.
—Leesburg, Virginia
@emAugust 3, 2007
The intention which is both expressed by, and underlies our 1776 Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution, is implicitly embedded in the texts in which the history of the origins, founding, and continued existence of our republic is embedded, and combined to form virtually a single living testament. In each time our nation's habit of folly has imperilled the continued existence of this republic, the hand of our history has reached out to those leaders who acted to inspire a resumption of the principles upon which the roots and forms of our republic have depended.
We have now entered an awfully perilous trial of our republic's ability to continue to exist. We could now recover to survive once again, but to accomplish that, we must make a radical change from our recently erring ways. The correction of this current state of most perilous error must reflect a cultivated sense of the true origins, history, and future prospects of our republic, and of the world in which this once great republic, in its time, came into being as a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind.
That great republic from our past, was crafted chiefly out of the inspiration of those who came here from Europe, by those whose aim was to realize the principles and aspirations of the best fruits of the history of European civilization, but to do this in a place as distant as possible from the morally corrupting reach of the oligarchical traditions which have dominated European systems of government and social life in Europe itself, even, to a large degree, to the present day.
The 1763-1776 break of our patriots from the British system, was prompted by the repressive actions to which the English colonies in North America were subjected, that under the new imperial authority which the February 1763 Peace of Paris conferred upon the imperialist financier-oligarchical powers of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal party's British East India Company.[2] Such is the prompting of the reflection we find in our 1776 Declaration of Independence.
The roots of our republic were planted, chiefly, by Europeans who, as typified by the Winthrops and Mathers of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, not only brought the best of European republican culture, including the influence of Gottfried Leibniz, into the new settlements in North America, but treasured that cultural heritage by moving it to a relatively safe distance from the oligarchical traditions reigning in "Old Europe." In that way, our image of a republic was traced by our founders to the image of Plato and the better times of Athens of the tradition of Solon, to times prior to the Sophist follies of the Age of Pericles.
At the time we established our young new republic, we enjoyed not only the commitment to freedom which many leading Europeans admired in their view of our efforts; but, unfortunately, London's orchestration of the follies of the French Revolution, and the follies of a Habsburg Emperor Joseph II driven into impassioned unreason by the Martinist freemasonry's persecution and guillotining of his sister Marie Antoinette,[3] made a moral ruin of continental Europe of July 1789 through the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Metternich and Castlereagh triumphed over Europe, with disgusting effects from which Europe has not been fully liberated to the present day.
So, from 1815 until 1865, our young U.S. republic remained at peril, threatened by London's agents deployed against us from without and, as the influence of Aaron Burr and his circles attests, within our borders. The notable assassinations of our sitting Presidents, actions dispatched from Europe, typify that source of peril.[4]
Nonetheless, the aftermath of the great victory, led by President Abraham Lincoln, over London's attempt to destroy us, has been severely injured, but not yet ruined, even by assassinations of our Presidents or foulness of a kindred disposition. Generations of the descendants of our founders, from the early Seventeenth Century on, and a spirit of freedom adopted by so many of our immigrants, remain the principal wellspring of a living patriotic tradition which we must treasure once again today. So, despite all of the various forms of accumulated corruption of our society now, our constitutional republic remains, in principle, something very special as a factor of advantage to all humanity, still today, even as this was more clearly true in a happier time under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Today, it would be to our ultimate advantage to confess that, politically, morally, and economically, we are a piece of wreckage, a state of moral and physical ruin of that which had been largely the accumulation of developments which had occurred since the nobler time before the death of our President Franklin Roosevelt. Nonetheless, human beings are not born as simply repetitions of the species and varieties of their ancestors. We must consider the fact, that we are embodiments of an accumulated, immortal cultural heritage, whose influence reaches, as in the consciousness of the living, to no less than three or more generations before us, and for those of us who enjoy certain cultural advantages, to traditions which we know as embedded within us personally from two or more centuries before our time.
Thus, in that way, we have a memory of ourselves and our nation as a true republic, reaching back two and a half centuries, or more, to as far back as the Winthrops and Mathers of Seventeenth-Century New England. Those of us who have the advantage of being better educated, trace this legacy to the ancient Greece of the Pythagoreans, Solon, and Plato, and see us as a continued embodiment of that particular cultural legacy.
On this account, our legacy is, that we of the U.S.A. are chiefly of Christian or Jewish heritage, the latter that of those Moseses known as Moses of Egypt and Sinai, Moses Maimonides, and Moses Mendelssohn, or, for others among us, as the current Pope Benedict XVI has lately emphasized, the living Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, at the same time, like Nicholas of Cusa and Philo of Alexandria, earlier, we are ecumenical in our best representatives' traditional view of the obligations we incur toward others, universally, by virtue of an informed insight into the essentially good nature of man. This heritage is expressed in the insertion of Leibniz's principle of the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence, and the echo of that as the supreme Preamble of our Federal Constitution. As our political forebears Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin reflected this: if we are true patriots of our republic, we must see ourselves as committed to "do good."
In respect to all of the foregoing considerations, we know we are mortal. This knowledge suggests to the wise the importance of "laying up treasures in Heaven," a sentiment which has tended to be mislaid among what are the currently relatively older generations which might be recognized as the usual sort of "middle class" of "white-collar" households' origin, or of pretensions to similar effect. When Sophistry adopts the trappings of the Frankfurt-School-style existentialism of Europe's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an existentialism which was widely instilled into our own "white-collar" generation born here between 1945 and 1958, any moral commitment to the future outcome of one's own existence is, at best, somewhat impaired. Whereas, our respectable patriots were formerly accustomed to think in terms of families of children, parents, grandparents, and, sometimes, great-grandparents; that sense of multi-generational national destiny has tended, lately, to seem to be lost from the perspectives met among that generation.
On this account, in these recent times, there has been an existentially menacing cleavage between the policy-shaping outlooks of the older adult generation of the "white-collar," "Baby-Boomer" tradition, in opposition to the sense of the imperatives of the prospective future, as the current situation is sensed by young adults of the 18-35 years age-interval. Thus, that still living remnant of that much older generation now dying out, my own generation, had thought in terms of long-range capital improvements in the physical productivity and related potential of generations to come: a perspective which has been lost among the majority of the Baby-Boomer generation in public office, or comparable status, today.
Whereas, now, as witnessed as the fall-off in physical capital improvements in scientific-technological progress and infrastructure over the recent thirty-nine years, the so-called "Baby-Boomer" generations of North America and western and central Europe have lost the practical sense of a future for their own nation, or mankind in general. As a result of that recent demoralization of many among us, now, we see that the members of the poorer classes so affected, often pray for an escape from reality, into a place of safety beyond the "Hell Fires" of Armageddon; whereas, the Liberal middle-class types express a contrasting yearning for the gentler inanities of a serene, deathly state of imagined nothingness, which might pass for Purgatory.
As far back as we know of daily experience within the pores of European civilization since about 2,800 years ago, this history has been polluted by the influence of a certain, pathetic notion of "money." That moral pollution is commonly identified today, in other words, as the teaching and practice of "monetarism." The intellectual pollution has been a leading source of all our recent, presently worsening, and threatened economic, moral, and environmental disasters.
We may trace the roots of this, our present moral affliction, to, for example, the case of ancient Tyre as the leading enemy of the Mediterranean littoral's civilization, about 700 B.C. and later. Focus, in this way, upon the site of the complex of the ancient Delphi Apollo cult, tracing the road down to the sea. Flanking the temple itself, there is a collection of smaller structures called treasuries, representing the monetary wealth of sundry cities of Greece. From the access to the sea, the "loan-sharking" from Delphi leads to locations such as the penetration and subversion of the Etruscan culture at the mouth of the Tiber, and up to the famous seven Latin hills above. Delphi itself is otherwise identified with the brutally oppressive law of Lycurgan Sparta, with its practice of helotry.
The dominant strategic role of usury, again, today, had already permeated most of the history of European civilization and its maritime cultures from those ancient times, through the time of the role of Venice's control over the medieval system of the Norman chivalry's rampages, and through the rise of modern Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperial maritime hegemonies such as that which, once again, has dominated the world increasingly, especially so since the virtually treasonous, 1971-1972 destruction of the role of the U.S. dollar as the pillar of a fixed-exchange-rate system of international credit.
This relationship between monetarism and imperial, or proto-imperial forms of maritime power, typified by the modern British imperial tradition, has been the root of the major wars of European civilization throughout the indicated period of history to the present date. Since the rise of Britain's Prince Edward Albert to power under his mother's nominal primacy, during the later decades of the Nineteenth Century, the issue of the imperial role of maritime power has been named "geopolitics." It had been, also, in fact, the pivotal issue of imperial conflicts from the time of ancient Tyre's conflict with a resurgent Egypt and Egypt's Ionian and Etruscan maritime allies.
To understand world history of the recent century and a half to date, it is essential to know that the name "geopolitics" was introduced to global strategies as part of a British imperial reaction to the aftermath of the victory of the U.S.A. led by Abraham Lincoln over the British Empire's Confederacy puppet.
President Lincoln had followed the policy-map which had been laid out with considerable precision by John Quincy Adams, during Adams' role in pre-defining the intended borders of a continental U.S. Republic, during his service as Secretary of State. The subsequent, great economic achievements of the U.S.A., under President Abraham Lincoln and beyond, in development of the productive powers of labor, were essentially inseparable from the integration of the U.S.'s territory as a continental nation, through aid of transcontinental railway development, and revolutionized the world at large. The American System of political-economy's achievements since the election of President Lincoln, inspired an attempted, great, beneficial change in the chosen destinies of Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and others.
However, the promotion of transcontinental and related railway networks throughout continental Eurasia, was seen by a war-like imperial London as a threat to the imperial hegemony of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal form of financier-oligarchical maritime supremacy.
This was the core issue of what are registered as having been World Wars I and II.
Thus, the ouster of Bismarck from the post of Germany's Chancellor, cleared the way for Britain's guilty Prince Edward Albert to organize World War I through using the silly Austro-Hungarian Kaiser as a tool for putting the Prince's nephews, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II and Russia's Czar Nicholas II, at each others' throats through London-directed Balkan wars, as British interests orchestrated the later, new, continuing wave of Balkan wars launched on London's direction during the term of President George H.W. Bush.
Thus, the British had allied themselves with Japan for the launching of Japan's 1895-1945 wars against China, against Korea and Russia. Thus, a 1920s naval alliance of Britain and Japan against the naval power of the U.S., led, ironically, to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. That conflict has been named "geopolitics." "Geopolitics," so defined, has remained the imperial war-like and related policy of London, as best typified lately by the cases of the Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair ministries.
Now, a new page in world economic history is being turned.
The two great "geopolitical" challenges now are, first, the fact that the growth of population, and the related needs for development of raw-materials resources, requires a sudden great expansion of the development of territories, a surge in advanced technologies, and also new, fundamental discoveries of principles in physical science. The strategic situation is therefore typified currently, by the present urgency of developing at least five and more nuclear-fission power plants per day on this planet, and by the need for a new quality of global network of land-based mass transportation, which will replace much of the dependency on sea-borne and highway transport, especially for the transport of relatively high-value-per-ton classes of freight.
This set of circumstances has led, presently, to the adoption of a mission for development of a Bering Strait railway (or magnetic levitation) transport tunnel, from Uelen in Russia's Siberia, to Alaska. Such a transport route, would be an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway system, and would provide a crucially needed keystone for the development of transportation lines, implicitly, from the Atlantic coasts of Europe to the tip of South America. From Europe and Southwest Asia, this same network, as extended, would penetrate the African continent. The development of high-speed magnetic-levitation modes along these routes would make possible, and otherwise revolutionize the efficiency of the world economy along, principally, these land-routes. Immediately, it would open the way for the needed development of regions of the world which must be developed to meet the greatly expanded requirements for development of raw-materials resources.
This would also facilitate a presently much-needed shift from costly dependency upon transport of hydrocarbon fuels, a shift which would be accomplished now through the use of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear-power reactors of suitable design, for the production of cleaner, hydrogen-based fuels from water. Carbon-based fuels would be relegated, thus, to their more useful role as raw materials of production and support of life, consumed in production of more valuable products-per-ton near the source of extraction. Long-range high-priced cost of transport of cheap materials would be greatly reduced, with a resulting great saving, and increase of rates of productivity, per capita, and per square kilometer, for the nations and populations of the world at large.
The combination of such economic-development measures would lead to an early and rapid increase in the productive powers of labor and average standard of living, in principally two ways. The relative physical cost of production would be lowered, by resort to more efficient modes, and the relative standard of living generated per capita, would be increased through a continuing shift toward higher rates of concentration of costs and investments, in increasingly capital-intensive modes of higher-energy-flux-density modes of technological progress in the productive powers of labor itself. These are absolutely indispensable changes in practice now needed for a secure future of this planet as a whole.
These considerations have a powerful impact on the way in which our own government, and others, should think about money. It is time to send the practice of usury, including monetarist dogmas, into permanent retirement in a place where such intrinsically immoral practices shall repose forever in harmless innocence. It is time for the world at large to adopt and employ what U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton named "the American System of political-economy," on this account, rather than an intrinsically imperialist monetarist system associated with the practices of the presently self-doomed British system of political-economy.
The proper way to think about money and monetary policies now, was already developed, with relative uniqueness among all nations, by both the crafting of the U.S. Constitution itself, and the exemplary leading role of Alexander Hamilton as the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. The task, at this immediate point in these theses as a whole, is to restate the case for the principles underlying that American System of political-economy, that in terms of contemporary relevance.
The leading cause for the awful threat to civilization, globally, today, is a shift away from the pre-1971 fixed-exchange-rate monetary system which had been launched as a phase of the economic recovery effected through the leadership of the U.S. Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. To understand the economic and related problems menacing civilization as a whole at this present moment, it is necessary to recognize that the 1971-1972 wrecking of the Bretton Woods system, on the initiative of the U.S. Nixon Administration, was no more than a crucial phase of inflection in a radical, downward turn in U.S. policy set into motion by the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent launching of an Indo-China war through the fraudulent pretext known as "The Gulf of Tonkin" resolution.
The effective outcome of those changes of the 1963-1972 interval, has been a subsequent, multi-generational process of transfer of power to the old British-imperial world-system under the new names for that imperialism, such as "globalization" and "environmentalism." It is old British imperialism disguised by its wearing a new rag. This new imperialism is the circumstance in which our U.S. republic, and virtually all of the world besides, has been dragged to the verge of a threatened general monetary-economic breakdown-crisis of the quality which might be described as something comparable to Europe's Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age."
The operative word for identifying this degeneration of the world's economic and strategic situation is "usury." Formally, the replacement of economic sanity by a return to a practice of usury was accomplished by the influence of the Trilateral Commission over the U.S. Carter Administration, during 1977-1981. Actually, usury had already been reintroduced to global monetary-economic dynamics with the 1971-1972 plunge of the U.S.A. into a "floating-exchange-rate" monetary order.[5]
Usury is an old, and intrinsically ever-evil practice, but the specific, historically relevant form of that practice of usury for today, is, chiefly, the idea of money-value associated with the special influence of Venice's Paolo Sarpi and his dupes.
The Liberal model, introduced as a certain kind of revolution in Venetian strategy, by Paolo Sarpi, is to be viewed as a qualitatively new phase of development in a long history of what was known, since ancient times, as "the oligarchical model." The old oligarchical model, which Sarpi's reforms superseded, was that which is associated with the depraved tyranny of ancient Babylon, with the so-called "Persian" Empire, the Roman Empire, Byzantium, and the so-called ultramontane system of shared Venetian and Norman medieval ruin and rule.
That presently most relevant, Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of modern financier rule, is a modern innovation in the form of imperialism. This innovation was developed by the influence of Sarpi, and by the notable assistance of his personal lackey Galileo Galilei. That use of the term "Liberal" as a term for a certain kind of social-political system, signifies a banning, as by the notorious enemy of the U.S.A., Adam Smith, of any actually systemic principle in human relations, whether within or among societies.[6]
In modern British culture since the accession of James I, the term "Liberal" signifies, essentially, and precisely, the virtual elimination of moral considerations based on universal principles. In such a system, rules, based on no actual principle, are introduced, and often brutally enforced, as pragmatic rules of the moment: rules chosen for estimated expediency of the moment, therefore, not as principles in the same sense as the notion of universal physical-scientific principles. The empiricists John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, are all more or less equally typical of this essentially unprincipled, Cartesian-like notion of public policy within and among nations.
This lack of rational rules of monetary and other economically relevant behavior, has created a British system of modern monetarism which is not merely utterly irrational, but is a degrading system of usury, which degrades the notion of economic value to the lunatic antics of a giant gambling casino, with no efficient regard for determining the relatively greater or lesser value of production and trade for specifically human objectives.
However, that issue of the notion of value, aside, to be treated at a point below, the point immediately at hand here, is, that, despite the wishful estimate of Lord Shelburne's lackey Gibbon, the British Empire will pass away of its own doing, probably, on an historical scale, very soon. It will pass like all of the empires which European civilization has experienced as earlier expressions of the influence of the ancient oligarchical model. It, too, will go, and, according to current signs of its morbidity, soon; the choice left to us, notably in the U.S.A., is to take steps to ensure that our republic is not swept from the world map together with the presently self-foredoomed British empire.[7]
The old, pre-Sarpi, medieval European feudal system of usury, was the medieval model which went belly-up in the chain-reaction bankruptcy of the Lombard banking system during the middle of Europe's Fourteenth Century. However, since George Shultz's guiding of the Nixon Administration into the inflationary wrecking of the fixed-exchange-rate system, and the subsequent installation of Trilateral Commission doctrine under Zbigniew Brzezinski's James Earl Carter Presidency, certain essential features of that ancient feudal insanity, far worse than any mere "John Law"-style financial bubble, began to be copied into what has become the present, terminal form of the presently collapsing monetary system of hedge funds and the like. This presently hyperinflationary, rabid condition of the world's monetary-financial systems generally, is an exceptional, fatefully, now, very temporary development within modern Europe, a very much temporary, and, in fact, also terminal phase of a dying system.
To address the matter of a longer-term prospect for a truly modern monetary theory as such, we must turn attention to the roots of the economic problems which preceded the disastrous, usury-driven changes of the 1971-1981 interval. We must focus on the perils also inhering in any prospect of return to the less rambunctious form of the ruinous monetarist practices prior to the 1929-style, October 1987 Wall Street crisis.
To understand why and how the evil of Sarpi's Liberalism came to supersede that of the old, medieval form of usury under Venice and the Norman chivalry, we must first recognize the special, new conditions in which the religious warfare of 1492-1648 came into being, and were developed. One of the most carefully studied of the writings which point out the underlying nature of these new conditions of warfare, has been Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, one among the most influential writings on the origins of modern military strategy. That book points to those new features of modern European civilization which ruined the Habsburgs' and related campaigns against the continuing influence of the great ecumenical Council of Florence. It was this challenge to which Sarpi's Liberal reform of the imperialist system responded.
Contrary to Aristotle, there is no tabula rasa which should be permitted to serve as a factor in shaping an account of the real history of our universe, nor in competent political science's efforts to understand the moment of world history within which today's people with very short memories presently find themselves. All of the changes inhering in the distant historical past, which extends, implicitly, to the time before a fast-moving, younger Sun had spun off the Solar system, have left deeply embedded, and powerfully influential effects of their heritage within all parts of contemporary humanity.
In respect to European culture today, which is a very distinct, and relatively most recent phenomenon in culture generally, this has deep roots in hundreds of millennia before any specifically European ancestor existed. Admittedly, many silly fellows today insist, that to qualify as a citizen, it were sufficient to be created as if out of mud only yesterday, and to be equipped, thus, with the magical blessings of combined common sense and ignorance, thus empowered to pass snap judgment on any conceivable issue of current political strife. To the contrary, in reality, as careful studies of the results of opinion-polls, and the perilous condition of many thousands of U.S. bridges, should have warned us, nations or cultures, and, certainly, governments, which hold to such short-sighted opinions, are not likely to survive for very long, especially under the awesome global conditions which are onrushing today.
The actual threat which most greatly menaced the medieval minds of modern Venice and its Habsburgs, as during the 1492-1648 interval, was the modern sovereign nation-state, such as Louis XI's France or Henry VII's England, which was, in all of its essential distinctions, a new form of society which was, more or less tenderly, digging the graves of the old. This was the new form of society which was introduced during Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, through the prompting of two exceptionally influential works of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, his Concordantia Catholica, and his De Docta Ignorantia. The first of these writings defined the principled basis for the establishment of a new quality of organization of society, into sovereign nation-state republics of the type which became known to modern Europe as the model commonwealths of Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England. The second, De Docta Ignorantia, became the keystone of a series of scientific papers on which the principal line of progress of modern, and also viable European science depended: that best typified by the work of Cusa himself, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Pierre de Fermat, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl F. Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann.
Before that Renaissance, the known condition of mankind generally had been associated, chiefly, with a division of societies between a ruling oligarchy and its lackeys at the top, and a larger mass of the population, the under-classes, which were subjected to the virtual status of human cattle.
As the work of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Winthrops and Mathers, shows, and as the work of their Promethean follower Benjamin Franklin attests, our republic is premised on the intentions associated with the influence of Cusa and his notable intellectual followers. Although much of this virtue has been assimilated in the development of modern Europe, and elsewhere, the development of the U.S. republic has been, its warts and all, the prime precedent for establishing sovereign states of the type from which our Constitution has expelled the relics of oligarchical class-supremacy (such as forms of lèse majesté and titled oligarchy) over the so-called lower classes of society. The founding of our republic under this notion from that Renaissance, has become the historical marker for a modern political and social order premised upon the principle of true freedom of the individual human soul, the freedom of men and women to become the "fire-bringers" which that pro-satanic oligarch known as the Olympian Zeus would have tortured and banned.
The onset and immediate aftermath of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, which had virtually given a rebirth from a New Dark Age to the previously shattered Christian Papacy, briefly reconciled the conflict between the leaders of the Eastern and Western Christian churches, and, as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Pace Fidei attests, set forth the principles for an ecumenical peace between Christians and non-Christians, such as with, most clearly, Judaism and Islam, but not only Judaism and Islam. This great moment of modern history was spoiled, through the deviltry of a resurgent Venetian financier oligarchy, which orchestrated the wave of religious wars triggered by the Fall of Constantinople. Despite that deviltry, the great benefits accomplished by the architects of the great ecumenical council, survived in a large degree, to become the foundation of all the later true achievements of the nations of modern European civilization. However, all of the surviving accomplishments of the great Fifteenth-Century exit from medieval horrors into modern society, have been imperilled, and often greatly corrupted ones, to the present time.
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain, where religious peace among Christians, Jews, and Moslems had prevailed for a long time, was that act by the monstrous Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada which set off what became the monstrous religious warfare of the 1492-1648 interval. Behind Torquemada, was the same Venetian financier oligarchy which had established the imperial feudal power of the Habsburg dynasty.[8] This was the same Venetian financier-oligarchy which, led, on the ground by Venice's spy-master Zorzi, personally orchestrated the corruption of England's Henry VIII, a turn by "girl-crazy" butcher Henry VIII which was intended to break up the peace among Spain, England, and France, through the break-up of Henry VIII's marriage by a pack of Venetian agents including Zorzi, Cardinal Pole, Thomas Cromwell, et al. These closely related developments in England and Spain, are key to understanding the role of the Habsburgs in orchestrating the monstrous outbreaks of Europe's internal religious warfare during the interval 1492-1648.
It was during that latter interval that a new system of oligarchical rule was introduced by Paolo Sarpi.
The general condition of religious and kindred warfare which has persisted, globally, since the Fall of Constantinople, to the present time, underwent a series of successive stages of development, the most significant of which, for our purposes today, hit western and central Europe during the span of the interval of Venice's orchestration of monstrous religious warfare, from the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from a Habsburg-controlled Spain,[9] until Cardinal Mazarin's successful intervention on behalf of what became the great 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
In between those two dates, a revolution broke out within the ranks of the Venetian financier-oligarchy itself. The outcome of this was Paolo Sarpi's modernist victory over the opposing faction of the Venetian financier oligarchy, and the launching of what became known as the modern philosophical-theological Liberalism from which the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system emerged to become that British Empire which exists as a leading, war-like power on this planet at large, to the present day.
To gain a competent insight into the still efficient roots of the development of our U.S. republic, the following summary clarification of the situation during the period between 1492 and 1648 is more or less indispensable.
The challenge which had prompted Venice to organize and promote the religious warfare of 1492-1648 throughout western and central Europe, was Venice's fear of, and hatred against the Council of Florence and its sequelae.
The most typical of these relevant sequels, were Cusa's launching of both modern statecraft and modern European science, and the emergence of the first modern sovereign nation-states based on the commonwealth principle, Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England. The birth and development of these two modern commonwealths, and the attempted emulation of this concept of the modern sovereign state, by Florence, an attempt in which Niccolò Machiavelli had participated as an official of secondary rank, were the source of the impetus of Machiavelli's post-1512 launching of his new, more famous career, as a great post-medieval thinker in the domain of modern warfare, a status which Machiavelli's work continued to enjoy in the training of the modern professional military officer corps of Europe and the Americas deep into the Twentieth Century.
The way in which that process unfolded remains crucial for understanding the roots of the modern world at large today. The setting is Florence.
The Florence we must consider, is that of the great reformer and backer of the Council of Florence Cosimo de' Medici, which is typified, on background, in that time, by the Filippo Brunelleschi who had discovered and applied the physical principle of the catenary, which he employed to craft the erection of the famous dome on Florence's Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.[10] Brunelleschi's genius was exceptional, as an experience of the acoustics of the Pazzi Chapel sings that message to the time of my last visit to that building; but, he was also typical of the production of many exceptional people of science and technology, by Florence of those times.
The greatest of those geniuses was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.
Study of the course and outcome of the 1492-1648 period of religious warfare, shows the perceptive historian that the crucial feature of the religious warfare unleashed by the Fall of Constantinople, was not a conflict between mere religious dogmas as such, but was, rather, more profoundly existential. The great ecumenical Council of Florence had not been a mere rearrangement of the deck-chairs of society's rulers and management; it was an organic, dynamic change in the scientifically principled way in which the productive, and also the political forces of society were organized.
The following set of historical considerations is most notable here for its bearing on the way in which our republic came into being:
a.) Nicholas of Cusa's Concordantia Catholica was, in itself, not only the work which superseded Dante Alighieri's De Monarchia as a prospect for the replacement of the feudal ultramontane system by a national republic based on the common use of a shared, literate development of a language (e.g., Italian) universal within the bounds of that republic. Indeed, the public oral renditions, in the streets of Florence, of sections from Dante's Commedia, was a crucial factor in the development of the notion of the use of a literate form of Italian in creating the cultural integument required for the functioning of a true republic. A brutishly illiterate population is not the foundation for the institutions of a viable national republic.
b.) Concordantia Catholica's prescription of a system of respectively sovereign republics based on a commonly unifying principle governing relations among sovereigns, was the indispensable prescription for the break-up of that form of tyranny which the discredited ultramontane system had represented.
On this account, the effect of the Papal council which took up the implications of the Nazi-like Norman crime in the trial and burning alive of Jeanne d'Arc, was integral to a series of the successive steps leading into the benefits of the subsequent great ecumenical Council of Florence. The case of Jeanne d'Arc was crucial for the later emergence of the first modern nation-state of the Commonwealth form, that of France's Louis XI, but that development by Louis XI in France was crucial for the coming-into-being of the modern nation-state in Europe, and in the U.S.A., after that.[11]
c.) Cusa's defense of science against the implicitly Satanic traditions of the Olympian Zeus and the Delphic Apollo-Dionysos cult in his De Docta Ignorantia was crucial. That founding of modern experimental physical science, by Cusa, was reflected in the sweeping social-economic reforms conducted by France under Louis XI, and in England under Louis's admirer Henry VII. These reforms engaged the middle class and peasantry which had been trapped within feudal society, in participation in the fostering of the conditions for scientific and technological progress. This freed the populations enjoying such benefits from what had been the tradition of a life of human cattle previously imposed upon the great majority of society's population.
d.) It was not religion which caused the religious warfare of 1492-1648. That warfare, as launched under the banner of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, was the war of the devil, the inquisitors, against the Creator. The relevant evil was the tradition of the Olympian Zeus, and the tradition of the Sophistry of the Delphi Apollo and Dionysos cults, which engaged itself in a fight for its survival against the principle of Mosaic Genesis 1: 26-29. It was a fight against a great evil, such as the evil of Torquemada which the Satanic Joseph de Maistre and his Nazi successors expressed later, as in the Hitler movement's seeking to purge continental Europe's culture of the great legacy of the Moses Mendelssohn who had contributed so greatly, in alliance with his friend Gotthold Lessing, against the gang associated with the decadent Leonhard Euler, which was working to ruin every cultural achievement to be recognized in the late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century culture and prosperity of Germany.
Here, amid these far-reaching considerations, lies the significance of Niccolò Machiavelli's exploration of the historic significance for civilization today, of those issues of modern European military strategy.
The changes in economic and related culture which had spread from the cities such as Florence in Italy, and the commonwealth system of reforms of Louis XI and Henry VII, unleashed both the emergence of modern Europe's urban life and the related development of the countryside. This change, was typified so, as by the effort to establish a republic of Florence. This connection was well recognized among the veteran officers of the American Revolution in their composition of the Society of the Cincinnati on the basis of a study of Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy.
So, when fondness for the fallen ultramontane system had summoned the evil of Venice to launch religious warfare against the accomplishments of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, the Venice-led Habsburg and other accomplices met a different quality of enemy in the resistance summoned by the newly developed republican spirit of the cities and countrysides of Europe. In that setting, the challenge taken up by Sarpi can be summarized in the following richly relevant terms for consideration by us, here and now, today.
In reading Machiavelli's writings, notably his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, it is essential to emphasize attention to the social policies implicit in Machiavelli's own argument there, and in relevant other locations. The Machiavelli of the period leading into 1512 A.D., was a product of a struggle for the establishment of the republic of Florence against the pro-medievalist reactionaries. His succinct treatment of the figure of Cincinnatus in the Discourses, as this connection is reflected in the adopted name of the veteran officers of the American Revolution, and his outline for the self-defense of the modern urban society against the forces of the reactionary predators, are items which reflect the specific spark of military-strategic genius which was to become so highly respected in military professionals' education during later centuries.
In the emergence and development of modern industry prior to the reactionary destruction of our economy during and following the 1970s, there was a crucial, conspicuous point of cross-over from productive craftsmanship to scientific discovery of principle in agriculture, modern industry, and other respects. The same craftsmanship which is required for effective machine-tool design in industry, passes upward into a higher quality of productive action in the crafting of the apparatus needed to accomplish a truly crucial experimental test of principle.
We see a relevant trace of that connection in the development of economy and its technology in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the interval prior to that suppression of the Colony's rights by England which occurred during 1688-1689. We see this demonstrated later in the role of Massachusetts-born Benjamin Franklin's emergence, as among the world's acknowledged leading and fertile scientific intellects during the course of his adult life. We see this also in the role of the so-called "Latin farmer" in the development of agriculture during the early decades of our young republic. Shifting our attention to earlier modern centuries, we witness a similar economic revolution, with leaps in productivity, in the reforms of France under Louis XI.
That is the social-political and physical-economic factor which prevented the Venetians' crushing of modern civilization during the late Sixteenth Century and beyond. This failure of old Venice's medieval tradition in modern circumstances, is what, to a large degree, fostered Sarpi's relative victory over his more traditionalist Venetian and related rivals of that time. It was the progress in proliferation of the benefits of scientific and technological progress among growing rations of the population, which produced the role of scientific, technological, and social-political progress in the resistance to the Venetian-led use of religious warfare during the 1492-1648 interval. Machiavelli's outline of the case for the self-defense of the city against attacking reactionary forces, was very much to this point. It was this latter factor, as recognized by Sarpi, which became the social-political foundation for the modern Liberalism of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchical faction, up to the present day. This is the key to understanding the reactionary motives of those who crafted the production of a generation of young white-collar spawn, the intrinsically dionysian "environmentalists," the so-called "68ers," for their continuing destruction of modern, capital-intensive scientific progress in production, still today.
Follow the traces of Sarpi and the Anglo-Dutch Liberals who followed his leadership.
Sarpi's Venetian faction recognized that it was the cultural and related effects of the realization of Cusa's revolution in science and statecraft which have proven to create the fatal operational flaw in the Venetian strategy. As long as Venice clung to the Aristotelean doctrine against scientific progress, Venice was doomed either to fail utterly, or to bring down the entire society into a general form of a new dark age. Therefore, in Sarpi's view, the apparent key for Venice's solution for this paradox, lay in Sarpi's recognition of this flaw in the specific strategic-cultural significance of the inherently pro-oligarchist, current Aristotelean dogma.
On this account, Sarpi directed his intellectual attack against the relative restrictions inherent in the Norman-Venetian medievalists' form of the Crusaders' own Aristotelean legacy. At the same time, for this reason, Sarpi's circles feared the influence of the anti-Aristotelean Kepler's role as an extremely thorough and effective follower of Cusa and Leonardo da Vinci.
As the assigned role of Sarpi's lackey, Galileo Galilei, attests, Sarpi's own attack on Aristotle resurrected the dead soul of medievalist William of Ockham (aka "Occam"). The significance of Ockham for both Sarpi and his house-lackey Galileo, was that Ockham was the ideologue of an essentially insane, highly formalist system of what was purely Sophistry. This meant, for Sarpi, that he could thus correct the crucial strategic flaw of the Venetian faction's role in religious warfare, by permitting adoption of some among the technological and social innovations used by the followers of the commonwealth cause, even as simplistic reifications of original discoveries made by Kepler, but without allowing the spread of the actually scientific method which Cusa et al. had revived from the circles of the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato's circles.
This, Sarpian view of the crucial strategic role of an Ockhamite philosophical revival, had the additional benefit for Sarpi's cause, of providing a design for the most irrational varieties of the doctrinal superstitions of some nominally Protestant ideologies, using this corruption to weaken both the sanity and the moral character of many ideological factions among the forces of Venice's adversaries. Such are the origins, with Sarpi's adoption of Ockham's irrationalism, of what became the Cartesianism whose methodological corruption persists within the Anglo-Dutch empiricism of even the present time. For example, we have the later depravities of the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham and Lord Palmerston; we have, also, the British East India Company's Haileybury School; and the Nineteenth-Century proliferations of positivists and pragmatists as typified by Laplace, Cauchy, Clausius, Grassmann, Helmholtz, and the wild-eyed followers of Ernst Mach.
Sarpi accompanied his launching of the power of his Venetian faction, by a shift of emphasis toward the emerging maritime powers of northern Europe, as centered upon the British Isles and the Netherlands. Venice had ceased to be a strategically secure position from which to take the kind of strategic control over Europe which it had commanded with its medieval Norman allies. The implied "New Venice" would be located, according to Sarpi, in the relatively more secure strategic base-positions in maritime northern Europe. With Sarpi's massive intervention into the affairs of the English monarchy, the character of the monarchy of James I was directly orchestrated by Sarpi channels which included such enemies of William Shakespeare as Sir Francis Bacon and Galileo's pupil Thomas Hobbes.[12] What followed, was the weakening of France and the boosting of the power of an Anglo-Dutch Liberal "New Venice" as a potentially imperial maritime power. This trend, as set into motion by Sarpi and his faction, was summed up in a 1618-1648 Thirty Years War which, in principle, was chiefly the handiwork of Sarpi's influence, rather than Sarpi's foolish Spanish and Austrian Habsburg dupes. With the rape of England by William of Orange, the process set into motion by Sarpi, of launching the series of continental wars which would clear the way for building an Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire (with Venice in the background) was under way. With the completion of the Hannoverian succession, upon the death of Queen Anne, as Graham Lowry has presented the evidence, the campaign to eradicate the leading influence of Gottfried Leibniz from the pages of European science, was under way.[13] A great period of Anglo-Dutch moral depravity, and orchestrated continental wars, prepared the way for the emergence of an empire of the British East India Company with that February 1763 Peace of Paris, which unleashed London's intention to crush and loot its own colonies in North America. The process of confrontation leading toward the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, was on the way.
Today's significance of Adam Smith as an economist, dates essentially from about 1763, when he came under the patronage of the British East India Company's notorious Lord Shelburne. He was of the same curious species as his contemporaries, David Hume, Hume's apostle Immanuel Kant,[14] and the notorious hoaxster Sir John Robison. He is, of course, most notable for his tract denouncing U.S. Independence, the so-called Wealth of Nations, a book which, insofar as it treated the subject of political-economy itself, was largely a work plagiarizing the Reflections of the follower of the Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay, A.R.J. Turgot. A better clinical insight into the origins of the troubled mind of Smith himself is to be found in his earlier (1759) publication, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. It is fairly presumed from the systematic features of Smith's work, that it was this 1759 work which must have prompted Shelburne's inclination to employ Smith.
There, Smith refers to what he alleges are the uncertainties of any form of human knowledge. I excerpt some crucial parts of a passage from his 1759 book here. He wrote:
"... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler [intention] ... the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country ... though ... we are endowed with a very strong desire of those ends ... it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them." (Italics added)
Smith, writing there, is following, strictly, Sarpi's prescribed, systemically irrationalist, Ockhamite doctrine; but this is not peculiar to Smith alone. The same argument was to be made later, with slight alterations, by the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham. The same kind of argument was made by all of the leading Haileybury School economists, including the Venetian Giammaria Ortes from whose 1790 English translation of his Reflections on Population plagiarist Thomas Malthus lifted his own 1798 On Population.[15] The same essential argument for the same piece of witchcraft had been made earlier by Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1734). The same systemic construction was proferred by the Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay; Quesnay is followed in the dogma of the A.R.J. Turgot which was generously plagiarized by Smith.
All of these and related cases, are expressions of an intrinsically pro-oligarchical, and implicitly Delphic misconception of the nature of man and society. The Physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot expose this connection more clearly than their British co-thinkers, and are of special interest otherwise, because they express the empiricist view from the standpoint of emphasis on an attempt at portraying a raw physical economy from the vantage-point of a class of landed gentry. Quesnay's Tableau Economique is a crucial mapping of such presumed intellectual and physical connections.
This difference between Quesnay and his British co-thinkers is a consequence of the way in which the influence of René Descartes was spread from Venetian influence on the Netherlands to France and England.
The center of the development of science in post-Westphalia Europe was the leadership of Cardinal Mazarin's associate Jean-Baptiste Colbert in developing the science-driven program of France. It was under the patronage of Colbert, that Gottfried Leibniz refined his work in science to such effects as are to be recognized from his unique originality in developing a calculus premised on the challenge which Kepler had bequeathed to "future mathematicians."[16] René Descartes was among the key figures developed by the Dutch Liberals as an instrument of Sarpian empiricism, to counter the development of science in the Colbertiste France of Pascal, Huyghens, and Leibniz. In turn, it was Leibniz, beginning 1692, who began his exposure of the fraudulent character of Cartesianism in physical science, as the crucial point of this exposure was summed up afresh in Leibniz's 1695 "Specimen Dynamicum."[17] This was the same period of the writing of "Specimen Dynamicum" and of the opening of the collaboration of Leibniz and Jean Bernouilli in elaborating the catenary-cued principle of universal physical least action. This preceded the opening of Leibniz's role as a crucial political factor in the process, under England's Queen Anne, in the English succession to the institution of the British United Kingdom.[18] During that same period, the preference of Leibniz's enemies, was to counterattack against Leibniz's powerful influence of that time by adopting the work of Descartes as the basis for an anti-Leibniz program in England itself. In light of the fact that the Netherlands-programmed Descartes retained nominally French attributes, it was deemed impracticable to import Cartesian ideology under an explicitly Cartesian label, into a France-hating England of that time. So, Hooke and other suitably skilled and witting followers of Galileo's hoaxes, were employed to synthesize a neo-Cartesian, anti-Leibniz cult in England, including a faked attribution of the invention of a calculus to an obscure academic figure known as a specialist in black magic dogma, Isaac Newton.[19] The most notable figure in the promotion of this creation of a synthetic, English-speaking "René Descartes" named Isaac Newton, was a Venetian, Abbé Antonio Conti, a devotee of the work of Descartes residing in Paris at that time. Conti would figure, until his death in 1749, as a keystone figure in the organizing of a network of anti-Leibniz salons throughout much of Europe, a network which included figures such as D'Alembert, de Moivre, Voltaire, Maupertuis, Leonhard Euler, Lagrange, et al., whose systemically vicious errors were demolished in an exemplary way by Carl F. Gauss in 1799. Important Nineteenth-Century followers of the legacy of those salons included London-sponsored adherents to the Newton clique such as Laplace, Augustin Cauchy, and the so-called founders of "thermodynamics" Clausius, Grassmann, and Kelvin.[20] The concoction of the fraudulent "Second Law of Thermodynamics" was an outcome of this process.
This was the background for the emergence of a Quesnay associated with the premises of the Deer Park of France's King Louis XV's minority.
The most crucial, but not surprising feature of Quesnay's argument, is the clarity with which he echoes that social standpoint of the oligarchical Olympian Zeus to be seen in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.
For example, the working farmer of the feudal estate, is portrayed by Quesnay as distinguished very little from that estate's cattle. For Quesnay, the peasant, like cattle and field, must be maintained in their respective biological functions, but the profitable portion of the fruit of the feudal countryside estate is to be attributed to a magical, Aladdin's-lamp-like quality of the feudal landlord's title to that estate, not the productive mental activity of the peasant. The cow-like attributes which Quesnay assigns to the economic role and personalities of the farmer on the estate of the aristocratic landlord, unveil Quesnay as an adherent of the doctrine of the Olympian Zeus from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, which is also the dogma of the Giammaria Ortes plagiarized by Thomas Malthus's On Population and by the sponsors of the ultra-Malthusian "Global Warming" hoax of today.
Such doctrines as those of the aristocratic Physiocrats, are echoed in the social prejudices of the British aristocratic landlords, the baronial, knighted, squirearchy, and no-counts alike. This same Physiocratic-like, bucolic fantasy, passed over to be echoed in the notorious sentimentalities of the "robber barons" of our Nineteenth-Century U.S. manufacturing, and the predatory freebooters of the hedge-fund banditry today.
The social-economic implications of Quesnay's argument, are to be viewed more precisely from the vantage-point of a reading of the pseudo-scientific Descartes, and of the roster of neo-Cartesian Leibniz-haters refuted in Carl F. Gauss's original systematic denunciation of their common error, in Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation.[21] That set of sundry quacks, such as Maupertuis, and renegades from science, such as Leonhard Euler, composed the anti-Leibniz faction of de Moivre, D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al., and of some British political-economists associated with the dogma of the British East India Company's Haileybury School.
The common ideological feature shared by the followers of Euler et al. and Locke, Mandeville, Smith, et al., has been a crucial factor of corruption in bringing about the ruin of the U.S. economy over the recent forty-odd years. That is to say, in the subject at hand, as in other, comparable areas of concern,
To gain a competent view of modern economic doctrine and practice, the British school's famous Mandeville, Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx must also be recognized as essentially victims: a type of ideologues polluting the field of economics, who suffered from the same, misguided, general epistemological follies common to all varieties represented by the Haileybury School. Thus, after Quesnay, in later versions of the physiocratic ideology, the source of the fruitfulness is said to be the magical properties of the land-area itself, or, simply the "mystery of the marketplace," thus copying, but also superseding the ideology previously expressed by belief in the allegedly magical work of the rural landlord's aristocratic title.[22]
However, to understand how this corrupt influence, radiated from the British school, works within the processes of the mind of its duped victim, we must understand the equivalence of what I have referenced here as a corruption of mathematical physics in the decadent phase of Leonhard Euler's intellectual life, the equivalence to the ideology expressed by the British schools of intrinsically imperialist political-economy.
There is no actually scientific aspect to the kind of statistical and related economic dogma currently associated with the government and, also, the usual university classroom, in the U.S.A. today. In the field of what is called "economics," our nation's official economic, and related life, has been taken over almost entirely by virtual ouija-boards. Our national economic and related policy has been controlled by forms of wild-eyed, abacadabrist varieties of statistical superstitions; this has been the usual state of affairs in most important circumstances, since that period of transition from economic power to virtual bankruptcy, which was unleashed in the wake of the rampage of the "68ers," under the successive, 1969-1981 Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and, more notably, the ruin unleashed as a frenzy by the Trilateral Commission, to bring us the decades-long, ruinous reigns of Federal Reserve Chairmen Volcker and Greenspan.[23]
From the outset, in a comparison of Euler's attack on Leibniz with the essential incompetence of the British school of political-economy, what should soon command the student's attention, is the fact that no actual, efficient form of universal physical principle is permitted within either of those two sets of assumptions. The key to this point is found, typically, in that moral bankruptcy expressed by science-apostate Euler's 1761 Letters to a German Princess, where he elaborates the same conceptual argument, there in relatively simplistic terms. That is the corruption which underlies his role in counterfeiting a Fundamental Principle of Algebra. Gauss's 1799 attack on the fallacy of the work of Euler et al., is exemplary.
This fraud by Euler is to be seen as typical of him, when one has recognized that he had been, formerly, an admirer of Leibniz and also a pupil of Jean Bernouilli. It was Euler's own personal corruption which had carried him over into the company of the faction of the followers of Sarpi, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and those salons associated with the Paris-based Venetian, Abbé Antonio Conti, and Voltaire. From the standpoint of epistemology generally, and theology in particular, Euler had passed over into Sarpi's diabolical school, the school of what Stephen Vincent Benet's story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, labels "Old Scratch," or the Mephistopheles of Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Goethe's Faust. To make the same essential point in other words, Euler had gone over to that worship of the wittingly diabolical Ockhamite irrationalism of Sarpi which Euler himself had expressed in his morally and scientifically disgusting 1761 "science for ladies"-style of his Letters to a German Princess.
For such apostates as those, there is no actual universal physical principle afoot in the universe, and, therefore, no immortal human soul. There is, as Quesnay insists in his own choice of fashion, no essential, functional or moral difference between a peasant on the landlord's estate, and a cow. In other words, the common features which I have touched upon in this immediate part of my presentation, are an expression of the same principle of a soulless oligarchical system typified by the reign of the Olympian Zeus which Aeschylus depicts in his Prometheus Trilogy.
This is the keystone-issue of the actual physical science of political economy implicit in the work of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
I shall identify the relevant connections here, leaving the development of the issues of a general economic science to the following chapter of this report.
To make the essential point in a way which is the simplest available argument, but nonetheless honest, we must say that the essential difference between man and beast, as between man and ape, is that all lower forms of life, lower than man, are decently considered, in first approximation, as subjects of ecology. Humans' behavior, unless they are being very stupid, is not. "Human ecology" is not a religion of the monkeys, but of people try to make monkeys of themselves, and also others. (Worse are the religious followers of John von Neumann, who share the radical positivists' delusion, that the human intellect could be replicated, even surpassed, by digital computer technology.)
As the work of Academician V.I. Vernadsky, especially during the last decade of his life, has greatly enhanced our insight into such matters, the known universe of physical science establishes that universe as Riemannian in principle, and assorts the known universe as a whole, functionally, among three interdependent phase-spaces: non-living, living processes, and the developable, creative powers unique to the individual member of the human species.[24]
The exemplary difference between man and ape on this account, is that shown by the effect of mankind's discovery and use of a universal physical principle, or the like. These discoveries either express, or reflect those sovereign qualities of the human mind which are most readily identified as the discovery of an experimentally valid universal physical principle, or a comparable principle of Classical forms of artistic composition.
The related evidence is that the "Second Law of Thermodynamics," if applied as a general principle (rather than a case of a special, limited type of phase-space), is so absurd as to be generally considered, in the case of representatives of modern cultures, as grossly stupid, or even as, functionally, among clinically insane opinions. The effects of the general acceptance of that sort of mental disorder in opinion, are demonstrated to have been extremely destructive in their effects on modern civilization.
The generation and employment of knowledge of those universal principles of a Riemannian type associated with, for example, Vernadsky and the matured Einstein, mark the individual, when treated either as an individual, or a representative of a cultural practice of such individuals, as a "Promethean fire-bringer," in the sense of the definition of the existence of man and woman in Genesis 1. It is this quality which competent theologians would recognize as the expression of that human soul, whose existence marks the essential distinction, in both existence and function, of man from beast. People who are actually human, do not eat people.
The proper definition of political freedom, as such a notion coheres with the intent of the Leibnizian principle of "the pursuit of happiness" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, or the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, is the exercise of those creative mental powers associated with valid physical scientific discovery and the comparable faculty of Classical artistic composition. The proper concept of Freedom as a state of being, is exemplified as freedom from reign over society of the deeply corrupting influence of the implicitly Olympian practice of the Physiocrat or his likeness.
In modern European culture, this quality of freedom is expressed, variously, both as political, and as physical-scientific in the sense of Cusa and his followers such as Kepler, and artistic in the sense of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Sanzio, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schiller. The objective of the true republic based on such intentions, is to develop each among all newborn infants into a race of poets, scientific discoverers, and statesmen, and to discover some means to extend this role to individuals whose relevant potentials of that sort are biologically or otherwise impaired. It is the right to have a sense of participating in the past, present, and future of society, in that sense of mode, which defines the condition for the kind of quality of happiness which Leibniz prescribes as the alternative to the depravity of a society molded according to the pro-slavery dogma of Locke. It is the conditions for individual and general happiness, so defined, which must be the fundamental law of organization of society.
This has not yet been achieved, but, so what? The essence of a journey is the process of getting to some destination. We live in that journey which our progeny will perpetuate.
When all of those considerations I have just identified, and others of similar import, are taken into account, the essential principle of relevant kinds of forward motion in society's progress, is not located in the arrival at some final destination, but in the process of getting to a valid, more advanced level of universal achievement of mankind than before. "Getting there" signifies the discovery of those validatable principles whose acts of discovery and expression, identify the quality of the motion which corresponds to the intended arrival at a limitless destination. Contrary to ideologies such as those of Clausius and Grassmann, the goal of the continued development of our universe is never a finished work; it is anti-entropic, and, therefore, mankind's work will never cease to lie before it. In the words of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, the purpose of our individual existence is to do good. This is Leibniz's best of all possible universes. Our present is, therefore, properly apprehended, as by the best theologians, as it were a simultaneity of eternity.
In our U.S. history, during the Nineteenth Century, a great effort was expended by our republic's British and other adversaries, domestic and abroad alike, to degrade the image of the chief architect of our republic from among us, Benjamin Franklin. Special societies and other projects were promoted among us to the effect of degrading the image of one of the great scientific leaders of the Eighteenth Century, among the promoters of the development of chemistry, and the virtual discoverer of electricity, the Franklin heralded as a Prometheus among the best spirits of Europe in his time, into the likeness of a mere tinkerer.
The principal evil of all known societies up to the present time, has been the systemic division between a ruling stratum which reigns over the larger portion of their own and other nations as if that larger portion must be penned up within the status of virtual human cattle. Hence, the proper image of a Satanic principle, is that which coincides with the figures of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and with the image of a reigning culture based on the bi-polarity of the satanic figures, Apollo and Dionysos, of the cult of Delphi.
In other words, to quote the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, good music must be that, as J.S. Bach's method of composing fugues requires, composed, conducted, and performed "between the notes." In other words, this means the principle of the functional infinitesimal of physical science which is also central to Classical music and poetry, as specified, in contrast to the crucial error of Archimedes, by Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Riemann, and other notables.[25] The hellish folly of the notorious Myron Scholes' methods of financial forecasting, is perversely useful only insofar as its folly is examined as an illustration of the crucial point being made here, at this juncture, the same folly which an intellectually decadent Leonhard Euler perpetrated in his infamous Letters to a German Princess. This is the same piece of anti-scientific stupidity expressed by Abraham de Moivre, D'Alembert, and Lagrange, and, also, later, Laplace, Cauchy, Clausius, Grassmann, et al. on the subject of the physical actuality of the infinitesimal, as the elliptical expression of the infinitesimal was defined by Kepler for gravitation, and elaborated by Leibniz in Leibniz's uniquely original discovery of the calculus, and in Leibniz's development of the catenary-cued concept of universal physical least-action. Where Kepler, Leibniz, and Euler's teacher Jean Bernouilli had followed Cusa's exposure of the systemic blunder of Archimedes on quadrature, in defining the notion of the infinitesimal as an expression of the existence of universal physical principles of action, de Moivre, D'Alembert, Euler, and their accomplices degraded the notion, into a merely imaginary beast existing, allegedly, only as ghosts haunting the depths, as imagined to inhabit the merely algebraic viewing of the domains of cubic and biquadratic functions.[26]
These considerations lead us to the most crucially important aspect of economics as science, the subject of dynamics, as that term was taken by Leibniz from the Classical Greek dynamis of the Pythagorean scientists and the usage of Plato and his Academy, and presented in his "Specimen Dynamicum."
As the cited, tragic, 1998 case of the LTCM's Myron Scholes et al. illuminates a crucial point, the common leading cause of economic tragedies of contemporary statecraft in the large, falls within the class of remedies supplied as a relatively sophisticated aspect of scientific method which I have already referred to as "dynamics." In social-economic processes as such, this technical term's applications are commonly met in two distinct expressions, both as dynamics, as that term is applicable to both the domain of physical science as such, and to encounters with systemic forms of social processes. The presently, extremely menacing effects to be addressed by both uses of that term, in both physical processes and also social processes, are illustrated in a currently most relevant fashion, by an onrushing, particular economic and social calamity striking an area within somewhat more than a sixty-mile radius of our nation's capital.
First, I develop the leading points to be made in viewing that case, and then locate the root of the matter within the respective domains of individual and mass social behavior.
The way in which the U.S.A. or Europe, and other places, have used the private automobile, or truck, especially since the aftermath of World War II, is typical of the failure of a society to grasp the extremely practical implication of failing to examine policies of practice as I do here. These errors in practice must be viewed, now, from the standpoint of certain types of non-statistical, but nonetheless functionally coherent, and scientifically necessary attention to patterns in individual, or otherwise localized choices.
I use that case here as an illustration of the crucially important role of Gottfried Leibniz's notion of dynamics, as I have already indicated its application to the shaping of the work of physical science. I now extend the view of that matter to include the domain of mass social behavior, the domain of the U.S. shaping of its public policy to the effect of producing certain among the kinds of effects to which I now turn your attention. As an example of that effect, I am comparing the way in which the current use of the private automobile, when used as a primary mode of daily commuting to and from place of employment, has contributed to destroying the economies of the U.S.A. and also Germany, among many others.
The first point of illustration of that point to be considered here, is continued resistance to the present option of replacing the combustion of petroleum products, as automotive fuels, by hydrogen-based fuels produced locally by high-energy-flux-density nuclear-fission reactors. The types of reactors desired for this application are becoming available, belatedly, today. This was a policy which came up as one among a variety of science-driver conceptions considered by us, during the course of a long evening's discussion of future science policy for the U.S.A., held between me and the late Professor Robert Moon, in Chicago, back during the 1970s. An associate of mine was present during the discussion, but he was chiefly content to let the discussion between me and Professor Moon rip through the passing hours of that exchange.[27]
First of all, the continued practice of reliance on the hauling of intrinsically cheap (per ton) hydrocarbon fuels thousands of miles around the Earth, is, in several ways, both an unnecessarily costly business, in addition to being a part of a nasty operation against the world by certain monopolistic oligarchical interests of the type which might be rightly considered as of the variety of up-to-no-good, monopolistical powers. Today, in light of the immediate prospect of nuclear modes of producing a superior quality of combustible fuels, it were better to employ hydrocarbon stocks as raw materials of manufacturing performed in the vicinity of the place where the extraction occurs, simply on the basis of the fact, that the greater the physical value of a ton of freight hauled, the lower the percentile of cost of transport of the material hauled.
There is a large factor of cost-saving in such a proposed change in policy of practice. The idea of relying on extraction of raw materials, by drawing down of ore-stocks which were created by the biosphere, as deposits, over a past many millions of years or more, has a long-term negative impact on the future of our planet. The future of mankind should be considered as requiring the regeneration of kindred classes of "raw materials," and also the generation, synthetically, of new classes of materials yet to be defined and designed.
This, however, is not the only factor which should be considered as impelling prudent societies of today into reliance on synthetic fuels which are to be produced by aid of nuclear-fission and comparably technologically advanced processes. The physical-cost efficiency of production is increased by such a change in policy, increased per unit of society's consumption of total product. This benefit is obtained by upshifting the technology of production, by emphasis on sources of power applicable to qualitatively higher "energy-flux-density" of heat-action per square-centimeter of cross-section of power flow.[28]
For example, only scientifically illiterate, and reckless "bio-fools," could propose a shift to the use of so-called "biofuels" today. When a society takes a highly organized form of product, such as the product of living processes, and consumes it, on a large scale, as an inorganic form of fuel, we are, relatively speaking, lowering the quality of support for human life, as measurable per capita and per square kilometer, on our planet. In earlier times, when we knew no better, and the population density of our planet was far less, the use of what might be termed biofuels, such as the practice of mere burning of wood and coal, although practices which have been wasteful in the long run, could be considered as relatively tolerable, even indispensable at that time, because desirable technological alternatives were not yet available for use. Now, growth of the world's population, and the availability of certain relatively advanced science and technology make commitment to rapid introduction of higher technologies, such as nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion, globally, both physically and morally imperative.
The point to be emphasized is, that power is not to be measured, as science-illiterates do, in raw calories, but in the quality of heat-action, which is properly measured as increasing the heat-intensity measured in units of cross-section, which might be usefully named Vernadsky units, of relatively negentropic flow: as per-square-centimeter cross-section of the energetic process itself. On this account, a calorie of power in the form of a living process, or a product of a living process, is implicitly a more useful quality than its consumption as a raw material to power an action of so-called "softer," lower energy-flux-density.
For example, the quality of human life on Earth depends upon a process of photosynthesis, which produces plant-life such as grasses and trees. While sunlight is generated in the Sun by high energy-flux-density processes, by the time it reaches the lower atmosphere of our Earth, it is of relatively very low energy-flux-density. The best ordinary use of sunlight impinging on the surface of the Earth, is typified by the action of a sophisticated process known as the action of chlorophyll. The action of chlorophyll, which grows plants of various types, lowers the temperature of the atmosphere, and makes areas of our planet habitable; this is an action of higher relative energy flux-density, an anti-entropic upshift, than the spillover from Solar radiation which it has captured. Thus, up to a certain point today, a marginal increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would encourage plant growth, and thus cool the environment. It is the means to make the desert bloom, and to maintain a livable quality of weather for human beings.
Similarly, the creative potential inherent as within individual human beings, who consume foodstuffs supplied by lower forms of life, has a more powerful effect in the application of valid discoveries of physical principle to the planet as a whole (i.e., the Noösphere), than the material (from the Biosphere) which was consumed as food.
Similarly, the increase of the mass of the Biosphere, with its included, peculiar fossil residues, relative to the abiotic mass of the planet otherwise, is superseded by the increase of the mass effects of the Noösphere relative to the Biosphere.
Thus, if we recommend consumption of biofuels today, we are tending to lower the quality of the human environment, and thus tending to raise the relative mean temperature of the planet, by a shift from a useful form of highly organized, living processes, to use of these products, and their associated processes, in ways which lower the quality of the environment which supports life, including human life, on Earth. This political-ideological, pro-malthusian tendency toward dependency upon biofuels, is already exhibiting its characteristics as policy, as a way of thinking which must result in early outbreak of a human demographic, and therefore moral disaster for all nations and peoples of the planet.
Admittedly, unfortunately, today, there is still what is termed a "consensus" to the contrary among many economics illiterates, including elected officials of our legislatures, and other dupes, who do not yet understand the elementary principles involved here; but, that is no excuse for transforming ignorance into the adoption of a policy based upon cruel expressions of avoidable stupidity. The remedy for that ignorance of the relevant illiterates would not be biofuels, but better schools.
Compare the energy-flux-density of various choices of fuels, comparing the relative availability of more efficient choices of sources of generation and transmission of sources of power as society has progressed technologically. Add to this, the fact, that of all technologies, poverty, ignorance, and superstition, are the most deadly, and the combined action of the three, is the aqua-regia of social-political technological follies.
That said on the indispensable elements of scientific background, return attention now to the subsumed matter of the particular folly of the way in which misuse of the automobile and truck has been promoted to the effect of ruining both the relative prosperity of our people and wrecking the performance of the economy itself.
Consider, for example, the ruinous effects of the post-World War II de-industrialization of both New York City and the adjoining region of northern New Jersey.
In the desirable organization of productive life, a finite and well-bounded urban area is situated within a surrounding area with characteristics such as forests and agriculture. Prudence places particular emphasis on production of agricultural products of the type consumed in the nearby urban center. The urban area and its immediately adjoining region, contain relevant manufacturing and comparable places of employment, to the effect that the urban locality and its adjoining industrial or related development, provide a relevant choice of principal types of places of employment for the inhabitants of the urban region.
Typically, in happier cases of development, the adult inhabitant can usually walk to place of work, or reach those premises, preferably by public transit facilities, within about a quarter of an hour. The wisely crafted suburban area is also a significant source of agricultural and other goods consumed within the urban area, and is also often itself a market for the products of urban industry and scientific-technological services.
This approach to regional planning of land-area and related development, including zoning, corresponds to lessons from our national experience since approximately 1620, and also that of much of the history of Europe, in the facilitating of the conditions for the development of modern life of nations and their component regions as a whole.[29]
Against the background of what I have just stated here, look at the degeneration of the entire region around the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., or New York City, since the birth of Levittown on Long Island, and in the bedroom areas from around the nation's capital since, notably, as recently as the post-Carter Presidency, early 1980s. Contrast what is termed, euphemistically, this "development" which has been driven chiefly by the crudest and most reckless impulses of predatory greed, to the preferable sort of planning of development which I have just summarized above. Economically, the net result of recent decades' post-industrial society trends, can be fairly described as, speaking economically, clinically insane, in respect to their effects. One might hope that the persons engaged in employment in the sundry functions of government in and around our nation's capital, might have noticed the ominous trend toward a national catastrophe in this pattern of the recent quarter-century and longer.
Currently, the inner part of the indicated area including and adjoining the nation's capital, is the engine of employment for households as far distant as two hours or more of driving time, with soaring prices of highway tolls, each way, from locations as distant as West Virginia. Meanwhile, as the economy of surrounding states, such as Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania collapses, there is migration into housing within a radius of about two hours' driving time, to and fro, from Washington, D.C. The gain which this population-shift brings to the greater D.C. area, has had a very dark side, a dark side which is becoming an obvious economic and social disaster at the present time, as the margin of a resident's financial equity in housing is now collapsing, even into purely negative valuations, at an accelerating rate.
To facilitate the referenced, insane abuse of land-area during recent decades, it had been found desirable to develop broad arteries, such as multi-lane toll roads, to funnel the flow of daily blobs of traffic-jam between the outskirts and center of this daily traffic-pattern. At the same time, as Loudoun County is a prime example of this, the process of so-called "real-estate development," causes the burgeoning of overstuffed, poorly organized (functionally) residential communities, and often also overflowing cesspools, in communities whose only significant revenue of local government is the tax revenues gleaned chiefly, directly, or indirectly, from household incomes of commuters. All of which is describable in the kindest terms available, as really very, very stupid practice.
Meanwhile, the soaring price of real estate, and therefore of rentals, too, fosters the potential for crime in the form of activities associated with drug-trafficking, festering concentrations of all forms of organized and related criminality, which must be constantly rooted out by vigilant law-enforcement intelligence work, and by related efforts. As the recent trend toward a general economic collapse has now intersected what had been recently soaring real-estate prices, the relevant communities are now sitting on a certain kind of economic time-bomb. The implosion to be expected arrives, when what had been heralded euphorically as Loudoun County real-estate "development," back during the 1980s, will now turn very ugly, as the sources of revenue collapse, and the county government is left to suffocate in the combined effect of inescapable masses of local governments' obligations incurred by the "growth," a crisis which is already erupting now, as the available sources of tax-revenues have collapsed.
I have warned that Loudoun's real-estate bubble has become a leading candidate for the potential role of "ground zero" for what is to be expected, under current habits of practice, as the great real-estate-mortgage implosion of this presently waning decade. Since I first made that warning, the unfolding pattern has been precisely what I had foretold. Unfortunately, in these times, our abundant, perennial Micawbers do not seem to accept a well-founded, but personally inconvenient warning, until after the relevant disaster has already happened—then, they scream and howl!
The proximate source of this lurking real-estate "development" catastrophe, has been the reckless show of sheer incompetence, or perhaps much worse, by the so-called "real-estate development" operations. In this case, we have a prime example of exactly how not to use and develop land-areas. The disease is not limited to the greater Washington, D.C. region; the effects are also the disasters, of a different form, transported, as grim effects, to the relatively depleted states such as Pennsylvania and beyond.
This is what the disease known euphemistically as "The Trilateral Commission" policies of the 1970s, has done, as the economic equivalent of perpetual rape, to this affected region around the nation's capital, and also to the larger regions, into the Appalachians and beyond.
Beyond the present moment's time and space, there is the ominous time ahead, when the matter of the quality of the construction of structures built during the recent quarter-century, expresses itself as the condition of decayed premises whose relative value has collapsed to a fraction of its nominal mortgage-value. The threatened condition now is far worse than what I witnessed in relevant parts of New England, during the early 1930s effects of the economic depression caused by the policies of th