This article appears in the November 11, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
'BOBOS AS A NO-FUTURE GENERATION'The Present Dark Age In Educationby Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. October 26, 2005 Have you looked lately at the ratio of the price of a four-year university education, to the average household income of persons in the middle to high range of the current personal income of members of the lower eighty percentile of the population of the U.S.A. and Europe, respectively? As you think about just those raw statistics alone, what do these ratios imply about the prevalent, deplorable attitudes toward the future of our nation among the majority of those products of attendance at institutions of higher learning, born between 1945 and 1955, in those regions of the world?[1] Study those facts more closely. Take into account soaring costs of housing and related expenditures by households, including power and heating costs. Consider rising medical-care costs as a percentile of income. Take into account the collapsing levels of household income as the sharply downward transition proceeds, from a formerly anti-entropic producer society, to an inherently entropic services economy. Consider the effect on household income and public services, as the decline from an agro-industrial economy dries out the incomes from states, counties, and municipalities.[2] Now, take the ration of the cost of higher education for family income-levels for the children of U.S. families during the 1950-1975 interval, when today's "Baby Boomers" (BBs) were growing from childhood to adult maturity, to the comparable cost today. Focus upon rations of incomes of the middle to higher range of the lower eighty percentile of household incomes, then and now. Now, compare family incomes and costs of higher education for the present generation of youth, in today's 18-25 age-range, for those from parental households in the middle to high portion of the lower eighty percentile of income-ranges, then and now. This supplies a rough-draft view of the matter to be discussed. The relevant horrors emerge as we look at this topical area more closely, as in the following pages of this present report. Taking those statistics alone into account, what does this imply about the way in which that BB generation (which the French call the "BoBos") has thought about the future of today's younger generation of our nation's future, during the years since members of today's BoBo generation entered their own adolescence?[3] I am painfully aware of the follies of the majority among my own generation, the Franklin D. Roosevelt generation, which returned home from the great war-time experience of 1939-1945. However, my generation is now dying out. It is the conflict between the principal two adult generations of this time, the BoBos and their presently adult offspring, which must be the center of our attention, in exposing the systemic features of the conflict between the generation of today's young adults' and their parents' acquired habits. For both of those relatively younger generations, we of my generation (65-90@pl years) have the advantage of seeing the larger reality to which the BoBo generation is blinded by its own ideological self-adulation, and we also have the advantage of being able to show the present, new generation of young adults a hopeful reality, which the ideology of the BoBos wishes to mislead the young, such as today's neo-conservative aberrants, into ignoring. What does that and related evidence of the experience of and conflicts between those present adult generations, tell us about the circumstances associated with the deepening social conflict, over the recent five to six years, as sources for the presently ongoing, systemic social conflict in values between today's young adults and the generation of their BoBo parents? Are those parents really patriots: Do they really care about the future of our republic, or of civilization worldwide? Or, are their usual expressions of active concern merely a reaction, not to the prospects for the future of our nation, or of civilization more broadly, but to some fallacy of composition, some narrowly defined, immediate, momentary circumstance of their own generation's experiences? Is there any meaningful, realistic imagination, among the university educated BoBos generally, of the future existence of civilized human life anywhere on this planet, beyond the retirement years of the BoBos of the Americas and western Europe today? Are these BoBos living in the fishbowl-like confines of that post-1989 fantasy world of Jonathan Swift's ageing "Struldbruggs," living in a kind of perpetual earthly Purgatory known, in today's post-Soviet world, as Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History"? If we think about the undeniable, painful reality of those observations, these are truly shocking facts. Among those ugly truths about the presently prevalent state of mind of the BoBo generation, is the expressed response to this challenge met among the majority of presently senior members of the faculties of our universities, especially those whose general attitudes about society and the subjects which they teach, lean toward supporting, or merely tolerating, like sophists, systemic accommodations to the brutish, anti-humanistic babbling of Professor Milton Friedman on the subject of economics. This decadent cultural phenomenon of the recent decades, is not the end of history. A new, historically crucial force for change, and cause for optimism, has appeared recently on the pages of current world history. A precursor of something like the change from the U.S.A. of the Coolidge and Hoover Presidencies, to the recovery under President Franklin Roosevelt, is now under way, as the current year's developments within the U.S. Senate express this. A successful outcome is never automatic, and not now; but, sometimes, as now, history gives us the opportunities to reverse trends for the better, if, as the architect of our republic, Benjamin Franklin warned, we can respond to the challenge of the given opportunity. It is in light of this new opportunity, that the history of the recent decades might not need to be written for some future visiting culture, as this present society's epitaph on a tombstone, but as the opportunity for a genuine and lasting recovery from the follies our civilization has heaped on itself during the recent decades. The subject introduced here must be approached in that spirit. Let the follies of our recent past, as the generational crisis of the BoBos expresses that, be the springboard from which we choose to rise to a better, and durable future. Why the LaRouche Youth MovementDuring the most recent period, as was to be seen in the July 2004, Boston, Massachusetts national convention of the Democratic Party, there has been an important, rather sharp, and accelerating change, very much for the better, as reflected in the Democratic Party leadership in the U.S. Congress, a process echoed to a very significant degree within the Senate leadership of the Republican Party. This development would not have begun or proceeded as it has done, but for the catalytic impact of a recent, qualitative change in the leading edge of political life within the U.S.A., as echoed to a certain degree in Europe. That special factor of change in the situation has been the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM). Those who shared the experience of the leadership of the Democratic Party in the course of the 2004 Presidential election-campaign, and in the decision of key leading elements of the Party to move forward from the national tragedy of the November general election, know the important catalytic role of that movement of young adults, chiefly under twenty-five years of age, in prompting and assisting many of the initiatives which have, cumulatively, dramatically changed the U.S.A.'s situation, and also the world's prospects for the better, over the course of the period since the Boston Democratic Party Convention of July 2004. This youth movement is more than just a new qualitative element of organized force within the political process. Its existence reflects the greatest single social problem to be faced in both North America and Europe, in particular; even more important, it points toward the model of a solution for that crisis. The problem which must be mastered to achieve that available benefit, is identified by the evidence of the consequences of the moral failure heretofore pervading the majority of the ranks of the BoBos, a failure which, taken as a challenge, prompted my sponsorship of the now historically crucial role of that LaRouche Youth Movement, a movement which has been in progress during the 2004-2005 phase of the present world crisis. I can now report, without the slightest reason to fear exaggeration, that, for more than a decade, the facts of experience show that I have been among the relative handful living in Europe and the Americas who has really thought seriously and competently about developing needed remedies for this specific problem. Since the time when the opportunity arose, during the course of my campaign for the 2000 U.S. Democratic Presidential nomination, to launch the beginning of what became the present LYM, I have understood that the future existence of civilized life on this planet, demanded my point of view in addressing this specific problem now facing, and threatening our planetary civilization as a whole. The personal role which I have performed on behalf of constituting that youth movement, was required for this occasion by my unique competence in the science of physical economy, the most relevant branch of science for getting the world safely out of the presently onrushing general breakdown-crisis. My role was required because this exceptional competence of mine in economics for today, carried with it the means for mastery of related philosophical issues of great importance for understanding, and curing those philosophical trends which have lured the majority of the population and institutions of post-1945 trans-Atlantic society into the catastrophic condition in which those nations of Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere now find themselves entrapped. It is essential to situate the discussion of such matters historically. How, and why, did the greatest economy ever known, the U.S. economy bequeathed to us by President Franklin Roosevelt, ruin itself as it has done over the approximately forty years since the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the launching of the ruinous U.S. war in Indo-China? How the U.S.A. Ruined ItselfConsider the early phases of the destruction of the quality of education which targetted the children of the returning World War II veterans, especially those in the socially upward-mobile suburban and related areas of the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called "Dr. Spock" children. Remember those children worshipping the 1950s television screen's man-eating monsters from outer space, or elsewhere, at play, and the subtler, lilting evil of kindergarten on the same screen; that experience was the product of a calculated, deliberate process of dehumanization of the young, a kind of "brainwashing," of the suggestible mind of the child and pre-pubertal adolescent. All of this occurred to a generation which had been born into a post-war Hell of a prolonged threat of pre-emptive, global nuclear, or thermonuclear warfare, through which it lived, in hovering terror, day by day, over the entire interval from August 1945 through near to the close of 1989.[4] Almost the entirety of the life-span of a generation from its birth to the age of menopause, was lived under the specter of radioactive mushroom clouds and worse. That was not a good recipe for the mental health of such a generation as that one. To a large degree, the BoBos growing up during those decades rarely knew the full extent of the horror under whose threat they lived. They grew up, preferring not to know that it was Winston Churchill who wished nuclear war against the Soviet Union, even before the war against Hitler had ended. They have preferred not to know, that it was Britain's Bertrand Russell who crafted the policy of global preventive nuclear warfare as a road to a global imperialism he called "world government," and who published this doctrine as a drive toward world empire established through terror, in September 1946. They have preferred not to know, that Russell's pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine of 1946, was the same British Liberal Imperialist doctrine adopted by U.S. Vice-President Cheney and Britain's Prime Minister Blair, and, presumably, the higher-ranking authority of the Vice-President's wife, Lynne, and her daughters. The BoBos of the 1945-1989 years rarely knew the full truth of their own perilous situation, until some among them begin to know that larger truth now; but, they felt the psychological pressures which those lurking circumstances generated. Against that 1945-1989 background, the deterioration of the quality of the content of education and quality of knowledge of the BoBo generation, can be traced to changes in the content of education over the course of much of the post-World War II interval. From the close of that war on, the corruption of education in morals and content of education, proceeded under the influence of institutions such as the self-styled Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and the spread of the radical anti-humanism of academic clones of the extraordinarily evil global nuclear war proponent Bertrand Russell, such as John von Neumann and the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation's Professor Norbert Wiener. The soaring relative cost of higher education today has its obvious roots in the economic trends which dominated North America and what was then called "Western Europe" during the 1968-1989 interval. To understand these trends, that change in trends must be seen as combined with Henry A. Kissinger's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's leading role, as U.S. National Security Advisors, in destroying the economy of both the U.S.A. and much of the rest of the world. However, the fact that our society still tolerates the exclusionary and related conditions of higher education, is a moral condemnation of the currently reigning political class, and more, of our society today. The combined effect of these two, overlapping trends, in economy and education, was the "68er" phenomenon, the revolt of the culturally middle-class "Baby Boomers" of their 1950s childhood and puberty, a revolt against the society which had spawned and reared them. These were not necessarily from "rich" family households, but included those whose adopted sense of personal identity associated them within their own minds with "upper middle-class" economic-social identities. They not only resented the society of that time, but went on to become a key part of the campaign which has wrecked this society. This was the birth of that destruction of the economies of both the Americas and Europe known as the cultural-paradigm shift, away from a productive form of society, to the decadence and ruin of that so-called "post-industrial, services economy" which is now collapsing economically, like a dynamited old, abandoned skyscraper, around our ears. As a result of the changes in economic and related cultural policy which had dominated the world increasingly since the advent of the brutishly ruinous first British parliamentary government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the world economy as a whole, Asian, African, Australian, and American combined, is presently crashing before our eyes and around our ears. The causes for the world's presently onrushing general physical-economic as much as financial collapse, are essentially cultural, rather than economic in today's conventional use of that latter term. It is the special kind of literally Delphic sophistry taught and practiced by the evil wretches of the CCF, and the cultural paradigm-shift, rooted in the related, 1950s trends in education of the youthful BoBos, especially in both the Americas and Europe, which is the generative cause of the global economic-breakdown crisis presently sliding civilization very, very near to the edge of the precipice. As members of the academic "68er" generation, they hated modern science-driven agro-industrial society; more recently, now, BoBos conditioned by that cultural-paradigmatic down-shift in intellect and morals—as the carrion crows of Enron, or the present hedge-fund control of essential productive industries and basic economic infrastructure, typify this predatory mentality—occupy most of the positions of power in the economy that they have succeeded in wrecking, and looting, today, the successful productive economy which they hated in their youth. Theirs was a hatred which most among them never actually understood; yet, like all hatreds, especially those deep-rooted ones whose actual roots remain unknown to the hater, they have, as the form of moral insanity known as "racial prejudice" typifies this, a deadly sort of corrosive effect on the general state of the mind and morals of any generation so afflicted. If you are a racist, for example, or see "race conflict" as a primary issue within society, you are dehumanized in yourself to that degree, less able to think clearly, morally or otherwise. A similar perversion, a similar quality of dionysiac irrationality grips the fanatical, ideology-driven behavior of the devotee of such lemming-like fads as "globalization" and "services economy." For the BoBos of the Americas and Europe who have now, in their turn, incurred the justified, deep resentment of the world's present young-adult generation, this world as a whole, is still, for them, "our world." It is their imagined possession; even the young-adult children of their generation are more or less feared and hated as menacing interlopers. This sickness among the BoBos is a moral decadence which I have been compelled to confront, more and more, since the lemming-like madness of the "Y2K" financial bubble. So, in the aftermath of December 1989 Berlin, the world of the past sixteen years has been a kind of purgatory, at "the end of history," especially so since the arrival of the fashionable age of psychological menopause—the period of the later age of Jonathan Swift's "Struldbruggs"—among both the male and female specimens of the BoBo obsession. "Sexual liberation" had been the battle-cry of their generation; the waning of the "Yahoo"-like prospect of impulsive rutting with almost anyone, on the impulse of almost any occasion, was, for them, like the entry into a kind of Purgatory where they now sit sullenly, like grouchy old Struldbruggs, passing the time, waiting for the trap door to a purer anomie to be sprung.[5] Such is the fate of any culture, any generation, which lowers its sense of triumphant humanity, as the exemplary 68ers have done, from the goals of the head, to the lunge toward the pudenda. A Principle of HistoryThis pattern of effects which a generation leaves upon its children, and the impact of those children's later development on those parents' generation, expresses a customary challenge of civilization for as far back as we know relevant history. Often, this transition among successive generations would be a beneficial and happy transition to an improved world. In other cases, as in the legendary rise of the duped children recruited to the phrygian cult of Dionsyus, as among a large fraction of the 68ers, the youth became a force for the destruction of civilization. In this case of the BoBos recruited to that Dionysian outlook of the existentialists Horkheimer, Benjamin, Heidegger, Adorno, Arendt, et al.,[6] the effect was intentional, and it was unfortunately malicious. Remember the late 1960s, and "The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius"? That was the battle-cry of the frankly satanic Friedrich Nietzsche, the professed prophet of the Anti-Christ. Remember the pestilence of the "Beatles," which left few tender minds, or chastities, intact in the wake of their passing.[7] That was the call for the destruction of civilization at that time, the destruction which was then, in turn, actually carried out by the shock-troops of the 68ers against the Americas and the Europe of the 1970s, up to the present day. There was nothing accidental, or spontaneous in the special characteristics which the BoBo generation's pace-setters adopted in their determination to destroy the culture which their parents and grandparents represented. The ideas did not come spontaneously from within the ranks of the poor little BoBos themselves. The operation was not only well-planned, top-down, but there was never really any secret about the whole business, which has led to such results as the cruel and increasing injustice which the BoBos have promoted against the generation of their own children. People of influence, such as the pro-satanic circles of the Lucifer cult's Aleister Crowley and "The Open Conspiracy's" H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, were the leaders, working together with a next generation of Aldous and Julian Huxley, and Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann, as did Professor Sidney Hook's CCF and its followers among the intellectual fathers of the "neo-cons" of today, in planning and urging this as what was intended to be a pro-Nietzschean, satanic turn in world culture, especially the culture of the Americas and Europe. Hopefully, the members of the young adult generation of today, will lead their parents' economic-panic-stricken generation back to the playful enjoyment of healthy mental life. However, before returning to that aspect of the report, society must turn its attention, first, to those motivating issues of the content of education which are posed by the situation of costs of higher education today.[8] When the U.S.A. emerged victorious over British Lord Palmerston's 1861-1865 attempt to induce us to divide and destroy our republic, we had created a nation which, as a continental power in North America, was too powerful to be destroyed by outside forces. Our influence in the world was great and growing, over the interval from Gettysburg 1863 through our Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. The American System of political-economy was being adopted in major features in Germany, Russia, Japan, and elsewhere in the Americas and in Eurasia. Once again, under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, we rose from the depths of a depression, to emerge, even prior to our actual direct entry into World War II, as the greatest economy the world had ever seen. We could only be destroyed by hostile outside powers, if we chose to destroy ourselves. We can only be destroyed now, if we fail to capture the new opportunity which the crucial political developments from July 2004 through the present moment have put before us. We must recognize, and correct our great errors of the recent past, and resume our earlier upward way. It is the development, largely as self-development, today, of our adult youth of university-eligible age, on which the prospect of our nation's ability to recover from its own recent decades of folly depends. The situation is similar throughout the Americas, as in Europe abroad. We can not only survive as a republic, but succeed in that mission, if we have the insight to recognize the roots of the present conflict between the generations of the BoBos and their adult progeny, and learn the lesson which that conflict is warning us we must learn, before it becomes too late to avoid the dark menace looming on the immediate horizon of the future. 1. Two Crucial Facets of Classical CultureAll great educational programs in the modern European civilization which was officially launched with the Fifteenth Century's great ecumenical Council of Florence, were launched amid the ashes of empires, on the resurrected foundations which had been provided by such exemplars of Classical Greek culture as Thales, Solon of Athens, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plato. In ancient times, this European culture had been undermined in ways which had led Athens to its own destruction through the Peloponnesian War. The method by which Athens was induced to destroy itself in this way, was that adopted by an association known as the "democratic party" of Athens, the party which perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates. The method employed to destroy that European culture from within, was known as sophistry, the Delphic method associated with the Thrasymachus of Socrates' time, the Thrasymachus whose model was copied to be taught in recent times in such ways as by the satanic Professor Leo Strauss and his followers. It is that same method, the method of sophistry, which has been applied since the death of U.S. President Roosevelt, to induce the most powerful economy which had ever existed, to destroy itself in the manner we are experiencing today. The cultural feature of this intended destruction of our nation, and of much of the world besides, is chiefly the modern type of sophistry typified by the influence of Bertrand Russell in mathematics, and by the existentialists and the kindred varieties of philosophical reductionism associated with Sidney Hook's CCF, such as Nietzsche, the Nazi anti-semite Martin Heidegger, and Heidegger's Jewish friends Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, on general and higher education in the U.S.A. The generic name under which those sundry and related perversions in physical and social science are purveyed in public and higher education today, is the combination of what is called logical positivism with the related moral disease known as existentialism, as the latter is defined most luridly by Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger's utterly misanthropic concept of "thrownness." The essence of that and related perversions is the same denial of the knowledge of truth which the CCF celebrity and existentialist pervert Hannah Arendt derived explicitly, in concert with Jaspers, from the doctrine of Immanuel Kant. This doctrine of denial of the existence of a standard of truthfulness, is the entire basis for the existentialist dogma of Adorno and Arendt in the CCF code-book known as The Authoritarian Personality. That book is at the center of the network of organizations, overlapping CCF and the former Paris Review of John Train, Teddy Goldsmith, et al., which have played a past and continuing role in the calculated efforts at subversion of the constitutional order of the U.S.A. today. Arendt's sentimental attitude toward her former Nazi lover, Heidegger, even after Heidegger's infamous academic role as a Freiburg University Nazi anti-semite, and mentor of the Paris "deux magots' " disgusting Jean-Paul Sartre, is exemplary. This issue, as just posed by this example, is crucial for understanding the principal systemic challenge to higher and other education today. The internal structure of that youth movement, the LYM, reflects the issues which are of crucial importance for organizing such a political movement in these times. The youth movement admits young adults of between the ages of 18 and 25. Some of the veterans when past the age of 25 remain for a while in the role of both leaders and training cadre. The program of activities features three principal elements. What is most apparent to observers of that youth movement's public activities, is the movement's role as a political mobilizing force within society generally. That occupies approximately between half and two-thirds of the activity, especially in the midst of political-campaign deployments which include educational product developed as research results of the work, such as economic research, of the youth themselves. The core of the remainder of the activity, is in an historical approach to mastering the underlying, systemic principles which are at the foundations of Classical physical science and Classical well-tempered choral singing. The latter, singing in the modern Classical mode of J.S. Bach, has been chosen, together with the work on the elementary foundations of physical science, as the most characteristic feature of the contributions of the Classical mode in European culture since Thales, Solon, and the Pythagoreans, to civilization as a whole. The roots of this youth movement can be traced implicitly to the role of the Pythagoreans as a teaching organization and center of scientific development, to Socrates at Athens, and to movements from which the modern university's best models emerged, such as Peter Abélard's fight against reactionary obscurantism, and the seminal influence of the Brothers of the Common Life during a period from the late Fourteenth Century until the order's suppression by the Habsburg- and Venice-led resurgent forces of obscurantism and religious warfare in Europe during the Sixteenth Century. It was, perhaps curiously, but not accidentally, the root of the birth of Massachusetts' Harvard University under the leadership of the Winthrops and Mathers, a development which was of leading importance in laying the foundations of the U.S. republic. These ancient, medieval, and modern European precedents are among those to be held prominently in view in assessing the necessary mission of young-adult movements of kindred spirit and intention, launched to meet the special challenge this crisis has presented to us today. A summary sampling of the policy governing the programs in physical science and music, will introduce the reader to a sense of the educational program overall. SphaericsClassical Greek culture, from Thales through Plato and his Academy at Athens, was chiefly a matter of the import of certain essentials of Egyptian culture by a Grecian culture, whose leading characteristics were its roots in a culture based on what is known generically as "The Peoples of the Sea," a city-based maritime culture with fortifications protecting the urban coastal region from the barbarians of the interior. The relevant history of this development of Classical Greek culture, dates from approximately the Seventh Century B.C., when Egypt sponsored its needed maritime allies among the Ionians in the eastern Mediterranean (against Tyre) and the Etruscans[9] in the western Mediterranean (against Carthage). The most strategically significant location of Egyptian maritime culture at that time, and later, was Cyrenaica, as is only typified by that leading representative of the Athens Platonic Academy, Eratosthenes, of Cyrenaic origin, but a matriculant of the Athens Platonic Academy, who became the leading scientist of Ptolemaic Egypt, and shared the honor, with his correspondent Archimedes of Syracuse, of being the greatest known scientist of the world in that time. The internal characteristic of the physical-scientific thinking of the relevant, pre-Aristotelean, pre-Euclidean Greeks, through the time and work of Plato, was their reliance on a method, adopted from the Egyptians, known as Sphaerics. The crucial distinction of Sphaerics, is that the physical-mathematical conceptions of constructive physical geometry associated with it, are based on the model of spherical astronomy, rather than the rectilinear geometry which was imported into Greece from the Babylonian tradition, as a form of Delphic foreign corruption expressed within so-called Euclidean geometry. All Classical Greek physical science and mathematics, including the ancient Greek conceptions of linear, "irrational," and transcendental magnitudes, are derived from the use of the systemically anti-reductionist method of Sphaerics associated with the Pythagoreans, the same method revived by the Fifteenth-Century Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and his followers, such as Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz, and assigned the appropriate name of dynamics by Leibniz, thus contrasting the viable currents of modern physical science, of Leibniz, to those of Descartes and the latter's viciously reductionist followers. The LYM program of work within the domain of physical science, traces the continuity of the development of the anti-reductionist heritage of European physical science from Thales and the Pythagoreans through Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann. All of these studies are pivotted on the principle of dynamis associated with Sphaerics, with emphasis on the point that by reliving the original discoveries of Sphaerics, through what Gauss later showed to be the significance of the Pentagramma Mirificum for the constructive generalization of geometrical solids, the students hone a sense of rigor in defining their experienced insight into the appropriate meaning of scientific terms such as "creativity" and "discovery of principle," as this is distinct from, and in opposition to the reductionist's stochastic and related methods of deduction/induction. In its scope, this work traces the development of the relevant, viable currents of ancient and modern European science, by constructive methods, from the work of the Pythagoreans through and beyond Bernhard Riemann's revolutionary 1854 habilitation dissertation, into the higher realm of Riemannian hypergeometries, as the application of the latter is typified by the implications of the discovery of the principles of the Biosphere and Noösphere by Russia's Vladimir I. Vernadsky. The underlying intention includes the consideration that young people who master those connections through reliving the actual, relevant act of original discovery and demonstration of universal principle, are implicitly prepared to take on any relevant subject-area in later work. This distinguishes them from those who are educated merely to become formally learned in the manner of laying-on of hands echoed in, for example, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau-modelled, typical graduate programs in business-management degrees today. The experience of tracing the self-developing elaboration of principles of scientific method, traceable from the ancient practice of Sphaerics, through to the realm of the Riemannian physical hypergeometries, which is indispensable for competent study of economics as a branch of physical science, serves as a mooring, a point of departure from which work can then proceed with an appropriate respect for the nature of rigor, in any direction within science as a whole. Bach and Bel CantoThe general requirement in the LYM is to work through the challenge of singing Classical polyphony according to the strict Florentine bel canto training and rehearsal of the individual and chorus in the performance of choral work within the standard provided by J.S. Bach. The most typical training exercises for this purpose, include the J.S. Bach Jesu, meine Freude and the W.A. Mozart Ave Verum Corpus. To perform either of these two exemplary works competently, is no off-hand chore; there is more depth of principle embodied in the composer's intended performance of these works than most observers, and numerous conductors have understood. This program has emerged as a distillation of work done during the 1980s with a large number of the leading Classical musicians, including guidance from among leading, bel canto-opera singers of the 1980s. For example, a better than credible performance of the Mozart Requiem was delivered on two occasions by a chorus of my associates during the mid-1980s. That production provided great satisfaction at that time, but also proved a principle of durable importance for today. To make clear the political significance of that program in music, I repeat here in summary what I have stated and written on sundry occasions. I repeat the account of a relevant personal experience I had in a U.S. military replacement depot camp in India at the beginning of 1946. After the jungle rainforest of what was then known as northern Burma, I was among a certain few who found themselves assembled at a replacement depot in India, to spend a bit of time sharing their ravenous appetite for some real music. The Red Cross facility at that camp supplied a few HMV disks, one of which contained a Wilhelm Furtwängler pressing of a Tchaikovsky symphony, a composition which I had not held previously in the highest rank. I was as transfixed as a stunned rabbit; Furtwängler's pressing brought the work to life as I had never heard Tchaikovsky performed before. Later, I became aware of the fact that Furtwängler's exceptional power of direction had to do with what he sometimes referenced as "performing between the notes."[10] Since that time, I have insisted that that principle, as illustrated by that performance, and also the relevant great performances I have studied since, be the pivotal feature of any musical program with which I were to be associated. This principle can be most simply demonstrated by the work of a great Classical string quartet, a form of instrumental choral music among different singing-voice species, as in Bach's Jesu, meine Freude or Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, but a form in which string performers with a very thoroughly developed sense of precise intonation can hear the life-like motion of counterpoint among the voices, without need of the kind of external direction which a skilled director provides for a full chorus of some Bach, Mozart, or other appropriate choral composition.[11] Without a Florentine bel canto form of discipline, and warm-ups by the singers, or the mental equivalent among the minds of the members of a string quartet, the performance does not really work to meet the composer's clearly implied contrapuntal intentions. I have often put the crucial point to be made here in the following way. Begin any relevant composition with a moment of hushed silence, a silence which clears the minds of musicians and audience alike, setting the music to be heard apart from any other sensed reality. The composition begins with a lunge—a perfect discontinuity which defines the domain within which the development of the performance exists, for which the celebrated Furtwängler is properly famous. The mind of the director, the performers, and the audience, are captured by the unfolding process of contrapuntal development throughout, to a brief time of taking a breath, when the sound of the music is leaving the room. There is another brief moment of silence. So, the moments of silence before and after the performance of that work are an integral, essential part of the performance. In between those bookends of silence, the musical development must be heard by the inner faculties of the mind as a special kind of seamless continuity: a continuity of contrapuntal development: a sensed experience of ironical suspension which is associated with the idea of movement emphasized by Heraclitus' famous aphorism: nothing is real (i.e., "permanent") but change. The effect corresponds to what Bernhard Riemann defined as Dirichlet's Principle, a volume of physical space-time which is self-bounded as an object unto itself.[12] Between the bookends there must be a seamless idea of continuing contrapuntal development, as the famous role of Lydian intervals in Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus illustrates the composer's intent to present a self-bounded singleness of a single idea which pervades the instant memory of the event, as a unit, from opening to ending breath. It is that objective, the principle of suspension associated with change, which drives the performers and the director in the successful performance of any great work of Classical musical composition. A similar case is to be made for any mode of Classical artistic composition which is allowably defined as "Classical" in character of intent and effect. It is that idea of change, which is the ruling object of the relevant musical performance. It is not mechanical rules of interpretation which define music; it is the unity of effect of the heard composition, including the silent bookends fore and aft, which drives the performers and the conductor to achieve the intention which the composer has embedded in the sketch seen as the score. Those "bookends" are not the origin of the finiteness of the conception of the composition as a whole; rather, the silences are necessary to assist the mind of performers and audience alike in hearing the composition's performance correctly, and in assisting the performers in mustering the specific kind of concentration the performance requires to produce the required unity of effect, the "Dirichlet Principle Effect." These deeper, underlying considerations are encountered as the special effect by which the performance of a notable choral piece by reasonably skilled and rehearsed performers moves audiences as no other use of the human voice can do this. Hence, an emphasis on immersion in the meaning of the performance of works for bel canto polyphony, develops the mind, and its general Classical artistic potentialities as a medium of communication of the more profound ideas, and does this in a way which complements a Classical scientific grounding, to the effect that the combination of the two produces a developed sense of a whole and integrated individual personality. Once the participants in the choral program grasp the implications of the cross-voice modalities, such as those associated with transitions such as the Lydian intervals of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, much more than the conception of music is revolutionized. The participant in that process is enabled to develop a definite conception of the human principle expressed by well-tempered counterpoint, a human principle which no reductionist mathematical calculation, nor machine could willfully generate, no matter how near the approximation accomplished by mechanical-like imitation of the effect which can be produced originally only by the human mind. In order to develop the personality, it is necessary to subject the standpoint of formal mathematical-physical experiment, to the tempering of the formal scientific outlook with the reality of the human social process, which is the medium of all specifically human activity. The relatively miraculous power of a well-prepared, competent performance of such exemplary, relatively simple compositions as the Jesu, meine Freude and Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, thus expresses a power to a musically literate, or even semi-literate audience, which no other medium of communication can match. Such music and its performance, are the appropriate standard for composition of poetry, and even for artistic modes of ordinary oral and written speech. Those persons who are subjected to conditioning in contrary modes, suffer more or less enduring, deleterious effects. The Role of LeadershipThe judicial murder of Socrates by the political leaders of the "Democratic Party" of Athens, illustrates the evil inherent in a style in politics based upon "consensus." This means, in other words, the evil inherent in the pro-fascist Samuel P. Huntington's doctrine of "democracy." The idealized essence of that perverse use of the name of "democracy," is the doctrine of sophistry, which is associated with those criminals of the Democratic Party of Athens, who perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates. It is also associated with frequent use of the term "democracy," to mean "sophistry," in politics in the U.S.A. and Europe today. For example, it was that precise doctrine, the doctrine of sophistry, which was upheld by the late I.F. Stone in his publicly expressed sympathy for the murderers of Socrates. Sophistry is the principle expressed by the infamous Nazi Nuremberg Rally. As in the Nazi Nuremberg rally, or the infamous public addresses of Benito Mussolini, a consensus as a controlling, heightened, populist's emotional state of mind, reduced the cognitive powers of the individual German's or other's conceptual powers to the impotence of virtual mush. This was the result shown in Hitler's Nuremberg rally. which must also be recognized as the quality of intellectual life exhibited by a Ku Klux Klan mob wetting its pants at a lynching, or the frankly Satanic quality of an "Elmer Gantry" revival meeting. This expression of sophistry as the promotion of pants-wetting, is the ideal of thuggish Benito Mussolini, strutting like a barnyard rooster before the mob which is mindlessly shouting, "Duce! Duce!" It is the snarling of Pavlov's decorticated dogs. In other words, by numbing those critical faculties of the individual mind which distinguish man from beast, the members of the assembly are transformed, as individuals, into the virtual likeness of decorticated beasts. Sieg Heil! for the pervert Huntington's conception of "Project Democracy." The essential principle permeating all competent modes of education of the young, is that the prevalent opinion of the majority was always wrong. In other words, the task of education is to elevate prevalent opinion to a level above its presently expressed, typical state of relatively ignorant beliefs. If that is not what the classroom is doing, the students are being subjected to the implicit economic fraud of a bad teacher, or, a morally depraved educational institution. In this respect, the principles of Classical education and valid modes of political leadership are identical. The leader who challenges the wrong opinion prevalent among the many, is the opposite of the Mussolini delivering a Roman salute to a pants-wetting mob shouting "Duce! Duce!," or of an Adolf Hitler, or his stand-in, such as a Hess or Goebbels, addressing the pants-wetters of the party in Nuremberg, or kindred rally. An honest teacher is a leader, and a valid choice of leader, is an honest teacher. Hitler was neither teacher nor leader; but his admirers were valid models of pants-wetters, or, perhaps, of foolish chickens being led in triumph, toward their own slaughter, under the reign of that silly but savage cock. My notion of leadership is that of the function of teachers in the Classical tradition traceable from Socrates and from Plato's Academy at Athens. This is the essential requirement of all science and honest politics, as in the history of Europe from Solon of Athens and Plato, to the present day. For the LYM, as for any competent program of education, the function of a Classical mode of education, as distinct from the approximations of "blab school" varieties of educational sophistries popularized by today's mass-media practices, is to develop the individual member of the task-oriented group as an individual leader in society. The society's needed leaders are individuals of qualified potential for that role in the domain of the original discovery, or personal re-discovery of experimentally validatable hypotheses, that in Plato's sense of hypothesis. In other words, a leader is an up-lifter of others, who inspires them to abandon the homely stink of conventional banalities, who prompts them to rise to a sense of the immortal goals for mankind, goals which express the vital, immortal interest of the life of the mortal individual. The essential task of the teacher, or other true leader, is to take an individual who is filled to overflowing with the familiar stench of his, or her own habituated, ignorant opinion, and to attract that individual to a valid sense of the better person waiting to be unleashed within himself or herself: a sense that he or she can change to become a mortal individual who takes great pleasure in doing something, while alive, which means a better life, a better planet, and, perhaps, a better universe, for generations yet to be born. Above all else, to actually comprehend that nature of mankind which is expressed so succinctly in the closing verses of Genesis 1. The need to develop a new generation of leaders of such qualities from among the ranks of young adults today, is demonstrated by recognition of the fact that the susceptibility of the nations of the Americas and what was recently called "Western Europe," has been the increasing tendency for the spread of both intellectual and moral mediocrity in and outside of government since the later half of the 1960s. Even the leading figure of exceptional talent, is dragged down by the sea of both intellectual and moral mediocrity in which he or she swims. The evidence of the extreme moral and intellectual decadence shown not only by corporate management in the Business Schooling tradition of Enron, but in the corporate realm generally, merely typifies the moral and intellectual decadence spreading through the dominant strata of the population at large. Getting short-term gains for top management first, stockholders a poor second, and devil take the hindmost for the rest of society and the nation's future, is to be recognized as merely a natural outgrowth of the trend into deeper and deeper intellectual and moral decadence among the trend-setting strata of society over about four decades, since the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle, the pushing of Konrad Adenauer (as "too Christian") prematurely out of the post of Chancellor, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the plunge into the Indo-China war, and the rising influence of the decadence spread by the influence of the 68ers. The culminating cultural effect of that long span of the slide into sophistry-driven decadence of leadership and its constituencies, has been the post-1989 "End of History" mass-psychosis. That is to emphasize the loss of a sense of history among the dominant layers of influence shaping the leading and popular culture today. This shows up as the potential fatal ignorance of actual history in leading circles of power; the correlated breakdown of the intelligence agencies of leading governments; the lack of a sense of an actual future as the dynamics of leading and popular institutions are gripped by ever shorter concentration-spans; and, the correlated loss of rational comprehension of actual processes of cause and effect. It is relevant to that general picture of the slide into decadence, that there is more than some little evidence, that Satan fears those who do as I do. He whispers to the person he has selected as his next dupe, pointing the accusing finger against me: "He is trying to change you!" To that, the credulous dupe, looking Satan in the eye, asks, credulously: "Is that what he is doing?" Satan nods a knowing nod. The dupe's eyes widen. Anger seeps into his facial expression. "Then, he is really a very bad guy!" the dupe exclaims. "Yes, he is a very bad guy," Satan affirms, indulgently, as he touches the dupe's sleeve lightly with his own little finger; "perhaps somebody should do something about him." The dupe's expression darkens. "Really?"[13] To do what must be done at the risk of that Satan's—and the Venetian financier oligarch's—displeasure, is to be a true teacher, a true leader. That such leaders might arise from the ranks of today's young adult youth, is my intention for the impact of the LYM upon our imperilled civilization of today. This purpose can not be achieved without emphasis on the foundations of modern physical science, but, on the other hand, training in physical science does not produce a healthy mind without development of competence in Classical artistic composition. Thus, the common curse of modern public opinion and education alike, is the artificial dichotomy represented by the pitting of science and art against one another, as virtual adversaries. Art without science, is a fool; science without Classical artistic development, is a brutish drudge. But, art must be rigorous in its own, appropriate fashion. Human individual creativity is the method which encompasses both, as the work of Plato typifies this; it can not be one imitating, or opposing the other. In physical science. the act of discovery of a universal physical principle, is primarily a matter of the sovereign individual mind's focus upon observed processes other than social processes as such. In the recently almost abandoned, traditional Classical artistic composition and performance, the same innate faculties have been cultivated to the degree needed to apply the principles of scientific investigation to the subject of processes of social interaction. It is the development of the individual mind to move freely and skillfully among the subject-matters of physical science and Classical artistic insight into human social processes, which defines the healthy and capable individual person, and the healthy modes in social processes. The Classical method of approach to both, by the Pythagoreans and Plato, or cases such as Leonardo da Vinci in modern times, illustrate the education of the healthy condition of the human mental processes. The principle of leadership, so situated, is expressed in an exemplary way, for both science and art, in the work of the ancient Pythagoreans and their collaborators, by the ancient Greek term dynamis. The efficient, practical comprehension of the proper meaning of that term, is the adopted model for the anti-Cartesian principle of dynamics, as introduced explicitly so to modern physical science by Gottfried Leibniz. Notably all living and social processes are dynamic in Leibniz's sense, as opposed to the anti-scientific quality of mechanistic methods of the modern materialists, empiricists, and reductionists generally. To repeat what I have emphasized in earlier published locations, the following points are essential for comprehension of the practical issues which I have just posed. By "efficient practical comprehension of proper meaning," I am warning the reader against the prevalent scientific illiteracy among the tribes of the mere grammarians. Concisely said: No word has any intrinsic meaning, and no efficiently objective meaning of a term in any language has any functionally valid meaning which is inherently specific to that language's conventions. The fraudulent, or simply ignorant presumption, that words have fixed, specific, individual grammatical meanings unto themselves, is the foundation of that art of lying known as sophistry, or sometimes referenced today as "spin." The valid meanings of words, are products of attributions derived from what may be described as "constructions of reference." The notion which I associate with that phrase, "constructions of reference," is of crucial importance for defining the nature and role of true functions of leadership in both education in general, and in political life. This argument were better understood by referencing it to Heraclitus' conception of a universal principle of change. The clinical example of the meaning of "cubic roots" as properly understood as a challenge in the physics of purely constructive geometry in the complex domain, is a convenient illustration of the point. The following review is necessary to situate the implications of my use of the example of cubic roots as a way of illustrating the concept of "constructions of reference." Classical IronyFor example, the competent modes of pedagogy employed to assist students in arriving at recognition of the meaningful, literate use of terms, is the Classic method of illustrating the varied use of the relevant term by citing a more or less excellent set of examples from literate writers or speakers. In all competent employment of this approach to education for literacy, the emphasis of the pedagogue is on the role of irony, that in the Classical sense of the use of the term irony. All notably significant uses of that method in pedagogy emphasize illustrative selections; the term which is emphasized in each such pedagogical choice of example, is a new meaning for an otherwise familiar word. This notion of a new meaning for an otherwise familiar world, points to the crucially characteristic feature of all truly literate utterance. The supply of an implicitly recognizable, but new meaning for an old word, or, turn of phrase, is the crucial issue which defines the essence of true literacy, as distinct from the morbid conventionalities of the soul-dead pedant. This way of writing, or speaking is, first of all, useful. It permits us to introduce needed new ideas, which would not be implicitly recognizable, except by changing the way in which a language is used, in a way which literate and cognitively viable users of that language are able to understand. It should be obvious, that this mode of communication is the life's-blood of any literate form of customary language; a language which resists valid new ideas for old words, deserves to be considered a virtually dead language. My favorite citation from P.B. Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry," typifies the relevant illustration of the point. There are periods in the life of a nation, or culture more broadly, which are distinguished by a generalized "increase of the power of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature." In such periods, as Shelley knew very well from personal experience of his tumultuous times, there is a tendency for a war between the grammarians and the poets, a conflict which, as Shelley would emphatically agree, echoes the conflict between the Olympian Zeus and the Prometheus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. A study of the history of J.S. Bach's method of well-tempered composition, through its continuation by Johannes Brahms. illustrates this point for artistic communication generally. Take, for example, the famous quotations from Bach's A Musical Offering as statements of this principled conception appears in numerous compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. In the opposition to the Prometheans Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, there was the Delphic brain-deadness of the circles of Rameau and Fuchs. In intellectual life, as in the universe as a whole, there is always the struggle between change and no change. The meaning of the underlying concept never changes, but the meaning of its expression always does change. The method this implies, and requires, is the same notion of anti-mechanistic dynamics required in physical science. Thus, it might be said of a grammarian's funeral, "How could one mourn the loss of a mind which was already dead?" The required use of as much as an entire paragraph, chapter, or entire text to define the true new meaning of the use of a familiar word in a new location, is a reflection of competent methods of physical science, and of the specifically dynamic method in Classical irony required for the expression of the meaning of ideas in the use of language. Literature will find the solution for the apparent mystery this involves, in the following continuation of our discussion of the principles of leadership within the framework of physical geometry in the tradition of the Pythagoreans. Leadership in Science and ArtAs I have emphasized in such recently published locations as "The Shape of Empty Space,"[14] the only valid basis for modern physical science is traced through the Classical Greek development of the Egyptian, astrophysical-based science of Sphaerics by the relevant Pythagoreans, Plato, and others. This development's pedagogical method was focussed upon the student's meeting of certain paradoxical challenges from the domain of an axiomatically physical geometry, which is free of the kind of aprioristic presumptions associated with a Babylonian style in rectilinear mathematics' Euclidean assumptions of definitions, axioms, and postulates. The only assumption of competent physical geometry, is that observed processes' effects must be assessed by aid of mapping those effects within a spherical universe. Thus, in ancient, pre-Euclidean Greek science through the work of Plato, the elementary issues of physical geometry are referenced to the correspondence between the configuration of the geometrical elementarities of point, line, and solid, on the one side, and the distinction of so-called rational, irrational, and transcendental number-orderings in the field of counting numbers, on the other. This functional connection between the two is that, in any competent sense of the issues, the latter domain, the shadow world of the formal number domain, is "explained" from the standpoint of physical geometry; whereas, incompetent practice of science evades the fact that the existence of the anomalies of the shadow-world of number can be understood only as the shadows cast by the realities of the physical-geometric domain (e.g., complex domain) of the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions. Thus, when the inferior role of numbers as such is understood, we must say, that, during Plato's time, the subject of transcendentals had already been brought adequately into principled focus, by two related special problems. The first, was the geometric construction of the doubling of the cube, a problem in geometry famously solved by Plato's friend and collaborator, the Pythagorean Archytas. The second was the challenge of defining the series of existing regular solids, solved by the associate of Archytas and Socrates, Theaetetus, the discoverer of the principled implications of the regular dodecahedron, in particular, and the regular solids as a series. The most ancient known definition of the physical meaning of the complex domain was supplied by Archytas' solution for the doubling of the cube by construction.[15] [See Figures 1 and 2.] From this standpoint in the constructive mode of physical geometry known as Sphaerics, the existence of the physical-geometric object is the product of the action by which the form of the object is generated. In general, this action itself is not an object of sense-perception; rather, it is discovered and known as a physical reality through experimental demonstrations which show the unlimited validity of the relevant construction of the perceived effect. This argument which I have just summarized, was made clear in a fuller, deeper sense by Bernhard Riemann's application of what he identified as Dirichlet's Principle to the general domain of a physical hypergeometry: the existence of the finite, self-bounded universe. From this vantage-point, that last important intellectual barrier to understanding the physical meaning of "universal" is essentially removed. Thus, in the modern references to terminology derived from the ancient Greek, the meanings of terms often have directly contrary significances in the modern locations in which they appear as technical terms used by professionals and others. This contradiction in assigned meanings of such terms, is usually a reflection of two absolutely incompatible definitions of mathematical reality: the Classical, that of the Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plato, versus the reductionist views of the materialists, Euclideans, sophists, et al. The appearance of the otherwise invisible act expressed as a discovered universal physical principle, is made knowable to the individual mind by a social process. This involves both the shared experience of the discovery of the idea of that principle among two or more respectively sovereign individual minds, by means of the shared experience of demonstrating the implicitly universal practical efficiency of the principle as a principle. This was, for example, the method prescribed by Bernhard Riemann in that 1854 habilitation dissertation, in which he eliminated the use of deductive method based upon Euclidean or comparable forms of aprioristic presumptions. For example, the experience of members of the LYM in rediscovering Archytas' construction of the doubling of the cube, produces a geometrical idea of concrete actions which show up as the set of allegedly mathematically "imaginary" cubic roots of the cube in the disordered mind of a D'Alembert, de Moivre, et al. So, for Plato, as for Archytas and the Pythagoreans generally, the real universe is not efficiently confined within the fishbowl-like bounds of naive sense-certainty. The real universe is one in which the determining action lies "outside" the literal reading of sense-perceptions. This relationship functions in a way already understood by the referenced Classical Greeks, and, in a modern recasting, as the view of the universe as seen by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and such among his typical followers as Leonardo, Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann. This view of the universe, in opposition to the reductionist hysterias of Euler et al., is represented by the notion of the complex domain, a notion derived for Eighteenth-Century and later reference by Leibniz's catenary-cued universal physical principle of least action, and epitomized by the work of Riemann from his 1854 habilitation dissertation on through his more fulsome later treatments of hypergeometric functions. The defense of the science of Kepler, Leibniz, et al. against the perversions of empiricists such as Euler, by Gauss, Riemann, et al., is an example of the way in which creativity is correctly understood in science, and, implicitly, in Classical artistic composition, too. This argument may be summed up by saying, that only the discovery of a universal physical principle, in this manner and in this social form, represents the discovery and communication of a valid idea of principle. This discovery and communication, as an original discovery for mankind, or re-enacted as an original discovery by an individual, such as a student, is the paradigmatic form of a creative act of the individual mind. The sharing of such experiences is creativity, as creativity should be fostered in the classroom. For the hypothetical case, that there is no explicit error in an adopted, dynamic view of a universe implicitly defined by an already established set of universal principles, the element of error to be corrected at that point, is expressed as the lack of knowledge of some additional universal principle, which does not cause us to reject the principles which have already been discovered, but, nonetheless, the new principle causes us to change the way in which we view everything which we actually knew previously. In that sense, every new discovery of a universal principle defines a universe "outside" what we had implicitly assumed the universe to be prior to the assimilation of the valid new discovery. The same principle applies to the use of language in a Classical mode. A new discovery of principle changes the meaning of every word or other typical expression of the use of language prior to that time. This does not necessarily signify that the previous use of the expression was wrong in its context. It signifies that the word has a different meaning in the more valid, larger context. Thus, all creative artistic expression, including that specific to the use of a given language, overturns the prior literal usage of terms and comparable modes of expression. In the case of the Classical Greek, the concepts, especially those pertaining to the human mind, are absolutely different for Plato and Aristotle respectively. The representatives of those respective views may use the same Greek term, but the meanings are exactly opposite. The dead mind of the pedant could not recognize the difference, but would lean toward his view of the Aristotelean connotations as if that notion were an absolute of literacy. The latter sort of behavior is comparable to the mind of the grammarian, the expression of a mind which has, relatively speaking, gone dead. This is a phenomenon which I have encountered as a matter of my professional work over a period of more than fifty years, the phenomenon of a mental disorder which I came to understand better, at about that time, from encounter with the relevant work of psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Kubie on what he defined as the subject of "the neurotic distortion of the creative process."[16] My own work in dealing with cases of this as functionally a relevant pathological phenomenon has included my relevant responsibilities in dealing among individuals and groups in the management of business and other organizations, with similar problems of administration arising within my own political association, as also characteristic features of clinical disorders typical of the effects of the ageing process within the "Baby Boomer" generation. While the proverbial case of the so-called "idiot savant" is the relative extreme, there is a lack of sufficient appreciation of the crucial functional differences which are commonplace in distinguishing simple memory from cognitive functions. What Kubie's writings clearly implied, especially in his 1962 publication, is the case of the scientifically trained, formerly promising intellect, who clings to precious memories of earlier training, but whose actual creative powers have become virtually inert, a disorder which appears to strike, among products of higher academic training, frequently during the decade from the mid-twenties on. Such types will often attempt to break up any discussion of a serious problem-solving nature, by changing the subject to a compulsive, scatterbrained rattle of irrelevant facts, resembling the behavior of a sexually excited jack-rabbit desperately lusting for a momentarily unavailable mate. Such diversions are intended, consciously or not, to force the discussion in progress away from the cognitive issues of the discussion in progress among their colleagues. Their behavior has the functional form of attempting to distract attention away from their lack of cognitive powers. The frankly neurotic quality of their mental states on such occasions is often lurid. This pathological tendency is not age-predetermined, although ageing-prone, but is functional in nature, and is often expressed rather frankly as the attempt to impose the "absolute authority" of what they have been socially accredited for "learning," as a way of concealing their relative loss of the cognitive potential they had shown as, for example, bright students, at an earlier time. My experience is, that by establishing and sustaining a social climate in which there is a relevant premium on the excitement of creative cognitive activity, the incidence of such unfortunate cases of neurotic decadence of the intellect can be prevented. It is clear that those practices in teaching of science and art which I have condemned here so far, are typical of the environmental factors prompting the tendency for loss of cognitive powers among what were otherwise promising young minds. Yet, the lack of such experiences, or the categorical rejection of some ideological premise such as that of the attacks on Leibniz by Euler et al., demonstrates the method of suppression of human creativity, relative suppression of the intellectual and emotional qualities which distinguish the normal human being from those who are behaving in the likeness of beasts. Prometheus, Creativity, and LeadershipWhen we look back to the actual origins of modern European science's best achievements, in the work of ancients typified by Thales and the Pythagoreans, and the immediate circles of Socrates and Plato, we have a sense that the Euclid of Euclid's Elements was not merely mistaken, but also evil. Again, the implications of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound are the relevant point of reference for understanding the significance of my earlier reference to "constructions of reference." It must be repeatedly emphasized, as I shall restate this point in a slightly different way in the following chapter of this report, that the introduction of Euclid's Elements represented a twofold attack on the mental life of European civilization, from that point through the present day. First, by introduction of a deductive/inductive method of argument premised on a fixed set of arbitrary, aprioristic definitions, axioms, and postulates, the creative processes of mind of those duped into such practices were crippled in a way which tended to eliminate actual creativity from accepted standards of social-intellectual practice. Second, by choosing a set of aprioristic assumptions which corresponded to the notion of space as axiomatically rectilinear, an additional, crippling effect was imposed upon the mental life of the victim of the aprioristic system as such. This criminal sabotage of the previously known ancient Greek science was continued, as Riemann emphasizes in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, from Euclid to the present time. Resistance to reductionist forms of brainwashing, such as Euclidean or even worse systems, has persisted as academic and kindred commonplaces from ancient Greek through modern times. Although the alternative was implicit in the work of such modern scientific thinkers as Nicholas of Cusa, his followers, and the followers of Kepler such as Fermat and Leibniz, the general remedy for the problem was not made specific until the work of Riemann. Riemann's establishing the foundations of a comprehensive approach to physical science expressed by his contributions to hypergeometries, may be considered as the modern liberation of Promethean science from the shackles of Zeus. On this account, it must be emphasized that what Riemann did with his 1854 habilitation dissertation, his Theory of Abelian Functions, and his contribution prefigured to a general hypergeometry, were already implicit in the development of modern anti-reductionist mathematical physics by Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Abraham Kästner, Gauss most immediately, and others; but, it was Riemann who made the issue an explicit one. Putting the issue on the table, explicitly, as Riemann did, was, in itself, a qualitative step forward in science, beyond what had been accomplished by his predecessors working in this direction. The effect of that liberation, by Riemann, assumes the form of a self-conscious approach to a form of education in which exercises in re-enacting discovery of universal physical principles in a mode consistent with Riemann's referenced contributions, represent something more than the already indispensable development of the individual mind for self-consciously creative scientific and artistic work. They enable the student to define the meaning of terms and related elements of communication according to what I have identified as "constructions of reference." To wit: Consult dictionaries and related references as you wish; you do not actually know the meaning of a term or phrase by deduction. You do not actually know an idea until you have discovered it by the creative method of thinking which leads to recognition of "constructions of reference." Any rational form of statement, if it admits of being considered as a rational form of argument, must be treated not as a solution to a question, but as, inherently, an implied question in and of itself. What does any statement of asserted fact actually mean? To answer that type of implied question, the assertion must be treated as the recognizable paradox implicit in the claim so represented; the solution to that paradox defines the meaning of that term. The solution must be generated in the form of proof of an hypothesis respecting the functional meaning of the relevant terms and phrasings. That application of what is, in principle, the scientific method of approach to that paradox, generates a mental image which is specific to that paradox taken within its specific context. The mental image of the solution to that, represents a construction of reference. The idea prompted as a solution to the paradox, is now the adduced meaning of the statement treated. This is the working principle of Classical irony in all media of communication. This is to be recognized as the essence of the Socratic dialectical method. This notion of "construction of reference" is to be recognized as cohering with the form of a dynamic process, rather than a deductive-mechanical one. The whole context within which a relevant term is uttered, is the location of the meaning of the isolated term, phrase, or sentence to be questioned. Therefore, the role of irony in Classical poetry presents the kinds of exercises which the student must experience as a precondition for competence in physical science. Leibniz's attack on the incompetence of the method of Descartes, is the relatively "elementary" model argument to be applied to that effect. It is that habit of mind, whose development is a pervasive goal of the system of education which I have specified, which provides the standard of meaning to be applied to a relevant term of phrase. Classical poetry which treats its adopted subject-matter in this way, is an example of this principle. The quality of individual mental life which generates social conceptions in this manner, to this effect, is the proper choice of standard for what we should intend to reference when we speak of "leadership." Such creativity, as a habit, is leadership. Any different definition of leadership is a metaphor akin to saying "What that machine is thinking, is...." 2. The Concept of Leadership:
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