2.3 The Nature of Man, As the Subject of Strategy
Most of the manifest instances of systemic incompetence found within recent decades' work of the U.S. national-security establishment, can be traced to the corrosive intellectual influence of academia's currently dominant social theory. One of the notable threats to U.S. national security, lately, has been the alarming number, among the U.S. military and related professionals, of holders of degrees and related special training in such social dogma. The misuse of the term "democracy" in the subject DoD report illustrates the point. The influence of that empiricist dogma upon the choices of definitions of both problems and their proposed remedies, sometimes appears to do as much damage, or more, to U.S. national security, than all officially presumed adversaries combined.
The axiomatic issues posed by such influence, have the same root, historically and otherwise, as the problematics of the bad, but widely accepted teachings of today's mathematical economics. Both pathetic types of beliefs must be recognized as products of a common, mechanistic mind-set. Next, as briefly as possible, we consider that common root, and the dismal nature of the axiomatic effect of such social theory upon strategic thinking; we consider, also, the alternative strategic outlook.
The Legacy of Paolo Sarpi
The present national-security concerns of the United States are properly understood only when it is recognized, that today's problems of national security are often derived from the influence of that Servite monk and mathematician, Paolo Sarpi, who maintained factional supremacy in Venice from 1582 until his death in 1623.[97] Sarpi is the father of all the mathematical and social theory which came to be known as The Enlightenment.[98] Many among today's security problems may occur, either as the effect of Sarpi's influence upon the behavior of other nations, or of our own, or a combination of both effects.
It was Sarpi who launched the process of "cloning" the British and Netherlands monarchies as the future "doges" of a ruling, global financier oligarchy. It was Sarpi, as mathematician and controller of such assets as England's Sir Francis Bacon and of Galileo Galilei, who established the axiomatic basis for both today's generally accepted, mechanistic, Galileo-Descartes-Newton-Euler faction in mathematical physics, and also the generally accepted assumptions underlying the social theory imposed upon today's universities. Under the rubric of "social theory," are included empiricist political-economy, the Hobbes-Locke current in law, and the most widely accepted varieties of psychology and utopianism of the English-speaking world (and, elsewhere).
In the preceding pages, we have summarized the case, that human nature is distinguished from the characteristics of all lower species, by virtue of those developable, not-entropic qualities of the individual person, upon which society depends, absolutely, for the continued survival of our species.
The followers of Sarpi, notably including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, Giammaria Ortes, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, premised today's dominant social theory, upon a directly opposite, bestialized notion of "human nature." It is fairly said, that the latter dogma is based chiefly upon apotheosis of the "Seven Deadly Sins," as the core of its teaching. This is generally known, variously, as the empiricist, British, Liberal, materialist, positivist, behaviorist, or psychoanalytical mind-set. Despite the secondary distinctions among the latter varieties of doctrine, they rest, each and all, upon a common species of underlying assumptions. Those assumptions are false; their implications for social practice, are wicked.
As noted, above, during the middle of the Eighteenth Century, the influence of Venice, throughout Europe, was centered in a network of salons set up under the direction of Abbot Antonio Conti (1677-1749).[99] That Conti is best known as the sponsor of the scientific reputation which he manufactured for a man who would otherwise be recognized today only as an obscure dabbler in black magic, Isaac Newton. Conti was also, similarly, the sponsor of Voltaire, of Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay, and many other Enlightenment notables of that time. He served during the first half of that century as a leading controller for the foreign intelligence services of Venice. During the middle of that century, the network of salons established by him, launched a campaign for what was sometimes described as "Newtonian social theory." As a result of this, Maupertuis and the same Giammaria Ortes who wrote the book plagiarized by Thomas Malthus, were among the leading pioneers in what became known later as empiricist and materialist dogma; today, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, are among the most widely known exponents of that "Newtonian social theory."
The significance of the use of the term "Newtonian social theory" and its variants of that period's usages, is the notion, advanced by Maupertuis and Ortes, that the mechanistic quantification of Thomas Hobbes' attributes for human nature, could extend the domain of Newton's Principia into the field of social theory, producing a "calculus" of social theory. Hence, we have the satanic doctrine of "freedom," derived from Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville, embedded as the cornerstone of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" dogma in particular, and Liberal political and social dogma in general.[100]
The dismal effect of this Enlightenment, or Liberal dogma, is seen efficiently in the credulous reception accorded to a fraudulent, but influential textbook, John Von Neumann's and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.[101] The relevant aspect of that book for consideration here, is two principal portions of Chapter 1:[102] "2. Qualitative Discussion of the Problem of Rational Behavior," and "3. The Notion of Utility." Special emphasis is supplied for "2.2 'Robinson Crusoe' economy and social exchange economy,'" and for "3.2 Principles of Measurement: Preliminaries." The emphasis upon the "Robinson Crusoe" model is the crucial point for us here. The influence of Von Neumann's pathetic method upon both sundry sections of the U.S. military, and the security establishment more broadly, is emphasized. He typifies that corrupting, "New Age" influence upon the U.S. security establishment, not only through his own direct influence, which has been considerable, but also in his employment of the same, antic, axiomatic assumptions which permeate what has become the prevailing, utopian outlook of that establishment.[103]
For our purposes here, it is sufficient to note the pivotal role which his game theory has contributed in making possible the specific form of "financial cancer" which is currently destroying the world's floating-exchange-rate monetary system from within: the orgy of financial speculation known as the "derivatives bubble." We should expect no objection to that bubble, from any person sufficiently ignorant, or deluded, to believe that Von Neumann's game theory is economic science. The axiomatic issues are already fully expressed in those early, definitional passages from his book to which we refer here.
His construction of his general theory of mathematical economics sets out from something fairly described as a "one-person game," analogous to that "one-person sex" (parthenogenesis), which is utopia for such a perennially boyish Narcissus as "Johnny" Von Neumann. He identifies this as "the Robinson Crusoe" model, that is, "an economy of an isolated single person or otherwise organized under a single will."[104] He notes:
"The chief objection against using this very simplified model of an isolated individual for a theory of a social exchange economy is that it does not represent an individual exposed to the manifold social influences. Hence, it is said to analyze an individual who might behave quite differently if his choices were made in a social world where he would be exposed to factors of imitation, advertising, custom, and so on. These factors certainly make a great difference, but it is to be questioned whether they change the formal properties of this process of maximizing. Indeed the latter has never been implied, and since we are concerned with this problem alone, we can leave the above social considerations out of account."Some other differences between 'Crusoe' and a participant in social exchange economy will not concern us either. Such is the non-existence of money as a means of exchange in the first case where there is only a standard of calculation, for which purpose any commodity can serve. This difficulty indeed has been ploughed under by our assuming ... a quantitative and even monetary notion of utility. We emphasize again: Our interest lies in the fact that even after all these drastic simplifications Crusoe is confronted with a formal problem quite different from the one a participant in a social economy faces.
"... Crusoe faces an ordinary maximum problem, the difficulties of which are of a purely technical--and not conceptual--nature,..."[105]
From the outset of the section immediately following that, the following passages are crucial:
"Consider now a participant in a social exchange economy. His problem has, of course, many elements in common with a maximum problem. But is also contains some, very essential, elements of an entirely different nature. He too tries to obtain an optimum result. But in order to achieve this, he must enter into exchange with others.... Thus each participant attempts to maximize a function (his above-mentioned 'result') of which he does not control all variables. This is certainly no maximum problem, but a peculiar and disconcerting mixture of several conflicting maximum problems. Every participant is guided by another principle and neither determines all variables which affect his interest."This kind of problem is nowhere dealt with in classical mathematics....
"A particularly striking expression of the popular misunderstanding about this pseudo-maximum problem is the famous statement according to which the purpose of social effort is the 'greatest possible good for the greatest possible number.'..."[106]
Von Neumann's synthetic Robinson Crusoe exhibits the Hobbesian quality of a man-beast. Like the worst perversions of mathematics and mathematical physics in the misused name of topology, or quantum mechanics, Von Neumann's argument is a mechanistic rodomontade. It is premised axiomatically upon the folly of maintaining a naively "Euclidean" notion of simply linear extension, by means of the most simple-minded, swaggering, stubborn verbal posturing. It extends such posturing even into the realm of the microphysically very small, always substituting linearity for true causality (Reason).[107] Every claim he makes for economic principle, is utterly false, as it is also bestial.
What, then, is the appropriate response to the principal questions considered by Von Neumann and Morgenstern in the cited locations? We had already addressed all of these propositions adequately before taking up this Von Neumann-Morgenstern text; the applicable representation of what we said earlier, is, summarily, as follows.
The function to be maximized in all cases, including the case which includes all past, present, and future members of our species, is that which correlates with potential relative population-density. The special need of the individual person within that function, is that which is associated with the mortality and relative physical weakness of the individual qua individual: the requirement that the end-result of the individual's mortal life shall be some good which long survives that individual, and that society afford the mortal individual, first, the means and opportunity to serve that purpose while he or she lives, and, second, the need for a less mortal agency, i.e., society, to nurture what the individual has bequeathed to society on that account.
Otherwise stated, the primary interest of the mortal individual, qua individual, lies in the coherence between the relatively immortal benefit which the individual must contribute to society, in his or her most vital interest, and the means by which that relatively immortal achievement is brought about.
Speaking in generalities, these are the principles of natural law referenced by Gottfried Leibniz's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which Leibniz, and the authors of the U.S. Federal Constitution counterposed explicitly to John Locke's wicked "life, liberty, and property." Von Neumann, et al., like the authors of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, adopt the position of John Locke.
The alternative to Von Neumann's argument is premised upon what we have identified here, earlier, as the Leibnizian universal characteristic which identifies the human individual's axiomatic distinction from, and absolute superiority over the lower species: the not-entropic quality of realized creative reason. The yardstick by which all physical-economic, and practical moral values are to be measured, is the function implicit in the reading given here of the Riemann Series (n+1)/n.[108]
We have addressed the relevant absurdity of empiricist social dogma earlier, in pointing out that the misused word "democracy," as invoked by the misnamed "Freedom House," by the misbegotten National Endowment for Democracy, and by philosophical fascists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Professor Milton Friedman, is a wonderfully curious term when applied as an endorsement of the practices of governments committed to the mass-murderous austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund.[109] It is a cannibals' democracy: the freedom of those who, for that moment, have the power, to eat those who, for that moment, do not.
It is the "freedom" of Adam Smith's dogma of the "Invisible Hand," the libertinism which "moral philosopher" Adam Smith, like Friedrich von Hayek, learned from Bernard Mandeville.[110] Leo Cherne's "freedom" and John Von Neumann's "utilities" are learned from Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and Adam Smith, by way of British foreign-service head Jeremy Bentham's "hedonistic calculus" [The Principles of Morals and Legislation, In Defense of Pederasty, and In Defense of Usury], and by way of Bertrand Russell's godfather, John Stuart Mill.
Put aside the Orwellian use of the term "freedom," by Von Neumann, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, von Hayek, Milton Friedman, the Heritage Foundation, the U.S.'s National Endowment for Democracy, et al. What is the contrary, truthful employment of the term "freedom"? Consider the following, alternate view of the subject.
We have summarized the case, that increase of the potential relative population-density of individual nations, and of humanity as a whole, depends upon a continued generating, and "receiving and imparting" of those valid metaphors which are "the most profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature." It is this developable faculty of creative reason, unique to the human individual among all beings sub specie aeternitas, which is the action by means of which humanity as a whole continues to exist. It is by means of this action (for the nation, and, directly or implicitly, for humanity as a whole), that the individual is permitted to continue to exist. This action is subject to the principle of the universal characteristic, as we have identified that above: a functional universal characteristic typified by the Riemann topological series (n+1)/n.
In this topological setting, there is a reciprocal relationship between each mortal individual and all humanity, which is defined by, and can only be defined by that mode of action which we have associated with the functional notion of such a universal characteristic. The essential part of the culture transmitted to form the character and capacity of the individual person, is that accumulation of valid metaphors of art, science, and the use of language itself, which are the heritage supplied to that individual, by all humanity up to that time: through household nurture, education, and other means. What remains of the individual, functionally, after death, is that which the individual has transmitted to society, to reciprocal effect. Thus, does the individual act, in the present, to enhance, or to betray the outcome of all earlier human existence; thus, does that individual act upon all humanity, present and future. The efficient action to this effect, is isochronic action, as defined from the functional vantage-point of the referenced universal characteristic.
Nothing in an individual human life is significant, except as it bears efficiently upon the quality of action defined by the functional notion of that universal characteristic. All else, including those possessions or acts which fools count as achievements of another sort, is, at its least contemptible, vanity, and, more often, pathetic folly. What you have done for humanity today, is what your existence will be judged to have been, when all your todays have been totalled. All that which is not good by that standard, is waste or worse.
After you are dead, what you are, in the service of all humanity's universally characteristic function, is what you were while you were alive. Think of your mortal existence as an artistic composition: a process of development, like a Classical strophic poem, or a Classical musical setting of such a poem. Think of the brief totality of your mortal existence in terms of the ontological paradox posed by Plato's Parmenides. In your reminiscence, what has been the Good of it? What is the sum-total of your life, from start, to what you might foresee as its final mortal moment? Apply that conception of yourself, as it were the thought of a Good; retrace the recollection of your development, crisis by crisis, metaphor by metaphor, from past, toward present and future. Grasp the tension between the retrospection of conscience's reminiscence, and the reliving of the successive moments of passage from metaphor to metaphor. Measure, thus, the "energy" with which you perform the composition which is your mortal existence. Judge yourself so.
In this context, freedom can mean nothing other than that joyful exercize of rigorously defined metaphor, which sets the individual person, apart from, and above all other beings. The value of that person is located within the sovreign power of creative reason, the which exists solely within the individual personality. It is the valid exercize of that sovreign power, to assimilate, to transmit, and to generate valid metaphor, which is individual freedom. It is freeing oneself--by valid overturning of false axioms--from the drowning of one's very soul in the putrid intellectual waters of banalized conformity, conformity to the falsehoods of so-called authoritative opinion. Freedom is the development of that power, through the right to relevant forms and circumstances of family nurture, through relevant forms and circumstances of universal and other education, and through the opportunity to develop and employ these individual powers for the advantage of mankind, in some relevant way.
Freedom is the right to tell the truth, and to find the courage to do so, even in face of such menacing adversaries as the academic forces of "political correctness," or in the courts of corrupt judges, and lying prosecutors with their faked witnesses and evidence. Freedom is the right to stand for whatever may be shown to be true, even against all contrary opinion, however popular that false opinion may be. Admittedly, mere opinion, no matter how popular, has no intrinsic moral authority, but truthfulness does; where truthfulness does not enjoy such expression, there is no freedom.
Freedom is, above all, the right to be and to act as such a person who is imago viva Dei, a being made in the image of that Creator whom Plato names "The Composer."
What, then, is your individual self-interest? What does your reminiscing conscience tell you your interest is? What have you done for past, present, and future mankind, with that fragile, momentary, precious moment which is your mortal life? Perhaps, you have done nothing bad with your life; perhaps, like many who wish to feel themselves self-righteous, without the labor of actually doing good, you have buried your talent, safely, where it would not be contaminated by contact with the dirty burdens of the real world. Perhaps, you have acted thus, like a self-righteous, small-minded bigot, gossiping about what you suspect the neighbors might be doing; but, otherwise, if you did little that you think was bad, you did even less that was good.
What, then, is of economic value in your market-basket of household and related consumption?
Your economic need, is that which you require to develop your talent for the kinds of action, which the principle of the universal characteristic may demand of you. Your economic need, is to remain in health, and as vigorous a productive capacity as possible, that you may perform such labor and other moral services which mankind may require of you. Your economic need does not include arbitrary maximization of your income, or your consumption, but only that which you and your family require to perform not only their productive, or related functions respecting the production of physical wealth, but also their functions as citizens, their duty to participate in poetry, in the largest sense of that term: in the generating, "receiving, and imparting of the most profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."
You also require that your neighbor's economic needs be defined by that same standard, and that the needs of our nation's neighbors also be defined in the same way. That, and that alone, is what we must "maximize." Contrary to Von Neumann's cant, the allocation function in economy is, indeed, nothing other than a "maximizing" function. That is the maximizing task which he did not recognize, because the Bernard Mandeville in him did not wish to recognize it. That is what it is, which must be maximized.
Individual & National Interest
The fundamental interest of the United States of America, and of each and all of its citizens--past, present, and future, is to provide a relatively less mortal agency, the constitutional state, to protect and nurture those rights of the individual which pertain to this interest, and also to preserve the beneficial fruit of the individual's contribution to present and future humanity on that same account. The constitutional responsibility of the government of the United States, is to foster increase of the productive powers of labor, through necessary public works, and through nourishing investment in capital-intensive, power-intensive modes of scientific and technological progress. This expresses the fundamental interest of the individual, and of the society as a whole. It is the "maximization" of potential relative population-density in that sense of the matter, which is the required function, as opposed to Von Neumann's mechanistic, Lockean "optimization."
The same point is made if one says, the vital interest of the United States of America is to make the present and future population of this nation safe, by freeing this planet both from the legacies of savagery, and from that spirit of slavery and serfdom, which is embedded axiomatically in the oligarchical traditions of both feudal landed aristocracy and financial oligarchy. The vital interest of the United States, is to free this planet from the reign of both intellectual and moral poverty, as much as from material want in general. President Franklin Roosevelt might not have wished to adopt our choice of words for this: Our most vital strategic national interest, is to free our nation's institution, and the planet, from the grip of those barbaric oligarchical traditions, from which, at long last, the Council of Florence and founding of the first modern nation-state republic began to free mankind.[111] In practice, in his war-time quarrel with the evil British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his opposition to Churchill coincided in practice with our policy here.
On this account, Franklin Roosevelt was being used by God, as Churchill served none but the Devil himself. In that sense, the United States must return to the anti-British standpoint which Roosevelt represented until his untimely death, on April 12, 1945. In that respect, President Roosevelt walked in the footsteps of such anti-British fathers of our nation as Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams, as the authors of our Federal Constitutional Republic before Adams, and as the murdered President Abraham Lincoln and President William McKinley, after Adams.
The United States' capitulation to Churchill's Britain, after Roosevelt's death, established that period of Current History defined by British imperialism's geopolitical notions of global, nuclear and thermonuclear, "balance of power." This 1945-1995, British-dictated notion of "balance of power," is key to all of the immediate security threats, both to our United States today, and to civilization in its entirety.
A New Strategic Hypothesis
For many, the most terrifying feature of the wave of destruction which will dominate the world, increasingly, from October 1995 onward, is the shapeless fear of the unknown which successive crises evoke within even the spectator who has not yet recognized that he or she is also among the victims. In other words, the most terrifying experience of all, is that the events sweeping in upon us, like an incoming hurricane or tidal wave, destroy, within such a spectator, rank after rank of fundamental beliefs, beliefs which had always controlled his behavior, but of whose existence he had been often blindly unaware.
Such, in its worst aspect, is the popular meaning of "common sense." That means, in practice: Certain axiomatic values, which are shared among that section of the population, which each and all serve as blindly as a puppet ignores the strings by which the puppet-master controls him. These are beliefs which control their behavior, even many among their most intimate thoughts, but of whose existence they remain unaware, until that moment a great crisis destroys their faith in nearly everything they believed up to that point in time. What is presently in the process of being obliterated is popular common sense's blind faith in those controlling beliefs of whose presence and efficiency that victim remained ignorant.
For example, consider as a warning, what happened to confidence in money, during the course of the 1922-1923 Reichsmark hyperinflation in defeated and occupied, post-World War I Germany. The legendary example of what happened in the end-phase of the 1923 collapse, was the image, that money was inflated to such a degree that the wheelbarrow full of money, which would have purchased a loaf of bread in the morning, was not even within the range of the monetary purchasing power required, to buy that same loaf at noon. Statist methods stabilized the bankruptcy Reichsmark, and then the United States stepped in, with the so-called "Dawes Plan," and the German monetary system was reborn--after savings, pensions, and so forth had been wiped out.
That, like similar occurrences in one nation or the other, during modern times, was, admittedly, a relatively isolated case. The recent collapse of Russia's ruble, under the rule of the virtual occupying power of the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's Glasnost, the International Monetary Fund, is, in the eyes of many, another such "isolated case." The monetary system of Russia today is considered by many an "isolated case," like each of those persons--approximately one-third of Europe's population at that time--who died of the "Black Death" during Europe's mid-Fourteenth Century; in today's world-wide economy, there is a pandemic of such isolated cases of collapse of national monetary systems.
To understand the U.S. situation today, it is useful to learn the lesson of that which has already occurred within the region of the post-1988 Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.
First, the communist system of economy collapsed. The blue-eyed anti-communist factions seized, with glowing optimism, the prospect of rebuilding their nations in the image of the West. The former officials of the Communist apparatus reacted, especially after Summer 1991, like the bureaucrats of a conquered and occupied nation; many of the greedy ones made the transition from official of a Warsaw Pact nation, either to becoming virtual compradores in London financier interest, or, to western-style gangsterism. Briefly, democracy was the rage; unfortunately, it appears that among those sundry categories, almost anything labelled "western," as demanded by Prime Minister Thatcher and her American familiar, was accepted with enthusiasm, at least for a time.
Now, the old Communists are returning to power throughout the region of the former Warsaw Pact alliance. The "free market" model has effected more destruction, within about six years, than during preceding decades of Communist rule. For some, including many within the population, Thatcher's misbeknighted notion of "freedom" is hated as a disease more disgusting and painful than bolshevism; for a growing number, if only temporarily, communism is viewed even a bit nostalgically. The reaction among many has come to be: communism, relatively speaking, was not so bad as this.
Even with this ominous lesson looming daily larger on the horizon, many foolish Americans are still unwilling to recognize the urgency of freeing this planet from the pestilence which Margaret Thatcher and her halcyonic George Bush called "freedom." For the failure of the majority of U.S. citizens to recognize that urgent fact today, this whole nation is already paying a terrible price, not yet as bad as the price the Russians have been paying, but, at the present rate, the Americans will soon overtake the Russians in the production of misery.
These are examples of the more profound type of crises during which sweeping changes in popularly accepted underlying values occur most often, times during which those axioms of popular and other belief which constitute the ideological foundations of a culture, are shattered, and new axioms, for better or worse, replace the old. That is the essential quality of the national security crisis immediately threatening the United States today. That is the frame of reference within which our nation's looming security crisis must be examined; only fools will refuse to do so.
Therefore, we must examine the strategic threat to the continued existence of the United States today accordingly. That means, in practice, that we must consider this as an existential quality of national security problem, one which we must examine in the way Bernhard Riemann's referenced, 1854 habilitation dissertation addressed the case for axiomatic revolutions in mathematical physics. We must examine this as an example of the type of process by which a failed hypothesis--some existing set of axiomatic beliefs--must be superseded by a new hypothesis, of new axiomatic beliefs. This would be a reversal of what the London Tavistock Institute branch of the British intelligence service's psychological-warfare branch has termed a "cultural-paradigm shift."
Whichever way history goes: By no later than the A.D. 2000 U.S. Presidential-election campaign, the world will be dominated by a set of axiomatic beliefs entirely different than those which were generally accepted during a then-departed, 1945-1995 half-century. For much better, or, for very much worse, the trends in values which have dominated the world over the course of the recent thirty-odd years, will be swept away, almost obliterated, replaced either by a rebirth of that institution, the modern sovreign nation-state, pioneered by France's Louis XI, or by a hopeless plunge into the depths of a New Dark Age, from which latter no more than a population of several hundred millions people, mostly Yahoos, will emerge a generation or two into the next century. The crucial issue of the 1996 election-campaign is, which road will the U.S.A. choose: to follow the philosophical fascism of "Contract with America" into the bowels of a New Dark Age's hellish, genocidal lunacy, or to renew our commitment to the anti-Locke, Leibnizian principles adopted in the Preamble of the 1788-1789 U.S. Federal Constitution? Should the U.S.A. ignore that issue, the U.S.A. will not survive as a nation, nor most descendants of the families presently living in it.
There is no issue of the 1996 elections which it would not be worse than a waste of time to debate, except as that issue bears on the fact that the world is presently gripped by a process of change, in which nearly everything which the citizen believed yesterday, is being transformed, rapidly, into what that citizen will believe tomorrow. Similarly, any proposed security policy issued by the Department of Defense must be seen as folly, unless it addresses the strategic implications of that ongoing transition.
It is a fair comparison to state, that the desirable change in values, which we may hope is now in progress, will be comparable in form to a successful scientific revolution.
As in the useful scientific revolutions during Europe's recent six hundred years, most of the particular ideas which people have believed will appear, superficially, to be almost unchanged. Children will be produced by the same process. The essential role of family nurture of the child will remain; the optimal model of the family as an institution, as known to Benjamin Franklin's time, has not changed at any time during history to date; cultures have violated the model only at their peril. The required functions of the home which ought to concern the architect (eating, sleeping, and so forth) will persist; the principles of design of family housing have remained constant since earlier than Harrappan cities of South Asia. Like the physiologically natural pre-determination of J.S. Bach's well-tempered polyphony, the principled character of those kinds of things which are essential to the successful reproduction of the human species as a culturally self-developing species, will not change. Culturally, sane people do not discard the past; we build upon those of its achievements which have been valid in their time and place, freeing what was good, from the burden of that which was not.
What must change, as in the emergence of a non-Euclidean geometry from a superseded Euclidean geometry, is the set of underlying axiomatic assumptions, the underlying hypothesis, which governs our reading of the empirically validated propositions of experience. What we think, is governed always by how we think; that is where the revolutionary changes in belief and institutions are rooted, in changes in the way we think. In the happier of two alternatives immediately confronting civilization, that is the kind of cultural renewal, the cultural revolution we must choose.
The crucial, axiomatic point of the matter, is that animals and tragically foolish people learn chiefly from what populists like to reference as "my practical experience." Successful societies learn in a radically different way: from scientific and cultural discoveries of a positive, axiomatic-revolutionary quality. As we have stressed through this section of this review of the DoD statement: if man were an animal, who learned from "practical experience," man would be a man-ape, of which never more than several millions individuals would have lived under the conditions which have existed during Earth's recent two millions years. Man is a creature of ideas, not attributable "instincts." The practice upon which the continued existence of the human species depends, is cumulative changes in practice which are situated primarily within the domain of ideas, as Plato defined ideas. It is man in the image of God, as a creature of such ideas, rather than instincts, which is the primary subject-matter of all sane varieties of strategic thinking.
Thus, the essential practice of competent strategic, and national security assessments and planning, is hypothesis as Plato and Riemann, for example, defined hypothesis.
Fifty years or more ago, this role of hypothesis might not have been so immediately and insistently apparent as it is today. As long as conventional axiomatic assumptions allow useful propositions respecting threats and their remedies, immediate survival of a nation does not depend immediately upon reexamining the axiomatic features of belief. In times of crisis, as in the periods of revolutionary crisis within physical science, the practical situation is changed: there is no competent definition of problems and their remedies which does not depend upon a direct, and implicitly revolutionary reexamination of both known and hidden axioms underlying belief.
Consider an example of this, as posed by one of the most disastrous features of the referenced DoD report: the antic notion of the interdependence of "democracy" and "free trade" which is central to that report.
What Fascists Mean by "Democracy"
Freedom House's misbegotten definition of "freedom" and of "democracy," first appeared in history under the rubric of the Democratic Party of Athens, circa 400 B.C. This party was an agent of influence of a foreign power, the Persian Empire, which, after the Cult of Apollo itself, had been Athens' most consistent and deadly adversary over the preceding two centuries. The Empire's policy was to foster recurring wars between Athens and Sparta, as a means for weakening Greek civilization. Many historically illiterate, and foolish public speakers and writers have made themselves sticky with their own expressions of lustful admiration for Meletus' ancient Democratic Party.
The opposition to the treasonous Democratic Party of Athens was led by a man in his seventies, a hero of the Persian Wars and leading political thinker of Greek culture, Socrates. Like his admirer and friend Xenophon,[112] Socrates was dedicated to bringing about the defeat of both the Persian Empire and that Empire's agents of influence inside Greek civilization. A notorious agent of the Empire, operating under the cover of the Mithraic cult of Abraxas,[113] employed the leaders of the Democratic Party of Athens to eliminate Socrates. Out of this came the notorious trial and execution of Socrates, an affair which presages the notions of "freedom" and "democracy" practised today by the philosophical fascists of Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society, Leo Cherne's Freedom House, the U.S.'s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and by Kissinger-ally Luigi Einaudi's associates within the State Department's Latin America bureaucracy.
As referenced earlier here, Britain's Friedrich von Hayek has performed the perversely useful service, of asserting that his, and the Mont Pelerin Society's notions of "freedom, "democracy," and "free trade," were derived explicitly from the satanic dogma of Bernard Mandeville.[114] Mont Pelerinite Milton Friedman's televised series, "Free to Choose," has the same origins. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the Nobel Prize economists to date, are from the ranks of those whose featured professional work has been in support of the same philosophically fascist reification of the term "freedom" as Nobel hoaxster Friedman.
The relevant argument is supplied in the candidate's "Why most Nobel Prize economists are quacks."[115] Therefore, the following summary of the case is sufficient here.
The quasi-mathematical notion of "free trade," was first introduced by Conti's Dr. François Quesnay, as the dogma of laissez-faire.[116] Quesnay's laissez-faire was parodied by Shelburne lackey Adam Smith, in his own Wealth of Nations, as his doctrine of "The Invisible Hand" (i.e., "free trade").[117] The various mathematical and quasi-mathematical versions of this "free trade" dogma, are derived from the work of the Francis Bacon intimate Thomas Hobbes, who was trained as a mathematician by Sarpi protégé Galileo Galilei. The argument for what became Mandeville's, Quesnay's, Smith's and von Hayek's dogma of "freedom," is modelled upon a mechanistic construction of a mathematics of percussive interaction within a confined array of gas particles.
The picture of the relationship between relatively "random" velocities and kinetic energies of individual gas-particles, and the pressure and temperature of the gas as a whole, is the symbolic imagery upon which the "free trade" dogma depends. This is the logic of Mandeville's libertarian argument in favor of vice,[118] and the passage from Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, quoted above. This is Smith's doctrine of the "Invisible Hand."
View the disgusting spectacles of much U.S. foreign policy, such as that of Ambassador Spruille Braden, since Franklin Roosevelt's death, accordingly.[119]
In summary, the Teddy-Roosevelt tradition within the U.S. establishment and Federal bureaucracy makes two demands of each nation-state of Central and South America: 1) Submit, without making any concessions to any of your nation's political opposition to this, to the austerity demanded by IMF "conditionalities;" 2) Do this democratically, preferably by governments elected by what international agencies of the OAS and UNO are prepared to certify as "free elections."
The economic measures which those governments have been ordered to carry out, under the terms of the IMF's post-1971 floating exchange-rate system, feature the following:
- Allow the London market to employ speculation to lower the price of your national currency on private financier-controlled markets. Do not employ those traditional protectionist regulatory measures, which could be used to defend your currency, if those protectionist actions might be construed by the London crowd as interference with the operations of their London-centered international thieves' market.
- Drop the value of your currency to the levels determined by such markets, when ordered to do so by the IMF and/or World Bank. However, do not raise the monetary denomination of the prices of your exports to reflect their world-market prices prior to the devaluation of the currency. Pay your foreign financial debt in full, in the earlier domestic selling prices, as denominated in your now drastically, arbitrarily devalued national currency.
- Do not make long-term productive capital investments in technologies, especially not capital-intensive or power-intensive modes of production in agriculture or manufacturing.
- Do not make any long-term investments in developing the basic economic infrastructure upon which per-capita and per-square-kilometer productivity of your nation depends.
- Cut domestic investments and household incomes drastically, to generate an added income-stream of payments to designated foreigners.
In the calculations of the insurance actuary, that complex of policies is a recipe for greatly increased death-rates and sickness-rates, for lowered life-expectancy, and for acceleration of rates of unemployment, misery, and of epidemic and other disease. In short, it is a policy of mass-murder by means of the bureaucrat's strokes at a PC keyboard; it is, thus, Nuremberg-Code criminality.
This mass-murder must, however, be perpetrated democratically. In other words, throw a party of persons into a lifeboat, set upon the open seas, with the requirement that limited food-supplies must be rationed by aid of throwing surplus persons out of the life-boat, but that the choice of next-to-kill from among those victims must be made democratically by all members of that life-boat's party: democracy in a Suicide Club, in which membership for all members of that society is mandatory. Thus, in the new Auschwitzes run by the devotees of Luigi Einaudi, the selection of the next batch of victims for the gas chamber will be made democratically, as Aldous Huxley might prefer, by the victims themselves.
In 1934, Adolf Hitler was elected democratically. Friedrich von Hayek should have been pleased. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he was; that would be consistent with the Mont Pelerin Society's fascist core-philosophy.
In these terms, the kindest thing which could be said concerning the referenced, leading thesis of the DoD report, is that it is "extremely paradoxical." Return to the exemplary case of Eratosthenes' estimate for the curvature of the Earth; view the paradox of the referenced DoD policy in the light of the paradox prompting Eratosthenes' discovery.
Attack the democratic selection-process decreed for the members of the life-boat, and the defenders of the DoD report's thesis will allege that you are "anti-democratic." Attack the policy of using "free trade" as an instrument of genocide, and they will babble ritual phrases, such as "authoritarian economics" and "centrally planned economies." Yet, if you do not object to their notion of "democracy," you make yourself, in fact, a Nazi-like accomplice in that willful mass-murder which is the actuarially foreseeable consequence of the "free trade" policy.
Look at the same proposition, when it is expressed not as a proposed U.S. policy toward nations and peoples of Central and South America, but as a policy of mass-killing, targetting such U.S. citizens as the aged, sickly, poor, and so on: Speaker Newton Gingrich's "Contract with America." If one totals up all those who are targetted for accelerated sickness and death-rates by Speaker Gingrich's dogma, about eighty percent of all U.S. citizens are the targetted population. Cut Medicaid and Medicare in 1995, and cut Social Security in 1997, are hallmarks of the "Contract" issued against that eighty percent of the U.S. voters. Now, the paradox is complete; not voting against Gingrich et al., is indeed joining a suicide-pact. Let us counterpose the citizen's right to health and life against the Contract's perverted definitions of "democracy" and "economics."
In this example, we are presented with typical elements of the kind of change in values which is forced by an existential quality of crisis, such as the inrushing global crisis of the 1995-1996 interval. In this case, the axiomatic notions of political democracy and free trade, which the population carried into this period of crisis, fall into devastating paradoxes, just as the citizens of today's former Soviet Union must call into question axiomatic assumptions respecting both "communist" and "free market" economy.
There must be a transformation in fundamental values. Freedom, as we elaborated its principle above, must replace wicked words such as "democracy" and "free trade."
The Historic Change
The listing of those presently axiomatic assumptions which must be cast out and replaced, could continue at great length. It was necessary to reference specifically the issue of mis-assumptions underlying the DoD report's leading feature. Rather than listing others in the same way, we now go directly to the crux of the matter: the urgent practical implications of the fact, that the present crisis marks the end of a five-hundred-year span of Modern History, from about A.D. 1510 to approximately 1995.
As we described this situation earlier, Modern History is a continuing conflict between two ultimately irreconcilable sets of underlying hypotheses: the conception of man embedded in the modern sovreign nation-state republic, is pitted against the conception of man derived from Venice's model of rule of the world by financier oligarchies. The ruin and defeat of France by Venice and its Anglo-Dutch clones, over the interval 1667-1815, and the subsequent failure of the model of the United States of America to eliminate the model of Venice's British imperial clone, has created a world order dominated by a perverse accommodation between the two axiomatically irreconcilable currents of European civilization, the modern nation-state versus the modern relics of ancient oligarchism.
Until the aftermath of 1962-1963, this accommodation had assumed the form of mutual consent to the conditionalities of modern philosophical liberalism: the financier oligarchy's toleration of the existence of the nation-state institution, in return for restive submission of the leading institutions of the modern nation-states to a more or less peaceful and perpetual cohabitation with that clone of Venice, which is the London-centered international financier oligarchy. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, among London, France, and the United States, as shaped by the 1782-1783 Prime Minister of Britain, Shelburne, typifies the result of this unprincipled accommodation between the two opposing forces within modern European civilization.[120]
In the internal history of the United States, the mark of submission of leading political forces to British influence, has been adaptation to the traditional policies of Shelburne and his lackeys Smith and Bentham, especially the betrayal of the traditional, anti-British "protectionist" policy of the United States, by means of policies in favor of the Shelburne conditionality of "free trade."[121] It is adoption of those "free trade" policies, which has been the consistent cause of depression-cycles in the United States, up to the presently ongoing depression. In France, the acid of internal economic corrosion was supplied by the Orléans-led heritage of the Seventeenth-century Fronde, the Physiocrats, and by Philippe Egalité (Orléans)'s ally, the Swiss "free trader" and banker Jacques Necker.[122]
In the world at large, as within the United States itself, the axioms of policy-shaping have become a pragmatic accommodation between the forces which represent two absolutely irreconcilable principles, two absolutely irreconcilable, mutually opposing conceptions of the nature of man and the universe. The philosophical basis for this pragmatic accommodation was supplied by the Enlightenment of Paolo Sarpi and his followers.
The case described a moment earlier, of the DoD's absurd effort to reconcile the name "democracy" with "free trade," is an example of the general accommodation and its implications. The attempt to reconcile the idea of classless participation of the citizen in the processes of national self-government (e.g., the putative meaning of "democracy"), with submission to the absolute, and mass-murderous rule of the world by financier-oligarchical interest, "free trade," can only result in either a "protectionist" meaning supplied to the term "free trade," or supplying the meaning of a capricious world-tyranny by the IMF's financier oligarchy to use of the term "democracy." It is plainly the meaning of "democracy" which has given way in this case. The significance of usage of the term Enlightenment is of the same nature.
The modern nation-state was the product of both the Renaissance principles of the 1439-1440 sessions of the ecumenical Council of Florence, and of the movement toward a Platonic form of universal, humanist secondary education, supplied by institutions such as the Brotherhood of the Common Life. As the work of the chief architect of that Council, Nicolaus of Cusa, attests, and of Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried Leibniz after him, it was the fostering of the use and development of the creative-mental powers of the student, as this candidate has identified those principles here, which was the seed-principle of the Renaissance as a whole, and of the development of Louis XI's France as the first modern nation-state.
It was that Platonic principle of education, against which the feudal oligarchy had focussed its rage, as in attacks on popular educators prior to the Renaissance, and by the introduction, by the Rialto and Padua Aristoteleans, of those same Aristotelean principles later advocated in Kant's Critiques. It is the upholding of what Kant identifies as the Aristotelean definition of "understanding," against the principle of Reason associated with Cusanus, da Vinci, Kepler, and Leibniz, which defines the principal, most fundamental philosophical and political controversy underlying all of what we have designated as Modern History.[123]
The inquisitional methods associated with Paolo Sarpi's one-time friend, Roberto Bellarmino, proved virtually impotent against the productive powers of the new form of state created by the Renaissance. This consideration prompted Sarpi and his faction to launch the more sophisticated Enlightenment, with the aim of controlling the institution of the nation-state, from within, rather than attempting to destroy it by head-on assault.
Sarpi et al. continued the division of Europe, for purposes of balance-of-power manipulations between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which had been organized earlier by Venice's Gasparo Contarini et al. Indeed, it was Sarpi's faction which would have launched what became the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War much earlier than it occurred, had France's King Henri IV not prevented the initial attempt to start it. On this side of the matter, there was no notable difference between Sarpi and the most simplistic of the Venetian controllers of the Counter-Reformation. Nor was there any difference between the two factions in their hatred of the Brotherhood of the Common Life and its tradition.
The difference was, that Sarpi proposed to take top-down control over the institutions of modern science and technology, rather than seek to burn their authors at the stake, or condemn them to be placed routinely upon on the index of prohibited ideas.[124] Scholars such as Sarpi could appreciate the lesson from Roman Emperor Diocletian before him, who, in the course of his time, found it more effective to legalize Christianity, than to feed the followers of Jesus Christ to a "Christian coalition" of homicidal wild beasts. Sarpi worked to legalize both the modern nation-state, and, in the traditional Venetian way of the Padua Aristotle school, also a castrated sort of science and technology.[125] He did this, as Diocletian's protégé, the Roman Emperor Constantine, had legalized Christianity as part of the Roman pagan pantheon, at the price of reserving the power to appoint bishops such as his favorite, Arius.[126]
Sarpi patronized the existence of approved scientists in the manner Venice's tradition produced its adult male sopranos, by removing the germinal factor from the intellect. Sarpi's other side, his personal role as a leading mathematical formalist of his time, figured prominently in the initiation of his policy toward science and technology. It was Sarpi who used Venice's English asset, the Cecil family, to propagate Sir Francis Bacon's career as an empiricist, and Sarpi's protégé, Galileo, who instructed Bacon's intimate, Thomas Hobbes, in mathematics. The characteristic of the Sarpi school's work in science was plagiarism. The case of Galileo, like those of Newton and Boyle, and of Conti's creation of the myth of Newton's authorship of a calculus,[127] later, typify this. Kepler was looted and parodied to build the scientific reputations of Galileo and Newton, for example. Leonardo da Vinci's codices were treated similarly.
The substitution, for Reason, of a mechanistic notion of percussive causality in a naively Euclidean space-time, is the act of castration which characterizes, axiomatically, the birth of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries mechanistic, empiricist method. Thus, did Sarpi create empiricism in the gnostic tradition of paganist mystery religions. That function of the individual mind which is the referent for the word creativity, which is made known to the student by the Platonic, Classical humanist methods of education underlying the Renaissance, was buried by the methods of mere learning of science and technology, and art, which were imposed by Sarpi's Enlightenment.
In brief, the Enlightenment signifies "engineering without science," "understanding without Reason," and, ultimately, the condemnation of a class of the perpetual poor to the bestiality of associative-emotional thinking, in opposition to cognitive development. Sarpi et al. embarked on the project of building a London/Netherlands-based clone of Venice in northern, Reformation Europe, in which the form of the modern nation-state would be tolerated, but not the spirit of the Renaissance. Technology would be tolerated, but not science; the name of science would be given to plausible, mechanistic explanations for the origins of engineering principles. Above all, the idea of man would be degraded to emphasis, as Hobbes did, upon supposed immutable, instinctive primacy of base lusts;[128] the idea of the human individual as characterized by creative powers of reason, would be outlawed.[129]
We have reached the point in Modern History, at which the possibility of humanity's continuing to tolerate this gnostic Enlightenment's accommodation between good and evil, British philosophical liberalism, must be concluded. There is no alternative to that. The world's economy could be saved, but only through measures which would mean the end of the power of the London-centered international financier oligarchy.
The pre-history and history of the United States is rooted in successful application of the economic principles of Leibniz and France's Minister Colbert, in combination with a peculiarly American invention, the modern currency and national-banking system which Treasury Secretary Hamilton combined with Colbertist and Leibnizian principles, to establish what Hamilton christened "The American System of political-economy." That American System has always performed brilliantly whenever and wherever it has been employed; it is the only proven system of economy which has existed on this planet to the present time. It is also of great importance to the present circumstances, that the precedents of the George Washington and some later U.S. administrations have established clearly the basis in law for the resurrection of that American System, as an alternative to the already bankrupted U.S. Federal Reserve System.
That American System precedent has a double significance for us, and for the world as a whole, at this juncture. That is to say, since the United States remains, at this point, still the world's dominant political power, that which the United States is capable of doing, in its own desperate interest, under conditions of the presently onrushing global crisis, is crucial for every nation on this planet.
Hence, the London-centered international financier oligarchy has repeatedly expressed its desperate fear of what the United States do, not only on its own behalf, but in providing leadership out of the present crisis, for most members of the world's community of nations. It is to this that spokesmen for that British international oligarchy refer, to explain the murderous hatred which the oligarchy has focussed against such figures as President Bill Clinton and France's President Jacques Chirac. In turn, consequently, it is the vital strategic interest of the United States and France, among other states, to rally a world-dominating array of nations behind the actions to be taken with aid of United States leadership, to bring the world safely out of the threatened collapse of the planet into Twenty-First-Century New Dark Age.
The historic implications of the months immediately ahead are more readily visible, once we consider the implications of those measures to be taken to bring us out of the danger of a New Dark Age. Those relevant measures include, most prominently, the following actions.
- Place the implicitly bankrupt U.S. Federal Reserve System, an institution chartered by the Federal government, into financial receivership by the relevant responsible authority, that Federal government.
- Simultaneously, under the terms of Article I of the U.S. Federal Constitution, and according to established precedent in other U.S. law and public practice, create a massive supplementary issue of legal tender, in the form of U.S. Treasury currency-notes, notes intended to be placed in circulation through low-interest loans, chiefly for creating places of productive employment, chiefly in basic economic infrastructure and manufacturing, for up to six millions or more members of the U.S. labor-force.
- To replace the bankrupted Federal Reserve System, create a U.S. national bank, as bank of deposit for the United States government, and as primary lender of legal tender created by the U.S. government.
- Activate an array of Federal, state, and local authorities as prime contractors for urgently needed infrastructural developmental programs, and organize a flow of credit from the national bank, with private lender participation, as progress-payments to those authorities and their accredited vendors.
- Create a new Federal, aerospace-centered science-driver authority, to stimulate investment in scientific and technological progress in both public infrastructure and private entrepreneurship.
- In cooperation with willing trading-partner nations, create a new nested set of trade and tariff agreements, designed to provide fair conditions of economic protection among this array of trading-partner nations.
The new national economic-development policies and foreign-trade agreements must be premised upon those lately neglected principles of national security, upon which the United States placed such emphasis at the close of World War II.
There is a relevant, old French proverb, the dead grasp the living, which is relevant to the circumstances of the monetary reform we have outlined. As nations muster themselves to revive production and productive employment, it is the future of economy, and the meeting of moral obligations to pensioners and other households of the living, which must enjoy absolute priority in the matter of settling the accounts of the bankrupt monetary and financial systems and their institutions. Under conditions that skyrocketting annual financial turnover is already at levels more than a hundred times total world merchandise trade among nations, reason prescribes very hard times for the nominal claims of the speculating financier oligarchy. The dead may grasp at the living, but they will not be permitted to take very much.
That considered, the power of the present world financier oligarchy is as doomed to extinction as was the power of that remnant of the old feudal landholding aristocracy which vanished from this planet during the maelstrom of World War I. That old prostitute, Venice's financier oligarchy, will find itself, at last, in permanent retirement.
Under those conditions of reform and economic recovery, the basis for the ideology of the Enlightenment is thus removed. All of those ideas respecting man and nature which are embedded in empiricist mathematical thinking, and sociological dogmas, lose thus the social basis for their continued existence. In that circumstance, what will survive is the principles of the Renaissance, and the associated principles of a planet organized politically as a community of modern nation-states. That constitutes what Secretary of State John Quincy Adams identified as "a community of principle" for the United States.
From those considerations, the following short list of leading principles of a sane U.S. national-security policy follow:
- The assured ability of the economy of the United States, to feed all of its people, and to satisfy this and other essential material and related needs through its own productive capabilities, constitutes the national economic security of the United States.
- The international security of the United States requires the domination of this planet by a community of sovreign nation-states functioning as a partnership of mutual interest and common moral principle.
The defense of the institution of the modern sovreign nation-state, is a principle we must defend in every quarter of this planet, this hemisphere most emphatically. In particular, we must defend that principle of the sovreign nation-state republic which is typified by our own Federal Constitution, against all efforts, from London's terrorist and other varieties of ethnicity advocates and kindred types of malefactors, to replace the system of nation-states by the brutish conditions which must result from a proliferation of so-called micro-states.[130]
- The moral viability of such a community of principle among nation-states, requires the fostering of those qualities of activity which set all individual persons apart from and above the lower species. The fostering of scientific and technological progress in the development of the productive powers of labor, and of potential relative population-density, typify those qualities of activity which must be given high priority, to the purpose that persons, through these activities, shall witness the true nature of themselves and of others as human individuals.
- That notion of the individual person, and of the qualities of universal education, culture, and work, which are consistent with such a notion of the person, constitutes the principle governing strategy.
Since Solon's anti-oligarchical reforms at Athens, over two and a half thousands years ago, the survival of civilization in times of existential crisis, belongs not to men of mere common sense, but what Plato identified as "philosopher kings." In these perilous months before all nations of this planet, the fluctuations between sterile pragmatic compromises, and violent extremes of populist radicalism, are, in practice, each and all but varieties of suicidal lunacy. Such lunacy this imperilled civilization could not survive; there is not a single family, in the United States, or any other part of this planet, who will not suffer horrors beyond the capacity of the imagination of all but a handful today, and will suffer those during the several years immediately ahead, unless all simple-minded, common-sensical varieties of pragmatic or violent proposed solutions are rejected, and a reasoned grasp of historical principle applied, instead.
Keep it simple? Keep it simple-minded, and most of us, and our children will die in horrible circumstances, and that will begin to unfold, at an accelerating rate, within the years just immediately ahead. The citizens and leaders of the United States must awaken to reason, from the sleep of televised entertainments, before it is too late. The folly permeating the referenced DoD report, is but a symptom of the real issues of the 1996 election campaign.
[END]
FOOTNOTES
97. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Why most Nobel Prize economists are quacks," op. cit., pp. 31-38.[return to text]
98. As noted earlier, The Enlightenment is most efficiently identified as the Anti-Renaissance. For the relevant discussion of the significance of this in U.S. security concerns today, see the text below.[return to text]
99. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Why most Nobel Prize economists are quacks," op. cit., pp. 36-37, also note 50.[return to text]
100. LaRouche, op. cit.[return to text]
101. Third edition, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). The first edition was issued in 1943.[return to text]
102. Ibid., pp. 8-30.[return to text]
103. Nothing said here is intended to suggest that John Von Neumann was less than an exceptionally capable mathematical formalist. In this respect, he mimics the rogue Leonhard Euler. Von Neumann is one of the "Dorian Grays" of Twentieth-Century science, in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell. In his work in science, this wickedness is noted in chiefly two ways. He is, like his mentors Bertrand Russell and Norbert Wiener, an apostle of formalist "virtual reality," thus morally akin to the pimp who peddles a promised experience of love. His application of game theory to economy reeks of that same, "gas chamber" mentality expressed by Bertrand Russell's threat to reduce the numbers of darker-complexioned populations of this planet, by "methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary."[return to text]
104. Ibid., p. 9.[return to text]
105. Ibid., p. 10.[return to text]
106. Ibid., pp. 10-11.[return to text]
107. It was Leonhard Euler's posturing insistence, in his attack on Leibniz's Monadology, to argue that infinite series continued to be linear, in the sense of the Euclidean space-time of the naive imagination, in their extension even unto the remotest smallness, and converge assymptotically upon zero, without limit. Euler's approach, typified by a popularized misreading of his natural-logarithmic infinite series, dominated the mathematics and physics of the Nineteenth-Century science adversaries of Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, Wilhelm Weber, Weierstrass. The positivist lynch-mob which harried Max Planck, like the accomplices of Bertrand Russell and Niels Bohr in the travesties of the 1920s Solvay Conference affairs, echoed this legacy of Euler's. During the present century, it became the relative popular delusion of the Bourbaki gang, and Von Neumann's protégé Benoit Mandelbrot, that they had concocted more sophisticated series, which rescued Euler's argument from the flaw of its axiomatic linearization in the very, very small; but, their argument is also dependent, axiomatically, upon the infinite preservation of linear causality in the very small, a fact which resides axiomatically in the arbitrary conceit that a pure mathematics exists. The only true "non-linearity" in the small lies where Leibniz's Monadology places it: in a topological function corresponding to a Riemannian (n+1)/n series, as we have defined it.[return to text]
108. Von Neumann's Robinson Crusoe is not human; in real life, that Robinson Crusoe is a pre-programmed, electro-mechanical toy, condemned to exist a miserable span of time as a plaything, the toy of a mad, sadistic, overgrown school-boy acting out a fantasy-life: all transpiring, perhaps, in the attic of some indulgent grandfather. In this connection, see his post-humously published, The Computer and the Brain, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958); although he did not live to supply an author's final editing touches to those lectures, the content, as given, is pure Johnny Von Neumann, the perennial-school-boy-like creature of our imagery.[return to text]
109. Of such "freedom," Shakespeare's Doll Tearsheet might have proclaimed: "Freedom! God's light! Freedom-lovers had best look to it, or these villains will make the word 'freedom' as odious as the word 'occupy,' which was a wondrous good word before it fell into bad company." [Cf. King Henry IV, Part II; Act II, Scene IV.][return to text]
110. It is to be emphasized that Friedrich von Hayek's autobiographical account attributes his own notion of "freedom" explicitly, and thoroughly, to the satanic teachings of Bernard Mandeville. Note, also, in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and David P. Goldman, The Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980), the kernel of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" dogma was shown to have been summed up in Smith's 1759 Theory of the Moral Sentiments. The passage quoted there runs, as follows [emphasis added here--LHL]: "The administration of the great system of the universe ... 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 department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country ... But 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." Satanist Bernard Mandeville would recognize his own dictum from his 1725 The Fable of the Bees.[return to text]
111. For example, the future security of the state of Israel depends upon having good neighbors in the Middle East, a prosperous state of Palestine, most emphatically. Just so, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams rejected Canning's hypocritical proposal for an alliance with Britain in defense of the Americas against the Holy Alliance. National security lies essentially in an appropriately anti-oligarchical (anti-British) community of republican principle, based upon mutually beneficial protectionism and resistance to free trade. The essential basis for such a community of principle lies in the Renaissance's Platonic conception of the nature of the individual person. Thus, since 1763-1766, every leader of the United States, who was neither a traitor nor a fool, has been anti-British. The issue was never the people of the so-called British Isles; it was the fact that England, as long as it were a plantation ruled by a "bourgeois" international financier oligarchy cloned to be the "Venetian Party," must always be the adversary of the United States: Because that "Venetian Party" represents an evil, oligarchical principle--a mens rea--which could never be at peace with the existence of a system of modern sovreign nation-states, such as our own was founded to become.[return to text]
112. The author of the famous Anabasis, which outlined the policy later employed, by Alexander the Great and his advisors, to destroy the Persian Empire, and also the principal contemporary biographer of Socrates.[return to text]
113. Synonymous with the Delphi and Delos cult of Apollo, the Roman imperial cult of Mithra/Sol Invictus, and with the gnosticism of the notorious Basilides, et al.[return to text]
114. Friedrich A. von Hayek, "Dr. Bernard Mandeville," March 23, 1966, lecture delivered at the British Academy, in Collected Works of Friedrich A. von Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).[return to text]
115. Op. cit.[return to text]
116. Von Neumann's doctrine of the n-person game, that no common maximizing principle subsumes the game as a whole, is a product of Quesnay's similar argument on the subject of the ordering of relations among the individual feudal landowners within a utopia tailored to the reactionary, anti-nation-state prejudices of France's Fronde oligarchists.[return to text]
117. "Shelburne" is William Maurice Petty, Second Earl of Shelburne, First Marquess of Lansdowne, grandson of the founder of the Bank of England, leading spokesman for both the British East India Company and Barings Bank, and controller of a "kindergarten" of lackeys, including Adam Smith, from 1763 on, founding head of the British foreign service (and intelligence service), since 1782, Jeremy Bentham, and William Pitt the Younger. After the fall of his position as Prime Minister, in 1783, the persisting charge that he was a "Jesuit" compelled Shelburne to operate from behind the skirts of his protégés, such as Bentham and the younger Pitt. By Hollywood standards, Shelburne operated quite successfully, as the East India Company's paymaster for most of the Parliament and, it is strongly rumored, even George III himself. He was the orchestrator, among other things, of the British East India Company's Haileybury school of British political economy, which featured Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and, also, in their time, James Mill and John Stuart Mill.[return to text]
118. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Public Benefits, Private Vices (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1989).[return to text]
119. Ambassador Braden, in concert with CIAA chief Nelson Rockefeller, was a key figure in the initial post-Franklin Roosevelt effort to revert toward cousin Teddy's anti-Drago "Roosevelt Corrollary." This is the point of post-Franklin Roosevelt origin of the doctrine of interdependent "democracy" and "free trade" reflected in such locations as the relevant DoD report.[return to text]
120. The key to the agreement among France, the United States, and Britain, in the Sept. 3, 1783 Treaty of Paris, was the earlier efforts of the King's favorite, Prime Minister Shelburne. The October 1782 defeat of London's Cornwallis, by combined French and U.S. forces, at Yorktown, had led to a secret treaty of November 1782, at Paris, between the United States and the British government of Prime Minister Shelburne. This had been followed by other treaties reached, at Versailles and at Paris, during January 1783, while Shelburne was still Prime Minister. These latter treaties were rejected, during February, by a parliamentary coalition led by Old Whigs North and Fox, which went on to oust the Shelburne government. Realities forced the victorious parliamentary coalition, in September 1783, to accede to the same terms of cessation of hostilities which Shelburne had negotiated the preceding January. This sequence of 1782-1783 events has often been cited by misguided scholars, and others, as presumed proof of the kindly regard for the young United States by Shelburne and the head of his British foreign service, Jeremy Bentham; the truth of the matter is directly the opposite. Shelburne's policy in his 1782-1783 negotiations with the United States, was a continuation of the doctrine which he had outlined to his lackey, Adam Smith, during a famous, 1763 carriage-ride shared by lord and lackey. That carriage-ride was the occasion on which Shelburne laid out that assignment to Smith which resulted in the 1776 publication of the British East India Company's anti-France, anti-American propaganda tract known as Smith's Wealth of Nations. Since no later than 1763, Shelburne's policy had been to destroy France and crush the English colonies in North America, by means of imposing the same "free trade" doctrines which were dictated by him during the negotiations of November 1782-January 1783, and which resulted in the self-destruction of France's finances and monarchy in the events of 1783-1789. Shelburne-Bentham-Palmerston-Edward VII is the axis of an unbroken 1763-1995 tradition of British imperial policy toward the United States and France.[return to text]
121. This was the influence of Bentham agent Albert Gallatin upon the governments of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison [see Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America, second edition (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), passim, on the sundry influences of Bentham's agents Aaron Burr and Gallatin on the Jefferson and Madison administrations]. This was the influence of Bentham's policy on the disastrous administrations of Andrew Jackson and his mentor Martin van Buren, and, notably, the administrations of the treasonous British assets Presidents Pierce and Buchanan. This is contrasted with the patriotic, anti-free trade policies of Presidents Washington, John Adams, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, et al.[return to text]
122. Necker, banker from Lausanne, Switzerland, British agent, an intimate of the Shelburne circles of Bentham, Adam Smith, and historian Edward Gibbon. As imported finance minister of France (1777-1784, 1788), introduced the free trade policies which led to the 1789 bankruptcy of the French state. It was on behalf of Necker's candidacy for recall as minister of Louis XVI, that the Duke of Orléans ("Philippe Egalité") armed and directed the mob which stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Necker was recalled. Necker's infamous daughter, the Madame de Staël, whose mother was engaged to marry British historian Gibbon, served as the leading courtesan of the French Revolution, and as a British spy in the circles of Queen Marie Antoinette. Similarly, it was Lord Palmerston's agent, Giuseppe Mazzini, whose insurgents were used to bring Palmerston's agent, Louis Napoleon, to power as President of France, and then as Napoleon III. Similarly, Edward VII, following the Palmerston tradition, brought the Anglophile party of the positivists and Napoleon III to power again, in 1898.[return to text]
123. Still today. Lord William Rees-Mogg, former chief editor of the London Times, leading Clinton-hater, and the most prominent British backer of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newton Gingrich, is a fanatical advocate of the lunatic "Third Wave" utopianism of Gingrich and Alvin Toffler. Rees-Mogg has insisted that no more than five percent of the future population of the world should receive education, and that, under the "Third Wave" regime, the wealth of the world will be generated by "information," which, Rees-Mogg insists, might be produced in such places of retreat as Britain's channel islands. Rees-Mogg might qualify for the funny-farm, but, even axe-murderers and Rees-Mogg must be taken seriously while they are still on the loose. The old London Times has been, since Prince of Wales Bertie's (Edward VII's) time, the leading voice of Britain's ruling, financier-oligarchy class, which often was first to inform the British foreign service of the oligarchy's latest change in foreign policy. Rees-Mogg, as chief editor, was, thus, the sitting "Josef Goebbels" for that crowd, and, in fact, still speaks for the most powerful circles within that oligarchy. What Rees-Mogg says, in echoing Gingrich and Toffler's "Third Wave" lunacies on economics and education, has been overt British policy for dumbing down the world's population since the 1963 publication of the educational reform proposal of (later) Club of Rome co-founder Alexander King's Paris, France OECD office.[return to text]
124. That was changed by some among Sarpi's followers. According to the late Professor Sidney Hook, the ban on any acknowledgement of this candidate's work in economics and related fields, was engendered by the candidate's public humiliation of the then dean of U.S. followers of John Maynard Keynes, Professor Abba Lerner, in a debate held at Queens College, New York, in Autumn 1971. Neither the New York Times, NBC-TV News, nor the Washington Post, for example, who have frequently libelled this candidate with exemplary hatred and violence, have ever told the truth about anything the candidate has said, from 1971 to the present date.[return to text]
125. E.g., the anti-Renaissance figure of Pietro Pomponazzi, teacher of such figures as Gasparo Contarini, and the favorite marriage counsellor of England's King Henry VIII, the Venetian monk Francesco Zorzi (a.k.a. Giorgi).[return to text]
126. One does not understand the British Empire and its role in modern history since 1763, without studying Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1995) in light of the contrasting actual history of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean littoral from approximately 600 B.C. through the conquest, looting, and half-century-long occupation of a weakened Byzantium by Venice's Fourth Crusade (A.D. 1204-1261), and the fall of Constantinople to Venice's Ottoman co-conspirator in A.D. 1453. Gibbon, a sometime habitué of Voltaire's Lausanne circles, and a later intimate of the Paris Philosophe circles, is the same who was once suitor for the hand in marriage of Madame Suzanne (née Curchod) de Staël, the mother of the notorious Madame de Staël. Gibbon undertook the writing of the book on the instruction of the Shelburne who appears to have acquired him as a hand-me-down from the circles of Lord North, although there are connections dating back to 1763. Gibbon's book, situated in the context of Venice's shaping of the British Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries mind, is frequently an immediate source of prompted insights into what the curious British oligarchical mind is thinking today.[return to text]
127. Gottfried Leibniz brought together the first completed development of a differential calculus during his years at Paris, 1672-1676. His pre-1672 efforts in this direction are identified in his own Origins of the Calculus. The project for creating a calculus was established, with specifications for this, by Kepler. The most important work in this direction, prior to Leibniz's work, was accomplished by Blaise Pascal; the then-deceased Pascal's unpublished manuscripts, in addition to his published writings, were placed at Leibniz's disposal during the latter's Paris years, and played a crucial role in his development of a Keplerian calculus. Leibniz's first completed presentation of the discovery of the differential calculus was presented to a Paris printer for publication, in 1676, at the time Leibniz was about to return to Germany; the manuscript disappeared for an extended period, but survives; the notes of Leibniz's work on the calculus during the 1672-1676 interval, surviving in the Leibniz archive, are extensive, and show work already anticipating what remained unknown to the public in this field until the Eighteenth Century. As Leibniz himself, and, later, Britain's John Herschel and Charles Babbage emphasized in their famous "D-ism and Dot-age" paper, Newton's "calculus" was never actually a calculus. Thus, with British takeover over France's Ecole Polytechnique, from 1815 onward, the Marquis Laplace's protégé, Euler follower Augustin Cauchy, produced a parodied Leibnizian calculus, Venetian style, with the germinal mathematical discontinuities removed.[return to text]
128. E.g., Adam Smith's "original and immediate instincts."[return to text]
129. Sarpi's attempted suppression of knowledge of the creative principle from education, had a long-standing, pre-Renaissance precedent in medieval oligarchical apologetics. That earlier form is echoed by the U.S. slave-states' criminal law, which decreed it a capital offense of anyone to teach an African-American slave to read and write. Apologists for oligarchism reacted similarly to pre-Fourteenth-Century teaching orders which embarked on education of the children of serfs and other poor. It was argued that such education of the poor was a hubristic (e.g., "Promethean") effort to overturn the Divine order of master and serf. It went to such extremes as regarding the idea that human creativity is a reflection of man and woman made in the image of God, as a capital offense of damnable heresy. Relics of that medieval dogma are found today, and not only among looney Lord William Rees-Mogg and his "Third Wave" co-thinkers.[return to text]
130. The efforts, as through relevant packs of UNO NGOs, to create a micro-state in Mexico's state of Chiapas, is a direct threat to the national security of the United States. Similarly, every effort to create "international zones," outside the full application of the law of the relevant sovreign nation-states, in border regions of the United States and other nations, in any part of the world, also constitutes a direct, war-like threat to the national security of the United States. Like mass-murder perpetrated through Speaker Gingrich's "Contract with America," whatever the clearly foreseeable consequences of a policy-action can be shown to be, are the content of the act of introducing and enforcing that policy. As Secretary John Quincy Adams made the point, respecting the proposed adoption of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the national security of the United States is the security of the international community of principle among (e.g., anti-British) sovreign nation-states to which the vital, global strategic interest of the United States' own sovreignty adheres.[return to text]
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