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This article appears in the April 2, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
FROM ANY NEW U.S. PRESIDENT
WHO ACTUALLY THINKS

Those Populist Fools Who Would
Seek a Contract Even With God

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

March 7, 2004

1. A Lesson From History

More than 1,000 years ago, a dirty agreement was reached among Venice's financier oligarchy, the pro-irrationalist clerics of Cluny, the Norman chivalry, and that Mathilde of Tuscany who was the founder of what was to become the hegemonic, Welf (Guelph) dynasty of Europe. It was this medieval "coalition of the willing" which produced the Crusades, the Inquisition, and all the kindred, ultramontane evils against humanity characteristic of medieval Europe. This wicked agreement of that time produced then those horrors which led, ultimately, and fatefully, into that great "New Dark Age" of Fourteenth-Century Europe, which, after about two generations, had wiped an indicated one-half of Europe's local communities from the political map, and had reduced the level of the population by an estimated one-third.

Something like that catastrophe could happen again. Indeed, although, hopefully, that is not yet inevitable, it is, at this moment, no less than a highly probable risk. Today, those arrogant fools, such as our contemporary assortment of so-called "right-wing religious fundamentalists," those same fools who would put their faith in Mel Gibson's or some other right-wing fanatics' illiterate interpretation of the Bible, as an imagined such a contract, would bring on such a new, implicitly, systemically global catastrophe.

The Creator of the universe does not negotiate contracts with so-called "fundamentalists." Jesus Christ was judicially murdered by command of the Satanic Roman Emperor Tiberius' Procurator for occupied Judea, Pontius Pilate, who was the only authority on the ground qualified, under Roman imperial law, to order a public crucifixion. Jesus was never embarked on a mission to make a contract with some people, certainly not the evil which was the Roman Empire or its emperors, but, rather, to inspire humanity as a whole, to redeem itself, to free itself from ancient and modern man's prevalent, small-minded delusions and other folly, especially to save our children, our posterity.

The Apostles Peter and Paul were judicially murdered, in Italy, by the Roman imperial authority, in the same way, for reason of the same charge by the Roman imperial authority. It is the Mel Gibsons and their like, like the figure of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, who represent the present-day Martinist-Synarchist mimickry of ancient imperial Rome; who slaver over the image of the torture and murder of Jesus Christ, murdered by Rome as "The King of the Jews." They slaver, as Mel Gibson did, in the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, who, like a cannibal, relished the monstrous torture and immolation of the Christians and others whose judicial murder he directed.

The Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age which was caused by Venice's assumption of the heritage of Roman imperial policies and practices, also weakened the power of the ruling, Venice-led coalition's medieval financier interests. Venice and its usurious Lombard bankers, such as the Florence House of Bardi, thus temporarily weakened their own power to the degree, that it was feasible for others to launch that great Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century, the Renaissance which produced modern civilization with its founding of modern science, its restoration of Classical principles of reason, and the founding of the modern nation-state based on the constitutional principles later embedded in the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence and Preamble of our Federal Constitution.

However, when Venice, in the latter half of the Fifteenth Century, had begun to regain much of its former power, by aid of its success in orchestrating the fall of Constantinople, Venice used that power to attempt to destroy modern European civilization, with a wave of the combined effects of the Satanic evil which was the Inquisition, combined with a wave of religious and related warfare spread across Europe during the interval 1511-1648. It was only in 1648, when slave-trading Hapsburg Spain, and other peoples, had nearly destroyed themselves by their part in those evil pranks, that a Europe led by France's Cardinal Mazarin, negotiated that great 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, on whose central principles all civilized forms of European civilization have depended, since then, up to the present time.

Now, to understand the threatened condition of the institutions and popular opinion of the people of the U.S. today, it is urgent that we consider the subject of this present report: a lesson to be learned from that Sixteenth-Century period when Venice's puppet, the Spain of the Inquisition and the Hapsburgs, was leading Europe back into what some modern historians have classified, most plausibly, as that "Little New Dark Age" of the 1511-1648 interval. To this purpose, look at the cases of a series of leading heroes from that Sixteenth Century, notably Erasmus of Rotterdam, England's Sir Thomas More, France's François Rabelais, Spain's Cervantes, and that great student of Thomas More's work on history, England's Shakespeare. The most prominent, and still durable feature of the published work of those great intellects of that time, was their attention to Folly and its Fools.

We must learn the lessons, for today, of such folly's effects on the history of civilizations past.

When Fools Play God Today

Do not put the blame on the fools of Virginia, even though those fellows do provide relevant clinical examples of the rampant folly of our times.

Consider, dear Virginia, those dangerously queer sorts of local populists you have harbored, even the loony types found among admirers of sadistic Christ-beaters such as actor Mel Gibson, and their like. Those are the wretches we meet from among both wild-eyed, right-wing, often Pope-hating, pro-fascist gnostics who call themselves Catholics; and their closest confederates, the Nashville Agrarian types of, also rabidly right-wing, so-called Protestant fools.

To meet my exemplary responsibilities as historian and patriot on this feature of current life in Virginia, I must summarize the background to the recent terror which struck Spain.

As I have outlined in my account of the current turning-point in global history since 1763, the great struggle for continued existence of the U.S.A. has put our republic into perpetually recurring conflict with the pranks unleashed upon this planet by that neo-Roman Empire, of the British East India Company, led then by the most Satanic figure of the moment, Lord Shelburne. The aspect of that to be emphasized in the immediate setting of this present report on the subject of Folly, is that newly minted British empire's creation of a freemasonic cult, within France, known, then, as the Martinists of the Satanic admirer of the Inquisition's Torquemada, the Joseph de Maistre, that freemasonic network of financier-oligarchs and their hatchet-men, known later as the Synarchist International which launched the fascist tyrannies of 1922-1945 upon continental Europe.

During the interval of those fascist tyrannies, the Nazi Party's Berlin office had used its Spanish tool, Franco's Spain, to establish a Nazi-run Synarchist network among the admirers of Mexico's Emperor Maximilian, such as Mexico's Cristero faction, and the like, throughout Central through South America. Up through approximately 1941, the U.S. military intelligence and related services had essentially uprooted this Nazi network from Mexico southward, and had uncovered the financier oligarchy behind the Nazi-allied Banque Worms syndicate in war-time France. However, at approximately the moment U.S. President Roosevelt died, the right-wing, pro-Synarchist faction within the U.S. command, as merely typified by the Dulles brothers and James Jesus Angleton, made a sharp right-wing turn toward intended war against the Soviet Union. The turn against the Vatican's Monsignor Montini, which continued up to his later election as Pope Paul VI, was a reflection of that pro-Nazi turn in the activities of Dulles, Angleton, et al. which almost instantly followed the death of FDR.

For that latter purpose, these right-wing Anglo-American circles, adopted and protected a hard-core of the Nazi security apparatus, including the husband of Hjalmar Schacht's niece, Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny. These Nazis, now based pivotally in Franco's Spain, were re-established throughout Central and South America southwards, and also within what became the secret security apparatus of the NATO organization. This is the network which orchestrated the so-called "Strategy of Tension," or "Compass Plot" terrorism and drug-trafficking operations throughout Europe during the 1969-1980 interval, and also, still later, throughout Central and South America.

Now, that Synarchist International faction of Franco-linked old-Nazi apparatus, has unleashed against Spain, a "Strategy of Tension" form of terrorism from the pages of the 1980 Bologna train-station bombing. There is a ready Synarchist-International-directed organization throughout Italy, France, Spain, and Central and South America, an organization built on the root-stock of the replanted Nazi security apparatus, now being deployed against many targets but aimed chiefly against the Americas, including the territory of the U.S.A. Only a credulous amateur, or the customary simply lying, official fools appear to believe that the bombing attacks in Spain were the work of either ETA or al-Qaeda.[1]

The orchestration of Mel Gibson's The Passion, is a reflection of direct association of Gibson et al., with those Spain-linked Synarchist networks currently based, significantly, in the Arlington Diocese of Virginia.

This presently continuing outcrop of that presently operational remnant of the Nazi security apparatus, has been my chief adopted foe, by me and by them, reciprocally, since the close of World War II, a Synarchist foe, a relic of the 1922-1945 rampage of fascism, which has been chiefly behind the warfare against me from within polluted regions of the U.S. Justice Department, within André Meyer's Washington Post, within the Manatt-Fowler aspect of the Democratic National Committee, and elsewhere, over the recent thirty-odd years.

In a closely related example of these Nazi and related connections from the annals of contemporary Virginia, Supreme Court Associate Justice Scalia, long associated with the meanest fools of that stripe, with his pro-Satanic doctrine of "text," is already long resident in that pocket of Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus," which is otherwise known as the snuff-box of the "Mr. Scratch" from Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Scalia should already know the murky destination his soul has chosen by his implicitly pro-Confederacy dogma of "text." Such fools, or demons, who read the U.S. Federal Constitution as a contract struck by a populists' conspiracy run behind the back of God, threaten to bring doom down upon anyone credulous enough to believe barely a single word of what they themselves hear themselves saying.

The point is this. The principles which predetermine the consequences of our actions, are universal. They are laws of the universe, existing as such natural laws, whether we chose them or not. Therefore, mankind can not negotiate a business contract with God. Man must discover the laws embedded in that universe of which we are a part, and use our discovery of those laws, as powers by means of which we improve the universe according to the intention embedded in those discovered laws.

No other living creature can effect such an intentional act. Only the ability to discover a universal physical principle, and improve our behavior as that principle implies, as Plato, Kepler, Leibniz, and others have done, enables mankind, if it is willing, to play the role assigned equally to man and woman in the first chapter of Genesis. Little mortal, you can not bargain with the Creator of the Universe; you may, at best, find your place in that universe, as Plato showed, by discovering and mastering the laws already embedded there, as Kepler and Leibniz did.

You are the worst of all fools, if you imagine that your so-called literal reading of some part of the text of what you consider some written contract, will, as U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has argued, magically convey the intention of the Creator into your real experience. Knowledge of universal principles can not be learned in a typical present-day American populist's version of a "blab school." Such are the fools who would seek to pass into a rent-free Paradise, by forcing their poor children to memorize the meaningless, "single-issue" answers they will need to pass a comprehensive, Diebold-designed, computer-scored multiple-choice examination: conducted by a decree of the man whom fools call, hilariously, "The Education President," George W. Bush, Jr.

However, when we discover a law of the universe, as I have used Carl Gauss' 1799 attack on the populists, his The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, as an example for today's university-age students, and others, we have increased our power in the universe; we are now enabled to willfully choose to invoke that principle, thus gaining a degree of control over our lives which we otherwise lacked.

The U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1787-1789 Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, are expressions of such discovered principles of the universe by mankind. These two constitutional foundations of our Federal Republic, contain four subsumed such discovered universal principles. These four phases of universal natural laws are: 1.) The Pursuit of Happiness, as defined by Gottfried Leibniz in such locations as his denunciation of John Locke, in Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding. That work of Leibniz, as it informed the circles of our young nation's leading scientist, Benjamin Franklin, is the foundation of the existence of our republic, a principle of natural law which rejected Locke's and the Confederate States of America's principle of what is called today "shareholder value." 2.) National Sovereignty of a people, through its government, over itself and its territory. 3.) The Promotion of the General Welfare (e.g., the Common Good, the agape of Plato's Socrates and the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13), the obligation which must be met to define a government as legitimate. 4.) The Promotion of Posterity, without which a people is not acting in conformity with the laws of the universe.

The remainder of our Constitution, and its law, is to be interpreted for practice as a commitment to the intention to meet those four standards obtained from man's discovery of universal natural law. Thus, all of our allowable law lies within the bounds of those constitutional pre-emptions stated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1787-1789 Preamble of the Federal Constitution. No other nation yet has a Constitution which is explicitly bounded by such living principles of natural law as those crucial four.

Why then, has our republic abandoned those proven principles on which all the greatness ever achieved by our nation has depended? Why are our people such fools as to trade that great heritage for the proverbial mess of pottage by which our citizens have ruined their nation and themselves, especially over the course of the recent forty years: since the beginning of our nation's shift from the world's leading, agro-industrial producer society, to the state of depravity which is today's Romanesque, wrecked and bankrupt, "post-industrial," bread-and-circuses society?

For the answer to such questions, look, first, to the minds of the great thinkers of those past times, when the habits of the people had once again led once-powerful societies, such as mid-Fourteenth-Century Florence, into the bankruptcy and pandemics of the time, during the Fourteenth-Century rampage of plague when Boccaccio composed his famous Decameron. Then turn to a later time, of Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and to that great folly of the 1511-1648 interval, from which the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia saved civilization, and also laid the foundations for what became that unique creation which was U.S. republic led by Benjamin Franklin.

From these lessons, extract the notion of the principles which must lead us away from our nation's recent and continuing, politically reigning foolishness, into safety among us today.

2. On the Subject of Folly

In the works of Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, the word "folly" has a profoundly ironical, ambiguous meaning. In their usage, it refers to a time when madness had overtaken a nation and its people, a time of a foolishness, like that of the recent decades of our own U.S.A., which prompts the foolish popular opinion of that time to regard as fools their contemporary wise men and women, rather than their own misguided, foolish selves.

Witness the case of the judicial murder of Sir Thomas More by England's foolishly girl-crazy Henry VIII. The real-life Mephistopheles of Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, came as a devil in a monk's robe; as the top-ranking Venetian spy Francesco Zorzi, a monk proximate in Venetian rank to Satan himself, and a bitter enemy of the legacy of the work of the great Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. This Zorzi wheedled his way into the position of marriage-councillor to that lecher, Henry, a king teased into a royal state of masturbatory rage, teased by the courtly, proffered, but elusive Anne Boleyn.

Under Henry's father, the great Richmond who unhorsed the monstrous Richard III, England had sailed in the wake of the model set by the France of Louis XI, establishing England as the world's second modern commonwealth form of nation-state, a state of wonderful progress in improvements of the general welfare, economy, and power, under that king. Both France and England of that century of Nicholas of Cusa, were leading examples of the work of that Fifteenth-Century Renaissance which had lifted all European civilization, from Russia westward, as far as the border of Inquisition-ridden Spain whose evil deeds foretold the fiendishness against the Jews by Hitler. This Renaissance lifted those parts of Europe from the nightmare of the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age.

As Shakespeare's work reflects this fact to the present day, England under the heritage of Richmond and Thomas More, brought into the English commonwealth the cultural riches of the Classical Greek legacy which had been resurrected, and set afoot by the great Italy-centered Renaissance. The improvements in the English language borrowed from the lessons of Dante Alighieri's Italian legacy, as Shakespeare typifies this work, served as the model for the great reforms which transformed brutish dialects into modern languages capable of communicating Classical conceptions of science, art, and statecraft, in such cases as Leibniz's and Kästner's Germany, up to the present day.

Unfortunately, by means of an act of high treachery within the alliance of a modern Europe against the medieval evil of Venice's financier oligarchy's rule, the League of Cambrai was broken up. Thus, from 1511 on, Venice deployed the Inquisition-wracked tyranny of Spain as Venice's chief instrument, in putting each of the former allies of the League of Cambrai bloodily at one another's throat.

To this end, Venice worked, by subversion and related means, to break up that thrust toward the fraternal unity of Christianity which had been the included fruit of the great 1439 Council of Florence. The first target of the complicate tyranny of Spain, was France. The second was Germany (and, in consequence, the Netherlands). The third was the targeting of England by the Spain which had been previously Spain's ally by virtue of a pact sealed by a royal marriage. Enter, thus, the real-life Mephistopheles who was to reappear in Marlowe's drama, Henry VIII's marriage-counselor Zorzi. Zorzi's part, in collusion with Venice's agents, the Plantagenet pretender Cardinal Pole and the wretched Thomas Cromwell, in the judicial murder of the saintly Sir Thomas More, was a crucial part of the turn of Europe, from approximately 1511, into a prolonged reign of the most awful kind of warfare, religious warfare, which endured until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

A Letter From Boccaccio

See the 1511-1648 "Little New Dark Age" as a place where we meet the ghostly echoes of the life of Florence from the time of Boccaccio.

The modern European Classical notion of Folly as an ironical principle of communication, is traced principally from the work and influence of Dante Alighieri, as seconded by the contributions of Petrarch. The compositions of the Giovanni Boccaccio associated with the Florence of its New Dark Age experience, is a reflection of that influential tradition of Dante and Petrarch, the resurgence of which played a powerful role in the setting of the subsequent Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.

It is approximately 1350 A.D., in a place on the hillside overlooking the river Arno and the city of Florence beyond. Boccaccio, by now a matured student of the principles of Classical irony learned from the work of Dante and Petrarch, presents himself, as author of his Decameron, as looking at the Florence across the river, where the Black Death was then striking down the residents of Florence, high and low alike.

At that time, the Black Death was scything hecatombs of the richest and poor of that city, alike, Boccaccio painted an echo of the wicked past, the present self-inflicted punishment, and, implicitly, an ironically contradictory future of that city. The sordidness, the doom, and, also, the spirit of optimism implicit as a prescience in the tales as a whole, are all expressed in a composition of what is reported to have been several days work.

Then, the celebrated Florence which had been a center of power up to that famous bankruptcy of the Lombard banking-house of Bardi, whose fall typified the full onset of the New Dark age, and was to become, a half-century later, as if reborn as the pivotal capital of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. We meet Boccaccio and his Decameron at a time, thus, in a Dark Age, midway between the death of the great Dante and the birth of that Renaissance Florence where chapters of Dante's Commedia were teaching the Fifteenth-Century population of that city an exquisite literacy each week, on the appointed places of public assembly in that city where the beauty of bel canto reigned. Among that population, the cycle of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, of the preceding century's span, was understood by the new Renaissance where Filippo Brunelleschi's completion of the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence and the convening of the great ecumenical Council of 1439 there, mark the belated emergence of modern European civilization from the preceding, seemingly cyclical nightmares of ancient and medieval history.

Then, as the Sixteenth Century approached, the dark times came again, with the treason by which the Renaissance was betrayed to the malignancies of the usuriously predatory, imperial maritime power of the Venetian financier oligarchy. These darkening decades of 1511 onwards, were the setting for the collaboration of Erasmus and Thomas More, and for the subsequent rebirth—by Rabelais, Cervantes, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, of the art of Dante's Commedia, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—from during the times of a kindred nightmare-age. The work of these writers of that new, troubled time, was informed by the spirit of preceding better times for mankind; they were an affirmation of the coming return of European civilization to the optimism of those periods of past history, when the confluence of development had produced what the poet Shelley was later to describe, in his essay In Defence of Poetry, as periods during which there is an increase "of the power of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."

These great intellects who lived through the folly of 1511-1648 Europe, became the typical leaders of the struggle to bring a new birth to civilization, the leaders whose work contributed much that was to prove indispensable to the repeated revivals of modern European civilization during centuries to come.

The characteristic feature of the work of all of these great Christian humanists, is the role of a pervasive sense of the personal immortality of the human individual. One can live through the severest adversities, if one can rise above the perils of animal-like mortality, to provide an active connection between the best aspirations of a long span of times before one's birth, and also the future for all mankind which lies beyond one's own mortal demise. For the fools contemplating such artistic souls, it is the poet who is allegedly the fool; but, in reality, it is his critics who are the fools in fact, whose useless submission to the crass opportunism of their times will cause their souls to weep, as in the Inferno or Purgatory of Dante's Commedia, when the uselessness of their intentions is buried with them.

The essential function of the Classical artist, as with Plato's dialogues, as with Jesus Christ and the Apostles of the time of Peter, John, and Paul, and Augustinus later, is to convey to those whom they can, a sense of the span of what are sometimes represented falsely as the oscillating cycles of history. This controlling dedication is the essence of the personal character and work of the truly great statesmen of all known times, as it has been, and is, for me.

Hence, it is foolishness indeed, to attempt merely to comment upon, or, worse, interpret, the great Classical works such as those of Dante and Petrarch, or of the great modern spirits of troubled times such as Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Or, in the same vein, the work of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. Art and science are not affected garments, to be worn by monkeys; they are mere uniforms of rank, which bring ridicule upon the rank itself, when the wearer lacks the essential distinctions of a suitable human soul. Otherwise, the putatively learned scholarship proves to be pretentious gibberish in the end. As Jonathan Swift said, in various ways: at the grammarians' funerals, the pedants practice the art of saying many more or less learned phases, about many things, as comments, about matters of which they know essentially nothing. Yet, they say less than nothing, if nonetheless grammatically—like certain officials featured within Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

The Principle of Irony

In numerous earlier locations, I have indicated, that it is now nearly six decades, since my critical study of, among other relevant prompts, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. I have proposed, then, as now, that the meaning of any conceptually significant statement must be assigned to, primarily, two features of that statement which are not explicitly included within that statement itself. The first of these two, expresses the principle of historical specificity; the second, the immediate, functional context within which the implied argument is posed. All significantly intelligent and competent communications which avoid sophistry, depend upon a more or less adequate mastery of those principles for practice.

The consequence of any deviation from the implicit strict requirements of those two contextual considerations, is fraud; is sophistry in the tradition of those Eleatics exposed by Plato's Parmenides dialogue.

The easiest way to convey any important notion of principle, such as the principles of historical specificity and context, is by a relevant ontological paradox. It must be ontological in form and conception (physical, rather than arithmetic in charlatan Bertrand Russell's sense); otherwise, the discussion drifts into today's customary academic mode of sophistry. By ontological, I signify the ontological implications of Carl Gauss' 1799, devastating refutation of the sophistry of Euler, Lagrange, et al., on the subject of The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. I signify the use of the notion of power by Plato and Leibniz, and by Gauss' formulation of The Fundamental Theorem, as opposed to the foolishness expressed by the sophist deception of Aristotle's use of the notion of energy.

I explain the importance of that distinction.

The physically-defined notion of historical specificity arises from that same absolute distinction between man and beast which is the implicit source of Carl Gauss' exposure of the referenced frauds of Euler, Lagrange, et al. Were mankind a member of the animal species, our potential population-density would have never exceeded that of the higher apes, that during a period of climate conditions estimated for as far back as two or more millions years. The maximum would be several millions living individuals. Today, more than six billions human individuals are reported.

This specific quality of increase of the power of increasing potential relative population-density, is unique to the human species, a quality of change unique to God and man. The relevant notion of this uniquely distinguishing power, is the notion of power adopted by the Pythagoreans and by Plato; it is the notion of physical power expressed in Gauss' referenced refutation of Euler, Lagrange, et al., in the matter of The Fundamental Principle of Algebra.

This power is expressed as the power of experimentally validatable Platonic hypothesis, as the discovery of any fundamental sort of universal physical principle typifies this. It is the replication of such acts of experimentally verifiable hypothesizing, as the mode of transmission of such power, from one mind to another, which is the crucially distinguishing characteristic of the mental behavior which distinguishes a healthy specimen of the human species.

The essential source of the increase of the potential relative population-density of the human species, is the transmission of such discovered principles from not only one individual mind to another, but across successive generations. The increase so accomplished, by both the discovery and its appropriate application, expresses the nature of all relevant such universal physical principles as principles of change per se. In other words, change of such quality is not a matter of a connection between two successive states; it is the generator of such series of states. Hence, the fundamental difference between the calculus of Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, et al., and that axiomatically, ontologically infinitesimal calculus prescribed by Kepler, and developed, principally, successively, by Leibniz and Bernhard Riemann. (For example, the Leibniz-Bernouilli universal physical principle of least action.)

Physics and Art

As I, and others, have emphasized in relevant earlier locations, the concept of Classical artistic irony is an expression of the same principles of both the physical universe and the human mind which underlie all the durable achievements of modern physical science. These are the principles which Gauss defended against Euler, Lagrange, et al., in 1799. It is important that I restate the relevant argument, summarily here.

Sense-perception is a shadow of the impact of the actions of the real universe upon our biological sense-apparatus, a frail array of easily destroyed particular senses, which, as a whole, dies with us. Those shadows, which we associate with the name of the materialist's (e.g., the empiricist's) sense-certainty, reflect the real universe, as shadows do, but do not show us directly that universe which the shadows sometimes reflect. Therefore, truth is not shown to us in the form of sense-perceptions, but only in the individual human mind's ability to adduce certain experimentally verifiable universal physical principles which are reflected, as knowledge, through anomalies which reveal the essential ontological quality of falseness of sense-perception per se. Kepler's initial discovery of a principle of universal gravitation, from assessing an anomalous feature of the observed Mars orbit, is a classical example of this arrangement.

The real universe is therefore known to us directly only through experimentally verifiable universal physical principles which we can not perceive, directly, with our senses, but only through that faculty which Plato's dialogues define as the principle of hypothesis. Thus, in modern mathematical physics since the successive discoveries of, chiefly, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, the functional relationship between sense-perception and reality, is represented in the form of the complex domain. In this latter arrangement, the unseen physical principle is treated as acting continuously upon the perceptible shadows of sense-perception. Thus, the efficiency of the principles expressed by the complex domain, are not "imaginary" factors, but are the reality for which the sense-perceived is merely the shadow of the unseen.

Such is the simplest form of expression of the principle of irony, as found in modern mathematical physics. However, since mathematics is merely a special aspect of language: in all uses of language to reference the same matters as such a Leibniz-Gauss-Riemann mathematical physics does, the same principle of irony represented by the complex domain carries over into ordinary speech on these same topics. Literal speech is, at its best, the mere shadow of the actual, real idea.

For example, in Leibniz's science of physical economy, as I have added new dimensions to it, the apparatus required to test, successfully, the validity of an hypothetical statement of discovered universal physical principle, must necessarily contain a functioning feature of design of that apparatus which corresponds to that principle in some unique, shadow-like way. Hence, we rightly term such a test, a unique experiment. This aspect of the test apparatus points to the way in which the proven principle can be applied to generate a panoply of technologies, such as these technologies reflected in design of machine-tool or comparable apparatus.

These experimentally validated principles, which arise from those higher, uniquely human powers of the mind which are invisible to sense-perception itself, are so translated into the form of product which we call the technology, the which is derived from a validated discovery of a fundamental physical principle. This technology's application expresses a discovered power, in Plato's sense of power (dynamis). The application of this power is the only source of that margin of gain in physical output which corresponds to true, rather than merely accounting-fictional "profit."

If language is regarded merely as an arrangement of spoken words according to some set of classroom rules, then language would have no place in its function to acknowledge even the existence of an experimentally proven universal physical principle, or the causal connection of that principle to the manifest gain in productivity visibly generated by technological progress. However, the properly developed mind of the scientists and kindred folk, does deal with precisely those concepts which literal speech can not recognize. Hence, the frequent case of the ignorant, so-called "practical" man's more or less brutish hatred of the actual practice of science, as what he regards, fears, and hates, as "theory." Hence the appeal of the Luddite cause among the pitiably ignorant toilers, sometimes known as "environmentalists," even "zero-growthers." Hence, the intrinsic professional incompetence of most of today's economists and accountants, especially financial dealers, respecting the role of long-term physical factors in capital formation.

What should become more or less obvious, therefore, is that that actually literate use of language, which is beyond the comprehension of the grammarians, is organized around that which the mere grammarians hate and fear, the organization of statements whose essential subject is expressed only by ambiguity, by the irony which lurks between the cracks of mechanistic notions of vocabulary and syntax. We know, for example, that most modern grammarians do not know how to think, because of the way in which they insist on their contemporary rules of punctuation. My judgment based on this kind of matured insight into that matter, has been shown, generally, to be virtually infallible. The way most people today punctuate, and compose and utter speech as if they were punctuating, reveals today's most commonplace clinical expression of a neurotic distortion of the creative processes of the subject's mind.

These seemingly elusive (or, allusive) features of the higher, intelligent modes of communication, operate in speech in a way which parallels the functions of the complex domain. In so-called physical science, as such, this interchangeable role is more readily understood.

However, when the subject of scientific inquiry focuses upon the generation of matters of principle itself, the matter becomes qualitatively more complex, more sophisticated. Here, the standpoint of Classical poetry and music must teach mathematicians how to think.

The subject of physical science, narrowly defined, is the relationship of the perfectly sovereign powers of the creative individual human mind to abiotic and living processes as such. In Classical art, as in effective practice of statecraft and study of history, the required primary target of attention, is both the ordering of the creative powers of the human mind, and the way in which that ordering defines the ability of society to cooperate successfully in the development and successful application of discovered universal principles.

Here, ambiguity is almost everything, as the ironies of the greatest Classical forms of poetry, drama, and music attest. All human practice, including physical-scientific practice as such, is made efficiently comprehensible, only through those principles of irony (ambiguity) which define the real subject of the matter at hand, that part which lies between the cracks of the dogmatically literal.

So, human existence, which is the existence of the societies in which individuals act, is always encountered concretely in an historically unique functional place in the developing existence of the universe as a whole. Thus, the essential actuality of an action upon, or by an individual person, in one place in historical space-time, can not be transported as if it were to have occurred in some different location in universal space-time.

Historical Specificity

This, for example, is the most critical role of the principle of historical specificity in the staging of a Classical drama of Shakespeare, Schiller, et al. What is not Classical drama, is essentially rubbish, not worth staging for truly sane audiences. A Classical drama of Shakespeare or Schiller, for example, staged as portraying events as costumed in a different culture, or in a different historical circumstance, is a disgusting hoax, a lie of the sort typical of the hate-filled, foaming mouth of a Bertolt Brecht, the prophet of the stage of the existentially absurd.

No Classical drama, such as Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, or the dramas of Shakespeare and Schiller, are works of fiction. They are, of course, crafted for the stage, but what is added or subtracted from the actuality addressed, takes away nothing, adds nothing which is not a truthful insight into the historically specific characteristic of the occasion treated by the drama. The function of the playwright, director, and actors, is to pare away distractions from the reality of the essential process considered, to bring the audience to a state of impassioned focus upon the confluence of influences which determine, and measure the essential, historically significant decision of that actual historical occasion. The challenge is to evoke in the players and audience alike, a prescience of the ghostly reality, like Hamlet's ghost, which is steering what appears as the shadows cast upon sense-perception.

This same discipline of the Classical playwright, director, and actor, is also the self-same principle of the discipline of the competent historian, and the historical standpoint of judgment employed by the qualified political leader of a republic.

The essence of all history, and the Classical drama, is to bring the actuality of the historical process to life in the population's imagination. This is to be done, by enabling the population to relive the actual history in its most essential features of issues of occurring and required change. The spectator sitting in the balcony of the theater for a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, must be a witness to the true performance of that history, not as on the visible stage, but on the stage of the spectator's imagination. The spectator relives real history so, by looking over the shoulder of the mind of key figures of history, as they make, or fail to make the decisions on which the fate of the actual society represented depends. In judging the mind of a historical character so brought to life in the audience's imagination, the member of the audience is gripped by a sense of personal responsibility for making decisions which will cause the leaders of society to find the way to the avoidance of a real-life national tragedy. The sense of the spectator, that he or she must take responsibility for shaping the selection of leaders of that society, for contributing to shaping the crucial decisions of those leaders, uplifts the spectator morally and intellectually.

It is that sense of personal responsibility, which the drama promotes in the audience, which constitutes the moral improvement of Schiller's citizen, who leaves the theater a better person than he had entered.

All otherwise academically qualified historiography generally current today, finds its incompetence in a lack of ability to define the historically specific moral issue of a culture treated in a way which gets to the core of the moral issue to which Schiller refers repeatedly, on the relation between Classical stage and historiography. Any historian who departs from the standard I have just referenced, will be a sophist, either by intention, or by the effect of political-moral indifferentism in treating the attempted correlation of merely chewing the cud too long, or too briefly, in ruminating over the digestion of individually localized facts.

The crucial relevance of context complements the role of historical specificity. No dictionary definitions of terms, no mere grammatical rules, could ever point explicitly to a relevant referenced matter of actual fact. Thus, the essence of intelligent communication is the injected imposition of well-aimed ambiguity into any attempted statement of important fact. Just as the anomalous features of the Mars orbit pointed to the irony which led Kepler to discover the first aspect of the principle of universal gravitation, it is intentional anomalies introduced to speech and writing, which are the only means by which a truly important idea involving a notion of principle can be communicated.

For example, puns which are merely word-play for the sake of word-play, are childish pranks. The image of a Nazi official stroking the cat held in his arms while discussing "objectively" a matter of murder of people, fulfills the intent of Classical irony. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Cassius' remark to Brutus expresses an earth-shaking irony about the whole matter of the actual history, and, consistently, Shakespeare's drama, with compelling simplicity and compactness: "...The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves, that we are underlings." The same could be said of the generally accepted leaders of the Democratic Party today, or the leaders of Europe; but, there is also an historically specific distinction between the context of Caesar's Rome and the world today. We recognize the similarities; but we are shocked into a heightened sense of the qualitative distinctions. It is the shock of the combined parallels and yet absolute differences in the historic cases, and in the differences in contextual features, which prompts rehearing that utterance from Cassius to quicken our sense of the continuing skein of history which separates and links the separate moments of history.

There is something which is rightly, and necessarily very shocking to today's citizen in the contrasted implications of that utterance, as made by Shakespeare's Cassius and as might be said of himself by a typical leading U.S. or European political figure of today. There is a deep principle and profoundly important principle lodged in that piece of irony.

3. In Praise of Folly

The class of cases of historical specificity which the work of Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare typifies, is a 1511-1648 state of society in which the society, its leaders and masses alike, is, predominantly, effectively insane. In the historically specific context of such a culture of lunatics, such as the Hapsburg Spain of Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the Spain of bad-tempered men who are incompetent to govern themselves, it is the sane man who is considered as the fool by the reign's popular opinion.

Despite the bitterness which the sight of such lunacy as a Spain's Sixteenth-Century ruling culture, might be expected to provoke in a patriot disgusted with the decadence of his nation's people, Cervantes' Don Quixote is a Sublime work, in which Cervantes looks at the folly of that Spain through observing the ironical eyes and mind of his witness, the Moor. To fight to save a nation, a culture, from itself, as Cervantes fought, is thus the toil of a Folly like that of a Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Rabelais, or Shakespeare; the only means—true leadership provided by great, exceptional individual thinkers—by which the nation and its people might be saved from themselves. If one can not save the presently living, let one's efforts inform their coming generations, a coming generation whose reforms of society and its culture will justify the lives of their ancestors.

Therefore, let us praise Noble Folly, and bow our heads in admiration of the wonder it sometimes brings to the rescue of an ungrateful nation whose people have presently gone insane, such as the U.S.A. of the recent four decades since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Let us admire these singular personalities, and their work, not only because we owe that to them, but because the lesson they taught is an essential part of the cultural heritage of reference on which the hoped-for future rescue of our culture, or another's, depends today.

When we look across the intervening centuries, from today, to the foolish people of Boccaccio's Florence, or the rampant brutishness which dominated so much of the 1511-1648 interval of European culture, compare Don Quixote's fantasy-life with that typical of the "Baby Boomer" generation which has come to dominate the U.S.A., the Americas generally, and Europe, during the course of the recent four decades. Think of the fiftyish-to-sixtyish "Boomer" of today, with his fugues of denial, his flight from the reality he or she is unwilling to face, into a kaleidoscopic array of psychopathological "comfort zones." The times and context are different, but the virus of decadence, infecting another culture of different specifics, has comparable, if functionally different results.

So, Cervantes' characters are specific to Spain of that time; but, the viruses of old diseases, although evolved, affect the susceptible of today to similar, or worse degree. Look, thus, at the France of Cervantes' predecessor, Rabelais, not overlooking the depraved madness of the reign of Henry II, or the England of sex-crazed Henry VIII, or the madness of the duped Elizabeth I in such follies as her role in the Essex affair which cleared the way for the alien Paolo Sarpi's takeover of England through such assets as the brutish and infinitely corrupt Sir Francis Bacon and the Orwellian Thomas Hobbes.

Such were only typical aspects of the times of those gracious fools Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, Marlowe, and Shakespeare in their time. To know their time, is to relive that history as they experienced it through the eyes of Noble Folly. We today, again, have our "sheep of Panurge"; they are a distinct species, called "Baby Boomers," but there is a parallel to the modern echoes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in these decadent days of our awful torment today. Many things have changed radically, as one specific place in the history of living society succeeds and breeds another, but the awfulness of death and decadence, that which takes away human life, remain as the final judge of those who allow themselves to remain fools such as the rulers of Inquisition-ridden Spain, or the dupes of such Hermann Goering successors as the Synarchists of today.

A bit later here, I shall focus more closely, on the subject of the specific differences among similar comparable effects.

The most distinguishing specific quality of each of these gracious Fools, is not only that they reject and ridicule, but also understand that insanity. They express afresh the specific objection made by Plato against the Classical tragedians of the Athens of his time. Excepting the case of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and the case of Ulysses in the Homeric literature, the lack of what Friedrich Schiller prescribed as the "Sublime," is the crucial moral failure of the usual, pedagogues, critics and would-be imitators on the subject of tragedy in general. The "Sublime" (German: Erhabene) is nothing different from Plato's view of the requirements of a study of history, and of the related notion of the immortality of the soul, as this conception was refreshed by Moses Mendelssohn. The cases listed are, each and all, expressions of the principle of the Sublime. It is the Sublime laughter of Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, as in the dialogues of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Plato, earlier, which is the model for the study and truthful portrayal of the true history of mankind.

I explain that point of the remaining pages of this report. My use of the "fish-bowl" fable is an example of the principle underlying the efficiency of the Sublime.

I continue now as follows. I begin the following piece of pedagogical discussion with the relatively simpler aspect of the Sublime, as viewed from the standpoint of physical geometry. Then, I proceed, in the remainder of this section and that concluding part which follows, to the subtler expression of the same principle, as in the Classical practice of art and statecraft.

'The Rules of the Game'

In my case for the "fish-bowl" fable, I call attention to the insanity inherent in a deductive form of Euclidean geometry's arbitrary adoption of so-called "self-evident" definitions, axioms, and postulates. With such a framework, as that of Descartes, Newton, and the Aristoteleans and empiricists generally, it is assumed that nothing may be alleged to exist outside the bounds of the deductive latticework of theorems consistent with that set of a priori assumptions. For that unfortunate, the true believer in such a scheme of things, those assumptions therefore define his notion of a specific, functional kind of a logical boundary of the universe.

The widespread, absurd notions of "mathematical infinity" associated with such reductionist ideologies, are clinically typical of the psychopathological state of mind common to the Aristotelean, empiricist-positivist, and existentialist of today.

Such a reductionist's scheme allows for the existence of a sub-universe, within which logically existing objects and forms of behavior may express a still narrower set of boundaries of the victim's self-inflicted mental prison, as by the adoption of certain axiomatically adopted rules of play. For example, the recent forty years of economic, social, and moral decadence of the U.S.A. and United Kingdom, are associated with a special set of assumed rules such as the conceits, that "post-industrial society" is good, and that wildly empiricist modalities in monetary action, rather than physical-economic action, are the primary determinant of the improvement of well-being of the society as a whole. The effects so generated over the recent four decades, have been precisely contrary to the outcome assumed by those who have adopted, and acted according to such arbitrary, aprioristic, or quasi-aprioristic assumptions. Such a saddening outcome illustrates the principled form of real-life tragedy in general.

The way in which children, for example, are induced to play prescribed games, "by the rules," shows us those vulnerabilities of the mind by means of which the population as a whole may be induced to act under the influence of its effort to play and win that childish game which is such a falsely imagined universe, rather than in the real universe in which they are situated. This is the root-mechanism of tragedy of even entire nations. Such is the import of the statement to Brutus by Shakespeare's Cassius, "that we are underlings": They work within the existing ideology; but, thus, even when they attempt to rearrange the furniture of that ideological house, rather than removing the ruling error of that culture, they only make bad matters worse, as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar aptly illustrates the point from real history.

Yet, even when doom is pounding on the sally-port where delusion reigns within, as in the domain of today's dumbest President in U.S. history to date, Dummo, who is not to be mistaken for anything as useful as a member of the Marx-ist entertainment family, says that since his actually failed policies are the best in the world, the remedy for short-falls in performance is to increase the emphasis on precisely those policies. If the majority of the population refuses to face the virtually self-evident reality that this present occupant of the institution of the Presidency is not only a virtual babbling idiot, but a very mean-spirited, and often sadistic person, as well, and would even vote him into office for a second time, that people will have no one as much as themselves to blame for the consequences of their folly. The tragedy is not that they have such a President, but that they are so ridden by the folly of their fish-bowl mentality, that they are impelled to make such a disastrous choice.

Games! Games! Games played by childish fools such as Dummo. Dummo is a sickening symptom of that disgraceful decadence of our nation's culture which disgusts the world at large today; but, it is not so much a judgment on President Dummo as upon the folly of the national mass of fools who are prepared to support, condone, or even prefer his re-election to a new term.

The failure of the form of economy assumed by the reigning pattern of assumptions during the recent four decades, shows that the real world has been proceeding according to a form of cause-effect assumptions contrary to the presumed benefits of the adopted, aprioristic ideal scheme. Such evidence indicates that the real universe exists "outside" the universe of the ruling assumptions of that society during that preceding interval. Therefore, in this way, that society is doomed by its own assumptions, and can not be rescued, except by acting in an implicitly "revolutionary" way, by going outside the bounds of those currently reigning assumptions. If not, if society chooses to defend the erroneous aprioristic rules of its childish games, rather than replace them in ways which negate the policies responsible for the looming crisis, the society is doomed by its own choice. Unless it were willing to overturn the relevant, pathological element of its most cherished axiomatic belief, it might not even survive.

In other words, then, we have the following.

Like our incumbent (and greatly encumbering) President Dummo, the true believer's reaction is to act according to his fixed set of fanciful, axiomatic-like rules, rather than adducing conclusions, bearing on critical, ontological judgment of the quality of those rules themselves, from a scientific assessment of the evidence. If "free trade" fails, for him there must be an intensification of "free-trade principles." Why? "Because they will always work," even when they have precisely the opposite consequence. If "free trade" cuts prices, "That is good, because "cheaper prices always help the economy," even when the price falls below the actually incurred cost of production! When cutting taxes on upper-income brackets of speculators pushes the nation into bankruptcy, cut those taxes still deeper, because "eliminating taxes will always bring greater prosperity." "We Baby-Boomers will not be pushed into returning to the ways of our fathers' generation." Thus, like our poor Dummo, George W. Bush, Jr., did the children of fabled Hamelin follow the piper, out and away, perhaps never to return to that residence again.

Such playing of childish games, has been the mass behavior of the increasing majority of U.S. voters, and others, over the recent forty years of following generally accepted, popular delusions.

Let us treat the series of pedagogical examples given immediately above as just that, and now recapitulate the essential argument to be made in the following terms. We consider the exemplary significance of the work of Bernhard Riemann for a science of physical economy.

Enter, Riemann

The crucial contributions of the leading scientist Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), were the outcome of chiefly Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, and Carl Gauss before him (with numerous contributors in that same trend included in that interval). His crucial, revolutionary importance for all of modern physical science, is defined, paradigmatically, on essential points, by his celebrated 1854 habilitation dissertation, on the subject of "The Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry." The essential step forward embodied in this work, is that the notion of dimensionality in physical processes, must be limited to discovered universal physical principles which, as what he terms, in German, Geistesmasse, have been validated as universal, that by a sufficiently unique quality of physical-experimental evidence. The popular notions of space, time, and matter, are thus excluded by competent modern science forever after, leaving only Riemann's notion of physical-space-time in their place.

This notion of physical-space-time, is not claimed as a final, fixed definition of the known universe. Rather, to state the matter in a choice of concise language, new discoveries of that quality will expand the definition of the universe, an expansion which we must expect will result in a new value for a "unit of action" corresponding to Leibniz's physical-geometric definition of universal physical least-action within an implicitly complex domain.

In plainer language, the practical significance of this is that we know the universe only to the degree that we have discovered and mastered certain among all of the powers contained within it. These known powers are experimentally validated universal physical principles of action, by means of which man's power over his universe, as Plato defines power, is increased to the effect of implicitly raising the level of potential relative population-density of the human species.

The scientist who has come to know that much about the universe, also knows that the picture is not complete; there remain disturbing anomalies in the total evidence, as the existence of hitherto unknown, additional powers are merely typified by evidence of matter/anti-matter reactions. What we know, is that the universe is organized for our purpose as the complex domain implies, and that progress results in man's increased power, as expressible in terms of Leibniz's notion of universal physical least action.

The fact of our certainty, that our knowledge of the real universe is limited in scope, forces us to think in terms of what we name "phase-spaces." For example, there is the real universe which no one shall perhaps ever know completely, as distinct from what we presently do know with a practically reasonable degree of certainty. Thus, we say, that the universe as we know it, is for us, as for Riemann, functionally, only a phase-space of the implied dimensionality of the real universe.

We also employ the term "phase-space" in a slightly different way. For example, we may distinguish experimentally among abiotic, living, and cognitive (noëtic) processes. The latter is a reference to the powers of creative discovery of newly known universal physical principles by the individual human mind. This division among three types of phase-spaces was already known within the bounds of ancient Classical Greece, and has been given a richer meaning by aid of the discoveries of the celebrated biogeochemist V.I. Vernadsky. These kinds of phase-spaces are respectively distinct, as they are defined by unique-experimental modes, but nonetheless interact in a universal, hence multiply-connected way.

The Sublime in Classical Art

Now, that said on background, return to the matter of psychological phase-spaces, the domain of Classical artistic composition and the scientific side of politics. We must consider three broad, principal classes. Those entail known principles, first, which constitute actual, but limited knowledge of the real universe. In addition, there are those assumed principles which are false. There are, third, principles which bear on the expansion of actual knowledge of principles of the real universe, including those principles yet unknown. In all civilizations, there is a certain mixture of the first two. In rare cases, up to the known evidence of the present time, there is a grasp of the implications of the third class, as I point in that direction here and now. The third of these classes is the location of Schiller's Sublime.

Usually, the combination of parts of both of the first two ranges of phase-spaces, defines a social-psychological phase-space with the characteristics of what I have defined, pedagogically, as a cultural (e.g., social-psychological) fish-bowl. The practical importance of making that and related distinctions, is shown by considering two contrasting types of modern historical effects of such combinations of relatively valid and false axiomatic assumptions.

Take the case of the shift of the characteristic features of the U.S. economy, from the relatively viable practices of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy of 1933-1963, with what has shown itself to be the systemically self-doomed character of the trends of the 1964-2004 interval to date. During the 1945-1963 interval, the post-Franklin Roosevelt system was gravely flawed, morally and otherwise. Nonetheless, the underlying trend in the economy was along an upward trajectory, thus reflecting the changes to this effect introduced, or reintroduced under President Franklin Roosevelt. With the onset of the U.S. official war in Indo-China, and the associated rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture of the 1964-1972 interval, an overall change in systemic character of the economy had been introduced and somewhat consolidated as a trend. Since the onset of that latter phase, especially since the radical changes in the monetary-financial system of 1971-72, and the added radical changes, such as "deregulation," in physical economic policy during 1977-1982 and later, the interrelated economies of the Americas and Europe were on a systemic track toward self-inflicted doom: doom in the sense of true Classical tragedy.

To understand the mass behavior of the U.S. population today, we must focus immediately on the principal effects of the experience of a succession of four adult generations: that born approximately the end of the Nineteenth Century, the adult generation of the post-World War I babies, the adult generation of the post-World War II babies, and the young adult generation of today. I focus principally on the importance of the 18-25 age-group of today.

The delusions predominant among the adults of the age of Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover, have embossed on their children's mental character the successive experience of the disgusting decadence of the "Flapper Era," and its consequence, the terrible psychological payment exacted from them for that "Era," the shock of the 1929-1933 Depression.

Their children's generation experienced the Roosevelt-led recovery from the Depression and the U.S.-led victory in World War II, but they also experienced the terrorizing right-turn in life, which erupted as a coincidence of the nomination of Harry S Truman, as an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt's successor. They experienced the entry into the right-wing utopian's nightmare of Truman's adoption of Bertrand Russell's 1940 doctrine of preventive nuclear warfare; but they also experienced sweet relief which military traditionalist, and anti-utopian President Eisenhower brought, mixed with the utopian economic-policy follies of Arthur Burns.

The members of their children's generation, the legendary "Baby Boomers," were taught to be smart, but never "blindly" tell the truth, or act upon it ("Lest the FBI come to eat your father because of what you say in school, or in front of our infinitely nosy neighbors!") In the aftermath of "The Bomb" and the legacy of Truman's offspring, called "McCarthyism," we bred those children to become an adult generation of self-doomed sophists.

The entry of the generation of the 1950s juvenile and adolescent sophists into young-adulthood was heralded by the series of successive shocks typified by the pro-fascist Allen Dulles' utopian right-wing adventure, the Bay of Pigs, by the outgrowth of the Khrushchev-Bertrand Russell negotiation of the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, the right wing's assassination of President John Kennedy, the launching of the right-wing utopian dive into folly, which was the official Indo-China war, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Presidential pre-candidate Robert Kennedy. These and related terrors of the time, prepared the way for the takeover of the U.S. government by the utopians grouped around the "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon. Then came the destruction of global economic sanity by the successive steps of 1971-1972 toward destruction of the post-war monetary system.

That succession of 1961-1972 shocks produced what became known as the rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture of the mid-1960s. This was in fact an outburst of mass-insanity, largely orchestrated, among the generation of those entering leading universities during this period. Not all went to the depths of that countercultural orgy of the times, but the political activists associated with that cultural paradigm-shift, became the cutting edge of the most savage innovations which came to be either advocated, or tolerated by the majority of that generation's more influential strata.

What had happened to the "Baby Boomer" generation was the combined product of a fear-driven, mass-psychotic flight from the reality of the world's most productive culture, a reality typified by the U.S. in the aftermath of the Franklin Roosevelt recovery, into a nuclear-armed, post-industrial utopia shaped in the image of the perverted fantasies of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, and such perverts unleashed by Russell as the Huxley brothers, George Orwell, and such Russell followers as the "cybernetics" cult of Russell disciples such as that horned-staff-wielding witch, the late Dame Margaret Mead and her kind. "The Children of the House," who saw themselves as the prettiest generation of them all, the "Golden Generation," were turned, by such brainwashing, into the collective, Dionysian monster dedicated, wittingly or not, to the destruction of the House itself.[2]

Science itself was replaced by the lunatic science-fiction cult of "cybernation."

Looking at these psychological effects in physical terms of reference:

As long as the morally and intellectually downward trend of changes is in the direction of only decreasing the required uphill rate of universal physical least-action in the economy, the system, however otherwise flawed, was viable. It is when that direction was reversed systemically by 1961-72 terror and the ensuing post-1963 developments, that we have such relevant cases as the doomed fish-bowl, as in the case of the self-doomed, present world monetary-financial system of today.

For example, virtually the entirety of the generation which came to adulthood after the 1962 missiles-crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most notably the so-called "68er" generation, is viciously incompetent in what were formerly considered the rudiments of managerial competence in economics practice. The most crucial observation to be made, is: the physical side of increase of the per-capita output of net wealth escapes them. The subject bores them to the point that repeated allusion to relevant facts of the matter evokes an angry outburst tantamount to "Stop talking about it! I am telling you for one last time: 'We don't go there'!" "Don't talk about producing wealth; bring in the money!" These kinds of knee-jerk reactions among managers from the Class of '68, are tell-tale clinical markers of the way in which a pathological phase in culture is reflected in the personal behaviorisms of the individual. It is a symptom of what Yale's Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie identified as "the neurotic distortion of the creative process." That creative process, as (predominantly) absent in the general culture of the "68er" generation (compared to the preceding, admittedly flawed generation), is the location of the specifically human quality which Schiller's argument associates with the concept of the Sublime.

The pathology of 1964-2004 to date, is comparable to both the decadent culture of the Emperor Diocletian's code, as echoed in the "zero growth" mentality associated with the most reactionary among the medieval guilds, the Luddites, and the most stubbornly backward of the organized crafts today. In ancient and medieval society, and among the Luddites and their kind, the psychopathological trait corresponded to such expressions as, "I simply do as my father and grandfather did before me." So, the fathers and mothers of today's young adults eat their children, by spreading such the pathological ideologies of the now-aging "68ers." The stubborn hostility to creative innovation in terms of principles of physical action, as reflected in such cases, as among the Baby-Boomer "ecologists" and their dupes today, is the "zero technological growth" state of mind commonly reflected in the mass and related behavior of, in particular, the "68er" generation today. This induced, pathological state of mind and morals, is not only the characteristic behavioral trait of the so-called "ecology movement." It is also, more broadly, a general correlative of those other, pathological forms of mass behavior associated with the fish-bowl syndrome among society's currently reigning Baby Boomers.

In all this, the most deadly feature of the delusions which have taken over the presently reigning "Baby-Boomer" generation of the Americas and Europe is the fact that that generation is not a true body of individuals; it is a collectivist mentality, a conformist, collectivist generation, converging upon the extreme of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and his crony's, George Orwell's 1984. Their extreme, and extremely labile notion of "democracy" as a truth-free reign of trends in mass-opinion, confronts us with a truly Orwellian image of the culture of the U.S.A. and Europe today. What makes this worse for the U.S.A., than even Europe, is the delusion of American "rightness," that we are right because we are the U.S.A., not because we are right in truth. The virtually imbecilic role of President George W. Bush, Jr. reflects this kind of dementia. The fact that a large number of citizens would even consider reelecting so obvious a virtual idiot-prince as king, is proof of a corresponding mass-dementia in the population at large.

Thus, we have now reached the outer limit of the continued existence of a European civilization which continues to tolerate the mass-insanity so induced in the so-called Baby-Boomer generation.

Yet, the situation is not hopeless. The now-inevitable collapse of the present world monetary-financial system, shuts off the source of psychic sustenance on which the self-confident reign of this mass-psychosis depends. Such points in world history have always been monstrously dangerous; the threat of a global dark age today is as great, or greater than at any known time in earlier history. It is also a moment when the discredit which the prevalent delusion of the U.S. is now heaping upon itself, means that the popular perception of the world depression now already onrushing in fact, weakens the collective self-confidence in that reigning delusion which rules the Baby-Boomer generation's elites. It creates an opening for a new cultural paradigm-shift, turning back toward what may be judged the best of what we had during the 1933-1964 interval, while debriding those influences which had misled our culture into what became the follies of the Baby-Boomer generation's reign. It is also a time of great danger to civilization at large, because the spokesmen for such Baby-Boomer ideologies are now so desperately desperate.

By seizing the opportunity to uproot and debride those fictitious axiomatic assumptions which define the Baby Boomer's reign as life in a vast goldfish-bowl carrying its contents to disposal in a cultural cess-pool, and by recognizing the impacts transmitted by that history embedded in the transmitted cultural experience of successive preceding generations, we are able to find our way back to reality, and, also to learn the lessons which open up to us the prospect of a future better than that mankind has had until now.

That goal may be achieved only through a sense of the Sublime. The agency of the Sublime is there; but, you must work to free its potential to become the actuality of generations now emerging. As in all discoveries of experimentally validated universal principle in physical science, in the matter of social processes, it is by detection and mastery of the clinically definable anomalies of popular opinion and practice, that the need for discovery of a beneficial change is prompted, just as Kepler first adduced the universal principle of gravitation from a paradoxical anomaly in the normalized orbit of Mars.

To recognize that the Baby-Boomer generation's grief is the source of its presently acute and worsening state of sickness, is the first step toward curing our culture of an imminently deadly cultural sickness. Rabelais would concur. That discovery must lead to the next step, the discovery of the cure.

4. The Sublime As Principle

To complete the picture which has been in the making here thus far, begin with two examples of the role of the Sublime in political history. The first, the account by von Schlieffen and some complementary sources on Frederick the Great's defeat of the Austrians at Leuthen on December 5, 1757, and my wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche's in-depth attention to the influence on Friedrich Schiller's studies in depth, of both the war of Spain in the Netherlands and the Thirty Years War, in shaping the Prussian role in the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1812 invasion of Russia. These two clinical cases, when compared with Schiller's insights into the actual characteristics of the Venice-orchestrated 1511-1648 religious warfare, including the Thirty Years War, serve as key benchmarks of a single piece, which provides insights into the nature and role of the principle of the Sublime for today.

First, the implications of the battle at Leuthen.

The so-called "Seven Years War," which was the broader context in which Frederick's war was fought, was an expression of the struggle of the British East India Company of then youthful Lord Shelburne, to establish the basis for a new world empire, intended to succeed in perpetuity beyond the point comparable to the time the Roman Empire had failed. The Venice-style British game, was to create a situation on the continent of Europe, in which the continent would become unable to unite to challenge the imperial financier and maritime power of the emerging British Empire. The isolation of France, and the engaging of Prussia, Russia, and Austro-Hungary in the attrition of perpetuated conflicts, was a leading feature of London's neo-Venetian-oligarchical policy of "divide and rule" over its intended continental, and North American victim.

The crushing of the aspirations of the British colonies in North America, and the destruction of France, were Shelburne's leading objectives during the period of the transition from the George II of that time (not the U.S. "George II") to George III, especially from the time of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, onward. The defeat of the continental alliance against Prussia, as played from William Pitt (the Elder)'s London, was used as the opportunity for a process culminating in two World Wars on the continent of Europe, and, more immediately, the distraction of France's attention from British imperial undertakings in North America and India.

The notable feature, for our purposes here, of Frederick's victory at Leuthen, is the way in which Frederick, facing a professionally capable Austrian force nearly double his own troop strength, twice outflanked, and routed that enemy force on that day. Notably, the Austrian force commanded by Charles of Lorraine was deployed for a Cannae-style flanking operation against Frederick; thus, he outflanked the would-be flankers' seemingly irresistable, Classical battle-plan.

Relying on his confidence in not only the quality of his troops and their commanders, but relying also on his certainty of their confidence in him, he deployed them abruptly, in a great breaking of ranks and scampering, to regroup in full force on the Austrian flank. Frederick was relying on what came to be known later, under Scharnhorst and "old" Moltke, as the voluntarist principle of Auftragstaktik (e.g., mission-orientation tactics), the most essential of the doctrines under which German military excellence of training and discipline was premised, until the practice of the doctrine was banned in more recent times. The use of this added dimension of capability of his forces, made his approximately half more than double for the results of that battle that day.

That is not merely a military principle. It is the application to the domain of military practice of the most fundamental principle of scientific progress, artistic achievement, and is the principle which my associated LaRouche Youth Movement practices as a political force more than twice as effective, per capita, then any other political organization on the field of political campaigns today.

As a matter of strategy and tactics, the principle illustrated by the case of Frederick at Leuthen, is recognizing that an otherwise well-trained adversary has shown himself to be a victim of his own fish-bowl mentality, to the extent that he fails to consider the possibility of a reality outside the bounds defined by his fish-bowl mentality. In the comparable case of Lazare Carnot, the modern author of the concept of strategic defense, Carnot's leading France to victory over a supposedly unbeatable mass of all the invading armies of Europe, the same principle applies, including Carnot's leading role in a revolution in military technology made possible by his associates of Gaspard Monge's pre-Cauchy leadership of France's Ecole Polytechnique. This legacy of Carnot and Scharnhorst was imperfectly echoed by von Schlieffen's famous Classical military work on Theory of the Flank, and in earlier practice, by William T. Sherman's playing hammer to Grant's anvil in flanking the Confederacy in its final defeat.

As Helga Zepp-LaRouche researched and reported on this, the crucial development leading to the defeat of Napoleon's attempted conquest of Russia, was the contribution of an in-law of Friedrich Schiller, von Wolzogen, who adduced the proposed Prussian plan for defeating Napoleon from Schiller's elaborated historical studies of the Spanish war in the Netherlands and the related case of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War. This approach was adopted by the circles of Scharnhorst, and presented to Czar Alexander I by Prussian advisors vom Stein, von Clausewitz et al. This became the Classical strategic defense of Russia, which led to the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the policy of strategic defense employed by the Soviet Union during World War II.

This was the same concept of strategic defense which I had proposed, for U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union, as part of my 1980 Democratic Presidential election-campaign, and which I recommended, with qualified success, to the immediate advisors of the President Ronald Reagan whom I had met during a campaign event in New Hampshire. This was named by President Reagan as his "Strategic Defense Initiative." It was the Soviet refusal, by Soviet General Secretaries Andropov and Gorbachev, which led, as I had warned the Soviet government, to the 1989-1991 disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union itself. I had warned the Soviet government's representatives to me, in the back-channel discussions of February 1982, that rejection of President Reagan's proffer, were he to make it soon, would mean that the Soviet economy would disintegrate within about five years. It required six years. Instead of preparing to fight an impossible war, flank the problem according to the same political principle which proved successful, in Cardinal Mazarin's hands, in securing the seemingly impossible peace of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

These examples are each illustrations of the practical working of Schiller's principle of the Sublime.

Lycurgus vs. Solon

Friedrich Schiller was a towering genius of his time, standing above all others, including those numerous peers who relied upon his wisdom in matters of art and statecraft, in the most notable productions of poetry, drama, and historiography thereafter. His dramas are impeccable fruits of historical insight applied to scholarship. The most simply accessible introduction to his political genius, is found in his famous lectures, as Professor of Universal History at the University of Jena. Typical is his theses on the subject of the contrasted constitutions of the tyrant Lycurgus and the noble Solon. As Schiller emphasized on that occasion, European history is of a single piece, traced from the outset as the unfolding of the conflict between the opposing forces represented, respectively, by Solon and the Lycurgus whose tyrannical system of brutality was, in historical fact, chiefly the product of the evil Apollonian Cult of Delphi.

Riemann must have nodded at Schiller's approach to defining European culture as a specific kind of organism. It was an approach consistent with the concept of Geistesmasse presented by the Schiller admirer, and Kantianism opponent Herbart, who influenced Riemann on this account. In brief, the significance of this view of European culture is the same view of the nature of universal physical principles which recognizes a discovery of an experimentally validated, universal physical principle as an object of the mind, an object which often, appropriately, bears the proper name of a relevant personal discoverer. European civilization, as Schiller defined the conflict between the legacies of Solon and Lycurgus, is a social process to be viewed as a distinct single organism, with distinct kinds of principled species-characteristics in its development as a process.

This integrity of European culture is defined principally by its positive qualities, but positive qualities in organic, mortal struggle against its infestation with a contrary, malignant current. This conflict between good and evil in ancient historical Greece, was between the legacy of such figures as Solon, Thales, and Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, and their principal adversaries, the Phrygian Dionysos and the Delphic Apollo. The cult of Dionysos is the root of modern fascism, a.k.a. Synarchism, and the history of sophistry, in its various manifestations, such as modern Anglo-Dutch Liberal parliamentary (and parla-dementary) empiricism, in European culture, flows essentially from the Delphic cult of the priests of Apollo. It is the manner and method which the best of European culture deploys against the insolent force of evil, which defines the continuity of European culture as a functionally distinct object of the mind in the history of our planet. Schiller's counterposition of Solon to Lycurgus typifies this point.

The conflict to which I have just referred, arises naturally from a certain conflict between immortality and mortality. The human individual, by virtue of those powers of discovery of principles which lie beyond the direct access of sense-perception, such as experimentally validated universal physical principles, is, on that account, implicitly immortal. However, he or she inhabits a mortal existence. True moral sanity is expressed as the quality of functional reconciliation of the two polarities. To suppress, or even diminish the former, the spiritual, immortal aspect, in favor of the piggish demands of the vulgar senses, is the root of human bestiality, the root of what is justly called evil.

Thus, European civilization, by virtue of that emphasis on discovery of knowledge of universal physical principles, which we associate with the method of Plato's Socratic dialogues, places that civilization into conflict with the piggish side of mortality (e.g., "original sin") in a specific way. This is in absolute agreement with the central feature of Christianity as defined by the Apostle Paul, for example, as in I Corinthians 13. This should not astonish us, because Christianity emerged around the figure of Christ within a Classical Greek tradition, in resistance to the evil which was the Roman Empire. In Christianity, man does not negotiate a business contract with the Creator; rather, man breaks with the need of those fences which keep pigs from wanton folly, and is governed, instead, by that love of the individual's immortal mission which is mortal man's atonement with the Creator, as Plato's Timaeus already implied this, and as Plato's Socrates asserted this quality of agape in opposition to the figures of Thrasymachus and Glaucon.

This conflict is the true nature of man in his mortal circumstances. It is the conflict the human individual and his society must resolve, to the effect that the immortal always governs the mortal. This is the functional essence of the situation of European culture to date.

Look again at the referenced battlefields from this vantage-point.

The immortal side of man is expressed only by the discovery and practice of those universal principles by means of which man acts on the real universe, rather than merely reacting to the sensory shadows of the unseen. This is to point to man's Promethean nature, as Aeschylus' Prometheus was in perpetual conflict with the evil tormentor, the Olympian oligarch Zeus. By denying man the right of access to discovery of universal physical principles, "Ecologist fanatic" Zeus would keep mankind in the status of herded cattle, rather than men and women. It is through the participation in the efficient use of man's creative potential for discovery and use of universal physical principles, that mankind expresses his spiritual nature, his immortality, his escape from the bounds of eternal piggishness.

Hence, in European culture, the essential conflict is between Prometheus, on the one side, and the evil ones, Apollo and Dionysos, on the side of man's degradation to the sensual bestiality of the materialist and existentialist.

Here stands the Sublime.

The solution to every systemic problem of society, is to awaken the people to remedies which are to be found only in that spiritual domain expressed as discoveries of physical-scientific and Classical-artistic qualities of universal principles. The seemingly miraculous achievement of the end of a 1511-1648 cycle of religious warfare in Europe, through the essential principle of agreement embodied in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, typifies such remedies. The use of the Sublime, in its expression as a higher principle of action, by Frederick at Leuthen, Wolzogen et al. in the matter of Napoleon's Russian campaign, and Schiller's response to the evidence of the American Revolution of 1776-1789 in his Jena lectures on European civilization, are typical of the work of the principle of the Sublime.

The Sublime is, in its simplest aspect, the shift of the individual mind from arbitrary rules of behavior lodged within the domain of sense-certainty, to the higher human faculties typified by original discovery of an experimentally validatable, hypothesized universal principle.

This phenomenon has an emotional aspect, a certain quality of passion peculiar to nothing else. It is a quality of disposition for such passion to which Shelley refers in his essay, "In Defence of Poetry," where he identifies this passion as associated with times when there is an increase of the power for imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The distinctive quality of the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, More, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, in their time, and Lessing, Mendelssohn, Schiller, Mozart, Beethoven, et al., later, is that the provocation of the powers of creative insight into the immortal domain, provokes the passion which may uplift a person, an entire nation, in times of even horror such as the reign of the Inquisition or its successor, Adolf Hitler. It is that passion which places a smile on the face of the persecuted and other oppressed in the worst times; it is that smile which empowers a wretched people to lay the foundations for change to a better future.

It is by these same resorts to the Sublime, that the great advances in man's power over nature are accomplished, and, by the same means, victory in seemingly impossible battles.


[1] The allegation of al-Qaeda's engagement in either the U.S. events of September 11, 2001, or Spain more recently, requires that the reader be educated in the relevant ABCs of post-Hitler secret operations by Anglo-American protected offshoots of the relevant, coopted Nazi-SS apparatus. This apparatus, whose spread is tied to the post-World War II itinerary of Hjalmar Schacht and his in-law Skorzeny, was organized along the lines of the Nazi Allgemeine SS apparatus of Nazi bankers, et al. It was a multinational force with assets from many parts of the world, which overlapped the Anglo-American-employed elements of al-Qaeda. The common modalities of the use of aircraft on September 11, 2001, with the use of trains in the Synarchist terror operations of Piazza Fontana, Bologna, and, now, Madrid, do not exclude the use of Anglo-American assets from al-Qaeda circles as expendable bodies to be displayed on the relevant sites in the "9/11" events. Why would Anglo-American nasties include al-Qaeda elements in "9/11": simply, Iraqi plausibles were not available dead meat for that occasion.

[2] This refers to such directly observed occasions as a Bucharest Conference on population-control, during which awkwardly lumbering Dame Mead took hostile pursuit, wielding said witch's staff with mayhem intended, of the athletic, nimble, and merrily laughing Helga née Zepp (later Helga Zepp-LaRouche). A veteran LaRouche hater in her haunts at Columbia University and (ostensibly on exhibition) at the New York Museum of Natural History, the beastly Dame was occasionally observed by eyewitnesses who reported her as in full display of a kindred stick and temperament.

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