EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2022

Schiller’s Science of Statecraft Can Stop the Algorithm of World War

April 22, 2022 (EIRNS)—The efficient truth of Percy Shelley’s famous statement, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” is seen in the recent affirmation, by certain thinkers, and leaders of nations, of the central, optimistic premise of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech at the Schiller Institute’s April 9 “Conference for a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.” In that speech Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche demonstrated, not academically, but in practice, poet Friedrich Schiller’s approach to the study and practice of universal history, particularly as exemplified in his History of the Thirty Years’ War. This is the necessary standard for all diplomacy at this time, and is the only “practical” method by which to resolve the “unipolar/multipolar” paradox that threatens to otherwise engulf humanity—perhaps in the fires of thermonuclear conflict.

No academic, “political science”-based, university-acceptable solution to the trans-Atlantic world’s headlong “descent into the maelstrom” of thermonuclear war will now work. For example, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, a voice of reason on the origins of, and NATO culpability in the now-unfolding events in Ukraine, found himself solutionless and literally “at sea” in a recent appearance on CGTN Television, watched by millions of largely Chinese subscribers and viewers: “I could only say that I don’t see how this comes to an end. And this is the reason. Russia cannot afford to lose. The United States on the other hand has decided that it is going to defeat Russia in Ukraine, and furthermore, we are going to strangle Russia’s economy. So here we have a situation where Russia has to win, and the United States has to win. You know both sides can’t win. So what’s the solution? I don’t know.”

While this may have been an honest statement, Mearsheimer was addressing the nation which has proposed for a decade the idea of “win-win” solutions in the world, through the Belt and Road Initiative; whose President Xi Jinping had proposed a Global Development Initiative on Sept. 21, 2021, and a Global Health Initiative on Jan. 17, 2022 at the World Economic Forum at Davos; and who has as, of this week, just proposed a Global Security Initiative. The Chinese President stated that nations must “stay committed to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously, uphold the principle of indivisible security, build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the expense of others’ security” [emphasis added].

As is well known to China, and to those that have followed or subscribed to Executive Intelligence Review, or read the economic writings of Lyndon LaRouche, a sustainable, durable security architecture is inseparable from a sustainable, durable development architecture, a process of unending technological and scientific progress, resulting in an increase in the secular rate of increase of the human population. That is the only successful metric for human survival, as well as the efficient precondition for the avoidance of species-threatening warfare.

What Mearsheimer was in fact proposing was not “win-lose” but “lose-lose.” When the CGTN reporter further asked him, “So, peace is not in sight at all?” Mearsheimer responded, “Peace is not in sight at all, and I would note to you that there are a number of people in the United States across the political spectrum, who believe that this war is going to go on for years.” Wrong again. The Malthusian unraveling called “the Great Reset” is a much more “nasty, brutish, and short” process than that. The war—the “big one”—could come “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” rather than in years—precisely because “everyone across the political spectrum” believes that it won’t. Philosophical minds are needed to navigate humanity through this moment, not “bread scholars” or “BreadTube influencers.”

For the digital-minded, systems-analytical State Department and Office of Net Assessment “whizzes,” who smugly insist that they know how things work, what to do in the uncharted waters of reality, in a time of crisis, does not compute. Ivan Rizzi, chairman of the Italian Institute for High Strategic and Political Studies, discusses what he refers to as “the Technical-Algorithmic Principle”: “The human mind, in a closed system, tends to decouple from a concrete dialectics and hardly cancels its own choices, once these have turned into a process.” About fighting thermonuclear war, which Rizzi points out was first brought up by the New York Times some weeks ago, he says: “The very fact that such a hypothesis is raised ... and national debates and talk shows talk about it, sets in motion the scheme of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, we are developing a hallucinated dialogue destined to increase schizophrenia and fatalize events ... sooner or later it is possible that the strategic algorithm makes it actual with facts.”

This is what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as “The Becoming Death of Systems Analysis.” The human Death Valley that is the inevitable terminus of systems analysis applied to war is also expressed in a different, but congruent context, by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous post-atomic-bomb-test-reference to the god Vishnu: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mathematicians and accountants. Whether Robert McNamara’s Vietnam-era “body count,” Ezechiel Emanuel’s “Why I Hope To Die at 75,” or excited anticipation of the killing to be made in the massive expansion of killings through weapons sales, including “nukes,” the “technical-algorithmic principle” is a dead end. It is entropy as morality.

Rather than subscribe to the inevitable “heat-death” of the planet through the hubris of thermonuclear war, however, there is another, more attractive possibility. The world of the accountants, of monetarism, could be ended, rather than humanity. In “The Becoming-Death,” LaRouche asks: “On the day on which, existing money goes out of existence, as in Weimar Germany 1923, but this time more or less world-wide, what do the existing accountants do?

“If we are to recover from the social effects of the currently onrushing disintegration of the present world financial and monetary systems, radically new methods of cost accounting will be required for private enterprises, as also for governmental and related kinds of institutions. The previously used, linear, ‘connect the dots’ tactics, of both financial accounting and of systems analysis, must be abandoned, and replaced. A new standard must be adopted, for cost-accounting, budgetary, tariff, taxation policies, national-income estimations, and related practices.”

“The pivotal question of all competent cost accounting, is: What causes an increase in the net physical value of the productive powers of labor?” LaRouche proposes a series of questions rooted in the science of physical economy, and then says,

“Competent answers to those questions, lie outside the domain of a cost accounting based upon financial analysis, and outside the tyranny of those recently popular, pseudo-scientific hoaxes known as the ‘systems analysis’ of the late John von Neumann and the statistical ‘information theory’ of the late Professor Norbert Wiener.”

As Bernhard Riemann said, in the conclusion of his 1854 habilitation dissertation called “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry,” itself the conceptual basis for the thought-experiments of Albert Einstein as well as the deadly practical work completed by the Manhattan Project, of which Oppenheimer was part, “this leads us into the domain of another science, of physics, into which the object of this work does not allow us to go today.”

By going beyond the realm of the academic, the “mathematical,” by assuming, as did Joan of Arc, the intellectual responsibility for addressing the future conditions for the survival of the human race as a whole, not merely on Earth, but throughout the universe, and in history—not merely the present—we can locate and claim our truly human identity. From that standpoint, the new international security and development architecture we seek, is as close, as is our decision, as unacknowledged legislators, to achieve it, through the method outlined in the April 9 conference and its aftermath. This is a winning approach, not dependent on popularity or authority, that can be accessed by each of us, and is outside of the ken of the “principalities and powers” that choose foolishly to believe in themselves rather than “the everlasting universe of things that flows through the mind” and is the true source of the principle of power.