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Dialogue of Cultures

LaRouche Fidelio Article

Obtained from the Macedonia FAQ website.
A project of Macedonia.org URL: http://faq.Macedonia.org/

How To Think
In a Time
of Crisis

Part II



This article is reprinted from the Spring 1998 issue of FIDELIO Magazine.

For related articles, scroll down or click here.

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Fidelio, Vol. #, No, #. Spring 1998

Part II

III.
The Fraud Called ‘Information Theory’

For our purposes here, let it be clearly emphasized, that, contrary to the silly things said in today’s university textbooks and classrooms, money and finance have no intrinsic value for economy. Rather, as the experience in creation and use of a paper currency by the Seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony illustrates the point, money and finance are social fictions created to facilitate trade, and therefore production and investment in employment of persons in production. Except as money and finance (e.g., credit), and their flows, are regulated to the effect of causing them to serve that necessary function, their role in economy tends to become a parasitical, and therefore negative one.

Real economy is nothing other than mankind’s unique, specific, physical relationship to nature, a quality lacking in both monetarism and beasts. Typically, this specific distinction is expressed, functionally, in the beneficial impact of scientific and technological progress in the increase of mankind’s power, per capita, over nature, per square kilometer of our planet’s surface. However, that relationship to nature could not have become an effective one, except as human behavior is coordinated through appropriate mechanisms of social relations. These are the relations through which physical production and distribution of goods, the which exist only as man’s transformations of nature, are effectively managed to the purpose of improving the demographic characteristics of the population, and each and all of its component households.

The most significant occurrence in the development of social relations, was the establishment of the modern European form of sovereign nation-state republic. Prior to that, history reports the existence of no true nations. Rather, under pre-nation-state forms of society, approximately ninety to ninety-five percent of the population were effectively “human cattle,” as slaves, serfs, or similar expressions of sub-human social status. Under all forms of imperialism, the state and its subject peoples existed at the pleasure of the ruling oligarchy. Pre-nation-state law reposed in the will of the ruler, a will tempered only by consideration of respect for religious and related customs. With the nation-state, for the first time, the state was, in principle (if with exceptions in practice), government of the whole people, by the people, and for the people. For the first time, someone—the state—was efficiently accountable for the development of all of the people, and of all of the land-area. It was this political change in social relations, which set off the highest rates of growth, and improvement in the human condition, in all known human existence.

To understand the establishment of the form of nation-state republic defined, in principle, by our Leibnizian 1776 Declaration of Independence, and our 1787-1789 Federal Constitution, we must, first, observe the central principle of Christianity, that all persons are made in the image of the Creator, without toleration for any racialist or other ethnic distinctions. We must take into account the role of Abelard of Paris, the defender of universality of reason, against such adversaries of this Christian principle as the irrationalist Bernard of Clairvaux. We must take explicitly into account, the entirety of the work of Guelph opponent Dante Alighieri, the single most significant figure in paving the way to the establishment of the idea of the sovereign nation-state republic, among the anti-feudalist currents of mid-Fifteenth-century Italy.

In these and kindred precedents, the emphasis is always upon the development of the individual powers of cognition, and, also, the development of improved means for bringing about the replication of the cognitive products of one mind in the mind of another. This places the emphasis upon a Classical-humanist form of education, as universal education. It also places the emphasis, to similar purpose, upon the state’s fostering of scientific and technological progress, and upon the development of the entire land-area for kindred purpose, all the ultimate responsibility of the universalizing role of the sovereign nation-state.

Hence, man’s relationship to the universe is expressed as the combined, coordinated development of these two interdependent, physical and subjective functions. That combination, so viewed, is the physical reality of political-economy, a reality to which mere money and finance must always be efficiently subordinated, thus constituting true political-economy.

It is in the terms of political-economy so defined, that we must situate any intelligent discussion of the question, whether or not a civilization has gained the moral fitness to survive. It is within the domain of economy so defined, that the impacts of cultural paradigm-shifts are to be located. So, to that effect, and in that spirit, we now proceed.

The present writer’s obvious authority in approaching the leading practical issues of the present global, systemic economic crisis, is the unique success of his work in economic forecasting, relative to all known other forecasts: his long-range forecasting which warned of this present, global, systemic crisis more than a quarter-century ago.32 This exceptional success is derived from original discoveries of principle initially developed during a project conducted during the 1948-1952 interval. This project itself was prompted by the writer’s recognition, that the definition of “information theory” supplied by Bertrand Russell devotee, Professor Norbert Wiener, in Wiener’s Cybernetics33 and related writings, was a hoax. In the course of the project, the case of a related hoax by another Russell devotee, John Von Neumann’s work on economic “systems analysis,” was also considered.

Since our correlated subject here, is the notion of “knowledge,” as distinct from mere learning, it is important to emphasize, that the roots of this 1948-1952 project, are located in the writer’s adolescent studies of the work of leading Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-centuries’ English, French, and German philosophers. In the course of this youthful enterprise, he adopted the standpoint of Gottfried Leibniz, against Descartes and such philosophical empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. The culmination of this study, was the writer’s working-through his own refutation of that attack upon Leibniz’s Monadology34 which is featured in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.35

The tendency of all relevant evidence is, that, especially under Classical-humanist forms of study, that the important discoveries of principle by adults, are usually, as in the present writer’s case, grounded in preparatory work done during adolescence. It is usually there, in adolescence, that the “cultural paradigm” underlying the future adult discoveries, is rooted. The case of Leibniz’ own discovery of the calculus, is exemplary.36 This advice should be received by the adult reader, as assurance that the crucial root-issues, as referenced here, are implicitly within the reach of a person whose literacy is that of the graduate of a decent secondary-school education.

The central feature of Kant’s three Critiques and related writings,37 through the treatment of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment,38 is Kant’s systematic rejection of the possibility of foreknowledge of the cognitive processes, by means of which a validatable discovery of principle is generated. One must grant to him, that Kant mimicked, implicitly, Aristotle’s own opposition to (and fraudulent representation of) the method of Plato. Russell’s radical-empiricist (e.g., logical positivist) devotees Wiener and Von Neumann, translate Kant’s argument into the “philosophically indifferentist” form of Ockhamite Sarpi’s empiricism.39 Both Wiener and Von Neumann are learned, and clever formalists, but are as intellectually crude in philosophy and method, as Göttingen’s David Hilbert and Richard Courant pronounced Wiener to be. Thus, Wiener’s hoax, whose essentials are repeated in the “systems analysis” and “brain theory” of Von Neumann, is, at best, merely a positivist’s parody of the argument made against Leibniz, by Kant.

This quasi-Kantian implication of Wiener’s “information theory,” was what first caught the present writer’s attention. However, rather than attack Wiener’s hoax from the philosophical standpoint of his own earlier, adolescent defense of Leibniz against Kant, he chose to argue the case from a practical standpoint: the role of technological progress in modern production, the area intersected by Wiener’s own treatment of automatic control devices.

This practical approach adopted by the present writer, had two features. First (circa 1948-1952), that the continuing increase in mankind’s per-capita power over nature is derived, most obviously, from the expression of validated discoveries of physical principles as new technologies of product and process design. Second, beginning the same initial period of work, that this transformation is effected through the same principles of machine-tool design which are customarily employed in the modern design of apparatus for proof-of-principle experiments. In summary: a proof-of-principle experiment implies the transmission of discovered physical principles, as technology, into the forms of improved designs of products and processes.40

In short, when the increase of the per-capita productive powers of labor is viewed from this vantage-point, we have a way of presenting scientific and technological progress as an ordered increase of the potential relative population-density of society.

Thus, we must represent the increase of mankind’s potential relative population-density, as rooted in validated new discoveries of principle. This immediately locates the matter within the bounds of those qualities inhering in the individual member of our species, which set the human individual, and species, absolutely apart from, and above all lower forms of life. This is a functional notion of “human nature,” in the sense that the language of Genesis 1:26-30 defines man and woman as each made in the image of the Creator, to exert dominion within the universe.

From this standpoint, the absurdity of Wiener’s representation of “negative entropy,” may be summarized in the following terms.

If we treat the task of sustaining a fixed level of productivity per-capita, in terms of a fixed level of technology, as the standpoint of comparative reference for attempted definition of physical-economic “energy of the system,” the entropic element implicitly embedded in that first-approximation assumption, should lead one to recognize, that advances in technology sufficient to offset that entropic factor, must be acknowledged as an included requirement of “energy of the system.” Economic processes, thus, exclude the possibility of a simple, linear “equilibrium state.”

Furthermore, since the relative physical-economic cost (e.g., “market basket”) must increase with advances in technology, we have the case, that the per-capita “energy of the system” must be increased (in physical terms), to maintain the ratio of output to energy-of-the-system above 1.00. Thus, we have the implied, functional requirement, as a definition of physical-economic anti-entropy, that the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” must be positive in value, and not decrease secularly, despite the fact that the physical-economic “energy of the system” per-capita, must be increased to bring about that meta-equilibrium state. This has served the writer, thereafter, as his adopted, paradigmatic use of the term “negative entropy,” or “anti-entropy.”41

Once the appropriate notion of physical-economic anti-entropy has been conceptualized, the next question is: What, then, is the appropriate notion of physical-economic measurement for physical-economic processes which are functionally, characteristically42 ordered in this anti-entropic way? The answer to that remaining question is implied by examining Bernhard Riemann’s revolution in physical geometry, as first introduced in his 1854 habilitation dissertation.43

Riemann’s underlying accomplishment in that habilitation dissertation, was to be the first to show adequately, how we might, and must, eliminate the naive, scholastic notions of Euclidean space and time from geometry, replacing empty, “ivory tower” speculations with a notion of an experimentally defined, physical space-time. In place of naive notions of dimensions, we replace the notion of “dimensions” in that naive sense (in the first approximation) by those kinds of Platonic ideas otherwise identified as experimentally validated, cognitively generated (i.e., discovered) physical principles.44

Then, the underlying characteristic of human progress, is represented by a series of validated discoveries of such principles. The “ivory tower,” imagined “dimensions” are then replaced, by the notion of a physical-space-time geometry of “n dimensions”: “n” corresponding to the number of previously established principles. Call this a (multiply-connected) physical-space-time manifold. That “n-fold” physical space-time manifold, involves not only something outwardly resembling the sense of extension associated with the experimental expression of each validated principle; we must also consider those effect of the experimentally determined values, the which express the connectedness of the “cycles,” or “cycle-like” interaction among these principles of which this n-fold manifold is composed.45 Those experimental determinations show us the non-constant curvature typical of elementary action within that manifold, or, otherwise said, its characteristic action.

However, since each validated discovery of principle leads us from an n-fold manifold, to an (n+1)-fold manifold, it is the characteristic of that transformation—that change, from a relatively inferior manifold, to a relatively superior one—which is the elementary subject of our concern, the elementary unit of conception underlying all valid notions of science.

Each manifold, as we have outlined the notion thus far, has the form of an hypothesis, in the sense of “hypothesis” supplied by Plato’s Socratic method. That said, the definition of “anti-entropy” supplied above, requires continuing change of the form of transformation from an n-fold to an (n+1)-fold manifold; the needed anti-entropy is obtained solely through the quality of action typified by the realization of elementary scientific and technological progress. That latter action, is the notion of validated cognitive change, from a relatively inferior, to a relatively superior hypothesis (manifold).

That cognitive action of change, unique to the human individual, corresponds to the elementary action upon which the physical-economic process depends. Since the successful continuation of human existence depends upon anti-entropic considerations, this principle of change, is to be defined, conceptualized as an efficient principle in the same sense we refer to any efficient physical principle. It is the efficiency of the principle of cognition itself, that “subjective factor,” which is the action upon which successful human existence, the “objective factor,” depends.

This principle of cognition, the “subjective factor,” is the characteristic action of the human species, the quality of action which defines us as a species, the activity which expresses human nature, as the referenced verses from Genesis 1, reference the universal characteristic of human nature.

In respect to effect, the progress of human existence is measurable in terms of several interdependent considerations. Generally, by the notion of increase of potential relative population-density. This is interconnected, in an interdependent way, with a colligating improvement in the longevity and other demographic characteristics of the population taken as a whole, the typical individual household, and the typical individual member of the population. This is interconnected, in a similar sense, with the colligating, manifest increase of per-capita power of action with respect to the physical universe per unit volume, and as a whole. The notion of increased “energy-flux density” is among those notions which reflect the latter such considerations.

Thus, we are challenged to recognize some efficient connection between the ordering-principle expressed in terms of a Riemannian succession of manifolds, which is the reason for the effects, and the effects, the derived gains in demographic and related performance of the society taken as a indivisibly functional unity as a whole.46 This connection is best attacked from the pedagogical vantage-point provided by the notion of a “four-step” cognitive process [See Figure 1]

.

47 The connection is best illustrated by comparing this “four-step” cognitive process, with its compact expression, as to be found within the practice of a Classical humanist form of secondary education.

In a good secondary education, in respect to physical or Classical-artistic principles, we must forbid all rote learning, and all of the related forms of so-called “textbook instruction.” Each student must relive, in fair approximation, the original discoverer’s mental experience of generating the first discovery and validation of that principle. This requirement ensures that the successful student becomes, in fair approximation, at least, a living embodiment of the history of important ideas up to the present time. In place of the mind-destructive methods of either “programmed education,” or its approximations, the policy must be, that the student must adopt the life-long, endless goal of reliving, as frequently as possible, the mental experience of reenacting, in some meaningful sense of succession, the original cognitive acts of discovery and validation of virtually, implicitly, every valid principle known to man today.

It is the education of the student’s cognitive process, as contrasted with, and opposed to textbook-oriented, or related forms of mind-deadening learning, which is the proper mission of education. The object is, that if the student were to learn virtually nothing, but to develop the cognitive habits required to regenerate almost all principles of knowledge, education has succeeded; whereas, if the student has successfully learned everything, as an idiot-savant in a “wired society” might do, but has discovered no validated principle, that student’s miseducation is the germ of a national catastrophe.

The following observation is a two-foldly crucial one. It is crucial, as it applies to the implications of deluded acceptance of the pseudo-scientific dogma of “information society.”48 It is crucial as it bears upon the nature of cultural paradigm-shifts.

The first implication, which pertains to the axiomatic delusion of Norbert Wiener’s dupes, et al., is the following. A formal mathematics, especially one which assumes the principled existence of linearity in the infinitesimal interval of a presumably continuous function/process, is like an oversimplified Euclidean geometry. It reflects an axiomatically linear (i.e., deductive) form of mathematical hypothesis, for which two conditions are most elementary.

First, the array of definitions and axioms, is fixed, a condition for which mere changes in postulates provide no crucial benefit. The model used by Wiener, Ludwig Boltzmann’s mechanistic, H-theorem model, is such a construction. Thus, a statistical model consistent with such axiomatic assumptions, has no relevance for the study of sane forms of human behavior, the latter being axiomatically “non-linear,” of the Riemann form of Platonic change, paradigmatically from an n-fold to (n+1)-fold manifold.

Thus, on the first implication, such thinking lies entirely outside the domain of real economic processes. Such thinking, as characteristic of populations, signifies a doomed culture, which, like all the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, and also cultures which adopt the Roman imperial code of Diocletian, such as the Byzantine Empire and western European feudalism (e.g., the Guelph League and the tradition which it represents), is one which lacks the moral fitness to survive.

Secondly, it is precisely in recognizing the fact that human behavior, including cultural behavior, is implicitly of “Riemannian” Platonic form, that cultural paradigm-shifts, such as the two principal cases identified at the outset of this report, are rendered comprehensible. For no culture, does truth lie in that which racists such as today’s cultural relativists, see as the relative truth of its fixed distinction from other cultures. Rather, it is the process common to each healthy culture, which implies its axiomatic changes, to become a new culture, better or worse than the prevailing set of behavioral values, which is the functionally characteristic feature of that culture, upon which we must focus, primarily, to understand that culture in a rational way.

For such reasons, no sane society will entrust the making of its functionally essential policies, to persons who defend the notions of “information society,” or who tolerate the doctrines of “moral” or cultural relativism.

The notion of ideas, as we have defined these by aid of reference to the illustrated “four-step process,” is the crucial issue. No statistical configuration of sensible objects, such as the particles attributed to a communications medium, can represent the communication of actual ideas. This is the issue underlying any competent effort to understand a cultural paradigm-shift, and to deal with the problems associated with such and correlated phenomena.

IV.
The Principle of Metaphor

Thus, by definition, the existence of each and every valid new idea, lies outside the relevant, previously existing hypothesis. It could never be adduced by analysis of elements specific to that relevant hypothesis. Hence, the elementary fraud of both “information theory” and “systems analysis.” The best which can be done, within the scope of that hypothesis, is to pose the need for discovery of such a new idea; this representation can be made only in the form of an ontological paradox, within the universe as represented by that hypothesis. Typical is the devastating ontological paradox which Plato develops, to expose the lack of credibility in the doctrine common to the Eleatics, sophists, and (implicitly) Aristotle, in his Parmenides. Such paradoxes, as they occur in Classical art-forms, are otherwise known as (strict) metaphors, metaphors implicitly associated with the proper use of the subjunctive mood. This is what Paolo Sarpi follower and Francis Bacon intimate Thomas Hobbes, demanded be driven out of English-language usage49; this is what the contemptibly sententious John Dryden accomplished, in his practice of degrading the notion of poetry to nothing better than doggerel. Hobbes’ injunction is what the most degraded among current Hollywood and related, chiefly percussive entertainments, have almost perfectly accomplished.50

At bottom, ontological paradox, as it appears within the work of experimental physical science, is identical with true metaphor as the latter appears within accomplished works in Classical art-forms, the latter both plastic and non-plastic. Thus, since the 1948-1952 interval, the present writer has adopted the convention of using the term “metaphor,” freely, to identify both Classical metaphor, as it appears in art-forms, and valid ontological paradoxes appearing in the domain of experimental physical science. Metaphor, so defined, is usefully named “the handmaiden of cognition.”

Any successful effort to explain the role of metaphor in mathematical forms of experimental physical science, could not avoid the great Eratosthenes’ notion of the number-sieve. The discovery of successive types of numbers: integers, rational, algebraic, transcendental, and transfinite, typifies the nature of scientific progress as viewed from Riemann’s standpoint. The present writer has used Nicolaus of Cusa’s original discovery that &Mac185; was not an algebraic magnitude, as Archimedes had mistakenly assumed it to be, as doubly typical of modern experimental scientific progress.51 Cusa’s discovery, as presented in his De docta ignorantia, was the cornerstone of his founding of the modern experimental science, developed by such followers of his writings and method as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, William Gilbert, and Johannes Kepler.52 It is also paradigmatic for the process leading through Leibniz into the hypergeometries of Gauss and Riemann.

Inasmuch as new discoveries of principle supplement, rather than entirely overthrow some previously established principle, it is small differences, which underlie the relevant ontological paradoxes leading to the new discoveries. For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s first insight into the significance of the catenoid-caustic relationship in physical experimental work, and Leibniz’s later elaboration of the implications of the catenary, lead into the generalized notions of non-constant curvature, underlying the achievements in hypergeometry by Gauss and Riemann. Similarly, the refined measurement of a small margin of error in Maxwell’s and related electrodynamics, underlies Wilhelm Weber’s correction of Maxwell’s error of excluding Ampere’s “longitudinal force,” a correction which opened the gates to microphysics.

Thus, it is the small differences in non-constant curvature in the very small, which typically express the root-differences between two successive manifolds. These are the “interesting” changes, the “interesting” topics of scientific work, which demand reliance upon the notion of reason, rather than mechanistic “cause.” This distinction is key to understanding the work of Kepler.

In Classical art-forms, it is similar. In art, the principle of metaphor is expressed as sometimes small, but inescapable inconsistencies of meaning attached to the same object. These differences function in art, as ontological paradoxes function in physical science.

Take for an example, Hamlet’s famous (“To be, or not to be”) soliloquy from the third act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The crux of the matter there, is whether Hamlet should choose to cling to his old ways, which lead to virtually assured doom, or choose a new way. Hamlet muses, that the choice of a new, therefore strange way is analogous to death, “from whose bourne no traveller returns.” On that latter premise, brooding “macho” Hamlet, the uncorrected, impulsive swashbuckler, proceeds to his doom. “To be, or not to be”: two contradictory hypotheses.

Or, consider, a specific contrast to Hamlet’s folly, the Prometheus of Aechylus’ Prometheus Bound. By choosing to suffer immortal torture, rather than reveal to the evil tyrant, Zeus, the secret of Zeus’ doom by his own hand, Prometheus assures mankind’s rescue from its murderous oppressor, that hubristic Olympian oligarchy which has set itself above man and God alike. The question here, is also “to be, or not to be.” Prometheus is victorious, where Hamlet chooses the way of folly.

All great Classical poetry and drama, especially Classical tragedy, is constructed to form a nested complex of metaphors, a hierarchy of metaphors. The greatest, including the exemplary cases of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller, always pose the issue of “To be, or not to be.”

All great art is substantially ironical; the highest form of irony, is metaphor. Irony is that which distinguishes art from silliness. However, great art is never merely ironical; art, like science, must be truthful. For example, consider a common form of irony, that of situation (common dramatic irony). Such uses enable the author to indicate the existence of an important fallacy of composition, bearing upon what otherwise might appear to the literal import of the current action. Neither the current action, nor the device used to achieve dramatic irony (such as a gathering storm), has the definitive, real meaning. Contrary to today’s widespread use of the term “symbolism,” symbolism is not to be tolerated in great art. Rather, it is the contradiction between things ironically juxtaposed, which is the device by which the cognitive faculty is provoked: the truth lies in the solution to the contradiction, a solution which the composer of the piece has intended to bring implicitly on stage through the excited cognitive powers of the individual minds, within the performers and, especially, the audience.

The essential, profound difference between physical principles and Classical art, is that the former is man’s act of cognition of the physical universe, whereas the latter is man’s act of cognition of the processes of cognition themselves. Generally, the latter pertains to social processes. The elementary, primary notion underlying all social processes, is the matter of inducing a second mind to reenact the discovery of a solution to a metaphor, which has been accomplished by the first mind. This latter, is the underlying principle of all scientific notions of actually human forms of social relations, relations of a sort congruent with the distinctive nature of the human individual, as each made in the image of the Creator.

That act of cognition of the processes of cognition itself, which is each great composition according to the principles of Classical art-forms, is much more than an abstract intellectual exercise.

It should be familiar to any person who has engaged in either original valid discoveries of principle, or simply the replication of earlier such acts by original discoverers, that there is a special quality of passion, which not only attends, but is essential to successful creative activity. This is the quality which may be described as “the emotion of cognitive concentration,” the emotion which supplies us the intellectual energy needed to prevent our minds from “fading out,” when faced with a soluble contradiction. It is also the emotion of joy experienced when a breakthrough is first achieved. In Plato’s dialogues, Plato’s Socrates identifies this emotion by the term agape¯, the passion for justice, and also for truth. This is the same definition of agape¯ employed by the Christian Apostle Paul, as in the celebrated I Corinthians 13. The attachment of that passion, as expressed in a moment of discovery of truth, or a moment in which justice triumphs over injustice, is an essential feature of the moral education of the emotions of the individual, and of an entire people.

In great Classical tragedy, for example, as Schiller proposes, the function of tragedy is to prompt a change in the audience, such that it becomes a better people leaving the theater, than it had entered. The visible failure of the central figures, to apprehend a clearly indicated truth and justice, on stage, as that failure is apprehended with awe by the audience, represents an uplifting of the audience’s qualities of moral judgment, an experience, in the theater, which haunts the conscience of those members of that audience, thereafter.

Thus, history is comprehended, and taught by the wise and truthful, as a form of real-life tragedy. Thus, those perceptions of truth and justice, as impassioned by aid of the metaphors of great Classical artistic compositions, become the living essence of true statecraft, the integument of a shared popular morality within and among the citizens of a great republic. Thus, the essential moral basis for effective transmission of cognitively generated conceptions, is transmitted, through replication, from the mind of one to another. Classical art, as we have defined it here, represents the distilled essence of viable forms of social relations.

V.
Economists and Economics

During the opening of this report, we indicated, that some economists are otherwise competent as professionals, although the economic theory they advocate is, usually, intrinsically incompetent, or worse. In other words, we must make a functional distinction between two functions typically performed in the name of “economics.” On the one side, persons may be called “economists” because they are viewed as specialists in aspects of administration which bear specifically upon economic performance. At the same time, they may be proponents of a doctrine which purports to explain why economic processes function as they choose to believe such processes do. Usually, their competence, when, and where it is manifest, appears only in the administrative aspect of their professionalism; on the side of economic theory, with increasingly rare exceptions, they are utterly incompetent.

It is a fair summation, that the presently escalating, systemic, or breakdown crisis in global financial and monetary affairs,53 is a reflection of thirty-odd years of deterioration of competence in the administrative side of production, aggravated by what has become a virtually metastatic, systemic aggravation of the general economic-theoretical incompetence which had been already established as an endemic menace, thirty-odd years ago. It is the coupling of this shift in leading factors shaping economic policy as such, to other outgrowths of the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift, which is the curable reason for the threatened, immediate, more or less simultaneous collapse of the world’s economies.

On this particular point: return to the period of World War II, through the 1950’s, and to the U.S.’s continuing work of the mid-1960’s, to effect both the manned moon landing and kindred things beyond. Consider, for example, the category of all good production managers of modern industrial firms, from that period, especially capital-intensive firms whose practice emphasized reliance upon the machine-tool principle of improvements in designs of products and productive processes. Generally, senior managers of this rank had a competent understanding of the administration of economic processes, an understanding which was, usually, a comprehension which was lacking in the specialist in the financial side of administration, even in the same firm. Although the competent production manager had a keen eye for financial costs, he treated that only as an unavoidable constraint upon his work; he did not attempt to solve the problems of cost-accounting by purely cost-accounting methods, but by the “industrial engineering” and related methods of physical economy. Often, however, that excellent industrial manager’s notions on the subject of economic theory, were abominable.54

Or, consider the case of the type of modern American farmer who began to be driven into extinction during the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In the practice of farming, this farmer was often brilliant. In the department of theoretical economics, he was usually a dupe for hair-brained, utterly incompetent recipes, especially financial and monetary ones.

As the U.S.A. ceased to be a predominantly agro-industrial economy, over the course of the recent thirty-odd years, the ration of professed economists and corporate executives who commanded administrative competence in economic matters, became smaller, at an overall accelerating rate. Thus, the competent production manager became a type which is now threatened with “post-industrial” extinction. This cultural downshift of the recent thirty years, is otherwise indicated by the fact that persons who still command even administrative competence in economic matters, tend to be in their seventies or eighties, or, occasionally, in their sixties.55

Looking at the history of society more broadly, we should not be surprised by the existence of such a functional distinction between competence in administration, and even virtual lunacy in taught doctrines respecting principles of economy: frequently, mutually contradictory views held by the same person. What Friedrich List defined as the modern system of national-economy, otherwise known as nation-state economy,56 is a phenomenon of the barely more than five recent centuries, since the 1461-1483 reconstruction of France under King Louis XI. Until the 1671-1716 work in this field by Gottfried Leibniz, there was no semblance of a science of economy anywhere, but only more or less useful, comparative studies of better and poorer forms of administration, as this state of affairs is typified by the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth centuries’ emergence of so-called “mercantilist” forms, emerging within the teaching and practice of what was called cameralism. In no sense, did even an approximation of a science of economics exist, prior to the 1671-1716 work of Leibniz on this subject.

What usually passes for “economic theory” in today’s classroom or popular mass-media, has nothing to do with even minimal standards for experimental physical science. There is virtually no widely proferred type of so-called “economic theory,” which is better than an empty sophistry. Chiefly, all popular classroom and street-wise pretenses of “economics,” are the pathetic concoctions, worse than useless mere rationalizations of irrational practice, adopted by minds each gripped by an impassioned virtual reality. One should recall, that, before the popularization of the cult-phrase “virtual reality,” parents used to warn their children that “fairy stories” were products of mere “make believe.”57 By the standards of experimental physical science, the only competent doctrine of economic theory heretofore employed by any nation, is either what is known as the “American System of political-economy,” or derivatives of the influence of the Leibniz-Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-Lincoln “American System.” Our approach here, adopts and defends that scientific evidence, but also adds a crucially necessary feature, an added feature indispensable for understanding how the present, global systemic crisis came about. That feature is the explicit, functional role of cognition.

Excepting a uniquely American contribution, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s pioneering in the proper use of government issue of paper currency, the American System of political-economy, as represented by Benjamin Franklin and the other leading founders of the U.S. Federal republic,58 adopted the principles of physical economy developed by Leibniz. Although Leibniz himself laid emphasis upon the “factor” of developed powers of cognition of the laborer in successful economy, it remained the case, until the work of the present writer, during and following his referenced 1948-1952 project, that no teaching of political-economy took the human factor of cognition explicitly into account in defining political-economy. This latter error of omission, is the cornerstone of the array of interconnected considerations brought together in the conclusion of this report. We shall turn to that next, after clearing away some important matters whose omission might be a nagging source of distractions.

Since the latter part of the Eighteenth century, there has been no instance of a successful national economy, in any part of the world, except in the case that that economy adopted, in large degree, the principles of what was known, during the Nineteenth century, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s American System of political-economy, as this was outlined in Hamilton’s three key reports to the U.S. Congress, on Public Credit, A National Bank, and Manufactures, the latter most emphatically.59 The unique role of the U.S.A. on this account, proceeded in two successive waves. The first such international impetus, reflected the work of Franklin, Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, in spreading the idea of the American System of national economy into Europe and Central and South America, during parts of the 1789-1860 interval. The second impetus came from the 1861-1876 interval, during which the U.S. pioneered in originating the form of modern industrial economy copied by Meiji Restoration Japan, Germany, Russia, and other nations. Even the Soviet system, under Lenin, for example, explicitly sought to adapt the American System of industrial development to a state with Bolshevik characteristics.

As Leibniz emphasized in his 1671 writings on economy, e.g., his Society and Economy, the issue of the relationship between individual productivity and cognitive development, is situated with respect to wages.60 The required wage, is that which assures a household those demographic and related cultural characteristics needed to foster the individual household member’s efficient assimilation of those discoverable ideas, principles, on which increases of the potential productivity of the operative depend. This vantage-point, together with Leibniz’s emphasis on both (what is termed today) energy-flux density, as well as technology as such, are the characteristic features throughout Leibniz’s founding of the science of physical economy. Thus, relative to the writer’s own work, Leibniz took the significance of cognitive development implicitly into account; the writer’s central, unique contribution, has been to make that functional connection explicit.

On the subject of the disastrous effects of the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift, there is a fundamental difference between the economic policies shared among Leibniz, the American System, and the present writer, on the one side, and, on the opposing side, the common features of the views of the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the modern monetarists. That difference is the first crucial set of facts which must be considered, for understanding how the present, global, systemic crisis of the system came about. Once that is accomplished, then, the present writer’s indispensable amendments, respecting the explicitly functional role of cognition, complete the intellectual arsenal required for making competent policy under present conditions of crisis.

To repeat the most relevant cautionary observations: although the present writer was the only known economist to have made explicit the functional role of individual cognition, the importance of the cognitive factor in physical economy was always taken into account, implicitly, by Leibniz, and by followers of Leibniz among American System economists such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, Henry C. Carey, et al. For each and all among us of that persuasion, we, in fundamental opposition to the views of the empiricists in general, and monetarists most emphatically, insist axiomatically upon the responsibility of the sovereign nation-state, to ensure the development of the productive potential of the whole territory of the nation, and the development and maintenance of the productive potential of all among the total number of households of the nation. We insist, in opposition to our opponents, the intellectual relics of feudalism, that the policy-making of the state must recognize the improvement of all of the territory, and of each and all of the households, as an unavoidable cost of maintaining the productivity and even modest growth of the economy as a whole.

To repeat the crucial point made here earlier: The doctrine of “free trade” is incompatible with the most fundamental of Christian principles, that each and all men and women, without ethnic or national distinction, are equally made in the image of the Creator. Therefore, the principles of Christianity join with the fundamental principle of our republic, in rejecting the feudal-oligarchical, heathen, British dogma of “free trade”: Ours is an economy, of the people, by the people, and for all the people.

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Footnotes

32. A summary identification of the present writer’s nine successive economic forecasts for either the U.S., or world economy, or both combined, is found in LaRouche’s Ninth Forecast: The Coming Disintegration of the Financial Markets [pamphlet issued by The New Federalist, August 1994 and subsequent editions; originally published in Executive Intelligence Review, June 24, 1994 (Vol. 21, No.26)] On this subject, see also, in recent issues of Executive Intelligence Review, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “1997 is not 1929: a lesson from Carl Gauss,” Nov. 21, 1997 (Vol. 24, No. 47), and, also, “What economics must measure,” Nov. 28, 1997 (Vol. 24, No. 48).

33. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948). The writer’s initial contact with this book, was an earlier, paper-bound version, printed in France.

34.See, Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. by Leroy E. Loemker (Dodrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 643-653. When that Leibniz writing was first published, posthumously, it became the focal point of a concerted, mouth-foaming attack, from various nodes of a Europe-wide network of agents of Venice, the network created by Leibniz’s principle adversary, the Paris-based Abbé Antonio Conti. One of the principal such nodes was the Berlin Academy under Prussia’s Frederick “The Great.” Excepting Academy members Gotthold E. Lessing, and J.P. Süssmilch, the dominant figures of the Academy, during that time, were all agents of Conti’s network, all associated with Conti’s principal recruit, Leibniz-hater Voltaire. The principal attack on the Monadology there came from Leonhard Euler, whose outrageous fraud (of petitio principii) served as the model followed by Kant, and also Lagrange, Laplace, and Cauchy. The hoax of Cauchy’s “limit theorem,” introduced to a mangled version of Leibniz’s calculus, follows Euler’s fraud exactly; nearly all Nineteenth- and Twentieth-centuries’ defenses of the assumption of linearization in the infinitesimally small, are derived from Euler by way of Cauchy’s hoax.

35.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965).

36.Gottfried Leibniz, “The History and Origin of the Differential Calculus,” in The Early Mathematical Manuscripts of G.W. Leibniz (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1920). The proposal for a calculus, was a task specified for the work of future mathematicans, by Johannes Kepler. This grew out of problems which Kepler encountered in the working-out of the imnplications of elliptic orbits. The problem was first solved by Leibniz, although with significant debts to preparatory work by Blaise Pascal. Following Leibniz’s first general announcement of his discovery, in a text submitted to a Paris publisher in 1676, Leibniz elaborated the calculus’development, as in his writings published in the Acta Eruditirum., on the foundation of what he termed “Analysis Situs,” a treatmet of the challenge of non-constant curvatures of functions in the very small, which we situate more frequently today under the development of the theory of multiply-connected manifolds (e.g., modular functions, hypergeometry) of Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. This priniciple of non-constant curvature in the very small, is the distinctive feature of the Kepler-Leibniz-Guass-Weber-Riemann development of mathematical physics, the only physics relevant to ther subject-matter of economics processes.

37.Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790). From the beginning of his career, Kant was a follower of the British school of empiricism, notably that of a David Hume from whom he somewhat distanced himself, later, on the issue of “British philosophical indifferentism,” with his Critique of Pure Reason. On this see the Preface the first (1781) edition of that first Critique, and also the Prolegomena. The charge of G.W.F. Hegel is essentially correct, that the later Kant become little more than a person who resituated empiricism within Aristotle, rather than the William of Ockham whose influence underlies the work of such Paolo Sarpi assets as Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes. The same charge, with some minor qualifications, could be made against Hegel himself.

38.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951).

39.On the origins of British empiricism. Although Venice’s takeover of England began shortly after the betrayal of the anti-Venice League of Cambrai, with the launching, circa a.d.: 1517, of the seduction and takeover of England’s mentally unstable Henry VIII, the founder of the modern British and Netherlands culture and empire is Venice’s Paolo Sarpi, whose English assets included such creatures as Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. The same circles, operating via The Netherlands, fashioned what became the René Descartes of the modern textbooks. At the close of the Seventeenth century and the early decades of the Eighteenth century, Sarpi’s role as a controller was assumed by the Paris-based agent of Venice, Abbé Antonio Conti, to whom we have referred above. Modern positivism is traced to the influence of Ockham via Sarpi, and such offshoots of Sarpi as English empiricism and its French cousin, Cartesianism.

40.The meaningful usage of the term “technology,” arises in the following way. A validated discovery of physical principle, references a principle which has universal application. For example, the development of earlier discoveries in the matter of electricity and magnetism, as by England’s William Gilbert and the United States’ Benjamin Franklin, et al., is subsumed under the closely related discoveries by two scientists of Gaspard Monge’s Ecole Polytechnique, Ampère and Fresnel. Ampère discovered the principle of electrodynamics, and Fresnel contributed crucial discoveries bearing upon retarded propagation in electromagnetic and related radiation and refraction. When Carl Gauss’s collaborator, Wilhelm Weber, measured the “longitudinal (angular)” force, which Maxwell et al. had foolishly brushed aside, a new branch of physics was established, atomic/nuclear microphysics. The application of these discoveries of electrodynamical principle found sundry applications, such as those of the U.S. experimental-science genius, Thomas A. Edison; these latter classes of application represent technologies. Each such area of application is associated with a crucial experimental demonstration specific to that area. Thus, the difference, and the connections between the distinct notions of physical principle and technology.

41.Before the unfortunate influence of radical-positivist doctrinaire Wiener’s nonsense-definition of “negative entropy,” the term “negative entropy” was widely used, among relevant professionals, chiefly to identify the characteristic functional distinction between living and mechanistic processes. Implicitly, that usage had been established, by Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler [e.g., Johannes Kepler, On the Six-Cornered Snowflake (A.C.E. 1611), trans. by Colin Hardie (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)] long prior to the mid-Nineteenth-century statistical-thermodynamical definitions of Rudolf Clausius, Lord Kelvin (Thomson), Hermann Grassmann, and, later, Ludwig Boltzmann, et al. This heritage of Leonardo and Kepler had been maintained into the late 1940’s, chiefly among biologists, such as Lecomte du Nouy (e.g., 1946), from that latter period. Until the late 1980’s, the present writer’s initial, and continued preference, was to maintain this traditional use of “negative entropy,” or “negentropy,” explaining that Wiener’s definition was the novel aberration of a misguided ideologue. By the beginning of the 1990’s, the Baby Boomers’ popularization of the Wiener’s cultish “information society” required a more forceful tactic, the use of “non-entropy,” or “anti-entropy,” as a way of preserving the pre-Wiener, original meaning of the term “negative entropy.” The difference in meaning is deep-going. Wiener’s definition is derived from a wild interpretation of Ludwig Boltzmann’s allowance of temporary, local statistical deviations within the scope of his own construction of his mathematical derivation of his H-theorem. In other words, Wiener’s notion represents a linear, mechanistic chimera; whereas, the traditional notion, of Leonardo, Kepler, et al., is an axiomatically non-linear process, the non-constant curvature of a modular function of the Gauss-Riemann type.

42.“Characteristic” is employed here in Leibniz’s sense. Given, a modular function, as typified by the many astrophysical cycles which determine our change of position within any relatively universal frame of reference, while standing on a fixed point on the surface of the Earth. In that context, define the change in position, relative to the chosen frame of reference, of anything observed from that point on the Earth. In the smallest interval, a complex, non-constant curvature of such type is to be taken into account. The non-constant curvature, as represented in the very small, represents a specific type, or characteristic, of the action of the process as a whole. Carl Gauss’s precedence in defining the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, is exemplary of this, for classroom instruction.

43.Bernhard Riemann, “Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,”in Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, ed. by H. Weber (New York: Dover Publications (reprint edition), 1953), pp. 272-287.

44.For classroom, and related purposes, it is convenient to begin by considering only the subject of physical principles. However, that supplies us only a useful first approximation. We must then consider those additional principles which reflect the principles of successful modes of cognition, and the terms under which the cognitive experience of one sovereign intellect may be imparted, by efficient modes of indirection, to the internal experience of other sovereign intellects. In short, the psychological and social principles which are subsumed by cognition.

45.As Riemann summarizes the argument, on this account, made in the concluding section of his habilitation dissertation: “This leads us over into another science, into the domain of [experimental-N-LHL] physics, which the nature of the today’s occasion does not permit us to enter.”[Es führt dies hinüber in das Gebiet einer andern Wissenschaft, in das Geibet der Physik, welches wohl die Natur der heutigen Veranlassung nicht zu betreten erlaubt.] Op. cit., Sec. III.3, pp. 285-286.

46.Here, in the place of the empiricist’s mechanistic, percussive notion of “cause,” we affirm the notion of “reason,” as employed by Kepler and Leibniz, for example. To illustrate the difference, the following: Once we abandon the popularized superstition, that extension in physical space-time either is, or can be safely estimated as linear in the very small, the most general of the significant differences among different manifolds, is the difference in Gauss-Riemann curvature of physical space-time, especially in both the extremely large and extremely small. Since this quality of difference among the manifolds, has its origin in the difference in the internally timeless hypotheses by which each manifold is subsumed, it is the relatively timeless such hypothesis which determines the curvature, and the action of reason which defines the relevant change in hypothesis, from one manifold to another, which is the source of the cognizable difference in characteristic curvatures. Thus, it is reason, so defined, as in efficient correspondence to that cognizable difference in hypothesis, rather than the percussive “causality” of the mechanistic argument, which is the origin of the adducible difference in characteristic curvature of the adduced manifold for that physical reality. Hence, reason, as employed by Kepler and Leibniz, must supplant the empiricist’s percussive notion of “causality.”

47.We must consider, in this light, those changes in curvature of physical-economic space-time whose effects are recognizable as improvement in both the human condition and mankind’s power in the universe. The source of those changes, is that replicatable generation of validated physical and related principles, which occurs within the individual human mind. It is, thus, cognition itself, as we have defined cognition, which is the specific action by means of which the desired changes in physical-economic space-time curvature occur. Thus, we must locate so-called “objective science” within the “subjective” domain. This relationship defines cognition itself as efficient reason. Thus, progress of the human condition must be seen as the effect of cognition, of efficient reason. This was the principle upon which Nicolaus of Cusa established the foundations of modern experimental physical science, in his De docta ignorantia and related writings. This is the standpoint of Johannes Kepler’s establishment of the first comprehensive mathematical physics; this is the standpoint of Leibniz’s work, as echoed in the methods of Carl Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and some others after them. It is this shift in point of view, from the illusion of “objective science,” to the reality of “subjective science”—the replicatable education of the cognitive powers of the individual mind—which is crucial.

48.E.g., the delusion popularized through the writings on the subject of a so-called “Third Wave,” by quackpot Alvin Toffler et al.

49.Leviathan. Both Hobbes and Cecil’s Francis Bacon were English assets of Venice’s Paolo Sarpi. Hobbes’ mathematics education, and his addiction to the mechanistic notion of percussive “causality,” was received from Sarpi’s personal lackey, Galileo Galilei.

50.It was an appalling error by U.S. negotiator Mickey Kantor, to refer to Hollywood productions as “intellectual” property.

51.Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “On The Subject of Metaphor,” Fidelio, Fall 1992 (Vol. I, No. 3).

52.The savage attacks on Cusa’s work by Venice and its accomplices, were spread to Henry VIII’s England by the Venetian Francesco Zorzi (a.k.a., Giorgi), the author of De harmonia mundi (1525) [“Those who retreat from direct knowledge of the universe will retreat into the Docta Ignorantia.” As quoted in Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).] Zorzi anticipates Ockham follower Paolo Sarpi’s doctrine of empiricism. Sarpi’s organizing a Europe-wide attack on the work and person of Johannes Kepler (e.g., Robert Fludd), and Sir Francis Bacon’s savage attack on Gilbert, of De Magnete fame, are relevant.

53.In the literature bearing upon discussions of such matters among such German Social-Democrats as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, early during this century, the term used to describe an hypothetical “systemic crisis,” was, in customary translation into English, “general breakdown-crisis.”

54.Conversely, there are persons whose theory appears, on the surface, to be relatively good, but whose production-management, or related practices are worse than the management practices of persons with terrible theory. The theoretician who treats production as a matter of merely barking orders, or performance graphs, not only tends to be a failure in his, or her own performance; he shows, by his lack of effective attention to the insightful development of the on-line cognitive performance of his, or her subordinates, that he, or she does not understand in practice the theory he expresses by mere words. The production manager’s essential responsibility is that of training the practice of supervision among subordinate management. “Supervision” should be understood to signify, not “harassment” of subordinates, but sufficiently frequent intervention to prevent a production failure during some part of the work-day from becoming the cause for a disastrous work-day as a whole. Implicitly, the method of supervision, from the production manager, on down, should be, at each level, the same tactical approach to pedagogy, as typified by the pedagogical method of a Classical-humanist form of secondary education: the transformation of a conceptual obstacle in the mind of the subordinate, into a stimulation of the relevant cognitive potential of that subordinate. This policy coincides with the doctrine of Auftragstaktik in German military doctrine since Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, as perfected under von Schlieffen (as contrasted with the worst widely accepted U.S. doctrine, called in German Befehlstaktik).

55.It is not unfair to suggest the following comparison. The industrial manager of the World War II generation, or earlier, would seek to discover the choice of principle, by means of which the problem could be mastered. The industrial manager from the “organization man” generation of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, tended to overlook principle, but did place emphasis on distinctions among precalculable, short-term, medium-term, and longer-term performance. The Baby Boomer refers the policy question to committees habituated to function as psychotherapeutic encounter groups.

Under the impact of a 1966-1997 deemphasis upon increasing capital-intensity, energy-flux density, and technological progress, the climate in which the production process itself tended to develop, selectively, better management, has been lost. For one experienced with a time in which production management was competent, it does not require much reading of today’s relevant literature, to recognize that, excepting a dwindling ration of aging dinosaurs from a pre-1964-1972 era, there is virtually no competent management today. Instead, corporate management’s criteria of performance are goals of financial capital gains achieved, predominantly, by increasing the rate of looting of both previously stored real capital values, and squeezing such speculative capital gains out of the living bodies of senior citizens and labor-force.

56.Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (1844), trans. by Sampson S. Lloyd (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley (reprint edition), 1977); Outlines of American Political Economy (1827), ed. by Michael Liebig (Wiesbaden: Dr. Böttiger Verlags-GmbH, 1997). In the present global crisis, serious U.S. policy-makers will give special attention to editor Michael Liebig’s essay in this work, especially to the discussion of the September 1931 Lautenbach Plan of Germany’s Friedrich List Society, on pp. 226-233. There have been understandably, but inherently incompetent attempts to trace the development of notions of political-economy to Aristotle. Aristotle was a rabid foe of Plato, and of the notions associated with the nation-state. His homicidal hatred and attempted assassination of the Alexander the Great who despised him, expresses the reality of Aristotle’s doctrines. The Alexander the Great, whose campaigns and statecraft were shaped by advisors from among Plato’s anti-Aristotle followers, is a forerunner of Hohenstaufen nation-builder Emperor Frederick II; Aristotle’s notions of political-economy are rabidly oligarchical in form and content, based upon a defense of usury.

57.Symptomatic expressions of mathematical and other pseudo-science are phrases such, “It is self-evident, that....,” “As all respectable scientists agree today....,” “If we can assume that.... ,” “Common sense will teach us,” or, “All my friends will agree with me, not with you.” Hearing such expressions, the self-respecting student applies immediately for transfer to another university, or simply takes a firm grip on his wallet, while quietly, but steadfastly leaving the vicinity of the medicine-show where such hokey-pokey is in progress.

58.Benjamin Franklin, “A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” (1729), in The Political Economy of the American Revolution, ed. by Nancy B. Spannaus and Christopher White, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1996). Franklin’s work reflected the influence of his former patron, Cotton Mather, who had also insisted on reviving that system of paper-currency which had been discontinued, during the 1688-1689 rampages of tyrannical Royal Governor Andros and also despot William of Orange’s London.

59.The economy of the United Kingdom represents no exception. The success of that economy came not from its own productive efforts, but solely through usurious looting of increasingly vast portions of the land-area and populations of this planet. On discussion of the impact of Leibniz’s economics on Eighteenth-century North America, see The Political Economy of the American Revolution, op. cit. On Leibniz’s influence here, see also Robert Trout, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Fidelio, Spring 1997 (Vol. VI, No. 1).

60.“Wages,” here, does not mean “money-wage.” It signifies physical-economic market-baskets of needed physical goods, plus essential physical elements of required quality of education, and of health-care and other science-and-technology services. See Society & Economy, trans. by John Chambless, Fidelio, Fall 1992 (Vol. I, No. 3), and On The Establishment of a Society in Germany for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, trans. by John Chambless, Fidelio, Spring 1992 (Vol. I, No. 2). See Spannaus and White, op. cit.

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