In reference to Lyndon LaRouche's "New Bretton Woods" policy proposal.

HOW TO DEFINE A PHYSICAL-ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Marat, De Sade,
And `Greenspin'^[1]

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 30, 2001

You wish to know what is going to happen to you in the coming weeks and months. Then, face certain facts. Learn the lessons of the past mistakes most of you have been making, repeatedly, over the recent decades. After studying those facts, understand that the future is often what we make it. Then, let you answer the question, what is going to happen to you?

Fact. For more than thirty-five years, virtually all of the publicly known, medium- and long-term economic forecasts, by virtually all leading U.S. governmental agencies and professional economists, have been consistently wrong. Ask yourself: how many of you believed those sources? How many believed in the limitless future prosperity of the so-called "new economy," for example? How many trillions of dollars of financial-asset values of people who could not afford to lose, were wiped out in recent months. because those victims were taken in by mass-media and other reports of endless financial gains "in the market"? How many of those people lost much more than they could have afforded to lose, because they rejected the warnings against exactly that impending collapse, which I caused to be widely circulated?

Another fact. Contrast that record with all of my own forecasts from the same period, each of which I placed on the written record; they have all been successful ones.[2]

Consider the fact, that, despite all that evidence, over all those decades, there are still many persons, even in high places, who cling to the delusion, that economic growth can be measured in terms of simple financial statistics, or even in those increasingly fraudulent, published data called "market indices."

Faced with those facts, some pretty reasonable observers are asking me and my associates: "You may have been right in the past, but how can we decide for ourselves which method is right for the future: your method, or that represented by so-called `mainstream opinion'?"[3] I reply to such questions in two steps.

First, I shall describe the kinds of false assumptions which have misled most typical forecasters into those erroneous methods of forecasting adopted by today's mainly downstream mass-media.

Then, after having cleared away some of that jetsam of false beliefs, we shall be able to focus on the central issue of the appropriate method of making economic policy today.

My task here, is to help you to approximate, at least, the same superior quality of expert conclusions I have succeeded in producing. Understand this through your own mental efforts. Then, you, too, will have an insight into the future, as well as the past. In this report, I shall give you some crucial hints on reaching an accurate understanding of the dangerous world economic situation in which you now find yourself.

Before turning to the pages which will immediately follow, I must perform that certain chore which must be performed by any competent writer or teacher. I must consider: For what reader is this report intended? With that author's responsibility in mind, I have chosen to address a mixed audience, of not only professionals, but also influential international as well as national and other political figures, and include a wider audience of readers who are simply literate lay persons. That requires that the subject be addressed in a way fully up to relevant professional standards for competence, but must provide all the intended members of the audience the opportunity, either to follow me, step by step, through the re-enactment of the concept presented, or to point to ways in which they might proceed to work the point out for themselves.[4]

I presume, of course, that the reader considers the issue important enough, that he or she would be willing to spend a certain amount of effort to learn what you need to know. Shall we say: not any less effort than what should be the level required for learning to own and drive an automobile, and perhaps conduct some repairs.

The wretched performance, over more than thirty years, of both those U.S. government and Federal Reserve officials and most academically trained economics professionals, should suggest to you, how most citizens have been more or less consistently misled into tolerating the disastrous policies of our government and political parties over those past decades.

Fortunately, that ignorance of the most important issues of national policy-shaping, which has become so typical of most of our citizens, could be overcome through a suitable combination of education and experience. The first fact to be made clear, is that the believers in the so-called "market" have been the victims of a swindle, a post-Franklin Roosevelt delusion, which grew into the form of a mass hysteria, especially so over the course of the post-Kennedy decades. Once that is cleared up, the citizen's mind is more likely to be open to discovering the needed, fresh way of thinking about economics in general.

I believe, that if you are willing to study the evidence to which I point, you will be convinced, that today's popular ignorance of economics can be cured, on the condition that the victims of popular delusions about the U.S. economy, are willing to consider the evidence. The problem is not a lack of those facts which could have been available to a member of the public who had looked for them. By definition, it is the characteristic feature of the hysterical victim of an induced delusion, such as today's widespread notion of "the market," that such persons will simply refuse to learn, even despite all available evidence to the contrary, and will cling to their delusions, even to proverbial bitter end.

It is that continued, hysterical refusal, among officials, professionals, and many ordinary citizens, to consider any of that relevant, crucial, physical evidence, which has misled the U.S. and many other economies, to the present brink of a very bitter end. This has been the case, even when all the warning signs of an oncoming financial collapse were available.

I know of the cases of relatively many Americans, for example, who said of me, "Lyndon is wrong. The U.S. is entering a period of great prosperity under the new economy. Perhaps Europe will be in trouble, but never the U.S. economy!" There never was any evidence to support that consoling delusion; it was something self-deluded people chose to believe, simply because they passionately wished to believe it.

Unless the citizens of the U.S.A., or at least many of them, can overcome the hangover-like effects of the delusion which increasing numbers of them had come to share during a period of approximately three decades or more, the worst would be inevitable, for all of you, during the period immediately ahead.

Fortunately, in the pivotal words of playwright Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the ongoing breakdown of the world's financial system, combined with the presently accelerating spread of 1930s-depression-like economic conditions, has taken "the life out of the booze." More and more of your fellow-citizens, are experiencing a "reality shock." Among the saner ones, the reaction is, in effect: "I realize I've been fooled. I am willing to accept that fact." That is way in which a similarly deluded majority of the U.S. population of the Coolidge-ridden 1920s, reacted, when they were confronted with the realities of the 1929-1933 Depression. "Now, perhaps" (but only "perhaps") "I am ready to understand what it is we must do to overcome this situation."

That is the situation which confronts all of us among leading policy-shapers, inside and outside governments today. That is the challenge which confronts the ordinary person trying to see his or her way through the presently worsening disaster our economy has become.

The purpose of this report, is to show to you what is wrong with the delusion many had come either to adopt, or to regard as the irresistible force of prevailing political opinion. However, before prescribing the needed medication, let us agree on the nature of the disease to be cured. Therefore, I shall now complete my prefatory observations, by describing one of the most crucial problems in dealing with the present political situation. What is passing through the minds of those citizens who are still, even now, gripped by that delusion which has been called "popular opinion," and which I, with good reason, prefer to call "vox pox"? How should we describe their continued, still widespread "state of denial" of the plain, and rapidly accumulating evidence in front of them?

Those in a State of Denial

Once again, the principal cause of the presently onrushing economic catastrophe, is the relevant moral corruption shared, not only among leading officials and professionals, but also popular opinion generally. Among today's common symptoms of that moral corruption, is the utterance of the magical words, "my money," an utterance often accompanied by a certain diabolical glint of Nintendo-style threat in the speaker's eyes.

These poor fools, officials, professionals, and just plain greedy individual citizens alike, had clung, hysterically, to faith in the delusion, that "my money," as reported on the fabled "bottom line" of an accountant's financial statement, is a measure of actual economic improvement in the physical conditions of both individual life and of the future of the physical economy of the locality, the nation, or the world. Citizens so deluded, even believed that very short-term, purely speculative financial gains, were the pathway to long-term growth of the real economy! Was this merely "irrational exuberance," or a vaster and more lunatic re-enactment, by U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "Greenspin" himself, of the John Law "bubble-headedness" of the early Eighteenth Century?

At this moment, such a citizen might remind us of some legendary, vacationing canoeist, who had been cruising dreamily from Duluth, Minnesota, down the Great Lakes, and is now nearing Niagara Falls. Above the rising din from that approaching cataract, we hear that fellow-citizen saying, "What crisis? ! I have been sailing these waters for months now, and I have not gone over Niagara Falls yet. Why should I believe you now?"

Admittedly, there is more to such tragic denials of reality than simply a lack of competent knowledge of economy. Sometimes, people are simply so afraid of facing a frightening reality, that they will refuse to admit the existence of facts which are staring them in the eye. For example, a sudden and total collapse of the world's financial system, is not something the ordinary citizen, or politician, usually wishes to think about. For example, imagine Bush's Treasury Secretary O'Neill looking at the charts, which show the downslide, and, on a sudden wishful inspiration, turns the charts upside down, in his attempt to convince even himself, perhaps, that the lunatic Bush tax-cut will bring about an upturn in the economy, looming not many months ahead.

Often, the principal factor driving a victim into such a state of denial of a reality staring them in the face, is their sense of helplessness in face of forces which they believe they could not control, even if they wished to do so. "Who am I, a little guy like me, to take on powerful interests like those?" As many said words to the following effect, to me, during the course of the Year 2000 Presidential primary campaign, "My friends and I are going to pretend I never heard what you just told me. I am going along to get along. I have to spend all my energy believing that you are wrong!"

Or, imagine the case of some imaginary Tarzan, who was raised from infancy by a female chimpanzee. Imagine that fellow being told that that beloved maternal creature was not his natural mother. He would probably fall into a paroxysm of four-palmed stamping, shrieking, and tooth-threatening fury, shrieking, "Lies! Lies! Lies! All lies!" He might bite you! Some children react similarly to being told that Santa Claus is really only a figure in a charming fairy-story. People who are afraid to face the sudden truth placed right in front of their face, are sometimes known to fall automatically into a fit of screaming denial of the plain truth standing right in front of them. Facts and science no longer persuade them.

The idea of an onrushing total collapse of the world's present financial system, can produce such Classically tragic flights of insanity in two kinds of persons.

In the first such case, there is a strong inclination to deny the possibility of a crisis for which he or she knows no feasible alternative. That is the kind of hysteria to be expected among ordinary U.S. citizens. In the second case, the affrighted person may be a compulsive financial speculator. He has been informed of an existing solution, but hates the remedy more than the disease, as the hard core of the Bush Administration and its devotees do.

In the first case, the victim of the delusion insists that, "You must be wrong. They will always come up with something!" One is usually left to wonder exactly who "they" is; perhaps it is "invisible little green gentlemen under the floorboard," or, the same thing known by a different name, "the invisible Hand." They may argue, "Look, we've been in crises before; they always came up with something. I know they will never let it happen." Will those "boys in the back room," or, perhaps, "the Invisible Hand," actually come up with something to keep the system going? Are you assured that, pickpockets aside, the "Invisible Hand" actually exists?

In the second case, the financier parasite's response is of the form, "I would rather see this planet exterminated, than that I should have to give up my way of life!" Obviously, such fellows are extremely dangerous, if they are allowed to have the power to get their way in such a situation.

The Bush leaguers, for example, respond to the present crisis as the pagan god Zeus would have reacted to the signs of the approaching "twilight of the gods" of Olympus. Few are more awful, when they have power, than a cowardly tyrant faced with either an actual or perceived threat to his power, a tyrant like the Roman Emperors Caligula or Nero, or tragic Adolf Hitler in his bunker.

In both of the two types of cases, the mind of the victim has played a trick. Therefore, we now begin a close examination of the reasons people allow themselves to be fooled by popular opinion about economics. Once you are able to recognize the way in which that kind of trick may be used to control your mind, you are, at the worst, less likely to be tricked again. We begin with that fact.

1. Escaping from an Imaginary Goldfish Bowl

Once again, the subject of this report is economics. By economics, I mean, first of all, a branch of physical science which was first discovered and developed by Gottfried Leibniz, over the interval 1671-1716, which he named "physical economy." Up to the present day,[5] Leibniz's original definition of that branch of physical science, supplies the only known basis for the development of political economy as a branch of physical science. My own original discoveries in this field, were a continued, qualitative development of notions first introduced to my thinking, by him.

To introduce the treatment of that subject to be presented here, I now supply a series of indispensable, summary technical definitions of topics to be referenced in the course of this report.

By "physical economy," I mean the individual's physical relationship to nature as I shall define that relationship, once again, in a later section of this report. For the moment, I shall emphasize, that it is a relationship situated within the medium of his or her historically determined, functional relationship to society.

More broadly, the emphasis is upon the relationship to nature of humanity as a whole, and that of that society in particular, as expressed in three rough estimates: 1.) The increase of physical output, to society, per capita, over necessary physical input, from society, per capita; 2.) The ratio of physical input-output per capita, measured in terms of per square kilometer of the surface area of the entire society, and the Earth as a whole, respectively; and, 3.) The correlation of such increases in physical input-output, with improvement in the life-expectancies and related demographic characteristics, of growing entire populations over successive generations.

These raw measurements of physical-economic performance, presume efficiently corresponding changes in society's actions on nature. That means, that the efficiency of the response of nature to mankind's actions, is improved through those qualities of willful innovations in man's actions, which are typified by experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principles, as those qualities of innovations are applied to both society in particular, and nature in general.

As I have elaborated the argument, in many locations, over approximately a half-century to date, the most crucial of the events which define a successful act of physical economy, is the application of the discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle, as this would be typified by the reader's re-enactment of Johannes Kepler's original 1605 discovery of a universal principle of gravitation, and Gottfried Leibniz's related, and also uniquely original discovery of the calculus and of the still higher, subsuming notion of a monadology.[6] This quality of action is not limited to what have been customarily termed "physical principles," but includes similarly defined discoveries in the domain of what I shall identify, later here, as the cognitive aspect of human relations, as the latter are typified by principles of Classical artistic composition.

By physical science, I mean the modern definition of experimental physical science, as introduced to modern European civilization by Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia.[7] This is the modern science continued by such avowed followers of Cusa as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler. This notion of science is grounded on the general principle, that we know nothing except that which is experimentally validated as a discovery of a universal physical principle.[8]

The branch of physical science called physical economy, addresses the discovery, transmission, and cooperative action of experimentally validated universal physical principles, that to the purpose of increasing man's power within and over nature. My own original contributions to the further development of the science of physical economy, typify the application of Cusa's method of docta ignorantia, as does my praise for certain crucial aspects of the contributions by V.I. Vernadsky, and my adoption of the standpoint of Bernhard Riemann's revolutionary definition of physical geometry.

Within the practice of that branch of physical science, we are often confronted, in actual cases, with the pathological effects caused by the persistence and recurrence of both assumed principles which are false to reality, and of arbitrary practices whose violation of principles causes destructive effects during the medium to long term.

In the present section of this report, I focus upon the axiomatic features of those forms of socio-pathological economic behavior, which are relevant to the root-causes for the presently onrushing, planet-wide financial collapse. As I have already indicated at the outset, my emphasis in this present section, is on the increasingly aberrant mass-behavior of the recent period of approximately thirty-five years, especially U.S. mass behavior. In the later, following sections, I summarize the needed alternative to recent U.S. habits in economics and related practice.

The Children's Games Adults Play

Perhaps most of you may have heard the story, that a goldfish, released into a pond, after months spent swimming in a small bowl, would continue to swim in the same tight circles to which life in the bowl had accustomed that creature. While I am willing to apologize to that goldfish, should he prove to be falsely accused, I shall never be justly compelled to make any apologies for reporting the "goldfish-bowl-like" behavior of many of my fellow-citizens, and of most among our own and other nation's recent choices of elected governments.

Something inside people's minds often causes them to fool themselves into limiting their actions to choices within purely imaginary boundaries. They might say, "I did that because I had no choice," when, in fact, there were no grounds which were both real and rational, for accepting such limitations on their choices of behavior.

During my childhood and youth it was widespread practice to use concrete for sidewalks, frequently with the result that each portion of the sidewalk was separated by a crack from the next. Usually, the concrete developed additional cracks. Sometimes, I observed a fellow walking strangely along such a cracked walkway. Curiosity led me to recognize that the awkward gait of such poor fellows, was often caused by his effort not to step on any of the cracks.[9] Brick sidewalks invited similar behavior. The same kind of behavior was prescribed in certain commonplace children's schoolyard and sidewalk games. There was an "old wive's tale" that matched such plainly neurotic (or, psychotic) behavior: "Step on a crack; break your mother's back!"

In general, there are two kinds of boundaries imposed upon willful human behavior. In one case, the boundary is an efficient physical boundary, which may be fairly described, for that place in time, as existing independently of the individual's, or society's will. In the alternate case, the boundary is not a natural one, but is either purely psychological, or the result of some legal fiction. Sometimes, these psychological boundaries are recognized as examples of neurotic or psychotic behavior; in other cases, the actions may be equally absurd in fact, but, because they occur in the guise of obedience to either political authority, or some popular convention, that society does not usually consider such behavior to be "abnormal" in any general sense of the term, nor as specifically neurotic or psychotic, even when the latter assessment is the only objective one. For example, the belief that society must work within the bounds of what is called "free trade," rather than the American System of political-economy, of Alexander Hamilton, the Careys, and List, is such a delusion.

The mechanism by which such artificial kinds of pathological behavioral values become socially induced forms of irrational behavior, is typified by studies of the manner in which children play and invent games. Among adults, that childish tradition is typified by the kind of purely positive, virtually fascist doctrine of law, as such rules are made up childishly, in such forms as the influence of Carl Schmitt, the architect of the Nazi legal system, or the similar behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

This childish trait may also be exhibited in the classroom, where students have often been conditioned into interpreting the universe according to the conventional classroom definitions, axioms, and postulates of a so-called Euclidean geometry. In such a geometry, as taught at the schoolroom blackboard, so-called conventional forms of arbitrary beliefs rule as axioms, instead of experimentally demonstrated universal physical principles. So, the child may grow up to become that unfortunate adult, who claims to "know" only the traditions which "my parents and schools have taught me."

The same childish trait also occurs in the stubborn declaration, "I believe only what my senses tell me," by the poor fish who insists that the universe outside his aquarium is the pictures which a child had pasted on the exterior surface of that aquarium, or the poor couch potato who believes that the world at large is what is told and shown to him by his Orwellian television set. Such are examples of the ways for substituting the methods of childish games for conceptions of the real universe.

Given the evidence, that not only individual persons, but even entire societies fool themselves in such ways, how could you, confined within the skin on which your living existence depends, distinguish what is real about objects existing outside your skin, from the objects of a fantasy-world?

Begin with the case of the person who is deluded by the assumption that, "What is real, is what my senses tell me." What are that person's senses, that he should rely upon them in that way? Should we, perhaps, recognize as behind such truculent utterances, a fearful note of hysteria, the plaint of what one famous American described, autobiographically, as "a life of quiet desperation"?

Ask yourself, "What are our senses?" These faculties of sight, hearing, touch, and smell, are what are fairly described as sources of impulses ostensibly transmitted to the brain by what we call sense-organs. These sense-organs are, in turn, living tissue, tissues secreted by the elaboration of our bodies, tissues, some of which are part of the brain itself, which transform their sensations into what becomes the input sent into the brain.

What is sent to the brain, is the sense-organ's reaction to a stimulus, not that which prompted the stimulus. There is nothing in the sensation itself, or in the "message" it transmits to the brain, which is a truly objective representation of the event to which the sense-organ has reacted. Our sensations may usually reflect events which have actually occurred outside our skins, but there is nothing in the perceptions associated with those sensations, which is, functionally, an actual replica of the experienced events.

You would therefore be badly, even tragically mistaken, if you simply assumed that reality is primarily what you consider the experience of your senses. The experience may be real, but the implied outside agency might not have existed; even if the outside stimulus had existed, you had no evidence from sense-perception as such, from which to conclude, that that which occurred outside your skin, was "objectively" in the form your brain interprets its sense-experiences as such. Therefore, those who actually know much of anything about such matters, have rejected the childish superstition, that "seeing is believing."

The Universe as We Know It

The greatest philosopher of European civilization, and founder of its scientific method, Plato, compared such sense-experiences to shadows on the irregular surface of the wall of a dimly firelit cave. Unless the sense-organs have made a mistake—which they sometimes do, the shadow you call experience is the shadow of something which has, functionally, real existence; but, that perception is not the same thing as the reality which has caused the shadow to appear to your senses. As modern microphysics illustrates this point, perhaps most forcefully, the challenge is to discover what caused that shadow to appear to your senses.[10]

There are characteristics of the healthy form of those cognitive processes we attribute to the human brain, which prompt us to assess it as a most remarkable living organ. The point is to know what it is that that organ actually does, not to credit it with all kinds of things it does not, and could not do.

Therefore, the first question is: What do we mean by the word "to know"? The second, follow-up question, is: "What is it possible to know, and how?"

In the case of the mythical goldfish, the assumption has been made, that the goldfish learns to behave in conformity with what behaviorists call a "conditioned reflex." It is assumed, that repeated experience, such as bumping against walls, "teaches" the goldfish to move within certain ranges equivalent to those of the repeatedly experienced boundaries.

The behaviorist argument is a copy of the argument made by the Eighteenth-Century, pro-satanic ideologue, Bernard Mandeville,[11] the argument adopted by Friedrich von Hayek's and Professor Milton Friedman's Mont Pelerin Society.[12] The same assumption was made on behalf of feudalism by Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay, and Quesnay's wild-eyed laissez-faire argument was copied by Lord Shelburne's lackey Adam Smith. Among disordered minds such as those of Mandeville, Quesnay, and Smith, like the notorious Bogomil (Cathar) cult before them, the belief prevails, that, under the statistical floorboards of the empiricist's universe, there dwell invisible little green men, known to some as "the Invisible Hand."[13] This "invisible hand," is the pagan god the "free trade" devotees actually worship and service, which, according to them, tilts the roulette-wheel of fate, to cause some men to become rich, and others ruined.

The empiricist, in his role as a behaviorist, assumes, as Kant did, that the choices of "conditioned reflex" determined by large numbers of either percussive, or percussive-like, billiard-table-like impacts, determine statistical phenomena which they regard as substitutes for ideas. Kant's notion of "negation of the negation," fairly summarizes the empiricist view on this matter. Charlatans akin to Kant, term the kind of behavior producing such fictitious constructs, as a hedonistic quality of "human nature."[14] Similarly, such charlatans argue, and superstitious people often believe, contrary to Louis Pasteur, for example, not only that human intelligence can be replicated by non-living, computer-like machines, but that life itself must have originated in a molecular biology of non-living material.

If, as I have just insisted, sense-perception is not knowledge of the real world, then, what is? Why do I recognize Plato as the first known elaborator of that quality of scientific method we should associate with the work of Nicholas of Cusa, and such followers of Cusa as Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried Leibniz? Let us start with the word "universe." What should we mean when we use that word? Since no one has ever seen, heard, touched, or smelled an actual universe, what, first of all, is the object which corresponds to a non-silly use of that name, and, second, how do we know that object to exist?

The literate use of the terms "universal" and "universe," signify the notion of "everywhere," or, in other words, "in all cases." Therefore, the sane use of those terms could never mean a single object of sense-perception, or a mere collection of such objects. It means a principle of action which is efficient everywhere; the term universal physical principle is paradigmatic. Thus, the only sane choice of referent for the word universe, is the notion of the existence of an open-ended, coherent collection of efficiently interacting universal physical principles.

This notion of a universe incorporates what Carl Gauss's greatest student, Bernhard Riemann, defines as a multiply-connected manifold. Riemann's famous habilitation dissertation of 1854, is the first explicit statement of a general principle of physical geometry, to replace every variety of Euclidean and other "at-the-blackboard" variety of abstract geometry. Riemann's use of "multiply-connected manifold" and "hypergeometry," and my own use of the term "physical geometry,"[15] are cases of different terms which signify the same thing. The history of the scientific method leading axiomatically into Riemann's discovery, is inseparable from both Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation, and Leibniz's related, and uniquely original discovery of the calculus.[16]

Those notions neither include, nor tolerate the idea that something exists outside the universe so defined. In any sane society, "little green men under the floorboards," and "invisible hands," are strictly confined to the psychiatric wards.

The next question is: How could we know a definite such, actual universe to exist? What is the nature of that remarkable object?[17]

Your Children Must Study Geometry

Since the seminal work of Plato, as, for example, in his Timaeus dialogue, the most effective, most direct approach to today's discussion of the notion of universality, requires us to introduce a crucial technical point.

The most efficient approach to the question just posed, emphasizes the contrast between so-called Euclidean geometry and what Leibniz's follower, and Gauss's teacher, Abraham Kästner, defined as anti-Euclidean geometry. The meaning of "anti-Euclidean" geometry, as distinct from "non-Euclidean," becomes clear though the continued development of Leibniz's notion of physical geometry. The notion of an anti-Euclidean geometry, as developed after Kästner, by such notable figures as Gauss, Lejeune Dirichlet, and Bernhard Riemann, is a result of that still ongoing progress.[18] I emphasize, in contradiction to much classroom and textbook error on this subject, that the distinction between the two terms, "anti-Euclidean geometry" and "non-Euclidean geometry," is not a mere difference in terminology; there is a fundamental matter of physical-scientific method at issue.

What globally extended modern European civilization named "Euclidean geometry," came into existence as a review of the earlier development of geometry, including, among its most crucial elements, the contributions of Plato and his Academy.[19] Reference to the pre-"new math" version of widely accepted classroom geometry, suffices as a choice of reference for the purpose of our discussion here. Begin with the way in which modern classroom convention, up into the 1950s, often used a Euclidean, quasi-Cartesian notion of space and time, as a way of representing what was often claimed to be the way to represent physical universality at the classroom blackboard.

In such classrooms, a Euclidean geometry of what was assumed to be the physical universe, was premised upon induced acceptance of what were called definitions, axioms, and postulates. These consisted of what were usually described as "self-evident truths," and were, in that sense, either arbitrary intuitions, or, as postulates, inserted to resolve certain deductive inconsistencies, or ambiguities in the system of definitions and axioms. It was usually assumed that such postulates not merely perfected the system of definitions and axioms; but, this often implied, for those who held to an extreme view, that the postulates asserted nothing that should not have been understood to inhere, as corollaries, in the set of definitions and axioms itself.

This effort to explain the physical universe from the standpoint of such an essentially fanciful geometry, was understood to be a way of explaining the deductively attributable form of observed relations among those shadow-objects which exist only in the form of sense-perception.[20] During the rise of the Roman Empire, this doctrine came to be associated with the method attributed to the principal writings of Plato's adversary Aristotle, whose works the pagan Romans revived.

Typical of this latter trend, was a notable, deliberate hoax against the previously established competence of Classical Greek science, the hoax which was perpetrated by Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy concocted a system to make astronomy appear to conform to the dogma of Aristotle. The result was a pro-Aristotelean hoax, the so-called geocentric system of epicycles, which came to replace the experimentally grounded solar hypothesis of pre-Roman, Greek science. Ptolemy's hoax continued in authoritative use even after Kepler had conclusively proven that method, including such examples as the method of the empiricist Galileo, to be anti-scientific.[21]

Nonetheless, the Euclidean view of physics, space, and time, has been ironically useful in classroom and related work, up to the present day. Ironically, this usefulness is found chiefly in its devastating fallacies, more or less as the study of diseases produces benefits in knowledge which reach beyond the mere mastery of such diseases themselves. The competent student does not believe that a Euclidean geometry is the standard for mathematical physics; rather, he, or she, wrestles it, seeks out its weaknesses, and thus conquers, and supersedes it.

To recognize why it is urgent to insist on the term anti-Euclidean, it is sufficient to observe the fact, that the customary classroom use of the term non-Euclidean geometry, refers to certain new developments within the bounds of the same method already associated with what modern classroom tradition had recognized as Euclidean geometry. The most famous of these non-Euclidean geometries, are those of Bolyai and Lobatchevsky. These challenge aspects of the system of postulates of what is otherwise the generally accepted classroom view of Euclidean geometry. Therefore, they are rightly termed "non-Euclidean," as distinct from "anti-Euclidean," the latter physical geometries are those which reject the Euclidean axiomatic system, as Riemann did. "Non-Euclidean geometries" have a certain usefulness, but fail to grasp the deeper issues addressed only by an anti-Euclidean geometry.[22]

The Euclidean "ivory tower" model of geometry, is the typical model to be confronted in the mathematics and physics classroom, to show two things. First, to use the method of exposing the kinds of insoluble paradoxes internal to any closed, formal deductive system, to show the absurdity of blind faith in sense-perception. Second, these fallacies, which inhere in any implicitly closed deductive system, provide the most convenient classroom example of the way in which a "goldfish-bowl mentality" causes entire societies to insist on doing obviously stupid and destructive things to themselves, as I expose that problem in this report.

To clarify this important point in this report, it were prudent that I stay with the choice of examples I have used in other published locations, the cases of the way in which the fundamental discoveries of Kepler and Fermat set a comprehensive form of modern mathematical physical science into motion.[23] I explain why I chose those illustrative cases.

By using the term "comprehensive" in that way, we mean "universal," or, as I have said, a "universe." In much of the development of modern physical science, the method by which progress toward the goal of universal conceptions has been achieved, is by challenging pre-existing assumptions, such as those of Euclidean geometry, which had been held up as universal. Challenging the generally accepted classroom definition and use of the Euclidean system, is the most convenient way of attacking the general problem of so-called universal systems, such as systems of popular axiomatic beliefs.

For that purpose, the development of modern experimental physical science, has relied upon Cusa's definition of the Platonic method as a Socratic docta ignorantia. The best way to describe the most successful applications of that method, is to show some important examples of such successes, by describing those cases in terms of what Leibniz identified as "Analysis Situs." The best such examples to be used to introduce this application of Analysis Situs, are those successes based on directly refuting the attempt to explain the universe in terms of devastating paradoxes incurred by the use of Euclidean geometry as a model for mathematical physics. This produces the relevant, added benefit, of illustrating the systemically pathological error of regarding physics as a branch of formal mathematics.

The significance of our use here of two examples from the work of Kepler and Fermat, is that these two sets of discoveries are outstanding successes, in constructing paradoxes which overturn the Euclidean notion of universality; paradoxes of that type have had a vast and deeply embedded impact in leading to much of the most important achievement of modern science.

Kepler's overthrow of the use of the ivory-tower fantasies of Euclidean geometry in the practice of physical science, led him to the original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, and, by this discovery, establish, for the first time, the construction of a comprehensive mathematical physics based upon the notion of an efficient universal physical principle.

He showed that it was incompetent, to attempt to derive the orbit of planets of the Solar System by means of extrapolation premised upon the kinds of calculations inhering in a Euclidean model of geometry. He showed, that to predict both the position and velocity of a planet at some randomly chosen future time, we must introduce the intention represented by a principle entirely outside the Euclidean form of statistical "connect-the-dots" extrapolations, such as the method of extrapolations proposed by Galileo.

Fermat showed, from study of the experimental evidence, that the pathway of refracted light was not determined by a principle of shortest distance, but, rather, of the quickest time. Fermat's theorem was then developed by Christiaan Huyghens, Leibniz, and Jean Bernouilli. The leads supplied by these combined discoveries of Kepler and Fermat, pointed their followers into the development of the notion of a relativistic mathematical physics as provided by Riemann. The case of Fermat's referenced discovery of quickest time, provides the simplest and best illustration of the principle of Analysis Situs.

Given a geometry, such as a Euclidean geometry. Use the geometry as the basis for a mathematics to be used in the practice of physical science. Now, state the results of Fermat's experimental observations of both reflection and refraction of light in that geometry. Introduce to that geometry the assumed dimension of time, with the implicit assumption that light moves fastest across the shortest distance between two points. The result of the attempt to provide a Euclidean sort of mathematical juxtaposition of events adduced from an observation of motion along a quickest path, rather than shortest distance, is a paradox within a physics based upon the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean geometry.

Fermat's "quickest pathway" paradox, is comparable to the paradoxical results upon which Kepler was led to his discovery of universal gravitation. This latter paradox Kepler proved by his more meticulous study of the astronomical observations made variously by both Tycho Brahe and himself, that a mathematical physics designed to be consistent with a Euclidean geometry, or the method of Aristotle, was incurably wrong.

So it went, until Riemann's revolutionary 1854 habilitation dissertation, when Riemann brought the process to a certain conclusion. Since Riemann, no definition, axiom, or postulate has any place in a geometry of physics, except as it is proven, experimentally, to be a universal physical principle.[24] That discovery by Riemann, is also crucial, as I shall show, for understanding the cure for the kind of pathological behavior commonly expressed in everyday decisions on policy in the U.S. today.

That said, now focus attention back on the question from which we started this section of the report: If sense-perception does not show us the actual universe outside our skins, how could we possibly know what lies "out there"?

We have just answered that question, at least in first approximation. By applying Cusa's Platonic method of docta ignorantia to challenge the arbitrary assumptions associated with either sense-perception or sheer fantasy, as Kepler, Fermat, and their followers did, we may discover experimentally validated universal physical principles whose existence and characteristics are known in practice. Those proven principles were named by Plato ideas.

We know such ideas of universal principle, because we are able to demonstrate that we are able to increase mankind's practical power in and over the universe by means of applying such discoveries. Moreover, we are able to do this, as we can not accomplish such resulting increases in potential relative population-density in any other way.

There are five principles by means of which we can know the actual existence of a universe as being contrary to the naive images we associate with sense-perceptions.

1. Any assumed set of principles can be tested experimentally in ways which show that set to be essentially false in some part. Fermat's discovery of a principle of a pathway of quickest time is an example of such a proof.
   
   

2. Such an experimentally based, or functionally equivalent paradox, challenges the cognitive powers of the individual mind to invent a hypothetical universal principle, which, if proven, will either overturn the challenged principle, or will serve as an added principle not to be excluded from consideration in such cases.
   
   

3. The experimental, or functionally equivalent proof for the universal case, transforms the successful hypothesis into a universal physical principle. This is the case for what today's classroom customarily considers physical science; it is also the case for matters pertaining to relations among individual human minds, as typified by experimentally validated universal principles of Classical artistic composition.
   
   

4. In no case, can any proven universal principle be identified as an object of sense-perception.
   
   

5. Universal physical principles are ideas which govern the actual relations among the objects of sense-perception. Sense-perception pertains to the shadows, whereas the principles corresponding to valid hypotheses, are the unseen, experimentally demonstrated, efficient causes of the existence of the behavior among the shadows.

This gives us immediately, two very important results. First, it shows us that sense-perception does not betray us, on the condition that we do not misinterpret the benefit it presents to us. However, we must never forget that the objects of sense-perception are merely the shadows of the reality we are experiencing. Second, that it is by using the principle of paradox, as illustrated by the method of Analysis Situs, we are able to craft a purely mental image of the causes which the patterns of behavior among those shadows merely reflect. We are then, thus enabled to act in ways which change the way in which those shadows behave. It is our success in bringing about willful changes in the behavior of those shadows, which is rightly known as Socratic truthfulness, or, in other words, science.

Microphysics is but one, relatively obvious example, of the willful changes in perceived behavior caused by efficient application of unseeable causes.

Gravitation, For Example

Usually, today's citizen who is "walked through," step by step, even the first crucial phase of Kepler's discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, must find his, or her mind gripped by the sense that he, or she is experiencing the universe in a new way. In his 1605 New Astronomy, where the original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation was first reported in print, the citizen is shown that the orbit of a planet, such as Mars or Earth, can not be determined by projecting a future position of the planet as a statistical projection. It could not be predicted by the methods used by Copernicus, or Brahe, for example. Kepler asked himself, what is the intention which governs the regular orbit of the planet.

Consider only the simplest aspects of Kepler's discovery on that point. Beginning from study of the observation of the orbit of Mars, Kepler determined that the orbit described an ellipse, not a circle, and that the Sun was located at one of the two focal points of that ellipse. Then, by measuring the rate of change of the angle the planet moved in its orbit, Kepler determined that the planet swept out equal areas of its elliptical orbit in equal time.

Halt at that point, and consider what this series of observations says about the way people think about what they consider objects moving within their perception of the world around themselves. Consider the angular motion of the planet along its orbit. In this case, that means observing Mars, from a fixed point on a rotating Earth, an Earth which is orbitting the Sun, as is Mars.

At this point, the citizen should draw a map of the region of the Solar System including the Sun, Earth, and Mars. The citizen should think about both the orbitting and rotating motion of Earth and Mars, relative to the Sun. Forget the simplistic, textbook explanations. Then, crucial details of Kepler's method of work are forced to our attention.

Remember, that the evidence proving Kepler's system, in opposition to the methods of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, is evidence based upon the sense-perceptions of the successive positions of those Solar bodies. These are the shadows on the irregular surface of the wall of a dimly lit cave. Kepler's principle defines the observed change of position of the planet; the methods he rejects do not. Therefore, the method he uses is proven experimentally, while the method used by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo is proven incompetent.

In other words, the difference between the Platonic method of Kepler and the Aristotelean method of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, is that Kepler's method exposes the way in which changes in the sense-perceptual positions of the planets occur, whereas the Aristotelean and empiricist methods do not. The difference is, that the failed methods each and all rely upon the assumption that what is real is what is perceived; whereas, the scientific method, as typified by the discoveries of Kepler, defines the certainty of the unseen principles which cause the observable changes in the shadows called sense-perception. The practice of microphysics illustrates the point quite nicely.

How might we know something which we can not observe directly with the senses? How can we know a principle in an efficient way?

We define a paradox in the form of Analysis Situs, by applying what is assumed to be a universal mathematical physics (for example) to evidence which is valid in terms of that supposed universal system. In the case, that the deductive application of that system shows that a pair of pieces of evidence, each equally valid by the standards of experiment used for that system, produce statements which are mutually contradictory in the terms of that system. Fermat's case is typical.

Since the system applied assumes itself, implicitly, to be universally efficient in what is assumed to be the real universe, such a paradox is called an ontological paradox, a paradox in the conception of the nature of the elementary existence of universal substance. The solution to such a paradox must be either, the deletion of some false principle or principles of the system, the addition of one or more validated principles, or a combination of both corrections. Focus on the case in which a single correction of principle is required. How is that solution to the paradox to be discovered?

I have described that process in numerous earlier published locations.[25] Briefly, the discovery is generated within the sovereign cognitive processes of the mind of the individual discoverer. These processes are opaque to observers; they are processes which can not be observed as subjects of sense-perception.

However, the experience of such a discovery of principle in the mind of one person, can be re-enacted within the mind of another. By sharing the paradox which the proposed principle (called an hypothesis) solves, and the experimental demonstration of that principle, two minds can come into agreement on the essential features of the act of discovery replicated in both minds.

As I have emphasized in earlier locations, just so do the sovereign cognitive processes in the mind of a student today re-experience the same act of discovery which prompted Archimedes to shout "Eureka!" more than 2,200 years ago: all competent methods of education, are based upon that method of inducing re-enactments of validated original acts of discovery of universal principles. These are what are known as Classical humanist methods of education.

Study of Kepler's writings, shows us today that that Classical humanist method of education, the method of docta ignorantia, was the basis for the practice of Kepler, as for Leibniz, and so on.

If those methods of education had been used in U.S. public schools and higher education, during recent decades, and if those methods had supplied the standards for defining competence for responsible positions of influence in public and private occupations generally, the U.S.A. could never have drifted into the terrible mess it is in today.

Today, competently educated people know, that the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean geometry are false principles, disastrously so when they are applied to physical science. However, the special importance of those false principles, lies in the fact, that the Euclidean standpoint presumes itself to be a representation of our universe; therefore, every principle which is proven by refuting the falseness of a Euclidean assumption, represents a step forward by human reason, toward increased potential for human mastery of our universe, with the aim of indefinitely increasing potential relative population-density of the human species. It is a step of progress away from those pathological systems of belief which tend to ruin, or even destroy, nations and cultures. It is freeing one's mind from life in a self-imposed goldfish bowl.

2. Science and Society

In the preceding section, we have considered the nature of those pathologies of belief and behavior associated with ideas about mathematical physics. We included emphasis upon the dangers risked in the use of Euclidean geometry as a model of universality, for controlling man's intended actions upon the world around us. We identified a contrasted, healthy form of universal physical system of axiomatic assumptions (principles), as a multiply-connected manifold of a Riemannian type.

In this present section, we focus on the pathologies of a second quality of such a multiply-connected manifold. Our attention is now focussed upon the axiom-like assumptions about society, which underlie the way in which specific individuals and groups form those decisions which they attempt to impose on both society and the surrounding parts of the universe.

With the addition of this present section, we shall be able to explore directly those pathologies we associated with the image of the fish in a pond who imagines he is swimming in a goldfish bowl.

We must take individual belief into account; but, our emphasis here is upon economic, political, and other social behavior, of both nations and large groups within and among nations. Our emphasis is upon nations and groups whose net behavior (its so-called "cultural paradigm") tends to conform to the axiomatic implications of some specific set of such assumptions. These are assumptions which define the behavior of one group as either specifically distinct from that of other groups, or approximately so.

I illustrate what I mean by such distinctions among specific types of social paradigms.

Typical are the qualitative differences in behavioral impulses between two large groups in the U.S.A. One is the tradition of a science-driven agro-industrial society organized in a way which at least approximates U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's description of the anti-British, American System of political-economy. The chief opponents of that American System within the U.S.A., opponents whom President Franklin Roosevelt identified as "the American Tories," are those who, like both the Ku Klux Klanners and the notorious "Nashville Agrarians,"[26] share the pro-British tradition of the Confederacy.[27]

This legacy of two conflicting paradigms, is the underlying cultural issue of the conflict reflected in an attempted political coup against even the last remnants of the American System, by what is regarded as the "radical right" political base of President George W. Bush, Senator Trent Lott, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. This is the now widely recognized conflict which exploded into the public political arena, with Senator Jim Jeffords' announcement of his break with the Republican Party of Mississippi's Senator Trent Lott.

Think about that example of two essentially distinct differences in culture, as typified by the U.S. Civil War and its legacies. Use your knowledge of both of those clinical, social types, then and now, to identify axiomatic qualities of belief which you are able to recognize as underlying the most typical differences in behavior between these two types.[28] Use that case as a model of reference, for my treatment of the subject of cultures, or sub-cultures, which we must regard as mutually exclusive types, when we apply the same standard of species-distinction among axiomatically different geometries.[29]

That said, I begin with a crucial topic, one with which some of you may be familiar from my earlier published works, but others will be meeting this principle of scientific method for the first time.

You and Society and the Universe

As I shall illustrate that point within the following pages, the most important concept in all science, is the principle underlying the notion of the perfect sovereignty of the cognitive processes of the individual human mind. As I have already emphasized, in the preceding section, those are: cognitive processes by which an individual mind discovers a principle which solves an ontological paradox, a noëtic process which can not be observed in action by the senses of any other person. That is what I identified, in the preceding section, as the principle of Classical humanist education. One individual's act of discovery can be known by another person, but only if the second person undergoes his, or her own, sovereign individual act, of re-enacting the discovery and its experimental validation.

This principle of sovereignty has still deeper underlying implications, implications which, if understood, define the method for solving the kinds of mass pathology which have been pushing the U.S. to the present brink of ruin, over the course of the recent thirty-odd years. To situate those deeper implications, we must return attention, for a moment, to the subject of physical economy.

If we accept a rational meaning for the word "economy," that word implies the development of methods by means of which we increase the potential relative population-density of a society, or of humanity as a whole. By "rational meaning for the word `economy,' " we signify a notion of a lawful function, as determined by some multiply-connected set of universal principles. Then, we are speaking of a form of organized physical action, by means of which the individual acts to express mankind's increased power to exist, in and over the universe, as measured per capita and per-square kilometer of relevant surface-area. These functionally defined forms of organized physical action, are bundles of interacting universal physical principles, combinations of principles also expressed as the technologies which those discovered principles subsume. All increments in the power of the human species to exist, depend upon the socially determined result of the discovery and application of such principles and their subsumed technologies.

In that degree, those actions express the sovereign cognitive development of the individual person. However, the paradox is: society is not a collection of individuals; the individual is a product of a process which is called society. From the standpoint of what is customarily called physical science and technology, it is the transmission, to the present, of the discoveries which were made as far distant as millennia or even longer in the past, which produces the developed individual intellect in the student and others today. The ability of society as such to use a discovered principle effectively, depends upon the re-enactment of that discovery in the minds of others, even very many others. That is the social process within which the existence of the individual is defined.

Hence, the decisive role of a universal Classical humanist mode of education, in fostering the physical-economic productivity of the labor-force as a whole. The content of the transmission of those ideas rightly defined as universal physical principles, depends upon the faculty of cognition in both the person who prompts the discovery of a principle in the mind of the other, and the function of those sovereign cognitive processes on which the other depends for his, or her ability to re-enact that discovery. Without that medium of transmission of discoveries of universal physical principle, the medium of cognitive creation, neither the discovery, nor its actual transmission were possible.

Thus, in that way, the perfect sovereignty of the individual personality persists, but efficient communication of cognitive thought occurs as a functionally efficient coupling without breaching that sovereignty. The larger process expressed by such modes of cognitive communication, is the foundation of the social process upon which civilized forms of cultures and societies depend.

This is a uniquely human quality of function. Excepting the human species, no living species has the power of cognition expressed by the original discovery of an experimentally proven-to-be universal physical principle. No other species has the power to discover and transmit a universal physical principle; no other species has the ability to increase its species' potential relative population-density by an act of individual free will. Man is, as Genesis 1 insists, a very special creature.

There is nothing magical about the power of the individual mind to generate valid discoveries of universal physical principles. For example, the collection of the dialogues of Plato, if acted as Classical actors would act a play, is a complete course of the comprehensive, preliminary training of the adolescent and adult mind, both to think cognitively, and to transmit such valid discoveries of principle to others.[30] This is the most natural method imaginable; it is the natural expression of human nature, both perfectly sovereign individual human nature, and the nature of humanity as an historical, social process. This principle of cognition, in and of itself, sets man, as a species, apart from, and above all other species. This cognitive link, not only among contemporary persons, but of the present to both the future and the past, defines the only meaningful use of the term "history," the only competent method for study of history, and the only competent basis for defining those universal principles of historical method which should govern all aspects of statecraft.

From the study of the human social process in this way, we are confronted with certain principles, which are universal principles in the same sense as those we associate with a universalized mathematical physics. This second set of principles, is the topic emphasized in the present section of this report. However, this emphasis is made without generating any functional separation between such principles of historically situated cognitive processes, and the multiply-connected manifold of universal principles we associate with the physical universe in which we exist, and upon which we act.

It is from this standpoint, that we must judge societies and cultures, as such, as either sane, or not.

Principles of History

As I shall now show you, it is important to recognize the three crucial features of the moral superiority of Plato's dialogues over the Classical tragedies. Once the reader has recognized those dialogues as a form of Classical drama, my argument on this point becomes clear.

The first two of the three words which identify this absolute quality of moral superiority of those dialogues, are, in English, the sublime, and, in the New Testament Greek, as also in Plato's dialogue, agape. The sublime and agape are congruent conceptions, but have slightly different forms of application; they are distinctly different facets of one and the same gem. Plato uses the term agape to signify a quality of justice, which he contrasts, through the mouth of Socrates, to the opposing principles of the characters Thrasymachus and Glaucon.[31] This Socratic principle of justice, called agape, is inseparable from the principle identified by a third word, truthfulness, the notion of the existence of cognitively discoverable truth. Such a notion of agapic truthfulness, defines an absolutely higher authority than any government, than any court, than any tradition, than absolutely anyone's mere opinion. It is the basis for what is rightly called natural law.

It is important, for understanding how to overcome the pathologies of U.S. popular behavior today, to see the equivalence of this notion of agape to the notion of the sublime, and the coherence of both with the principle of the obligation of us all, to be governed by a cognitively knowable standard of truthfulness. This use of "cognitively knowable truthfulness," ought to be recognized as nothing other than the only proper definition of "reason."

The simplest way to explain this most crucial point of statecraft, is to identify the nature of Plato's view of the moral failures of the Classical tragedians who preceded him.

All great Classical tragedies, including those of Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, are focussed upon the same problem which I identified by reference to the goldfish-bowl syndrome in the U.S.A. today. In the typical Classical tragedy of the tradition of Sophocles and Aeschylus, there is a potentially fatal, self-inflicted flaw in the culture, the flaw which is the subject of the drama. This flaw is represented by a leading figure, or figures, figures in the position of authority to make the changes in policy by which the tragedy is averted, but who, because the figure, or group of those figures, shares the fatal cultural flaw of the nation, he, or she fails to take the possible action by means of which the national disaster could have been averted.

Do not be deceived by foolish commentators on such plays, by moralizing critics and others who, through ignorance or malice, trivialize great artistic works, by demanding that you focus upon some alleged symbolic meaning, or the alleged "character flaw" of the leading character of a drama.[32]

All Classical tragedy deserving of the name of art, is historically specific. The drama is situated truthfully either within a real-life time and place in history, or in relative historical specificity of some legend, such as the Homeric epics. The flaw which defines the tragedy, is historically specific, and can not be attributed to times and places other than that. The characteristics of the leading characters of a Classical tragedy are specific to that setting; therefore, they can not be freely transported to different historical settings.

The foolish commentators attempt to project an essentially symbolic significance to the characteristics they claim to recognize in the relevant characters of the play. In respect to Classical drama, they would mislead you into overlooking the fact, that the essential flaw is that of the culture, in which that character is in a leading position to avert the plunge into national disaster, but fails to do so. He fails because he, or she capitulates to the influence of the historical specificity of the tragic culture in which he is situated. Just so, has the putative leadership of the U.S.A. failed, during the specific interval of the recent thirty-five-odd years.

Thus, in Schiller's Don Carlos, all of the characters but the French-born queen are terribly flawed, and represent the same moral decadence of that Sixteenth-Century, post-Isabella I Spain of the Inquisition, which Miguel Cervantes addresses by his use of the fictional figures of Don Quixote (the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy of the Carlist tradition) and Sancho Panza (a people corrupted into virtual stupidity by their hedonistic impulses). In Don Carlos, the queen serves as a figure, situated such that she, although queen, lacks the official authority to compel a change in the other principal characters, but who sees the tragedy. The assessment of Spain in that play conforms to the actual period of history to which the drama refers, just as Cervantes' Don Quixote addresses the same tragic quality of that nation during that same specific period of its history addressed by Schiller.

The same is true in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is not some eccentric personal character flaw of Hamlet which is tragic; Hamlet's "flaw" is that he is typical of the whole pack of ruling institutions and circles of that kingdom. The character flaw is that of the kingdom, as the contrasted declarations of the characters Fortinbras and Horatio point toward the persistence of a folly, which continues to live in that condition of the Danish nation after the death of Hamlet removes him from the situation. The same folly which had taken over the nation prior to the opening scene of the play, continues to prevail after Hamlet's role has ended. That nation's problem is not Hamlet; Hamlet's problem is that he reflects the character of that nation, in that implied historically specific time and place.

Sometimes, the apparent exception proves the rule. Under pressure from the censor, Giuseppe Verdi transports the actual historical setting of one of his plays, Un Ballo in Maschera, from the drama's historically actual location, Sweden, to Massachusetts. The censor's intervention thus weakens the resulting alteration of the opera. Despite that drawback, the authority of the opera as a Classical tragedy, lies in its historical specificity governing the composer's intention in crafting that composition, and is preserved in that fashion.[33]

Up to a point, learning from such Classical tragedy, and other valid expressions of Classical artistic composition, continues to be an integral part of the qualifications for the practice of statecraft, or writing of accounts of history. The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, for example, are indispensable requirements for the practice of law and other crucial elements of statecraft today; but, as it is said, "they left room for improvement." Plato, and Friedrich Schiller later, focussed attention upon the needed improvement.

Contrast such tragedy by Sophocles, Aeschylus, et al., with Schiller's notion of the sublime, as expressed in both real history and drama, alike, in that case of Joan of Arc which I have treated in an earlier location.

Joan is no tragic figure; exactly the contrary. In real life, and in Schiller's drama, she is a girl inspired to save the nation and people of France from Plantagenet (Anjou) predators,[34] by persuading her foolish king to become a real king. For that, in real life, as in the play, she is butchered by the corrupt Inquisition; but, she changes history, both by her effect on the processes leading into the mid-Fifteenth-Century Council of Florence, and making possible the establishment of the first sovereign nation-state, Louis XI's France, based on the principle of the general welfare. She gave her life to achieve a noble purpose for mankind; she was no tragic figure. She spent her life in a way which achieved a great fulfillment of her having lived. That is sublime.

We should not wish to be burned alive by the Inquisition, as she was, nor devoured by lions in Nero's arena, nor crucified for Christ's sake. Yet, that aside, it were the true purpose of any mortal human life, that it be lived as sublime, as Joan's was. We are going to die anyway; therefore, wisdom lies in choosing the way one spends the talent given to you, your mortal life. Choose the mission which is your part to play, for the benefit your living might contribute to your nation, and for historical humanity as a whole. Be as you were an angel. That is the sublime definition of the good individual person, and of the good nation. That is the quality of agape.

In the drama which supersedes the tragic principle by the sublime, the gripping tension of the well-performed Classical tragedy, is continued, and, as in the case of Joan, the crucial figure may suffer a brutal end. The difference is, that, as in Joan's case, in her actually heroic life, and in that same heroine's life and actions on stage, are not a waste.

Yet, as Schiller demonstrates this case, what may be called the mechanism of the composition of all great Classical tragedy, is retained. The situation presented has many of the same features; there is the threat of a tragic outcome. However, this time, the central figure does not fail to offset the tragic outcome, but is willing and able to accomplish this at whatever price the hero must pay to bring about this sublime result.

See the contrast between the Classical tragedies of Greece and Plato's dialogues, in that light.

Express that same principle, of the distinction between the merely tragic and the sublime, in another way. This time, I strike closer to home. Consider the following question: Why is what is called morality, especially thunderously Bible-belting morality, often the enemy of the good?

If it is moral, not to kill, nor steal, nor lie, for example, does seemingly perfect observation of those rules, that repertoire of "single issues," make one good? Take the case of a publicly avowed admirer of the racist legacy of the Confederacy, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft; accept, provisionally, the claim of his supporters, that he does not intend to violate the Ten Commandments, even when he kills. Overlook, if only for a moment, his repeated lying sophistries. Is he to be assessed as "a good man," simply because his duped admirers consider him as wielding "a banner of Christian morality"? Absolutely not! Anyone who does not serve the principle, that all men and women are made equally in the image of the Creator, is no Christian! When you defame the image of man, as all racists do, you defame the image of God. "Hypocrite" were too gentle an epithet, in Ashcroft's case.

It is necessary to guide children, so that they do not step off cliffs, or into the front of oncoming automobiles, and so on. It is necessary to advise young persons similarly, for their own good, during that perilous journey near the outskirts of insanity, called adolescence. If it is also necessary to housebreak and train pet cats and dogs, that should not be used as a pretext for degrading morality to the form of do's and don't's for household pets, or for persons whom you attempt to degrade to the status of trained human cattle. Put to one side, for a moment, the fact that Ashcroft is not exactly housebroken, even by four-footed standards for morality; were he less a hypocrite, that would still not qualify him as "a good person."

The problem is, that he is not a person of good intentions. Obeying a set of rules, or merely seeming to adhere to such rules, does not define a good person. All the single-issue prescriptions which might be imagined, provide no test of goodness. As it was said of Adolf Hitler, Satan never lowers himself to commit little sins; he saves his energy for the really big ones. He leaves the practice of lesser sins to little people.

Take, for example, the bi-polar, strictly church-going Bible-belter, who belts his wife and children religiously, at whim, on Saturday night, and then weeps over the bruises and broken bones he has successfully inflicted, even while he pontificates, "I'm sorry, but you made me do it." On Sunday, we find his sanctimonious self sitting upright, posing as a paragon of smug rectitude, in church.

Contrary to the enormous number of such and comparable cases, the fact remains, that man is naturally good. That spark of goodness is already in the newborn child, but it awaits development through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, into what should become true adulthood, approximately a quarter-century later. How could man fail, as he usually does, somewhere along the road between birth and biological maturity? Or, to restate that question, why does the individual fail, so awfully often, to reach the moral maturity which was his or her potential at birth?

Virtually all of us have come to understand, somewhere along the way between infancy and adulthood, that, as each of us is born, each of us will die, and that rather sooner than later. This fact should prompt any reasonably sane and intelligent individual to ask himself, "What, then, will have been the meaning of my having lived?"

In a famous fable, a monk asks a youthful woman to look into a mirror, and think of her aging and mortality. She accepts the monk's observation, and makes her decision accordingly, seeking pleasures while she might. The existentialist sees himself as Hannah Arendt's friend, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, did, as the individual "thrown into life in society," into a realm in which that individual not merely denies, but defies the existence of truth. The notion that life in society has some social purpose, some mission, is denied. Or, like the woman of the fable, she seeks a substitute for immortality in sensual diversions which die like Autumn leaves.

Heidegger, like his beloved Friedrich Nietzsche, and like his follower Jean-Paul Sartre, typify immorality in the extreme. Yet, it is the ugly reality of today's U.S. life, for example, that the individual who is asked to identify his or her self-interest, has tended, more and more over the recent decades, to locate self-interest in terms of "immediate self-interest" within a world ruled by pleasure and pain. In other words, such unfortunate people seek reality within the shadow-world of sense-perception, and they themselves thus come and go as shadows do. They seek in shadows, an identity which has no substance, and, so, if they succeed in that attempt, when they have passed, they leave nothing of real moral substance behind.

At the best, most of our citizens of earlier generations, defined their interest in the future prospects for their children and grandchildren, and defined their reciprocal relations to their own parents' and those of their parents' generation, accordingly. Willingness to put one's life at risk, whether in war, for the sake of the future, or simply to act for the good when that challenge is set before you, typify those symptoms of goodness many of my generation had come to expect of one another. Yet, that is not enough to make a society, or a religious body a moral one.

Try to answer my question from the standpoint of what I have described as the implications of the Classical humanist method in education. If we are decently educated and experienced, who are we, really? If our relation to the past is defined in terms of our re-enacting the original discoveries of principle, by persons from earlier generations, even millennia earlier, we know that we embody that re-enacted experience from their lives within ourselves. If the re-experiencing of such creative moments in science and Classical artistic composition, is the core of our educational development, then our intimate relationship with the sovereign cognitive processes of persons long deceased, defines our moral sense of conscience.

So, a child thinks of a departed grandparent looking down upon, smiling, from somewhere beyond. That is a simple expression of the essence of goodness. It is a sense of the sublime, a sense that the quality of the sublime is the essence of true beauty in art, and in life.

Thus, on the basis of the points which I have just developed here, there are two leading clues to the stubbornness with which the goldfish-bowl syndrome persists in, for example, the U.S. population today. First, the individual's lack of the benefits of a Classical humanist policy in education. Secondly, the specific effects of social pressures associated with the dominant role of an anti-cognitive world-outlook in the institutions which have the relatively greatest impact on the daily social experiences of the individual. We shall examine these factors and their implications for the U.S. population of my lifetime.

The Cognitive Identity

As Jesus Christ establishes what theologians call a New Dispensation for all mankind, obedience to easily understood rules, might prevent bad incidents from occurring, but adherence to such rules will never qualify a person as good. Goodness lies in a higher place, within the realm of the sovereign quality of the human individual's cognitive potential. Goodness is not a quality of isolated actions, or mere patterns of such actions. As I Corinthians 13 defines goodness, it is expressed as the quality of agape. It is expressed, so, as an efficient form of intention, as Kepler employs the notion of intention in his New Astronomy.

An efficient good intention, is a commitment to actions which are both agapic in impulse, and which are aimed toward the sublime. How do we make that notion concrete for the practice of and among nations?

If it is immoral to suggest that positive law, or equivalent prescriptions, might be apotheosized as a standard of goodness, how must a nation define the standard by which its actions, and its character, may be good, or not? On what authority, do we have the right to say that the Presidencies of Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, Nixon, Carter, and the "Emperor" Bush I, were morally bad, as they were in fact, and those of such as Monroe, Quincy Adams, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were more or less good? How shall we express the notion of goodness as an efficient form of intention, as the basis for defining the kinds of pathologies expressed by the goldfish-bowl syndrome?

Weighing a few examples will help to clarify that question.

It is good, to intend that one's living shall be a blessing to one's grandchildren, to the community, to the nation, and to the betterment of the world in which we live. However, putting to one side momentous acts of heroism, the highest choice of profession is that of a philosopher-scientist such as Plato, to be one of the Apostles of Christ, a prolific master of Classical artistic composition, such as Johann Sebastian Bach, or a prolific universal scientific mind, such as Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann.

Next to such great artists and scientists, are those great teachers and physicians, either famous or relatively obscure, who, day by day, brought young minds to re-enact the discovery of many of the most precious principles of scientific and artistic composition, or, as physicians, maintained the continuity of the development and practice of care for the health of the people. Whether famous, or little known, each of these figures is a world-historical personality in fact.

Each of these are implicitly world-historical personalities, because of, first of all, the subject-matter of their professional intention is universal. Since it is a profession rooted in the transmission of knowledge of principles, deep into the past, and far into the future, it is historical as well as universal.

By virtue of their profession, all such persons reach toward the sublime. Such world-historical personalities have thus achieved a somewhat greater or lesser degree of efficient personal, cognitive sovereignty.

From such examples, we should recognize the manner in which the quality of goodness is typically expressed within society.

The true self-interest of each persons, is his or her personal identity, as that is located primarily in the cognitive process of history as a whole. Consider that true self-interest against the contrasting relative moral decay I have witnessed among members of my own, World War II generation.

President Franklin Roosevelt had lifted a nation up out of the decadent pessimism of the Coolidge legacy. His death suddenly took away the guidon planted upon the hill, around which so many had rallied to the mighty effort of the Roosevelt Presidency's years. The shock which struck most returning veterans, can be compared to the demoralizing effects, in the history of modern Germany, of the successive experiences of the 1789-1794 Jacobin Terror, Bonaparte's emergence as the model for all fascist governments after his imperial rule, the Congress of Vienna, and the Metternichean Carlsbad Decrees.

In my own experience, the most typical expression of moral decadence erupting among returning young veterans, showed itself in the way in which U.S. mass higher education proceeded during the post-war decades. Most among these fellows were in such a hurry to get their sheepskin, that they rarely stopped to actually think. Granted, the universities were bad and becoming worse on this account, but, generally, the majority among the students were no better, or were even much more corrupted.

For example, consider the case of the place of Kepler in the curriculum of our leading universities during the 1946-2001 interval. The evidence of Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation, among many other things, is, objectively, one of the best-documented facts in the record of scientific discovery, especially when re-examined from the standpoint of the related work of Carl Gauss.

Anyone who had not swallowed a textbook, but had actually investigated the mass of factual evidence showing how the discovery of a principle of universal gravitation actually occurred, or, similarly, investigated the ample evidence detailing how Leibniz originated the existence of the calculus in response to Kepler's discovery, would not defend the Isaac Newton myth against the reality of the work of a Kepler or Leibniz.

Among the majority of those students, while as students and later, they, instead of knowing what they were talking about, became parroters of that Newton myth, which they had swallowed whole, as a condition for passing the course. They parrotted the formulas in a way which, in fact, increased my appreciation of mynah birds, while smiling smugly to one another in mutual admiration of their common folly. They would be very proud of themselves for having done such things as that. I know; I was part of that generation.

Such students may have acquired certain useful kinds of professional competencies, but, they, of course, knew virtually nothing of that portion of their education which they had merely learned. What they had merely learned, occupied more and more of their claims to knowledge, as the decay of our educational institutions has continued over the decades to date, all the way down. Chiefly, in their education, they had failed to re-enact the relevant original act of discovery. They had not experienced the essential elements of the cognitive history of science.

Then, after slightly more than a decade of the post-war years had passed, came "programmed learning," "the new math," and, in the course of time, "looking it up on the Internet." Amidst this, the teacher's function was subverted by the Orwellian social worker who controls more and more of the schools' functions, and the students' minds, today.[35] How could there be meaningful education, when the schools and their pupils are regimented by such controllers, all done according to the pro-satanic dogma of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the dogma, that there is no truth, but only opinion?

There was a nasty complement within the sort of behavior I observed among members of my own generation. This involved my encounters among the ranks of engineering students. These offenders, more or less a majority, despised "liberal arts." Granted, much of the university liberal arts instruction was bad in its own way; sometimes, it was even worse than the effect of the drill-and-grill methods used by the all-too-typical engineering faculty. The typical engineering student's expressed opinions concerning political-economy, for example, were about as intellectual as a Ku Klux Klan rally. Speak of a bowl of pottage? Many of such ambitious engineering graduates would have sold their soul for a piece of sheepskin.

To estimate how scientific such engineering students were, take the case of a typical reaction to the teaching of economics. Most university graduates were taught to believe, as Karl Marx was, that modern economy first appeared under the British monarchy, and that Bernard Mandeville and the British East India Company's Haileybury School of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, et al., were the founders of political-economy.

In fact, any responsible study of available sources, would have shown any honest student, that modern economy was born in Fifteenth-Century Italy, whence it was established in Louis XI's France, and then copied in England under Henry VII.[36] It was developed as the mercantile school of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries; but the beginning of a scientific notion of political economy, was discovered and developed by Leibniz, during the interval 1671-1716. The industrial revolution was brought to England itself by the visiting Benjamin Franklin, who sent Watt to France to develop a new model of the steam-engine under the advice of Lavoisier. In the young United States, the productivity and income of the average farmer and worker was approximately twice that in the British Isles under George III.

Even more embarrassing for those among the engineering students duped into admiring the British empiricists, is the fact, that the most successful design of modern economy ever developed, was what U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton defined as "The American System of political-economy," an elaboration of economic principles best represented otherwise by the two leading economists of the world during the Nineteenth Century, Friedrich List and Henry C. Carey. Did it not occur to these ostensibly science-oriented engineering students, that the U.S. wars against Britain in 1776-1783 and 1812-1815, were a defense of the superior economic policy of the U.S.A. against the drug-pushing and other predatory practices of the ever-morally-decadent British system?

Since those students were taught nonsense, bread-and-butter motives prompted most of them to believe steadfastly in the nonsense they had been taught. Later generations of students were, as a whole, much worse than those of the World War II veterans. The decadence expressed in the design and relative unreliability of products manufactured under the influence of the cult of "benchmarking," illustrates the outcome to which that corruption within my generation has led during the recent decade.

Take the related case, of the introduction of the so-called "new math," which was being popularized during the late 1950s and early 1960s. There could have been no possible outcome of this but significant, virtual brain-damage of two generations of secondary and university students.

Since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Carl Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae,[37] inspired by his teacher, the great founder of anti-Euclidean geometry, Abraham Kästner,[38] had been the standard for competent mathematics instruction. This masterpiece should be the recognized standard, even today, for basic secondary and higher education in mathematics. The result of replacing that standard with "the new math" program, should have reminded any literate professional of Jonathan Swift's famous description of education as practiced on the allegorical floating island of Laputa.[39]

In all sorts of academic specialities, much of what was being peddled was, with increasing frequency, not only rubbish, but transparently so. No intelligent student would swallow such stuff, had he or she not been in such a terrible hurry to pass the courses, that there was no time to consider the possibility that what was being taught was a hoax, often of the ideologically motivated variety.

The introduction of the "new math" was not a mistake; the implications of the inherent incompetence of that system were already very well established, and widely known.[40] The relevant literature leaves no margin to doubt, that this was a deliberate act of mass-brainwashing of what is now two generations, designed to cripple the potential of students for competent thinking about such matters as physical science, and economics. It was the calculated ruse of the circles of the radical positivists Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell.

The result has been, that most among the generations drilled in that "new math" approach introduced during the late 1950s, have not only been crippled in their capacity for scientific thinking, but many of those popular policies which have led the U.S. economy down the road to self-destruction, since the mid-1960s, have found a growing basis for acceptance of such destructive policies, in the accumulated effects of "new math" indoctrination upon generations passing through schools and universities during the recent forty-odd years. The proliferation of pseudo-scientific fads in not only statistical argument today, but also in enacted statutes and international treaty-agreements, typify the natural product of this pathology.

Notably, as more and more of the top positions in public and private institutions have been taken over by persons born after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, the effects of the spread of radical-positivist trends in education, have produced a crisis of national leadership. Most of the persons of those generations, leading the public and private sectors today, have virtually no comprehension of how successful economies of the pre-1966 period actually worked. The current crop of corporate industrial and bank management, is a disaster. The role of the "new math" has been only a leading part of that loss of ability to think effectively about economic policies, but an extremely important part. Once again, the cult of "benchmarking," is to be recognized as a reflection of the factor of scientific-technological imbecility already embedded axiomatically in the "new math" and "programmed learning" curricula of the late 1950s and 1960s.

This is typical, with rare exceptions, of the trend in higher education which most of those returning veterans, and others, experienced in universities during the immediate post-war decades.

Go back to the late 1940s and 1950s, as if to ask them, then: "What are you doing with your life?"

The answer would often be to the effect: "I am going to be a success, move into the suburbs, have nice children, a fast car, a pretty wife, and leave guys like you way behind." In the end, there were many personal tragedies, beginning the mass layoffs unleashed during the 1957-1958 recession, when pink-slipped executives who had had $40,000-level salaries,[41] were trying to peddle their resumés to employers who were not buying at the time.

Some of those university-educated veterans did some good work, despite all that. A few did excellent work, although not without flaws they should not have incurred. People are naturally born good, and some of that can be brought out in them under the right conditions. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of the direction of relative motion, that is the way it was.

All of these and related problems attributable to most of those returning veterans and their families over the recent fifty-odd years, must take into account a crucial extenuating circumstance. Grant the fact, that the overwhelming majority of the returning veterans capitulated to the kinds of conditioning I have outlined here. Why should they have capitulated in that manner and degree? Grant, that the generation of those World War II veterans produced suburbia's "Baby Boomer" generation, who were educated to become victims of the victimization of their parents' generation, and to make their own generation a, similarly, even more victimized one.

It should be obvious, that their problem was lack of a sufficiently clear sense of personal cognitive identity, a lack of that sense of identity needed to supply them an efficient impulse to resist. They should have cried out: "Stop telling me! Walk me through the process of making the discovery for myself!" Why did they not do that? I know, I can still hear the voices from my childhood and youth: "Once you have learned what your teachers and textbooks tell you, then the time will come when you will be permitted to judge for yourself."

"Let us brainwash you for twelve to twenty years, until you graduate, and then `think for myself?' " "If you wish to get ahead, you must learn to go along, to get along."

The principle such brutal slogans express, is the same used to establish the dictatorship known as the Roman Empire. There was the ruling class, and a mass of virtual human cattle which the Romans named the populari (English: predators), and the system which the Nazi regime, like the British monarchy and the late Walter Lippmann, adopted from the Romans, popular opinion. In the typical case from the veterans' youth, it was considered shameful not to be "popular." "Popular opinion," as defined by the Romans, the Nazis, and the prevalent culture of the U.S.A. today, is the method by which a ruling oligarchy induces its subjects to discipline themselves into playing the part the ruling oligarchs assign to that mass of human cattle, which they consider most of you to be.

"I should learn how to become more popular, or, at least, less unpopular." Let some poor fellow adopt that imperative as a virtual axiom of his habit-making. There is no more efficient way to brainwash the susceptible, especially those passing through the emotionally perilous time of adolescence, than to torment them with the challenge of trying to gain a bit of popularity in an intrinsically capricious social climate.[42]

So, most of the American veterans returning from war, gave up their weapons, but also their personal cognitive sovereignty. I know; I sadly watched it happen. I wish that they, and their children, would reclaim what most of my generation lost during that time.

The Roots of the Pathology

To become a truly sovereign individual, you must muster the courage t