The only "Yellow Peril" threatening the world today, is that running up and down the spines of the current harvest of Anglo-American sinophobes. These are typified by such leading elements as: the sinophobes rallied around Baroness Margaret Thatcher's and Sir Henry Kissinger's May 1996 Prague Conference, a witches' coven now scheduled to reconvene in Arizona, in mid-May; Thatcher lackeys such as Sir George Bush and Sir Leon Brittan; Sir Caspar Weinberger and other rabid Anglophiles of the New York Council on Foreign Relations; and, those born-again Tiberiuses and Neros associated with Thatcherite Baroness Caroline Cox's British-intelligence front, "Christian Solidarity International," who have turned, recently, from their customary occupation, promoting genocide and war against Africans, to spreading racist hate-propaganda against China.

Although this latest epidemic of sinophobic mouth-froth is solidly in that tradition of that British geopolitics which caused the two World Wars of this century, notable British circles, of considerable policy-shaping experience and influence, regard the anti-China rant of Baronesses Thatcher and Cox, and Thatcher's Sir Leon Brittan, as the strategic folly of shallow braggarts. London, as usual, divides its assaulting forces, complementing its obvious frontal assault with an envelopment of the unwary victim's flank.

Merely opposing the strategic imbecility of U.S. President Bill Clinton's London-run adversaries, is not a viable alternative to the hysteria of witchy Lady Thatcher's familiars. Ranting cultists, such as today's wild-eyed dupes of the Mont Pelerin Society, have always turned out in significant numbers and varieties, like Europe's Fourteenth-Century flagellants, as omens of any catastrophic crisis in civilization. Such deranged wretches become a severe security-threat to society, when, as today, existing governments fail to provide an anxiety-stricken population the needed, credible assurances, that those in charge know what is wanted, and are prepared to act appropriately on that knowledge. Therefore, the problem is not the subject of China; the problem is the present lack of a competent strategic outlook from governments, most notably in the capitals of Europe and North America.

It must be emphasized, that the great majority among rational ordinary people, know, that they themselves have not developed the competence to judge what needs to be, or could be done. Only dangerous demagogues, such as populists, or similarly-deranged sorts of persons, would suggest, that the caprices of desperate popular opinion, ought to design the foreign policy of their nation. Sane, but usually perplexed, ordinary citizens recognize, that today's popular majorities do not know the best way in which to secure their nation's future; these citizens rightly expect to be represented by their government, that in the same sense they hope to be represented, in time of illness, by their family physician. Intelligent citizens have entrusted certain responsibilities to the governments they have chosen to represent them. Such citizens hope that their government is not of that foolish sort, which, like skittish "wimps" or unprincipled demagogues, makes its policies in compliance with public-opinion polls; those citizens expect nothing more, nor less, than competent service to those rights for which we are all accountable to the posterity of not only our own nation, but of humanity as a whole.

A government which relies upon what it chooses to perceive as popular opinion polls, is a government which, in its zeal to represent almost everyone, ends up, like the ill-fated Robespierre and St. Just, representing the interests of almost no one, its own interest least of all. Under conditions of crisis, a government which is a slave to the perceived whims of public opinion, or, to the opinion shaped by a corrupt press and entertainment media, will be astonished to find itself dumped, and that inevitably, by a people which has lost patience with a poll-disoriented regime's intrinsic incompetence to govern effectively under actual conditions of crisis.

In a crisis such as this present one, the government must serve the nation and its people as does a competent military command under conditions of wars of "annihilation." The people have a right to expect competence, above all, from their government. Until this moment, during the present global strategic monetary-financial crisis, no government on this planet has shown either competence, or any likelihood that it might develop that specific quality of competence, the which is relevant to the threatened doom immediately before all of this planet. The qualification should be added: Virtually all have shown relatively poorer performance on this point than the present government of China. That competence, is the matter which we address here.

A strategic theorem

Crises, such as the present global crisis, develop because governments, and their populations, have persisted in foolish opinions much too long. The only exception to this rule, is the rare case in which the crisis was caused by a natural catastrophe which a reasonable government might fairly argue that it had not been equipped to have foreseen. That exception granted, all other crises are man-made.

A case in point, is the flooding in northern California this past winter. The destruction was not caused by any unforeseen changes in weather-patterns for that region, but by the folly of the relevant state and Federal governments, which had failed, over nearly three decades, either to develop, or to maintain adequately, those existing flood-control systems which had been effectively designed, according to foreknowledge of likely extremes in weather, to prevent exactly the result foreseen, a result which was caused by nothing but governmental negligence.

Granted, that negligence by government was encouraged greatly by pressures from adherents of sundry budget-cutting and environmentalist fads. No competent government would excuse its submission to pressures from such faddists; in each instance, in which a government might have foreseen the consequence of giving way to such faddists, it should have denounced, and otherwise resisted those fanatics, on the authority of reason. If it did not resist those fanatics with all the means at its disposal, then government itself must be blamed for what the fanatics may have induced it to do.

Putting aside cases which could be blamed, reasonably, on the consequences of practically unforeseeable natural disasters, every remaining crisis occurs as a result of the existing policies of relevant governments. If those policies have been popular ones, then it is the people who have brought the crisis upon themselves, through the influence of their support for wicked popular opinion.

From scrutiny of the history of relevant types of cases, we can liken popular opinion's common response to a crisis, by aid of the following fictional case.

A man who drove his automobile into a fire-hydrant, had that automobile towed to the repair shop. Later, as he drove the repaired vehicle away from the repair shop, he steered the vehicle into a tree. When the man was next seen, his attorney was attempting, without success, to explain why the tree can not be sued for the fresh damages suffered by the automobile.

That man reminds us of numerous currents within contemporary public opinion. In the U.S., for example, we live in what is called "a democracy," a foolish nation, which has been plunged into a global monetary-financial crisis, like that menacing those present-day U.S. "Baby Boomers" who had invested most of their savings in the mutual-funds bubble. The popular opinion among such "Baby Boomers," substitutes a strong desire for personal financial gains in speculative markets, in place of, and in opposition to the vital interest of the nation and their own posterity.

Man is not a beast; he is not a creature of instinct. Man is a creature with the capability for developing valid ideas. The entire development of the human population, above those levels of population-density and demographic characteristics achievable by some species of higher ape, is the benefit of the development of a growing accumulation of ideas, transmitted by one generation to its posterity. In this way, the unlimited potential of human cognition, to increase our species' power over nature, has been demonstrated in principle. In this way, the history of mankind is the internal history of the process of change in the transmitted storehouse of available and practiced, relatively validated discoveries of ideas. All of the defects of society are to be traced, therefore, to man's stubborn tolerance for those ideas whose influence has prompted society to do itself in.

Thus, each crisis for which man could not fairly blame nature, is the result of a society's Hamlet-like, stubborn adherence to those ideas which have produced the crisis, the society's preference for the current set of "mainstream" ideas, over those available alternatives which would have served to avert, or cure the crisis.

The present strategic crisis can not be seriously, effectively addressed, until it is scrutinized from the vantage-point which recognizes, that the history of mankind is the history of ideas. The most easily recognized, appropriate model with which to begin such a study, is the example of Euclid's geometry.

That said, the theorem which we shall demonstrate, is, that a strategic partnership, centered around the U.S.A. and China, including key states of the former Soviet Union, Iran, India, and their Asia partners, is an indispensable alternative to the near-future collapse of global civilization into a "New Dark Age," a catastrophic physical-economic and demographic collapse, of the type experienced, but on a lesser scale, earlier, in the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe, or, during the middle decades of Europe's Fourteenth Century.

For reasons to be identified, the theorem just stated here, like the theorems of Euclid's geometry, is premised upon an underlying hypothesis. In Euclid's geometry, the relevant hypothesis is represented by an interdependent set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. The hypothesis which underlies the entirety of a Euclidean geometry is axiomatically deductive, and linear. The theorem we have introduced here, reflects a higher order of underlying hypothesis, of a quality better approximated by Bernhard Riemann's 1854 revolution in geometry, an hypothesis whose characteristics are non-linear, and premised upon Leibniz's Analysis Situs, rather than deduction.

In the case of the theorem just stated, the relevant hypothesis is one of unique authority for comprehension of all leading developments presently in progress. It is urgent that key leading circles understand the nature of this non-Euclidean hypothesis; without solutions cohering with that comprehension, it is improbable that the present civilization will long survive the close of the present century, assuming it does not disintegrate at an earlier time. Without policies and related actions which are coherent with the products of that quality of understanding, no government, however chosen, could rule competently under the presently worsening conditions of planetary crisis.

That approach, the introduction of the principle of hypothesis to the problem at hand, is not optional. Given the special nature of the crisis at hand, the resort to our proposed method of analysis is indispensable. No different method could possibly define practicable comprehension of the nature of the crisis, or, of the nature of useful solutions.

For reasons to be identified below, the present global crisis of civilization, is neither of the form which might be identified by the accepted usage of "business cycle," nor of any other model profferred by the modern economics, political science, or history classroom. The present crisis confronts us with a breaking-point, an existential crisis of the entirety of that modern European civilization whose power has dominated the entirety of this planet since no later than the Eighteenth Century. That civilization, in that degenerated form of its former self, which it has assumed during the recent thirty-odd years, is doomed. This present, global civilization, may be likened fairly to the fabled sinking of the British Empire's ship Titanic. That ship can not be saved. The only practical question is: can the passengers, the nations and their people, be rescued, in time, from the doomed ship?

The only possible solutions are those which abandon most among those leading radical changes in social, economic, and political institutions (e.g., excepting the U.S. civil-rights reforms effected during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King's leadership), the which were introduced during the recent thirty years. The required solution must include restoration of the formerly most successful features of modern nation-state economy and related practice, as they existed thirty years ago, during the U.S. Kennedy administration, and the Franklin Roosevelt administration earlier. It is not a matter of simply "turning back the clock"; that could not, and should not be attempted. It is a matter of learning from the lessons of five to six centuries of modern history, as we might learn from a great scientific experiment.

It is relatively easy to show, if performance is measured in terms of demographic characteristics of individual and household life, that the principal changes in the cultural, political, and economic policies of Europe, the which were made, from approximately the mid-1960s on, have been a net, global catastrophe. Despite all of the catastrophes and other errors of practice which had beset European civilization since the beginning of Europe's Fifteenth Century, the global impact of the Fifteenth-Century creation of the modern European nation-state committed to scientific and technological progress, had been, until the middle of the 1960s, the greatest rate in improvement of demographic characteristics of populations in all known, or inferrable previous human existence. Since the second half of the 1960s, the result of the mid-1960s cultural-paradigm shift, has been a general, secular, accelerating decline, globally, as measured in those demographic factors. Since the introduction of relatively unchecked increases in tendencies for "globalization," since the close of 1989, the degeneration of life on this planet, overall, has brought us to the brink of collapse into a new, global "dark age."

The comparative superiority of European civilization's global performance, during the centuries preceding the mid-1960s, relative to trends since, must not blind us to the fact that there were weaknesses in pre-1966 European culture globally, which permitted the introduction of those radical changes underlying the accelerating downward trend in culture and economy since. We could not simply return to the early 1960s. We require a less haphazard approach to the problem. Hence, an added reason we must turn to the method of hypothesis.

Thus, we are confronted by the following array of leading questions.

1. From the standpoint of physical-economy: What have been the underlying changes in implicit (e.g., axiomatic) assumptions, which distinguish the policy-shaping of the post-1965 period, from that of the preceding thirty years? How have these changes brought about reversal of the overall-upward trends of the 1936-1965 interval, causing the overall-downward trends of the more recent thirty years?
2. From the same standpoint: What weaknesses in the set of underlying assumptions, governing policies of economic practice, during the 1936-1965 interval, permitted those radical changes in ruling assumptions which have governed shaping of policies of practice during the more recent thirty years?
3. How are the answers to the preceding two questions expressed as changes in the social composition, and functional interrelations among the institutions whose interaction dominates the shaping of policies of practice?

We proceed by outlining an insight into the latter question.

The war-economy paradox

Since the 1901 assassination of U.S. President William McKinley, the economies of Europe and North America have never achieved significant economic growth, or improvement in the conditions of life of their populations, except as a by-product of preparations for, or conduct of warfare. The fact that military expenditures, as such, are consumed as a form of waste, presents us with a powerful paradox, of singular importance for our consideration here.

This paradox can not be mastered, without discarding the cardinal assumptions underlying every form of generally accepted textbook and classroom economics doctrine, those of Karl Marx and John von Neumann's so-called "systems analysis" included. One must discard the linear, and "post hoc ergo propter hoc" assumptions, which presume to examine the ratio of magnitudes of outputs to inputs, as if the relationship between the two were causal, or were statistical characteristics of the domain being represented in this simple-minded fashion. One must take note of the fact, that the replacement of persons by higher apes, in the production cycle, would not result in that increase of outputs over inputs, the which is typical of all viable economic processes taken as a unit-whole. The fact which the simple-minded, generally accepted classroom doctrines ignore with recklessness, is, that the determining feature of mankind's anti-entropic relationship to nature, is those cognitive processes, by means of which the individual human mind generates, and replicates the discovery of valid principles, both of nature, and of cognition itself.

In successful cases, the vastly superior performance, above all alternative modes of past or present economy, of the best European and U.S.A. models of modern nation-state economy (the anti-Adam-Smith, Hamilton-Carey-List "American System of political-economy"), centers attention upon the crucial relationship between a universal compulsory education (typified by the Schiller-Humboldt reforms of education for Germany), and a sector of the productive process fairly identified today as "the strategic machine-tool-design" sector. The transmission of the reenactment of accumulated, crucial, validated discoveries of principle, through the education process, and the generation of valid new discoveries of principle in this same cognitive mode, drives the sector of "strategic machine-tool design," and also supplies production so tooled with an educated labor-force capable of assimilating new principles into successful productive practice.

As the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, already specified, in his December 1791 Report to the U.S. Congress, "On The Subject of Manufactures": The success of this process is conditional upon an appropriate development, chiefly by government, of the basic economic infrastructure in which production and distribution of goods are situated. It is the rate of improvements effected in this way, which is the only source of sustainable net physical-economic profitability, and related gain, of nation-state economies considered as wholes.

That summary of the case so stated, consider the sociology of industrial management during the 1901-1965 interval.

At the top of the Twentieth-Century industrial sector, the operating management was divided among three most notable components. One of these was encountered in the persons of those who represented the standpoint of rentier finance. Another component, which was usually allied, or tended to ally factionally with the outlook of rentier finance, was the accounting mentality. The third, was the standpoint of physical production and distribution.

A series of events, beginning with the mid-1890s, first Sino-Japanese war, featuring the implications of Fashoda 1898, and concluding with the assassination of McKinley and the accession of Britain's King Edward VII, brought the standpoint of London-centered rentier finance into a dominant political position throughout Europe and the United States. With President Theodore Roosevelt's anti-industrial counterrevolution in the U.S.A., and the developments correlated, world-wide, with the 1905-1907 depressions, rentier-finance was in the saddle everywhere, but with one significant qualification.

The other side of these 1894-1907 developments, was the British Empire's orchestration of an oncoming general war, centered in Europe. Crucial, in Britain's plan, and preparations for launching what became known, variously, as "The Great War," or "World WarI," was the capture of the U.S.A. as Britain's committed ally, through the Presidencies of two treasonous spawn of the Confederate States of America's oligarchy, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The switching, under U.S. President Theodore Roosvelt, away from the U.S.A.'s traditional European allies of the middle through late Nineteenth Century, Germany and Russia, to the U.S.'s traditional Nineteenth-Century adversaries, Britain and the British-French Entente Cordiale, ensured Britain's commitment to its preparations for a simultaneous military assault on Germany, from Russia in the East, and Britain, France, and Belgium, in the West.

The industrial mobilization essential to the preparation for, and conduct of such warfare, brought the third element of management, the production manager, temporarily, into a relatively powerful political position. A similar role and influence of the production manager, was called into play in preparations for, and conduct of World War II, and in the military mobilizations and non-military aerospace development of the 1946-1963 period of threatened general nuclear warfare.

This same logic affected the Soviet and other Warsaw Pact economies in an analogous way. The chronic performance-failures of the civilian side of the Soviet economy, contrasted with the mission-oriented successes of the Soviet science-driven military-industrial complex, illustrate the point.

The standpoint of all competent production management, is the mastery of that present potential given to it from the past, to the purpose of creating the higher levels of performance of future production. The span of this concern, respecting extension in time and physical space, increases as a function of capital-intensity, and also as a function of rates of technological attrition. The skilled production management, especially in the relatively smaller-sized, closely held firm of the strategic machine-tool-design sector, and also in the technologically advanced, capital-intensive industrial giants, operated on the basis of planning backwards, from a targetted economic "horizon" to be reached either a half or full capital-turnover cycle, seven to twenty-odd years ahead.

Without such production managers, no power is equipped to survive the kind of general warfare which became characteristic of all leading military conflict over the period beginning Lazare Carnot's 1792-1794, revolutionary reconstruction of both France's military-industrial complex and the conduct of warfare itself, until the aftermath of the 1962 "Cuba Missile Crisis." The American Revolution, Carnot's reforms in France, the effect of the reforms made by Scharnhorst, vom Stein, the Humboldt brothers, Abraham Lincoln and military leaders in the Grant-Sherman tradition, Britain's Admiral Fisher, and others, through Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, was to establish a symbiosis between the world's most capable military commanders, on the one side, and, on the other side, the most capable scientists, machine-tool designers, and production managers available.

During this century, every period of peace and disarmament was a national economic disaster. It was not the lack of war which caused this, but, rather the tendency of the financiers and accountants to ruin the economy, whenever the authority of the production managers was weakened to the degree the financiers and accountants could do more or less as they pleased. Only in the wake of the 1962 missile crisis and the subsequent assassination of President John Kennedy, were the relevant financier oligarchs assured, that the progress of "détente" permitted the systematic destruction of the production-management faction and the policies it represented.

The beneficial effect of pre-war, and wartime economic mobilization for modern warfare, is located in the "spill-over" of "strategic machine-tool designs," from the military side, into the generality of production and product design. It was the rate of that spill-over, including the conversion of military production-capacity to civilian uses, which accounts for the high rates of real economic growth associated with mobilizations for general warfare, and for governmental, military-like commitments to "crash programs" of aerospace development.

There were chiefly two reasons for this pattern. "Normally," during those periods, during this century, when the preparation for, or conduct of general war was not an overriding consideration, the productive sector of the economy was looted, by diverting an increased ration of the total income-stream, away from the real economy, into sundry forms of wasteful expenditure, such as leveraging growth of those financial assets situated in rentier modes of financial speculation. The result was a "draw down" of the productive sector of the national economy, including a relative inhibition of scientific research and development, and a relatively diminished role for the "strategic machine-tool-design" sector. Only the fear of losing a current or future general war, overrode the peace-time priority commanded by the finance sector and its accountant lackeys.

Once it was assumed, that the terror of the 1962 "missiles crisis," and the consolidation of a "détente" orientation, promised to lower the risk of warfare, from general warfare, to "cabinet" and "surrogate" warfare, the priority upon strategic implications of technological attrition was virtually eliminated. The 1966-1967 take-down of the leading edge of the aerospace sector, exemplifies this. The role of foundations, such as McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation, in fostering the "New Age" lunacies of the "Frankfurt School's" Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, typifies the massive corruption of university strata of "Baby Boomer" youth, in bringing about a perversion of the future national elite with neo-Malthusian and related anti-science, anti-rational dogmas. It was the "march through the institutions," by those corrupted strata of late 1960s university populations, which is key to understanding the presently imminent collapse of civilization into the global barbarism of a "New Dark Age."

The post-1965 trend, of degeneration of university education into the production of bigotted adherents of "politically correct" Yahooism, is an expression of this change. The collapse of the "strategic machine-tool design" sector, is a related expression of this.

Through the present century, until 1963-1966, whenever the dominant financier oligarchy was not burdened by threat of general warfare, its role was to loot production, and productive potential, to the speculative advantage of financier parasites. This was the cause of all of the pre-1966 economic depressions suffered by Europe and North America. Only under conditions of threatened general warfare, did the London-centered international financier oligarchy consider itself, reluctantly, obliged to bend to the imperatives of the production managers and the military allies. After 1965, military science, and productive growth, were replaced by the cult of positivist sociology. Since 1965, a corrupted U.S. military establishment, steeped in the utopian suppurations of radical-positivist sociology, has been near to the forefront of civilization's march into Hell.

In this pattern, the special significance of the 1962-1963 developments, is that the London-centered financier oligarchy was persuaded, that the process of "détente" energized by the terror of the 1962 "missiles crisis," had eliminated the likelihood of future general warfare, that future warfare would be limited to diplomatic abominations in "cabinet warfare," such as the 1960s Vietnam War, or surrogate warfare, such as London's and Vice-President George Bush's Pakistan-based, drug-trafficking-financed "surrogate" war against the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. These creatures estimated that the probable elimination of prospect for general warfare, made feasible the reduction, and ultimate elimination of the factional political power of the "strategic machine-tool-design" sector, and the production managers.

This, latter, neo-Malthusian transformation, was consolidated during the years 1966-1968. The "march through the institutions" by the veterans of the 1968 upsurges of the post-industrial "youth counterculture," did the rest.

The mid-1960s 'paradigm down-shift'

That review of the "war-economy paradox," steers our attention back to the first of the three questions posed above. From the standpoint of physical-economy: What have been the underlying changes in implicit (e.g., axiomatic) assumptions, which distinguish the policy-shaping of the post-1965 period, from that of the preceding thirty years? How have these changes brought about reversal of the overall-upward trends of the 1936-1965 interval, causing the overall-downward trends of the more recent thirty years?

With the virtual elimination of the political power of the production-management faction, the rentier-financier oligarchy and its accountant allies took over. The result is, in functional terms, what we have summarized in the "Triple Curve" (see Figure 1). We have recently entered the region of the steepest slope of the curve of hyperbolic interrelations among the three elements of that "Triple Curve" function; the imminent disintegration of the international financial and monetary system, is presently inevitable; it is unstoppable by any means other than actions by powerful nation-states to throw the IMF, et al., into government-regulated bankruptcy-reorganization.

The process leading into the present "triple-curve" syndrome, began approximately thirty years ago. It is relevant to bring resolving-power to bear, on the mid-1960s shift of popular values, away from the production-oriented values of the pre-1966 population, to the increasingly anti-industrial, "consumer society" lunacy of the post-1965 period to date.

The characteristic pathology infecting many in the ranks of the returning U.S. World War II veterans, was the impulse often described, during the 1950s, as the "White Collar" syndrome. This impulse was fostered initially by what the returning veteran of 1945-1946 saw as the tendency of President Harry S Truman's U.S. economy, to return to the conditions of the pre-war, 1930s Depression. This impulse was grafted onto this stratum's experience with the advantages of rank in that veteran's recent military service. It was also fostered by what has been called the "political witch-hunt hysteria" which took over the national psyche during the years of President Truman's incumbency.

It was, in short, a fearful, politically and economically motivated desire, to become either part of "management," or as close to that status as possible; this syndrome was sometimes identified with a tendency toward George Orwell's 1984 utopia, and, more broadly, as the self-image of "The Organization Man." It was the households of that sector of the World War II veterans' stratum most closely associated with this, which supplied most of the university-student populations of the 1960s, the middle to late 1960s most notably.

The inquisitional hysteria of the Truman years, was characterized by a strong impulse toward shamelessly "anti-intellectual" Yahooism within the population generally. The uncouth Senator sometimes known as "the Pepsi-Cola kid," Wisconsin's, and Roy M. Cohn's Joe McCarthy, parodied the convergent roles of both England's Sixteenth-Century hooligan, Lord Sir George Jeffreys, and the Nazi courts' Judge Roland Freisler. Such were the formative political conditions, under which the parents of the "Baby Boomers" lived, during the Truman years.

These family conditions of the late 1940s and 1950s, set up the "Baby Boomers" for the successive, profound shocks of the 1962 missile crisis, the 1963 Kennedy assassination, and McGeorge Bundy's and Robert McNamara's launching of the Indo-China "cabinet war" over the dead body of President Kennedy. So, under the sociological management of such creatures as Margaret Mead, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, the accumulated hatreds of the "Baby Boomers" against the hysteria of their parents' 1940s and 1950s, were detonated as the enraged, existentialist radicalism of the middle to late 1960s.

The recruitment of hundreds of thousands of such campus youth to the "rock-drug-sex counterculture," during the middle to late 1960s, provided the culture-medium for spread of the same infection as the basis for the pervasive "political correctness" of the 1970s through 1990s. The same patterns were spread, by similar means, during the same period, into the rest of the Western Hemisphere, throughout western Europe, and, soon, into the Soviet bloc, too. This existentialist mania among youth, spread from the dionysiac revels of the rock-drug-sex counterculture, into a generalized hatred against industrial society, expressed as the shamelessly neo-Malthusian, fascist-like mythos of "post-industrial" utopianism. The emergence of the specific syndrome, called "consumerism," during the second half of the 1960s, is exemplary.

Go into the philosophy programs of typical universities and junior (e.g., "community") colleges today. The core of what is taught is the Nietzschean dogma of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, or such kindred forms of radical existentialism as, the dogmas of Heidegger's admirers Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre, the criminality of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, or the parallel dogmas of Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, et al. The core of the matter is Heidegger's emphasis upon "thrownness": society is an alien jungle, into which the individual is "thrown," against which he, or she must strive. This, like the Nazi outlook which it echoes, is a brutish form of feral paganism, in opposition to all notions of the individual as participating in society, such as the Christian principle of capax dei. That warmed-over Nazi philosophy of Heidegger's followers, is in perfect accord with that cult of "consumerism" which was introduced, during the 1966-1968 interval, as a companion to the "post-industrial" dogma of "The Great Society."

Until the cultural-paradigm shift of the late 1960s, the characteristic relationship of the American to the economy, was typified by the technologically progressive American farmer, and the role of the famous Model T Ford, which often sawed the farmer's wood, served as a tractor in the field, and which the farmer, or other owner, repaired as needed. We produced what we needed, what we consumed; our role as "consumers" was defined by our companion-role as participants in the process of production through which the means of consumption was supplied. Since the government of President George Washington, the factory was to the urban household as the fields and barns were to the farmhouses.

The adolescent's, or adult's ability to perform the most commonly required, successful repairs on objects possessed, was a measure of functional literacy. On Saturdays, many back yards and side yards were transformed into repair-shops, in this way. Often, it was a measure of the successful design of objects offered for sale to households, that the object was crafted in such a manner as to facilitate commonly needed types of repairs by the purchaser.

U.S. studies have demonstrated, that, during World War II, for historic and related reasons, the German soldier, not the Brit, Russian, or American, was the best fighting man. The offsetting advantage of the American lay largely in the domain of logistics, including the incidence of raw recruits with the established, or readily acquired ability to drive, and to repair a truck. We, like German contemporaries, took pride in the quality of the products our economy produced, especially good products fabricated with our personal participation. We Americans also took pride in our economy's cultivated ability to turn out more of our products than anyone else's. "Shop talk" was ubiquitous and preferred weekend gossip among friends visiting friends.

Beginning the radical youth of the middle to late 1960s, Americans lost their earlier, productive identity; the mental disease of "consumerism" soon became an epidemic. During that time, one sensed the change had come upon us suddenly. Certainly, it had come to the surface suddenly; but, there had been warnings, if we thought back to the 1950s and early 1960s. The 1950s "White Collar" syndrome, was one such warning-sign. The anti-labor, and therefore "anti-Blue-Collar" implication of "McCarthyism," was a clear warning-sign. That moment of horror, the 1962 missiles crisis, was a crucial added factor for the anti-war youth of the Vietnam War 1960s: "technology is bad!" The "Baby Boomers" had been conditioned to this latter view, by Hollywood's "Frankenstein" and Japan's "Godzilla" syndrome in horror films, and related rubbish: the paranoid reaction among Hollywood's dupes, was: "These mad scientists will kill us all, if we don't get them first!"

We should not have been taken by surprise. The modern anti-science horror-story had been pioneered by the anti-Franklin rant, Frankenstein, of Jeremy Bentham's Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley. That "science-fiction" horror-formula had been rewarmed by Britain's geopolitical Fabian, Herbert George ("H.G.") Wells, who damned all industrialists as "Morlochs." It was Fabian, or Fabian-like sociologists, of Marcuse's, Adorno's, Norbert Wiener's, and Margaret Mead's ilk, who typified the London Tavistock Institute accomplices, who had preshaped, and later launched the youth-counterculture of the middle to late 1960s. The 1962 missiles crisis made all those 1950s "science-fiction" horror films seem suddenly real to young minds which had been nursed by that one-eyed baby-sitter, the television tube, and, fondled, as adolescents, in the parking lots of the drive-in theater.

The changes so typified, reflect deep, axiomatic transformations (for the worse) in the way in which the affected minds work. In this instance, "deep" signifies something which goes deeper than any among the axioms of Euclid's geometry; it reflects the class of assumptions which Gottfried Leibniz referenced by his use of the term Analysis Situs. Here, our attention is focussed upon a special sector of the domain of such Analysis Situs, the underlying ordering-principle which distinguishes an entropic process from an anti-entropic one.

How an economy grows

Back to Euclid's geometry, as Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation clarifies its axiomatic flaws. To summarize what has been published in numerous earlier locations.

Mankind's improvement in both potential relative population-density and correlated demographic characteristics of both households and total populations, is chiefly the product of axiomatic changes in belief, changes of the type associated with validated discovery of a new physical principle. This process of change can be rendered comprehensible only by reference to the kind of geometric thinking introduced by Riemann: geometry as the subject of a governing, Platonic principle of hypothesis. This approach is crucial for mastering the Leibniz-founded branch of physical science known as physical economy.

The source of all fundamental progress in knowledge, is metaphor. Given, a system of validated axiomatic beliefs, but, also given a factually validated phenomenon which is irreconcilable with those preexisting, relatively validated beliefs. Since the mutually contradictory beliefs receive their authority from the same level of development of the person's cognitive faculties, the new phenomenon must either be exposed as not existing in quite the manner initially thought, or the entirety of previously established belief must be overturned. The juxtaposition of established belief with the contradictory evidence, is the prototype of true metaphor, in Classical art forms, and in science.

The effect of posing the metaphor, is analogous to counterposing Euclidean geometry, with its definitions, axioms, and postulates, to a successful construction which implicitly invalidates one or more among the colligating elementarities of the Euclidean hypothesis. No formal representation of the connection of such a valid, real construction with the universe in which it appears, is possible, until we have superseded the Euclidean hypothesis with a new hypothesis.

This method, which was that of Plato's Academy, and of such moderns as Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried Leibniz, was refined through the massive contributions of Carl F. Gauss, beginning his elaboration of a systematic definition for higher mathematics, in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. The experimental method, associated with the term "biquadratic residues," as Gauss himself had applied this to astrophysics, geodesy, and magnetism, is of crucial importance for accomplishing the result which Leibniz demanded under the rubric of "sufficient and necessary reason." As Riemann stressed, Gauss's derivation of a general theory of curved surfaces from the basis provided in his work on biquadratic residues, supplied the basis for Riemann's own revolution in geometry, and the writer's own approach to problems of measurement central to a science of physical economy.

On this connection of Gauss's and Riemann's work to Leibniz's principle of "sufficient and necessary reason," the present writer summarizes a pedagogical illustration he has employed over the decades, as in his one-semester introductory course in economics: the case of the plumber.

Assume that a U.S. plumber, in the year 1965, is applying exactly those skills he had practiced since 1946. Consider the question: In light of the technological progress which has occurred in many branches of production during twenty years, does the labor of that plumber deserve relatively less compensation (as measured in household market-basket contents) than during 1946? On the contrary, the value of the plumber's labor is located within the production cycle of which the plumber's work represents a necessary component. In other words, to assess the result of the plumber's labor, we must first situate the plumber in the actual physical-economic space-time in which his actions are located. The technological "level" of that physical-economic space-time may be viewed as a matter of the Riemannian "curvature" of that space-time. The value of the plumber's actions are determined by their place in that economic phase-space-time in which they are situated. This relationship, this situation, is the necessary and sufficient reason for the significance of the plumber's action. In all cases, economic and other, the relevant hypothesis is the necessary and sufficient reason for the principle of action governing effects in that physical-space-time geometry.

The principle of measurement, as rigorously defined, successively, by the non-Euclidean, physical geometries of Gauss and Riemann, affords each newly validated principle of nature the quality of an added dimension of an ndimensional geometry of physical space-time. The fact, that such principles are made known through measurement (i.e., a generalized, rather than linear/scalar notion of extension), affords each the same quality of dimensionality which relatively more naive opinion attributes to senses of directed extension in space and time. In place of the simple, linear extension characteristic of Euclidean space-time, we have a factor of curvature implicitly derived from applications of the notions associated with biquadratic residues, to the relevant experimental evidence. The result, is the distinction of physical space-times and related phase-spaces, by their pervasive characteristics.

Thus, unlike Euclidean geometry, we are focussed not only upon a physical space-time geometry, rather than an aprioristic space-time, but, we must also consider the functional interrelationship among all the dimensions of an n dimensional physical geometry, a functional interrelationship expressed mathematically as "curvature." This approach enables us to introduce an otherwise unavailable quality of competence to measurement of relations within economies.

Mathematically, progress from a physical geometry of "n dimensions," to one of "n+1 dimensions," in this way, already provides a notion of measurement. The principle of measurement involved, is that associated with the progression from simply linear/scalar forms of rationality, to so-called incommensurables, to still higher mathematical cardinalities, the transcendental domain, to yet higher transfinite cardinalities. Inasmuch as such increases in physical dimensionality are expressions of revolutionary increase of validated principles of nature (i.e., scientific revolutions), the application of that newly gained increase in knowledge of principles, is the correlative of those increases in the productive powers of labor, by means of which society achieves a correlated increase of potential relative population-density, together with improvement of the demographic characteristics of households and general populations.

Recognizing that this progress is effected through the medium of metaphor, we are guided to appropriate insights respecting the benefits to society's general development, including its productivity, of improvements in language and Classical forms of art.

The relatively simplest aspect of the increase of the productive powers of labor through scientific and technological progress, is shown by examining the relationship between the resolution, and practical realization, of a single, new, validated principle of nature, to the effect of transforming a physical-economic geometry of "n dimensions" to one of "n+1 dimensions." The change in Riemannian curvature of the physical-economic space-time, corresponds to an anti-entropic increase of the potential relative population-density of that society. That is the only way in which there can occur a general increase in the productive powers of labor valid for any possible extension of the economic "horizon."

The Fifteenth-Century establishment of the modern nation-state introduced a new form of society, in which trends toward general education of the population, were combined with state fostering of scientific and technological progress, and with accelerated emphasis on state fostering of development of basic economic infrastructure. This had the twofold effect, of increasing the realization of new knowledge, while also increasing the rate at which new discovery of principle occurred per-capita.

The superior impact of modern European civilization, from the impetus supplied by the Fifteenth-Century Italian Renaissance, until the 1966 downturn, has been the result of the establishment of a new form of society, known as the modern nation-state. The characteristic, most relevant distinction, is the emphasis placed upon preconditions which must be satisfied to realize the potential of all, or nearly all of the individual members of society, through both the development of the specifically human cognitive potential of each individual, and the opportunity for that individual to participate in that society in a way consistent with the development of those cognitive powers. The notion of the Federal Republic of the United States, as summed up in the indelible Preamble of the Federal Constitution, typifies the highest notion of such a modern nation-state yet achieved anywhere on this planet.

The situation in which this notion of the modern nation-state was able to emerge to such advantage of all mankind, as traced from Charlemagne, through the work of such as Abelard of Paris, Dante Alighieri, into the Fifteenth-Century Council of Florence, is the commitment of the Platonic, Augustinian tradition of Christianity to the notions expressed in Latin as imago dei, capax dei, and in Plato's and the Apostle Paul's Classical Greek, as agapë. In short, the driving force within western Europe, was to devise a form of political society consistent with Augustinian Christianity's conception of the nature and requirements of individual mortal existence. This meant, a state committed to the development of all individual members, and to fostering the realization of the cognitive potential of those persons. It was the explosion of the previously pent-up individual cognitive potential, fostered by this new kind of political institution, which unleashed the unprecedented growth of potential relative population-density, and of improvements in demographic characteristics, developments which dominated, and characterized, the striven centuries from the Council of Florence until the 1966 downturn.

The youth-counterculture, riddled with the same brutish existentialism promoted by Nazi philosopher Heidegger, was a repudiation of both this axiomatic nature of the human individual and of the form of modern nation-state developed to meet the natural requirements of every human individual. The repudiation of the earlier commitment, to fostering relatively high rates of investment in scientific and technological progress, and the accompanying impulse, of Henry A. Kissinger and others, toward making technological stagnation tolerable by culling the "human herd" of its "excessive numbers of eaters," represented assaults upon the most essential axioms of modern society, and, also represented assaults on both the dignity and related rights of the human individual, and of the capacity of the existing level of world population to escape the most horrid holocaust of combined mortal strife, famine, and disease which has ever been known, or inferrable from earlier human existence.

The roots of the counterculture

Turn to the second question posed above:

From the same standpoint: What weaknesses in the set of underlying assumptions, governing policies of economic practice, during the 1936-1965 interval, permitted those radical changes in ruling assumptions which have governed shaping of policies of practice during the more recent thirty years?

For all of known and inferrable human existence, prior to Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, more than ninety-five percent of the population, under all branches of human culture, lived in those relatively depraved, relatively bestialized conditions which are typified by serfdom, slavery, or, as under Aztec rule, worse. In historical times, the model of such generalized depravity is the "empire," as typified for the history of the Mediterranean region by Babylon, Tyre, Rome, and Byzantium. In such forms of society, the power of lawmaking was concentrated in an oligarchy, often by an "emperor," or kindred authority selected by that oligarchy to rule in its interest and name. The only recognized political or moral constraint imposed upon such a ruler was the intersection of the collective interest of the oligarchy itself, with such customs as were usually associated with such "mainstream thinking" as were represented in a pantheonic collection of authorized varieties of religious belief. To that latter degree, the emperor, or analogous figures, ruled by a twofold "covenant" with the oligarchy itself (e.g., the Magna Carta imposed by the English oligarchy upon King John), and, according to adopted notions of custom, as typified by the established pantheon, such as that of ancient Rome, or Babylon before it. The principle of government under law, rather than rule of men, did not exist, except in such forms as the Classical Greece of the Homeric epic, of Solon, and of Plato, adduced the existence of such a body of natural law.

Thus, the emergence of the first modern form of nation-state, under France's Louis XI, was a fundamental threat to the continued existence of the two forms of oligarchical rule hegemonic throughout the Mediterranean region up to that time: the form of oligarchy based in the tyranny of a landed aristocracy, and the form of oligarchical tyranny represented by the financier nobility of imperial Venice. The U.S. Declaration of Independence and Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, express that principle of law which is a threat to the existence of all forms of oligarchical or other tyrannical rule. This is the notion of law rightly associated with the term "natural law."

By "natural law," we signify the appreciation, that there exists an adducible principle in the comprehensible relationship between man and the universe, this in the same sense physical science thinks of laws of nature. However, the notion of natural law is intrinsically superior to any ordinary notion of physical-scientific law. This intrinsic superiority lies in the fact, that natural law focuses upon the means by which the human species is capable of exerting dominion over nature. In other words, the domain of natural law is a domain superior to ordinary physical science, the domain of epistemology: how man develops those ideas, in Plato's sense of idea, by means of which man's power over nature, per capita, is increased.

In Augustinian Christianity, this relationship between man and nature is expressed, in Latin, by the notions of imago dei and capax dei, and in Plato's Greek, by agapë. These are the notions from which the development of the modern nation-state was derived.

These notions conceive mankind's relationship to the universe, as actually expressed in an upward course of development of man's increasing dominion, a development which has the epistemological character of Plato's "Becoming." The successful expression of this process of "Becoming," reflects the existence of a constantly governing, underlying, unchanging principle, Plato's "Good," which is always, simultaneously efficient in governing the past, present, and future of the Becoming. The central question of natural law, thus shows itself to be the relationship between, on the one side, the development and activity of the mortal human individual, and, on the other side, that Good which is simultaneously efficient in all past, present, and future existence of the universe. It is the willful, cognitively defined role of that individual, in that context, which presents us the location of the most elementary practical considerations of natural law. Upon these notions all principled features of the modern nation-state implicitly depend, including the notions of equality of all human individuals under law.

In short, the relevant historical fact is, that the form of modern nation-state sprung from Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, is the expression of the deepest principles of universality associated with Christianity, Augustinian Christianity most immediately. The notion of the human individual, as centered, equally, in the expressed self-development of all individual's cognitive potential for practice (dominion), is the essence of the relevant natural law, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution's Preamble reflects this.

Although the fuller comprehension of these implications of natural law was limited to a relatively few key leading intellects of that Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, as earlier, or today, the irreconcilable conflict between these principles and the principles of the extant and more ancient oligarchical orders was written with a broad, bloody hand across the continents, then, and since. While the traditional conflicts between financier and landed forms of oligarchy continued into the Twentieth Century, the primary conflict in Europe, since the Fifteenth Century, has been the combined effort of landed and financier oligarchies to destroy the heritage of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. It is the cumulative impact of this effort upon the internal characteristics of the Twentieth-Century form of the nation-state, which shaped the potential for the successful 1960s introduction of the "post-industrial" cultural-paradigm shift. The nature of these connections is seen most readily from the standpoint of the axiomatics involved.

The initial effort to crush the modern nation-state, as it were "in the cradle," was a mobilization of feudal and financier oligarchs under the direction of Venice. For a moment, the League of Cambrai, led by France, was on the verge of crushing Venice. The betrayal of the League, by Pope Julius II and then Spain, allowed Venice to survive, and organize its sundry political, military, and cultural counter-offensives, then chiefly against France and Italy, but also on every possible flank in Europe, Germany prominently included.

To focus upon the net essentials of the ensuing five centuries of history, the initial reaction by Venice was a raw, conservative reaction, much like the convergence of political conservatism upon fascism since. During the middle to late Sixteenth Century, a more cunning form of reactionary strategy emerged from within Venice: of building counter-nation-states, as maritime and financier powers, in the Netherlands, England, and so forth. This new faction within Venice, led by Paolo Sarpi, gained hegemony in Venice in 1582. That faction is better known as "the Enlightenment." While Venice continued its use of the tradition of landed aristocracy as a "conservative" variety of anti-Renaissance force, chiefly in southern Europe, the main emphasis was centered in the Enlightenment of Sarpi's protégés, such as his lackey Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Galileo's protégé Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, et al., and their Eighteenth-Century empiricist and other followers, Bernard de Mandeville, François Quesnay, Voltaire, Giamaria Ortes, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant ènotably included.

While the relatively more compassionate among the pro-feudalist political conservatives relegated the rights of serfs and other politically oppressed to the domain of the after-life, the Enlightenment, from Bacon through Kant, adopted a simpler, neo-Aristotelean ruse, of denying the existence of the human soul altogether. The root of the latter tactic is traced through Gasparo Contarini's teacher, the "mortalist" Pomponazzi; but, the source on which Sarpi relied for this, was that medieval prophet of present-day radical positivism, the notorious William of Ockham. A wag might admire the conceit, that Sarpi sought to induce civilization, like Seneca, to commit suicide with a razor--Ockham's Razor.

After Sarpi's faction had consolidated its control over London, with the accession of George I, the British Empire, including its present, thinly disguised form as a "Commonwealth," gained increasing cultural hegemony throughout the planet, chiefly through London's participation in the victorious party in a series of European wars, continuing through two London-orchestrated World Wars of this century, and the 1989-1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and its military alliances. A glance at today's typical university curriculum is sufficient to demonstrate the pathological control over the modern mind exerted by the Ockhamite philosophical tradition of Sarpi's Seventeenth-Eighteenth-Centuries "Enlightenment."

Consider the generally accepted forms of social doctrines encountered there, as typified by sociology, psychology, ethnology-anthropology, economics, political science generally, and history. The conception of man which is hegemonic in virtually all universities, is what is otherwise recognized as the British definition of "human nature": the degenerated view of Galileo's student Thomas Hobbes, and of all of Hobbes' notable followers, such as the pro-slavery John Locke, the pro-satanic Bernard de Mandeville, the pro-drug-trafficking Adam Smith, and the British spy-master Jeremy Bentham known otherwise for his scandalous doctrine of "hedonistic calculus," as in his notorious In Defense of Usury and In Defense of Pederasty. The hegemonic axiomatics of today's most widely taught classroom mathematics, is derived from the same Hobbesian view of "human nature," and a correlated notion of the relationship between man and nature. To a large degree, physical science, including biology, is corrupted by the influence of that perverted axiomatic view of mathematics. The doctrines of language are derived from anti-Renaissance notions set forth, in Hobbes' Leviathan, demanding suppression of language's most crucial expressions of cognition, metaphor, and the subjunctive. Classical philology has been superseded by a radically Ockhamite pseudo-science, called "linguistics." Even rational punctuation has been slaughtered on the altar of academic empiricism. The nadir of all this, is the positivist dogma of law uttered shamelessly from such tainted fonts as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The connections are most simply illustrated by the case for generally accepted classroom forms of economics. Piero Sraffa's The Production of Commodities by Commodities has the perverse relevance of presenting the kernel of the fallacy upon which virtually all generally accepted, Twentieth-Century classroom economics has been premised, Cambridge Systems Analysis most explicitly. The notion that the role of labor in the production-process might be adequately represented by a linear magnitude of labor-time, or price of such labor-time as a commodity, is the kernel of a great folly. The attempt to represent economic processes as input-output relations of this characteristic, is the essential absurdity which underlies, pervasively, nearly all popular financial, accounting, and economic dogmas of the present-day classroom and textbook.

To summarize the point, consider your own making the following argument to any defender of what is currently generally accepted economics dogma of the university classroom. Ask: "Where in your equations, do you express the determining role of the human individual's cognitive function in acting as the sole cause for the net increase of physical productivity of society as a whole? In other words: the innate ability of the developed individual human mind, either to assimilate a discovery of physical or analgous principle by replication, or, even to generate a valid discovery of a new such principle? This quality of the developed, innate ability of the mind of the individual person, is the sole source of the anti-entropic transformation of society, from a relatively lower ("n dimensions") to higher ("n+1 dimensions") state of potential relative population-density, and correlated improvement in demographic characteristics of the households and of the population considered as a whole.

This expresses an anti-Hobbes, anti-empiricist valuation placed upon the human individual. It is this conception of the human individual which provides us the basis for judging what are, and what are not intrinsic human rights under natural law. This expresses the standpoint of imago dei and capax dei (and, also, agapë as the passion for sustained creative, cognitive concentration in search of higher truth as solution to metaphor). This is the standpoint of Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance; the contrary view, expresses that notion of man as a mere beast, as portrayed by Hobbes, and by all exponents of the Enlightenment, through today's typical sociology, political science, law, physics, and mathematics classrooms.

At this point, we supply an additional argument. The point being added might not appear to be essential to the line of argument being made, but, for the fastidious thinker, it is not only a relevant, but an essential point. Earlier, above, it was noted, that the principal subjects of the cognitive processes, are not only discovery of valid principles of nature, but also of those principles of cognition itself, through which mankind's discovery and mastery of principles of nature is effected. We are not seated in the spectator's gallery, contemplating the universe performing in the confines of the arena before us; we are in the universe, exerting increased relative control (dominion) over that universe, by means of the discoveries of principle generated within our cognitive processes.

The question of truthfulness, for us, is not what "is," but, rather, "by what means do we know it is?" The primary subject-matter of knowledge, is the nature of proof of the validity of the cognitive processes by means of which we acquire knowledge. The experimental basis for such proof, is the demonstration of man's increased power within the universe, per capita and relative to a square kilometer of the Earth's surface, as this variable ("extensible") magnitude can be counted in terms of formulations corresponding to the advancement from a (Riemannian) physical-space-time geometry of "n dimensions," to a superior one of "n+1 dimensions." Hence: imago dei.

The corollary proposition is: What is the nature of the human individual, by virtue of this, thus, experimentally validated demonstration of the principle of truthful knowledge? Thus, what are the natural rights which must be attributed to that individual? Hence: capax dei. By what means, is this quality of the individual expressed? Hence: agapë, that passion for truth and justice, the emotional power, that Classical-artistic sense of beauty, the which sustains concentration of the cognitive powers on producing a validated solution for what is rigorously definable as a metaphor of science or Classical art.

Riemann and paradigm-shifts

To sum up the case presented thus far. We have located the present global crisis of mankind in terms of two, nested cultural-paradigm shifts. These two, successive shifts, have been situated as, away from the axiomatic assumptions underlying the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's generation of the modern form of sovereign nation-state republic, a species of government under forms of constitutional law (rather than some designated body of public opinion) which derive their intrinsic authority from what we have identified here as natural law.

These two shifts represent the efforts of, chiefly, a European finance-oligarchical faction, rooted in the imperial, maritime and financier power of medieval and early-modern Venice, to, first, resist and undermine the establishment of the sovereign nation-state republic in Europe, and, then, to create sovereign nation-states based upon financier-oligarchical principles, as a counterforce against the principles of the Renaissance. Most recently, since the collapse and disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the financier-oligarchical interest has moved most boldly, with shameless openness, in the effort to eradicate the existence of sovereign nation-states, to clear the way for immediate return to a parody of the old, pre-Fifteenth-Century forms of empire, this time labelled "global society."

The additional feature of the crisis, is the fact, that under the influence of principles of the Renaissance, as these were efficiently present in modern European civilization's global influence until the mid-1960s cultural-paradigm shift, the population of this planet rose from several hundred millions, to more than five billions today. Had the levels of technology extant during the late 1960s, been fully utilized for economic development, this planet could have sustained a population, living at 1960s European standards of per-capita market-baskets, and comparable demographic profiles, in the order of approximately twenty-five billions. The source of this increase of potential relative population-density, has been entirely the changes which the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance in Europe had introduced to the "cultural matrix" of leading rations of the world's population.

The continued cultural-paradigm shift, away from those values, when accompanied by the willful imposition of "globalization," to the effect of eliminating the modern European form of sovereign nation-state republic, means a rapid collapse of the world's potential relative population-density toward approximately the levels reached, world-wide, during Europe's Fourteenth Century. The exact levels which might be reached during a period of approximately the first two generations of the coming century can not be predicted. The extent of chaos-driven mortal strife, the scope and variety of old and new forms of epidemic and pandemic diseases of plant, animal, and man, and the correlated collapse in nutrition, all involve too many presently unpredictable considerations to permit us to say whether the world population's collapse might tend to level off at approximately several hundred millions living individuals, or perhaps tens of millions.

It must be stressed, that the institution of the Renaissance model of sovereign nation-state republic, is itself the most essential pillar of all of those institutions upon which the rise of humanity's potential population above several hundred millions has depended absolutely. Destroy the centralized institutions of nation-states such as the U.S.A., and civilization as a whole is doomed to plunge into the worst "new dark age" yet known. Continue the present shift toward parodies of pre-Renaissance imperial rule, under growing power of "globalization" and supranational agencies subverting national sovereignty, and that "new dark age" is an inevitability.

For the worst case, we should adopt the view, that once mankind had purged itself of those foolish, presently "mainstream" ideas which have been responsible for bringing civilization to the point of collapse into a "new dark age," civilization might emerge on this planet again, perhaps not to repeat the mistakes which had destroyed this present civilization from within. That resilience of living processes, the which has so often, pleasantly surprised so many among us, and the manifest power for good inhering in the human individual's cognitive processes, oblige us to adopt more optimistic estimates for the distant future of mankind.

Nonetheless, unless we overcome the present crisis, during the months before us, the likely prospects for the declining years of the presently aging "1968 generation," and their presently living descendants, are horrifying beyond the presently existing capacity for belief. If we fail to reverse the recent thirty years' cultural-paradigm shift during the weeks and months immediately before us now, the tattered remains of the crisis-stricken human species will suffer a monstrous penance for the stubborn folly of our "1968 generation." The willful choice of globalist forms of neo-Malthusian, "post-industrial" utopianism, means a collapse of the planet's human potential relative population-density, from the present level, above five billions raw population, to not more than several hundred millions. The rate of collapse of population-potential so indicated, signifies a catastrophe beyond the scope of today's known human experience.

There we stand, imperilled, at the brink of such a holocaust. By recognition of that cruel fact, let our consciences be informed for action.

This is a crisis from which only appropriate leadership, acting with at least the degee of great pungency and force invoked by President Franklin Roosevelt's March 1933 inaugural address, might rescue the human species. Were these issues for action relegated to an ordinary dialogue among political parties and governments, a form of dialogue like that of the European Union, delimited by the consent of all leading parties, the worst disaster would be ensured. Only such leadership, radiated from agreements among two or more of the world's largest powers, and their collaborators, could rescue humanity at this present, very late date.

That fact, that a few must act boldly and preemptively, in the interest of the whole civilization, as President Franklin Roosevelt might have done, but for his untimely death, summarizes the special character of the strategic crisis before us; any less dramatic view of the matter, were already exhibitions of the pathetic folly of present-day Hamlets. In fact, joint preemptive action taken by the President of the United States, with the consent and support of the People's Republic of China, and our two nations' mutual partners in great economic enterprises, is the only possible route to safety for the human race as a whole; those who oppose such action, or seek to prevent it, are therefore misguided souls, acting as if they were the enemies in practice of all mankind.

With those considerations in view, return to the Riemannian model of cultural-paradigm shift confronting us now. Examine certain leading scientific features which have an essential relevance to the cited, practical strategic perspective required of the statesman.

The image of progress as corresponding to an orderable succession of hypotheses, from a Riemannian manifold of "n dimensions" to one of "n+1 dimensions," applies not only to the domain recognized as that of scientific and technological progress, but also the domain of Classical fine arts and related matters of development of the principled character of the individual's, and culture's relevant cognitive powers. One crucial feature of such a succession of hypotheses must be emphasized before turning to our concluding argument.

In the case, that we are considering a series of actions, or propositions, which are consistent with a single hypothesis (e.g., interdependent set of definitions, axioms, and postulates), that hypothesis defines the ordering-principle of developments so situated. In the case of a succession of hypotheses, a differing sort of underlying hypothesis is determining. For our purposes here, an adequate illustration is provided by considering the cases in which the notion of ordering pertains to the distinction between entropic and anti-entropic series of hypotheses. This specific issue of ordering is that which must occupy our attention for the case at hand: the transition from the hypothesis which assures us the entropic result of a doomed civilization, to the new hypothesis which assures us the contrary, anti-entropic result. The ordering principle which defines that distinction, is the point of crucial difference between the anti-entropic Renaissance impulse, and the contrary, corrosive, entropic impulse supplied by the Enlightenment. The modern sovereign nation-state republic, is an integral part of the Renaissance impulse; without it, civilization could not survive. Such are the references which identify the state of mind required of the statesman addressing the presently onrushing global crisis.

The most commonly endemic obstacle to progress, is that kind of militant adherence to defense of "mainstream thinking," which might have shouted "flat earth" slogans at the departing three caravels of Admiral Christopher Columbus. The great crises of humanity are often defined by those moments at which time has at last run out for some stubbornly held, popular body of what today's politically-correct muddleheads admire as currently "mainstream opinion." In such moments of crisis, it might be better to say, that the previously held hypothesis must now be promptly superseded by a better one. It is for that reason, that great moments of progress in human civilization often arrive with the accompanying bloody afterbirth of violent revolutions and, or wars. The stubbornness with which entrenched bankrupt opinion is defended as it were a vital strategic interest, is the most common cause of ruin of nations.

For that same reason, leadership in time of crisis is distinguished by the willful capability of resisting so-called "mainstream opinion," the capability of refusing to wait, in the customary cowardly fashion of bureaucrats, until the wind of opinion turns to one's advantage. As in any ordinary emergency, the customary problem is to find among those engaged, an egregious voice of authority, which will summon an otherwise confused body of people to act with resolve in the manner required to address the crisis. This is the essence of distinguished military leadership; it is the essence of statesmanship in a moment of crisis. Today, the need is for voices of leadership which speak to the troubled, anarchic world at large with the authority of great-power status. Today, there are but two remaining nations on this planet, whose cooperation might provide that quality of leadership: the incumbent President of the United States, in partnership with the government of the People's Republic of China. If that does not occur, then there are presently no visible hopes of rescue for humanity at large; in that case, the threatened "new dark age" will come, in the immortal words of former U.S. Vice-President Walter Mondale, "early and often."

The psychological heart of the matter of leadership, is the ability of leading agencies to see with clarity the non-linear process of transition from a previously established, to the appropriate new hypothesis of ruling opinion. As the Act III soliloquy of Shakespeare's Hamlet addresses this matter concisely, the doom of the play's Hamlet, and Denmark, too, lay in Hamlet's fearful inability to bridge the transition from those familiar ways which led only to doom, to the new, unfamiliar paths toward survival. Like the commander whose suicidal frontal assaults betray his lack of intellectual courage to see the appropriate flanking actions, or young Moltke's fatal loss of intellectual courage at the outset of World War|I, or the methodical Montgomery who personally delayed victory by months of war or longer, in repeated demonstrations of a kindred intellectual flaw, the most deadly sin of the well-meaning, failed leader, is the propensity to cling to old geometries of thought, when the leap into new ones is historically decisive.

For that reason, it is essential, that even among many who will not yet grasp fully the implications of what I have written here, it is essential that they be informed of the presence of such qualities of consideration, that they might not commit the potentially fatal mistake, of assuming that what they perceive as the unfamiliar, is therefore in error. They must grasp the fact, that anything that is not in error, will be unfamiliar to them, and that whatever seems familiar were likely to be a fatal error. They must sense the importance of their immediate study of these matters, otherwise they will be more or less useless advisors on choices of action during the onrushing moment of crisis.

Now, the course of economic and related events, has made clear to all reasonably well-informed and literate persons, the outstanding accuracy of the present writer's forecasts and accompanying characterization of the recent decades cultural and economic decline. Although some institutions have attempted to evade this fact, by misrepresenting the writer's functional forecasts as implying "tea-leaf"-style predictions which, in fact, the writer did not make, the forecast of the late-1960s process leading into August 1971, the writer's mid-1970s assessment of the "floating exchange-rate" system, the writer's outline of the awful implications of the 1979-1982 "Volcker measures," his Spring 1987 forecast of a probable stock-market crash beginning the first week in October, and his 1992-1994 treatments of the "derivatives bubble" implications, are the best forecasts on the public record from any source on these matters. This writer's earned, solid authority in these and related matters, has very specific strategic importance at this crisis-juncture.

It is unlikely that any presently visible governments would act competently until such time as an "economic Pearl Harbor effect" suddenly transforms public opinion in the manner needed to support dramatic, sudden executive action by the incumbent President of the United States. Therefore, the great danger is, that the President, and also his key partners come to that moment of history-shaping decision inadequately prepared, and, for that reason, flub the situation, with disastrous effects for all mankind.

The danger is not only that the President and his immediate partners in decision might be inadequately prepared. The willingness of the world at large to submit to the required, preemptive decisions by the President and his partners, requires that they, too, be informed in advance, and thus prepared to react in the appropriate way. The argument will be heard, that the discussion is moot, since no one is presently prepared to consider such actions; the opposite argument must be made, unless people are informed of the reasons for those needed actions which they would only be prepared to take under conditions of crisis not yet arrived, they will not act competently when those conditions do arrive. We must employ the precious little remaining time available to prepare decision-makers for those actions they must take all too soon, whether or not they are presently willing to admit such a moment of crisis would ever arrive. The point of view outlined above, is the standpoint which is indispensable for defining those near-future decisions upon which the continued existence of civilization depends.

If relevant persons are not willing to accept the massively redundant proofs of the present writer's exceptional authority in related matters, the conclusion to be drawn, is that our poor civilization has no person qualified to rule in any of the governments whose decisions will soon determine whether mankind launches a planetary economic recovery, or sinks into the worst "new dark age" yet known.

-30-