ON ACADEMICIAN LVOV'S WARNING

What Is
`Primitive Accumulation'?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

July 12, 2001

Current developments are shattering wishful delusions about the world's economic situation. During the several few months since the inauguration of President George W. Bush, Jr., more and more among leading circles around the world are being impelled to recognize, that this planet as a whole is gripped by a systemic crisis, rather than, as they had wished, merely cyclical ones.

Since the financial crises of 1997, those leading circles have been wrestling with the increasing intensity of financial and other disasters, such as those currently erupting in Korea, Japan, Turkey, Argentina, and Brazil. That evidence should have already warned them, that the present crisis can not be mastered by treating it as either a periodic phenomenon, or the result of some isolated past mistakes in managing the system. As usual with such circles, they have had to learn such lessons the hard way, if, indeed, they are capable of learning them at all.

Now, with the most recent developments, apart from the typical U.S. dupes of mass-media brainwashing, it is being recognized, more and more, that although the world's economy itself could be revived, the present monetary and financial systems could not be saved. The immediate risk is, that this rescue action would be possible only if we act soon enough, to uproot that post-1971 monetary-financial system which made the terminal collapse of the world's present financial system inevitable.

We must not waste any more effort in the attempt to save the doomed system itself. We must conserve all our rapidly dwindling, remaining resources, while ensuring that the present financial and monetary system is shut down before it destroys the economy and civilization with it.

Worse, given the present level of the world's population, and the rate of collapse of the means of production needed to support that population, unless that post-1971 system is immediately scrapped and replaced, the attempt to maintain the presently bankrupt world financial and monetary structures, would result in a generations-long new dark age for the planet generally.

The immediate danger is, that although the captains of finance and political power have all the evidence needed to show them that this crash is now ongoing, many among them would prefer to reign in Hell, than survive in a world which is not ruled by their doomed financial system. Their reaction to the crisis, is to plunge into flight forward, even if that means plunging the world into a global spread of warfare, or even a new dark age, that as a way of disrupting the efforts of others to build alternatives to the present global financial and monetary lunacy. They would cling to their sinking Titanic, even though they presently know it is sinking, rather than give up their seat at the captain's table.

Thus, for the moment, the world's situation is typified by the evidence that, for the present moment, the present U.S. administration, the British Commonwealth, and also the still marginally influential, if self-discredited, Democratic Leadership Council faction of the U.S. Democratic Party, are all still clinging to their hysterical refusal to accept the fact that there is no place in the living future of this planet for the kind of politics they practiced in 2000.[1]

The sweeping changes needed at the present moment of global systemic crisis, are, chiefly, of two classes.

First, we must immediately put the world as a whole through emergency bankruptcy-reorganization, through measures which include extensive nullifications among existing masses of debt-obligation. Such measures are to be taken under the included authority of that general welfare principle embedded in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.

These measures must be as drastic as may be required, not merely to save the continued orderly functioning of governments, necessary banking institutions, agriculture, and industry, that at levels required for the security of present nations and their present levels of population, and also to launch immediately a new wave of accelerating physical-economic growth. There is no hope for the U.S., and other nations, unless those seemingly drastic actions of reform are taken very soon.

To save the world's economy from the presently onrushing disaster, the protectionist form of the fixed-exchange-rate system of the 1945-1964 Bretton Woods System, including capital and financial controls, offers us an available, recently proven model of successful reform. All change from that successful, former system, to the present, failed, floating-exchange-rate system, has proven itself, over three decades, to have been an awful mistake. The only practicable emergency action by governments, under present crisis-conditions, is to use the fact that the 1945-1964 Bretton Woods system worked, whereas its 1971-2001 successor has failed miserably, as the point of fact on which to base emergency measures today.

Second, we must institute certain reforms in the way in which the physical priorities of present and future economic policies are set. On this account, since it is the presently bankrupt world monetary and financial system which must be urgently replaced, we must focus much attention on those crucial, pathetic errors of the 1966-1981 interval, during which the most destructive of the axiomatic changes in physical-economic policies were set into motion by the U.K. and U.S.A., on the one side, and then echoed, with menacing global side-effects, within the Soviet system.

The subject of this report is the second of those two classes of emergency actions. I shall show, that our principal subject of policy-deliberation here, should be the phenomena sometimes associated with the economist's technical term "primitive accumulation."

The Lvov Warning

During the same June 29, 2001 hearings of the Economics Committee of the Russian State parliament, the Duma, at which my testimony was featured, Academician Dmitri S. Lvov warned against overlooking the long waves of physical-economic decadence which this planet has suffered over recent decades.[2] Later, in the brief remarks with which I was invited to close the testimony presented at that day's hearing, I emphasized the importance of his intervention, and implicitly committed myself to provide, soon, fuller elaboration of my own argument in support of his testimony. The subject is a matter of concern for the world at large. That elaboration is supplied in these pages.

Much has been said and written, during the past decade, of the decline in the Soviet economy, wreaked upon both the Soviet Union and, then upon post-Soviet Russia, the latter under the influence of the Anglo-American monetarist "carpet-baggers." So far, the great error has been, that too little attention has been given to the fact, that these developments afflicting Russia today, can not be competently assessed apart from the larger setting of the presently accelerating physical collapse of the world's economy as a whole.[3] To correct that great error, we should situate Academician Lvov's June 29 warning, in the breadth and depth of the historical background for the combined, present crisis-situation enveloping not only Russia, but the world as a whole.

The crucial fact which no competent study of the present crisis could overlook, is that the presently onrushing, global financial collapse of the world's monetary and financial system, is chiefly the outcome of approximately thirty-five years of increasing interdependency among two distinct political-philosophical types of economic systems. The first of those, is the decadent, radically monetarist form of the IMF system, the form which emerged within the United Kingdom under the succession of, most notably, the Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher governments. This decadent form was echoed in the U.S.A., as the impact of the succession of the "Southern Strategy" candidacies of Republican President Richard Nixon and Democratic President Jimmy Carter.[4] The second case, is that set of downward-leading trends of developments in the successive Soviet and Russian economies, a trend which appeared over the course of a parallel span of time.

Looking at this problem from the vantage-point of developments in Americas and Western Europe, over the 1945-2001 interval, we witness net progress in post-war physical-economic development during the 1945-1964 interval, for as long as the policies instituted by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt continued to exert their waning influence on the policies of the U.S.A. and western continental Europe; but, the assassination of Roosevelt emulator President Kennedy, was soon followed by the onset of a period of overall collapse, inclusive of the interval 1967-2001 to date. During the latter interval, a parallel, net downward development, occurred in the Soviet and Comecon system. Those two, conflicting systems of that latter period, while each distinct from the other in many of their sundry axiomatic, or merely superficial characteristics, were nonetheless coupled to such a degree, that the short- to medium-term weakening of the long-term internal strength of the one, was reflected, ironically, in radiated effects, as a long-term weakening of the other.[5]

Look, for example, at the ironical combination of effects upon both western Europe and the U.S.A., of the 1990-2001 collapse of the savagely looted physical economies of the Comecon and its successors.

During that 1990-2001 interval, the 1992-1998 interval most notably, the monetary systems of the U.S.A. and British Commonwealth jointly applied the same methods for looting of the territory of both the pre-1989 Soviet Union and such associated nations of the former Comecon as post-1989 Poland and Ukraine, which had been used by the post-1866 Wall Street "carpetbaggers," in their looting of the territory of the short-lived Confederacy.

Through such "carpet-bagging" methods, the Anglo-American monetarists and their Russian compradors reaped vast physical wealth and financial income, by looting the economies of their victims. For a time, up to the close of the GKO-triggered, 1998 collapse of Wall Street's Long-Term Capital Management hedge-fund, this looting of the accumulated wealth of the former Comecon area, combined with the continued looting of both Central and South America and Africa, was a principal contributing factor, in temporarily propping-up Commonwealth and U.S.A. economies which were otherwise in a state of prolonged medium- to long-term physical-economic collapse.[6]

Consequently, the international financial and monetary collapse-crises of 1997-1998, reflected the principle, that any parasite which depends for its existence upon sucking its prey into a state of exhaustion, will be ultimately brought down by its compulsion to weaken the vitality of its prey. The triumphant predators of the 1989-2001 interval, the U.S.A. and British Commonwealth, are now being brought down by their feral exhaustion of the combined victims among nations of the Americas, Africa, Southeast and East Asia, and, also western continental Europe, Turkey, and the Balkans, that in addition to the looting of the former territories of the Comecon bloc.

Earlier, in such a manner, a succession of ancient Mesopotamian empires had each destroyed itself, in its turn, by its own parasitical triumphs. So, such practices, including the looting of the great and prosperous Abassid Caliphate, by tax-farming usurers, produced there a desert from which the region has not recovered to the present day. So, the Roman Empire and Byzantine successors destroyed themselves, demographically and otherwise, from within, by the same policies which brought about the exhaustion of their chosen prey.[7] Thus, the imperial, Anglo-American-controlled international monetary and financial systems of today, have doomed themselves, by their Romantics' presently continued imitations of the fallen empires of the past.[8]

In addition to these interactions among the various, interdependent systems of this planet, there is an included, crucial factor commonly underlying the presently ongoing global collapse: the large-scale introduction of neo-malthusian global policies, beginning with the influential 1963 Paris OECD education-policy report of Britain's Dr. Alexander King, and the subsequent founding of the Club of Rome and Laxenberg, Austria-based Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) by the influence of the same Dr. King, Lord Solly Zuckermann, McGeorge Bundy, and Britain's Cambridge University-centered systems-analysis cabal.

This so-called neo-malthusian policy, sometimes called "environmentalism," amounts to nothing other than a form of economic suicide by slow poisoning, whose terminal effects are now being experienced approximately thirty-five years after the relevant changes were first introduced to the shaping of the policies of the U.S.A. and other governments.

The common, characteristic feature of this self-imposed, post-1967, internal economic collapse of the most powerful national economies of the 1945-1964 interval, has been the spread of the fungus of "systems analysis" throughout the policy-making of leading public and private institutions of today's world. "Systems analysis," is only a different variety of the same ideological practice, of "zero economic growth," expressed as neo-malthusianism.

The intrinsically "entropic" effects of applied systems analysis, is the characteristic, now global feature of the effects of the neo-malthusian ideological trends of the recent thirty-five years. The acceleration of the post-1989 self-destruction of the industrial economies, by aid of the introduction of the idiot-savant's delusion with "benchmarking," is merely one of the more outrageous of the many simple examples of the lunacy propagated in the name of "systems analysis."[9]

Considering Academician Lvov's testimony against the background of the world as a whole, it is clear that the division of each of the post-war world's dominant cultures into two matching periods, of successive periods of growth and decline, presents us with certain general characteristics which were common to both those otherwise distinct systems.

However, we must not commit the typical fallacy of composition, of concluding that it was the monetary and financial systems introduced after 1964, which ruined the world. No man dies of suicide; by definition, he dies of suicide only if he had succeeded in an attempted suicide. It was not really the prostitute who gave her customer the venereal disease; it was his decision to use that prostitute, which awarded him the infection. It was the physical-economic criteria which otherwise healthy modern societies imposed, arbitrarily, upon the design of their pre-existing financial and monetary systems, which has caused the decadence of both of what had been the world's dominant economic systems, that during the course of the recent thirty-odd years. When a scientist adopts a clearly anti-scientific mathematical dogma, and does so simply because that dogma has become fashionable, it is that professional who is morally responsible for the resulting catastrophe, not that mere dogma.

When a man acts immorally for the sake of acting in consistency with some mathematical dogma, it is the immorality of the man, not the dogma, which is to be blamed for the result. Like the assassin who pleads innocence, on grounds that, "It was nothing personal; I was just doing my job," the crime of the adherents of systems analysis, is that they chose to obey that fallacious dogma, even in immoral disregard for what they should have foreseen and known as the obviously cruel results of making that immoral choice. It is that crime which needs to be corrected.

Thus, the clear cause for the characteristic difference in physical-economic trends, between the 1945-1964 interval of net medium- to long-term growth, and the 1971-2001 interval of long-term collapse, is to be identified with two principal changes, beginning with the adoption of Richard Nixon's 1966-1968 "Southern Strategy," of more than thirty years ago: first, monetarist modes of physical looting of nations and their populations, and, secondly, the corruption of those cultures with deadly types of clearly mass-murderous ideological intentions concerning physical values, such as "neo-malthusianism," immoralities typified by so-called "systems analysis."

1. `Primitive Accumulation'

Since each particular quality of social-political system, reacts somewhat differently to the same kind of experience, than do societies of other historically determined social-political characteristics, we must always examine the reactions within each, from study of both prevailing ideas and the preceding cultural history of each of those systems. We must then examine the interaction of those societies in light of the interactions among the distinct cultural-historical specifics of each.

Such are the principles of the development of an applied science of history, which we should adduce from close study of the principles of Classical humanist modes of education. So, to understand relations between Russia and the world today, we must consider the succession of Czarist Russia, the Soviet system, and present-day Russia, in the light of both their historically evolving relations to the world at large, and Russia's unique, and strategically crucial characteristics as a specifically Eurasian nation.

So, I proceed here. Most immediately, any consideration of Russia and its external relations today, must take into account the legacy of the circumstances leading into the formation and internal evolution of the Soviet system, and the impact of that later shift to a radically monetarist, more or less "Thatcherite" form of economy, which was institutionalized in Russia about 1992. Any strategist who fails to take such relatively recent developments of the recent several generations into account, is likely to break his professional neck by his overlooking such evidence.

In the lexicon of modern Russia's history, including the legacy of Karl Marx and of such successful critics of Marx's error on the implications of this matter as Rosa Luxemburg and Soviet economist Ye. Preobrazhensky,[10] it is fairly said, that "primitive accumulation" signifies the uncompensated conversion of previously existing resources into current consumption. In any valid use of that technical term, it signifies the drawing down, for current physical consumption, from either the store of nature, or previous forms of physical capital investments, or a combination of both, including those embodied in education and Classical forms of artistic culture. Implicitly, it signifies that, for an economy to prosper, it must, sooner or later, replenish the physical economy, to compensate for that which has been "borrowed" from it as "primitive accumulation." Net primitive accumulation signifies, that even during the medium term, the marginalization of the gross resources being depleted, will tend to result in a lowered performance of the physical economy, as performance is measurable in per-capita, per-square-kilometer, and demographic terms.

Therefore, for the long term, any sane government will wish to tax the using-up of natural resources in the degree needed, as a source of resources for the nation's reinvestment, either to replace what is being used up, or, to produce a substitute which is, functionally, a suitable replacement for it, or, to compensate for marginalization by an offsetting set of science-technology-driven increases in the net productive powers of labor.

Similarly, every functionally sane government will also, whether directly or indirectly, tax the economy in the amount needed to acquire the resources which ensure the maintenance or replacement of depleted, or depreciated capital improvements in both basic economic infrastructure and means of production of goods. Any government so reckless as not to do this, is condemning its nation to a long-term process of decay, and ultimate collapse through attrition, all through "primitive accumulation."[11]

To resolve the issues implicitly raised by these observations, we must situate any discussion of Russia's economic policy-shaping, against the relevant historical backdrop: in terms of the way in which Russia reacts in such matters, which is to say, in terms of the historically defined contrast among the most relevant three dominant, historical, social-economic systems of globally extended modern European civilization: Soviet, American System (e.g., "Hamiltonian"), and that common rival of both of those, which is called either "monetarist" or "liberal."[12] The latter is that British system of "Adam Smith" et al., which President Franklin Roosevelt denounced in warning Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that a post-war U.S. would not permit the world to be ruled again by what Roosevelt denounced as "British Eighteenth-Century methods." Unfortunately, Roosevelt died before he could carry out most of those changes.

Therefore, for this discussion of interactions among those three, historically "rival" systems, we must take into account another debatable, but nonetheless important topic of Marx's terminology, such as "fictitious capital (accumulation)." By "fictitious accumulation," I emphasize the substitution of purely nominal financial, or equivalent notions of income, such as the increase in accounted volume of a leverage-driven financial real-estate holding, or the substitution of a common-stock price-bubble, for net growth in net physical output. The recently collapsed, fraudulent "new economy" bubble of 1995-2000, is an example of this. The present, explosive U.S. real estate-mortgage bubble, is a deadly example of this. To treat the scope of the subject-matter implicitly addressed by my opening remarks here, we must also make reference to the work of two among the most notable figures of Soviet Russia's 1918-1945 interval, the "long wave" economist Nikolai Kondratieff, and the founder of biogeochemistry, V.I. Vernadsky.[13]

To that end, I shall focus on the exemplary case of policy-shaping axioms underlying the post-1966-1971, long wave of economic and moral decadence caused by the looting of previous capital investments in U.S. basic economic infrastructure and productive capacity of the U.S. economy. I shall then view the more general application of the relationship between global effects of primitive accumulation and the systemic, rather than merely cyclical aspects of the presently onrushing physical collapse of the economy of the planet as a whole.

In this connection, I shall, once again, take into account the current political relevance of Vernadsky's work, for addressing the subject of the role of primitive accumulation, as that subject is to be seen within the bounds of the science of physical economy. Out of respect for the relevance of some of the discussion of the role of "energy" in Vernadsky's work, which followed my June 28th address to Moscow's Lebedev Institute, on the subject of the immediate relevance of Vernadsky's work, I shall situate that discussion at the Institute within the specific framework of Russia's history. I begin now with a relevant summary of my personal relationship to Vernadsky's concept of the noösphere.[14]

My Agreement and Differences With Vernadsky's Definition of the Noösphere

My own original discoveries in the science of physical economy, were made, during the interval 1948-1951, as products of my intention to refute Professor Norbert Wiener's radically positivist misdefinition of "information."[15] At that time, I proceeded with the same attacks against Wiener's argument, which I had adopted, years earlier, in my adolescence, in defending Gottfried Leibniz's notion of a monadology against Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It should be apparent, and thus taken into account, in my remarks here today, that my views on the opposing methods of Leibniz and Kant, as located centrally in the issue of the monadology, have continued to be the point of reference for all of my intellectual development and related work since adolescence.

Therefore, from the start of that refutation of Wiener's hoax, I was already persuaded, that the effort to trace the origin of life from within axiomatically abiotic processes, was obviously an epistemological absurdity.[16] However, partly because of what I recognized as an included flaw in the way in which Vernadsky locates the impact of scientific discovery on man's relationship to national economy, his work on this subject of the noösphere had no functional role within the way in which I originally developed my own discoveries during those early years of my work.[17]

Also, at that point, in 1952, I had reached my conclusions in the course of refuting Wiener's and von Neumann's work on matters of economic processes; at which point I was about to adopt the habilitation dissertation of B. Riemann as the only competent standard from which to define the internal characteristics of what Vernadsky identifies as the noösphere. Thus, while, in later years, I have consistently praised Vernadsky's beautiful application of the methods of experimental physical science, I also emphasize, that the relationship of the individual to nature, through the historical social process, can not be competently addressed in any other way than from the standpoint of adopting a Riemannian notion of an anti-Euclidean physical geometry, as a standard of reference for defining the social process in which the individual's mind's functionally efficient relationship to nature is actually situated.[18]

That is to emphasize, that the individual discoverer acts on nature, not as an isolable individuality, but only through acting upon the social process in which he or she is situated.[19] It is this social aspect of the matter, an aspect typified by the proper function of education, which demands the approach offered by Riemannian physical geometry. It was on this pivotal point that my work has been based, during the 1948-1953 interval of my initial series of discoveries and related developments, as now. It was the approach, which led me to adopt Riemann's geometry as the location in which to situate my own discoveries.

Thus, although I recognize and admire greatly Vernadsky's development of his concept of the noösphere, his conception of the individual person's cognitive relationship to the biosphere was flawed, to the degree it was axiomatically a greatly oversimplified representation of the relationship between the individual discoverer and the realization of the benefit of the discovery; it does not correspond to my own image of the characteristic, determining social processes of what he termed the noösphere, as I have developed my own view from a different starting-point, through my own discoveries in physical economy.[20] The crucial importance of that distinction should become clearer in the course of this present report.

Later, however, in my writing a 1973 letter which founded the scientific institution subsequently known as the Fusion Energy Foundation, I emphasized that my associates must subsume Vernadsky's concept of the noösphere-biosphere underneath my own original contributions to the development of the science of physical economy. Since that time, the institutions which I represent, have always adhered to that specific view of the crucial place of Vernadsky's work within the framework provided by a science of physical economy.

More recently, since my Berlin address of October 12, 1988, this standpoint finds greatly increased practical importance, in the setting of the task-orientation now defined by the Eurasian Land-Bridge program, in which qualitative and large-scale changes in the functioning of the biosphere are elevated to crucial importance.[21] Here, Vernadsky's work blossoms into its fuller importance for the science and practice of physical economy, as also in restoring a presently much-needed, non-reductionist approach to biological science in a more general way.

The central feature, and starting-point of my attack on the obvious fraud perpetrated by Wiener (and, also, such lunatic concoctions by John von Neumann as "systems analysis" and "artificial intelligence"), was, as I have already noted, my earlier adherence, since mid-adolescence, to the standpoint of Leibniz's monadology, in opposition to the virtually brain-dead reductionism of Immanuel Kant's celebrated Critiques.[22] Wiener's argument carried the legacies of both British empiricism and Nineteenth-Century neo-Kantian Romanticism to an extreme. The challenge to me, was to define the method by which to demonstrate, experimentally, from the standpoint of a science of physical economy, that the generation of valid new discoveries of universal physical principle, was a provable hypothesis. The study of the role of applied discoveries of scientific and technological progress, in generating increases of the per-capita productive powers of labor, offered the obvious approach to meeting that challenge.

The core of my argument against Wiener's "information theory," is elementary. As Vernadsky has made a similar argument, the issue is whether or not the human species has the manifest ability to increase willfully its potential relative population-density, as no other species can willfully accomplish such a result. This effect is shown to occur only through the application of experimentally validatable discoveries of universal physical principles to social practice. These discoveries can not be derived by the statistical methods associated with the influence of Ernst Mach, or that of Bertrand Russell and such Russell acolytes as Wiener and von Neumann.

What Is Scientific Method?

The disastrous effects of all application of the dogmas of "systems analysis" to real economies, originate in the intrinsically anti-scientific, and actually schizophrenic assumptions, from which that dogma is derived.[23] The essentially insane assumption underlying systems analysis, is, that the principles of physical processes can be adduced from within the bounds of an implicitly arithmetic, aprioristic system of that type associated with Bertrand Russell's control over the production of the Russell-Whitehead Principia Mathematica. The combined influence of Wiener and von Neumann, as expressed in the founding of the RAND Corporation and promotion of systems analysis, is a leading example of that specific insanity. Kurt Gödel's devastating 1930 refutation of the doctrine of Russell, Gödel's proof, is not the best refutation of systems analysis; but it is a devastatingly conclusive, formal type of proof with special historical relevance.[24]

The pivotal symptom of such specifically schizophrenic delusions in the name of science, is the exclusion of the principle of physical-scientific discovery of universal principles, as such principles are excluded, deductively, from the aprioristic, axiomatically "complete systems," as practiced by such cults as those of Wiener and von Neumann. On the subject of primitive accumulation, the functionally crucial element of what is actually clinical psychosis within the methods of systems analysis, is its hysterical denial of the act of an experimentally validatable discovery of a universal physical principle. This is, for example, expressed as the hateful hysteria of Bertrand Russell against the memory and influence of the work of Leibniz, Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, Riemann, et al., and also expressed by all of those allied with Russell, as the followers of the radically empiricist Ernst Mach expressed a related kind of hatred against Max Planck.

Since all durable physical-economic progress of society, depends inclusively, but also absolutely, upon such discoveries of universal physical principle, the attempt to eliminate the factor of such discoveries from the shaping of economic policy, must lead toward an entropic decline, and, ultimately, disintegration of any society which adopts the currently epidemic form of mental illness expressed by systems analysis and its correlatives.

Therefore, for precisely that reason, all competent economic policy today, begins, in current practice, from a refutation and rejection of systems analysis and its correlatives.[25] This means, that we must begin all serious study of the problems of today's world economy, from the standpoint of defining and affirming the principle of discovery and socially determined application of experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle.

In summary, that definition is made as follows.

In the successful design of those experiments which lead to proof of a newly discovered universal physical principle, we are able to identify features of that design which are unique for the principle being tested in that choice of medium. Those features of successful such proof-of-principle experiments, are usefully identified as "technologies." It is necessary to call these "technologies," to distinguish such derivatives of discovery of principles, from the related universal physical principles themselves. It is the application of those technologies to the design of productive and related practice, which is the immediate expression of the way in which the discovery of a universal physical principle generates the physical potential for a willful increase in the potential relative population-density of the human species.

The relevant definition of a universal physical principle, is derived from the Socratic method upon which Nicholas of Cusa founded modern European experimental physical science, as in his De Docta Ignorantia and later writings on this matter. The Classically Platonic method of docta ignorantia, which is otherwise described in science as Cusa's "the coincidence of opposites" and Leibniz's "Analysis Situs," leads to the Classical model to be recognized in the original and unique discovery of the principle of universal gravitation by avowed Cusa follower Johannes Kepler. The latter is the work which was the actual founding of a modern mathematical physics which is both implicitly comprehensive and a competent impulse in its intended direction.

That is to say, that all typical discoveries of universal physical principles, occur as solutions to those well-defined paradoxes which overturn previously established axiomatic assumptions respecting the principles governing the universe. The false assumptions overturned, are either explicitly false claims, or appear in the form of omission of some universal principle which must be taken into account; or, often, this has involved a combination of both types of erroneous assumptions.

In the language of that modern experimental physical science defined by such explicit followers of Cusa as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, and by the uniquely original discovery of the calculus by Leibniz, the typical method for defining such a paradox, and then solving it, is to state the mutually contradictory elements of the experimental evidence within the terms of an axiomatically geometrical mathematical physics representing the assumptions within which that paradoxical evidence is situated for study.

Fermat's definition of a pathway of quickest time, as opposed to shortest distance, is perhaps the simplest, best choice of standard Classical pedagogical model for such constructions. Kepler's proof, that the future position and velocity of Mars in its orbit at some chosen time, could not be derived by the statistical methods of Copernicus, Brahe, et al., is another best choice for a typical standard in pedagogy.[26] From such discoveries as these of Kepler and Fermat, we have the modern notion of the discovery and proof of a universal physical principle, that from the starting-point provided by a well-defined ontological paradox. Leibniz, and his followers, used the term "Analysis Situs" as typifying this class of paradoxes. These principles were identified by Kepler, in his discovery of universal gravitation, as the expression of a universal intention existing outside the previously established assumptions of any closed system in mathematical physics.

For the purposes of the topic of primitive accumulation, compare Kepler's use of scientific method with that of Vernadsky.

By application of those same principles of discovery in experimental physical science, Vernadsky defined the evidence of a universal principle of life. This signified life as a principle which could not have come into existence through a development within the domain of axiomatically abiotic processes. He used the same method to argue that noësis (cognition) could not have come into existence within the domain of non-human forms of biotic processes.

Thus, for Vernadsky, as for me, and for relevant others, the known universe is composed of three, multiply-connected, but distinct, experimentally defined categories of universal physical principles: abiotic, biotic, and cognitive (noëtic). Proceeding in that order, the epistemological implication of Vernadsky's experimental conception of the noösphere, is, in brief, that none of the respectively higher two categories of universal physical principle can be derived from either of the lower ones; however, it also follows, that the universe as a whole is so multiply-interconnected, that no lawful process in the universe exists functionally as independent of the efficient presence, as a universal physical principle, of all three categories of principle.

The Issue of Entropy

Vernadsky's discoveries implicitly demolish what has become widely accepted as a pro-paganist variety of modern religious doctrine on the subject of thermodynamics. Reconsider the foregoing identification of scientific method in light of the simplistic axiomatic assumptions on this subject which were introduced arbitrarily by Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, Boltzmann, et al., as also by Wiener et al.

These referenced founders of the more popular modern classroom doctrine of universal entropy, premised all of their work on the subject of heat, on a hoax spread through the influence of an anti-Leibniz fanatic, Leonhard Euler, who attempted to eliminate the actual content of the Leibniz differential from the calculus.[27] At that time, 1761, Euler was among the followers of the then-deceased (1749), Paris-based Abbot Antonio Conti, whose Europe-wide network of salons, including the cabal of Maupertuis and Euler at Berlin, had created, as if out of mud, the mythical apotheosis of both Voltaire and Newton. The work of Clausius et al., providing a sophistry on the subject of Sadi Carnot's work, was then arbitrarily extrapolated by Clausius et al., chiefly on the authority of the mathematical assumptions inhering axiomatically in Euler's fraudulent, reductionist representation of the Leibniz calculus. In this way, Clausius, Grassmann, et al., thus introduced the foundations for what became the doctrine of universal entropy.

Thus, we have notions associated with the so-called Three Laws of Thermodynamics, and such by-products of that as both the famous work of Ludwig Boltzmann and of Wiener.

As outcome of that, we have the effort of a student of Boltzmann's, Erwin Schrödinger, to degrade the anomalous experimental phenomena of life, to a matter of "aperiodic crystals." The hoax of "information theory," as perpetrated by Bertrand Russell acolyte Norbert Wiener, was directly a product of this wild-eyed doctrine of "thermodynamics." The work of Russell acolyte John von Neumann, as on so-called "random theory," systems analysis, and "artificial intelligence," is among the schizophrenic by-products of that same Delphic heritage.

The inevitable consequence of those gnostics' hoaxes in the name of science, is those presently popular fantasies of molecular biology, which insist that living processes are evolutionary outgrowths of abiotic processes; and, as system analysis' von Neumann insisted, that eventually, computing machinery based on "information theory," will create robots which degrade man into the status of a more or less obsolete species.

The pervasive consequence of the spread of such malicious fantasies as those, is the widespread axiomatic presumption, that the existence of a substance called "energy," and these assumptions of reductionist thermodynamics, are codependent realities. Hence, we have, especially since Wiener's 1948 Cybernetics, certain widespread delusions respecting the existence of phenomena described as negative entropy ("negentropy") within a universe in which entropy is falsely assumed to be universally pervasive.[28]

For such reasons, since approximately the time of his death in 1945, the work of Vernadsky has been regarded by some, such as some among the RAND Corporation circles of the late 1940s, as the principal scientific threat to the current, post-modernist version of the dogma of universal entropy.[29] The following considerations are the most immediately relevant ones.

If the experimental evidence, such as that cited by him, shows that life is a principle of universal physical action, which exists independently of the principled characteristics of abiotic processes, what happens, then, to the claims for a universality of reductionist thermodynamic notions of energy? To similar effect, as I have demonstrated, cognition is efficiently a universal physical principle found only among human beings. If the principle of cognition is demonstrated to be a physically efficient generator of anti-entropic organization in man's relationship to the universe, what, and where, then, is "energy"?

In the light of the latter classes of evidence, reason will not tolerate that epistemologically absurd presumption, that these principles, of abiotic, biotic, and cognitive action, do not co-exist equally, as if from any assumed "beginning" of the universe. Only the voice of mental illness could propose that anything exists efficiently as a universe, "prior to," or "outside" the multiply-connected array of these three categories of universal physical principles. Those considerations oblige us to consider the following implications of such view for mathematical physics in general.

If, then, each experimentally validated discovery of a universal physical principle, as what Kepler identified, in his The New Astronomy, as an intention of the universe, is, functionally, an independent physical dimension of the universe, what kind of geometry must be adopted as the basis for a competent mathematical physics? Instead of seeking to improve on Euclid, as non-Euclidean geometry does, we must choose an anti-Euclidean physical geometry, which, as Gauss's teacher Kästner argued, tears out all a priori choices of definitions, axioms, and postulates at the outset, as Gauss's follower Riemann does. Instead of assuming that physical action is bounded by a priori, "ivory tower" notions, as at the blackboard, of space, time, and matter, we must let the physical universe speak for itself: rather than through the voice of some Babylonian or Delphic priesthood.

Here lies the essential issue of fundamental difference between such followers of Cusa, Leonardo, and Kepler as Leibniz, and such notable representatives of the reductionist standpoint in mathematics of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, as Euler, d'Alembert, Lagrange, LaPlace, Cauchy, Clausius, Kelvin, Grassmann, Helmholtz, et al. Such is the difference, respecting geometry, between those reductionists and such contrasted French scientific geniuses and Newton opponents as Arago, Lazare Carnot, Monge, Fresnel, Ampère, and Poncelet. This is also the difference between those reductionists and such notable followers of Göttingen University's Abraham Kästner as Carl Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, and Bernhard Riemann.

If we consider the entirety of the now-published writings of Riemann, including what are classed as his posthumously published metaphysical papers, we can not exclude the likelihood, that Riemann was already exploring directions, respecting the physical efficiency of human cognitive thought, which I have drawn out explicitly, in part from my considering certain implications of his principal writings. However, if I rely only upon my own appreciation of the implications of his principled published work published in his lifetime, it is clear that Riemann's conception of an entirely anti-aprioristic physical geometry (an anti-Euclidean, physical geometry, rather than a merely non-Euclidean one), shows us how to deal conceptually with the three-fold composition of the universe implied by Vernadsky's work.

Thus, we must emphasize, once again, from this standpoint, that the universe as a whole is not to be considered as derived from a primitive, exclusively abiotic beginning. The quality of anti-entropy which is characteristic of both life and cognition, are qualities already embedded in the universe "from the beginning," rather than phenomena derived from a perfectly entropic sort of abiotic origin.

What we witness, as Vernadsky viewed the matter of biogeochemistry in general, is the development of the biosphere through production of naturally produced materials and arrangements, a development which provided the natural conditions required for the appearance of certain classes of species, and so on. We must recall, that the existence of the oceans and atmosphere, typifies the importance of our willful maintenance of those products of life's actions on our planet, and points out the implied penalties of our failure to do so. E.g., the problem of "primitive accumulation" so situated. Similarly, the existence of human life, as an expression of a principle underlying cognition, may be universal, but its expression as conscious life, human life, both in the first appearance of human life and in its perpetuation today, requires the development of pre-conditions in respect to both the preceding abiotic and biotic development of our planet.

The progress of human life, as measurable in various ways, depends also upon conditions created by man, conditions which were not, and are not produced naturally by means other than human activity. These conditions must also be either maintained, or an efficient replacement supplied by the human will. The failure to meet that responsibility, defines the political issue of primitive accumulation.

There is a related, second crucial problem which must be considered, if we are to grasp the implications of the issues of primitive accumulation being addressed here. In addition to the implications of discovering, as if by an isolated individual, that the universe is a multiply-connected geometric domain, of an expanding number of discovered "intentions," each in the form of universal physical principles, there is the matter of the social relations through which such discoveries for practice are transmitted within society. Here, in the role of the social processes defined by cognition as such, lies the essential difference between my definition of the noösphere and that of Vernadsky's known writings.[30]

1.1 Primitive Accumulation and Classical Education

The transmission of an individual's discovery of a universal physical principle, through the replication of that act of original discovery within the sovereign cognitive processes of other persons, is the only proper, rigorous basis for defining what should be called education. The proper form of transmission of discoveries of a crucial significance for today's society, from even the remote past, is what is known as a Classical humanist mode of general education of the young, as the famous reform of Friedrich Schiller's follower Wilhelm von Humboldt typifies this.

To understand the implications of the concept of primitive accumulation for shaping a nation's policy, we must look at the entire economy, both the national and world economies, from a standpoint which features such a Classical humanist notion of generalized public education.

For this reason, during my published writings of the recent seven years,[31] I have frequently employed an improved form of pedagogical defense of those discoveries of mine dating from the 1948-1952 interval, by aid of a particular kind of reference to Raphael Sanzio's famous portrait of The School of Athens. I employ that pedagogy, again, here.

This reference involves a conception, sometimes called, in Classical usages, "the simultaneity of eternity," which is of crucial importance in defining the functional relationship between Classical-humanist models of educational policies and scientific-economic processes of societies. The direct relationship of that aspect of education, to the subject of primitive accumulation, I shall address at a relevant later point in this report. I now introduce that definition of education, at this point in my argument, for its immediate relevance to the issues posed by Vernadsky's definition of the noösphere. I emphasize that this is a crucial aspect of the concept of a noösphere, which is necessarily overlooked in focussing merely upon the direct relationship to the noösphere, of the individual as such.

To emphasize the point made above: In the methods of physical science, and in opposition to the tenaciously held, fallacious presumptions of at-the-blackboard mathematical formalists, such as Russell, Wiener, and von Neumann, the definition of a universal physical principle arises, entirely outside previously existing, formal mathematical systems. It arises, in its typical first reflection, as our confrontation with a mathematically insoluble ontological paradox, which the experimental evidence imposes upon the effort to represent that evidence in terms consistent with a preexisting choice of mathematical, or equivalent system.[32] The already referenced discovery of universal gravitation, by Kepler, and Fermat's discovery of least time, are leading classroom examples of this distinction for classroom and related use.

The only solution for a valid such paradox in mathematical physics commonly so-called, is the generation of a physical hypothesis of the type, which, once proven experimentally, constitutes a newly discovered universal physical principle. If so proven, that principle then becomes the functional equivalent of a new physical-geometrical axiom of mathematics, that according to Riemann's definition of physical geometry. As this point can be demonstrated even within the bounds of a well-composed secondary education, this principle forces a corresponding transformation of the existing mathematical physics, and, sometimes, radical transformations in our ideas about mathematics as such.

On this account, Kepler's uniquely original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation, in opposition to the incompetent methods of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and the empiricist Galileo, is paradigmatic for all modern physical science. The statistical methods of Vernadsky, used to define life as a distinct principle, and to define noësis similarly, are examples of this same principle, the principle otherwise called docta ignorantia, coincidence of opposites, Analysis Situs, or simply Socratic method.

This method has three principal aspects, all of which come into focus when the acts of discovery and experimental proof of a valid physical hypothesis are juxtaposed within the framework of what is best identified as a Classical humanist mode of general education. The point to be made, is perhaps made most clearly when one situates the lesson to be adduced from Raphael's The School of Athens in such an educational setting.

Any discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle, has three categorical features. First, as I have said, there is the ontological paradox. Second, there is the discovery, by cognitive generation within the individual mind, of the hypothesized universal principle which would bring our understanding of the universe into correspondence with the experimental evidence. Third, there is the crucial quality of experiment which validates that hypothesis as of a universal character.

The special difficulty each such three-fold act of discovery poses, is that no universal physical principle, as such, exists, or could exist, in the form of an object of sense-perception. Such principles are of the ontological quality which Plato references by his allegory of the shadows on the irregular surface of the wall of a dimly fire-lit cave. The task, as in microphysics in particular, is to discover, and to know with certainty, the existence of the unseen object which casts the shadow. Vernadsky's definitions of both life and cognition, respectively, are each an illustration of Plato's argument. So, the function of education is to be situated within the noösphere.

An Hylozoic Universe

Situate that issue of scientific method within a functional definition of the noösphere. View Raphael's The School of Athens from that vantage-point.

In Vernadsky's argument on these points, the relevant shadow as such, assumes the form of statistical evidence of a crucial quality of significance. In this, he describes himself as following the path trodden by Louis Pasteur et al., on the matter of defining the efficient existence of a universal principle of life: Certain patterns of perceptible, distinct reactions, occur in the presence of living processes, which do not occur otherwise, at least not in a statistically significant degree. The branch of science called biogeochemistry, addresses these phenomena and their implications. I have defined a principle of universal cognition differently, but to similar effect, defining it as distinct from the characteristics of species which are, functionally, systemically inferior to human beings.

I emphasize my agreement with Vernadsky on the point, that seemingly relatively weak forces of life, reshape, over an accumulation of time, what appear to be the relatively powerful forces of the abiotic Earth. Seemingly ephemeral, cognitive forces, reshape, over an accumulation of time, the combined forces of the abiotic and biotic domains.[33] The future of the universe, is thus shaped, so, by the interventions of ostensibly "weak forces."

The view, that the universe, when considered in all of its combined aspects, is ontologically a living, in addition to being an abiotic one, was known to Classical Greece as the notion of a hylozoic universe. This idea, already a well developed concept among some of the Classical Greeks of Plato's lifetime, regained notable attention of physical science with the impact of relevant discoveries of Pasteur and his followers. Continued attention to the work of Pasteur et al., by that current, modern experimental physical science which was developed in Europe beginning the Fifteenth Century, has brought the ancient concept of an hylozoic universality to the fore, at least in some important scientific circles, in a fresh, more powerful, and more conclusive way.

The special significance of the relevant work of Vernadsky, and of such followers as Gurwitsch, is that modern biophysical scientific practice impels and aids us in focussing experimentally upon the nature of the interactions between living and non-living processes.[34] For example, experimental study of biophotonic interactions among living tissues not otherwise in direct interaction, expresses a most important general question, one bearing directly on issues of primitive accumulation in the domain of physical economy.[35]

As Vernadsky emphasizes, the action of living processes upon the Earth, has created a biosphere in which the products of the action by living processes, have produced such necessary preconditions for higher living processes as the creation of the oceans, atmosphere, and soils. In that context, the interaction of non-living products of living processes, in providing the preconditions necessary for higher evolution of the biosphere as a whole, bring into focus a crucial question of physical science as a whole. This view of an hylozoic universe, over which the specifically human principle of cognition reigns, is the foundation for any competent study of the problems of primitive accumulation. This touches a crucial feature of Academician Lvov's warning.

Regard these notions of life and cognition, as universal physical principles, as from the standpoint of Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation. How does life express what Kepler identified, as in his revolutionary The New Astronomy, as that same quality of intention, as that feature of the Solar system which defined the regularity of orbits of constantly non-uniform curvature?

In Kepler's work, that use of intention corresponds explicitly to what modern science since Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kepler recognizes as a universal physical principle, just as Kepler was the first to discover and define a universal physical principle of harmonically ordered gravitation. In any rigorous definition of the term "science," we must limit ourselves to thinking of willful forms of action, which, when discovered and applied, enable mankind to increase its power to exist within, and also over the universe.

The conscious expression of what has been proven to be such a universal physical principle, is our consciousness of it as our own willful, conscious intention to produce that quality of effect which is a specific expression of that universal principle. In other words, we do not know such principles as existing apart from the human will, outside of our consciousness of them.

What we know is three-fold. We know our intention to bring about the effect with which that discovered principle is associated in our mind; we know the paradox which provoked that discovery, and we also know the result which the relevant experimental evidence points out to our intention. If we keep those distinctions in mind, we will avoid many of the follies all too commonplace in what is often considered today's expert practice. This willful, even impassioned character of intention, as I have identified such notions of an impassioned, voluntary impulse, as distinct from the notion of deductive proof, is the crucial point to be kept in mind.

If we are not to commit the blunder of repeating the linear, "connect-the-dots" methods used by Copernicus and Brahe, we can not assume that random actions of "natural selection" enabled life to create the previously non-existent preconditions for higher forms of life. It is an echo of the same problem recognized and solved by Kepler: if the universe operated as the mathematical methods of Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo imply, the Solar system could never have existed. There must be an intrinsically adducible intention, embedded in the principle of life, which governs the "orbit" of hylozoic development, in the same sense that the principle of intention embodied in Kepler's Sun orders the regular orbits of the planets.[36]

Consider the economy's depletion of its environment from that standpoint. Define the challenge of primitive accumulation from that standpoint. That presents us with three categories of depletion to consider: a.) the abiotic features of the environment essential to human existence; b.) the biosphere as essential to human existence; c.) those products of cognitive development of the society on which the continuation of the upward development of the productive powers of labor depends. It is in the last of those three that the role of education, and the significance of my present reference to The School of Athens, lies.

To restate that crucial point: the preconditions for the possibility of sustainable human life on our planet, are thus three. First, the existence of the Sun, and of the creation of the Solar system, with its development, from that Sun. Second, the development of living processes, thus developing the biosphere, on our home planet. Third, the cognitive development of the human species, which is expressed as an accumulation of discoveries of experimentally validatable universal physical principles.

That means that whatever is physically efficient as an effect, whether in abiotic, living, or cognitive processes, expresses some universal physical principle, or set of such principles. Over the past five decades, I have always emphasized, that these principles include those universal physical principles properly associated with Classical, as distinct from Romantic, modernist, and post-modernist, artistic composition. The arts of statecraft, such as law and history, are derived from the impact of Classical modes of artistic composition and performance, in fostering the insight of the population.

That store of knowledge represented by surviving discoveries of the universal physical principles of abiotic, biotic, and Classical artistic principles, is represented by an accumulation of the interconnection among those three categories of universal physical principles which, by definition, do not exist as objects of sense-perception. The following set of observations, is therefore crucial for understanding the role of education in determining the ability of a society to continue to exist at even its present level of development of its population.

To understand this matter, the relevant argument must start from the recognition that, as I have just said, neither valid discoveries of universal physical principles, nor the individual mental processes by which those principles are discovered, are a subject of sense-perception, or of deduction. The act of discovery occurs only as a sovereign cognitive act of an individual mind, a process which is perfectly opaque to the sense-perceptual powers of an observer.

Thus, contrary to sophist Immanuel Kant's "Dialectic of Practical Reason,"[37] the communication of a valid discovery (noësis) of a principle, can not occur directly, as perception of the actual discovery. It can occur only by inducing a truthful replication of the act of cognitive hypothesizing by one mind, within the cognitive processes (noësis) of a second person. That conception, so shared, becomes truthful human knowledge, when it is proven, and thus known to be specifically efficient, by relevant standards of experiment. Such is Plato's method of the Socratic dialogue.

In all competent modes of education, those which approximate, at least, what is termed Classical humanist education, the student relives the experience of the actual mental process by which an Archimedes, for example, discovered a universal physical principle. The commitment to a principle of Socratic truthfulness, respecting the adoption of ideas of principle, thus produces a resulting state of memory which we should recognize as the true form of knowledge.

What is thus induced in the student which corresponds to what Raphael portrays as The School of Athens? Many personalities, most of whom are not contemporaries of one another, live still, as sovereign personalities, cognitive beings, in the mind of each student who has reexperienced, which is to say personally reenacted, relevant cognitive acts of discovery of principle by each of these figures. We must call such remembered experiences living memories of living beings, and sovereign ones at that. We must do so, because, as we should easily recall, the action which generated the idea of that principle in the mind of that discoverer, lives, and acts, as an efficient cause of action within the living process of our own memory.[38]

The crucial fact about this, is that such a memory is a memory of the relevant act of cognition by that discoverer. Therefore, the image of that person in one's memory, is not a motion-picture image; it is an image of a specifically human act, an act which can be performed only by a living cognitive being. Therefore, the memory of that act is both a living and a human object within the memory of the rememberer. In effect, in that degree, the mind of he who remembers has given rebirth to the living personality of the discoverer. That discoverer lives again, in that manner and degree, in the mind of the rememberer.

The same thing occurs in all valid performance of great Classical works of artistic composition. The great actor of the Classical tragic stage, brings the character portrayed on stage to life in that way; that actor summons the cognitive personality of the character into true life, which lives, breathes, and thinks, upon that stage.

What the graduate of such an education applies to the challenges of his or her profession, is the resources represented, in that manner and degree, by all those personalities who are still living, in that way, within the graduate's cognitive memories of their moments of true discovery. It is the sharing of that historical-cognitive experience, reaching back into innumerable earlier generations, which the members of contemporary society bring to bear on making the decisions which shape contemporary practice.

The maintenance and improvement of that store of cognitive knowledge, from past and present combined, is as much the stored-up physical-economic capital of a national economy, as the society's investment in tangible capital goods, or infrastructural improvements, or the natural resources which are drawn upon. That stock of cognitive intellectual capital is, indeed, the most important kind of physical-economic capital of any society.

Thus, the net depletion of the human resources provided by the development of the Solar system, such depleting of resources produced by life's action on the abiotic Earth, and the depleting of society's store of accumulated discoveries of universal physical principles, each and all together represent three forms of primitive accumulation which tend to threaten our society's future. We must either replace the relevant portion we have consumed, or must provide a functionally efficient alternative as replacement. Thus, the elimination of Classical humanist methods of education, is not only an economic disaster for a nation, but one of the most deadly forms of destruction of the possibility for maintaining the present level of human existence, one of the most malicious of all forms of primitive accumulation.

The individual does not act upon the economic process called society, from the standpoint of an individual acting according to a particular, isolated individual discovery. The ability to make such a discovery, depends upon the student's building up something akin to Raphael's The School of Athens, in his or her own sovereign cognitive processes. It is the living dialogue of such personalities, within the body of memory which is that student's sovereign cognitive processes, on which the student relies, to generate the act of insight leading toward his or her own, original tentative hypotheses. It is through sharing the fact of the common experience of such a memory with other sovereign intellects, even many long deceased, that such insights are evoked in the minds of the other. It is through collaboration so ordered, that cooperative action in adoption and use of discoveries by society, may occur.

The individual discovery of a universal physical principle is, thus, never directly applied to nature. Rather, it is first applied to the multiply-connected manifold of principles already existing in the discoverer's mind. What is then applied to society's practice, is the full force of the implicitly Riemannian manifold of all of the universal physical principles existing in the mind of those sharing those discoveries as a cognitive form of knowledge.

It is, therefore, not the isolated discovery, by the isolated individual, which generates the maintenance and increase of the potential relative population-density of society. It is, rather, the individual's fruitful intervention into the accumulated knowledge of society to date, as represented, not only by himself, but also the other members of society with whom he or she cooperates, and those who have gone before, thus to bring effective change about.

This contribution by the individual, depends, functionally, upon the degree of moral and related cognitive development accumulated in the relevant other members of society. If they are ignorant on this account, they will tend to respond foolishly even to the best and noblest of useful innovations, as we see this demonstrated in the average scientific and other cultural decadence of the current U.S. population, for example, relative to that of professionals two or three generations earlier.

This is not merely a matter of accumulation of formal knowledge of physical principles. The array of principles contained in such a developed memory of past discoveries of principle, is far greater than the sum of its parts. The history, as various known or implicitly reflected, by means of which these discoveries of principle have come into existence as knowledge for that individual mind, is expressed, in the unity of those ideas, as a quality best termed "judgment." This quality of judgment points toward a conception sometimes called "the simultaneity of eternity."

The Space-Time in Which We Think

This view of education leads us into a pair of directions for further reflection and exploration.

The first such consideration, impels us to ask ourselves: what is the implication for the application of physical science, of shifting the emphasis, away from those actions which today's popular opinion imagines to occur within what we might assume to be an axiomatically fixed, sensory domain of practice, into an alternate domain, in which the most significant action, is the class of cognitive acts of generating and reenacting experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle? These latter represent a species of ideas not apparent through sense-perception, but which are not only demonstrated to exist, but which are fully efficient existences in our functional relationship to the universe.

The second consideration is, what does that shift in standpoint of physical-science practice signify, for the development of both the moral and physical potential of the individual person and society? What does such development of the individual signify for the survival and progress of cultures and civilizations?

Look at these matters from not only physical science and economy as those might be ordinarily defined, but from the standpoint of Classical artistic productions.

What is the relationship of the student in today's classroom, Johnny, who has just reenacted successfully the cognitive act of a certain discovery of principle by Archimedes, to the Archimedes who was murdered by the Romans approximately 2,312 years ago? Ask: looking at this from inside Johnny's memory of that act of discovery of Archimedes, what is the lapse of time expressed by that action which connects Archimedes' act of thought and the reenacted copy of that thought by Johnny? The paradox is a truly delicious one! More notably, study of this paradox leads us toward comprehension of the most challenging among the implications of primitive accumulation.

To grasp the significance of what I have just written at this point, recognize that one's experienced knowledge of the act of discovery accomplished by Archimedes, increases the power of the person enjoying that knowledge, qualitatively, over the one which does not. Thus, Johnny has not merely copied an image; Archimedes has, in effect, transmitted a specific quality of increased power to Johnny's ability to think and act. Johnny's society is improved in its power over nature, in that degree.

Therefore, the connection between Archimedes and Johnny's society, is not a simple connection; it is Archimedes' mind acting efficiently upon Johnny's society, changing Johnny's society, through Johnny's mind, in that efficient degree, in that fashion. Johnny, in turn, by realizing a current benefit of Archimedes' principle, has changed the outcome of Archimedes' life for the better.

In such ways, through relationships defined primarily in terms of cognition, we are able to change the outcome of the past, as we may the future which will emerge long after we are deceased.

Situate an original discovery, such as one of Archimedes, as a personalized existence within the memory of Johnny, within Johnny's simulation of something like Raphael's The School of Athens. Within that simulation, the development of knowledge of universal principles, the order of the succession of discoveries is well defined, but, in the act directly connecting between the two, Archimedes and Johnny, within Johnny's memory, there is no notion of an intervening period of absolute clock-time. In that momentary relationship between Johnny's and Archimedes' thought, twenty-three centuries of lapsed clock time, are dissolved into an interval whose duration is as but a moment.

Except for the matter of ordering the sequence among such ideas, each pair of persons sharing knowledge of the discovery of such a principle, or its reenactment, lives, as if born again, in that moment, in a moment of a shared simultaneity of eternity. In the domain of cognition, time is, in first approximation, reduced to a sense of relative order of cognitive events as such, rather than the lapse of clock-time between such successive events; here, we see Fermat's notion of "quickest time" driven to its hypothetical limit! The argument is a more or less obvious one, but its implications can be stunning on first consideration.

To calm the agitated state of mind these notions might tend to provoke in the unprepared person, recall the implications of Plato's use of his allegory of the dimly lit cave. What our powers of sense-perception detect, is not the real universe outside our skins, but, rather, the shadows of efficiently existing, but unseen objects, which Leibniz names "monads," such as a selection from among those objects of nuclear microphysics which modern experimental physics, since Wilhelm Weber's discovery, has defined rather well.[39] This distinction between perception and experimental reality, does not make the experienced universe less real, but merely reminds us that our perceptual processes, which are organs of a living process, report to us what they experience, but not the reality which produced that experience. That distinction signifies, that we must resort to the methods of physical science, as biogeochemist Vernadsky did for the biosphere, to discover the reality of the effects which our senses report.

Thus, we have two contending opinions respecting the nature of the physical universe.

First, there is the erroneous, but commonplace view, that of a physics based upon an aprioristic Euclidean or similar geometry, in which sense-experience is interpreted according to the arbitrary assumption, that the real universe outside our skins is more or less Euclidean, or, at the best, non-Euclidean. In the case of such a misguided person, the believer is deluded into imagining that the senses are a transparent window through which to view the naked form of actual developments in the world around the observer. The non-Euclidean, unlike the Euclidean, accepts the curvature of physical space-time in the large, but does not free himself, otherwise, from a priori kinds of axiomatic assumptions respecting space, time, and matter.[40]

Then, there is the view, as implicitly developed by Plato's dialogues, that the real action in the universe, is the cognitive action which permits us to extract truthfulness from a paradoxical, and therefore false, perception-bound notion of the universe of experience. We acknowledge, that the thing which bumps against our space-craft's-like sensory periphery, is a real bump, but the cause of the bump has to be determined, scientifically, by those methods of modern experimental physical science introduced by Nicholas of Cusa. The contrast of these two mutually opposing views, leads us to correspondingly different conceptions of the nature of space, time, and matter.

In the popular, pathological view, Archimedes has merely transmitted "information" to Johnny, as if in sealed bottle cast upon the waters twenty-three centuries past. In the second, Archimedes has acted to change Johnny, and Johnny's society; he has transmitted to Johnny not mere "information," but an increased power to act. Johnny's reenactment of that discovery, has also changed the historical outcome of Archimedes' existence. Hence, for such cases, the term "simultaneity of eternity" is employed.

The discovery of the universal principles, which underlie what is proven to be, experimentally, these efficiently real objects, defines the personalized discoveries which inhabit the equivalent of Raphael's The School of Athens. The result is of the form of a Riemannian multiply-connected manifold. It is that manifold, as a current state of the sovereign cognitive powers of an individual mind, which governs the act of discovery by an individual.

So, as if from the standpoint of the classroom as such, the notions of space, time, and matter appear to be purely relative. The central feature of that classroom's standpoint, is the relative position of a cognitive form of action, such as a discovery of a universal principle, in respect to the sequence in which it may be generated in a merely academic setting. This is a useful first approximation, pedagogically, but it is not a true representation of the relevant evidence.

The truth of the matter lies in the universe's response to actions governed by cognitive progress in applied human knowledge. It is in the universe's response to our willful interventions, as through the methods of experimental science, that we are able to assign a meaningful, relativistic sense of lapsed time to the process being considered. Thus, the most important real effects are expressed not in linear absolute time, but, rather, in cycles, which are not necessarily simple ones, which express the relative lapse of time which, in that state of society's practice, has become characteristic of the causal connection between certain actions and their effects. The change in such characteristics, as Riemann supplies his preliminary definition of characteristic of a multiply-connected manifold, is properly a subject of the generalized notion of Riemannian manifolds.

Thus, the upward shift to emergence as a truly human being, occurs as cognitive development enables the individual to shed the prison-like pupal husk of blind faith in sense-certainty, to locate reality in those ideas which are the power to change the lawful, cause-effect ordering of the universe in which we live. Sense-perception is thus downgraded to its truthful status as phenomena, as mere shadows of a reality which exists in the form of that manifold of principles by which the universe is actually controlled.

My definition of changes in potential relative population-density of societies as entireties, supplies the needed corrective. As I shall emphasize the importance of that distinction, in the subsequent chapter of this report, I define the term anti-entropy, with my eye on Kepler, to correspond to an "orbital pathway" of increase of potential relative population-density. This definition of anti-entropy corresponds, then, to a functionally ordered succession of changes in relative values of the society, as an entire process: a "pathway" of change in society's potential relative population-density. It is not the change as such, which we must measure; we must measure the rate of change which is characteristic of a continuing process; as Plato defined change, as Kepler defined the lawful organization of the Solar system, as Riemann's discovery defines a characteristic change from one manifold to its successor.

Our task is not merely to measure that process, but to cause it to exist, to set the desired rate of change into motion through our adopted intention.

Thus, by defining science to mean only the practice of cognitive progress in discovery and application of universal physical principles to effect such anti-entropic progress of society, we have a way of locating the efficient reality outside our skins, which corresponds to valid ideas generated from inside our skins.

The most immediately crucial problem of method posed by such considerations, is the issue of efficient intention. This, as I shall emphasize in the next chapter, identifies the causal factor from which the notion of a functional rate of continuing change can be adduced, rather than the erroneous post hoc, ergo propter hoc method of connecting the dots, the erroneous method common to the work of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo.

The class of actions, by means of which willful actions cause anti-entropic changes within the determination of a society's potential relative population-density, are not the product of dense percussive interactions among individual human wills. Only ultimately entropic effects for society, can be prompted in the kinds of percussive modes prescribed by the English and British empiricists, for example. Anti-entropic effects are achieved solely through a willful (i.e., voluntary), cognitive choice of positive intention by the actor.

A Musical Example

For discussion of those distinctions, use as a standard of comparison, the notion of the willful choice of the type of course of action which governs the change in behavior associated with the adoption of a validated discovery of a universal physical principle. Choose an example of this from the standard of performance required for a Classical musical composition of the type generated from the root of the work of J.S. Bach by such Classical polyphonists as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.

In this case, the performer does not merely follow the notes of the score. Rather, as the nature of such Classical polyphony requires, the performer must proceed from an insight into the composer's intention of what is to be accomplished by the time the conclusion of the composition is reached. In all such cases, as contrasted with the pathetic views and practices of Rameau or the prescriptions of Fux, the composition has been crafted under the governance of a quality of principle which corresponds exactly to a universal physical principle. The object is to create an idea in the mind of both performer and hearer, an idea akin in quality to an idea of scientific principle.

Proceeding in that way, the morally responsible professional performer does not perform the work for a public (except as in the form of a pedagogical experiment, a pedagogical dialogue), until he or she has grasped the entire work as if it were a single idea compressed into a momentary thought of memory. Yet, everything in the elaborated work performed, shall be necessary to evoke that effect in the mind of the audience. It is that consideration, which prompts morally inspired professionals to rework the performance of a masterwork over and over again, over the course of their lifetimes, always determined to convey the idea more effectively than before. Thus, by such life-long persistence, they perfect themselves, and those who benefit from their precedents.

In other words, the performer and composer are combining their efforts, in this case, to produce the replication of the composer's discovered, intended idea, in the mind of the hearer. In other words, in a well-performed such Classical musical composition, the communication effected by means of the performance, is an idea in the same sense the idea of a principle earlier discovered by Archimedes may be re-created within the mind of a student today.

The performance of a Classical musical work composed according to the J.S. Bach tradition of well-tempered polyphony, expresses exactly the same principle associated in the communication of an idea of principle from the mind of Archimedes, to Johnny. The essence of such a composition, does not lie in the sensory domain as such. Rather, as in any experimental demonstration of a conception of universal principle, the sensory aspects of the process mediate the transmission of the idea which can not be contained explicitly in the performance as such.

As the poet John Keats reminds us, it is the unheard sound of the idea, which motivates the composition and performance, which is the true subject of such a Classical composition, not the sensual effects as such. The performance is the experiment which must demonstrate, and thus communicate the principle, the idea which is the intent of the composition. The performance appears to be in the sensory domain, and what is done in that domain must be well done; but the content of the performance is located in the higher, cognitive domain.

Admittedly, for the musician first grasping that conception, the initial recognition of the fact that such is the true nature of the idea to be conveyed by the performed music, evokes an eerie sensation. It is the same quality of eerieness encountered when a student first recognizes any true idea of universal principle.

Just as any experimental proof of a universal principle must meet exacting standards of design and performance, so the great performing artist is encumbered. However, the idea which is imparted, is of the quality which inhabits the domain of The School of Athens. As a corollary matter, the power and authority of the Bach tradition of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, is that no other discipline than well-tempered Classical, thorough-composed polyphony, is suited to express such communication with such beauty and precision.

The qualified performer seeks to induce that latter effect in the individual member of the audience, at least of some among them. To that purpose, the performer must muster a certain passion. That passion matches the intention, and is aimed zealously to bring the intended result into effect. That passion, that intention, grips the will of the accomplished performer, just as the discovery of a needed hypothesis arouses the cognitive passion and intention of the discoverer of a newly discovered universal physical principle, or inspires the young student to reenact an original discovery by Archimedes.

Such Socratic passion for truthfulness, is the active quality of moral motivation in all aspects of individual social life. Such is the principle of truthfulness which distinguishes Classical artistic composition from the Romantics, the modernists, and the popular. The requirement is, that art must always be truthful, must never be arbitrary. It must conform to what is usefully recognized as the good.

In general, the notion of a good will, must be recognized as an impassioned, efficient intention to promote the anti-entropy of human existence: mankind's increased power for good, within and over the universe.

This must be the law for society; but, there is an intervening problem. Who shall inspire a society to muster itself for such purposeful courses of action? What is the distinctive quality of persons who have developed such qualifications for leadership of their fellow human beings?

Within my lifetime's experience, I have observed chiefly two types of cases in which such qualities of leadership are expressed, at least in significant approximation. In one case, an individual rises above what appears otherwise to be his or her standard behavior, to put himself or herself even at great risk for the nation, or for what might be carelessly described as some other sort of "conspicuously selfless" good deed. In the other, more significant case, we have the dependency of societies in crisis, upon the appearance of and selection of exceptional persons with true qualities of leadership. Emphasis upon the latter case is sufficient for our purposes in this report.

The moral problem, which is to be observed, with a certain sadness, among even most of the society today, is that they degrade morality to a certain, relatively "small-minded" notion of self-interest, or even into a sophist's lists of "single-issue" do's and don't's.

The person whose sense of identity is located in a conscience assembled as the members of Raphael's The School of Athens are, locates his or her sense of personal identity in a loving sense of obligation toward those minds which inhabit the living individual's memory of discoveries of principle contributed from the past; and, a complementary sense of obligation to the future of mankind. That individual's sense of personal identity, is essentially both a cognitive and an impassioned one, rather than merely a response to the sensed experience of oneself situated within perceived present times.

Relatively small-minded persons locate their self-interest in the smallness of a few years, a few decades at most, of family, community, and national life; and with a customarily diminishing sense of responsibility for consequences of their behavior, as matters become relatively more remote from immediate ordinary notions of self-interest. The problem which confronts the qualified leaders of society, is, that most of the persons in society have not really grown up, and most, still today, never will. They have not reached that level of truly adult maturity which is typified by the mind which locates its existence within the simultaneity of eternity. Worse, most of them would not wish to attempt to attain that higher moral status: "I have more urgent, immediate personal interests, and desires, to take care of."

Such persons may be inspired, under exceptional circumstances, to rise, as if above themselves, to higher motives; but, this occurs only under exceptional conditions of stress, and, usually, only when such stress is combined with the impact of exceptional leadership upon them.

The most notable moral problem found among nations whose population is not really bad, is that in history so far, only a very, very tiny ration of the total population ever attains true intellectual and moral maturity. In times of crisis, either the lack of such rare leading persons, or the rejection of their properly leading role, will usually prove more or less fatal for the future condition of that society as a whole. In all great crises, as the best Classical tragedy points this out, the society will fail, as Hamlet's society did, unless the right combination of a sense of crisis and of leadership for a time of crisis uplifts them, for at least a time.[41]

Therefore, on this and related accounts, the most urgent of the long-term interests of any society, is the development of the relatively greatest possible numbers of truly adult members of society, those who approach that quality of a sense of an historical "simultaneity of eternity" which a nation in systemic crisis should require of its leadership. On this account, only a nation whose policies of education at least approximate the standard of universal Classical human education, is well equipped, either to avoid, or to overcome devastating forms of self-imposed and related suffering.

The failure to develop and maintain the quality of the population, according to that standard, by Classical-humanist educational policies and other means, is therefore to be counted as among the most deadly expressions of primitive accumulation: primitive accumulation against that upward cultural development, on which continued success of civilized forms of existence depends.

Those exceptional persons, who meet the standard of maturity implicit in the lesson of The School of Athens, are what Plato sometimes identifies by the image of "the philosopher-king." A similar case is that of the exceptional military leader, whose insight into a principled flanking approach, an approach contrary to the prevailing opinion of his subordinates, prompts the forces he leads to take the course of action leading to victory.

The principle of leadership illustrated by such cases, as by Plato's allegorical argument, is that those who locate their self-interested personal identity in the future consequences of their present choices of action, are the only figures likely to provide their society the needed pointing of the way out of an otherwise terminal sort of systemic crisis, such as that threatening all humanity immediately today.

Such leaders are able to succeed in this role, only on the condition that their intervention lifts those who follow them into sharing their own view of an orientation to the future state of humanity to be achieved. The object of leadership, in such endeavors, is to lift those who follow them, at least temporarily, from the latter's accustomed tendency toward moral mediocrity, away from that habituated smallness of mind and morals which locates "self-interest" in the "here and now."

The method by which this function of leadership is accomplished, is the method we might best learn from the model of The School of Athens as I have used it as illustration here. To perform that role of leadership, the leader can not adopt the role of an ordinary actor on stage or screen; he must become, must be, cognitively, the character he plays in that moment of crisis. In such a situation, no script writer can provide him the lines he must speak, except himself. He must therefore be the part he plays; he must be the rare, morally matured and impassioned intellect his role demands of him.

2. Change as Economic Value

The paradox which led Kepler to his founding of a modern basis for mathematical astrophysics, in his The New Astronomy, was his recognition that it was impossible, using the prevailing mathematical methods of the relatively decadent Sixteenth Century, to forecast both the position and velocity of a planet, within its known orbit as a whole, for a particular time. This problem, in particular, prompted Kepler to specify the need for the discovery of a calculus to future mathematicians. Leibniz's original and unique discovery of the calculus, was a solution for Kepler's proposition. As I have already emphasized, in the preceding chapter, it was a calculus in which, contrary to the hoaxes perpetrated by the fanatical reductionists Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, et al., the interval between two moments of a continuing process, can never be reduced to a mere linear approximation.

The folly of Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, et al., in their fraudulent misdefinition of the calculus, pops up again as the chief source of the incompetence of most national income accounting practiced throughout the world today. A corrected notion of the differential, one consistent with Leibniz's monadology, is required to define the form of calculations required to overcome the usual blunders in defining measurements of relative economic value.

In all of the important paradoxes of physical science, including physical economy, a similar difficulty arises. As for Kepler's recognition of the paradox which led him to discover the principle of gravitation, in the case of every leading discovery of principle in science, the paradoxical evidence at hand has suggested that the future is determining the present.[42] In all cases of otherwise regular trajectories which exhibit characteristically non-uniform rates of curvature, such as the Solar orbits examined by Kepler, this conceptual problem is encountered: the completed orbital cycle of Earth is regular (with certain long-term qualifications), yet the attempt to determine both the position and velocity of the planet in that Earth, from the immediately preceding observations in the short term, breaks down; it appears, thus, that the future (the apparent regularity of the orbit) is determining the non-uniform curvature of the present interval immediately ahead. The same quality of irony arises in Fermat's recognition of the principle of quickest time.

Thus, since the work of Kepler, Fermat, Huyghens, and Leibniz, for example, one of the leading topics of scientific work, is the ability to adduce notions of mathematical functions, by aid of which we can forecast the pathway of future unfolding conditions from an insightful reevaluation of present knowledge. When attention is shifted, to focus upon the matter of forecasting future human behavior, an entirely new, higher category of problems confronts us: the factor of what we call the individual human will. Since I have demonstrated, recurrently, some unique and historically important successes in the matter of forecasting, I have the relevant credentials for addressing the way in which this challenge is expressed in economic processes.

Academician Lvov's reference to a margin of cost which is not taken into account in today's customary accounting practice and economic doctrines, presents us with a problem which can not be solved by explanations of existing doctrine. This requires a revolution in thinking about estimating the costs of production.

From my standpoint in physical economy, the solution to that paradox of accounting is elementary in nature, but not so simple in practice. For such problems arising in science, precise estimates often escape us, but, nonetheless, the practical way of approaching such difficulties of estimation, can be made clear to us, more or less readily. Such is the case as I now address it here.

The subject of this chapter, is the estimation of the true costs of consumption, taking into account the factors referenced by Academician Lvov.

The Bill of Consumption

How shall primitive accumulation be measured? I begin by reporting, successively, on two ways in which it should not be measured. Those examples given, we shall then consider the causes for the highly paradoxical effects inhering in the assignment of a money-price to a standard bill of materials and consumption.

The question is: What is net economic growth? Better said: What is net physical growth, measured in terms of physical science, rather than today's accounting practice? Therefore: How shall we define the specific problem of measurement posed by Academician Lvov's reference to what I have identified as the problem of primitive accumulation?

During a 1984 half-hour nationwide telecast, I pointed to a current willful fraud then being perpetrated, on a large scale, by the joint efforts of the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the Federal Government. I identified the hoax in question as "The Quality Adjustment Index."[43] That fraud is being practiced, still today, with as much irrational exuberance as in 1984.

Back then, the Federal Reserve System under Alan Greenspan's predecessor, Chairman Paul Volcker, had a problem.

The succession of changes in U.S. policy since the late 1960s, especially under "Southern Strategy" Presidents Nixon and Carter, had gutted both the productive potential and standard of living of the U.S. wage-earners and pensioners, by means of various forms of so-called "fiscal austerity." This looting of the typical households and communities, was also expressed in both depletion of long-term investments in basic economic infrastructure, and of entrepreneurial potential; the effects of this included an escalating real inflation in the cost of living of households.

This looting of the nation and its population, had become savage under Carter's rampant deregulation programs. The most savage of the depredations unleashed under Carter, was the impact of a Federal Reserve Policy which Chairman Volcker himself had identified as "controlled disintegration of the economy."[44] That controlled disintegration of the economy, which had appeared in 1975 as a new name for the same policies adopted under Nixon and Britain's Wilson and Thatcher governments, is the cause for the systemic crisis which has now reached its decades-long progress into its presently terminal phase.

Under the succession of measures introduced by the Nixon and Carter Presidencies, the incurred physical costs of maintaining preexisting levels of physical productivity, had come to exceed the total net physical output of the U.S. economy. At first glance, most professional economists would be instantly alarmed by hearing the utterance of that statement; nonetheless, despite their misguided, if understandably negative reactions to my report, what I have just said is nothing but true. That truth becomes obvious, if one looks carefully at the actuality of the situation, rather than the falsified conclusions usually read into the misinterpretation of the official statistics. This is one of those facts to which Academician Lvov referred in his testimony to the Duma. To settle that very important issue, so posed, it is sufficient to define the range of facts which must be taken into account to set the record straight.

First of all, we must measure the performance of national economies in physical, rather than inherently deceptive, conventional accounting terms. This means that we must measure input and output per capita, per capita of the labor-force, per square kilometer, and in terms of changes in the demographic characteristics of households, and also of the population considered as a whole. We must include the depletion of basic economic infrastructure, and must include the maintenance of so-called "natural resources," or their suitable replacement, as an essential part of that infrastructure.

We must also conduct those measurements against the background of combined advances and reversals in those technologies which define the productive potential of both the nation and its employed labor-force. Take U.S. aerospace technology as an illustration of this point.

During the period from 1945 to date, the U.S. economy's rate of progress in aerospace potential has been twice set back systemically. The first setback came under a President Eisenhower whose economic policies were misdirected by the same Arthur Burns who rescued Professor Milton Friedman from richly deserved obscurity. The Eisenhower administration shut down the leading work of the space program at the very point it was prepared to put a satellite into orbit, several years before Sputnik. The next systemic wrecking-act came during the second half of the 1960s, with the deep budgetary cut-backs in research and development unleashed under President Johnson, during 1966-1967.

In between, there was, first, under Eisenhower, the initially abortive, frantic effort to take the Huntsville U.S. space program out of mothballs, after both the "Sputnik shock" and several U.S. aerospace "flopniks." Eisenhower's "post-Sputnik" reactivation of the space program, was followed by the much bolder, and highly successful Kennedy "Moon landing" crash program. Ironically, the successful landing on the Moon, under President Nixon, occurred at a time that the space program was already being collapsed. Soon, the last landing of man on the Moon occurred, and man has not been back since.

Meanwhile, under the savage cut-backs instituted under the Mont Pelerin Society-inspired follies of Nixon and Carter, by the time Carter left office in January 1981, the U.S.A. had lost many categories of technology which had been essential for making possible the U.S.'s success in putting men on the Moon.

Similarly, under "out-sourcing" programs such as NAFTA, the U.S. labor-force has suffered a deep-going, far-reaching loss of technologies and related production skills. During the past decade, the spread of the folly called "benchmarking," introduced as a way of employing high-speed idiots (computers) to replace and eliminate the use of qualified design engineers, has destroyed much of the U.S. economy's ability to produce effective products of advanced physical technologies.

Otherwise, during the interval between the inauguration of "Southern Strategist" Nixon, and self-humiliated and disgraced President Carter's exit from office, the deep cuts in the nation's ability to maintain basic economic infrastructure, were the most conspicuous single factor in transforming the U.S. from a prosperously growing nation, which produced more than it consumed, into a decadent economy, depending, more and more, on its use of imperial power for looting other nations. By January 1981, as an angry U.S. electorate afflicted with this situation hoisted a wretched Carter administration out of office, U.S. output was no longer capable of meeting the current full costs of reproducing the successfully growing economy of the quality it had been prior to Nixon's 1966-1968 election-campaign.[45]

The Anglo-American control over the post-August 1971 international monetary and financial systems, enabled London and New York to loot much of the rest of the world, despite some notable 1970s resistance from France, that in concert with Germany's Helmut Schmidt, from France's President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. In other words, the imperial quality of continued Anglo-American monetary-financial power, enabled that power not only to loot, physically, much of the rest of the world, but to control the U.S. population itself, more and more, through a "bread and circuses," entertainment-centered policy at home. ("Enjoy your neighbor, in any way it pleases you to do so! Forget economics; the name of the game is `pleasure.' Call it, as Senator Lieberman did recently, `culture'!" Include under the heading of pleasure-seeking, buying up targetted, corrupted sections of the U.S. population, with the bribes of a "faith-based initiative;" the religious fervor expressed by that program of political bribery, is plainly faith in the appeal of the checkbook.)

Underneath the financial veneer of imperial financial power, since no later than August 15, 1971, the real economy of the U.S. has been rotting on the inside. If we measure the changes of the 1971-1981 interval to include all of the relevant physical changes, the 1970s were a net loss, and there has been no reversal of that downward trend since. Finally, thirty-odd years of folly have finally, inevitably caught up with us.

Thus, as measured against a standard of per-capita income of ordinary people, a significant rate of long-term inflation has continued during the recent two decades.

The challenge to the Federal Reserve System at this time, was its joint responsibility, with the government, in a legally assigned duty of reporting the rate of inflation in the U.S. economy. Had the relevant statisticians been honest accountants, they would have been obliged to show a substantial rate of price-inflation, as measured in net content of the market-basket of goods and services per capita of household income, especially the income of the lower eighty percent of family-income brackets (Figure 1). As part of the attempt to disguise that inflation, the Quality Adjustment hoax was concocted.

The fraudulent trick used by those institutions, was simply to classify some very large increases in prices as representing "improvements in quality," when those institutions' reports were, in fact, suppressing large percentiles of the actual price increases of certain key commodities, under this convoluted pretext. As I presented examples of this in my 1984 broadcast, this Orwellian swindle was used, to persuade the credulous victims, that "less is better, and therefore you must pay more for it."

That fraud which I exposed back in 1984, has been continued in full force, until today.

Had the Fed statisticians adhered honestly to their assigned duties, they would have continued the Department of Commerce's standard national-income accounting system's standards for "Value Added" of earlier decades. That would have meant counting comparable objects in the market-basket of commodities and general infrastructure, to the effect of presuming that equivalent-use-equals-equivalent-value. Although such measurements are not scientifically reliable ones, at least they are not flagrantly dishone