Economics:
At The End of a Delusion

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Back to the Foreword
Ahead to Chapter 2

1. What Is Economics?

No rational discussion of "economics" is possible, unless we define what that term should signify. Unfortunately, especially today, after the so-called "cultural paradigm-shift" which erupted during the late 1960s, most of today's generally circulating definitions of the term, are proffers of allegedly "self-evident" gobbledegook, which are not designed in a way which might provide the hearer with a sense of functional correspondence to reality.

The first thing to know, is that, contrary to some ivory-tower "true believers," the subject of economics did not exist in any rational form prior to what is known, alternately, as the Fifteenth-Century, or "Golden" Renaissance. It was that Renaissance which defines the difference, between, the essentially medieval, A.D. 300-1400 history of European civilization, and its post-1400 phase, as modern civilization.[8] Economy began with the birth of the modern nation-state, over the course of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-pivotted Renaissance.

By national economy, I mean a continuing process of durable improvements in the potential relative population-density of the whole population and its posterity. By economics, we should signify the existence and use of some scientifically demonstrable principle, which permits us to forecast efficiently the connection between today's practices and the worsening, or improvement of the relative well-being of the present population and its posterity, as a whole, a generation or two ahead.[9]

"Economic Forecasting," properly understood, signifies assuming accountability, in the present, for the future consequences of the choices made today. Without such accountability, there is no morality worthy of that name. That requires the existence of a form of government which holds itself efficiently accountable for ensuring such improvements as are measurable in terms of their per-capita and per-square-kilometer physical effects.[10] In applying that definition of "economics," it is not sufficient that that government should intend to bring about such beneficial results; the intention must be an efficient one.[11]

Societies qualifying as such economies did not exist in ancient or medieval history. Those who ruled then, used the subject populations as virtual human cattle, for the advantage of the ruling oligarchy and its lackeys. For them, as for the notorious feudalist Dr. François Quesnay, the fruit of society belonged, by divine right, to the overlord; the rights of the toilers were limited to the same kind of rights a farmer accords to the lower forms of life he hunts down, or maintains, or culls as cattle. That oligarchical system is also typical of the philosophy of John Locke, and the radical-positivist[12] definition of "shareholder value" recently upheld by the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The notion of accountability for the general welfare of a human population, as specifically human, as a whole, did not exist.

Although the first reasonable approximations of true nation-state economies, were those of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, the adoption of the set of universal principles on which the modern sovereign form of nation-state and its economy have been based, the notion of the general welfare, had been already brought into being, earlier in that same century, largely through the leading role of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, as typified by 1.) His Concordantia Catholica, which set forth the principled argument for replacement of the imperial system as it existed under feudalism, with a community of principle among individually sovereign nation-states; 2.) His founding of modern experimental physical science, as merely typified by his De Docta Ignorantia; 3.) His role in pulling together the circle of scientists and other influentials, on whose work Columbus, among others, depended, for the wave of great trans-oceanic explorations launched during the latter decades of that century.

The pivotal principle of law, upon which that coming-into-being of the sovereign nation-state republic was premised, was the adoption of the doctrine of natural law known variously as the general welfare or common good, as typified by the central argument of law later expressed by the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and as stated explicitly as the fundamental law of the U.S.A., in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.

Although this involves subject-matters which are, in part, lodged in the history of pre-modern centuries, even the mere right to existence of the institution of the modern nation-state, has never been uncontested, even within globally extended European civilization, up to the present day. Brutish cultural relics of the cultural heritage of the ancient Rome and medieval feudalism, have more than merely persisted into the Twentieth Century; the effort to reverse the clock of modern history, back to brutishness, has been the dominant post-World War II trend in Anglo-American policy-shaping for about a half-century. The U.S. wars against its historic adversary, the British monarchy, are an example of the conflict between the U.S. defense of the principle of the general welfare, against that modern relic of the Norman-allied, imperial maritime power of Venice's pro-feudalist rentier-financier policies, the policies of the British monarchy since 1714. The Preamble of the Constitution of that British puppet, the Confederate States of America, for example, stressed the suppression of the principle of the general welfare, in favor of the immoral John Locke's defense of slavery.

Today, the depraved relics of Europe's ancient and medieval past, are resurgent in such forms as so-called "globalization," "shareholder value," "the rule of world law," and the effort to establish a military dictatorship in the form of universal fascism.[13] Fascism is typified today by such lackeys and cronies of the late Professor William Yandell Elliott as Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel P. Huntington. These are typified today by family interests, and associated major law firms, gathered around such influential institutions as the H. Smith-Richardson, Olin, and Mellon-Scaife foundations, and associated circles such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the RAND Corporation. That fascist ideology is also rooted axiomatically in the doctrines of the Mont Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation, et al.

Typical, as I have summarized this in earlier reports on the implications of the celebrated events of Sept. 11, 2001, are the views expressed by the collaborators Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and British Arab Bureau veteran Bernard Lewis. Inside the United States itself, a new, utopian military doctrine, has sought to destroy the legacy of that citizen-soldier typified in military history by Germany's Gerhard Scharnhorst, and the republican U.S. legacy of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, General Douglas MacArthur, and President Dwight Eisenhower.

As Huntington speaks for today's often explicitly self-described universal fascists generally, the Huntington-Brzezinski image of the role of the military, harks back to the genocidal practices of the Roman legions and the Nazi Waffen-SS: legions of the professional warrior, recruited from assorted nationalities, as the instrument of death deployed by a global neo-Roman, universal fascist tyranny, which hunts, herds, and culls populations as the Nazi Waffen-SS echoed the Roman legions in this genocidal practice.

These universal fascists have appeared in the Anglo-American sphere as chiefly products of the process out of which the British Fabian Society emerged. The most influential such ideologues include Thomas Huxley's Golem, H.G. Wells, whose 1928 The Open Conspiracy typifies the way in which the Fabian method promotes the universal fascist influences expressed by such Wellsian fanatics of the Brzezinski circle as the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who confessed herself a Wells follower, speaking as Secretary of State, openly, in a 1999 public address. The influence of Bertrand Russell, and his Unification of the Sciences project, is an integral part of that same campaign for universal fascism detailed, step by step, in Wells' The Open Conspiracy.

The principal target for destruction chosen by these contemporary universal fascists, is always the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic, and the doctrine of the general welfare or common good. It is sufficient to study The Open Conspiracy, and to note that Bertrand Russell signed on to that policy publicly, to understand how the influences of universal fascism work intellectually, as they permeate the departments specializing in the so-called "social sciences," in academic and related life in the United States and its government institutions today.

In summary, these universal fascists, with their present, frantic search for an "integralist" "pagan ethic," are the modern expression of the attempted resurgence of the model of the ancient Roman and kindred empires, and of the worst of medieval Europe's history. The essence of the movement for universal fascism, typified by Brzezinski et al. within the U.S.A., is a movement whose purpose for existence is to eradicate the existence of the modern nation-state from any and all parts of this planet, and to replace the nation-state with world-government over the population-controlled inhabitants of a global, dehumanized zoo.

There is no significant danger to civilization on this planet today, which could not be made manageable, were this threat to be removed. To paraphrase a famous Harvard professor, those who do not wish to recognize my emphasis upon history, may be forced to relive the very worst part of what they, who presently profess "I don't go there," prefer to ignore.

Therefore, all competent policy assessments of the present world economic situation, that of the U.S.A. itself most notably, are rooted in a grasp of the continuing historical origins of modern society. The following brief summary of the point elaborated in other published locations, should therefore be sufficient here.

During the pre-Fifteenth-Century history of Europe, especially since the emergence of imperial Rome out of the its military conquests during the same general period as the close of the Second Punic War, the power to make law came to be invested in a figure selected to perform the function of a pagan Pontifex Maximus, an emperor whose function was centered in his authority to arbitrate disputes respecting essential matters of doctrine and related practice among the diverse religious and cultural groups of which the subjects of that pantheonic tyranny were composed.[14] In other words, like many of today's would-be busy-bodies setting themselves up as the arbiters of peace, the Pontifex Maximus imputed to his own person the right to "play God." The Roman Empire, in particular, was thus maintained as a permanent state of warfare, representing a process of hunting and culling the ranks of, even exterminating, some of the sundry religious and cultural groupings, either within the Empire or at its periphery, as the associates of Brzezinski and Huntington adhere to such perspectives today.

This state of imperial depravity of ancient Empires, such as Babylon and Rome, was also characteristic of the ultramontane faction of medieval society over the interval A.D. 300-1400. It was this characteristic of medieval Europe under domination of the Venice-Norman alliance, which led into that vast depopulation and lunacy of the mid-Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age," a dark age of genocide which one Twentieth-Century historian has characterized as "a distant mirror" of that troubled century's likely outcome.[15]

By its essential implications of doctrine and practice, the oligarchical interest represented by the function of Pontifex Maximus, divided the subjects of that imperium between the oligarchs and their lackeys, on the one side, and the mass of the subject population, the human cattle, on the other. The human cattle fell into two grand sub-classes, herded and hunted (e.g., "rogue") cattle. Thus, the imperial law of the ultramontane tradition, by reducing herded and hunted subjects to cattle, reduced the rulers themselves, including the Pontifex Maximus himself, to the axiomatically implied status of a beast like that which Britain's Thomas Huxley claimed to be, a beast from H.G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau.

Thus, in an imperial, or kindred social order, the mass of the human population, of all categories, was herded and culled according to the perceived interest, or merely the caprices, of the ruling authority. Thus, in imperial society (including all those societies called variously "ultramontane" or "integralist," or "globalized"), the people exist for the convenience of the ruling power. Whereas, in the modern form of sovereign nation-state, as prescribed by our Federal Constitution, the state exists for the promotion of the welfare of the present and future population as a whole.

I emphasize the most crucial point of relevance for shaping contemporary economic policies.

The state must therefore be subject to control by the principle of its obligation to serve the promotion of the general welfare, to serve the common good. The moral right of the government to exist, is conditional upon its efficient promotion of the general welfare of all of the present generations and their posterity. No type of rule of law may be tolerated, which violates that principle.

That notion of law premised upon the notion of the common good, is the distinction of civilized government in modern society. That is the distinction which defines the modern sovereign nation-state republic; that distinction was the essence of the continuous quarrel between the patriots of the United States and the British monarchy over the interval 1776-1901, and the quarrel between President Franklin Roosevelt and the British monarchy's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, during World War II. That is the essential difference between the American System of political-economy, as exemplified by the work of Hamilton, the Careys, List, and Lincoln, on the one side, and the neo-Venetian, British rentier-financier system of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and the Mont Pelerin Society, et al., on the other.

This function of the principle of the general welfare, is no mere precept, no mere tradition. It has a functional basis in the essential distinction between a man and an ape, between the human individual and all other living species. This connection is, as I shall indicate here, the key to understanding the physical principles of economy on which the entirety of a competent practice of statecraft, including economics, depends in an efficient and fundamental way.

For reasons included in this chapter of my report, an efficient understanding of economics, and of the economics issues underlying the present world crisis, could not be attained within that medley of mysticism and reductionist fanaticism which pervades today's usually taught classroom instruction in, not only economics as such, but also much of the teaching of mathematics in particular and science in general. Therefore, the required understanding of the problems of policy-shaping posed to us by the present crisis, must include emphasis upon certain issues of scientific method. The feature of economic science on which I have placed emphasis in this chapter of the report, is the deeper practical implications of the notion of physical-economic cycles, especially long-range cycles.

A.  The Physical Basis for Economic Cycles

To serve the stated purpose of this report as a whole, I must now turn to define what I mean by the practice of a science of physical economy. I must show why and how that science is indispensable for understanding the predominant influence of long-range and other physical-capital cycles, in steering the evolution of the economy, from point to point, within such governing cycles.

Economics, when properly defined as a branch of physical science, should be understood in terms of principles defined in the same way universal physical principles are, first, hypothesized, and, later, proven experimentally, in any competent form of physical science.[16] In practice, the measurements to be made for society as a whole, are to be made in reference to general cycles, long-ranging cycles, of not less than one to two generations. This means, that the measurement of performance in periods of less than a generation's span, must apply to the short-term measurements in economy, echoes of those same methods Kepler used for astrophysics, in connection with his original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation.[17]

So, Kepler defines the universal physical principles of organization of the Solar System, from the standpoint of the long-range cycles which are commensurate with completed orbits, and with the cycle of those combined planetary, lunar, and comets' orbits, of which latter the System as a whole is visibly composed. The motion within any local, much shorter interval, must be understood as an expression of the orbit as a whole; not, contrary to today's typically foolish Wall Street statistician, the orbit as the expression of the cumulative effect of localized motions. This is as true for economic cycles, as it is for Solar ones. This approach to the principle of cycles, was, incidentally, the method underlying and permeating the original, 1676, first published announcement of the discovery of the calculus, by Gottfried Leibniz; therefore, the principle I am invoking here, is by no means a Johnny-come-lately innovation, but is an elementary, and solid matter of scientific method, as it should be taught in all respectable secondary schools and universities today.

The long cycles built into the top-down design of the Solar System, do have a determining influence upon the circumstances in which life within the Solar System depends; but, for reasons I shall identify here a bit further on, the authority of those cycles does not prevent man from changing even the Solar System itself, including changing it for the better, if but only gradually, and over very, very long periods of sustained action, as living processes have transformed the Earth into a Biosphere.

The widely accepted methods among today's economists, of measuring economic cycles in a simple statistical way, commit the same blunder which Kepler exposed as the common, anti-scientific error of the earlier astronomical dogmas of such diverse authorities as the Aristotelean Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe.[18] The use of the mere describing of nature as a substitute for discovering the underlying universal physical principles at work, is the typical folly of those intellectually impaired statisticians who pretend to be economists, a folly abhorred in competent modern astrophysics since Kepler.[19] It is for the reason of their refusal to recognize this issue of method, that all the principal forecasters opposing my forecasts, have been, at their best, simply incapable of providing competent projections of their own.

The source of the failure of those forecasters, has been, to a large degree, the incompetence of the way in which economics has usually been taught in all leading universities, and often practiced in the profession in general. For example, if they had studied and understood Kepler's founding of the first approximation of a comprehensive mathematical physics, and the developments in the same direction, through Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, et al., after Kepler, they would not have produced the often catastrophic effects typical of their work on business cycles, and the continuing influence of that misguided work on policy-shaping today.

The importance of Kepler which must be recognized among economists today, is that he was the founder of the first successful effort to establish a comprehensive form of mathematical physics, the first to establish a comprehensive method of attack which freed science from the ivory-tower mathematician's blackboard, and to civilize mathematics by bringing it into the real world, the world of universal physical principles, rather than the purely imaginary world of abstract ivory-tower mathematical speculations. The first discovery of an experimentally defined principle of universal gravitation, by Kepler, is the point of departure from which all subsequent progress in developing a comprehensive form of modern physical science has emerged. So, it is inevitable, that fertile scientific minds are impelled, repeatedly, to return to Kepler's arguments, as Albert Einstein did in his reappraisal of the importance of the discoveries of both Kepler and Bernhard Riemann.

Kepler recognized certain anomalies in the orbit of Mars, which had been overlooked by Brahe. This led him to recognize, not only that the Mars orbit was elliptical in general form, but that the Sun was located at one of the two focii of that ellipse. Kepler observed that the measurements made by aid of his normalization of an observed orbit, precluded the possibility of predicting, statistically, both the position and velocity of the planet's motion within an immediately subsequent portion of the orbital cycle as a whole.

This required throwing away all as-if-at-the-blackboard varieties of Euclidean mathematics, such as those used by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, et al. For Kepler, there must be a physically efficient intention embedded in the Solar System, which determined the characteristics of the orbit. By that use of the notion of intention, Kepler signified the existence of some corresponding, experimentally demonstrable, efficient, universal physical principle, such as his original discovery of universal gravitation. This notion of a universal quality of intention, by Kepler, has been the definition of an experimentally validated universal physical principle, among all competently educated persons, ever since.

Therefore, as I shall summarize the case here, anyone who would wish to become a competent economist, should study the pivotal ontological paradox, which led Kepler to a crucial discovery of a universal physical principle, in this case, gravitation.

Kepler recognized, that although the orbit as a whole was observed and knowable with experimental precision, the velocity and position of the planet at any time could not be predicted as a simple statistical projection of its immediately preceding action. Kepler's measurements led the way to Leibniz's future development of the calculus, by showing that the orbit fit such rules as "equal areas, equal times," for the case that the angular measurement was made with respect to the relatively fixed position of the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. The measurable fact of "equal areas, equal times," pointed to the existence of an efficient agency existing beyond statistical comprehension of the mere moment-to-moment motion observed for the planet itself. Kepler's development of the concept of the relationship among the harmonic ratios of orbits, in the ordering of the Solar System as a whole, was a continuation of that same method and approach.

The same class of problem confronts the attempt to solve the mystery, concerning the way in which long-term economic cycles interact with short-term changes in economic policy. In examining long- to medium-term economic cycles, we must adduce the demonstrable physical principles characteristic of each phase of the cycle, and assess the local phase of the ongoing process from the standpoint of an experimentally-based insight into the systemic characteristics of that process which defines the cycle as a whole.[20]

To restate that point with an eye on the referenced work of Kepler, there is something outside, "behind" the sometimes apparently simple statistical projection of trends, which controls, and accounts for the ironical, ultimately contradictory relationship between short-term performance determined statistically, and medium- to long-term cycles. The challenge presented is, therefore: Is there some ontologically paradoxical, undeniable empirical evidence, which points our cognitive powers toward an appropriate search for a relevant hypothesis, which might, in turn, lead us to an experimentally defined universal physical principle? That "external" action by a principle is embodied within the cycle itself, that more or less in the same sense that it is the orbit as a whole which determines the short-term motion of the planet. In astrophysics, or economics, it is a universal physical principle, which is both embodied within the cycle as a whole, and which, pending the efficient introduction of a newly added long-term cyclical principle, subsumes the idiosyncrasies observable, in effect, at each moment.

Therefore, in physical science, and the methods of mathematics appropriate to that science, the secret of competent forecasting in general, is the same which Leibniz developed in his unique, original discovery, and continued refinement of the calculus. This was a discovery which met precisely the challenge which Kepler had bequeathed to future mathematicians. We must discover the cycle, first, and then assess the local action within that functional frame of reference.

It is the long-term cycles which are of the greatest importance. Therefore, in all my forecasting, I have always forecasted from a long-range cyclical standpoint, as Gauss, in his development of his general notions of curvature, and Riemann later, successively, perfected this conceptual approach for mathematical physics in general. Reliable long-range economic forecasting depends upon that conceptual approach.

Yes, the human will does intervene in this: but how? Effective intervention occurs by acting, in effect, upon the long-range economic cycle itself, rather than upon the local interval of that process! The purpose of economic forecasting, is to discover how to intervene, in the relatively short term, if possible, to change the characteristics of the long-range cycle in which events are currently trapped. By changing the characteristics of the long-range cycle, we are able to change the effect which the changed long-range cycle now imposes upon the local interval.

To illustrate that point:

When we discover a new universal physical principle, and then apply that principle intentionally to a process previously defined in terms of earlier discoveries of such principles, the addition of that new universal principle, changes the characteristic action in every interval of the process. It changes the characteristic effect of willful forms of human action upon the universe. The development of the notion, by Leibniz and Bernouilli, for example, that isochronic pathways in physical processes are implicitly those of a catenary, rather than, for example, a cycloid, typifies the mathematical-physical idea of applying a new notion of extended magnitude (i.e., a universal physical principle) to change a previously assumed characteristic of a process.

That is the key to any competent appreciation of the role of scientific and technological progress, in bringing about a medium- to long-term trend of increase in the productive powers of labor, as this effect is expressed in the short to medium term. This is, in fact, the only true source of the increase in the physical-economic rate of profit.

That, in short, is what I mean by changing the cycle as a whole, as the way to alter the characteristic behavior in the localized part of that process. That is the kind of systemic effect we are attempting to induce, when apply a new principle, expressed as a technology, to an already established productive process or product design. I repeat, for emphasis: This kind of transformation, in characteristic, is the only true source of physical-economic profitability of an economic process. The complex of principles expressed by the process, has the quality of a more or less long-range cycle. By integrating an added principle, through the medium of new technology, we transform the characteristic of that cycle, and, thus, transform the characteristic action in the local situation.[21]

A long-term cycle is the reflection of the action performed by a complex of universal physical principles upon the universe. In scientific and technological progress, we may correct erroneous assumptions from the past, but, usually, in practice, we do not otherwise change any of these principles; we bring additional such principles into play voluntarily, just as we do through the successful discovery and application of any previously unrecognized universal physical principle. Thus, by bringing an additional such principle into play, thus altering the long-term cycle, we alter the characteristic quality of action, the systemic quality of action, in the short term. In other words, we change the physical geometry of the system.[22] This alteration is a typical form of anti-entropic action. Such is the nature of the determining relationship of scientific progress to physical productivity of labor, per capita and per square kilometer.

The most commonplace foolishness practiced by my opponents, in the name of forecasting and related analysis, today, is that exemplified in the extreme by the pathetic case of the Mont Pelerin Society's Professor Milton Friedman's post hoc ergo propter hoc school of forecasting.[23] The reading of trend-line charts, for purposes of forecasting real economic processes, is a form of sheer buncombe, into which contemporary financial accountants are prone to fall all too often. The past certainly does predetermine the conditions on which the present and future will be built, but the simple statistical reading of a trend from the recent past, tells us nothing so much as the fact that the believer in such methods of forecasting has learned less than nothing from the past five centuries of scientific progress.

Thus, there is a deep scientific principle involved in that distinction of economies from mechanical systems. I summarize that crucial topic as follows.

The long-term rise or fall of economies, is determined, as I have just pointed out, by the fact that healthy economies are of a special quality of characteristic, which is defined by an intrinsically anti-entropic process. In effect, any competent measurement of the characteristic features of an economy which is increasing its potential relative population-density, is a measurement of the reflection of anti-entropy, or want of it, in the cyclical aspects of the process as whole. It is the intervention, by means of an added universal physical principle, or a technology derived from that principle, that long-range and other economic cycles are profitably transformed in their characteristics. The physical-economic profit generated locally, or in the large, is an expression of implicitly measurable local anti-entropy. Thus, competent long-range economic analysis, is focussed upon discerning functions of technological change, which either increase the entropy of the cycle, or its anti-entropy.

So, in summary of what has been said on this matter thus far: in defining any long-term or medium-term cycle, the immediate object is to determine whether the trajectory is toward an increase or decrease of the entropy of that cycle over its term. The function of informed intervention, is to take some action, either to remove an axiomatic feature of the cycle which increases the entropy of the cycle as a whole, or which, happily, will increase the expressed anti-entropy of the cycle. True profit, as defined from the standpoint of a science of physical economy, expresses a net gain attributable to anti-entropic action within that economy. No other definition of profit is acceptable for purposes of long-term forecasting of the course of physical economies. Belief in a zero-growth model of a stable, so-called "sustainable" economy, is not an option which will permit an economy to survive over the relevant long term.

In the matter of organizing a recovery from the physical-economic depression brought about through a defective monetary-financial system, as today, the essential mission must be to reverse the characteristic of the physical economy as a whole, from a state of self-aggravated entropy, to one of significant anti-entropy. This is accomplished, primarily, not through the simple sum-total of individual productive and related actions, but through changing the characteristic of the system considered as a whole. The value of production, is not the sum-total of estimated value added at local points. It is the relative anti-entropy of the economy considered as an indivisible whole.

The desired, happy outcome, is accomplished by a combination of measures. Increase the ratio of useful employment relative to the potential labor-force as a whole. Raise the level of technology relative to infrastructure, production, and design of products and processes, within the whole. In the course of this report, I shall clarify that approach to bringing about a general economic recovery.

Rather than merely describing my relevant discoveries respecting the specific point just made, I prefer that you should actually know what I am describing here. I describe the initial phases of my original discoveries in the science of physical economy, the discoveries on which all of my successes, relative to the work of my professional and other rivals, have depended. These are the principles upon which competence in economics depends today, especially under conditions of crisis, in which all conventional habits fail. These are the principles which dominate any competent discussion of the situation in the U.S. and world economies today.

The Trouble with Sense-Perception

The central, controlling issue of scientific principle in politics, and in economics, is implicitly, whether or not man is simply another animal. Most present-day economists would not, and most probably could not explain that difference competently. That is one of the several crucial reasons for the demonstrated incompetence among most of our leading economists today, the worst being the radical empiricists such as the followers of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.

The principle of natural law called variously the general welfare or common good, pivots upon the evidence, that man is not merely another form of animal life, but has a distinct quality, expressing a universal physical principle which is absent in the beasts. This crucial evidence proving the existence of this quality, is typified by fact of the power to generate valid, revolutionary discoveries of experimentally verifiable universal principles. The difference in effect, flowing from the acceptance, or rejection of this principle, is the proper basis for defining all civilized law, when the principle is efficiently understood as both a universal physical principle and a principle of equity.

This quality is, therefore, the essential referent for all investigation of economic cycles.

The basis for all proper constitutional law is, therefore, the notion that the conduct of man, and the rights of man, are to be derived from nothing other than the discernible implications of the specific quality of difference which sets man apart from the mere beast. The scientific, and, therefore, the legal conception of man, and the governing intent of law, must always be derived from the practical implications of this distinction. The substitution of a religious doctrinal tradition for science, on this account, does not provide proof of principle of law in the deliberations of a sovereign nation-state. Plausible sincerity of assertions of belief, is never rightly admissible as evidence of a witness' truthfulness.

These principles of law have axiomatic authority in the domain of physical economy, and of policies of practice which affect the outcome of practice bearing upon the physical economy as a whole. Violations of those principles of physical economy, are the principal cause of all of the economic catastrophes which a modern nation-state may inflict upon itself.

The so-called "ecological" difference between mankind and the animal species, is that the sovereign power of cognitive potential, which is specific to the human individual, does not exist among the beasts. Cognition signifies the power of an individual human mind, to form a successful hypothesis as the solution to a well-defined ontological paradox, and to verify that hypothesis by the quality of experiment required to demonstrate that hypothesis to represent a universal physical principle.

From the standpoint of animal ecology, a variety of a species of beast has a systemic ability to adapt to its environment in a way which is defined by a combination of ostensibly fixed, genetic and kindred characteristics. With mankind, it is different. Through the discoveries of universal physical principle, which are generated through the sovereign cognitive powers of the individual, mankind is able to increase what animal ecologists might describe as its relative ecological potential as a species; that, in a fundamental way, a way not found among higher apes and other beasts. This is the basis for my own central contribution to the science of physical economy, the notion of potential relative population-density.

If I use "ecology" here in the sense of "animal ecology," as I do, this is not to be read as adopting the methods of animal ecology for man; quite the contrary. It is to employ the experimental implications of the Socratic method of negation, as Pasteur, Curie, and Vernadsky, et al., did, for defining the existence of a non-abiotic class of universal physical principle, a principle which does not exist within the bounds of principles extant in an experimentally defined notion of what might be assumed, often, if wrongly, to be an originally abiotic universe. That a process identified as living, is shown to be able to produce effects in an abiotic medium, which could not be generated within an axiomatically abiotic domain, is the experimental basis for the definition of life by the succession of Pasteur et al.[24] The distinction between man and the animals, may be shown in a similar way, by showing that human behavior accomplishes a physical effect which could not occur within the axiomatic bounds of an animal ecology. Any competent teaching and practice of economics, including forecasting, is premised on an understanding of the crucial importance of those threefold, categorical distinctions among experimentally defined phase-spaces.

However, that is not sufficient. This brings us to a crucial sub-topic of my hitherto unique achievements in long-range forecasting, the functional notion that certain principles of Classical artistic composition, are also universal physical principles. Without examining economic processes from the included standpoint of the role of social relations in defining possible forms of scientific cooperation around the discovery and use of the universal physical principles of both abiotic and living organizations, it is impossible to account for the way in which long-range economic cycles, or kindred processes, have been ordered in previous history.

This functional distinction between man and the lower living species, is otherwise expressed in an essential way, by the functional distinctions between sense-perception and knowledge.

As I shall indicate here, my original discoveries in the science of physical economy, were derived from further development of the argument I crafted first as an adolescent, and which I refreshed at the close of the war, for refuting the attack on Leibniz by Immanuel Kant. I signify that attack which had been the central feature of Kant's notorious series of Critiques. Through this approach to refuting Kant, I was able to define the meaning of cognition in a fresh way, and continue to improve upon that definition later. The result was not inconsistent with the outcome of the spiritual exercises better known as Plato's series of Socratic dialogues,[25] nor with Leibniz's insight into the principle of Plato's dialogues; but my application was an original one, prompted chiefly in reaction to the influence of Leibniz upon my studies. This discovery defined a method which subsequently proved itself to be peculiarly best suited to the task of accounting for the essential features of long-range economic cycles.

As I have presented the case in locations published earlier, the action of generating a valid discovery of a universal physical principle, occurs only within the perfect security of the sovereign cognitive processes of an individual human mind. I shall explain some points on this matter of crucial relevance to economics, during this immediate portion of the report.

This fact of sovereignty presents us with a paradox: since no person can observe directly the cognitive process of another person's generating a provable hypothesis, how is it possible to organize effective cooperation in society's use of such universal physical principles? Discovery of principles, is always an individual act of a sovereign individual mind. However, this is paradoxical, in the Socratic sense, since technological progress in society does not occur through the bare discovery of such a principle by a single discoverer. The will, and knowledge needed for effective cooperation in use of any discovered principle, is a product of a social process, not a purely individual action. Thus, the demonstrably perfectly sovereign quality of individual cognition, presents us with a true ontological paradox.

This, in turn, generates a nice nest of multiply-connected, subsumed ontological paradoxes. For example: since we can know that a discovery is valid, only through its efficient effect in a social setting, how can cooperation in use of that principle be organized within society? Since the maintenance of the human species requires the transmission of accumulated successive advances in such knowledge of universal physical principles, it is the ordering of the related social relations within a society, or among societies, and from generation to generation, which defines the possibility of a society's realizing the benefit of such discoveries, and transmitting the accumulation of such cognitive experiences from one generation to the next.

Human `Super-Genes'

Consequently, the essence of human nature, does not lie in the mere reporting of sense-experiences, or tricks, as "information," from one individual to another, but rather the prompting of the cognitive processes of one individual, to replicate the cognitive act of discovery of a universal principle which has been made by another.

It is that cognitive aspect of social relations, which defines an individual's relationship to previous generations, over thousands of years, or more, and, similarly, to future generations. It is that aspect of social relations, which distinguishes the human individual, as an integral part of humanity as a whole, from the individuality of the mere beast. It is that relationship which expresses on the largest possible scale, the proof of an absolute distinction between man and the beasts.

The matter does not end there. The ability to demonstrate that transmittal of discoveries of knowledge of universal physical principle, is universally efficient in this universe, is a definition of truth. For example, what I have just written is demonstrably true, but, it is nonetheless highly debated. The empiricists, Kantians, and logical positivists, like the anarcho-syndicalists, for example, disagree most vehemently with what I have just reported here. The Kantians, for example, would deny the existence of knowable truth; the radical positivists and existentialists,[26] especially the sociologists of that curious persuasion, would go into a frenzy like that of angered rhesus monkeys in a cage, and do, if the issue of truthfulness were raised in their classroom.

The point, respecting that quality of difference between man and beast, which I have just summarized, is the most hotly contested issue of all modern civilization. It is, for example, the issue posed by the true statement, as by me, that "information theory" is one of the most monstrous, and most destructive of the hoaxes popularized during the recent sixty years. The issue arises in a general way by posing the inherently paradoxical question, whether knowledge is located within the domain of sense-perceptual experience as such, or whether human knowledge must be defined as of the form of experimentally demonstrated, cognitive generation of universal physical principles.[27]

This method of transmission of discoveries of universal physical principle, not only from one individual to another, but over successive generations, obliges us to define cognition in a way which goes beyond the argument of Vernadsky, and that in a qualitative way, rather than in degree of refinement. We are implicitly obliged to recognize the existence and role of a class of phenomena unique to human social relations, phenomena which we might best term "super-genes." For this, we resort to the same experimental method of negation, by means of which living processes are distinguished from abiotic ones, and cognitive from animal life.[28]

The relevant argument goes as follows.

Since the act of cognition occurs only within the perfectly sovereign cognitive processes of individual mentation, the act can not be transmitted in that form from one mind to another. It can be transmitted only by replication. This does not leave the equivalence of the act, occurring in two distinctly separate mental processes, a mystery. The experimental method enables two minds to be certain of the equivalence of their discovery, once the relevant, crucial form of experimental proof of the coincidence has been achieved.

On this account, we are able not only to speak with certainty of an absolute distinction between man and the lower forms of life, but to define that distinction as the essential quality of social relations among the members of our species. On this account, there is no essential equivalence between animal and human behavior, except to the degree men and women are bestialized in both their sense of identity and behavior. Indeed, the proper notion of "evil" is the notion of bestialized man, the notion of man typically associated with modern existentialists such as Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Hitler, Heidegger, Adorno, Arendt, Sartre, et al.

This notion of the specifically human quality of the cognitive form of social relations, is not limited to the isolable individual act of verification of a replicated discovery of principle. Human nature is located essentially, primarily, in the way in which the cumulative effect of transmission of discoveries is expressed over successive generations. Study of this aspect of the matter, requires that we recognize the existence of a phenomenon fairly described metaphorically as "super-genes."

The clearest expression of the function of such "super-genes," is found in the mode of transmission of knowledge of principles called "Classical humanist education." However, we must also take into account, that such forms of communication of cognitive ideas, are not limited to a formally Classical-humanist mode of education. It is readily demonstrated, if one takes the time and effort to demonstrate this, that the Classical-humanist mode is a concentrated expression of principles which have always operated among human beings, especially in the loving relationship with child and parents, as from birth, if not, as is probably the case, even while the infant is gestating in the womb.

Ask: What is happening in the cumulative social process, of transmission of cognitively generated, and replicated experiences of discovery of experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles? What is happening physically? Very well: what should we mean by use of the term physical?

Without going beyond what Vernadsky has accomplished, the rational use of the term "physical" finds an adequate basis in those qualities of experimental demonstrations of principle, which are distinguished from one another by their distinctive form of regular physical effects. Thus, we define universal physical principles of an abiotic phase-space, by physical experiments which are coherent with the notion of an abiotic sub-universe. We define living processes, the Biosphere, by means of physical effects which could not come into being in a universally abiotic phase-space. We define the Noösphere by physical effects which could not come into being within the experimentally defined confines of either an abiotic or biotic phase-space, or both combined. This is, therefore, the only rational, experimentally based method, for the definition of the term "physical."

Vernadsky's notion of the Noösphere carries us through to the notion of the physical impact of individual cognition. I carry this same approach a step further than he does, to the notion of the effect of a principle of cognitive social relations. Here, we encounter another, distinct physical effect, defined in a manner consistent with the way Vernadsky defined the Biosphere and Noösphere, to which I give the name "super-genes." This effect reflects the physical basis for what is otherwise recognized as the methods and products of Classical modes of artistic composition associated with the influence of such as Solon, Plato, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, J.S. Bach, Kästner, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Heine, et al. This is identified with the function of irony, metaphor, and the subjunctive, in both Classical modes of artistic composition (and performance), and in the work of statecraft, as in physical science.

All of these expressions of that principle of cognitive social relations, have the useful name of Classical culture. This means not only the transmission of what is explicitly and rightly distinguished as Classical forms of culture, but also all social processes which express the same principle within them, whether the culture is otherwise meaningfully definable as "Classical," or not.

The accumulation of transmitted discoveries of principle, of science and art combined, over successive generations, results in a type of individual, and society, which is more or less far removed, in physical effect, from a simple individual person with the cognitive potential in general embedded within his nature. This transformation occurs through the cognitive form of the special quality of social relationship expressed by the effective transmission of cognitively generated conceptions from one generation to another, or across cultural currents. The effect of such transformations is equivalent, in physical effect on the Biosphere and Noösphere, to the same general effect as culturally effected "genetic" change, as genetic change would be observed in the character of a lower species or variety.

Clearly, the effect of cultural transmissions of this cognitive type, produce their characteristic physical effect in terms of the capabilities and other characteristic responses of the persons in whom that experience has had its effect. There is, in short, a change in the physical principle expressed by both the individual and the social relations among the individuals of the relevant culture. This is the effect which prompts theologians to locate the immortality of the mortal human individual, as living in a simultaneity of eternity. The continuity of that continuing cognitive process, within which the mortal individual exists, is never broken.

There are also reverse effects, virtual species-downshifts, such as the pestilence of cultural decadence which erupted in globally extended European culture during the recent thirty-seven years of the so-called "rock-drug-sex counterculture."

The significance of these issues is shown more clearly, when we apply the method of very long cycles to the most crucial topics of theology.

In the Classical Greek treatment of the nature of God, as by Plato's dialogues,[29] the idea of God appears, in first approximation, as a universal principle; or, in Greek, a Logos. The experimental proof that the principles underlying both life and cognition, respectively, are universal principles, signifies that no universe existed, or will exist, without their efficient, anti-entropic presence within it. If creativity is a universal physical principle, as Vernadsky's approach suffices to define such a noëtic principle, then it was always and everywhere efficient, existing in the form reflected as cognition within the human mind.

Yet, the universal physical principle of creativity is known to mankind only in the sovereign individual form of the act of cognition. Here, we are confronted with the same kind of argument made by Leibniz, in his conceptualization of our universe as organized according to a monadology. Thus, to our knowledge, creativity exists efficiently in the universe only as an expression of a perfectly sovereign being, a being which expresses His existence in such forms as those intentions which Kepler equated to universal physical principle. [30]

It is the continuity of such a universe, through its included expression as the human species and human history, which is subtended by the physical principle I have associated with the notion of "super genes." The continuity of the cognitive creative principle has itself a sovereign identity, a quality of personality, as the Creator Himself exhibits this in creation considered in the large. So, although this is a physically efficient principle, it is also a spiritual principle, the reflection of a physically efficient power acting upon what we otherwise perceive as the physical universe. In that case, we are employing the term spiritual as a term of physical science, in the same sense that we employ the term life to distinguish the principled difference between a living and an abiotic process.

These cultural processes which I have associated with the notion of "super-genes," play a critical role in determining the characteristic features of long-range economic cycles. I shall address this effect at an appropriate point below.

Anti-Entropy vs. Entropy

To understand the functional definition of those economic cycles which increase the potential relative population-density of a society—that is, generate true physical profit—we must define the way in which individual persons are able to inject an added factor of what must be recognized as anti-entropy into the economic cycle. That brings us into direct confrontation with the popularity of the absurd, currently popularized, pseudo-scientific fad of "information theory."

This issue, whether or not man is a creature of cognition, unlike the beasts, is inseparable from the issue, as posed by Plato, for example, of whether or not sense-perception as such, affords the mind a competent representation of that actual experience which prompts our sense-perceptual images. In the history of ancient through modern philosophy and science, the effort to reach a rational form of conclusion in this matter of sense-perception, has been reduced to two general types of results.

In these systems of the first type, the believer is constantly confronted with the evidence, that the behavior of the processes in which he is situated, is not fully consistent with the assumptions deduced from sense-certainty. This persistent inconsistency within the domain of sense-certainty, has repeatedly driven the philosophical reductionist into wild-eyed mysticisms, and, therefore, sometimes, also into conducting religious wars.

Among the one type of cases, we include all superficially rational systems which sought to defend sense-perception from intrusions by cognition, such as the systems of Aristotle, the modern empiricists, Kantians, and such devotees of Bertrand Russell as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. The most typical expression of this is therefore found in those known as the reductionists. In contrast, in the second, contrary type of cases, such as my own, that same inconsistency attracts the delighted thinker with the prospect of discovering some truth which overturns shopworn prejudices.

This is key for understanding the chief characteristic error common to the otherwise incongruent systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and to the empiricist Galileo. By assuming that Aristotle's method, as followed blindly by Ptolemy, was valid, or, in Paolo Sarpi's alternative, the neo-Ockhamite versions known as empiricism and logical positivism, they degraded science to the mere attempt to describe nature in conformity with an adopted set of purely arbitrary, "ivory tower" assumptions. They did this without adducing any universal physical principle which would actually resolve the ontological paradoxes erupting from within the phenomena under examination.[31]

These "ivory tower" systems of the reductionist, include the more extremely pathological expressions, such as explicit satanism, or varieties akin to Romanticist composer Richard Wagner's ring myth, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter cult, or the axiomatically irrationalist notion of "freedom" associated with John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Dr. François Quesnay, Adam Smith, et al. In these reductionist expressions of defective mental development, the victim gropes in the unseeable. Like Marlowe's or Goethe's Faust, he yearns, as the superstitious gambler does, for some magical power, perhaps satanic, outside the universe, which is wishfully presumed to act upon that universe, if one could but win that mysterious and axiomatically mystical power to service of one's desires.

The mind of that poor fellow presumes that the imperfection of sense-perceived reality, as he misperceives that reality, is sufficient evidence of the existence of some utterly irrational form of higher authority, beyond the senses. Adam Smith did this. His lunatic notion of the "invisible hand," typifies the kind of superstition to which the wishful devotee might appeal for such beneficent interventions as fixing the outcome of the role of the dice. That sort of "invisible hand," of Bernard Mandeville and Smith, is the mystical authority to loot farmers as prey, which Quesnay's laissez-faire attributes to the aristocratic landlord. So, the pro-satanic Mandeville, the official prophet of the pro-satanic Mont Pelerin Society, saw public virtues as the fruit of private vices, as Mont Pelerin's Milton Friedman promoted drug-trafficking.[32]

The advocates of these systems, have been compelled to acknowledge the existence of some efficient agency, beyond the reach of either sense-perception or their personal comprehension, which, they fraudulently assert, as Mandeville and Adam Smith did, accounts for certain deductively paradoxical patterns in sense-perceived experience. The so-called "invisible hand," as variously presented among empiricists such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Bernard Mandeville, are examples of this. The same pathological feature appears as the crucial defect debunked by Kepler, in the flawed physics of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo. I emphasize: a related variety of obscenity appears in the laissez-faire of the radical pro-feudalist, Dr. François Quesnay, as Quesnay is plagiarized as the "invisible hand" of the British East India Company's Adam Smith.

There is a real world, beyond direct access by the simple senses, but it is in no sense an arbitrary concoction, as those reductionist fairy-tales are. It is a rationally comprehensible universe, once we have come to know what it is through the methods of scientific discovery of universal physical principles. In that aspect of science lie the efficient, knowable realities for which the images of sense-perception are merely shadows.

The same general problem is inherent in Euclidean, so-called non-Euclidean, and related formal systems of classroom geometry. In these ivory-tower systems, a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates is introduced arbitrarily, on the presumption that sense-perception, as supplemented by some antic inspiration, makes these assumptions "self-evident." Again, the attempt at making science from the vantage-point of such ivory-tower, so-called a priori assumptions, is self-degraded into yet another substituting of the mere describing of nature according to those arbitrary presumptions, as Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe did, instead of discovering the universal physical principles at work, as Kepler did.

These ivory-tower systems have often led the classroom instructor to abuse the students with such absurdities, as assertions equivalent to, "we have not yet proven that life is possible in this universe," or, the worse assumption, that "life (or, even human mentation) is a product of trillions of transactions within the framework of purely abiotic transactions within a strictly abiotic universe."

From the contrasted viewpoint, of which my own work is typical, we have the approach which leads into that world-view which is indispensable for comprehension of the origin and functional characteristics of physical-economic cycles. In this case, the recognition of the existence of ontological paradoxes in the world of sense-perception, does not lead to faith in magic, but, rather, a search to discover experimentally valid, universal physical principles.

The most famous paradigm for this second view of sense-perception, is the use of the pedagogical ruse of the "Cave" in Plato's Republic. What sense-perception apprehends, is as but the shadows cast on the irregular wall-surface of a dimly-lit cave. The task of the viewer is to discover, and learn to control, the unseen object which the shadow reflects. Today, the very existence of microphysics offers an elementary illustration of that point. Fermat's adducing a principle of "quickest time" from the paradoxical juxtaposition of reflection and refraction, is a perfect illustration of the argument of "Plato's Cave."

The role of the reductionists as the kind of lunatics which John Maynard Keynes showed Sir Isaac Newton to have been,[33] arises from the fact that, on the one side, they are fanatical slaves to sense-certainty, and yet, at the same time, as Leibniz pointed out to Newton and to Antonio's agent Dr. Samuel Clarke, they themselves premise what they offer as the most precious parts of their theory, upon intervention by an agency from outside the reach of sense-certainty. By denying the path to sanity, in the existence and role of hypothesis, they impel themselves to worship, or fear, otherworldly, purely magical and fantastic forces and agencies, for which there is no experimental proof of principle that these fantastic concoctions ever did, or ever could exist. Newton's "scientific" chest of experiments in black magic, are typical of the lunacies implicit in empiricism.

Since it is in precisely those connections, that experimental method reveals and verifies the specific distinction of man from the beasts, the impact of tolerating the influence of reductionism in education and popular opinion, is the denial of the nature of man, and, therefore, of man's God. Reductionist mysticism is, therefore, a lie, and, worse, implicitly as pro-satanic as the secondary and other pupils who turn themselves into lunatic mass-killers of the current times' spread of "new violence," through such recreations as cultivated addiction to the positivist's reductionist extremes of what are inherently de-humanizing, Nintendo and kindred games.

The fallacy of such ivory-tower viewers as the Aristoteleans and modern empiricists, was recognized in this or kindred ways, by many ancient and other thinkers. The case of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, is exemplary. The humanism of Solon of Athens, is to be contrasted thus to the psychotic image of Lycurgan Sparta and the Roman imperial legionnaire, or the Nazi Waffen-SS model which mimicked those legions. The issue served as the basis for the development of modern experimental physical science, by Nicholas of Cusa, in his De Docta Ignorantia. Followers of Cusa such as Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci addressed this. The line of development of approaches to a comprehensive form of mathematical physics, by Kepler, set into motion a process, leading through Leibniz, Kästner, and Gauss, to Bernhard Riemann's overthrow of all "ivory tower" mathematics, in his 1854 habilitation dissertation.

With Riemann, space, time, and matter, as many had thought we had known them a priori (with assumed self-evident certainty), were banned from all competent physics thereafter. There was no Santa Claus, but only real adults who bestowed loving considerations upon children. In place of arbitrary, ivory-tower sorts of definitions, axioms, and postulates, only experimentally validated universal physical principles were allowed.

To understand the anti-scientific character of concoctions such as "information theory," one must focus on the characteristic problem presented to society by the question: Do the individual powers of sense-perception represent a faithful image of the real universe around us, or not? Understanding this problem, shows us how technologies are generated. An understanding of the fuller implications of that matter, leads us, in turn, to a conception of the functional meaning to be attributed to the term "economic cycles." Are these notions of technology derivable from the interpretation of sense-perception, as Wiener's argument, and silly statisticians such as Milton Friedman and Senator Phil Gramm imply, or are they obtained, as they are in fact, by discovering ways for overcoming the fallacies inhering in a naive faith in sense-perception?

My Attack on `Information Theory'

One of the common pathologies of contemporary policies of practice in education, is the practice of demanding that the students learn, and pass an examination in a taught doctrine. That is essentially a fraudulent practice. Teaching of ideas, is properly accomplished by inviting the pupil, for example, to experience what the teacher has experienced in the struggle to discover the relevant principle. All honest teaching is biographical, and, often, autobiographical. So, proceed as I did, in making my original discoveries within the science of physical economy.

It happened during the years 1948-1952. It began with my reaction to an early 1948 reading of an advance-publication copy of Professor Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics.[34] I was, at first, entertained by Wiener's discussion of some designs, but then angered, by that book as a whole. What angered me, was Wiener's use of both Ludwig Boltzmann, and of echoed effects of Wiener's own Faustian training under the Mephistophelean Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica notoriety.[35] Wiener excluded the existence of cognition in human behavior. Cybernetics' entertaining examples aside, for anyone with actual knowledge of technological changes in physical economy at the point of production, Wiener's "information theory" dogma was a hoax, from beginning to end.[36] For anyone who had wrestled successfully with the fallacy of Kant's attack on Leibniz, as I had been seasoned in that subject since adolescence, the diagnosis and cure of Wiener's fraud, was also evident.

We must take up this matter at this point. I emphasize, that, the basis for systematic understanding of the function of economic cycles, depends upon an adequate comprehension of the way in which the cognitive development, or lack of such development, of improved technologies, determines the principal kinds of general characteristics of those cycles. My 1948 reaction against Wiener's "information theory" hoax, was therefore essential in prompting my fascination with the task of discovery of solutions for the then hitherto unresolved problem of redefining the general notion of economic cycles in a physically meaningful, functional way.

Qualitative improvements in productivity, are reflected at the legendary "point of production" through the use of what are called "technologies." Technologies, efficiently defined, can never be reduced to the form of what Wiener et al. define as "information."

The development of any valid technology, occurs as a by-product of a special kind of proof-of-principle experiment. In the attempt to test an hypothetical form of universal physical principle, a successful series of experiments qualifying, in total, as "universal," pin-points certain features of the relevant design of the experiment, as situated within the medium employed for the chosen experimental subject. By "abstracting," so to speak, this feature of the experimental design, the discovered principle can now be employed as a technology which reflects the relevant specific hypothesis's application to the relevant medium.

In addition, not only do such discovered technologies contribute an essential part to the increase of the effective productive powers of labor. It is the additional experimentation required to define ways in which previously known and newly discovered technologies might be combined, which points to the paradigmatic character of the relationship between original discovery of some universal physical principle, and the increase of the productive powers of labor, as if at the point of production.[37]

The significance of that experience of modern industrial production, is to be formulated as follows. The experimentally provable hypothesis, upon which the generation of individual and combinable technologies depends, is a product of a faculty specific to human individuals, the faculty of cognition, which the life's work of Russell and his acolytes Wiener and John von Neumann denies to exist. Immanuel Kant anticipated Russell, Wiener, and von Neumann, in Kant's famous Critiques. Russell, Wiener, et al., also went much further than Kant, into the kind of radically Ockhamite nominalism associated with those more fanatical reductionists such as Ernst Mach and Russell himself.

To understand both the anti-scientific character of concoctions such as "information theory," one must focus on the characteristic, elementary problem presented to society by the same question addressed above: do the individual powers of sense-perception represent a truthful image of the real universe around us, or not? Understanding this problem, shows us the way toward discovering how technologies are generated. An understanding of the fuller implications of that matter, leads us, in turn, to a conception of the functional meaning to be attributed to the term, "economic cycles." Are these notions of technology derivable from the raw, statistical interpretation of sense-perception, as consistency with Wiener's argument requires, or are they obtained, as they are in fact, by discovering ways for overcoming the fallacies inhering in a naive faith in sense-perception?

Contrary to the "information theory" cultists, in the history of ancient through modern philosophy and science, the effort to reach a rational form of conclusion in this matter of sense-perception, has been reduced to two general types of results. First, take a clinical look at the pathology called "information theory" from the standpoint of the transmission of knowledge of the way in which a principle was discovered and developed for use, rather than as a matter of descriptive instructions to be learned, animal-training fashion. Second, look at production, and "information theory," from the standpoint of economy as a social process.

To establish the basis for long-range forecasting, as I have done, it was necessary to define the general method for integrating all the most essential parts of the set of axiomatic-like constraints, which generate the effect to be recognized as a long-term physical-economic cycle. Since all such constraints are defined for knowledge by the processes of cognition, it would be impossible to conceive an effective functional analysis of the characteristics of such cycles, except through a rigorous examination of the most relevant features of cognition in general.

Civilized society has a convenient working-model for study of the characteristics of that function of individual cognition, in the set of Socratic dialogues of Plato. In fact, those dialogues are, so far, the only known, reasonably comprehensive model on which to premise a study of the general principles of cognitive behavior. Over the recent several decades, I have used the case of Kepler's discoveries in astrophysics, and crucial features taken from Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, as the pedagogical standpoint, consistent with Plato's dialogues, from which to clarify the import of Plato's method for discoveries of experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles.

As I have emphasized in a number of published locations,[38] my approach overlaps the views of Vladimir Vernadsky, in dividing physical space-time among three distinct, but interconnected experimental phase-spaces. The first, and crudest of these phase-spaces, is the abiotic domain implied by experiments which ignore the existence of the effects of characteristically anti-entropic living or human-cognitive processes. The second, relatively higher, is living processes and effects on the abiotic domain of those processes, which Vernadsky defines as the Biosphere. The third, the highest, is effects on both the abiotic and Biosphere domains which are uniquely products of human cognitive intervention, the domain which Vernadsky identified as the Noösphere. On the proof of the existence of the Noösphere, I accept Vernadsky's notion of the experimental proof of this; however, as I have indicated, my own views on the internal characteristics of the action of the Noösphere, differ from that of his published accounts, in a significant way.

This threefold set of phase-spaces, then serves us as the basis for a general theory of physical economy. The characteristics which define long-range cycles in physical economy, are to be comprehended as the combination of human actions, and the reactions they evoke, from among, and within each of the three phase-spaces. These cycles are determined by the (physical) differential geometry cohering with the implicitly axiomatic features of the combined universal phase-spaces.

In the immediate discussion, on the subject of "information theory," the point to be emphasized, is that, in truth, science must explain everything in terms of experimentally demonstrable principles, always relating any such principle to a certain higher class known as universal physical principles. The relatively unique kind of common significance of my own and Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere, is that this approach enables us to grasp all combined abiotic, biotic, and cognitive processes as both respectively distinct, and yet efficiently interconnected from the standpoint of a generalized notion of experimental development and application of universal physical principles. We must do this while considering each and all of these types as something commonly experienced in terms of evidence which is equally a set of physical products of the relevant activity.

Vernadsky's doctrine would agree, that it is cognitive action, as by discovery of an experimentally validated hypothesis, which generates new human knowledge of universal physical principles. His views I accept as corresponding to my own, insofar as we are considering the relationship between experimental proof of principle and the origin of new technologies subsequently introduced as effective innovations in both productive processes and product-design.

These cognitively generated discoveries of universal physical principles, from which technologies are generated as by-products, have the effect of changing the physical geometry of the physical domain in which human actions are located. In other words, we respond efficiently to our discovery that a previously unknown, universal physical principle was sitting out there, in the real universe, as if waiting for us to discover, and utilize its existence.

It is by these qualities of changes in our behavior, and in only that way, that mankind is able to increase its power to exist in, and over the universe. Indeed, we have reached the state of successful population of the planet, that society could not continue to exist without generating and applying to production, without limit, new discoveries of universal physical principle. Zero-technological growth, would be generalized attrition, and rapid extinction of most of the current levels of the human population, through the most horrible holocaust ever imagined. The recognition of these discoveries, and either cooperative action to employ those discoveries, or to abhor them, determines the general potential for increase or decrease of the effective productive powers of labor of an economy.

In my reaction against the obvious fraud of Wiener's "information theory" on this account, I focussed not only upon the cognitive features of the generation of technologies of design of processes and products, but on the matter of the mode by means of which cooperation in discovering and employing technologies, is fostered among human beings considered in the totality of their social existence as human beings.

The Role of Art in Economics and Morals

Consider for a moment, as part of the indictment of the charlatans of "information theory," a commonplace, relevant illustration of the kind of socially-expressed economic dysfunction, which the popularization of "information theory" and related practices, has introduced to the design and use of manufactured products.

Look at the degeneration in the functional qualities of material which so-called "tech writers" have inserted into the typical product description and use instructions, accompanying the delivery of a manufactured product. Consider also, a directly related pathology, exhibited in the past decade's often disastrous, increasingly widespread substitution of "benchmarking" for competent design-engineering. Then, after summarizing that case, contrast those indicated forms of cultural decadence, to the qualities of communication which the Classical English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley identified as periods in history during which there is an increase of the power for "imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."[39]

It is readily shown, that the effort to make a separation between matters of artistic composition and subjects such as physical science and economics, reveals a moral impoverishment of the mind of the would-be scientist or economist. The included result of such an impoverishment, will be, inevitably, a contribution to society's loss of economic potential.

For an example of such a pathological influence, consider the following, relative simple quality of clinical evidence.

During and immediately following World War II, there was a significant, and expanding resort to dividing the work of the scientist and engineer who designed the product, from the writing of those descriptions and instructions supplied which were prepared for the user by persons who came to be known as "tech writers." At the outset, the resulting damage was apparently minimal. The "tech writers" tended to show actual, conscience-stricken comprehension of the product they were describing. Over the years, especially with the introduction of the unconscionable fad called "programmed learning," the always fragile functional relationship between the actual design of the product and the descriptions by the "tech writer," became an increasingly troubled one.

As it is said, the competent, or relatively competent "tech writers" of the immediate post-war period, into the 1950s, "took it from the top." In the instance of information associated with the product of any reliable firm, the reader was usually given an overview of the subject being addressed, and a sense of the relevant functional relations among the sundry components and operations referenced in that report. Over time, the quality of "tech writing" became increasing less coherent. The work-product suggested something assembled from the snippets sent in from sundry places. The effect of this loss of coherence was, that reading the finished, combined result, suggested, more and more, the image of a collage of lines, each written by one of a scattered herd of separate writers, many of whom were apparently on poor speaking terms with one another. The end result has been often something akin to the "recurring nightmare of the guilt-ridden nerd."

This problem, which was merely symptomized by the case of the apparently disintegrating mind of the evolving species of "tech writer," was aggravated, catalytically, in the extreme, by three social factors. First, the accelerating degeneration in public and higher education, over the course of the recent thirty-five years. This is typified by the influence of the 1963 OECD report on education issued by the influential malthusian Dr. Alexander King. Second, the disastrous effect of the post-1963 spread of the "rock-drug-sex cultural-paradigm-shift," in destroying the intellectual and related emotional mission-orientations of dedication to competence, among secondary and higher education graduates. Third, the past thirty years' process of combining intentional ruin of the former leading sector of U.S. family farming, and de-industrialization of urban industry, reflecting rabid devotion to "free trade" in general and "outsourcing," most emphatically. The effects of these trends were aggravated by the introduction of related, novel, and extremely irrational notions of the nature of "intellectual property rights." A recent novelty expressing the same pathological trend, is the idea of the patenting of John Q. Citizen's genes; this has the smell of something invented by the notorious Dr. Mengele, or perhaps H.G. Wells' "Dr. Moreau."

Over approximately the recent decade, under the impact of the process called "globalization," even the mission expected of the tech writer, and of the user of the product, have undergone an additional, qualitative change for the worse, to the effect of continually aggravated spread and intensification of functional illiteracy. From the evidence now at hand, it is implied, that the "tech writer" usually assumes that the reader should not attempt to understand the product, but that he should obey literally, and more or less blindly, the instructions supplied. Usually, the instructions themselves are incompetent in one degree or another. Implicitly, at least, the idea that the "provider" has a moral responsibility for being either coherent, or that the instructions given should be competent, has been abandoned; the peddler of the heavily "outsourced" product, shrugs off the complaint, as if to say: "Don't blame me. I don't make the stuff; I only sell it. If the instructions don't work, accept the fact, that things are tough all over."

Consider the case of problems created by the "outsourcing" of sub-assemblies. That the latter have often been assembled from other sub-assemblies, has become typical of the packaging of the process of production and distribution. The result is expressed in ways which not merely prohibit, but virtually outlaw the intelligent user's sense that he or she has a right to know what is actually inside the package he is about to ingest. At least, the putative manufacturer ought to know, but often, apparently, he, too, does not. Try to buy a replacement part from the party under whose brand-name the product was sold; how could that putative manufacturer know where to get the part, or how to install it? He bought and installed the assembly within which that component, whatever it is, is buried somewhere, and the design of the component is in some place perhaps unknown.

Such manifest trends signify, that during the recent thirty-five years, we have passed over, from a production-oriented society, to a consumption-driven society. Ours often appears to be a society with less concern for the nature of the stuff it is consuming, than a desperately hungry rat foraging in the garbage dump. The United States has been transformed from the nation of backyard repairmen, whose stubborn determination to make things work, contributed much to our capabilities for winning World War II. Ours has become a population employed increasingly in relatively unskilled "services," of persons who are conditioned not to wish to know what they are actually consuming, using, or doing.

"Benchmarking" carries this process of degeneration to the logical extreme implicit in the "information theory" hoax. Benchmarking's nominal designer of the product, is no longer assured the means to challenge the assumptions underlying the mathematical packages he or she is combining into the design of a product. These are often products which will no longer be tested by former standards of automobile or other manufacturer's accountability, or for even the simple safety of the prescribed use of that product. It is cheaper (ostensibly more profitable) to kill people, than to lessen the current diversion from income to "shareholder value," by spending what we used to spend to ensure the safety and other satisfaction of the user. Benchmarking virtually ensures that things move in such directions. It has been a process of slightly more than a decade, in eliminating the existence of a type recognizable as a qualified design engineer.

In summary of that and kindred observations, it is to be said, that as part of the past thirty-six years shift, away from a producer economy, to a consumer society, policy-makers and public have lost the capacity for insight into the requirements of producing the essentials of civilized life. Society has come to view the world economy itself as like nothing as much as an endless nightmare, searching for bargains amid a globalized huddle of gigantic, Orwellian shopping malls. People just don't think the way they used to, forty years or so ago, and the inhumane, poverty-stricken economic policies which they have come to prefer, show it.

These and related trends, considered as a whole, are reduced to a single underlying issue. The fostering of the cult of "information theory," has defined a quality of society in which people's knowledge of what they are doing, or of what is being done to them, might remind us of those students in Jonathan Swift's tale of Lemuel Gulliver's visit to the Island of Laputa, where students learned by swallowing slips of paper on which was written the information they were to assimilate in that fashion. The slips of paper might have been written by Eighteenth-Century versions of "tech writers," who took courses in the equivalent of today's "programmed learning," instead of science and engineering. Perhaps, therefore, it was Jonathan Swift, not Norbert Wiener, who invented "information theory," that as a joke on "ivory tower" varieties of Eighteenth-Century academic asses in general. The breed of such asses has not been improved since.

The pervading issue, among all of those issues listed, and also many other leading contemporary cultural disorders, is the failure of common practice to recognize the essential features of the principled distinction of the behavior of man from that of beasts. In each of the listed, and many additional examples of the same principled social dysfunction, the pathological element is the same. That essential element, is the failure to apply the processes of cognition to the formation and communication of those ideas which are of crucial importance for sustaining the viability of an existing culture.

In his celebrated essay, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley described a renaissance, as a period in which there is, as I have stated above, a general increase of the power of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The expressions of post-1945 intellectual decadence, especially post-1962-65 decadence, which I have just sampled here, typify periods in which these moral and intellectual powers tend to vanish into a condition like that of the Seventeenth-Century Britain depicted by Hogarth, or by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or described by Cotton Mather as his observations on the period of decadence of the post-1688 Massachusetts Bay Colony.[40]

In contrast to such periods of decadence, the leaders whose influence distinguished the quality of renaissances, such as the referenced case of the leaders of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, walked the user of a technology through the cognitive experience of the passage from the initial, ontological paradox, which prompted the search for the hypothesis which would solve that paradox, through to the experimental work which proved the hypothesis. In all known cases of a renaissance, Shelley's formulation is clearly upheld. Examples of this include, the cultural renaissance known as the German Classic, which was led by such avowed followers of Gottfried Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach as Kästner, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, Wolfgang Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and the Humboldt brothers, for the German-speaking world. The examples include the Italy-centered Fifteenth-Century Renaissance earlier.

This effervescence, shown in such renaissances, in the power of communication of "profound and impassioned conceptions of man and nature," always expresses certain specific qualities, which have a common form and character of expression, whether in physical science or in Classical modes of artistic composition. It is the dominant role of those modes within certain influential currents within a culture, which warrant describing such expressions of moral and intellectual fertility as specifically "Classical," as distinct from, and opposed to the quality of the French and English Eighteenth-Century "Enlightenment," for example, or Romantic, modernist, or post-modernist effusions.

The principle of any such Classical productive experience is the same, in principle, as that of the students in a class who are each simultaneously experiencing the way in which some original discovery of universal physical principle was prompted and accomplished. The successful student had relived the act of discovery and empirical verification. Intellectually, "he now owned" the principle whose act of discovery he had replicated within his own cognitive processes.

The reenactment of the cognitive act of discovery, rather than "programmed learning," for example, must become recognized, once again, as the standard for transmission of knowledge within society. Probably, that sort of sanity about economics will become prevalent, only when the standards exemplified by Wilhelm von Humboldt's program for Classical humanist education, are restored as a model for what secondary education throughout humanity must become.

As a matter of first approximation, we may divide communications expressing the quality of explicitly "cognitive" activity into the sovereign personal act of discovery by an individual, and the process by means of which cooperation in use of those discoveries of principle is motivated in relations among persons within society. Classical modes of artistic composition typify the modes of cognitive cooperation. Plastic and non-plastic modes of Classical artistic composition, especially the non-plastic modes in poetry, drama, and polyphonic music, typify the form of the latter cognitive modes, but the significance of such art is that it also serves society as a model for understanding history, and for formulating policies of government. Examples of this include the opening paragraphs of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, and President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg address; each and all these examples are consistent with the intent of a renaissance.

Back during the 1948-1952 interval, as a result of seeing issues implicit in the difference between what we may recognize as a Classical humanist and contrary, morally defective forms of education, I came to recognize a lesson of crucial significance, to be adduced from comparing mathematical formulations used to describe aspects of physical processes, and the often contrasting mental image expressed by a rigorously composed verbal description of what might be presumed to be the same process.

On the surface, a good verbal description of the process and the mathematical representation, could be at least ostensibly consistent. Yet, a good verbal representation conveyed important included notions, which were lost in the translation, as if stripped away by Ockham's Razor, when stated in the generally accepted classroom form of mathematics. Over the course of the 1947-1948 interval, I approached this paradox from the standpoint of Classical forms of poetry, drama, and Classical settings of poetry as song. I posed the question: Why is good Classical poetry superior, as a disposition of mind, over mathematical language, in conveying important ideas of physical science? Years later, I discovered that like the greatest teacher of both Lessing and Gauss, Kästner, the best Classical poets already knew the answer.

In thinking through the apparent paradox, one should come to the eerie, but therefore truthful conclusion, that the act of cognition exists only within the limits of the sovereign cognitive processes of an individual mind; but, that the possibility of the validation and realization of that discovery for social practice, lies in an aspect of "social relations" which can be generated only, paradoxically, by human individuals.[40] When the significance of those cognitive forms of social relations are viewed in a certain special way, the individual develops a quality of personal moral character which sets him or her apart from the run of the mill among nominal leaders, as exceptionally qualified to be a leader in that society. Friedrich Schiller's follower, the Wilhelm von Humboldt who launched Nineteenth-Century Germany's system of Classical humanist education, has emphasized this same connection which I came to recognize from my own vantage-point, during the course of the 1947-1952 interval, between Classical humanist education and the development of the moral character of the student.

Up to the present time in known history, the primary distinction of the individual of truly moral character, from the more ordinary members of society, is a certain kind of impassioned attachment to his, or her personal cognitive relations to the greatest known creative thinkers of both the past and the future. By reliving the experience of replicating the act of original discovery of truly universal principles from the past, that individual brings that moment from that original discoverer into his, or her own sovereign cognitive processes. He, or she brings that cognitive moment from the mind of the original discovery to life within his or her own living cognitive processes. If the education, and related development of the young person is steered with great emphasis on this kind of cognitive act, this quality of historically determined cognitive experience affords the young person an insight into the proper definition of truthfulness.

With the ground so lain in the educational and related development of the young, that young person will soon begin to think of his, or her own future adult life as having the character of a personal mission. The child will express that sense of mission in such forms as describing the importance of the profession, or equivalent, he or she intends to accomplish "when I am grown up." This is often expressed with a manifest aura of spontaneity and passion; one senses that that child "owns" that sense of mission.

For the Christian, for example, the sense of Jesus Christ's gripping sense of mission, expressed in such ways as J.S. Bach's settings of the Passions of St. John and St. Matthew, typifies the sense of the immortality of the individual cognitive self residing within the mortality of the individual. Such a person lives for all humanity for all time, with special emphasis on the mission implicit in the society, the culture, with which he or she is immediately most closely associated.

The distinction of the leader, is that he or she puts that universal mission and interest foremost, and resists the diverting, immoral temptations flowing from a contrary passion for "my own and my community's immediate interests, in the here and now." The person who is incapable of meeting the requirements implicit in such a challenge, excuses himself in such forms as the following expression: "Yes, I care about the future of my country and the world, too, but my immediate family and community interests in the here and now, must come first!" The less moral person can sometimes lend lip-service to the words: "Of course, I know that since I am mortal, I should care about the kind of world I leave behind me, but I must work within the culture of my society"—and, there we have, once again, as in Shakespeare's case of Hamlet, the moral failure.

Hamlet is not the cause of the doom of his Denmark. He, like Fortinbras, is an expression of the fatal moral flaw which pervades the leadership, and more, of his culture at that time. His fatal error is to be an obedient participant in the "popular culture" of the realm; only a leader who could save the realm from itself, would have been of any use in that circumstance. Between being and not, he chose, explicitly, in the course of that soliloquy, "not to be." Only the leader who marches out of step, can bring that parade safely across that bridge of crisis to the safety of the future.

The true leader, as I have just summarily described those distinctions, is a leader because he, or she places the emphasis on cognitive relations, rather than merely sense-perceptual ones. Herein lies Leibniz's passion for the truthfulness which Kant and Kant's followers abhorred. There is a corrupted Faust lurking within the hide of every Kant. The Kantian, or his like, abhors the truth, because the truth might deprive him of his preference for those circus-like learned tricks. by means of which he hopes he might reap the sensual pleasures of Earthly Paradise.

It is when the individual view of society is that of a sovereign cognitive agency, maintaining the continuity of the development from past into future, that the individual has a sense of himself, or herself which is truly a moral one. That is to say, it is only in that view of the immortal self, the cognitive self, lodged in the mortal passage from the past, to the future, that that person is motivated to recognize his, and his society's essential self-interest. He finds that essential self-interest, in the outcome of the present for both that society in particular, and humanity in general. He locates himself, or herself, in personal devotion to the intention that society's self-interest will be honorably served. That is precisely the moral quality which the putative leadership of today's United States has lost, a quality which has generally withered away, decade by decade, since the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt.

Now, that summary given, take into account what has been explicitly written, or referenced in this report, up to this point. The challenge of statecraft, is to effect and maintain progress in the quality of the human condition across successive generations. That must be the orbit of our intention, in the sense that Kepler introduces intention as the notion of an efficient, universal physical principle. Against the backdrop of such considerations, the relative quality of the type and mode of communication employed to organize scientific and other forms of cooperation, becomes a subject of crucial importance in itself, as I am stressing and elaborating some essential features of that argument here.

The challenge of statecraft, especially in times of crisis, is the production and role of those qualified to be leaders, so qualified by their dedication to fostering the influence of the higher morality within the mass of a general population which otherwise can not free itself from the fatal trap of small-minded, and hence corrupting, intrinsically immoral obsession with the smallness of soul expressed by obsession with personal family and community relations.

This brings us to a crucial aspect of the matter which Shelley addressed in his A Defence of Poetry, the specific role of ambiguity in the cognitive aspects of communication.

Ambiguity As Truth

As Plato echoes Heraclitus in the Parmenides dialogue, the remedy for the fatal ontological paradoxes of the Eleatics and their like, is recognition of the universal principle of change. We must recognize that, as a matter of universal principle, nothing is constant, but constant change. Thus, cognition shows us an experimentally provable image of our universe, which is unlike a naive reading of the images of sense-certainty.

In life, and in the self-ordering of the affairs of the human species, change ceases to be a nebulous idea, when that term is defined as broadly interchangeable with anti-entropic action, as I have defined such a notion for the science of physical economy. The quality of anti-entropic change specific to the human species, to society, to the sovereign nation-state republic, is knowledge of the type of cognitive action which proceeds from ontological paradox, to experimentally defined universal physical principle.

Now, look! How is the specific quality of cognitive change expressed in language? In principle, it is through the use of the subjunctive, and in the resort to the devices of irony in general, and metaphor in particular, to impose the expression of the hint or actuality of an ontological paradox upon what might otherwise be a syllogistic, or outrightly sophistical form of "spin."

In the mouth of a moral speaker, the ambiguity of these apparent literary devices, never appears, except when it occurs truthfully. Such is the specific quality of truthfulness which sets Classical artistic composition in opposition to any other mode. We must never refer to a phenomenon as ambiguous, unless the object of the statement is itself actually ambiguous.

For example, take the case of Fermat's argument for a concept of "quickest time," as opposed to "shortest distance." When Fermat compared the reflection of light with the refraction of light, the difference between reflection and refraction was, in truth, an objective ambiguity in the propagation of light. The juxtaposition of the two cases, for the propagation of light, was thus a true ontological paradox. The solution for that ontological paradox was among the most crucial of the continuing discoveries of the succeeding two centuries, from Fermat through Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernouilli, Fresnel, Ampère, and Wilhelm Weber: all dealing implicitly with the physical principles underlying electromagnetic propagation in general.

To express a phenomenon as ambiguous, as by resort to mere tricks of symbolism, when one has no knowledge on which to premise that representation, as Romantic poets and playwrights often do, and modernists do invariably, is a more or less vicious form of lying. The ability of the conventions of language to convey those objective ambiguities of meaning which qualify as ontological paradoxes, is therefore a quality of Classical modes of poetic and related composition, on which we largely depend for those discoveries which lead to progress in the human condition, economic condition included.

This will bring us here to a point to be emphasized respecting the difference between my conception of the social organization of the Biosphere, and that implicit, to a significant degree, in Vernadsky's writings on the subject.

Throughout this report, I return repeatedly to focus on two closely related, if distinct implications of the principle, that the universe is composed of three component phase-spaces: abiotic, pro-biotic, and cognitive. In each of these three, the characteristics of the three phase-spaces are defined in terms of a common, universal standard of physical-experimental proof of universal physical principles. In each instance, in turn, the discovery of the principle demonstrated by the physical experiment, was introduced for experimental study by a preceding hypothesis. This hypothesis was provoked, in the sovereign cognitive processes of individual minds, by scrutiny of experimental evidence of an ontological paradox.

Now, respecting those processes of cognition, within which all of these discoveries of principle occur, cognition itself has internal laws, which are laws in the same sense that we define laws discovered to operate within the respectively abiotic and pro-biotic domains. The nature of those laws internal to the efficient forms of cognitive relations among individuals, are most readily identified by comparing the principles of Classical forms of artistic composition and performance, to certain intrinsic failures incurred by the very nature of the violation of an otherwise more or less indispensable and comprehensive mathematical physics of a Riemannian type.

Early during the 1948-1952 interval, my attack on the fallacy of Wiener's, and also John von Neumann's work, was enriched by reflection upon my earlier attraction to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.[42] From my special standpoint, I saw flaws in some aspects of Empson's work, but, that taken into account, it was a very good, mature, and searching piece of scholarly work. I recapitulated what I gleaned from him, by working from the standpoint of the notion of cognitive processes which I had acquired in the course of my adolescent and later pro-Leibniz attack on the absurdities of Kant's Critiques.

A truthful ambiguity, whether in the description of a rigorously defined experimental subject-matter, or in the composition of Classical poetry, has the characteristic significance of betraying the shadowy, but efficient existence of something which, in reality, exists outside the scope of a statement lacking that ambiguity.

The physical principle of ambiguity is beautifully illustrated for study, as I did during 1947, by seeking to identify the physical distinction, on principle, which sets the greatest Classical Greek sculpture from the archaic. I began to equate this, already, then, to the roles of the subjunctive, irony in general, and metaphor in particular, in poetry, drama, and Classical song-settings of poetry. This came to serve as an integral part of my reaction against Wiener's radically reductionist notion of "information theory."

There is a recognizable element of imbalance in the Classical piece. It is not an arbitrary imbalance, but, to succeed, must be credibly a body caught in mid-motion. The same is the case in Bach's method of well-tempered counterpoint, in which the development of the entire composition expresses a single conception of contrapuntal development in mid-motion. In Classical poetry, it is irony, ambiguity, especially true metaphor. All Classical ambiguity is truthful, not arbitrarily fanciful; it expresses a true paradox, for which the mind must supply a solution. It is Classical art, only to the degree that the solution to the paradox, is of the quality of a truthful act of cognition.

Try an elementary, but crucial sort of experiment. Take a mathematical expression from the domain of mathematical physics. Now, think of describing the corresponding physical process as such, which leads from an initial experimental form of ontological paradox, through the generation of an hypothetical solution, to the experiment which expresses the proof of that hypothesis. Now, express that process, as a physical, rather than mathematical form, in poetry, or prose. Best of all, if you have the skill for it, compose a compact Classical form of poem, which presents each and all phases of that paradox, hypothesis, and proof. Add nothing not relevant to that mission. No symbol-mindedness, please! No frosting on the cake! If you succeed in that mission, you will probably understand the principle of metaphor as I do.[43] Focus on the essential cognitive feature of that representation: the paradox, as I have referenced the relatively simple, but richly devastatingly significant case of Fermat's paradoxical juxtaposition of reflection and refraction.

The relative fault in the mathematical formulation, is that, when applied according to today's generally accepted classroom tradition, it lacks poetry. It lacks the obligation of the poet, to embed a truthfully stated ambiguity in the composition. It fails to compel the mind to capture the image of the idea in mid-motion, the form in which all true ideas exist. "Q.E.D." is a lie, if it is claimed on the basis of what can be demonstrated at the blackboard.

For example, the danger to the student's (and teacher's) mind, in at-the-blackboard mathematics, even mathematical physics, is that the