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This article appears in the August 23, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
MAN'S TRUE INTENTION!:

How the Future Builds Its Past

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[PDF version of this article]

August 10, 2013


August 4, 2013 occurred in the week when the British Empire's J.P. Morgan virtually declared war against what was then formally identified as the firm's choice of mortal foe: which was us. Our quarrel on that account, is not among a collection of some more or less numerous individuals, or even some particular nation; it is now our battle to save civilization from the most evil agency in the world today: the actions of the imperial forces of the Anglo-Dutch world-empire and its effects on the future. The issue is still a world empire under the reign of Britain's malicious Elizabeth II who is the actually avowed principal enemy-in-fact of our own U.S. republic.

In this conflict, the principle of this present defense of our republic, must be traced properly in recent world history: as traced now from the leadership which had been associated with the Great Golden Renaissance's Nicholas of Cusa, and, also, later, Cusa's follower, Johannes Kepler in the matter of the deeply rooted principles of physical science. Cusa and Kepler still represent the same principles of physical science which the great dramatist William Shakespeare demonstrated in the particular case of the "Chorus" introduced in Shakespeare's King Henry V: the same common heritage of the greatest Classical dramas and Classical composers of music, poetry, and of what should also be known as physical science. Let your future create your past!


Foreword:

These Higher Principles

The search for any actually truthful insight into the matters to which I have just pointed immediately above, must overcome those systemic difficulties which tend to block the pathway to rediscovery of the actual meaning of truth for what is presently identified as "physical science," as that science was properly understood by such exceptional minds as those of Nicholas of Cusa and Johannes Kepler, and, perhaps, much earlier, the water of Heraclitus' science, too. Unfortunately, present academic and contingent sets of educational practices, have lately tended to discard the high standard for science which had been that such as what Max Planck and Albert Einstein had represented in their time. Whereas, their opponents from the ranks of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries, have tended toward the brutishly crude, ideological practices, practices which have polluted what had been formerly the honorable, scientific classrooms, now supplanted by the thuggery of Bertrand Russell's legacy.

True scientists, especially great ones, think actually within the setting of the future, rather than the past. Do you?

The opposition to which I have just referred, above, is the effect of the general lack in the ability of most people of the relatively same rank today: their typical inability to summon from among themselves, that crucial knowledge needed to recognize the intrinsic fallacy of present-day, so-called "popular opinion" as such. What I mean by that, is that the error which must be recognized, is to be located in that intrinsic fallacy which a brutish sort of contemporary opinion on the subject of "sense-perception," typifies. Thus: Among the relatively few best scientific thinkers of modern times, there had been the still very relevant Bernhard Riemann, who, in writing the concluding sentence of his 1854 habilitation dissertation, made a proper distinction in his separating what are meaningfully true universal physical principles, as to be distinguished from what were merely a class of empirical deductions from an assorted collection of mere sense-perceptions as such.

The origin of the failures in science which confront us here and now, has been more a blinded soul's reliance on the systemic fallacy and trap of merely currently immediate sense-perception, a trap which has been used as a virtually categorical substitute for what is the necessary action of real science. That often remains a distraction, which, in this way, has tended to make a true insight into actual principles nearly impossible, as by pre-emption, and, to turn what should have been heroes, into opportunists, by intention.

The choice between folly and victory, is, thus, to be secured by the separation of true physical principles from what were merely the constructs of credulous, gambling fools. True principles, like those of Riemann, have been typified with a nice elegance in the discoveries of principles such as those made by such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Competent science, and true victory, alike, are to be found only "outside" any merely mathematical deductions—in these awful days, science today exists only in the making of the future.

Only fools gamble, as Alexander Hamilton could have told you, had he still lived.

The Problem with Mere Mathematics

The effort to delimit notions of principles to merely methods of mathematical concoctions, tends toward producing a deadly exclusion of any true notion of an actually universal physical principle; it is, in fact, a virtual practice of the veritable witch-doctors and gamblers gathered on Wall Street's Boardwalk.

When today's practice of what is named science recognizes the inherent fallacy of what passes for the blind worship of a "conventional mathematics," better identified as "gambling" in empty air; today's calamitous trends in a popular science, and "business," too, must re-discover the human mind from an earlier century of such senior figures from the 1890s as Planck and Einstein: to learn from them, what are, still, really, the necessary foundations of a true physical science. By a true physical science, I mean a science which lives in the actual future, and, therefore, one created by persons whose minds, also, already live in their actual future.

The downward-going, devil's difference made from the likes of Bertrand Russell, to which I had just referred immediately above, was already prominently reigning in the then prevalent trends of the 1920s, then in a time when I had been born, and, then, still beyond. The difference in what passes, unfortunately, for a true standard of science, has come to be typified by the ration of those then-currently prominent physicists and chemists, such as those of the life-time of a President Franklin Roosevelt, who would defend our republic against the typically, utterly fraudulent, implicitly "green," British hoax-craft of the likes of such as the dupes who followed the image of the silly Isaac Newton.

Success in Forecasting

Take an example of this issue of distinctions: take, for example, the common folly of attempts to define an a-priori distinction of "life" from "non-life," by using those terms of merely mathematical arguments which have been often mistaken for "truth" by the overly zealous. Or, for example: consider the savagely destructive delusion which is produced by the pretext of treating the subject of an actual matter of a physically efficient principle in forecasting, by a resorting to mathematical deductions derived from a merely presumed human knowledge of principles measured in past purely mathematical clock-times. The ability to adduce a truly universal physical principle, must be prescribed, instead, as requiring the developed ability to present a current forecast of what must be also a quality of that true foresight which goes intrinsically into a true sense of an actual future which actually exists only beyond the alleged "powers" of mere sense-perception, but, which, rather, exists only within the actual process of generating a future!

For example: in relatively customary cases, there is a very limited ability to forecast an actual change in principle of action, insofar as my own experiences with frequently successful forecasting experiences, have often successfully demonstrated."Experiencing an unexpected development," which had occurred in the course of forecasting a development of that type, occurs among some persons, but never actually occurs "as if deductively."

My experience with the most frequent instances of successful cases of forecasting the future, including my own future, have happened to have been chiefly in the relative domain of economy. Those successful cases have occurred in their most familiar form of expression as "presciences": they occur, in my experience, as like an effect of "tuning-in on" a fortuitous stepping into what may have seemed to have been a sensation from a broadcast "heard as streaming from my head into the future." The experience "appears" in the guise of "an ebb and flow in a heightened effect of a generally maturing awareness" of the future.

The proper function of the human mind, is to create a fresh new existence which dwells within the actualized future.

However, there is never anything "magical" in such experiences of forecasting; it occurs "as an actual foreseeing of" an experience of an approaching, oncoming awareness, and can, implicitly, be consciously brought forth by a form of concentration experienced as of an "on-coming" quality, as in the likeness of a sense akin to approaching changes in weather. The cases of both Max Planck and Albert Einstein illustrate the point.

Doubters aside, such forecasts have occurred, as in instances of my own experience, and really do occur, as according to my personal experience, in the degree that they are to be experienced, when considered retrospectively, as validatable experiences which had actually been occurring before the sensed fact. I have experienced a relatively few, but nonetheless notable such instances of a quality of remarkable experiences which qualify as having been compelling certainties. I mean certainties which fit the image of the "certainties" of an actual forecast which has more or less global importance, as that aroused in shaping a turnabout in the course of human experience on a broad scale. It merely occurs to be the case that most of my such experiences of importance, do fit within the category of crucially important economic effects on a scale of national or even greater importance. It can be observed with little difficulty, that I now do that much of the time, that done simply as needed "in the course of business."

What this variety of my own now long-standing experience shows, principally, is that the conventional outlook of people engaged with certifiably important implications in practice, is such, that the cultural characteristics of most among even exceptionally influential persons and circles, however relatively credible otherwise, often fall far short of such a customary experience among even what are usually considered exceptionally able social strata. They should have been made capable of foreseeing, as I have observed this frequently in my own work; but, instead, most among them had failed to exercise that capability, even on fairly important occasions, even crucial ones, as General Douglas MacArthur's decision at Inchon demonstrates the case of the truly leading type of creative personalty (it was Harry S Truman who had things bass-ackwards). The state of corruption of what had been competently trained scientists, has often not been the outcome of failed attention to a competent science; it is folly which seeks silly solace in some set of popular opinions.

The "lesson to have been learned," should now be made necessarily clear, as follows:

I

Sense Perception: the Hoax

Most among the common frauds presented in the mere name of science, as conventionally typified by the cases of Euclid and Aristotle, are rooted in the a-priori expressions (e.g., "past," "post hoc") of what is an actually extremely dubious, and wholly fictitious, mere presumption of the arbitrary form of existence of such a geometry per se. A related sort of hoax is foisted, similarly, respecting the origins of the notion of life; that same hoax, is also foisted, a-priori, on both the existence of life itself, and also the principle of the human mind.

From those persons listed as bringing home wretched mere presumptions, the hoaxsters responsible for the elements of that strange listing, have fashioned the sheer hoax against the very existence of that unique specificity of the human mind which is lacking in all other known living species. That is to emphasize the crucial feature of human existence, in contrast to all known types of other living species, which shows the unique process of increasing the energy-flux density of the human species, as that increase is expressed through man's simple use of fire and beyond, toward the higher levels of nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, then matter-antimatter, and, then, beyond that.

The problematic issue amid all this, is the inherent failings which must be attributed to human psychological dependency upon the habit of "mere sense-perception."

There is nothing "inherently wrong" in the use of sense-perception itself. The problem lies with what is merely that. The problematic feature is located efficiently in the limits which reliance upon a merely bare sense-perception imposes, intrinsically. That is not "a fault" of sense-perception, excepting in respect to the limitations which mankind incurs in relying on such a medium as a virtually self-evident basis for the practice of human knowledge. Man often makes himself a fool, but only if he treats the medium of sense-perception as it were an outer limit of the natural talent for scientific knowledge.

There is much more to this matter, as shall now follow.

The higher authority is located, most typically, in the media of truly "Classical artistic" practice. William Shakespeare's creation of his character "Chorus," in King Henry V, is among the many repeatable instances of what are rightly distinguished as those media which typify the human mind's power to rise above the impoverished media of sense-perception in the latter's biological-functional expressions. Classical musical composition and its appropriate expressions, only typifies the human mind's super-imposition over the mere level of biology in the domain, in which life supersedes, by the margin of a virtual universe, the mean limitations of mere chemistry.[1]

Or, to restate the point in a somewhat more refined expression, "life" is the superior medium which has transcended mere chemistry; the notion of life, as distinct from mere chemistry, and as the superiority of human life to merely animal life: all such as those bespeak those relevant domains to which I am turning your attention here. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia reaches that level of a distinctive specific intention respecting the highest reach of human intention this far.

Those points of distinction are the prerequisites for the human species' capability of actually reaching from beyond Earth as such, into the necessity of man's intellectual entry into domains beyond the modest limits of the merely biological chemistry of life in general on Earth. With that action, mankind reaches, even efficiently, from beyond the fools' domain of what were merely sense-perception. It is, notably, the superior domain of the human mind which, alone, renders mankind something above "mere Earthlings," if we are willing to try, and, then, succeed.

With those words now spoken, I will have sought to turn your attention to places beyond the neighboring planets and, sooner or later, stars. Now, having said so much this far, follow me in what now follows as man among the stars: as I once wrote in a poem titled "My Lyre," about sixty years ago: " . . . bending stars like reeds."

What Is Wrong with 'Sense Perception:'

In consistency with what I have outlined as some crucial considerations in my argument this far, the serious qualities of thinking of the human being are located in what had not been actually experienced this far. It is, therefore, necessary to pre-think what one is about to experience, that as what one is about to think. My observations on my experience with public schoolroom classes and kindred circumstances, had led me, not uncommonly, to be aware of an un-trustworthy characteristic of the school room. The result was often my stubborn resistance to what I recognized as an attempt to force my attention to be focused on arguments which I considered what we today would identify as "spin." My defense-tactic in cases where a kind of instinctive rejection of apparent "manipulation" was in progress, as during my early adult manhood, had drawn me to think in "Classical poetic" or like veins, as a means of defense against the unwanted intrusions emanating from the classroom and its like.

The result of that is reflected, typically, in my "Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler & Shakespeare."[2] The Classical mode in drama, Classical music, and poetry, was the source of the influence and bulwark of my intellectual defense against unwanted categories of intrusions. This included prominently, my disgust with the efforts to gain my submission to the hoaxes of Euclid and Aristotle. Fortunately, my fascination with the constructions in progress at the Charlestown Navy Yard (in a suburb of Boston at the verge of my adolescence), armed me against Euclid's hoax. The Classical modalities prevailed upon me on most accounts then; this was a part of a crucial point in the entire sweep of my life from the time of early grades in a local grammar school, onwards. The fact is, that that experience and my commitment to it, "saved my mind." This prevailed in all categories of the educational and closely related considerations. I look back to that experience as having been the "defense of my mind" against the standard curricula. It is not what you appear to think, but the way in which you think it, which is ultimately decisive in crafting what you become. "Practical" is for me, a called alert to do battle. Classmates who did not resist as I would do on account of the Classical principle, left me with the feeling that I was being betrayed by my friends, or, perhaps an experience of going into a better profession. Hence, my periods of devotion to the wonderful consolations provided by Classical artistic compositions generally. There was, and is, a very clear distinction in what some would term "styles," in all that.

When you might have taken to heart what I have just written this far, you have fair access to an outlook on my practices and their underlying motivations. Among all features of that world-outlook which I have just referenced on my own account, the Classical repertoire of categories, including that of Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Kepler, Classical poetry, Classical drama, and Classical music, exemplify who and what I am in that to which I am the most devoted, including the love for the very idea of what mankind should be able of becoming.

However, the heart of it all is my devotion to participation in the future: what mankind should be capable of becoming. Now it is time to become very serious.

II

Walking Inside the Future

Insofar as we know presently, the human species is the only form of life which has the capability of foreknowledge of future events and related developments. A very much smaller fraction of that total human population has shown active insight into the implications of that fact. Nonetheless, despite the latter fact of the present situation, the fact that some living human persons manifest such a capability with significant facility, is sufficient to define that capability as being a universal principle of our said species.

The crucial distinction of those actively prescient of their own such capability, is that they have some significant degree of actual knowledge of the practical implications of the special intellectual capabilities involved. Hence, I identify such persons as "Walking Inside The Future."

That much now said here, the crucially significant characteristic of witting participants in such knowledge, is that they are enabled to exhibit a conscious awareness of the "special characteristics" of the experiencing of conscious apprehension of the distinctive features of the experiencing of that process, as distinct from merely ordinary recollections of past experiences. The unwitting person, may stand outside the door, but does not knock to enter; the witting person knocks, at the least, and may actually open the door.

Those admittedly rare such forecasters, tend to shift emphasis from treating foreknowledge as a shadow cast, to active interrelations with the creative process as an active faculty accompanying what might be considered as recent experience. This does not occur as in the sense of a delivered message, but as a process of experiencing something "which is running as if 'just ahead of,' " the actually experienced developments in progress. I am personally familiar with the latter quality of experiences with human foresight.

Hence: "Walking inside the moving future."

The relatively greatest of known "fore-seers" insofar as I have been made aware of such a trait, will tend to see a discovery of principle, not as a past event, but as an ongoing one moving just ahead of the process. I trace such developments in terms of on-going processes of discovery. Notably, all of my significant economic and related forecasts, overlap the processes of experience and of prescience.

III

On Background

It should be known among the literate generally, that one's sense of personal identity is shaped, to a more or less greater degree by the changes in the sense of the significance of the person's notion associated with the quality of the role, and associated sense of responsibility, into which they are being, and have been drawn into playing in life over time. In my own case, this had been the strongly-sensed applicable factor in the shaping of my world-outlook into the period of World War II, and some years beyond. It was also what had prompted me to compose some poetry, because such poetry proffered the experiencing of the relevant prototype of creativity. My being drawn into a role in management consulting experiences, later, had set off my accelerating role as an executive in the profession, and into what became my leading role as what has been demonstrated as my ability to have been a leading expert, in the matter of economic forecasting.

Consequently, therefore, to restate appropriately what I had just stated in the foregoing paragraph, the beginning of "an awareness of myself" as emerging in the role as being in a leading position as a forecaster, emerged from my career in management consulting. The notable event, on this account, was my precise forecast to occur during that time, for an outbreak within the range of a few days of variability for the crash of the "great U.S. auto industry of the 1950s." It was, for me, a crucially unique success as a professional at that time, and, as a matter of the facts of the case, a uniquely successful forecast which I had made in defiance of the failed conclusions supplied by my putative Wall Street-related rivals on that account. It was, otherwise, to be the first of a series of comparable forecasts which I have supplied over the decades later, through to the present time.

Probably, the most notable of such forecasts of mine was my August, 1971 forecast of the great crash of the 1970s, which quickly turned out to have been the greatest post-1929 "crash" in the trans-Atlantic international experience. Today, the world at large, is now being gripped, very soon, by the greatest breakdown-crisis, measured in global effects, in modern world history up to the present date.

However, that does not mean that we are necessarily nearing "the end of the world."[3] My outlook, whether during the late 1970s, or today, was, and remains that of a prospect for bringing civilization out of what has now become this presently monstrous crisis, a crisis which I know could be brought under control, if an appropriate effort were made soon enough, now – while the actual time available is, admittedly, most painfully short.

Consider Some Key Consequences

The immediate danger of "end of the world" options, now, would be that of a general, "globally-extended, imperial warfare," a war which were to be launched at the prompting of the general command under the control of the broad range of the presently existing Anglo-Dutch empire, the empire featuring the current Queen of England, Elizabeth II, or, of her successor. This would be as updated on the present world's calendar, according to a model made in the spirit of the original Roman Empire. That would be the prospective basis for a global thermonuclear-warfare, which is, admittedly, a seriously nearby threat which I concede for this presently immediate time. That Queen has a current, and a practically very loud and persisting commitment to an early reduction of the Earth's human population, to about one billion persons, or much less, instead of what had been earlier, the currently estimated, approximately, seven billions; I am presuming here, that the outcome could be thwarted, as the relevant, U.S. Army General Martin E. Dempsey, so far, has continued to seek to bring that about.

Against that background, the early re-establishment of the original Glass-Steagall Act in the United States at this time, would probably lead to an avoidance of thermonuclear warfare. Otherwise there would be, admittedly, no pre-assured avoidance of a thermonuclear holocaust, or, an actual such holocaust beyond question.

That consideration of the Glass-Steagall restoration thus considered, a prospective renaissance of the U.S. nation and its economy, is a presently feasible outcome. However, otherwise, the incumbency of U.S. Presidents under the 2001-2013 terms, if continued beyond the presently immediate period ahead, is quite probably the determinant of "a human extinction prospect." One might make the point: "The patience of the Creator would be sorely tried."

However, once that much has been said, the actual issue to be considered here, is the question, whether it were likely, or not, that the very early re-installation of the original Glass-Steagall promptly occur now.

Already, the accelerating trend, since the election of President John F. Kennedy, had been set by the assassination of that President, and, the continuation of that development actually expressed by the assassination of his brother, prospective President Robert Kennedy. Those two murders set on the stage of 1960s U.S. history, remain existent within the deployment of a continuing state of extended warfare spreading throughout the world in one or another expression, an implicitly global spread of global fire through to the present moment as I am writing here and now. It has been a state of threatened warfare since the nuclear warfare threatened by the combinations of such Administrations as those of Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, and the administration of the U.S.A.'s President Harry S Truman; it was a war called off, temporarily, when the British empire discovered that the Soviet Union had a nuclear warfare capability comparable to that of the U.S.A. and the British monarchy; Britain and Bertrand Russell moved on, then, toward thermonuclear warfare. The assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, was promptly used as a pretext for launching a decade of warfare in Indo-China, and then, beyond and beyond, still today. This has now brought us, through the British-Saudi launching of the 9-11 attacks on the United States, to the virtual, present threshold of global thermo-nuclear warfare.

The successful restoration of Glass-Steagall in the U.S.A. now, would signal an almost-certain-avoidance of thermo-nuclear warfare. It would also portend the beginning of the launch of an accelerating rate of economic recovery within our United States (in particular).

Fire! The Principle of Progress

Now take under consideration certain broader and deeper considerations, most of which usually pass as either overlooked, mis-conceived, or both.

The exact measure of the continuing existence of the human species, the distinction which distinguishes all mankind from the relatively lower forms of life, has been and remains, most simply defined, the rate of increase of the primary energy-flux density; per capita, and per unit of territory of concentration of human existence of the human species. This also takes under consideration: the rate of that progress so measured.

Among the worst diversions of members of the human population, is the failure to take into effective account, the whole of the process of human existence, a failure demonstrated by concentration on "selected factors," rather than the process as a whole process.

Then comes a more deeply rooted failure in human opinion generally: the "wild-eyed error" of belief, of a popular reliance on sense-perception as such: sense-perception foolishly considered as being a physical principle of measure within the Solar system as such. This should have brought to our intention what should have been the most readily demonstrated, worst systemic fallacy of popular opinion of them all: the reductionist's human sense-certainty!

The proper retort against "sense-certainty," is the function of human relationships within the setting of the relevant process of interactions among processes as wholes. That is already "marked-out" for our attentions in the domain of a strictly defined range of Classical-artistic composition when considered in terms of processes, as Heraclitus or Plato, Nicholas of Cusa and Johannes Kepler, might have preferred, rather than merely individual parts as treated as the chronic, madly-mathematical reductionist's "merely imaginary infinitesimal" "purely mathematical" grinding of individual species of parts.

The first principle of any competent scientist (in particular), is the reality of human experience! Overlook that, and you are susceptible to believing almost anything that some certain lunatic magician wishes you to believe. The name of the disease I am attacking here, is what is called "reductionism," which is otherwise to be known as the most commonplace expression of what is, unfortunately, the most popular form of systemic human insanity. That is why mathematicians tend to be morally and otherwise insane, as monetarists' thoughts almost always are, or absolutely worse.


[1] Compare my "Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler & Shakespeare," June 10, 2013, in EIR, June 21, 2013, or LaRouche PAC.]

[2] Ibid.

[3] At the present moment, the sudden arrival of the "end of the world" is actually a possibility, but without the real risk of an early, global thermonuclear war, that were not a likely outcome. Very bad things are now possible, but a general thermonuclear bombardment, is something still very much to be prevented, as the U.S.A.'s General Martin Dempsey has rightly emphasized.

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