The presently closing dynastic cycle
This is the concluding section of the "presentation of the case to the jurors"
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
To judge the criminality of the accused, the evidence which has now been presented to you should be sufficient. To decide what course of action must be chosen to cure this crime, we must focus now upon four additional, interconnected facts.
For many of you, these additional facts represent a difficulty which it is urgent that you surmount. That difficulty is that although each of those points is a matter of historical fact, it is a fact which conflicts with stubborn popular misconceptions. Insofar as literate people of good will must share some of the blame for the perilous situation in which humanity is presently situated, their ignorance or neglect of those four facts is a contribution to the influence of those evils which have caused the present global crisis of mankind.
The administration of justice in the case at hand depends upon your willingness to examine the relevance of this additional matter.
We have been mustered by the outcry from an urgent crisis, not to punish some selected scapegoats, but to craft a judgment which focuses upon curing the problem before us. The duty to which we have been called by circumstance requires, first, that the jurors understand the historical setting in which the crime has been committed: that these horrors have arisen during the closing phase of a "dynastic cycle" in European history, a cycle of approximately five centuries.
To understand the characteristics of the presently ongoing collapse of the global political, monetary, and financial order, one must situate the recent six centuries of European civilization's rise to global domination within the longer span of similar, earlier cycles of rise and fall of formerly dominant cultures. None of these cycles, including the present one, can be understood without first conceptualizing the second and third facts and the mutual interaction of those two facts.
The second fact to be taken into account is the special nature of the human species, as the past six centuries of world history have made most plain the differences between human and animal demographies.
Mankind is the only species which can willfully increase its potential relative population density, a distinct power of the individual person shown most directly and simply by the impact of valid, axiomatic-revolutionary scientific discovery of principles of nature upon the productive powers of labor.
As the heritage of the Renaissance has shown, more brilliantly than in any earlier portion of history, the nature of mankind lies in the potential creative-mental powers of the individual person, a notion of man in axiomatic opposition to what the modern British oligarchical tradition has adopted as its empiricist definition of "human nature."2
Only from the standpoint of that second fact, can the significance of the third fact, oligarchism, be understood in a practical fashion. It is the conflict between, on the one side, the Mosaic notion of man as in the image of God,3 and the bestial view of man, inherent in oligarchism, that the functional characteristics of history's and pre-history's "dynastic cycles" are rooted.
The anti-Renaissance "Enlightenment" is to be recognized as a consistent, if modern example of the same type of oligarchism which caused the fall of Babylon and Rome.
1. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics? (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984), passim. See also The Science of Christian Economy (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991), pp. 6-26, 241-256.
2. In other words, the empiricist notion of man as presented by Henry VIII's Venetian marriage counsellor's, Francesco Zorzi's Harmonia Mundi (1525), in the Rosicrucian dogmas of Venetian Paolo Sarpi's English proteges, Francis Bacon and Robert Fludd, in the writings of Bacon's Thomas Hobbes, in the "social contract" dogma of John Locke, and of the English "Venetian Party's" David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and in the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, et al. That anti-Christian, empiricist doctrine of "human nature" is otherwise known as the 17th and 18th centuries' Enlightenment; this includes not only the Venice-created, anti-Leibniz faction of Voltaire, Maupertuis, Algarotti, Euler, et al. at Paris and Frederick the Great's Berlin Academy, but also Immanuel Kant and the 19th-century Romantics and positivists generally.
3. On the reading of Genesis 1:26-28, see Philo Judaeus, On The Creation, in Philo, Vol. I, F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker, trans., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). The working point referenced in this way takes into account the historical fact that Philo, a contemporary of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and a sometime collaborator of the Apostle Peter against the Mithraic Gnostics of Simon Magus et al., played a leading part in resurrecting the Mosaic heritage, and reflects the view of the Mosaic heritage found among the Christian Apostles, including John and Paul.
The fourth among these crucial historical facts to be considered, is the notion of what the achievements of modern European civilization might be, if the impulse supplied by the Renaissance were freed from the encumbrance of cohabitation with usury-based, Venetian-style oligarchism.
To that purpose, one might focus initially upon the policy-changes, the "cultural-paradigm shift," which have led the planet downward, especially during the past 30-odd years, to the present verge of a global "New Dark Age."
The famous aphorism runs, "Don't throw out the baby with the bath water"; to rescue the accumulated achievements of the past six centuries, out from under the collapsed rubble of the London-dominated monetary and financial system, is precisely the image the jurors might consider, in seeking a practicable decision of that quality which is consistent with the curative principle of justice.
We now present a thumb-nail description of the present "dynastic cycle."
That image supplies the benchmark conception to which the relevant facts of the matter are related thereafter.
The origin, rise, and fall of the British Empire 4
The breaking economic and financial crises now gripping the entirety of this planet reflect the close of an approximately 500-year cycle in European history.
This cycle began in the aftermath of the temporary rout of the vast maritime, political, and financial power of Venice, a rout caused by the mid-14th century disintegration of what is known to today's historians as "the Lombard debt-bubble," a collapse which immediately plunged all of Europe into a "New Dark Age."
The new cycle, which came to the surface during the 15th century, has been determined by the emerging conflict between the two leading forces within European culture during that century.
On the one side, there were the forces of the Golden Renaissance, centered around such figures as Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa and the 1439-40 Council of Florence. On the opposing side, was the reemerging power of the Venice-centered European aristocratic and financier oligarchy.
From the time of that council, especially following the war of the League of Cambrai against Venice, at the beginning of the 16th century,5 all European history since the 15th century within Europe and globally has been dominated by the cultural conflict between the radiated influence of the Renaissance and the opposing, Venice-launched force of the so-called "Enlightenment."
During the very early 16th century, when the present "dynastic cycle" was first defined, the strategic situation was as follows.
4. The following description of the current dynastic cycle is a summary of the facts presented in Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.'s "How Bertrand Russell Became an Evil Man," Fidelio, Autumn 1994.
5. 1508-10.
The intellectual power of the Renaissance was the heritage of Nicolaus of Cusa's founding of the principles of the modern system of nation-states and of modern science.
That influence is typified by the titanic intellects of Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Raffaello Sanzio. Through the failure to resolve the issues within Italy itself, the modern nation-state was established first in France, by and under King Louis XI (1461-83).
Louis XI's success fostered movements for establishing similar forms of nation-state in England and in Spain, in which the Oratorian and other Renaissance networks of Leonardo, Erasmus, and Raphael contributed in important ways.
The ensuing, admittedly unstable alliance among Queen Isabella's Spain, Henry VII's Tudor England, and the heritage of Louis XI in France,6 formed around the Vatican the backbone of the anti-Venice alliance, the League of Cambrai. At the very point in that war that Venice was about to be conquered by the allies, its vast and evil usurious power broken forever, Venice succeeded in corrupting some of the allies; the League of Cambrai was dissolved.
Northern Italy in 1494; by the start of the war in 1508, Louis XII had expelled the Sforza from the Duchy of Milan and added its territory to France.Venice used the breathing-space it obtained so, to use corruption once again, to break up the alliance among France, Spain, and Tudor England. This was accomplished by Venice's use of the trollop Anne Boleyn to tease King Henry VIII, crazed by Anne's persisting sexual harassment, into measures which created a virtual permanent state of warfare among France, Spain, and England, from 1527 until the British cultural subjugation of France in the aftermath of the 1814 Congress of Vienna.
Thus, the presently closing, 500-year cycle of history began.
Admittedly, throughout the history of its existence as a political and financial entity, Venice always attempted to take over as much as possible, especially of payments, from any nation into which it could sink its diplomatic and financial claws.
That consideration, and Venice's intent to keep the European powers at each other's throats, represent the only clear purposes behind the great influence which Venice exerted in England, from the time of Anne Boleyn's flirtations with Henry VIII, until 1582.
A change in this relationship of Venice to London came in the aftermath of the 1582 victory of Paolo Sarpi's radical faction (the giovani) over Venice's traditionalists (the vecchi); Sarpi's majority faction sought to shift the base of the Venetian oligarchy's operations from the strategically vulnerable Venice itself, to a new Venetian maritime power in the northern Protestant countries, while the minority concentrated upon operating from within the factions of the nominally Catholic Counter-Reformation regions, to the south.
Sarpi's faction chose London as the future headquarters of a "new Venice of the North."
6. For the edification of any carping critics: The differences in policy between Louis XI's nationalism and Charles VIII's (of France) reversion to pre-Renaissance dynastic games, need not be reviewed in the context of this summary.
Out of a bloody transitional struggle during the last two decades of Elizabethan England, the accession of the Sarpi (e.g., Cecil) faction's candidate, James VI of Scotland, to the English throne as James I, was the first formal step toward developing a London-centered "new Venice" as a global maritime and financial power like the imperial maritime power which Venice itself had enjoyed in the Mediterranean littoral during most of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries.
Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta or Repùblica de VenesiaCoat of Arms
By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, especially from the accession of William of Orange in 1688-89, the term "Venetian Party" was freely and widely used to describe the Liberal Party of England and the United Kingdom. This new form of British rule was not something autochthonously developed by the English people; it was imposed from the top down, by a combination of trickery, treason, and bloody force.
William of OrangeWith the defeat of the Tory opposition to the Venetian Liberals, during the final years of Queen Anne, English sovereignty was crushed when the Mr. Welf also known as Georg Ludwig of Hanover, an asset of the Antonio Conti who was then Venice's chief spy, ascended the newly established British throne as King George I.
From the 1760s rise to power by William Petty, the Second Earl of Shelburne, the East India Company potentate placed immediately above the throne, Venice's agents completed the intellectual retooling of the British Liberals for the tasks of creating a worldwide British Empire.
This retooling was represented chiefly by what is known today by the somewhat misleading term,
"British 19th-century philosophical radicalism," or, simply, "radical empiricism."
Typical exponents of this radical Venetian dogma are:
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), one of the leaders of the "Venetian Party" in Britain, founded the British foreign intelligence service - coordinator of the French Jacobin terror.
The famous plagiarist of Venetian Giammaria Ortes's published writing on population control, Thomas MalthusIn 1814, Britain's Venetian Party completed its immediate goal of France's political subjugation.
It then prepared for its next imperial objectives: by the crushing of Britain's former allies, Metternich's Holy Alliance, through subversion by British agent Mazzini's radical terrorists; and by London's reliance upon the treasonous corruption of certain factions within the United States for the reassimilation of the United States under British domination.
Except for the United States, the combined result of the revolutions and wars of the 19th century, and two world wars during the 20th century was: every one of the major transatlantic competitors of British power which had been standing proudly at the beginning of the 19th century, was either destroyed by war and revolution, or reduced to a servile state of political corruption, as was post-1918 France of the Third Republic.
Through U.S.A. political factions prominently associated with Theodore Roosevelt's or Woodrow Wilson's legacies, even the United States often played the part of an American dog on a British geopolitical and cultural leash.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), one of the leaders of the "Venetian Party" in Britain,
founded the British foreign intelligence service.
As we must recognize from the documented samplings of prominent persons and financier interests rallied around Prince Philip's "Allgemeine SS," his World Wildlife Fund backers, the British monarchy is not a secretion of the people of the United Kingdom.
The current status of the Welf monarchy of Britain is that of "Primate among Parasites" for a truly international oligarchy, an oligarchy which knows no national loyalties, but which uses the British monarchy as its doge, much as the great princes of the so-called Habsburg Reich coddled or killed even members of the royal family through instruments such as the Geheimpolizei of von Kaunitz and Metternich.
Look at the physical evidence today: Britain's imperial conquests manifestly have not been for the interest of the British people; the conquests have ultimately unified virtually all among the surviving royal, princely, aristocratic, and financial nobility of Europe (and beyond) into a single international oligarchy, a body of parasites which the currently reigning British doge serves as Primate.
As long as credible potentially contending powers existed, the London-centered international oligarchy did not dare suppress entirely the institutions of nation-state and scientific progress.
They hated those institutions, but they dared not evade them as long as potentially credible adversaries existed, lest the reigning Welf party's feral oligarchs themselves become materially weak strategically in the face of then-intended prey.
It was only after the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis, about 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union signed on to the nuclear-weapons condominium prescribed by Bertrand Russell, that the oligarchy dared to unleash its desire to ruin, and then eradicate the institution of the nation-state, scientific progress, and reason itself, through such "New Age" ventures as "post-industrial," anti-science utopianism and the rock-drug-sex counterculture.
The result of the introduction of that mass "cultural-paradigm shift" during the past 30 years, has been to bring the entire planet to the present verge of a collapse into large-scale economic and political disintegration.
Since 1964, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the emergence of the ruinous Harold Wilson government in the United Kingdom, there has been an accelerating, global collapse of the rate of physical-economic growth in scale and productivity of output and essential basic economic infrastructure, per capita and per square kilometer.
For the United States itself, as measured in those physical units, negative growth has prevailed continuously since the early 1970s, accelerating rapidly since 1982. Meanwhile, post-Thatcher Britain is a rubble-heap of formerly industrialized ruins, where the activity of financier saprophytes is called "privatization."
The delusion of "periods of prosperity" in North America and Europe during the past 20 years, is premised on a combination of out-rightly faked statistics and, more significant, the fact that the financial system, for which the data is reported, has been de-coupled increasingly from the real economy of production and trade.
The inevitability of the early collapse of the present global monetary and financial system is fairly summed up in the following three paragraphs.
The present terminal sickness of the global financial system is marked by the phenomena of highly leveraged, out-of-control markets in so-called "derivatives." Marked by this lunatic speculation, the financial system is operating like a vast, play-money casino, operating from dusk to dawn according to a blending of "game theory" with those outer limits of lunacy known as "chaos theory."
The bubble of speculation so devised hangs by the thread of an income-stream taken from the real economy, an income-stream which is a tiny fraction of the nominal financial income imputed to investments in the bubble itself. In a word, the system is already bankrupt, if any competent standards of audit-transparency were in force.
To postpone the implosive bursting of the bubble, an increase of the original income-stream taken out of the real economy must occur.
However, the very existence of the bubble is already contracting the real economy at an accelerating rate. To increase the rate of income-stream from the real economy, means to attempt to lessen this week's instability of the bubble by measures which worsen that same instability during the immediately ensuing weeks.
There are ominous similarities to the popping of the Lombard debt-bubble during the middle of the 14th century. This is a system which is axiomatically designed to self-destruct.
The destruction will occur either because sensible governments step in to put the world's present central banking system and financial markets into government-conducted financial bankruptcy reorganization; or, if governments lack the political will to take those rational measures, the bubble will burst inevitably in a manner which resembles, mathematically, a chemical, nuclear, or thermonuclear explosion, except that this will be an implosion defined functionally by a reversed-leverage chain-reaction.
The reason this situation has been permitted to develop, is that the most powerful of the ensconced political potencies of this planet, the international oligarchy, threatens to destroy anyone, any nation which is considered a threat to the continued growth of this financial bubble, or a threat to the continuation of the "New Age" cultural paradigms.
Thus, the likely course of events, is that matters will become worse until the point is reached, as was the case after the mid-14th century debt-bubble crash, that the oligarchy is perceived to have lost enough of its financial and political power that remedial actions are not altogether disallowed.
So, we may view the now-ending long-cycle in its proper, axiomatic political terms. On the one side, there is the upward impulse, the not-entropic impulse, supplied by the principles of nation-state and investment in fostering and employing scientific progress. On the opposing side, there is the anti-nation-state, anti-science, and pro-usury, entropic impulse, supplied by that international oligarchy which was formerly centered in Venice.
As the influence of the latter has increased, at the expense of the political power of the former, the entropic impulse within the society tends to predominate, increasing the power of the oligarchic faction by weakening the power of its opponent.
So, the interaction of the opposing axioms of the two conflicting tendencies defines the cycle.
This cycle is now emerging in its end-phase as a prospective, imminent disintegration of that British "Venetian Party" dynasty which has reigned nearly five centuries, from the sex-crazed Henry VIII to the imminent fall of the House of Windsor.
Oligarchism
Until the emergence of modern Europe during the 15th century Golden Renaissance, for as far back into history and pre-history as our knowledge reaches, more than 90% of the households of each and all peoples subsisted upon a more or less brutish form of rural labor.
As the case of the Delphi cult's oligarchical Sparta illustrates the point, the prevailing state of actual or virtual serfdom paralleled, and all too often coincided with the evil of outright chattel slavery. Those forms of society, often described as the "Asian model," are the paradigm for what we have identified here as oligarchism.
Consider one typical case of an oligarchical form of society: a state premised upon a configuration of four castes, estates, or classes. In this type, the households in a serf-like condition are at the bottom. At the top is a collection of ruling families, to such effect that the collective power of this oligarchy to govern the state lies in the relatively less mortal, corporate form of the family institution, rather than the highly mortal individual member of that household.7
Proximate to the oligarchy as such is a priest-caste, such as the early Chaldean pagan priest-caste and its "magician" successors, or the priesthood of the Delphi cult of Gaia-Apollo-Python/Dionysius.
Below both of these, but above the serf-caste and slaves, the plebeians: craftsmen, merchants, and so on.
The most influential relatively recent codification of an oligarchical form of society is found in the notorious "socialist" Code of the pagan Roman emperor Diocletian, the model for the modern "eugenicists" and other radical "environmentalists."
In contrast to modern Platonic culture and Christianity, oligarchism, such as that of the Darwins, Huxleys, and Harvard University's B.F. Skinner and Herrnstein, allows no strict distinction between mankind and the beasts. The general tendency, often enough a codified practice of rigid oligarchical societies, is to treat the separation of the upper from lower classes as a distinction between an inferior and superior animal species.
The oligarchical division among ruling and inferior castes is defended, often explicitly, by the apology that these distinctions are the product of natural, biological, genetic distinctions.8
That is the so-called "Asiatic model" of oligarchism which was transmitted from Ishtar's Mesopotamia and Moloch's Tyre into the European forms of oligarchism echoed by the House of Windsor today.
Plato and the Christian revolution
In known history, the first clear attempt to break with this oligarchical system, is seen in the maritime power of those Ionian city-state republics which certain forces in Egypt sponsored against the Canaanite maritime power of Tyre, and against the spread of the Babylonian model of empire generally.
With Solon's reforms at Athens, the contrast between Solon's laws and Lycurgus's law for Sparta serves to the present-day as the best choice of benchmark of reference for the difference in principle between political good and political evil in European history to date.9
7. The Roman pagan law's notion of paterfamilias is exemplary of the nature of this distinction. The Venetian family's fondo is an echo of the Roman law of paterfamilias; it is the trustees of the fondo, not the biological members of the nominal family, which exert the authority of paterfamilias.
8. The oligarchs, like the British aristocrats or U.S. self-styled "patricians," often apply the rules of thumb borrowed from breeding of cattle and dogs to the mating practices of their own progeny. Considering the decadence shown by today's litters of heirs from such aristocratic and wealthy families, one must say fairly that the intellectual qualities ostensibly produced by such breeding-practices are scarcely awe-inspiring.
9. Friedrich Schiller, "The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon" (1790), George Gregory, trans., Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom (Washington. D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988), pp. 273-305.
The chief precursor of modern science and also the modern alternative to the oligarchical model of society, is the writings and influence of Plato and his Academy at Athens.
The pre-foundations of the modern European nation-state are found in the Apostle Paul's mission to the Gentiles.
Although Christianity was within the context defined by Moses worship, the Pauline mission broke from the ethnic bounds of Roman-captivity Judaism to practice Jesus Christ's message, that all persons are in the image of God, and thus each and all set above all beasts, by virtue of that capacity for generating and receiving those qualities of valid axiomatic-revolutionary discoveries of principle which are typified by great Classical forms of works of art and by physical scientific discovery in the tradition of Plato, Nicolaus of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, and Leibniz today.
The same principle was reemphasized with great clarity by the Christian Platonist, Augustine, who is the central figure of the organization of a western European Christianity freed of the gnostic corruptions rampant in the eastern empire.
Although that principle was always embedded in Christian faith, it was not efficiently incorporated in the doctrine of statecraft until the work of Cusa and other key figures of the 1439-40 Council of Ferrara/Florence. Until that Renaissance, western European society was governed by an imperial, oligarchical notion of law.
Earlier Christian efforts to change that were assaulted with infuriated great force by the feudal oligarchies, which saw attempts to elevate the mental and political condition of the lower castes as a threat to the oligarchical order. Nowhere on this planet, until that Renaissance, did a nation-state exist, or was a society dedicated to the general promotion of increase of the productive powers of labor through a scientific culture.
The case of the young revolutionary United States of America is a crucial demonstration of the introduction of that Christian principle to the ordering of society's secular affairs.
The Federal U.S.A. of the 1790 Census shows that, even that recently, over 90% of the population subsisted from rural occupations. However, at that time, the literacy, the productivity, and the standard of living of the Americans were each already more than twice the level existing in the United Kingdom.
That American "Latin farmer," is typified by his literacy in the political tracts of such writers as Tom Paine and Alexander Hamilton; those are texts beyond the capacity of the relatively less literate, typical present-day U.S. high-school graduate, even many university graduates. The potential basis, in morals and literacy, for a great upward transformation in the conditions of family and national life were already visible during the late 18th century.
The benefits are traceable in the changing composition of employment and real incomes of the U.S. workforce over the span from 1790 into the mid-1960s, until the pestilence known as the "New Age cultural-paradigm shift" was unleashed upon our society.
This U.S. example illustrates the unprecedented achievements of the Golden Renaissance's establishment of the new norms of nation-state and scientific and artistic development for all of the population. We see the breaking-down of the oligarchical class-barriers which had kept mankind morally beneath its birthright for so long.
Plato's contribution to the principles of human knowledge was indispensable for making this possible.
In the exemplary case of his famous Parmenides dialogue, he presents a pedagogy for demonstrating a fully intelligible principle of human creativity lying outside and absolutely above the level of mere deductive arguments such as those of Parmenides, the sophists, and Aristotle.
This principle, which appears in Classical forms of poetry, drama, music, and painting as the principle of true metaphor, enables us to define the act of creativity as a mental object, an object not dependent upon the mere senses, an object rendering intelligible to us those forms of mental activity through which we are able willfully to generate, and to assimilate valid axiomatic-revolutionary discoveries of principle respecting universal lawfulness of the universe.
This mental object, so defined, is the object to which we must refer when we describe the individual person as, "in the image of God," or, the same thing, "possessed from birth with 'a divine spark of reason'."
It is this power to receive and impart conceptions which are valid, axiomatic-revolutionary discoveries of natural principles which has enabled mankind to increase willfully the productive powers of labor, per capita, per household, and per square kilometer, in such a way as to increase the potential population-density of the human species by more than three decimal orders of magnitude above the level possible for "primitive hunting-and-gathering" modes.
In this and other expressions, this creative-mental practice of the individual is the source of the "not-entropy" of all relatively successful modes of society, as distinct from those cultures which are inherently doomed, dead-ends.
The demonstrated superiority of the culture flowing from the Golden Renaissance over any other culture which ever existed, expresses the power unleashed by forms of statecraft and scientific and cultural progress consistent with the understanding that human creativity is a fully intelligible conception, the only empirical basis for the notion of the person as in the living image of God the Creator.
In principle, we may look into the eyes of any child, of any parentage, and see that mental object existing behind those eyes, so to speak. That is seeing one's fellow-human as "in the image of God." Once we have seen that, we could tolerate no longer a policy which degrades any household into a state of beastly slavery or serfdom.
It must be our passion, that these children shall be developed in their minds to receive and impart valid conceptions of creative-mental discovery in art, in science, and in technology of productive practice. It must be our passion, that society must be organized to such effect that this right to live as a truly human being ought, is a universal right, around which society as a whole must be organized.
As Augustine shows, it is the method of Plato informed by Christianity, which is the basis for public morality: political, economic, and otherwise. The Christian is freed from the piggishness of racialism and class prejudice, freed from self-degradation to the likeness of a mere beast.
Whoever has glimpsed the evil of early history, should recognize as hateful and mass-murderous, anything like Prince Philip's proposal: to return the world to a state of affairs in which any other view of man but as in the image of God's creative nature were to prevail as the law among nations.
The interaction
For more than five centuries, the oligarchy has hated the Golden Renaissance as the gods of Zeus's pagan Olympus hated playwright Aeschylus' Prometheus.
Bringing "fire," the knowledge that the individual person's gift of creative reason casts him in the living image of God, menaces the power of those Olympian tyrants who would be considered immortal gods by foolish men and women. To bring the utmost rage to the features of a true oligarch, threaten to educate the cognitive potentials of his serf.
In the old oligarchical model, the peasant is regarded as just an animal. The oligarch puts the peasant in a field, in a stall, just as he keeps "other cattle." The peasant-animal grows food, just as a cow produces meat and milk. So many cows (or peasants), so much food, as long as the pastures are not overcrowded!10
Just so, wild game is raised in forest preserves of the princes and dukes: the prince's park rangers kill off the extra venison when the game-herd becomes too numerous. So, Prince Philip uses precisely that image to describe the methods he employs to manage the size of the human population, worldwide.11
To understand this issue of oligarchism adequately, one should compare experience within western Europe and the Americas with the problems which development faces from within the cultures of Asia.
10. What we have identified here are the philosophical assumptions underlying the anti-Colbert Physiocratic dogma of figures such as that asset of Abbot Antonio Conti's salon, Dr. Francois Quesnay. Except as Adam Smith extended Quesnay's dogma respecting agricultural labor to manufacturing labor, all of Smith's notions of morality and political-economy were either copies of the views set forth by Quesnay by 1758, or copies of the influence of those members of Conti's salon from which Quesnay derived his. With those modest qualifications, Smith was a Physiocrat, and a complete oligarchist. Quesnay's views were informed by missionaries' reports on the principles of China's oligarchical model. In both Quesnay and Smith, and with all Venetians of the 15th through early 19th centuries, human creativity was flatly denied to exist at all, and excluded from consideration in respect to efficient factors of social change. Venice's oligarchical philosophy was, and remains, the bestialization of mankind.
11. In an Oct. 27, 1991 appearance on French national television, Prince Philip walked the interviewer through the paces on the way in which the prince's crowd arranged the mass-killing of excess populations of wild animals inhabiting the "protected" areas of the Africa wild-game preserves. Then, in response to the interviewer's obvious question, the prince replied: "This is the same principle for man; only, for us, our protected area is the entire Earth. The principle is really the same."
At the same time that the European oligarchy represented by the House of Windsor does everything its tyrannical arrogance dares to venture, aided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in virtually crushing out of existence any possibility of scientific and technological progress in developing of the so-called Third World, there is also a powerful internal resistance against progress from within the populations of the developing sector, as in Asia.
The success of oligarchies from within these developing nations in preventing the improvement of the quality of life of their poorer strata, depends to a large degree on strong resistance to change from within the ranks of those same poorer strata. Indeed, in all human history, few tyrannies could have persisted for as long as they did, but for such culturally determined complicity among the victims.
So, in the fight against chattel slavery within the pre-Civil War U.S.A., the African-American civil rights leaders adopted the expression, that literacy matching European Classical standards is the essential difference between the free man and the slave.
The mechanism by which the serf is motivated to defend the forms of enslavement he suffers, is more readily understood by examining similar forms of self-degradation commonplace among U.S. left-wingers, such as anarcho-syndicalists or other culturally illiterate populists. The oligarchical intelligentsia is aware of this mechanism and relies upon it as the chief means by which the victims of oligarchism are induced to assist in putting on one another's chains each night.
To gain insight into the psychological origins of oligarchism, and to understand the tricks on which the modern oligarchy has most relied to control the serfs, one must muster insight into the self-degradation of the mind of the populists or analogous cases among the victims.
There is a profound principle involved here, but the point is of crucial relevance.
Insofar as the individual person's world-outlook is more or less limited to emphasis upon an associative form of interaction between his or her emotions and sense-objects, that person tends to share the misanthropic misconception of "human nature" one meets in Zorzi, Sarpi, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, et al.
For those unfortunates, the reality of one's own existence is imagined to begin with earliest recollections of sense-experiences, and to end when the senses go silent. Anything beyond that he attributes to an Orphic after-life in Hades. A poor wretch like that, if he is of an academic bent, readily accepts those disgusting 1759 utterances which Smith later resurrected for his 1776, Physiocratic dogma of the so-called "Invisible Hand":
Nature has directed us... by original and immediate instincts.
Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of Nature intended to produce by them.12
12. Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759).
Matters are entirely different with any person who is aware of the efficient use of his own and others' creative-mental powers.
In mathematics, for example, our scientific knowledge of that subject-matter begins by our replicating the discoveries of such as Pythagoras and Plato, reliving in one's own mind, as student, their mental experience of discoveries from thousands of years ago. It is the same with every other discovery mastered in a similar way.
The student whose mental powers are developed in that way, is keenly aware that the practical benefits of modern mathematics incorporate, as presently efficient principles of work, ideas generated by individuals now deceased many centuries, or even millennia. Such a student recognizes that the distinction which sets mankind above the beasts is the discovery and perpetuation of those valid ideas which are the accumulated sum-total of human knowledge to date, all acquired and transmitted through the agency of this mental-creative faculty.
Such a student has access to a realization that one's own, brief mortal existence is an opportunity for a participation in all of human existence, taking from the distant past and giving to the far distant future.
This is the ground on which that student finds his vast moral superiority over the populist "practical man" who knows only the fruit of his sense-experience and blind passions.
When the oligarchs reduce a large portion of humanity to the status of talking cattle, as they did to slaves and serfs, they not merely suppress the human potentials of the victims. They also dehumanize them by transforming them into "regular guys" of the reduced status to which they are relegated.
The fate of peoples, nations, and the outcome of a personal mortal life is determined by processes which span, ultimately, the entirety of human existence, past and future. From the past, we inherit the accumulation of ideas developed by others before, and the condition of man-improved (or worsened) conditions of life. The outcome of our having lived as a person lies with our posterity.
The crux of the matter, on both accounts, is our self-governance by selection of those ideas which guide us to act upon the course of history, as we encounter all humanity, all history, while it passes through our mortal time.
The individual who lives with that awareness of ideas, and his or her relationship to such a realm of ideas, is the truly adult human being. The victim of oligarchical thinking is relatively infantile, or worse, morally as well as intellectually.
The person who is morally degraded from a person of ideas, to a mere "practical man" of "my personal experience," flees from his or her contributing responsibility for the outcome of human history, for the general welfare of our posterity.13
13. On this, contrast the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution to oligarchical parody found in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. The U.S. Constitution's intent is thus shown, by the "general welfare clause," to be the adoption of Gottfried Leibniz's principle of natural law, and a rejection of the immorality of Locke's oligarchical "social contract" dogma, which Locke embedded in the colonial law of the Carolinas. The Confederacy, like Locke, was an expression of oligarchy in the evil tradition of Lycurgan Sparta, in contrast to the tradition of Solon and George Washington represented by President Lincoln.
He or she flees into the virtual reality worshiped by the fan of "soap opera."
For him or her, everything is a matter of an empiricist's pairwise interactions among persons in the "here and now." The empiricist's preoccupation with his or her personal affairs, so defined, rules him. He is too busy with such pairwise interactions in his pitiably tiny here and now to assume moral accountability for the outcome of his generation's having lived.
He flees from the big issues into the microscopic realm of what he calls "my affairs," and "my personal morality." He can tolerate any great crime against humanity with self-assured moral self-satisfaction, as long as he is not caught in such personal offenses in the very small as stealing or adultery.
Thus, do such immoral persons smugly, and obscenely call themselves "Christians" while endorsing Adam Smith's thieving, mass-murderous dogma of "free trade."
The most commonplace evil practiced by small people is smug confidence in the moral-indifferentist practice of such small-mindedness. It is upon this consenting wickedness in the smugly self-righteous oppressed that oligarchical rule finds the democratic consent to the most monstrous tyrannies. So, until now, have oligarchs fooled most of the people most of the time, and some of the people all of the time.
So, victims of serfdom or the like may be induced to commit treason against their own humanity.
The mechanism of the cycle
The clearest model of the way in which dynastic cycles function is the cycle now closing. Never before has the not-entropic impulse for increase of potential population-density even approached the vigorous growth accomplished through the Renaissance-launched institutions of nation-state and scientific progress.
On the opposing side, whenever technological stagnation is imposed upon society for an extended period, the result must be an entropic collapse in the potential population-density. It is the interaction among the two contrary impulses, the not-entropic and entropic, which is the cause of dynastic cycles such as this one.
From approximately 1510 until the mass-recruitment to the oligarchical "cultural-paradigm shift" which surfaced during the 1964-68 interval, European civilization was fairly characterized as of a dual character. The successes of that civilization, as it spread throughout the world, were derived from the not-entropic impact of the combined principles of the nation-state and scientific progress.
At the same time, the civilization was being fatally corrupted, top-down, by the entropic, oligarchical element which came to be centered in the "Venetian Party's" British monarchy.
Then, coinciding with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the oligarchy on top elected to begin the final phase of total destruction of the not-entropic institutions of nation-state and scientific progress. Under the impact of that latter, most recent phase of this long cycle, the global system as a whole has been brought to the verge of self-disintegration.
If we could resuscitate the heritage of the Renaissance, freed of the discarded encumbrance of the Venice-fostered Enlightenment, the result would be a unimodal, not-entropic form of cycle-free economic and related recovery.
The leading institutional problem is replacing the incurably bankrupt present global monetary and financial system.
The measures of physical-economic recovery required are either well-known or readily identified. The use of state credit to finance both governmental and private concerns in the development of urgently needed programs of repair and expansion of basic economic infrastructure, in the public sector, will provide, as it has done numerous times before, the stimulant for rapid growth of the entrepreneurial private sector in agriculture and industry.
The crux of the matter is to replace the existing monetary and financial systems, based on privately controlled central banking systems, by the kind of system of national banking which tradition associates with the name of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
The implied life-death struggle between private central banking systems and national banking, becomes now the key to whether civilization as a whole recovers from this crisis, or descends into the most menacing "New Dark Age" in history.
The oligarchy has brought about its own destruction.
The successful indoctrination of its own ranks in the cultural paradigm causing this present collapse, has produced, as the present generations of that oligarchy, a stratum bereft of the capacity to recognize its own folly, incapable of defining alternatives to the doom now threatening us all. For some portions of that oligarchy, it is nonetheless clear, that as long as the utter depravity represented by Prince Philip is allowed to continue to dominate the oligarchy as a whole, the imminent doom of civilization is assured.
So, the coming fall of the House of Windsor is inevitable, in one way or another.
For the rest of us, the task is simply to throw out the dirty, oligarchical bathwater, without losing the baby in the process. The point of the exercise is to know which is which.
The point, therefore, is not to permit oneself to be degraded into smallness of mind.
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