LaRouche Fidelio Article

Fidelio, Vol. #, No, #. Spring 1998

Part III

On the contrary side, the feudal reactionaries called the “Physiocrats,” rejected, not only absolutely, but also hysterically, our rational view of society and its economy. The fervid irrationalism of our opponents, is properly typified by the expressed views of Adam Smith and other representatives of the British East India Company’s Haileybury School (Ricardo, Malthus, et al.), who were close to the Physiocrats on this point.⁶¹ Respecting capitalist economy, Karl Marx represents a branch of the British East India Company’s Haileybury School. Under strong advice from that English processor of slave-produced cotton, Frederick Engels, Marx was induced, during the 1840’s, to become a savage opponent of the American System of political-economy of, first, Friedrich List, and, during the 1860’s, the same Henry C. Carey whom Marx otherwise tended to admire as an economist: that on precisely this same crucial point.⁶² It is from that vantage-point that the post-1966 upsurge of influence of Britain’s Mont Pelerin Society upon the “Baby Boomer” generation must be referenced, as typical of the causes for the systemic character of the present, global, financial and monetary crisis.

To make clear the determining considerations underlying those facts, we must situate the issues of political-economy within their relevant social context. To that end, we must emphasize, once more, that, following the liquidation of the anti-Venice League of Cambrai, until the present day, the rise of modern nation-states in Europe has always been contained by a continued hegemony, in financial and monetary, and related political affairs, by a feudal relic, a London-Amsterdam-centered, international financier-oligarchy, the which was developed partly as an extension of Venice’s ruling financier oligarchy, and otherwise as a clone of that Venetian oligarchy. In the U.S.A. itself, a similar parasitical social formation has been developed around a combination of, chiefly, former New England partners of the British East India Company opium-trade; Manhattan bankers in the footsteps of treasonous Aaron Burr and August Belmont, and London’s New England opium-runner protégé, J.P. Morgan; together with bearers of the southern slave-holders’ and Nashville Agrarian’s tradition.

Put the political side of Karl Marx’s case into that setting.

As insider Simon Bolivar publicly exposed this, toward the end of his life, the control over the wave of revolutions in South America during and immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, was directed by the then head of the British foreign-intelligence service, former Shelburne protégé Jeremy Bentham. This was the Bentham who personally trained (in London), and later directed, from London, in France, London’s French Jacobin terrorists Danton and Marat. Bentham’s own protégé, Lord Palmerston, continued Bentham’s creation of such neo-Jacobin notables of the 1848-1849 period, as British intelligence agents Giuseppe Mazzini and Louis Napoleon. Karl Marx was one of the many pre-1848 acquisitions of Mazzini’s Young Europe organization. It was Mazzini who founded the so-called “First International,” whose founding meeting he chaired. It was Mazzini who, then, personally, publicly placed his protégé Karl Marx in the position of secretary of the new organization.⁶³

No literate person should be surprised that there have been few “professional leftists” who were not backed, in miserly or other fashion, by financier interests.⁶⁴ The principal adversaries on this planet, since Europe’s mid-Fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance, have been national economy versus feudalist financier oligarchy. Just as Jacobin terrorists, directed from London, were deployed to destroy, from within, Britain’s most deadly rival, France, so, as U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned President James Monroe, the Mazzinian associates of Simon Bolivar, were deployed in South and Central America, both to undercut London’s Holy Alliance allies (and rivals), and to combat the republican influence of London’s and the Habsburgs’ avowed chief enemy, the U.S.A. in that region of the world.⁶⁵

All causes, great and small, find their common setting, and their meaning, in the one great conflict which has dominated this planet since earlier than the wars of the wicked Guelph League against the nation-builder Frederick II. Since the oligarchs, by the nature of their cause, can not exceed a small percentile of the total population, even if all their “Leporellos” are added into the account, it is by playing one or more sections of the masses of “human cattle” against one another, that the oligarchs manage their preferred game of “divide and rule.” Hence, if leftist and fascist mobs are slugging it out in the streets, the oligarchs respectively controlling the leadership of both opposing sides, are watching with shared interest, and amusement, from their box seats in the grandstand of that modern Colosseum. Let us remind ourselves that the victory of either, or, as in Bob McNamara’s and McGeorge Bundy’s 1960’s U.S. sport in the Vietnam arena, of neither, of those two sides, is more likely than not to be ultimately a victory for no one but the oligarchs, who set up such sport to control the credulous masses on both sides of the affray (in the Vietnam case, the credulous masses inside the U.S.A. itself).

In the case of the Civil War, the letters of the British agent, August Belmont, who then controlled the Democratic Party top-down, reveal the truth behind the common purpose served, on London’s behalf, by New England abolitionists and Confederacy slaveocracy. New York banker, Democratic Party “king-maker,” and all-around British agent, Belmont, reports with gloating, London’s common purpose in deploying those abolitionists and slave-owners against one another, was to bring about the destruction of the hated Federal government of the United States, by breaking up the republic into a Balkanized collection of warring baronies.⁶⁶ This had been the continued policy of Bentham’s, Castlereagh’s, Canning’s, and Palmerston’s London since the 1790’s, as had also been the policy, from a slightly different standpoint, of Clement Prince Metternich’s operations of the Hapsburg-dominated Holy Alliance.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, unlike most of today’s more credulous leading political figures, was a man of principle, not the common sort of fool to be taken in by such monkey-traps as so-called “practical politics” of the “left-right” variety.⁶⁷

Thus, during the entirety of the Twentieth century, the U.S.A., like western Europe, and the nations of the Americas to our south, has been dominated, from the top, by such a financier oligarchy. The chief partial exception to this rule, has been the increased emphasis on national-economy during periods either of general warfare, or strained preparations for the threat of general warfare.⁶⁸ Under these conditions of military preparations, the government has been disposed to impose such restrictions upon the behavior of the financier-oligarchs, as were seen as indispensable to the “national defense effort.” Thus, since the Hayes-Tilden election-compromise, when the spirit of the Confederacy began to be returned in significant numbers to seats in the U.S. Congress,⁶⁹ every upturn in the U.S. economy has come about only, either as a by-product of war-economy measures, or the Kennedy round of the U.S. aerospace “crash program.”

These same oligarchical methods of divide-and-rule are key to understanding the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift. It is to be emphasized, that except for the assumptions of agreement among the U.S.A., Britain, and Soviet Union, immediately following the 1962 Missile Crisis and ensuing assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the past thirty-odd years drift into a “post- industrial” utopianism, would not have been tolerated, even by most among those same liberal foundations, which led in funding the 1964-1972 upsurge of the university-campus youth-counterculture. The presumption, within Liberal-Establishment circles, that the kind of process of thermonuclear detente prescribed by Bertrand Russell’s cronies of the Pugwash Conference series, was securely emplaced by the combined effects of 1962 missile crisis and Kennedy assassination, signified, for those circles, the end of “crash program” science and technology in the context of national-defense mobilizations.⁷⁰ Thus, the first introduction of neo-Malthusian doctrines into U.S. foreign policy, and President Johnson’s savage budgetary cut-backs in the space-program, during 1966-1967, mark the crucial historic turning-point, the crucial downturn, in recent U.S. economic history.

Thus, through the entirety of history of the post-Fifteenth-century rise of Europe’s modern nation-states, and much of the existence of the U.S.A., too, these nations have been mixed economies, with the financier-oligarchical interest usually on top, and the patriotic, national-economy interest on the bottom. The patriots have been the exponents of dirigism, of large-scale infrastructure development, of universalizing social-security systems, and of forced-draft promotion of investment in scientific and technological progress. The financier-oligarchical interest has been, like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s band of Heritage Foundation-brainwashed yahoos, the proponent of a weakened national government, “free trade,” and primacy of unearned financial capital gains over taxation, and, also, over both the nation’s essential basic economic infrastructure, and industrial and agricultural profitability.

Thus, once again, too many allowed their foolish passions to mislead them into the single-issuism which oligarchs commonly use as bait for all varieties of monkeys, rabbits, and populist boobies, alike. Thus, since 1966-72, the welfare and cognitive powers of our citizens, especially of our younger citizens, have been sacrificed to the Mont Pelerin Society’s pagan god, the Moloch of “free trade,” in an era of neo-Malthusian, “post-industrial” “information society” and related utopianisms.⁷¹

It is in this context, that the cumulative, global economic impact of the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift, must be situated for rational comprehension.

The Yellow Brick Road To Hell

For purposes of first-approximation, let us construct a mental model of the U.S. contribution to that thirty-odd-year process which has led us all to the current, global, systemic collapse. There are principally two interconnected classes of processes to be considered. First, the formal, economic side of the process. Second, the passions which motivated this process of economic and cultural degeneration. The first, is best represented from the standpoint of “anti-entropy,” as we have identified that concept above. The second, turns our attention to the connected issues of passion which we have associated, above, with the principles of artistic experience.

The combined result: We discover, so, that, at the beginning of the recent thirty-odd years, the leading strata in today’s policy-making had turned from realities which terrified them, into the lollipop-land, called “Or-Whatever,” where pleasurable fantasies hung like fruit from every tree, a dream-land of make- believe. The promise which lured our Peter Pans of the mid-1960’s into a perpetual fairy-tale, where no sweet fruit was forbidden any child, and childhood never passed, now leers back, a mocking nightmare; the dream has become much worse than the fearful reality of that jungle they called “Don’t-Go-There,” from which they had fled. Their world of happy therapy-group hugs and squeezes, has turned out, to have been the most horrifying of wicked, middle-aged fairy-tales, a world of make-believe, become the “Yellow Brick Road to Hell.”

The formal-economic side of the process now to be considered, is represented by aid of reference to three distinct functions, as presented at a Jan. 17, 1998 conference in Crystal City, Virginia. The first of these three is, today, the rather widely recognized “Typical Collapse Function,” first presented in late 1995 [See Figure 2].⁷² The second, one typical form of business-cycle function [See Figure 3]. The third, the typical form of a normal, cyclical-crisis-free process of agro-industrial economic development [See Figure 4].

In the first two cases, a financier-oligarchical class, is usually the dominant political force in the shaping of a nation’s monetary and financial policies of practice. In the first case, the “typical collapse function,” the political and economic power of the leading opposition to the financial-oligarchical supremacy is collapsing; in the second case, the financier-oligarchy power is dominant most of the time, but is held in check by periodic upsurges of political resistance from the combined entrepreneurial and popular interests representing the standpoint of national-economy. In the third case, the interests of national economy predominate.

Define the most relevant terms of our study by reference to the first of these three figures, Figure 2. The construction of this Figure is premised upon the following, interconnected considerations.

1.  The Figure as a whole reflects the functional interconnectedness of the change in rate of change among three parameters: (a) A money-valuation applied to an aggregation of physical values expressed in terms of anti-entropy, as this was defined earlier in this report; (b) The circulation of currency which has been issued on the basis of physical-economic security implicitly pledged by the flow of physical-economic values (hard commodities plus education, health, and other science-related essential services) through the economy taken as a unit-whole; (c) The growth of nominal value of perceived financial assets based upon, chiefly, price-earnings-ratio considerations.
   
   
2. The term “physical-economic values” signifies the notion of those items of consumption which are functionally required to maintain an implicitly associated rate of growth of per-capita, per-square-kilometer productive powers of labor, at a specific time and place in the history of economy. This function is subsumed by the notion of “anti-entropy,” as the definition for that was given earlier in this report. This includes not only household consumption requirements so defined, but also per-capita, per- square-kilometer values for basic economic infrastructure, capital-intensity, energy-flux density, and level of science and technology (as the latter is defined in what are paradigmatically Riemannian terms). The rate of change of the ratio of actual physical-economic inputs to outputs, per-capita, then defines the curve (the lower of the three curves depicted in the Figure).
   
   
3. The per-capita value for physical-economic values, so determined functionally, is then assigned a money- price, corresponding to a current standard price for the required market basket of infrastructure, productive investment, household consumption, etc. The rate of change of this magnitude, then becomes the basis for comparison of the lower curve with other two curves of the Figure.
   
   
4. The middle curve, the monetary curve, is defined as follows:
   
   The issuance of a paper national currency, by, or authorized to be issued on behalf of a government, is a debt of that government. That issue incurs, thus, a charge against the physical-economic values of the market-basket, this according to a price reasonably assigned to the physical-economic items in that market- basket. In other words, real national output, is discounted in that manner, to that degree.
   
   In the case, that the issue of currency is, first, efficiently employed for the production and circulation of essential components of the physical economy, as the Massachusetts Bay devisors of their Seventeenth century paper currency intended, and, second, that the discount-rate on money issued is below the physical- economic rate of growth, there is no fault on this account. However, if the circulation of that currency is diverted from production and distribution of the requirements and products of the physical-economic process, then the discount incurred by use of money for other purposes, tends to assume a parasitical, pathological role. The precipitous collapse, since 1972, of the ratio of foreign-trade turnover to foreign-exchange turnover, from 1956-1970 trends, reflects the self-feeding growth of the parasitical factor in monetary circulation during the recent twenty-seven years [See Figure 5].
   
   
   
5. The third, uppermost curve, represents the growth of nominal financial assets/obligations, at prices corresponding to current monetary prices. However, the principal factor in recent decades growth of these magnitudes, has been leveraged financial speculation, typified by the successive, post-1982 roles of cancerous “junk bond” issues, and the post-1987 domination of world finance by what are purely and simply gambler’s “side bets,” called “derivatives.” These “derivatives,” simulate actual financial values, for both debtor and creditor, by means of the arbitrary presumption, that expected financial capital gains actually determine a realisable price of the title to that nominal asset.
   

The fact, that that financial asset, and the gains associated with it are purely fictitious, is the first problem incurred in that way. The price of the nominal asset is fictitious, because it exists merely as a reflection of a price-earnings ratio. The price of a capital gain in such a nominal asset, is, therefore, doubly fictitious: essentially, as the teller of fairy-tales must admit, it is only play-money, traded to the credulous for real, all in a dream-world game of make-believe.

In the indefinite continuation of any economic process, in which the monetary system is dominated by the harvesting of purely fictitious financial capital gains as financial-monetary assets, either a cyclical, or systemic collapse must result.⁷³

In the cases corresponding to Figure 2, the three curves are participants in an interconnected manifold. The maintenance of the financial bubble, demands accelerating the flow of monetary aggregates into maintaining the rate of growth of the financial bubble. The expansion of the flow of monetary aggregate occurs at the price of a growing discount of the real economy’s combined current and accumulated real physical values. In the case, that financial speculation is favored over long-term investment in scientific and technological progress, the net productive flow in the real economy will soon fall below the anti-entropic zero-point, into an entropic phase, as has been the case for the U.S. economy since about the point of the 1970 Chrysler and Penn Central crises. Beyond that point, the continuation of the process occurs solely through net primitive accumulation, looting stored-up values in order to generate the monetary flows required to sustain speculative capital-gains growth of what converges, increasingly, upon a pure financial bubble.

Hence, the post-1971 form of world economy, taken as a whole, has been a downward spiral into a global, systemic, “breakdown” crisis.

Turn to Figure 3. Here, again, the three curves are functionally interconnected, but the conditions of interconnection are characteristically different than in the first case. In the alternative case, typical of the U.S. economy, for example, over the course of the 1789-1966 interval, the same tendency toward financier-driven, entropic destruction of the national (and world) economies exists. The difference is, that as long as political and related social forces regard the defense of growth and technological improvement of productive powers of labor in the real, physical economy, as indispensable, this political-cultural factor acts as a brake against the adoption of the kind of “post-industrial” utopianism which is the distinctive trend-feature of the 1966-1998 interval to date. In that case, the society’s intolerance toward the financier interests’s impulse for radical austerity measures, results in the partial collapse of the financier bubble, wiping out a sufficient amount of speculative financial capital, to permit a resumption of investment in real economic growth. Hence, the political and related cultural determination of the cyclical nature of modern industrial economy since European history’s early Sixteenth century.

Turn to Figure 4. In this case, too, the three curves are functionally interconnected, but the conditions of interconnection differ crucially from those in either of the preceding types of cases. If a national economy is organized as Alexander Hamilton⁷⁴ and the Friedrich List Society’s Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach⁷⁵ presented the case, there is no inherent reason for either a cyclical or systemic crisis at any time in that economy’s future. Policies of using credit to foster full employment in increasing the society’s per-capita productive powers of labor, through the combination of investment in development of necessary basic economic infrastructure and scientific and technological advances in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, have the deflationary effect of lowering the percentile of total output required to satisfy the increasing physical-economic needs of households and the rising capital-intensity and energy-density of production and distribution generally. Thus, not only do most products become cheaper, in monetary terms, despite improvements in quality, but the cost of living is reduced, as a percentile of output, under conditions that the physical standard of living of households rises. The tendency is, that the economies which have the highest standard of living for their labor-force, have the highest rates of profitability, and the societies with the “cheapest labor” represent, therefore, the relatively poorest opportunities for investment.

Under those conditions, the relative quantity of physical-economy aggregate, increases more rapidly than the monetary aggregate associated with it, but the defensible financial aggregate grows, reflecting the relatively superior performance, per capita, of the economy which has made more effective use of investment in scientific and technological progress.

Thus, the greatest periods of improvement in the living standard and culture of the U.S.A., have been those in which we least resembled the policies of Britain, and our rates of decline in living conditions and culture, are associated with periods in which British thinking gained relatively more sympathy among the policy-shaping circles of our government and private entrepreneurships.

There were two relevant qualities of those Baby Boomers on university campuses during the 1964-1972 interval.⁷⁶ One was a product of middle-class suburbia: “avoid forms of employment in which you get your hands dirty; don’t let the smelly blue-collar people succeed in dragging you down to their level.” The other was a by-product of the nuclear terror which permeated their childhood and youth, especially after the 1962 missile-crisis; this might be labelled “the mad scientist syndrome”: “science and technology are usually bad for you.” Not by means of any mere coincidence, these induced prejudices were a parody of H.G. Wells’ science-fictional wars against “the Morlochs.” 1964 saw the publication of a manifesto known as “The Triple Revolution,” which sought to bring these two irrational prejudices together, as axioms of a new utopian fantasy, a form of “post-industrial” utopia most commonly listed today under the rubric of “information society.” Since “information” does not really have physical existence (except in the realm of make-believe called “virtual reality”), use of it will never soil one’s hands.⁷⁷ Thus, the cornerstone for the Baby Boomer fantasy-world of make-believe was lain.

This animus against reality had a third element: the variety of cultural pessimism often traced, to French degenerates such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, through Friedrich Nietzsche and Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, from Arthur Schopenhauer. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is also a relevant point of reference for Baby Boomers deranged by their own irrational rages. These fascist philosophical currents from the Adolf Hitler period, and its immediate aftermath, are, indicatively, relatively hegemonic, “politically correct” items, in relevant university departments today. The nub of the matter is best identified by Nazi Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness,” something like the feral dogma of irrationalist Ayn Rand, and actually a throw-back to the variety of “Clockwork Orange”-style anarchism typical of the political and musical impulses shared by the partnership of Richard Wagner and N. Bakunin. For the latter type, society is the enemy per se. The latter is the same nihilist impulse expressed by Congressman Newt Gingrich’s collection of hyperventilating specimens, trooping, glassy-eyed, down the street, in January 1995, from the brainwashing sessions at the Heritage Foundation, toward their seats in the Congress. Reality, anyone? From the existentialists of the 1964-1972 Baby Boomer ranks, the reply came: “Don’t go there.”

Thus, we have four axiomatic presumptions:

1. Industry and blue-collar workers are Morlochs.
   
   
2. Science and Technology are against nature. Science, by definition, seeks universal truths. Therefore, science is intrinsically authoritarian: science, like all forms of reason, is, therefore, “fascist,” and, perhaps worse, masculine.
   
   
3. We must replace factories and science with “information.”
   
   
4. Society itself is the enemy of the moral and cultural relativism which we adore as the “politically correct” quality of pluralism. There is no truth; feeling good or bad about things, is everything.
   

The array of assumptions featuring these four reactionary mantras, become, year by year, since 1964, the Procrustean bed on which existing and proposed policies, alike, are chopped or tortured into conformity with so-called “political correctness.” From this vantage-point, society is no longer society, but, rather a collection of a special notion of “interest groups,” a Rainbow coalition of groups and groupuscles, a political-social slime-mold, cultural-warlord parodies of primitive tribes. Each particle has it own peculiar array of emotional prejudices, which it demands be respected as “givens,” on no more authority than that these happen to be the momentary prejudices of a particular pseudo-tribe. Politics becomes, more and more, a combination of, on the one side, steering a pathway of minimal conflict among the mutually irreconcilable beliefs of the sundry components of this social slime-mold. On the other side, the challenge is, to fool the fools, and, thus, to manipulate them.

As we have, once again, identified the case, earlier in this report, the method for showing the connection between such mantras and the physical effects produced by the mantras’ impact on policy-shaping, is to treat each of the mantras as a postulate of the hypothesis which regulates the relevant topical area of policy-shaping. Thus, these mantras, as added postulates, become a condition which must be satisfied by each and every policy of the policy-theorem-set generated. No generated policy is allowed to violate (contradict) the implications of any among such mantra-postulates.

Thus, such mantras transform what had been a viable policy-shaping structure, into a dynamo of economic-cultural catastrophe. To wit, the present, global, systemic crisis now deeply enmired in its own terminal phase. The point is, that the indicated mantras, and others like them, are intrinsically, axiomatically entropic influences. A culture which can not rid itself of such mantras, is a culture which has lost the moral fitness to survive.

If, Then, the Revolution Comes

Plato, like the Apostle Paul, placed the quality of agape¯ in the highest rank. For the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, agape¯ is expressed as the alternative to erotic passion, as the quality of passion associated with love for realization of justice. On this account, is it also, by necessary implication, the passion to discover and defend truth, and the passion for beauty, as Classical art typifies artistic beauty. For the Christian, the notions of truth, justice, and beauty, are premised upon the recognition of the nature of the human individual, each, by virtue of the potential of cognition, made, man and women, in the image of the Creator. Upon the passion of agape¯, so rooted in one’s love for the nature of oneself and one’s neighbors, the measure of all other values is premised.

Unfortunately, the actually living persons who are ruled by this passion called agape¯, are ordinarily a terribly tiny ration of the population of any nation, up to this time. Thus, for most of the time, the development of the truthful ideas, through which justice is once more secured, is the special province of a relatively tiny number of individuals within any portion of the population. As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley sought to convey the notion, in his essay “In Defence of Poetry,” respecting the poets and philosophers of a great people, he points out, that, only in exceptional times, the rare times of a quickening of the capacity for profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature, does a large ration of the population rally around its poets and philosophers, to do a great good for justice. Most of the time, the torches of truth and justice are borne by a fragile few.

Most of the time, most of the people, live in fearful awe of that which they take to be ensconced authority. If they fear the wrath of that perceived authority, the people will not speak publicly, or, perhaps even dare to think the thought which might offend ensconced authority. Mostly, people cautiously profess to believe what they consider it opportune to be overheard professing, and to do what they think they must, to propitiate established authority. Thus, the overwhelming majority, live, are sheared, and die, as a kind of political sheep.

There are exceptions to this general tendency. Happy exceptions, and terrible ones. We limit ourselves here to the happier sort of exception.

How long will a people tolerate a perceived, prolonged, unbearable injustice? How long will they accept the official lies which serve as the mirror of popular opinion in which injustice admires itself? Approximately this past November, we saw a sudden change, modest in scale and intensity, but not less definite, for all that. Since then, this impulse has continued, even in western Europe and the United States, even after the credulous deluded themselves, that rising New York Stock Exchange prices signalled the crisis to have ended. Those who were deluded, were fewer after mid-January, than than before mid-October. There is a new quality of ferment afoot, in the U.S.A., as in numerous other parts of the world.

Nothing encourages a down-trodden, frightened people more, than signs that the oppressing monster’s feet (or, perhaps, head) of clay, are beginning to crumble. What the crisis of mid-October 1997 through mid-January 1998 signalled, was the fact that the present world financial system has, as a canny Scot might say, a fey look about it. As no man has more numerous perceived faults than a fallen tyrant, so a long-oppressed people find it easier to perceive the warts on the nose of a ruler who has become unsteady on his throne, than a power taken at its prime. To the degree that ordinary people find it easier to associate truthfulness with the perceived position of authority of a speaker, than with any other grounds, so, the signs of weakening of entrenched authority’s grip on power, open the popular mind to truths it prudently refused to consider at an earlier time.

In short, the ruling financial-monetary system of this planet exposed itself as a wavering, failed system, on the edge of toppling. Those governments, and other powerful institutions which had cast their lot with the wavering system, were also eyed with a thought to early retirement of those authorities, too. In short, suddenly, minds began to open to possibilities not so readily considered up to that point.

Old grudges against cruel policies, suddenly came to life. Proposed new policies, which had been received earlier with the rebuke to militant silence, began to be discussed. In the pores of society, at seemingly all discernible levels of social status, an increasing tendency to organize around discussion of ideas, was to be seen.

To summarize the point: The generation of former university students, which had marched through the institutions, to occupy most among today’s high-ranking positions of power in society, is no longer the virtually unchallenged pace-setter in national and global policies. The cults of “political correctness,” the world of make-believe into which the frightened ’Sixty-Eighters had fled, are no longer the unchallenged wave of the future they might have appeared to be as recently as a few months ago. The essential quality of the new cultural paradigm-shift, which emerged with the crisis events of this past year-end, is a sense that the New Age has shown itself to be a deadly fantasy, a yearning to abandon that failed fantasy, for a new cultural paradigm, fairly to be described as a flight back to physical-economic and correlated reality.

At this moment, the full import of the crisis has yet to be impressed upon the currently dominant strata of the world’s financial moguls. For the moment, these creatures are behaving like a Jacobin mob, demanding that governments bail them out of their bankruptcy, “or else.” That phase will pass. The coming new rounds of global crisis will topple a good chunk of those enraged moguls, and humble a sizable number among those who survive long enough to slide into bankruptcy in the ensuing next round. The word which fits all sizes, now, is “change.” Whatever it is today, it will be somewhat different very soon. Meanwhile, the new cultural paradigm-shift, the back-to-reality paradigm-shift, is the changed political opportunity to which wise statesmen will hitch the destiny of their nations.

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