Classical Greek Tragedy,
and Today's Breakdown of Civilization

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 14, 2008

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The question to which this answer responds, is included at the end of this exposition by Lyndon LaRouche.

Coincidentally, the essential features of the specifically required. but also rather long response to your question, had already been delivered by me at yesterday's (Oct. 11) usual Saturday mid-morning discussions. Unfortunately the only available publication of that available at this moment, is a computer-generated, rushed print-out of a discussion among a room full of delegated associates, as their discussion was recorded, by a common microphone, as published within today's regular international, internal morning briefing. The meeting was long. The interventions following my opening remarks, were numerous, largely impromptu, and by relatively many among those present; the over-night print-out was supplied only to the membership of the association.

So, in reply to your challenging question, I restate the same argument to you now; I summarize the point which I had stated here in that way.

I summarize the same argument I delivered then and there, but only in those parts which bear specifically on the implications of your question. The element of that argument which I presented, as the chief topic, then and there, is probably the most important single utterance made by anyone, until now, on the very advanced stage of the presently ongoing world economic and cultural breakdown-crisis. Therefore, what I stated, in the piece your message referenced, is a concept of the utmost immediate, historic importance for both present and future generations of the world at large. I restate the same conception here, in this reply to your question.

The subject of my leading part in that back-and-forth discussion of last Saturday morning, was a view of the present phase of the onrushing, world breakdown-crisis which has been in progress since the close of July 2007. This past Saturday, I presented the present state of that collapse then, by comparing the historical lesson to be adduced from that Classical Greek tragedy which was rooted, essentially, in references to the Iliad, when the Iliad is read in terms of the significance of the fact under every U.S. government during the entire sweep of every U.S. fiscal year, over forty years, from October 1968 to October 2008.

During that latter time, the U.S. economy has undergone, consistently, what has been, in fact, an accelerating breakdown in the physical economy, of not only the United States in particular, but also of each and all of the nations of Europe considered collectively, every year, in each and all years, during that entire interval of four decades.

Throughout that period, the characteristic feature of the U.S. monetary-financial system has been that the U.S. dollar became essentially an appendage of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialist system dollar which has become, more and more, a subsumed feature of the British imperial financier-oligarchical system since that change which occurred during the 1968-1973 interval, and most emphatically, the 1968-1981 interval.

That four decades interval, 1968-2008, represents a pattern of systemic failure, which has now reached the point of a general, planetary economic, social, cultural breakdown of the world economy as a whole. This fact, which I emphasize here, defines the immediate challenge which will determine the early outcome of this present crisis for the future of mankind everywhere on this planet.

The point to be emphasized, in prefacing the following elements of my argument in reply, is that the fate of civilization on this planet will depend, for a long time to come, on the possibility of the present months' adoption of a technically appropriate sort of reaction to the thesis which I summarize, afresh, for you here, as to others, as I did during yesterday's session.

Meanwhile, in no part of the world today, including Russia, for example, does the presently governing body of opinion have any systemically competent, alternate approach to my own, either to defining the root of the presently onrushing general, planetary breakdown crisis, or presenting what would be a decently conceived alternative to the present policies. In other words, get the passengers out of the cabins and off the decks of the sinking financial S.S. Titanic, or all will, piteously, drown.

The Global Breakdown of 1968-2008

Look at the specific kind of downward trend in the Trans-Atlantic cultures during the 1968-2008 interval, as anthropologists, among other relevant specialties, would examine any set of species (e.g., mammals vs. marsupials) which exhibited a consistent, approximately continental, or even world-wide, catastrophically downward trend in its factors of potential relative population-density over four successive generations. In such a case, the question is implicitly posed: how has that kind of population (e.g., order of living creatures) lost what had once been its earlier interval of moral and other fitness to survive?

There is no margin of error that I might be mistaken in the view of the situation which I presented to that Saturday morning meeting. When we take into account the physical, as distinct from the increasingly illusory, reported financial and finance-based statistics, my characterization of the 1968-2008 interval, is functionally authoritative beyond competent points of objection from any source.

In physical terms, the potential relative population-density of the planet, as measured per capita and per square kilometer, has been declining at a generally accelerating rate during each and all of these forty years. World hunger is but one crucially significant reflection of this. This is a decline which is obvious even in bare, superficial statistics, among the Trans-Atlantic nations, when these are considered, dynamically, as a set. But since the growth in other nations of the world depends crucially on their participation in what has been the ruling, 1971-2008 Anglo-Dutch, radically Liberal state of financier-oligarchical imperium, the presently onrushing collapse in the Trans-Atlantic sector, spells the threatened, virtually inevitable, consequent physical-economic and demographic catastrophe lurching now, to strike the remainder of the planet.

This decline is expressed by a combination of looting of natural resources (which could and should have been replenished through scientific progress), and by a cumulatively savage wrecking of the infrastructure, and shrinking of the ration of the population employed in physically productive employment, and per-capita physical productivity, during every year of every decade, over the course of the recent four decades. In other words, the trend in policy-shaping among each and all governments, has been fatally errant in intended outcome, during each and all among those years, as much as the span of forty-year development as a whole.

None of this tragic ruin of the world's economy was in any way inevitable for any reason but a combination of systemically (rather than merely occasional) bad decisions, and of related moral disorientation of populations. This disorientation would not have occurred, except for what is identified, technically, as a downward-directed, cultural paradigm-shift steered chiefly from London, but an influence also exerting increasing influence, and even control, over the policies of practice of the United States and of other trans-Atlantic nations during the course of the entire post-World War II interval. This was a degeneration of the culture of the trans-Atlantic nations, most emphatically, during the recent four, potentially fatal decades.

During 1969-1973, under U.S. President Nixon, the longer, post-Franklin Roosevelt trend which I have just identified, had been fully replaced by a decades-long phase of net collapse of the world's physical economy, especially in the Trans-Atlantic sector. It grew worse during the course of the 1974-1989 interval, and became catastrophic when U.S. President George H.W. Bush (Sr.) chose to support Britain's shrieking Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in using the circumstance of the political collapse of the Soviet Union to loot all of Europe, and to accelerate the looting and decadence inside the U.S.A. itself, and also the former Comecon and Soviet Union, even more savagely, throughout the 1991-2000 decade.

During 1969-1988, the economic and related policies of the U.S.A. turned virtually insane; later, from 1990 on, under the influence of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the reigning policies became absolutely insane. Under nominal President George H. Bush, Jr., our U.S.A. has been economically, and otherwise, a raving psychotic in every conceivable way. At the top of the national political institutions, that condition prevails to the present moment of writing.

The fact, that what had been the technologically most advanced part of the world, the trans-Atlantic part, could have fallen so far below the accomplishments in economic gains and morality achieved through struggles led, during 1932-early 1945, by President Franklin Roosevelt, to become as thoroughly debased as Anglo-Dutch Liberalism-dominated trans-Atlantic society has become now, can not be explained away by allegations that the problems of today are reflections of merely one or more mistakes which had been made along the way by some heads of state and some installed governments. In any such case, the problem is a persistently pervasive moral and intellectual corruption of the culture of those nations as a whole, virtually the world in its entirety, throughout the entirety of the 1968-2008 interval to present date.

The best way in which to introduce the needed discussion of such a pathological development, is, both, by reading the tragic history of Classical Greece in the shadow of the earlier developments associated with the Homeric Iliad, and, after that, by approaching the study of relevant kinds of patterns in mass human cultural behavior, as I do here, from the standpoint of the rise of the mammals to replace, largely, the marsupials in even those continents and islands which they had virtually dominated earlier.

I proceed along that track as follows.

The Principle of Tragedy

The foolishness of most recent generations' teaching of what were taught as the principles of Classical drama, such as that of ancient Classical Greece, as, still, in trans-Atlantic cultures, today, is the empiricist's popularization of the essentially silly, Romantic, virtually Cartesian misconception known as "the tragic individual hero." For our purposes today, limit our attention to the roots and influence of the wide belief in the hoax of the so-called individual "Romantic hero in tragedy" to its immediate roots in the modern European, Ockhamite empiricism of the followers of the Servite monk Paolo Sarpi, the same Sarpi whose personal legacy continues to exert the relatively greatest influence on the cultures of modern, Trans-Atlantic cultures today.

The effect of this influence of Paolo Sarpi, is to be located in the modern Romantics' assumed, but vastly mistaken view of the relationship of the influence of the actual Homeric Iliad, a mistake which has shaped the present, generally accepted misreading of the body of tragedy associated with later Classical Greek drama. Here is the location of the core of all cultural development in ancient and modern European culture, and its trans-Atlantic offshoots, still today. It is, in fact, the comprehension of the function of that concept of Greek tragedy, which distinguishes the vanishing species of competent modern historians (and strategists) from the so-called "historians" who are. in fact, essentially chroniclers, even, worst of all, statisticians and newspaper and magazine publishers, rather than true representatives of the tradition of Classical historians and strategists, today.

To remedy that generally accepted misreading of the Classical Greek matter, one need only ask oneself, "What is really happening in the poetical, literary account of actual history echoed by the Iliad?" In other words, what is the reality which corresponds to the Homeric account as an echo of the relevant real-life history of the period of the siege of Troy? Then, consider the continuation of the Iliad's characters and themes in the Greek tragedies of the later Classical period. What went wrong with ancient Classical Greece? In what way, was the victory over Troy Classically a disaster? What, in this light, is the real significance of that principle of Classical tragedy which most modern pedagogues and related critics fail utterly to recognize in their customary discussion of the so-called "tragic leader"?

In the instance of the modern, Trans-Atlantic civilization dated, approximately, from the assembling of the mid-Fourteenth-Century, great ecumenical Council of Florence, the essential internal conflict of ideas within European and Trans-Atlantic cultures has been between the dynamic view of social and other lawful processes traced from the work of the Pythagoreans and Plato, as also of Leibniz, the American founders, and Riemann, on the one side, and, on the opposing side, the leading variety of contrary current associated with the influence of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism's financier-imperialist culture of today. There are no significantly leading planet-wide cultures existing today other than these two adversaries, adversaries usefully identified as representing the conflict between Cartesian reductionism, such as the intrinsic irrationalism of British empiricism, on the one side, and the dynamic method revived for modern Europe, explicitly, by Gottfried Leibniz, as continued, most notably, in the work of Bernhard Riemann.

To understand the crisis in globally extended European cultural influences today, we must examine the tragic legacy of the Iliad in this light - - the light of social dynamics, rather than the sundry reductionist sociologies currently afoot. There, in that outlook, lies the true key to understanding the Classical principle of tragedy, as dynamic, and specifically Riemannian, rather than Cartesian.

Read the Iliad again: perhaps as Chapman's Homer.

We are confronted with an interrelationship between two populations. These are not Greeks versus Trojans; they are the gods, chiefly of Olympus, rather than real-life men and women. It is the gods, with the most notable exception of Athena, who are the force of evil impelling mortal men and women to tragic ends, from the age of Homer through the dramas of Aeschylus et al. It is the wicked Olympian gods and demi-gods, whispering in the ears of the mere mortals, who create the passions and the specific fears which guide the credulous to destroy themselves for the pleasure of the gods who play with the credulous as virtual toys.

So it is, with all true tragedies, such as the tragedy of the world at large during, most emphatically, the recent four decades.

Something inside each mortal player's mind is whispering to that dupe. Fear of the wrath of, and desire for the advantage of the evil gods, is the essential dynamic of the tragedy which must be considered only as in its entirety. It is rejection of the whispering voices of those wicked in the mortal imagination, which is indispensable for the rescue of a civilization from the evil outcome on whose behalf the evil gods conspire. In all great real-life tragedies, such as the succession of major warfare, and its auxiliary conflicts, over the interval since the 1890 ouster of Germany's Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck, it is the whispering of the evil gods, specifically the Anglo-Dutch Liberal priesthood, which has caused all of the major ruin the peoples of this planet have suffered over the entire sweep of 1890-2008 to present date. Only credulous fools, especially fools in high places, are to be blamed for permitting the evil whispering gods of popular opinions to encourage the brutish follies which have tormented mankind as a whole during this span.

There is no tragic hero in real-life history. There is only the heroic leader who comes near to success in going against the pricks of the always foolish prevalent popular culture from which all great wars and kindred afflictions arise.

For example, as in Friedrich Schiller's tragedy of Don Carlos, as in real-life Sixteenth-Century Spain as a whole, there was not a single leader within, or placed near a position of power to defeat the evil embodied in the Adolf Hitler-like Grand Inquisitor. It is the successful election of the popular mis-leader which affirms the tragic force of evil in any nation's history; it is the lack, or elimination of an available potential leader who would have gone against the pricks.

It is only nations which reject the quality of competent leadership which bring doom upon themselves. It is always, as Plato, for example, understood, such leaders, as the ancient Christian martyrs, upon which the forces of doom focus their hatred, whose elimination ensures the doom of the nation which submits to the will of leading figures who serve what are essentially the same whispering evil gods of the tragedy of ancient Classical Greece. The relevant forces of evil are, like the prevalent gods of the ancient Trojan wars and the Sophist voices of Classical Greece, not the origin, but the exemplification of the evil which has come to occupy the leading position of influence and rule of that society.

It is those evil gods which we must now destroy, or, at least, rid our nations' leaderships of, if the world is not, now, in the process of a very early collapse into the worst dark age of all humanity in the known history of mankind.

Answer your own question to me in those terms of reference. Those who choose to support would-be leaders which appear to be predetermined winners, are the true worshipers of the evil which brings the worst times upon the peoples of nations foolish enough to admire such leaders.

Footnotes:

1. In considering Europe as a whole, we must take into account the fact, that there have been shifts of wealth among nations, as from Russia into Europe and the U.S.A. during the pre-Putin 1990s, and a relatively reversed shift under Putin, and, until recently, under Medvedev.

IN REPLY TO:

Hi, You hate to give anyone credit in this disaster market, but Larouche's call that the markets were doomed placed him among the few voices of reason in the wilderness. Now, everyone will steal his ideas and rebrand them as their own. And the blackout against him will continue. They won't announce or name Larouche. He has a radical and hard to swallow interpretation of history, authoritarian like personality when compared with Swiss cheese Pelosi and other New Age boomers. They can't swallow Larouche because his history is not always verifiable and he says things that don't even process with modern day historians let alone politicians. Even as we plunge deeper, his name won't be mentioned in the US...unbelievable...They will mention Ron Paul who also condemned these financial markets, but because he stops short in his analysis, he's only partially blacked out.

Just when Larouche seems to be making a breakthrough, he spends a large portion of his speech suggesting that Bush will turn troops on the US population and pushes "independents" away..Throughout his history, it's the same pattern...People agree 80% with what he says, but would rather face imminent doom than support him over the 20% they find appalling and unfounded...they would rather go down in flames than support the 80% than swallow the 20%...That is his history--constantly having to influence the system from the sideline because of the 80/20 rule and his use of the word "agent." Please tell me that I am wrong here.... Please send this to Larouche and tell him I said he's a pretty good forecaster.