The relevance of the subject of well-tempered scales to our general sub-topic here is that the author and his collaborators have demonstrated that the discovery of the well-tempered principle depends upon the point of departure of a conception equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and is determined precisely by projection of a self-similar conic spiral onto the circular base of the cone. The implication of this demonstration is that such notions arise "naturally" from applying the verb "to create" to a rigorous study of astronomical evidence. Although we can merely infer, if rigorously so, that ideas in this direction were implicit in the pre-Vedic arctic culture, we have more precise indications to related effect from the interaction of the Egyptian temple of Ammon with classical Greek culture, as well as leading internal features of Mosaic Judaism. The specific kind of monotheism of both the temple of Ammon and Moses converges, at least, upon the consubstantial doctrine of monotheism of Plato's Timaeus. The essential part which the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis performs in the Timaeus, and the interdependence of that with geometrical notions rooted in a version of the isoperimetric principle is rigorously demonstrated. It is only necessary, if we are to make such argument conclusive, to show that in Plato's classical Greek, for example, the verb "to be" is sometimes employed in the self-reflexive form of "It causes itself to become". If physical geometry is defined by a notion equivalent to the isoperimetric principle, and if the evidence so ordered is defined as data from the standpoint of the verbal, rather than the nominative form, the rigorous development of astronomy for aid of wide-ranging navigation is adequate empirical basis for discovering the existence of a monotheism like Plato's from the evidence of nature. This is not to project such an advanced form of monotheism upon the pre-Vedic arctic civilization of interest to Tilak. It is only to indicate that such an urban maritime culture was on the track leading toward such advanced notions. Otherwise, it indicates the reasons why the development of the well-tempered system in music tends to reflect the course of development in such directions. In the same vein, we must compare the degraded conception of man and nature embedded in the writing of Hesiod with the heroic conception of man of the Iliad and Odyssey, the latter conception better, more clearly defined by Aeschylus. Aeschylus's Prometheus rejects the evil gods of Hesiod's pantheon as usurpers, and references a higher power, implicitly the Composer of Plato's Timaeus. It is provocative to read what Diodorus Siculus reports the ancient Atlas people to say of the Hesiodic pantheon, that all these supposed gods were nothing more than a principally rascally collection of fellows whose civil strife destroyed the culture of the urban maritime colonization of their region. As corroborated by Manetho's king lists for Egypt, the victorious scalawags of that ancient Moroccan strife employed their maritime culture to colonize regions of the Mediterranean, imposing the worship of their ancestors and associated mythologies upon the credulous subjects of these colonies. The Hesiodic pantheon was evil enough. The substratum upon which that pantheon is superimposed embodies the essential evil, the anti-Logos principle. This substratum is the Chaldean-Philistine system associated with worship of the earth goddess (Shakti, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Cybele) and her phallic-symbol son (Siva, Osiris, Satan, Dionysos) and also with a third male figure (Horus, Lucifer, Apollo, etc.). This substratum is the irrationalistic, hedonistic doctrine of "blood and soil". Together, the Hesiodic sort of pantheon and the substratum, define the characteristic theology of oligarchical culture. The Hesiodic pantheon symbolizes the capricious tyrannies of a degraded, squabbling collection of families of an ancient "jet set". The philosophical world outlook congruent with such ordering of society is the degraded belief-structure exemplified by the cult of Isis-Osiris-Horus. The contrast between the Promethean man of Judeo-Christian monotheism and the degraded man in the alternating images of Apollo and Dionysos, is paradigmatic for the deeper study of cultures. The first approximates a culture based on the principle of the Good, the latter cultures based on the principle of Evil. The development of mankind according to the ordering principle provided by the first coincides with the cited injunction of the Book of Genesis: mankind must "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it". The fulfillment of this injunction is measured as increase of potential relative population density. The study of advances in technology, by means of which this injunction is fulfilled, compels us to probe the principles of discovery common to successive advances in technology. This obliges us to advance toward discovery and mastery of the notion of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. Good is the principle of beauty and love, akin to the joy of a child in discovering new knowledge to replace earlier beliefs. Joy and beauty are a world of such surprises, a world of ironies which are beautiful because they are lawful. This beauty is a sense of freedom. Not freedom to violate the law, but freedom to discover the limitless advancement of human knowledge and of the human condition available to mankind through mastery of the law. Evil is the principle of the wicked child's rage against the parents who threaten to "interfere" with the impulses of infantile, irrationalistic hedonism. Evil is therefore essentially hateful against Reason and all that Reason implies; it is the dionysian terrorist's hatred against Reason and against the urban culture which destroys the bestial freedom of fang and claw of the wilderness. Evil is Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Good in culture is the rule of prometheans over the apollonians and dionysians. Good in the individual is the subjugation of the evil of infantilism within himself - the enslavement of the Apollo and Dionysos within himself. On this account, the Good culture is "authoritarian" in the hate-filled eyes of the Nazi follower of Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, "authoritarian" because it represents Reason's "suppression" of infantile bestiality, irrationalism, by Reason. To all good men, a society according to the model of Sparta - the freedom of the beast unleashed in the form of man - is an evil tyranny, from which mankind must be liberated. So evil modern men, like Nietzsche, hate Friedrich Schiller, hate Socrates, and are determined to eradicate from culture the image of Jesus Christ, as Adolf Hitler was so determined. Human culture is primarily the struggle of Good to eradicate Evil from this world. It is not a Manichean struggle, to be foreseen as alternate periods of rule by Apollo and Dionysos over endless eras. It is a struggle to eradicate Evil from culture, and to eradicate therefore cultures which are evil. It is at the same time, a struggle to define the process by which the evil of the newborn infant, that infant's irrationalistic hedonism, is brought under the control of and ultimately destroyed by the spark of the divine, the potential for Reason in that same infant. It is in that latter respect that the principles of culture, as we have thus far described those principles, determine what is more or less conventionally identified by the term culture in scholarly opinion. Culture is the elaboration of a principle, which principle is more or less Good or Evil, to shape both the education of the infant, child, and adolescent in society, and to shape also the body of ideas of practice which the adults employ to educate the young. Culture is essentially the development of the potentialities of the new individual, essentially through his or her sixteenth to eighteenth birthday, as Wilhelm von Humboldt's program for primary and secondary education addresses this principle. Otherwise, culture is the developing body of ruling ideas, according to this principle, which governs the aggregate practice of a society composed of individuals whose potentials have been developed in that way. The general approach required for a science of culture applies the conceptions we have thus far developed to the outline afforded by Dante's Commedia, together with other writings focussed upon the same issues. What culture is, is measured first by finding the place on the "ladder" of the Commedia on which that culture is located, and at the same time, determining whether the motion of that culture is up or down the ladder. SM-LL-42,43&44
A fixed culture is at once characterized by codes of conduct which are on relatively higher or lower rungs of the ladder as codes of conduct by the group within society, such that a group within the lower rungs of "Purgatory" of this sort is to be preferred to such a group on the rungs of the "Inferno". Yet, the relatively moral grouping of such fixedness is at best deceptively moral; it is incapable of true love, as a cultural type, and is moral only by means of negativity - Kant's negation of the negation - and is therefore a society which often uses its morality as a license for great, immoral acts of cruelty in the name of punishing offenders who breach the code. It is a society which keeps order by keeping its members in pigpens, moral pigstys called "homes" usually. It is either a dionysian society, as a society of Raskolniki (Old Believers of Russia) must be, or an apollonian society of bestial Cadmuses wearing their Sunday clothes on way to church meeting. It is English Victorian society, which butchers and loots entire colonial nations, but which renders outcast a woman who shows an ankle in public, or a man who speaks publicly of the fact that ladies also walk on legs. It is like the society of Lady Chatterly, a respectable British lady with certain habits which are not made public by gentlemen. It is an apollonian sort of Victorian society whose characteristic collective productions are the sodomic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, theosophical Lucifer-worshipping cults, John Stuart Mill's doctrine of irrationalist hedonism (utilitarianism), and the dionysiac Fabian Society of philosophical mass-murderers H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and so forth. The divine spark of humanity is development congruent with the principle of hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. The moral potential so expressed, moral as it is adopted as the central principle of social identity by societies, by cultural currents within society, or by individuals, is the characteristic feature of the sense of personal identity - to greater or lesser degree. It is the absence, or suppression of that spark which is evil. The individual's moral conflict with his peers presents us, in the extreme, with two opposite moral types, the potential martyr and the criminal personality. An individual who rises morally above the potential of an "infernal" or lower rung "purgatorian" society or peer group, is much like the legendary "ugly duckling", as if a creature of a higher moral species than those among whom he or she is immediately situated, an "eccentric", whose supposed "eccentricity" is feared as an alien thing among the peers. Without a social mooring in a peer group appropriate to his or her moral nature, the "ugly duckling" will become "eccentric" in fact; lacking a peer group of reference, corresponding to his or her moral sense of identity, the "ugly duckling" will tend to construct an arbitrary culture as an individual, a culture which is for the "ugly duckling" the establishment of a culture superior to that of the immediate peers. The individual dionysian - the anarchist or existentialist personality - will also tend to create a "sub-culture" with reference to the peer group, by negating the authority of whatever morality happily characterizes the peer group; he acts against morality because it is morality, out of rage and hatred. The second principal class of conflicts between individual and peer group are of the form of conflicts between the individual's family household and society. This may be rooted in the differentiated morality among the households of a social stratum which otherwise participates in a common ethic. The most notable problematic features of such conflict are those rooted in the infantile personality's attachment to the "oedipal" image of the mother, either an actual mother or a transference of the idea of "mother" to an adopted surrogate, assigning this surrogate value either to a personality or a mere fantasy construct. To the infantile mind, "mother" protects the infantile ego from the obligation to be weaned socially. As long as the individual's sense of identity is "I am my mother's child", the authority of the infantile ego, the rejection of the social responsibilities of the weaned adult, is sustained. Most psychotic and neurotic behavior has, of course, this characteristic pathogenic core. This latter is the root of anarchism, existentialism, and so forth, as the autobiographical writings of the late Jean-Paul Sartre rather obscenely illustrate the point of connection. The pathological droolings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, or of Voltaire, exhibit the same pathology most shamelessly. The reek of incest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, is also illustrative. A special case of this pathological influence of the idea of family is provided by the oligarchical family's rearing of its offspring. The idea that such families are "the best people", destined to rule over their inferiors, and the placing of the capricious will of such family as a matter of imagined right over society, is nakedly Hesiodic. This applies not only to nominally aristocratic families of such dispositions, but also large strata of the U.S. rentier-financier patrician class, the so-called blue bloods. The republican principle, that all persons qualified to be citizens are politically equal as persons, members of the highest social rank tolerated in society, is not a "democratic" principle, but a political principle rooted in the harshest requirements of morality. Granted, societies require elites, but this only to the degree that someone must take efficiently leading responsibility for uplifting the majority of society not only to the moral qualifications of true citizens, but to assume the rights and responsibilities of true citizens. The republican elite never considers itself biologically superior to the rest of society, but only as the most dedicated servants of the betterment of society as a whole. In the families of such republican elites, the rearing of the child is directed toward successful weanings, as John Adams prudently entrusted the adolescent education of his son, John Quincy Adams, to the greatest republican figure of that time, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, this to the great benefit of the United States at a later point. By contrast, the oligarchical individual is a permanently infantile individual, by virtue of the idea associated with the "family". The similarities of the typical oligarchical mind to the criminal mind are functionally determined. SM-LL-47&48
Over the past four centuries, reductionist natural science has been mobilized on the side of political reaction at each moment of revolutionary social upheaval: Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century against the English Revolution, Buffon et al. against the French Revolution in the 18th century, Malthus against the rising British proletariat in the first half of the 19th century, Darwin and the social Darwinians in the second half of the 19th century against the First International and the Paris Commune, German-Italian fascist science in the first half of the 20th century against the Russian Revolution and upsurge in the advanced sector, Rockefeller-fostered "Zero Population Growth" in the last decade against the imminent potential for world revolution. In each instance of conjunctural crisis, the underlying terror that there is "no way out", i.e., the absence of a conception of man's creative potential to determine "progress" beyond the crisis point through scientific breakthroughs and social organization on a higher level, expresses itself in the political motif of "Every man for himself". Science as it exists for the mind of the empiricist, the mind which denies its own coherency, at such moments exposes its underlying vicious ideological prejudices by "coming out" of the laboratory - onto the side of reaction. SB-WH-13
The key is the measurement of usable energy available per square kilometer. The level of biological reproduction potential is determined by the minimum value reached by a continuous supply of usable energy per capita. In what aspect of food gathering culture at the most primitive level is the supply of usable energy for human existence sufficiently concentrated to permit qualitative increase in population density? The answer is fishing, especially fishing near the mouths of important river systems. The sequence of human development commonly given by anthropologists is: (1) hunting and gathering society (primitive society), (2) animal husbandry, (3) small garden patches supplementing animal husbandry, (4) agricultural revolution, (5) "hydraulic" society - urban culture based on water management near the mouths of large river systems. The Diodorus account and other evidence already cited give a different sequence: (1) fishing, (2) maritime culture leading into fixed urban settlements based on development of navigation through aid of astronomy, (3) development of the agricultural revolution by urbanized maritime society, (4) collapse of wide-ranging maritime culture shifting the center of culture to a culturally lower level based on development of "hydraulic" societies around colonies of the collapsed maritime culture. SM-LL-41
The same sort of paranoid games apply to most forms of popular dramatic entertainments: novels, movies, plays, TV dramas, and - most emphatically - "soap operas". The ordinary "formula" or "Plotto" sort of dramatic entertainment so popular on TV is a half-way case between paranoid-schizophrenia and the ordinary neurotic perception of events. Their value for the neurotic is both catharsis and, equally important, suggesting new fantasy-material to the observer. Literary, drama, and TV critics may be regarded as the Duncan Hines's of the masturbation circuits. The best qualified CIA "covert operations" planning executives are to be found among hack paperback novelists and TV dramatists. The credulous neurotic projects reality onto the banal stage and TV screen "productions" because of his strong desire to believe that the combination of painted backgrounds, papier-mache, costume, and montage has such reality. There is no way in which to conceal repeated "covert operations" unless the public wishes to be credulous. Give that public a fantasy of the sort to which it is susceptible, and no amount of mere fact will easily dissuade the majority of such persons from believing in whatever illusion the covert operation is designed to create. The application of the calculated deception of the successful hack novelist and dramatist to the so-called "documentary film" and "non-fiction expose" is the connecting link between outright pornography-writing and the techniques for designing a CIA-type "covert operations" scenario. (If, by chance, a covert operation is "blown", the CIA's obvious remedy is to prompt one of its subsidiaries or sister-agencies to whip up a fresh expose of the CIA! Give the credulous public a "believable" expose scenario and the expose provides a deeper cover than the original plot itself.) It is not accidental therefore that the leaders in all branches of psychological warfare have included leading dramatists, novelists and newspapermen. The accumulation of "organic" knowledge of what will effectively induce the public to deceive itself - the normal practice of the successful fiction-writer and journalist - represents a developed talent out of which both "white" and "black" propaganda can be shaped, and from which can be developed the scripts in which news media and "covert operations" specialists combine their roles to create an artificial reality for the gullible. All Anglo-American psychological warfare operates as the peddling of paranoia. The artisans of this craft often have no real knowledge of the mental processes on which they are operating; they merely have certain talents which have been shown to be workable. RF-LL-59&60
Having now established that Woodward's Veil is an artful blending of fact and fiction, I come to the main purpose of this book review. Woodward employs the "Fleming effect" to accomplish more than to simply falsify particular U.S. covert operations. The selection and arraying of facts in the book as a whole, is a gross misrepresentation of the way in which intelligence operations work. I concede that many of Woodward's facts about U.S. operations are true, like an artist's colors used to produce a painting. It is the painting produced with those colors, which is false. I also not only concede, but stress, that the false picture painted is only partially the result of Woodward's conniving. On one level, the lower level, Casey did understand the detailed side of covert operations; on the higher level, professional Casey was the bungling amateur we recognize him to have been in reviewing the net result of his reign as CIA director. Woodward deliberately misrepresents only those mechanics of covert intelligence operations which Casey understood very well. On the higher level, Woodward's misrepresentation is a reflection of his own self-confident ignorance. The postwar U.S. intelligence community, like that of Britain, has been a parody of the mythical gods of Olympos. The intelligence community as a whole is run by invisible men and women, chiefly men and women who hold no official position inside government. Advisory committees, such as the old "Forty Committee", Reagan's PFIAB-IOB, and so forth, are merely reflections of the overall direction by an establishment which exists independently of the control of elected government. This establishment is a pastiche, somewhat like the late Meyer Lansky's corporate form of direction over U.S. organized crime, of various factional elements among "the gods of Olympos". The establishment reaches decisions which determine the fate of individuals, governments, and nations. The official intelligence community merely executes the collective decisions reached within this establishment. The resulting situation properly reminds us of Aeschylos' Prometheus Bound, and also of one of Goethe's most successful poems, his Prometheus. In Aeschylos, Prometheus warns the gods of Olympos, that there is a real God, and that the Creator's world has embedded within it laws which shape the ultimate doom of whoever sets himself up as an Olympos in defiance of the Creator and His laws.... So, under the establishment's rule, intelligence functions on three levels: 1) the choices of policy-directions by the higher echelons of the establishment itself, from which a man on Casey's 1981-87 level is absolutely excluded; 2) the shaping of the implementation of establishment policy directives by committee-like formations composed of the designated representatives of sundry factions of the establishment, into which Casey was integrated; 3) the shaping of implementation by somewhat free-wheeling intelligence "barons" at the level of Casey and below. A Casey would receive directions from the highest level, which he could not challenge. He could participate in the shaping of policy on the second level, and would carry out the choice of implementation of policy which was adopted at that level. Within the limits of that decision, a man at Casey's level had wide latitude to do almost anything he could get by with, within understood guidelines. Woodward's book addresses only the third, lowest, of these three levels, and generally runs to the underside of that level.... On the lowest level, most current U.S. intelligence operations are pure "psy-ops" (psychological-warfare operations). On this level, the lower-ranking people, such as liberal news media journalists or entertainment media people, carry out the psy-ops, while the higher-ranking circles on this operational level plan and coordinate the psy-ops operations. ER-LL-29,30&31
The peril this nation is imminently confronted with, in fact the peril to the whole human species, is nothing less than complete elimination of what mankind has historically regarded as its soul. Our brainwashers are proposing the complete extirpation of mankind's inner sense of identity, and the placement, in the vacant space, of an artificial, synthetic pseudo-soul. Before you howl "incredible!" you ought to review the technical study that was prepared in May 1974 by the Stanford Research Institute, whose contents were later used in popularized form in Marilyn Ferguson's book. The study is entitled Changing Images of Man, Contract Number URH(489)-2150, Policy Research Report No.4/4.74, prepared by SRI Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, Director. Dr. Harmon later personally coached Marilyn Ferguson in writing her popularized version, The Aquarian Conspiracy. The 319-page mimeographed SRI report was prepared by a team of 14 researchers and supervised by a supervisory panel of 23 controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence and others. The study begins with the argument that the fundamental self-conception of mankind, the "image" that mankind has of itself, determines the behavior of mankind. To change mankind's behavior from industrial progress to "spiritualism", one must first force a change in mankind's "self image".... The report asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded".... The image of man appropriate to that new era must be sought, synthesized and then wired into mankind's brains. The SRI report conducts a summary review of the "dominant images of humankind throughout history" from 250,000 B.C. to the present. It identifies 19 "images of man" that dominated in various epochs. From each one of those it extracts such features as are useful in replacing the "industrial-technological image". Totemism and identification with animals in the Upper Paleolithic era is reported useful today; the "farmer son of Goddess earth" of the neolithic era is useful; the Sumerian image of submission to ruling elites must be retained in the postindustrial image; the Old Testament image of man having "dominion over nature" is dangerous and must be dropped; the Zoroastrian image needs to "be worked on"; the Indian image of yogi is good, will contribute to the "self-realization ethic"; the Chinese Confucius image will contribute to the "ecological ethic" of our future society; the Greek dionysian/mystical image can contribute to deemphasize material overconsumption; the Greek apollonian image can help combat the "technological ethic"; the Christian image of the New Testament must be reworked; the Christian image of the Gnostic Gospels can contribute a new "self-realization ethic"; but, the image that emerged from the Italian Renaissance, the "economic man", individualist, rationalist, materialist, seeking objective knowledge, this is inappropriate and must be discarded. AC-CFL-11&12
Now, re-examine the same historical connection from the vantage-point of our earlier discussion of curvatures of physical space-time. Let us recognize thus, that the approximate simultaneity of the collapse of the Anglo-American and Muscovite economic systems shows the convergence of effects of the two systems sharing in common certain among the most flawed axiomatic assumptions implicit in each. The history of European civilization, including the post-1492 Americas, is essentially, as Schiller portrays this, the struggle of republicanism (such as Solon's reforms in Athens) against the barbaric heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, usury-ridden oligarchism. British philosophical liberalism, the root of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mills, and Smith's "moral philosophy", and of eighteenth-century British (Haileybury) political-economy, is in all essential features, a utopian pantheistic ethical dogma, modeled chiefly upon pagan imperial Rome, but also upon the ancient, pantheistic Delphic cult of Gaia, Python-Dionysus, and Apollo. The principal forerunners of Delphic oligarchism in Ancient Greece, is the so-called "Babylonian" model of ancient Mesopotamia and Canaan. To adduce the relevant common axioms implicit in the collapses of the British and communist political-economies, it is perhaps sufficient to compare British and communist dogmas of national and super-national economic practice with the following reference-points in ancient and Renaissance history. We begin with the succession of usury-caused collapses of the ancient Mesopotamian "bow-tenure" system of agriculture. We include reference to the circumstances of Solon's anti-usury reforms in Athens. We examine the crucial, related issues associated, successively, with the Flammarian and Gracchi reforms of pre-imperial Rome. We include the process of collapse inhering in the axiomatic features of the pagan imperial Rome of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, and Diocletian. We examine the reasons for the upsurge of economic power generated by the Golden Renaissance, and view this with a reflection upon the great enterprises set into motion by Charlemagne earlier. Two opposing features of these cases are emphasized: the role of usury, and the issue of increase of the per capita productive powers of labor, scientific and technological progress. The forms in which usury's systematic taking of unearned income (i.e., "theft") occurs may be reduced to three general sub-classifications. First, there is simple usury : payment taken on account of debt, whether the original principal amount of that nominal debt may have been created in payment of money or real value advanced, or simply imposed upon the debtor either by fiat, or kindred means. Second, there is the role of monopolies (e.g., the international grain cartel), in exacting usuriously unearned income from both producers and consumers of some essential commodity. Third, there are the sundry guises of ground-rent usury. We include among these the evolution in the modern British model of central banking, and related forms of public indebtedness, from roots in ancient (e.g., Mesopotamian) tax-farming. We counterpose earned profit of physically productive enterprise to the merely nominally "earned" profit and interest of usurious activities. We explain the necessity and functional basis for this distinction. SC-LL-37
The problem of scientific development in the setting of mathematical physics is a useful point of reference. The most wretched fallacy which might be introduced into creative scientific work is the notion that platoons of scientists working according to predetermined specific objectives are the "most efficient" mode for progress. In fact, such procedures or bureaucratic measures to similar effect, are the most certain means for minimizing the gains of progress so undertaken. The process of conceptualization by which new scientific achievements are generated is an individual activity. Not only must the thinker be afforded the opportunity to think without interruptions or other interference for protracted periods, but he must have means for "toying with" experimental approaches as certain features of his individualized creative activities demand. (Demand that he delay this until his duly-elaborated proposal has been approved, and the progress of fundamental scientific work virtually ends until such a silly bureaucratic control practice ceases.) To all immediate practical intents, the processes of creativity are contained within the person of the thinker and cannot be reduced to an externalizable "division of supervised labor" form without destroying their integrity. This is not the complete picture. To the extent that self-consciousness is developed in creative personalities, there is a fruitful increase in the degree of communicability between the creative aspects of the mental processes of all involved. This is not a dissolution of several creative intellects into one larger mass, but represents a more frequent intersection - through which the partial progress of one collaborator stimulates new directions of mental activities among the others. The particular creative discovery is, in every case, the private impassioned agony of the individual working in some degree of isolation. The activity of synthesis which every relatively negentropic Gestalt represents is uniquely coextensive with the individual's cognitive processes, which cannot be directly merged in their primary form with the similar processes of other individuals. "Interruption" and "distraction" are terms which traditionally express the destructive effects of intrusion into the necessary privacy of the creative process. The creative individual's effort in any new undertaking begins with tugs at a few elusive clues of incommunicable prescience. The thinker seldom begins with any better assurance of a definite kind of success than the certainty that the effort will be fruitful if pursued long enough with sufficient intensity of concentration. Creative discovery is in this sense a process of exploration of unknown territory, for which a sense of direction, broad training and resourcefulness are the essential prerequisites. At the beginning, there can be no maps in existence of that which is to be explored, nor can one establish any meaningful schedules concerning one's intended arrival at definite new discoveries in particular. During the ensuing process, the thinker's initial partial successes do not appear as definite solutions to a preestablished problem, but only as new ways of considering a problem, or the importance of a certain detour, or a new overview of the entire nature of the problem to be solved, or solutions to problems which had not been considered relevant to the original undertaking, and so on. In between each moment of articulable progress in this experience, the ongoing process assumes forms which are indispensable to accomplishment, but are not susceptible of direct social expression. Although creative work is uniquely individual in those repects, it is the most social of all activities. The development of the mental processes in preparation for creative work is entirely social. Not only are the actions impinging upon the individual's development social, but the content of this influence reflects the internal geometry of society. In fact, it is to the extent that the individual apprehends his experience in just such terms that he is orienting the results of his experience for fruitful creative efforts. Similarly, the definition of problems requiring solution is determined by social criteria, as social criteria on the broadest scale of reference determine which hypotheses represent probable insight-solutions to these problems. The distinctive outlook of the creative thinker is associated with the extent of its scope of reference in respect to the much greater breadth of its current relevance and its historical setting. The conceptions and principles of scientific work are the accumulated accomplishment of approximately six centuries of European progress since the early period of the Renaissance. They have been evolved under the impact of changes in technology as such and changes in the social relations through which technology is realized. The characteristic interchangeable terms of creative effort are "universal", "fundamental", and "revolutionary". RF-LL-85&86
With that said, let's turn our memories to March 23, 1989, when two of the world's leading authorities in electrochemistry, Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, issued the shattering announcement that they had achieved nuclear fusion of hydrogen isotope deuterium in a room-temperature environment by means of an experimental apparatus which might fit upon a kitchen table-top. After a few stunned outcries of admiration and curiosity from some circles, the subject of cold fusion and the hundreds of cold fusion scientists, have been subjected over the past two-odd years to one of the nastiest political witch-hunts in recent history. Today, nearly 30 months after the first cold fusion announcement, the findings of approximately 600 scientists working in various parts of the world, is that the essential original claims of Professors Fleischmann and Pons are validated. Whatever the cold fusion experiments lead us to discover in the end, it is clear now, that the cold fusion experiment is what science calls a crucial or unique quality of discovery. It is the kind of discovery which will force much of the physics textbooks to be rewritten sooner or later. EI-LL-59
The point so illustrated, is that the idea is not contained within the explicit communication. Rather, the communication is a more or less reliable guide, as a key to a locked compartment, to the secret of the message. The receiving mind does not "decode" the message. Rather, the receiving mind relives - "unlocks", in a sense - the sequence of mental actions prescribed as the explicit message (geometric construction is an example of this). It is the interior of the creative processes of mind, in response to the stimulus represented by the message, which regenerates more or less faithfully the concept which prompted the sender to compose the selected set of instructions which are aggregately the relevant working-content of the message itself. To oversimplify, without doubt, the relevant features of the process of communication are aggregately devised, by the sender, to set up the receiver's state of mind in such-and-such a combination of ways. Thus, respecting the essential idea to be regenerated in the mind of the receiver, the message is not the medium. SC-LL-56
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