The 50th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 has created an opportunity to rethink some of the fateful decisions that set western society onto a trajectory of zero-technological growth and mindless consumerism in the early 1970s. Rather than speed up the momentum of ambitious goals for a permanent lunar settlement, nuclear rockets, terraforming and Mars colonization which leading NASA administrators had promoted after the successful landing of 1969, the very opposite occurred.
First the dollar was floated onto the international speculative markets on August 15, 1971 followed by the destruction of the Apollo program in 1975 and cancellation of most of the cutting edge projects that were meant to break humanity out of the closed system of geopolitics and finiteness of the earth’s limits for the first time in history.
Today, America has not only lost the capability to place a man on the moon, but cannot even send an astronaut into orbit without hitching a ride on a Russian Soyuz shuttle. While certain forces within America led by current NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and the sitting President earnestly do wish to revive those capabilities, America’s 50 year visionless dance with monetarism have annihilated the memory of how such funding and long term planning occurred in the post war decades. Ironically, nations like China, Russia and India have discovered these modes of thought and economic practice to such an extent that China has quickly become a leader in Space technology, being the first nation to land a rover on the far side of the moon while all three Eurasian nations have unveiled ambitious programs for lunar-Mars development.
The fact that America put itself onto a course of action that has hollowed out its technological capabilities, and brought about the creation of the largest speculative bubble in history, can be largely accounted for by recognizing the existence of two worldviews at war. Only one of which will win.
Open vs Closed Systems
The idea that mankind is the only species that organizes itself around functions of MIND, will and ideas has been a point of battle going back to ancient records of Greece. Where other species regulate their existence based upon environmental and genetic impulses mediated (in the higher life forms) by pleasure/pain and impulses for survival, humanity is uniquely capable of CHOOSING which organizing principles it applies to its own self-regulation.
The question has always been: Do the CONCEPTS we allow to govern our laws adhere to the discoverable laws of the universe or not? Either way, how do we know?
To address those questions, it will be helpful to visit the minds of three anti-closed system leaders: economist Henry C. Carey (1793-1879), U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) and the American economist/presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche (1923-2019).
Introducing Henry C. Carey
Abraham Lincoln’s senior economic advisor Henry C. Carey was a leading American Platonist who decried the British closed world view embodied by Thomas Malthus’s promotion of depopulation in his hundreds of books and essays. In his 1872 Unity of Law (which should be studied deeply by all truth seekers today) Carey attacked the British system of Malthus, Ricardo, Darwin, J.S. Mill which he said had the tendency of destroying man’s innate powers of creative reason while bringing the laws of matter into dominance over the life of humanity:
“Such was the state of things when the Rev. Mr. Malthus, minister, as he professed himself to be, of an all-wise and all-merciful God, gave to the world a theory by means of which he satisfied the rich and powerful that the misery and wretchedness by which they were everywhere surrounded were necessary results of error in divine laws; that population tended to increase faster than food; that all attempts at alleviating the miseries of the poor would prove to be sad mistakes; that rise in wages could have no effect other than that of stimulating the growth of numbers; that they themselves were free from responsibility for any and all these things; and that they might, therefore, properly and safely eat, drink and make merry, while closing their eyes to the fact that the condition of their fellow-men was deteriorating in the direct ratio of their own increased power for controlling the great forces that had been given by his Heavenly Master for man’s use and service.”
In opposition to this unjust closed system which divides to conquer, the American system as he then defined it, was premised upon a principle of raising standards of living and powers of mind through an unbounded commitment to discoveries and inventions. Carey described what effects a healthy society must strive to achieve in order to adhere to the truthful laws of the universe by saying: “the more his power of association, the greater is the tendency toward development of his various faculties; the greater becomes his control of the forces of nature, and the more perfect his own power for self-direction; mental force thus more and more obtaining control over that which is material, the labors of the present over the accumulations of the past…”
Carey’s open system thought expressed the best of America’s anti-imperial roots and tended to arise whenever a true nationalist took the helm (often at the expense of their lives) in Washington. The American System which Carey led both in America and globally was premised upon the use of national banking, public credit for long term development and public works in obedience to the public good.
In the post-war era, the last representative of that spirit in high office was America’s 35th president John F. Kennedy who launched the challenge to break out of the limits to existence which the new Malthusian revival was beginning to claim defined mankind’s absolute population limits.
JFK revives Carey’s Open System Thinking
Unleashing the space program in 1961, Henry C. Carey’s spirit can be heard in the mouth of the president as he said in his inaugural address:
“Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe.”
After unveiling the challenge to go to the Moon “within the decade”, Kennedy demonstrated the powerful thinking which led his killers to assassinate him when he gave a speech at the UN on September 20, 1963 calling for US-Russia collaboration on the moon landing as the basis for an escape from the Cold War/closed system logic of Mutually Assured Destruction:
“I include among these possibilities [for great power cooperation] a joint expedition to the Moon… Why should man’s first flight to the Moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world— cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the Moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.”
Kennedy called not only for a new world of cooperation, but also unleashed funding for a nuclear rocket that was to drive mankind’s access to the broader solar system, making journeys that took months in a chemical rocket diminish to days in a nuclear engine. The space race was never meant to be a geopolitical “race against the reds” in Kennedy’s world view, but rather the rebirth of mankind into a new age of reason.
Kennedy vs. the Malthusian Revival
Kennedy recognized the reawakening of the same closed system ideology that Carey had done battle with a century earlier as he took on the Malthusian revival then underway with the origins of the World Wildlife Fund in September 11, 1961. This new ecological movement was created by a nest of eugenicists such as Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, Prince Philip Mountbatten and Sir Julian Huxley (founder of UNESCO and President of the British Eugenics Society). WWF Vice-Presidents over the years included Maurice Strong, and Sir Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, whose Permindex Bureau was banned from France for being caught attempting to kill Charles De Gaulle and which was discovered by U.S. District Attorney Jim Garrison to be at the heart of JFK’s assassination in 1963. All of these figures were devout neo-Malthusians who demanded that the world be as devoid of creative thought as their own minds.
Tackling Malthus head on, JFK said to the National Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1963:
“Malthus argued a century and a half ago that man, by using up all his available resources, would forever press on the limits of subsistence, thus condemning humanity to an indefinite future of misery and poverty. We can now begin to hope and, I believe, know that Malthus was expressing not a law of nature, but merely the limitation then of scientific and social wisdom.”
Within a month of this speech Kennedy was dead and a new green paradigm of adaption to limits grew like a virus in poisonous environment of LSD, cultural irrationalism and the Vietnam War.
The Figure of Lyndon LaRouche
Throughout the 47 years since the cancellation of Apollo and the descent into liberalism, America saw the unique figure of presidential candidate and economist Lyndon LaRouche rise to challenge the neo-Malthusian ethic forming a vast array of political, cultural and scientific organizations such as the Fusion Energy Foundation (1976-1987), and the International Schiller Institute (1984-present). Over the years, these organizations have sponsored thousands of conferences on renewing JFK’s vision, driving fusion power, and were even on record as the earliest western voices promoting the New Silk Road which has become China’s grand design today.
In his 1980 book There Are No Limits to Growth, Mr. LaRouche attacked the core of the Malthusian paradigm saying:
“No beast, or any other lower form of life could willfully increase in potential relative population density by even one order of magnitude. Man is fundamentally different from the beasts. Man is not merely a creature of instinctive potentialities, a mere creature of animal-like perceptions of pleasure and pain. Man is somehow very different. Man has the potential of Reason, the power to make creative discoveries which advance his scientific knowledge, and to convert such scientific advances into advances in technology. We are able to uncover, with increasing perfection, the lawful, universal principles which order universal creation, and to master nature with increasing power, through guiding ourselves to change our ways of behavior in accordance with universal laws.”
China has picked up the torch which had dropped with the death of JFK.
Soon China will have the only functional Space station as the ISS is decommissioned in 2024. China has plans for a manned lunar base by 2030, and has a stated intent to industrialize the moon as a springboard for broader interplanetary flight and mining of rare earth metals and especially Helium-3 (the Holy Grail for Fusion power). Russia is closely aligned with China under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative with India joining into the process at a quicker rate every day. All three nations have ambitious lunar development plans and have offered America olive branches to join them in open system development.
Whether the America of Donald Trump accepts their offers and averts a military confrontation which could turn into WWIII is a question that has yet to be answered.
