The nominalist wants to define each and every term of his or her existence as though it is a logical proposition of a social contract. I never had a card that I carried declaring my membership in the political movement associated with Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. My time of some twenty years of that active association was brought to a close some twenty plus years hence.
In the time that I spent drumming up support for various planks of the campaigns of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, it more often than not was a hindrance to fundraising to bring up the much reviled name of the "political extremist and convicted felon" Lyndon LaRouche. So, today for myself it is rather ironic that there is a public skirmish over who is to be blessed, so to speak, with the mantle of carrying on a political organization in his name.
Today, having retired from my workaday job, I find myself at a sort of crossroad in my ripe old age. Political movements desire visibility. Therefore, even if we might sometimes disagree with some or perhaps many of the tenets of one another's professed philosophies, if we can show that society must pay respect to a person's "qualifications" that will serve us in building the "movement." Or so goes the mostly unspoken assumptions about appeals to that which society respects, willy nilly.
And yet, I distinctly recall the a document written by LaRouche on the strategy of recruitment to his movement that was polemically critical of the tactic of foregoing one's principles for the purpose of collecting "gate receipts." In fact, rereading just now his autobiography, The Power of Reason, he always considered the issue of collecting gate receipts as a tendency toward conciliation of backwardness to be just the opposite of that course he established in forming and steering his political movement. A movement he avowed he would abandon forthwith if it stopped serving that purpose.
What is it that is desired to effect change in the required revolutionary direction in order to uplift humanity to finally defeat its age old enemy in its many guises? How to overcome the inherent weakness of past concessions to pragmatic deals of current political realities?
What is it that is of enduring substance in this ever changing current of history? As I spoke to in the previous post, the demonstration that reason is the characteristic of all humans by Socrates was revolutionary. The Renaissance Erasmian Imitation of Christ is in this mold. Just as we must elevate our reason above the constraints of the axioms of the simple counting numbers as the basis for producing a square in order to double it (and yet a degree more for the doubling of the cube,) so must we resolve the paradox of Christ as the Prince of Peace and yet the bringer of "not peace but a sword."
For if we would have not the peace of the grave but instead a grand design for a concert of nations to propel humanity forward into the peaceful era of space colonization, what must be routed and overcome by the metaphorical sword for that to happen? Is it not the age old shackles that imprisons those universal creative powers that give meaning to the premise that each not in a war against all, but rather each created in the image of the ever developing and living, universal Creator?
Today in America there is a rising incidence of suicide that is lowering the life expectancy. Why? The hopelessness of the drug/radical environmentalist counterculture. It appears that getting high to escape the high tech imitation of the Roman Circus we have become eventually leads to a despairing and futile dead end.
On the other hand, with a mission orientation for space colonization, we can expect the average human "healthspan" to significantly increase secularly with very little end in sight. We will accomplish what would seem rather miraculous today in the same way that building cities on the moon and Mars would have seemed to mortals just a few hundred years ago.
For instance, the program of space colonization entails a scientific mission of overcoming the deleterious effects on human health of weightlessness or reduced gravity and mutagenesis from cosmic rays. Therefore, we can expect the secrets of cellular defense of microbes against radiation such as Deinococcus radiodurans to be put to use to provide our own species protection. Likewise, we will unlock the means to regeneration of tissue that we are currently homing in on in modern biophysics.
As to the predicted baleful prognostications of diminishing natural resources, that really has cast a pessimistic pall over the outlook of our youth, the future of technological progress holds just the opposite prospect. With nuclear fusion, the concept of a plasma torch will become a reality. This means that the age old dream of transmutation of elements will no longer be the domain of crazy Hermeneutical cranks like Isaac Newton. We will unleash the never ending abundance of resources with the amount of energy dense throughput or intensity at our disposal. The increased lifespan, biophysical breakthroughs and availability of resources will make Kraft Ehricke's vision of the creation of artificial planetoids for long term human space exploration a reality.
And what will fuel these planetoids' propulsion to the vast stretches of space that we invariably seek to explore? Fusion probably won't do the trick. Up until now we can only produce puny amounts of anti-matter in particle accelerators for the prospective matter anti matter reactions that could propel such colonizers. Ah but, it turns out that anti-matter will be available in relative abundance in many orbits of our own solar system, let alone many, many others in yet to be identified.
This then is the vision of the eternal optimism of the creative purpose of humanity.
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