Home | Search | About | Fidelio | Economy | Strategy | Justice | Conferences | Join
Highlights
| Calendar | Music | Books | Concerts | Links | Education | Health
What's New | LaRouche | Spanish Pages | PoetryMaps
Dialogue of Cultures


This article is reprinted from the Spring 1996 issue of FIDELIO Magazine.

For related articles, scroll down or click here.


Fidelio, Vol. V,No, 1. Fall 1995

The task of the people of the United States—as conceived by our nation's founders—is fundamentally simple. It is to do good, and to do good such that others may have the opportunity to do likewise, for the benefit of all mankind. That is also the function historically assigned to our constitutional republic, consistent with the fundamental idea of western Christian civilization, that man is created in the image of God, and endowed with the power of creative reason.

As a people, we owe, therefore, one great debt which has gone unpaid for far too long—and that is our debt to history. One might even say that the account is even overdrawn—so maybe we will have to put through a little reorganization there as well. But I can assure you, that the constitutional government of the United States of America was never intended to have Newt Gingrich—that pathetic bundle of diseased impulses—as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

So he's got to go. But to ensure that, we have to defeat what he is, not just who he is. And that is our nation's historic enemy: the oligarchical, imperial, British principle, the doctrine that man is inherently evil.

Most people were presented with something quite foreign to real American history, during the years they imagined they were acquiring an “education.” Straight from the hallowed halls of fraud at Britain's Oxford and Cambridge Universities, you were given the idea that the American Revolution was the accidental result of a nasty little spat—between the “generous but demanding” Mother Britain, and her “rebellious” colonial offspring, who were demanding more tea and crumpets than she could afford.

Well, our Founding Fathers, and many of their forefathers dating back into the Seventeenth century, knew better. They knew that “Mother Britain”—referred to by John Quincy Adams as “our Lady Macbeth mother”—was evil.

Hobbes and Locke

They knew it from Thomas Hobbes, tutor of the bestial King Charles II. They knew Hobbes's argument in his Leviathan, that, by nature, human society was merely a “state of war,” of “each against all.” Man's inherently evil nature, said Hobbes, were best restrained under a monarchical dictatorship—a notion which the libertine Charles II found quite pleasing, when he assumed the throne following the English Civil War.

They knew it from John Locke, who declared that the human mind was merely a passive register of animal sensations; that man was a beast. They knew that Locke was the champion of “free trade” for the homosexual Dutch Prince William of Orange, who seized the throne of England in 1689. They knew that Locke had advocated in 1701, as a member of King William's Board of Trade, that all the independent charters governing the American colonies be revoked, that all land titles granted under them be made the property of the King, and that all American manufacturing of finished goods be banned. They knew the evil behind the mask of “free trade.”

Yet to the so-called “educated” American today, bobbing along in the tide of British historical bilge, Hobbes appears to surface as “a profound conservative thinker ahead of his time,” and Locke even as “the father of American constitutional liberty.” The sodomized launderers of Oxbridge have worked for centuries to provide a cleaner appearance for these evil creatures; and so you came to know them in their altered states.

But in this British oligarchical chamber of horrors, there is one figure, first displayed in the early years of the Eighteenth century, so openly, vividly, and thoroughly evil, that no serious attempt was ever made to launder his image. Consequently, he has been hidden from ordinary public view.

His name was Bernard Mandeville. Born in Holland in 1670, he acquired a medical degree at Leyden in 1691, and slithered into London a few years later, in the wake of William of Orange's Venetian-rigged takeover.... Not surprisingly, his medical specialty was stomach disorders. Mandeville's career in Britain, however, was dedicated to only one purpose: that of prescribing the doctrine that evil itself is the basis for good.

In 1714, the year that Britain's Venetian Party completed its murderous coup against the regime of Queen Anne, Bernard Mandeville anonymously published his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. It proclaimed what became the official governing doctrine of the emerging British Empire—that vice, corruption, and downright evil were the necessary, desirable foundations of a successful, prosperous state.

Mandeville argued that man's uninhibited pursuit of his natural, evil instincts constituted liberty; that the state, therefore, ought not to interfere with “private vices';' and that this seething mass of evil, in the aggregate, constituted the public good. This is free trade; this is “laissez-faire;” this is libertarianism; this is privatization. This is the Conservative Revolution.

A Model for Empire

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees was actually built around an earlier poem—actually ten pages of doggerel—entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest, which he had published in 1705. Here he counterposes the supposed life of ease and luxury enjoyed by a society devoted to vice, to the poverty and economic ruin brought on by pursuing virtue and honesty.

Mandeville describes the “successful” model for the Empire:

Vast numbers thronged the fruitful Hive;
Yet those vast Numbers made 'em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each Other's Lust and Vanity. ...

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th' Esteem of Foreigners. ...

Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Virtue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a thousand Cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The Worst of all the Multitude
Did Something for the common Good.

But, Mandeville warns, if “the knaves” turn honest and virtuous, and act like human beings instead of beasts, then the game is up, and society (meaning oligarchical society) is destroyed. Economic ruin follows, because the only source of wealth is stealing. Profit can only be derived from pandering and extortion, and can be increased only by maximizing the rate of human degradation. Even the broader circulation of currency depends on rising rates of crime.

Here is some of the commentary Mandeville included with his doggerel verses:

I shall be asked what benefit the public receives from thieves and housebreakers. They are, I own, very pernicious to human society, and every government ought to take all imaginable care to root out and destroy them; yet if all people were strictly honest, and nobody would meddle with or pry into anything but his own, half the [black]smiths of the nation would want employment.

He adds that even the growth of their trade, producing for “both ornaments and defence,” would “never have been thought of, but to secure us against the attempts of pilferers and robbers.” Mandeville continues: “A highwayman having met with a considerable booty, gives a poor common harlot he fancies ten pounds to new-rig her from top to toe.” In this case, asks Mandeville, is there a tradesman “so conscientious that he will refuse to sell her a thread satin though he knew who she was? She must have shoes and stockings, gloves,” and so on. He says:

[A]ll must get something by her, and a hundred different tradesmen, dependent on those she laid her money out with, may touch part of it before a month is at an end. The generous gentleman, in the meantime, his money being near spent, ventured again on the road, but the second day having committed a robbery near Highgate, he was taken with one of his accomplices, and at the next sessions both were condemned and suffered the law. The money due on their conviction fell to three country fellows, on whom it was admirably well spent.

Bernard Mandeville had little interest in succoring the masses. He spoke for the British-Venetian oligarchs, at a point in history when they imagined they could exterminate the Renaissance idea of man—and the threat of the nation-state, that dreaded engine of creativity, designed to safeguard life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In his summary of The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville argues that to

have a frugal and honest society, the best policy is to preserve men in their native simplicity, strive not to increase their numbers; let them never be acquainted with strangers or superfluities, but remove and keep from them everything that might raise their desires or improve their understanding.

“Great wealth and great treasure will ever scorn to come among men, unless you'll admit their inseparable companions, avarice and luxury; where trade is considerable, fraud will intrude. To be at once well-bred and sincere is no less than a contradiction; and therefore, while man advances in knowledge and his manners are polished, we must expect to see, at the same time, his desires enlarged, his appetites refined, and his vices increased.

The Walpole Era

To any sane person, it is clear that Mandeville speaks for the Prince of Darkness—denying God and Heaven, and advocating a dictatorship of evil over all humanity, to confine it to a living Hell. Mandeville was widely known to be the leading figure among Britain's Satan-worshipping secret societies, which proliferated rapidly among the degenerate financier elite. They became notorious after George I's accession to the throne in 1714—typified by the infamous Hell-Fire clubs—and flaunted their political ascendancy following the devastating financial blowout of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Huge fortunes disappeared overnight, along with scores of fictitious stock companies; but vast sums were raked in by the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy and the political thugs they employed.

To what remained of the decent, informed portion of the British population, the entire affair had a specifically Satanic, Mandevillian character. It was vividly captured by the artist William Hogarth in his 1721 engraving, The South Sea Scheme, portraying the Devil presiding over an orgy of obscenity and brutality, in celebration of the destruction brought on by the crash. To keep matters from getting out of hand, a King's Order-in-Council was issued that year banning the Hell-Fire clubs, at least in their public form.

But the King's cabinet was also reshuffled in 1721, further consolidating the power of the thieves and swindlers who came out on top, following the collapse of the Bubble. Chief among these was Robert Walpole, one of the most venal and corrupt figures in the whole Sodom and Gomorrah of British politics. Newt Gingrich would give anybody's right arm to have such a career.

Walpole was pure Mandeville, and he was no small-time chiseler. Queen Anne had imprisoned him in the Tower of London in 1711, when it was discovered that £35 million in naval expenditures were unaccounted for, while Walpole served as Treasurer of the Navy. He took his revenge in 1715, as chairman of the Committee of Secrecy in the House of Commons, trumping up any charges he could think of against the Venetian Party's opponents who had worked with Jonathan Swift during Anne's reign. Following the cabinet reshuffle of 1721, Walpole emerged as Prime Minister, and held the post for more than twenty years, operating under the maxim which he coined himself, that “every man has his price.”

Jonathan Swift and his friends accurately referred to Robert Walpole as “Bob Booty,” and cast him as the head of a gang of cutthroats and highwaymen in the devastating satire The Beggar's Opera, brought to the London stage in 1728.

Walpole personified Mandeville's satanic notion that the interests of the state—for the oligarchy—lay in the maximum brutalization of its subjects. He celebrated Walpole's rise to power by reissuing his Fable of the Bees in 1723, adding a new essay attacking any efforts to educate the poor. In a nation without legalized slavery, Mandeville argued that

[T]he surest wealth consists in a multitude of Laborious Poor. ... To make the Society Happy and People Easy under the meanest Circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be Ignorant as well as Poor. ... Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they'll be when grown up for downright Labour, both as to Strength and Inclination. Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they'll submit to it for ever after.

The fascists of today's Conservative Revolution have exactly the same policy, differing only in some of the rhetorical niceties they employ. They speak of “privatized schools,” “voucher plans,” “curriculum tracks,” “vocational training,” “work-study,” “manual arts,” and—“prison labor.”

top of page


Related Articles

Revolution in Music

Education, Science and Poetry

Fidelio Table of Contents from 1992-1996

Fidelio Table of Contents from 1997-2001

Fidelio Table of Contents from 2002-present

Beautiful Front Covers of Fidelio Magazine

What is the Schiller Institute?

top of page



Join the Schiller Institute,
and help make a new, golden Renaissance!

MOST BACK ISSUES ARE STILL AVAILABLE! One hundred pages in each issue, of groundbreaking original research on philosophy, history, music, classical culture, news, translations, and reviews. Individual copies, while they last, are $5.00 each plus shipping

Subscribe to Fidelio:
Only $20 for 4 issues, $40 for 8 issues.
Overseas subscriptions: $40 for 4 issues.


The Schiller Institute
PO BOX 20244
Washington, DC 20041-0244
703-297-8368

schiller@schillerinstitute.org

Home | Search | About | Fidelio | Economy | Strategy | Justice | Conferences | Join
Highlights
| Calendar | Music | Books | Concerts | Links | Education | Health
What's New | LaRouche | Spanish Pages | PoetryMaps |
Dialogue of Cultures

© Copyright Schiller Institute, Inc. 2001- 2004 All Rights Reserved.