Summary of Carroll Quigley's Last Public Lecture by Christopher Quigley

Summary of Prof. Carroll Quigley’s
Last Public Lecture Given Months Before He Died:
"The 3rd. Oscar Iden Lecture 1978"
By Christopher M. Quigley B.Sc., M.M.I.I., M.A.

“This shift from customary conformity to decision making by some other power, in its final stages, results in the dualism of almost totalitarian imperialism and an amorphous mass culture of atomised individuals.

The fundamental, all pervasive cause of World instability today is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neurosis and psychosis.

Another reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas of sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and corporations. These two elements are therefore free of political controls and responsibility.

They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.

The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital. Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities. All these processes create frustrations on every level of modern human experience and result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday."

Carroll Quigley

In 1978 Professor Carroll Quigley, a few months before he died, gave three lectures at Georgetown University, Washington.  The lecture series was sponsored by a grant from the Oscar Iden endowment.

The genius of Carroll Quigley shone through his three presentations because, as always, he forced his audience to think.  His essays covered the thousand years of the growth of the State in the Western tradition from 976 – 1976. His approach went against the grain of most academics who only taught history in short sound bites.

Quigley believed that you could not understand anything unless you saw the whole, and the essence of his philosophy was that history is logical, i.e. things happen for a reason.  For him the core of all that occurs throughout the ages is the underlying force of fundamental human values.

Leaders, rulers and executives who miss this point are prone to make erroneous decisions because their actions will be based on flawed analysis and understanding. The professor saw that American society and Western Civilization were in serious trouble in the late 70’s. In hindsight his final essay The State of Individuals was particularly prophetic and events during the subsequent 32 years have exonerated his controversial conclusions.

In summary this essay stated the following:

Society is an organization of persons and artifacts to satisfy human needs.

Currently our desires are remote from our true needs. Societies are built on needs and they are ultimately destroyed through desires.

Power between the state and the society rests on the ability of the state to satisfy human needs. The state is a good state if it is sovereign and responsible.

There are seven level of culture or aspects of society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious and intellectual.

Military: men cannot live outside of groups. They can satisfy their needs only by co-operating within community. The group needs to be defended.
Political: If men operate within groups you must have a method to settle disputes.
Economic: The group must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs.
Social: Man and women are social beings. They have a need for other people. They have a need to love and be loved.
Emotional: Men and women must have emotional experiences. Moment to moment with other people and moment to moment with nature.
Religious: Human beings have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and do not fully understand.
Intellectual: Men and women have a need to comprehend and discuss.

Power is the ability in society to meed these eight fore-mentioned human needs.

Community is group of people with close inter-personal relationships. Without community no infant will be sufficiently socialized. Most of our internal controls which make society function have historically been learnt in community. Prior to 976 most controls in society were internal. In the West after 976 due to specialization and commercial expansion controls began to be externalized.

Sovereignty has eight aspects: defence, judicial, administrative, taxation, legislation, executive, monetary and incorporating power.

Expansion in society brings growing commercialization with the result that all values, in time, become monetized. As expansion continues it slows with the result that society becomes politicized and eventually militarized. This shift from customary conformity to decision making by some other power in its final stages results in the dualism of almost totalitarian imperialism and an amorphous mass culture of atomised individuals.

The main theme in our society today is [ruthless] competition, and no truly stable society can possibly be built on such a premise.  In the long term society must be based on association and co-operation.

From 1855 Western Civilization has shown signs of becoming increasingly unstable due to: technology and the displacement of labour: increased use of propaganda to brainwash people into thinking society was good and true; an increased emphasis on material desires; the increased emphasis on individualism over conformity; growing focus on quantity rather than quality; increased demand for vicarious satisfactions.

As a result more and more people began to comprehend that the state was not a society with community values. This realisation brought increasing instability.

Another element of the trend towards instability in Western Civilization was the growth in weapon systems that if actually used would ensure total destruction of the planet. This in effect meant that they were effectively redundant.

In addition the expansion of the last 150 years has in essence been based on fossil fuels. The energy which gave us the industrial revolution, coal – oil – natural gas – represented the combined savings of four weeks of sunlight that managed to be accumulated on earth out of the previous three billion years of sunshine.

This resource instead of being saved has been lost. Gone forever never to return. The fundamental all pervasive cause of World instability today is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neurosis and psychosis.

Medical science and all the population explosions have continued to produce more and more people while the food supply and the supply of jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, not only in the United States, but everywhere, because the whole purpose of using fossil fuels in the corporate structure is the elimination of jobs.

Another reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas of sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and corporations. These two elements are therefore free of political controls and responsibility. They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.

The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital. Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities. All these processes create frustrations on every level of modern human experience and result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday.

Today in America there is a developing constitutional crisis. The three branches of government set up in 1789 do not contain the eight aspects of sovereignty. As a result each has tried to go outside the sphere in which it should be restrained. The constitution completely ignores, for example, the administrative power.

As a result the courts, in particular the Supreme court, is making decisions it should not be making. In addition the President, who by the constitution should be easily impeached, has become all powerful to such an extent that the office is now as basically Imperial.

However, to me the most obvious flaw in our constitutional set-up is the fact that the federal government does not have control over money and credit and does not have control over corporations. It is therefore not really sovereign and is not really responsible.

The final result is that the American people will unfortunately prefer communities. They will cop or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into it and say it is a great life but I think otherwise.

Do not be pessimistic. Life goes on; life is fun. And if a civilization crashed it deserves to. When Rome fell the Christian answer was. “Create your own communities."

Source:  The Oscar Iden Lecture Series Georgetown University Library: Prof. Carroll Quigley

Professor Carroll Quigley - Last Lectures, The Western Tradition, Fall of the American Republic

These quotations excerpted below are all taken from Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition by Carroll Quigley.   It was the three part Oscar Iden Lecture at Georgetown University in 1978, a few months before he died.

Quigley is perhaps most well known for being the author of Tragedy and Hope.

Later this week I intend to publish a very nice essay and summary of these thoughts in this last lecture by Christopher Quigley.

Needless to say I do not necessarily agree with everything that Professor Quigley states in his writings. But I do find them extraordinarily well informed and interesting. Given that they were written in the 1970s his forecasting, although not perfect, was quite prescient.

He does state that after Nixon it is unlikely that another President will be impeached, because of the manner in which the impeachment process has become 'lawyerized.' How ironic then that we have seen the impeachment of William J. Clinton, who himself was a student of Quigley and who publicly thanked and acknowledged him as a mentor.

Related: Carroll Quigley on Tragedy and Hope

"And since what we get in history is never what any one individual or group is struggling for, but is the resultant of diverse groups struggling, the area of political action will be increasingly reduced to an arena where the individual, detached from any sustaining community, is faced by gigantic and irresponsible corporations."

Prof Carroll Quigley, Part 1 The State of Communities, Georgetown University 1978

"The reality of the last two hundred years of the history of the history of Western Civilization, including the history of our own country, is not reflected in the general brainwashing you have received, in the political mythology you have been hearing, or in the historiography of the period as it exists today.

Persons, personalities if you wish, can be made only in communities. A community is made up of intimate relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized. He may grow up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life. In our society today, we have attempted to throw the whole burden of socializing out population upon the school system, to which the individual arrives only at the age of four or five.

Human needs are the basis of power. The state, as I said, is a power structure on a territorial basis, and the state will survive only if it has sufficient ability to satisfy enough of these needs. It is not enough for it to have organized force, and when a politician says, "Elect me President and I will establish law and order," he means organized force or power of other kinds. I won't analyze this level; it's too complex and we don't have time. I will simply say that the object of the political level is to legitimise power: that is, to get people, in their minds, to recognize and accept the actual power relationship in their society.

We no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression. So when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have what I call misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money, or in being elected to the White House in 1972, or in proving to the poor, half-naked people of Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.

And then, as the society continues and does not reform, you get increased militarisation. You can certainly see that process in Western Civilization and in the history of the United States. In the last forty years our society has been drastically militarized. It isn't yet as militarized as other societies and other periods have been; we still have a long way to go in this direction. Our civilization has a couple of centuries to go, I would guess. Things are moving faster than they did in any civilization I ever knew before this one, but we probably will have another century or two.

As this process goes on, you get certain other things. I've hinted at a number of them. One is misplacement of satisfactions. You find your satisfactions--your emotional satisfaction, your social satisfaction-- not in moment to moment relationships with nature or other people, but with power, or with wealth, or even with organized force--sadism, in some cases: Go out and murder a lot of people in a war, a just war, naturally.

The second thing that occurs as this goes on is increasing remoteness of desires from needs. I've mentioned this. The next thing is an increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends are the human needs, but if I asked people what these needs are, they can hardly tell me. Instead they want the means they have been brainwashed to accept, that they think will satisfy their needs. But it's perfectly obvious that the methods that we have been using are not working. Never was any society
in human history as rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it is not a happy society.

In its final stages, the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.

Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under restraints. The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a stable society, government ultimately becomes unnecessary ; the restraints on people's actions are internal, there're self disciplined, they are the restraints you have accepted because they make it possible for you to satisfy all your needs to the degree that is good for you.

Communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not on competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximise his own greed is talking total nonsense. All the history of human society shows that it's nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the
American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.

The fundamental, all pervasive cause of world instability today is the destruction of communities by the commercialisation of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures. We still have at least half a dozen political structures in Europe, but our technology and the power system of Western Civilization today are such that most of Europe should be a single power system. This creates instability.

Another cause of today's instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility, and they have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society.

They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.

So now everything is capital intensive, including medicine, and it hasn't worked.   ['financialised' is a more current term - J.]

Secrecy in government exists for only one reason: to prevent the American people from knowing what's going on. It is nonsense to believe that anything our government does is not known to the Russians at about the moment it happens.

To me, the most ominous flaw in our constitutional set-up is the fact that the federal government does not have control over of money and credit and does not have control of corporations. It is therefore not really sovereign. And it is not really responsible, because it is now controlled by these two groups, corporations, and those who control the flows of money.

The administrative system and elections are dominated today by the private power of money flows and corporation activities.

Certain thin regulations were established in the United States regarding corporations: restricted purpose and activities especially by banks and insurance companies; prohibition on one corporation's holding the stock of another without specific statutory grant; limits on the span of the life of the corporation, requiring recurrent legislative scrutiny; limits on total assets; limits on new issues of capital, so that the proportion of control of existing stockholders could be maintained; limits on the votes allowed to any stockholder, regardless of the size of his holding; and so forth.

By 1890 all of these had been destroyed by judicial interpretation which extended to corporations— fictitious persons— those constitutional rights guaranteed, especially by the Fifteenth Amendment, to living persons.

Now I want to say good night. Do not be pessimistic. Life goes on; life is fun. And if a civilization crashes, it deserves to. When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, 'Create our own communities.'"

Prof Carroll Quigley, The State of Individuals, Georgetown University 1978

Power: The Essence of Corrupt Banking and Politics Is to Grow and Control the Debt

"Events have satisfied my mind, and I think the minds of the American people, that the mischiefs and dangers which flow from a national [central] bank far over-balance all its advantages. The bold effort the present bank has made to control the Government, the distresses it has wantonly produced, the violence of which it has been the occasion in one of our cities famed for its observance of law and order, are but premonitions of the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

Andrew Jackson, Sixth Annual Message, December 1, 1834


"Another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation.

These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.

The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital."

Professor Carroll Quigley, Oscar Iden Lecture Series 3, 1976

Money is power.  And those who control the money, if they have the will for it, can use it as a means to incredible power, to create debt, and to control it, thereby controlling the debtors, both as individuals, as communities, as regions, and whole nations.

This is the story of global trade deals, the Dollar, and the foul marriage between politics, money, and central banking.   The more discretion and secrecy that is granted to those who create money and debt, the more vulnerable is the freedom of the people.

This is the story of Cyprus, of Greece, and of the Ukraine.

And there will be more.

This will to power is as old as Babylon, and as evil as hell.

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966


"He promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.

He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

John Henry Newman

Weekend Reading: Carroll Quigley on Tragedy and Hope

 

 I own a first edition copy of Carroll Quigley's book, 'Tragedy and Hope' and I have read it, and have always found it, and the history behind the work, to be interesting.

Quigley was a mentor to Bill Clinton as a student at Georgetown, and was instrumental in obtaining Clinton's Rhodes scholarship.

Here is a pdf version of the article by Kevin Cole which is the substance of this video below:
Professor Carroll Quigley and the Article that Said Too Little

I would have preferred if the audio did not contain annoying background music and if the narrator had spoken a bit more slowly.