Saturday Class - Why No Equation Can Predict a Discovery - September 12, 2026

Every week, Promethean Action holds a Saturday Class — a deep dive into the ideas, history, and strategic thinking that the mainstream won’t touch.

We’d love for you to join us live. Sign up here and we’ll send you class details every week.

Entropy says decay is destiny

The American System is built on anti-entropy

Bruce Director answers your website questions from the August 29 class: two systems, two ideas of man, and why no equation can forecast a discovery.

Tony Papert opened by noting those comments were serious enough to deserve a serious response. Election season pushes everything toward bite-size snippets — but anyone who wants to lead toward physical, economic, and spiritual progress has to go deeper, the way Franklin and Paine did.

Two systems, two ideas of man

The American System succeeds because it reflects a fundamental scientific principle about the nature of the universe.

Henry Carey, Lincoln’s economics advisor, put the choice this way — in Bruce’s paraphrase:

The British System fails because it rests on a false idea of man and a false idea of the physical world — like trying to defy gravity by jumping off a building. Tinkering with interest rates, money flows, and regulations never touches the axiomatic flaw.

Adam Smith stated that flaw in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:

To man is allotted a much humbler department. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passions which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great director of nature intended to produce by them.

— Adam Smith, quoted by Bruce

Man as an animal of instinct — Mandeville’s private vice as public good.

The American counter

• Man is created in the image of God — the only species that discovers principles of nature.
• Those discoveries change our own behavior — and nature itself.
• The empirical proof: growth of human population and power over nature.

Wealth is the creative mind

Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures settles the economics:

To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind by multiplying the objects of enterprise is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.

— Alexander Hamilton, quoted by Bruce

Wealth isn’t money flows. It is the stimulation of the creative mind — new technologies, new resources, new forms of labor.

Why no equation can capture it

People are schooled to think science means predictive math. Gödel showed no mathematical system can be both complete and consistent.

The British System’s preferred math is statistical mechanics — gas molecules bouncing into equilibrium, Clausius’s entropy increasing until nothing can change.

Creativity introduces something that was not in the existing relationships. Electricity is the example:

• Franklin’s and Volta’s experiments became a major economic power no one at the end of the eighteenth century could have forecast.
• Even in retrospect, no equation maps the pre-electricity economy onto the post-electricity one.
• Marxist central planning and the Newton–Laplace clockwork universe delete the same thing.

Bruce drew on Lyndon LaRouche’s framing: an economy’s input is creative ideas; its output is more advanced creative ideas — with physical technology, new social relations, and culture in between.

Your question: what about entropy?

Website commenters asked what Bruce meant by entropy and anti-entropy.

Clausius coined entropy studying heat-powered machines — and economics drove that science: before heat engines, mankind ran on muscle, wind, and water. Boltzmann reduced heat to molecular collisions. Cream diffuses into coffee. Everything runs toward equilibrium.

Norbert Wiener — whom LaRouche battled directly — turned the second law into a worldview:

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization…. May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonged to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

— Norbert Wiener, quoted by Bruce

Anti-entropy is not entropy run backwards

It is an entirely different process — creative discovery reorganizing ideas.

• In economics you can measure its effects: population, potential relative population density, energy flux density.
• You cannot produce it with Wiener’s mathematics.
• New experimental science — Michael Levin at Tufts, Dennis Noble’s immune-system example of a body creatively answering pathogens it has never met — indicates anti-entropy characterizes life itself.

Watch the full class — then send it to the friend who thinks “science” proves decline is inevitable.

—Promethean Action Editorial Staff

PS: If this class grabbed you, come live next Saturday. Sign up here and we’ll send you the class details every week.