The Ozymandias Principle - EIRNS

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Jul. 08, 2025 EST - Credit: Claudio Celani

Solving the grave existential crisis that today besets the West—even as the nations of the Global South and Global East, by far Mankind’s majority, hew a different path of indivisible security and development for all—requires a deeper understanding of our axiomatic flaws than is normally discussed. We can refer to this as the “Ozymandias Principle,” recalling Percy Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The issue is not simply modern-day wannabe Ozymandiases; nor is it the Leviathans that the satanic Thomas Hobbes recommended to keep us in check since, he claimed, “man is a wolf to man”; nor is it the bankrupt trans-Atlantic system which speaks and rules through them; nor is it even the Gaza concentration camps reportedly under discussion at the White House between Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump.

All of that is of course doomed, because it violates natural law, imagining that the universe itself can be bullied into obeying the whims of a tyrant.

But there is more to “that colossal Wreck” that Shelley speaks of, than meets the eye.

Lyndon LaRouche, in an Aug. 23, 2002 article “Special Report: Science and Infrastructure,” proposed the following:

“In peace, or war, the laws and customs of a society combine in their effect, to form what scientists term a system, as a specific form of mathematical physics is a system. By ‘a system,’ we should understand something comparable to Euclid’s geometry, his Thirteen Books of the Elements. The system is based upon an approximately fixed set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. That system is filled out by adding an accumulation of theorems and related impedimenta, each and all of which are presumed to be not-inconsistent with the set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. A body of popular opinion, for example, has many of the characteristic features of such a system. For example, the culture of Belshazzar’s Babylon was such a system, in approximation. The notion of such a system is the point of Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias.’”

It is the West’s system of flawed “laws and customs” that has prevailed over 500 years of colonial practice, and has left the Global South in economic shambles, that the BRICS nations meeting in Rio de Janeiro July 6-7 determined that they will replace. To President Trump’s threat that “any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS” will be hit with an additional 10% tariff, Brazilian President Lula, the host of this year’s BRICS summit, responded: “It’s not right for a president of a country the size of the United States to threaten the world online…. The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor. We are sovereign countries.” Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa—like Brazil a founding member of the BRICS—criticized those “seeking to have vengeance against those doing good in the world.” And Luis Arce, President of Bolivia, a new partner nation in the BRICS, concluded, “There is a clear struggle between the old stagnant bloc of the U.S. and Europe, on the one side, and the emerging bloc of BRICS countries on the other.”

Among the agreements reached at the BRICS Summit was a “Partnership for the Elimination of Socially-Determined Diseases,” premised on the principle that “health is a fundamental human right.” They propose to satisfy this human right by “improving sanitation and housing conditions, tackling malnutrition and poverty, and leveraging innovative technologies.”

Is that “anti-American”?

It is rather Ozymandias, and Leviathan, and Thomas Hobbes that deserve to be called that. Because science has shown us that “Man Is Not a Wolf to Man,” as will be proven afresh at the July 12-13 international conference of the Schiller Institute in Berlin, Germany.