The Greatest Crisis in History:
Can We Solve It?
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened the July 2-3 Schiller Institute Conference, "Rescuing Civilization from the Brink," with the panel, "Imminent Disintegration of the World Financial System or Enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act?" Here is a video of her keynote address:
Dear friends of Friedrich Schiller and mankind:
Before I start my remarks, I would like a greeting to be read to this conference, because it makes clear from the beginning, that we are really in a war which can be won [see box].
Well, I think all of you are aware that the world is in a dramatic mess. As a matter of fact, as we are convening here for this conference, we are maybe days away from a civilizational catastrophe. And what I mean by a "civilizational catastrophe," is a process where chaos is erupting in the trans-Atlantic region, to an extent where it could not be remedied. So, if this is not stopped, and reversed within days, we are in danger of a process which is without precedent in history. References have been made to the 14th Century, but if you look at the global collapse which is in process right now, I think that that is too soft an example.
There is a solution. It is actually quite easy, relatively speaking, because, if in the United States, the population can be aroused so that the Congress and the Senate have the guts to implement Glass-Steagall, writing off the trillions of dollars in gambling debts, and going back to a credit system in the tradition of the American Revolution, then there is hope for Europe. If the United States would make a bold action, and enact Glass-Steagall, there would be nothing left for Europe, but to act in an analogous way, and do the same, simply because of the interaction of the market segments of the derivatives markets, of the combination of the global system.
However, if this is not done, then developments like we are now, unfortunately, watching them in Greece—and I can assure you, you don't know half of what's going on there, because the media is not reporting it—violent chaos could erupt around the globe. Because there is no question, that we are in the absolute terminal phase of the collapse of the trans-Atlantic system.
The intention of the European governments and the United States government is to react to this bankruptcy of the system, by loading the burden on the shoulders of the population by brutal cuts, by taking away their living standards, by basically, make the people pay for the speculative debt which they have incurred. It is very clear that the cuts they propose, are so brutal, that they will lead, and are already leading, to social explosions, because the people realize that their personal existence is threatened, that their lives are being shortened, that their future is being taken away.
The Danger of a Fascist Coup
Now, in the United States, as my husband has warned in the recent days, there is the danger of a fascist coup, to occur any time early in July. This is not from secret sources we have received information from, but if you know the nature of the beast we are dealing with, if you know who was responsible for the Reichstagsbrand [Reichstag Fire] in 1933, and how a situation which seemingly was manageable, namely, when Hitler came to power, very quickly after the Reichstagsbrand, you had the Enabling Laws, and then it was too late. And just remember, how many people were fooling themselves, saying that this Austrian corporal would soon be out at the next election; and except for maybe three people in Germany, they did not recognize the fundamental difference between Hitler and a normal conservative.
And the danger is right now, that people, again, do not understand that the financial oligarchy, which did finance and bring Hitler into power, is now faced with the collapse of their system, and therefore, they are absolutely capable of doing exactly the same thing.
There are various options of how such a fascist coup could come about: You could have social unrest, and then simply an emergency is declared; or, you could have a new terrorist incident, of the type of Sept. 11; but any such pretext would then be sufficient. And that is the absolute danger.
In Europe, you remember, we had a very good reason why we fought the Lisbon Treaty, because the Lisbon Treaty has also provisions for emergency situations, which include even the death penalty against rioters. And therefore, we are very, very close to a supranational dictatorship.
Now, obviously, this is an untenable situation, because the European governments, and the U.S. government, are on a complete collision course with their populations. The people feel absolutely not represented any more by what the governments are doing.
So, if you look at the situation in the United States, there is a de facto state insolvency: The United States now has a budget debt of $14.3 trillion, and right now, the negotiations between the Obama Administration and the Republicans to increase the debt ceiling, are completely stuck. They're stuck, not because they differ in wanting to cut—they both want to cut. Obama wants to cut; the Republicans want to cut. The only difference is that Obama wants to increase the taxes, supposedly, on the rich. However, if you look a little bit closer, you can actually see that some of the cuts would destroy industry even more, which point has been made by the trade unions.
Both positions are completely insane.
Now, Moody's, one of the rating agencies, has demanded that the United States increase the debt ceiling through the middle of July, or they will downgrade the U.S. debt, which is obviously brinksmanship, in order to force through the cuts all the more quickly; and the IMF in its annual report basically said that this increase in the debt ceiling must be done immediately, to avoid a shock which would have dramatic consequences worldwide.
Now, yesterday started the new fiscal year, and, according to American law, the states are not allowed to carry over debt from the last fiscal year into the new fiscal year, and therefore, what these states have done—or most of them, with a few exceptions—they have imposed cuts in their budgets which are absolutely unbelievable. They are cutting in a barbaric way—social services, police, firemen, schools, universities—they are privatizing prisons! (Now, how can you make money out of a prison? Naturally by slave labor.) They are cutting health benefits, pensions.
And these cuts are so dramatic, that they are evolving towards chaos. And what has already happened in the United States, are flash mobs, robberies, and the situation is clearly heading towards a civil war. The unemployment level in American cities is unbelievable. Youth unemployment is generally 40% in some of the areas—black youth, even beyond that. Now, these are unemployment levels which we also see in Portugal, in Spain, in Greece.
The Crisis in Europe
Now, in Europe, the situation is moving in the same direction. Europe is bankrupt; the European Central Bank, de facto, is a "bad bank," which has trillions of toxic state bonds from the so-called bankruptcy states; the European banking system is hopelessly bankrupt. And they are trying to solve this by squeezing the living standards of the populations, privatization, and cutting state functions.
Last week, on Wednesday [July 29], when there was the vote in Greece, there was tension in the international markets beyond belief: The word was, that if the Greek Parliament would not pass the austerity program, the whole world financial system would go into a crisis, much worse than with Lehman Brothers and AIG in September 2008.
The package which the Greek Parliament had to agree to, is going to kill Greece. There is no way that Greece can live with that: Because the first package of EU110 billion of a year ago, has already led to a collapse of the living standard by 25%. Now, they want now a new bailout package, which would cut even more: It would privatize state functions; it would close down jobs; it would just make it much worse.
Now, with utmost pressure from the EU, and the banking system, the Greek Parliament passed the austerity package by 155 to 145 votes, which is not exactly a large majority, but the population did not accept that. Because they correctly—contrary to what certain tabloid propaganda in Germany tries to tell people—they consider this as a profoundly unjust. Because the rich people, who have profited from this situation, who have the yachts, who have the villas, they naturally took their flight capital already to other countries, and the poor are now supposed to pay the bill, and people who have incomes of EU500 are supposed to pay more taxes, more value-added taxes (VAT), and take cuts in all other areas.
Therefore, there are demonstrations every day of the so-called "Indignants" movement, which copied itself from the Spanish Indignados movement; and they, in turn, took the revolution in Egypt as a model, to express that they do not agree with these oligarchical structures any longer.
Now, in Syntagma Square in Athens, and many other cities, daily demonstrations took place. But recently, after the vote in the parliament, Papandreou ordered the police to squash these protests with violence, with real police brutality. And, as video documentation proves, they had provocateurs who would instigate and go for violence, and then the police would take that as a pretext, to squash the protests down. And we have video proof, which shows that some of these provocateurs committed their provocations, and then, disappeared behind the police lines, being protected by the same police.
I want to show you a short video segment of footage which was taken in Greece, and which you don't see on the TV here, but they give you a taste of what is going on. Here, the police are using tear gas, and the tear gas was also then used in the subway [where protesters fled to escape the gas—ed.], on the pretext that the demonstrators had their terrorist headquarters in the subway; and then people said, "They're turning the subway into a gas chamber."
Okay, I just wanted to give you a sense of where the EU policy, which is supposed to unify Europe in peace, and make sure that there is never again war, where this EU policy is taking us.
A Failed Policy in the Trans-Atlantic Region
One can say very clearly, that the policy of the U.S. government and of the European Union has failed. They have a failed policy because, if you look at the situation four years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the situation is worse; they have done absolutely nothing to intervene; and when you remember the prophetic webcast which my husband made on 25 July in 2007, one week or three days before the outbreak of the financial crisis, where he said, "This system is hopelessly gone; there is nothing which will save this system," which then played out in full! In August, he had already proposed measures that could be taken, in the policy of the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, which, if it had been implemented then, would have stopped the crisis right there, and it never would have unfolded!
Now, Wall Street and London, first through Bush Jr., and now through Obama, basically made sure that the HBPA was stopped in its tracks. And instead, the G20 countries have put through one rescue package after the other, honoring the gambling debts of the high-risk speculators, and have probably injected something like $30 trillion into the money system, which has greatly increased the inflation potential which is about to explode in a hyperinflation, like in Germany in 1923.
What the governments have done in this period, is, they have turned the private debt of the casino economy, of gambling, into public debt, into state debt: And they want now, to make the taxpayer and the average citizens who are not paying taxes, because their living standard is being cut, too!—basically to cut this. And this means nothing else than murdering people, by shortening the lives of people, and there is no question that that is the intention.
Now, the Angelides Report, that is, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, which was published in January this year, and the subsequent Levin-Coburn report of the Senate, gave all the information which was needed to stop this. Basically, they pointed to the reckless behavior of the "financial industry," so-called, and the total failure of the policymakers and regulatory authorities to intervene. They also pointed to the reason for this, namely, that it was the abolition of Glass-Steagall in 1999, and similar deregulations of the last 30 years, which are responsible for this crisis.
The Angelides report was published half a year ago, and the Levin-Coburn report a couple of months ago; and in this entire period, not one European government has commented on that in a serious manner, nor have they acted on it!
Time is running out. It is about to run out in these days. And we must get of this system, which has caused this situation, because, if we don't change the system, then the danger is of a tragedy of mankind.
Globalization vs. the Chance of 1989
Now, the system I'm talking about, which we have to get rid of, is what you call, generally, "globalization." Or another word for it, is the Anglo-American Empire, or better, British Empire, if you understand by "British Empire," not the island of Great Britain, but the conglomerate of central banks, investment banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, insurance and reinsurance companies, cartels: It's the idea of taking money as an absolute value, and sacrificing people, sacrificing economies, sacrificing farmers, sacrificing agriculture. It has been a gigantic redistribution, from the poor to the rich.
Now, this tendency of the monetarist system has existed all the time, and existed also after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a tendency. But there were normally many constraints in the postwar period: There was Bretton Woods, which was not perfect, but it had a regulation system. You had statesmen, like Adenauer, de Gaulle, and others, John F. Kennedy, who made sure that the common good of the people was looked after, and that these powers were relatively contained.
But, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, between '89 and '91, the major barrier for the oligarchy against the idea of global empire, disappeared. Because, remember, that Machiavelli had pointed to the fact that even oligarchical systems, which hate progress because they want to keep the masses stupid and backward, has to allow technological progress for military purposes. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Comecon countries, that requirement to keep up technological progress disappeared, and they started to move towards the idea of a global oligarchical empire.
In that period, in 1989-1990, I made many speeches where I said: If one would make the mistake, to superimpose on the collapsed Communist system, the free-market system, that maybe you could have a looting process for several years, but that it would come to a collapse, much, much worse than the collapse of Communism, and that is exactly the point where we are.
I mean, if you think back to the moment in 1989, what it meant for Germany, the fall of the Wall, that people were completely happy about the great chance of '89. You could have made a completely different world! You could have had peace! And we had basically a situation where there was no more enemy; the "West," so-called, had won. And you could have had a chance for a complete peace order in the world; you could have used the resources for the military, for peaceful purposes, to reconstruct the terrible conditions, and eliminate the terrible conditions of the developing countries.
And we had a plan for that moment: We had, first, the so-called "Productive Triangle," taking the area between Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, to upgrade it with high-technology, the Transrapid, with the maglev train, the high-temperature reactor, and other advanced technologies, and use that then as a motor to develop the East. When the Soviet Union dissolved itself in '91, we expanded this program immediately, in the so-called "Eurasian Land-Bridge" program we campaigned for in many countries, and which has been taken up by such countries, in part, as China, Russia, and so forth.
So, we had a plan for how to go about it, how to react to the collapse of the one system. The problem was, that Bush Sr. and the neocons in the United States, instead, decided to go for the "New American Century" doctrine, based on the "Anglo-American special relationship," which has been the mechanism of how the British always try to undermine the American Revolution, and instead of going for a peace order, you had such ideas like that of Samuel Huntington pushing the Clash of Civilizations, replacing Russia as an enemy with Islam, with the North-South so-called "conflict." And, naturally, building the empire, which was based on another writing of Samuel Huntington's, The Soldier and the State, where he develops the idea that you should get rid of draft armies, and have legionnaire armies, in the tradition of the Roman Empire.
So this was the idea: to have legions, to go for imperial wars, privatized security firms, and that has been used in Iraq; it's being used in Afghanistan; it's now being used in Libya. And, naturally, part of this was the conscious geopolitical destruction of Russia and the other ex-Comecon countries. There was a CIA study in '91, which came to the conclusion that the former Soviet Union had too many raw materials, and too much skilled labor. So, if you would not deindustrialize it, a too-strong competitor on the world market would appear. This was the privatization program done by the oligarchs in Russia.
The European Union: a De Facto Empire
For Europe, the plan was to turn the EU into a de facto British Empire, under the guise of the European Union. Naturally Great Britain would stay outside, but the EU policy was supposed to be modeled on the policy of the British Empire.
Now, we know how this came about, because, remember, in 1989, we had a plan for what to do: the Productive Triangle, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and therefore, we watched much more consciously than ordinary people what the enemy did. Now, on Nov. 28, [German Chancellor] Kohl presented his famous 10-point plan for the confederation of the two German states, not yet a unification. Then, on the 30th of November, Alfred Herrhausen, then-boss of Deutsche Bank, was assassinated, because he had also a development plan for Poland and other countries, like our own idea; and his assassination was meant as a message to Kohl, because he was one of Kohl's closest friends, to absolutely capitulate.
Then came the famous Strasbourg EU summit, on Dec. 8-9, 1989, where Mitterrand, Thatcher, and Bush, from a distance—they all came down on Kohl, demanding that the German D-mark should be given up as the price for German unification. Kohl later said, these were some of the "darkest hours" of his life.
We know how the D-mark was taken away, in order to weaken Germany, and the biographer of Mitterrand, Jacques Attali, even wrote that Mitterrand threatened war against Germany, if it would not capitulate and take the euro. Now, Attali, just a week ago, came out with a statement saying that they consciously designed the euro and the Eurozone, so that it would not function, so that Europe later on would be forced to go for the political union and economic union, which the countries had opposed so far.
So then, naturally, came the entire process, where people knew that the euro could not function, that the European Monetary Union could not function, if you had no political union; but, then, step by step, they proceeded to have the various treaties, the Maastricht Treaty up to the Lisbon Treaty, which is a completely monetarist structure. The EU Commission has turned into a supranational structure, which means the almost total loss of sovereignty of all the member countries.
Europe has become a construct, and the euro can, and could not work! And what we're seeing now in Greece was intended: It was intended not to work; it was intended to weaken Germany, and to force a dictatorship upon Europe. And we have to understand this history, because if we don't understand it, we will not draw the right conclusions.
Now, look at the arguments: Europe was sold, because a unified Europe was supposedly good for peace in Europe! Well, look what the people in the marketplaces in Greece, in Portugal, in Spain, are saying about the German Chancellor! They have flags with the EU and swastikas painted on them, and this is the opposite of peace.
The second argument for the credulous, was that is was necessary to have a unified Europe to counter the emerging world powers, like China, India, Brazil, Russia. But, under the green EU policy, Europe is just now committing economic suicide. The recent development by the German parliament to exit from nuclear power, has absolutely nothing to do with Fukushima! Because, if you look at countries like Russia, China, India, South Korea, and many others, they are 100% committed to expand nuclear energy; to learn the lesson from Fukushima, to go from the not-so-safe nuclear reactors to the more safe, or totally inherently safe fourth-generation reactor; to go to the high-temperature reactor; to go to thermonuclear fusion. And only some European countries, like Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, are committing economic suicide right now!
Forty Years of British Policy
This is not related to Fukushima, but is the result of 40 years of British policy, which started with the insane lies of the Club of Rome, which was consciously intending a paradigm-shift in the values in Europe. They put out this absurd thesis of limits to growth, that the world would be at equilibrium, which developed until 1970, and now we have reached the limit, and now we have to have "sustainable development," appropriate technologies, and all of these things. And these were all lies, because neither is the planet like that, nor the universe: And we are going to hear many presentations in the next two days, which are going to prove this.
But what was behind this was the policy of Prince Philip, the World Wildlife Fund—which now has been exposed by German TV a little bit, because the World Wildlife Fund is involved in murderous policies in the Third World concerning biofuels. It is what Prince Philip said all along: He wants to reduce the world population to 1 or 2 billion people. And that is what is behind this policy. And we have been following this for the last 40 years, and there are many people of this depopulation camp who have said, "Well, how do you reduce the population?" It is very simple. You take the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Hunger, Death, War, Disease, and that way you can solve the problem."
Now, when the Club of Rome started its evil policy, we calculated that the effect would be hundreds of millions of people dying, especially in the developing sector. And we said—I said it personally, at the Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974—that "this policy is 100 times worse than Adolf Hitler." Now that may have been shocking to some people, but if you count how many people have died, of hunger, of disease, which could have easily been prevented, it is absolutely true!
Now, they have put out one lie after the other: The lie of global warming; the lie of so-called anthropogenic climate change—which, after all, is the whole basis for the policy of renewable energies—and most recently, there was this unbelievable paper in Germany, which was the basis on which the German government decided on the exit from nuclear energy, by the scientific advisory board headed by Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who is a Commander of the British Empire, and he says, in every speech and every letter he writes, it says, "C.B.E."—Commander of the British Empire; instead of being ashamed and hiding it, he puts it up front. So, this is a British policy, which we have proven in many ways.
Now, what they want to do, is the so-called "Great Transformation"—"a new social contract for the great transformation"—which they have been pushing for years, so it has nothing to do with Fukushima: It is the idea of the so-called "de-carbonization" of the entire world energy sector, meaning not only exit from nuclear energy, but also coal, gas, oil, and if you do that—it will not happen, because no way will Russia, China, and these countries go along with it!—but, from the plan, it would be to reduce the population to 1 or 2 billion!
But it would not function, because it probably would lead to the extinction of the human race, in total.
Because, if you look at the recent half-billion years of life on Earth, it not only proves that the anti-entropic tendency is what is the trend of evolution in the universe, but that you have more advanced species of life, who require a net energy-flux-density increase, if they are to survive.
Now, at each level of development, you reach a relative exhaustion of resources, and if you then stagnate, you indeed have a collapse. A society which tries to enforce a fixed-level of energy flux-density, like solar or wind, creates a condition where the process is going in the direction of the extinction of the leading species, which, at this point, is mankind.
For the continuous existence of mankind, society has to go to increased energy flux-density in the production process, and a higher capital-intensity in order to redefine, at each level, what a resource is. Without accelerating the density of nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, and finally matter/anti-matter reactions, and increasing the capital-intensity of production, and also moving from what Lyndon LaRouche calls one platform of technology, to the next higher one, mankind is setting itself up to become one more of the extinct species, like the ones which have disappeared in previous great catastrophes, which largely ceased to exist because they failed to change their mode of existence, and they could not cope with natural disasters which were hitting them.
Therefore, the deindustrialization of energy-intensive sections of industry will not only mean that these industries will leave Germany, but they will take many industries with them, because you will have brownouts, blackouts, collapsing living standards, shortening of lives.
Britain Delenda Est!
And this has now reached the point where the situation has become absolutely unacceptable: The battle cry of this conference, at least concerning my person, is that the British Empire has to be destroyed, with all the axiomatic features which belong to it, which is monetarism and the idea of an oligarchical system of society. And we have, as a reality, an oligarchy, a dictatorship in Europe at this point.
Some people will protest, and say, "But we have democracy—we can vote." But what good does it do you, if you have absolutely no influence on the decision-making which comes from Brussels? And normal people therefore say, "One can not do anything anyway."
Because people sense that presently, the money-elites control politics, they control the politicians, which is why they have not done anything to curb this speculation. They also control the media, the entertainment, and the problem is, that as a result of it, the masses of the population are living in a denial of reality, because they are driven by their desire to maximize the "quality of life," and they don't want to hear about reality, because that counters their pleasures! Which really is the theory of Adam Smith: that man is not supposed to be concerned about nature, the universe, and the totality—that should be left to God, according to Adam Smith—but man is only controlled by the desire to maximize his pleasure and minimize his pain.
As they did in the Roman Empire, with bread and circuses, with the amphitheaters where the Christians were fed to the lions, and the audience was encouraged to put their thumbs up or thumbs down, if a gladiator was allowed to live. And remember the warning of St. Augustine, saying that these games induce the masses of citizens to degrade themselves, to be manipulated to accept that they are underlings.
Now, if you look at the youth culture today, if you look at such things like Lady Gaga, or if you look at the children's violence which is going on, where eight-year-olds are murdering six-year-olds, you can see where we have come to at this point.
The End of an Epoch
Now, this has to stop! And we are now at a point, where it is very, very clear: We are at an end of an epoch—which means we are also at the beginning of a new epoch! And if this new epoch is going to be a dark age, or a new renaissance, well, in large part, I do think this depends upon whether the United States goes for Glass-Steagall and then Europe would do likewise, and, we would simply write off the trillions of gambling debt. We would issue new credit, and we would immediately deploy this new credit for reconstruction.
We have worked out, with the World Land-Bridge, many concrete programs, from NAWAPA and many other water projects, about which we will hear also, tomorrow; to develop not only NAWAPA and transform the American continent, but to develop the Bering Strait, to go for the Eurasian Land-Bridge; to refill many lakes which have dried up, like Lake Chad, the Aral Sea, and many others; we would immediately start to develop Africa, build infrastructure, green the deserts, and double food production!
We would immediately go to eliminate poverty. Within a couple of months, we could eliminate the worst poverty and hunger to a degree that people wouldn't starve any more. And in a year or two, we could have really a beginning of a prospering economy, worldwide. We would immediately go back into fundamental research, to study better the laws of nature, and of the universe. Rather than going to a nuclear exit, we would upgrade our knowledge of the precursors, which would enable us not to prevent earthquakes, but to have a warning system, so that we could, with surety, evacuate people; we could prevent hundreds of millions of people from dying of these volcano eruptions, and similar things.
Now, in the last half-billion years, there were five times, big catastrophes on this planet, which had to do with a 62-million-year cycle, which had to do with the position of our Solar System in our galaxy. And each time, five times, it came to a complete destruction of up to 98% of all species on the Earth. And we are now clearly moving into such a period where this can happen. Not tomorrow, but if we want to make sure that our children and grandchildren, and their grandchildren, are equipped to deal with this, and make sure the human species will survive, we better start the process now. And if we can't change it, we have to learn to adapt to it, and make sure humankind can survive that.
That means a fundamental change in the way we think. The Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement, we find ourselves—we place ourselves—in the tradition of such great minds as Nikolaus of Cusa, who already, in the 15th Century, made the point that there is an absolute coincidence between the laws of the microcosm and the laws of the macrocosm: the microcosm meaning human creativity, and the macrocosm meaning the created universe. And Nikolaus also pointed to the fact that this universe is developing; it is continuing to develop. Naturally, since he was a Cardinal, he basically said the Creator created the universe, as a creative universe. And since man is there in the universe, man continues the process of creation, on a higher level than the universe is already developing by itself. And Nikolaus called this the vis creativa which governs both man and the universe.
It is high time, that we create a mass movement around the world, of people who intend to put the political and economic order into cohesion with the laws of Creation.
Genius Is the Natural Condition of Man
Our great friend, the late spaceflight pioneer Krafft Ehricke, called this the "Extraterrestrial Imperative," where he said: Only if man starts manned space travel will you start to behave in such a rational way, that you continue the evolution of man, and of life, into space. And that the Extraterrestrial Imperative will mark the moment when mankind becomes adult, and stops this irrational behavior.
Now, the Indians call this, to bring politics in cohesion with the cosmological order. And basically, that means not only scientific progress, but it means, eminently, also Classical art. Why is the only art belonging to mankind, the Classical one? And why can we not have a Liberal view about "taste," about this music, about this poetry, about that so-called drama? Well, because it is only Classical art, in music, in poetry, which corresponds to the creative process: You have a poetical idea, or a musical idea; you develop that idea until it is exhausted, through the process of thorough-composition. And then, you reach a higher level, which is expressed either in a metaphor, or in an hypothesis.
Now, we also have to put the ideal of man back on the agenda, the ideal of my and your beloved poet, Friedrich Schiller: who said, the only way how man can be, is as a beautiful soul. A beautiful soul, according to Friedrich Schiller, is a person who does what is necessary and finds his freedom in necessity; who does his duty with passion. Who is not a Kantian, who says, "I have to be moral, and therefore I have to take these terrible burdens," but somebody who is joyfully becoming a genius. Because, according to Friedrich Schiller, it is only the genius who is a beautiful soul: Somebody who enlarges the laws of the universe, of art, of music, in a lawful way.
Now, that is how we have to change society. We have to make sure that every human being is developing their full potential, and becomes a genius, becomes a beautiful soul, because there is no reason why every person should not be a genius! It's the natural condition of man. Man is the only species which has the ability of creative reasoning. And therefore, let us make the sacred commitment not to allow mankind in this crisis, which is without precedent, to become bestial; but to leave empires and oligarchism behind us, forever.
