HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE
Bringing America
into the New Paradigm
This is an edited transcription of the keynote remarks of Helga Zepp-LaRouche to the Houston Seminar on Oct. 1. She was introduced by Kesha Rogers.
[Print version of this article]
Kesha Rogers: Good morning everyone, I’m very happy to see our audience here this morning in Houston for this very special event and occasion that we’re going to be having here today for our day-long seminar, called “A Symposium To Prepare You for Victory.” This is titled, “Unleashing the Creative Nature of Man.”
We have a special guest with us today, the founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who will be addressing us this morning. And I think Helga’s address is coming at a very timely point for mankind and for the nation in history. And I’d like to say good evening to Helga, who’s addressing us now from Europe. And I want to go ahead and let Helga get started with her remarks and then what I’m going to do is come back up and fill you in on the the treats we have for you over the course of the day.
We will be making presentations regarding this unleashing of the human creative identity and the Renaissance culture, the new paradigm for mankind that we are now in the midst of and seeking to create.
And Helga will start us off with that discussion. After Helga’s remarks, we will open it up for questions and answers, and then after that we will continue with our program for the day. So, again, thank you Helga for joining, and thank you all for being here this morning. [applause]
 EIRNS
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Anybody who watches the very rapidly changing strategic situation—which almost creates a new unbelievable moment every day—is probably wondering what direction this will take. We have on the one side, a very, very dangerous confrontation exploding from the side of the United States and NATO against Russia. When the ceasefire negotiations between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia broke down, basically because there are certain forces within the United States who did not want it to succeed, that put us back on a potential confrontation between the West, and especially the United States, and Russia.
This is a situation which comes from a certain paradigm of thinking. It is a result of the fact that the United States insists that it is the United States which sets the rules around the world and keeps a unipolar world, which is no longer really in existence.
Underlying all of this, you have the immediate danger of a blowout of the financial system. The most obvious case right now is Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is the largest so-called German bank—it’s not really German any more because it’s living in London and in Wall Street—but it has a derivatives exposure of $42 trillion, and every large bank in the world is a counter-party, and those banks are also loaded down with derivatives.
Deutsche Bank could go under. Its stock has dropped like a stone in the last year—on Friday, at one point its stock even dipped below 10 euros. At that point, people were really panicking. All the financial media were saying that this is the potential new 2008, this is the “Lehman Brothers moment of Deutsche Bank.” The financial media started to show no respect for Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, by saying she bungled that crisis again, because she had said a couple of days ago that, “If there is a new crisis of Deutsche Bank, the German government is not going to bail it out,” and that led to a complete speculative attack which made everything worse. One financial analyst was reported in Bloomberg News today, saying that these “zombie banks” soon will create a “zombie economy.”
At this point, you have the coincidence of these two crises: A strategic showdown, where Ash Carter was travelling to U.S. military bases in the last week. In North Dakota at an Air Force base, inspecting the B-52 bomber which is nuclear capable, he said, “The Russians have mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons, but even if there would be a conventional attack the use of nuclear weapons is not unthinkable. It has not been used since 1945, but one should not rely on the fact that it remains like that.
View full size DoD photo by Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley
Defense Secretary Ash Carter addresses sailors aboard the USS Carl Vinson in San Diego, Sept. 29, 2016. Carter is on a trip to discuss the U.S. “mission” in the Asia-Pacific region.
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Obviously, if you take these two dynamics: (1) the new Cold War which is already very, very close to turning into a hot war in Syria, which in turn could lead to a global showdown between the West, and Russia, and China, because Russia and China now have an extremely close strategic alliance, and (2) the financial meltdown, which is much, much worse than 2008, because all the central banks have used up their so-called “tools,” quantitative easing, and negative interest rates. They’re talking about “helicopter money” and that is about as bad as it gets, so, is there any hope that civilization can pull itself out of this?
The Way Out
I think there is. And for all those people who normally say, “oh, you can’t do anything anyway, because those powers up there, they’re too powerful,” I think a recent development really has proven these people to be utterly wrong. When a couple of days ago, both houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, voted to override Obama’s veto in respect to the JASTA bill, this came as a big surprise, to everybody, I guess, including ourselves.
There was a 15-year-long battle, where the families of the victims of Sept. 11, had courageously fought to get the 28 pages released, and they were putting pressure on the U.S. government to have the right to sue Saudi Arabia for their possible involvement in 9/11—which, after the publication of the 28 pages, was pretty obvious.
But then, in the last four weeks, something additional happened, that has certainly been completely overlooked by Obama for sure. It has certainly also been overlooked by the Saudis, and it has caught even the Congress and the Senate by surprise.
View full size EIRNS/Stuart Lewis
Schiller Institute chorus performing Mozart’s Requiem at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph, Brooklyn, NY, as part of a four-concert living memorial by the Schiller Institute, on the weekend of 9/11/2016, to victims of the 9/11/2001 attacks.
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We organized four concerts of Mozart’s Requiem and African-American Spirituals, which commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with an attendance of about 4,000 people who watched in person and listened to these performances, in addition to many more via live audio-visual transmission and on the Internet afterwards. It was evident if you watched it, that everybody who participated in these concerts was completely transformed. People were moved in the deepest part of their souls, in their hearts. Many of the family members and firemen and police officers who participated in these concerts, said that even though they had commemorated this terrible catastrophe every year for 15 years, never had anything like what they had experienced with Mozart’s Requiem, happened to them.
It is extremely important that we understand what has happened with these concerts. Because, for those of you who know Friedrich Schiller and especially one of his later plays, called The Bride of Messina, he has a beautiful introduction with the title “On the Role of Chorus.” And there he describes, and he doesn’t mean the musical chorus, he means the ancient Greek chorus which was always part of the ancient Classical dramas. He says there: The power of great art is that it creates a force in people which does not end when the performance—when the great piece of music or drama ends, but it creates a lasting power in the person who participates in such an experience. The reason is, he says, is that great Classical art is not looking to set man free temporarily, but to set him free truly, and therefore this power is increased in man when he participates in that.
And it was precisely those concerts which gave the additional, I would say, inspiration, spark of absolute sovereignty and absolute sublime power of will and courage which the family members could then transmit to even those hardened Congressmen and Senators. I watched the Congressional debate live and I must say, some of these Senators did say things which were quite surprising. And that power, of the fight for justice inspired by Classical music, was proven to be more powerful than all the millions of dollars of Saudi Arabia and their disgusting law firms and public relations firms which they had hired to put pressure on the Congress to not override Obama’s veto.
This is extremely important, because Mr. LaRouche yesterday said that we have to add that quality into the fight, because if you stay on the level of pragmatic policy, the fight cannot be won on that level. And what Mr. LaRouche also stated, is that we have to add a completely new desire to find new scientific discoveries—to really go for scientific breakthroughs in the knowledge of what is the true identity of man. Why is the human species in existence? What is our role in the Solar system? What is the role of mankind in the Galaxy?
This demand that we have to go for a completely new definition of what science is, is very interesting. Science is neither some mathematical formula, nor some pragmatic gimmick, but is a fundamental understanding about the role of the human mind in the Universe, showing precisely the direction in which the next scientific breakthroughs have to occur. That is precisely what Nicholas of Cusa had already said in the 15th Century, that every newly born human being recapitulates the entire history of the universe, practically in his own mind, by learning the knowledge of mankind up to the level of the knowledge of his time. Then, based on that knowledge, he can define the next step necessary for a breakthrough.
This understanding of the development of new science challenges the way people think that science has progressed. Scientific progress is not some kind of an awkward discovery somebody makes in their garage and then gets a patent for this discovery, and somehow that’s how scientific progress occurs. No. Cusa, and in that same light, Lyndon LaRouche says, man can with absolute certainty determine where mankind must go if mankind is to continue to exist.
The Necessary New Paradigm
What are these next steps? We need a new paradigm and that new paradigm obviously, in light of what I said in the beginning about the two strategic crises which are now facing the existence of civilization, must overcome geopolitics and also overcome the idea that a nation has a legitimate right to pursue its own national interests.
What has to occur instead is that we have to proceed from the ideal of the one, unified mankind which informs our decisions first, and then the national interest comes after that.
That new paradigm requires a shift in thinking. It is a paradigm which is so fundamentally different from the paradigm which now governs the world, including the world of geopolitics, that the shift must be as big or bigger than the paradigm shift which separated the Middle Ages from modern times.
For those who have read about the Middle Ages, this was like the 14th Century for example, a period which was absolutely horrible. You had Black Death, you had witchcraft, you had people going crazy over the Black Death, you have universities dominated by Scholasticism, by Aristotelianism, the new Peripatetics, and this was a method which was a complete dead-end of thinking. No new knowledge could come from this kind of geometry.
The learning of that era was similar, in a certain sense, to the kind of stuff which is being taught in our universities today, which is based on mathematics, on health economics—which is really a way of defining triage in the health sector, deductionist thinking, reductionist processes, and produces no new knowledge. No new qualitative knowledge can be produced by that method of thinking.
Cusa Rejected Axioms
So what was the beginning, the most important step in the new paradigm of the modern times? It was actually the thinking of such people as especially Nicholas of Cusa. He very consciously rejected all the axioms that went along with the Middle Ages and Scholasticism and Aristotle. And he said, I’m thinking something which never has been thought by any human being before. He developed a method of thinking which he called the “coincidence of opposites,” which was the idea that the One has a higher power and a higher magnitude than the Many.
 Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, 1401-1464.
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Nicholas of Cusa, who was a Cardinal in the 15th Century, developed this idea through a theological argument by saying that the One is God and that the Many, being the universe and all created things, are unfolded out of this One. And therefore you have to be able to think like a second god, you never will be like God, but you have to apply the vis creativa of God, the creative power of God, and then you become a second god.
Now, in his Docta Ignorantia he developed these ideas in the most powerful way and if you haven’t read it yet, please go home and read this absolutely groundbreaking work, which was immediately attacked by the same Scholastic professors in the universities and the clergy, who felt completely threatened, and they accused Nicholas of Cusa of being a pantheist, because if Cusa says God is in everything, and everything is in God, then that’s pantheism, which, of course, it is not. Joseph Wenck was one of those who vociferously attacked Cusa, and after some years Cusa chose to counter his criticisms.
Cusa said: Obviously, this poor Mr. Wenck has not understood what I’m talking about, that it is a completely different way of thinking; that if you are on the level of Aristotle, you are just seeing contradictions and you don’t see the higher level of reason. He said: My thinking, the thinking on the level of the coincidence of opposites, is like—and he used a very nice pedagogical way to describe it—he said, it’s like standing on a high tower, and you’re looking down, and what you see when you’re looking down is, you see the hunter, you see the hunted, and the process of hunting. While the Aristotelian is either the hunter or the hunted, but he never sees the process.
He then appeals to people to elevate their thinking and make the mental jump over what he calls the “wall of the coincidentia oppositorum” which is a kind of intuitive thinking. It is basically that kind of thinking which we need to accomplish and what goes along with that, is the ability to think a completely new level of relations among men, among nations, to proceed from humanity as a whole.
And one country which has now already proposed very concretely making that jump, based on that level of thinking, is China: It proposed a new level of relations among nations, based on the respect for complete sovereignty of the other, respect for the different social system of the other country, of non-interference, and basically that is the opposite of what Obama said recently in an article in the Washington Post, where he said “the United States sets the rules, and not China.”
Positive U.S. Role Is Available
For the United States this would mean going back to the outlook of John Quincy Adams, who in his foreign policy had established exactly the same idea, that the United States was a republic and that it should have a perfect alliance of sovereign republics, with non-interference and respect for their respective sovereignty.
Obviously, our economic proposal, that the New Silk Road must become the World Land-Bridge, is based exactly on that type of thinking. Then you can work together on international projects for the development of every part of the world, but you do it with the full respect for sovereignty of the other, instead of trying to dominate the systems of economics and finance.
 Xinhua
China continues to expand high-speed rail construction, to eventually link 80% of China’s cities with high-speed rail. Here, four CRH380D high-speed trains, which have a maximum speed of 380 km/hr.
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It would mean, for example, that the United States would cooperate in such a “win-win” perspective. Now, what would that mean? Would it mean the United States would have a Silk Road? The United States, which is now falling apart in terms of infrastructure, would have a system of fast trains, like China does. By 2020, China wants to have every major city connected to a fast train system which would travel at 450 kph. For the United States this would mean the immediate construction of 50-100,000 miles of fast train systems connecting all the major cities, creating some new cities, including science cities, and simply participating in a completely different economic system, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did with the New Deal, but this time geared towards the 21st Century.
View full size www.offiziere.ch
A railway construction project in Pakistan, along the route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, carried out with Chinese funding and cooperation.
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Global Glass-Steagall
It would also mean immediately addressing the bankrupt financial system, by installing a new financial architecture in the tradition of Roosevelt, which would have a global Glass-Steagall system, which may be forced upon the world more quickly than anyone may think: because if Deutsche Bank goes bankrupt, the whole financial system comes down. Mr. LaRouche and myself proposed a [couple of weeks ago], to go back to the model of Deutsche Bank as it was before Alfred Herrhausen was assassinated in 1989. This would mean putting Deutsche Bank under a bankruptcy/insolvency commission, to unwind in an orderly fashion the very complex derivatives, which are very interwoven with all the major banks internationally. Most of these derivatives cannot be paid, therefore you have to write them down.
And then you have to protect the business model in Deutsche Bank, the part which is engaged in commercial banking and enlarge that aspect of the bank by making that the only business plan of Deutsche Bank. This would mean applying a sort of local Glass-Steagall to Deutsche Bank. Given the size of Deutsche Bank, such a move would immediately make necessary a global Glass-Steagall, because the derivatives exposure is so intertwined with all the other banks, that it simply would be the only alternative to a complete breakdown into chaos.
It would also mean cooperating on the basis of such a global Glass-Steagall system with national banking systems of each of these sovereign countries. Now when we’re talking about the World Land-Bridge, we’re talking about projects which last, in terms of realization, 20, 30, 40 years, 50 years. However, with the speed of construction that the Chinese have demonstrated in the recent period, it would probably not require 50 years, but probably 25. But it still would require national banks in each participating country. It would require compensating for the fact that some of the countries are large, like Russia, with 11 time zones, have very few people, large supplies of raw materials. Some countries are very small and landlocked like Slovakia, while others are very, very poor, like Eritrea. There are many, many differences, and you need to set up a new credit system which takes these differences into account, because the new credits given by these national banks cannot be paid back before the investment realizes what they were meant for, i.e. producing the necessary productivity increase of the labor force and the industries of the countries participating. So you need clearing houses which take care of these differences and long-term and short-term commitments.
That is then the new credit system, which would be a sort of New Bretton Woods system which would go along with the World Land-Bridge. China has already called for that, with the demand for a new financial architecture, and has created a parallel banking system with the AIIB, the New Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Maritime Silk Road Fund, and the Shanghai Cooperation Bank. So the alternative system is already in place, and if the trans-Atlantic sector, Europe, and the United States, would get rid of their casino economies, they could immediately be integrated into this already-existing financial system. So it is absolutely possible and within reach.
China’s World Development Offer
Xi Jinping not only demanded that the world economy, following the G-20 meeting in Hangzhou in the beginning of September, must be based on innovation. “Innovation” is not just, as I said, some arbitrary innovation, but it must address the fundamental requirements of the world economy. This means, in the physical economy terms of Lyndon LaRouche, that the increase of the energy-flux density must provide the basis for the increase in the relative potential population density of the planet, and that must be the scientific yardstick of whether an innovation is actually productive or not. A lot of the innovation which takes place now is in areas which are not productive at all, and the new innovation must be geared towards increasing the real processes in the Universe.
It is highly interesting that Xi Jinping demanded that Chinese scientists make fundamental breakthroughs in four areas:
• The evolution of the Universe
• What are the laws of the development of the Universe?
• Third, the laws of the human mind
• Fourth, the laws of life, what is life? How does it originate,
how does it occur?
And these are all touching upon the kind of fundamental questions, what Lyndon LaRouche called for yesterday, and obviously, this is the direction in which we have to go.
You have heard a lot from Kesha and others about the absolutely fantastic world outlook of Krafft Ehricke, who called for the extraterrestrial imperative, as the necessary next phase of the development of mankind.
Krafft Ehricke was a close friend of ours, and especially in the last years of his life, I had many conversations with him about the relationship between science and culture. And he was absolutely convinced that the efforts of the Schiller Institute were absolutely crucial, because, he said, we have to add the aesthetical education of man to scientific progress, since technology is never good or bad. It is man which brings it to a good or an evil use. Therefore, he said, the crucial question is that we ennoble the human species, which is exactly the question of the aesthetical education.
This is why we put such a big emphasis on beauty, and that art must be beautiful, because only then does it accomplish this ennobling of the human soul. Beauty, Schiller says, is very important because it is both a quality of the senses, because the senses are perceptive of beauty, but it is also in the realm of reason, because what is beauty is not a question of experience, but it is a question of the definition of the mind, of reason.
Therefore, Schiller says, we have to educate the emotions, which are related to the senses, but not identical with the senses. We have to educate these emotions up to the level of reason, so that man can blindly follow what the emotions are saying, without ever losing control or going to a lower level.
So therefore, he said, we have to educate every human being to become a beautiful soul, so that people can blindly follow their instincts because their instincts would never tell them anything which is not guided by reason, and therefore, freedom and necessity, passion and duty, must become the same.
I think that that is an emotional development which is the only way that man will master the requirements of the extraterrestrial imperative, because if man does not become more noble and better, I don’t think we are going to make it.
Therefore, Schiller added to the question of beauty, the question of the Sublime, the Sublime being that quality which in a certain sense makes man great even if he is confronted with tragedy and catastrophe, because he has bound his identity to a higher cause and higher principles than those which can threaten his mortal life. And I think it is that Sublime quality which is evoked by great Classical art and what we have seen by the power unleashed in the concerts leading to the absolute breakthrough in the fight in the Congress.
This kind of thinking is necessary to make the kinds of breakthroughs Lyn is demanding. Nicholas of Cusa said the only people who are capable of making these kinds of necessary breakthroughs are people who are thinking on the level of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, because only if you are thinking on that level, do you have something which Lyndon LaRouche called “prescience.” Nicholas says, the person who makes a discovery has to know already ahead of time what he is looking for, because if you just discover something and do not know what you were looking for, you do not even know if what you have found is the right thing.
Therefore, it is that kind of creative intuition, which is what is really at stake, and that quality happens to be the same emotional mental quality that you need to write Classical poetry, to write classical drama, to make a scientific discovery, it all comes from the same faculty of your mind. And we have to educate the entire population, so that they reject the present pragmatic or even Satanic joy in the here and now, the lust for the senses, or just degraded kind of entertainment, and we have to get people to taste the sweetness of the thinking of a creative person, because that is the only way in which mankind will become truly human.
And I have a beautiful idea of what the new paradigm can be: Just imagine if we get the best minds of each culture in each nation, relating to each other in love and admiration for the creative powers of the other one, like the great space scientists who are working together, or the astronauts who all report what the viewpoint is when you look at our planet from space. The idea that people will relate to each other like the relationship between Einstein and Max Planck, or among Schiller, Humboldt, Körner, in other words, or the Humboldt brothers. In a certain sense, we have to fight for that kind of humanity, where people respect and love each other for their creative powers, and have no greater passion than to further the creative abilities of their contemporary citizens and fellow human beings.
And I think we are on the verge of that. I think that with the recent victory, the power for the good has been demonstrated, and I think we have to absolutely carry that forward: And then victory is within reach. [applause]
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