The Coming Fall of the Cult of Gaia

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this transcript]

This is the edited transcript of Schiller Institute Founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote address to an international youth discussion, October 23, 2021. Subheads and hyperlinks have been added.

First, let me say “Hello” to all of you, wherever you may be, in whatever corner of the world.

I think we all are extremely aware that we are in very challenging times, with many threats to the existence of the human species from the pandemic, famine, war danger, and many things like that, like hyperinflationary developments. Therefore, I want to focus on the most important topic for today, which is what underlies all of the different subjects one could discuss—that is what is the nature of man. What is the identity of man in the universe? What is life all about? Why do we exist?

Two Irreconcilable Views of Man

There are questions which normally have been discussed in the past by religions, by philosophers, by poets. Today, the whole question has basically been reduced to two fundamentally opposing views of what man is. On the one side, you have the almost dominant—at least in certain countries—dominant view that man is a parasite; that man burdens nature. That he has a CO₂ footprint which makes him trouble for Mother Earth, and therefore he endangers the planet. On the other side, you have the idea that man is the most advanced existence in the universe. That man is limitless, perfectible. That the world is in a systemic change, a tectonic change, the outcome of which will be determined as to which of the two views will prevail.

It is obviously not an easy situation for a young person. If you are now 20 years or even 30 years, and you have been born in the United States or Europe or a developing country, depending which country you are from, it’s very different. But essentially, I can say that almost for sure you have never experienced what is a good government. If you are about 20, you were born in 2001; that was the year of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Then, you had eight years of the Bush administration, eight years of the Obama administration, four years of Trump. If you were in Germany, you had 16 years of Chancellor Merkel, a time of complete stagnation. In this whole period, you had 20 years of a war in Afghanistan.

Now, you see what these 20 years resulted in, namely that this period of the endless wars is ended; and with what? An incredible experience, where the most powerful military force in the world—that of the United States and NATO countries—could not win in 20 years against 65,000 Taliban fighters. That has left a complete vacuum in the strategic situation. Naturally, all these other endless wars in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Latin America.

In Africa, you are plagued with incredible poverty, and the effects of the pandemic were devastating. You had mass migration. In many countries, the drug lobby or the drug producers and drug mafias are running the country. If you look at the recent figures of the ILO, the International Labor Organization, 60% of all jobs worldwide are in the shadow economy. Which means that people have been living from hand to mouth. Just how fragile our world is has become very clear during the pandemic.

You have also been told by the mass media and most politicians that Russia and China are autocratic states in which there is no freedom and no liberty. If you look around the world, you are actually in a horrendous situation. There are more than 820 million people who are under-nourished, who go to bed hungry every day. That means every 10th person does not have enough food. One million die of hunger every month; 2 billion people have no access to clean water.

The head of the World Food Program David Beasley has been saying many times in the recent months that we are in front of a hunger catastrophe, which is already going on, of Biblical dimensions, he said. Basically, this incredible information about almost 1 billion people going hungry, may catch the headlines for a day, but then it’s forgotten again, and nothing happens.

Is there any chance the G20 would immediately organize an emergency summit saying this is intolerable; we have all the technologies, we could change that, we could start an immediate humanitarian airlift to the Southern Hemisphere [Global South—ed.]. We could double food production; we could make sure that not one child is going hungry anymore within a few months. We are calling upon the farmers of the world to double the food production, which they easily could do. Well, obviously, nothing like this is happening.

Look at the U.S.-Mexico border, where recently 15,000 people were gathering under this bridge, and then were chased away with whips and devices worse than during the time of slavery. Look at the Mediterranean; this is not any better. Over the last several years, hundreds of thousands of people have tried to flee from hunger in Southwest Asia, in northern Africa. The border organization of the European Union, Frontex, is now in a court trial, because it was involved in and condoned push-back operations, driving the refugees back into the water where there is an uncertain possibility to survive. This has been happening in the recent period in Greece, and on the islands in Croatia.

If you look at this incredible condition, what is the reaction of the population in the United States or in European countries? Do people go into the streets and say, “We want justice for all of these incredible situations because it would be so easy to remedy”? No, nothing of this sort is happening.

OK, during the pandemic, people got a little bit upset because they were deprived of their usual kind of life, but in general, they were quite indifferent to the suffering in Africa, Latin America, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Haiti. I think it’s not wrong to say that what characterizes the outlook of most people in the United States and Europe, probably other places in Asia as well—I come to that later on. You could characterize it as “depraved indifference”; indifference against the suffering of people which reflects on the depraved character of those who are not acting.

This is basically all the result of a deliberate policy; this is not a natural catastrophe. This is actually something which my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was warning against in 1971. He said that if the IMF would continue their policy of monetarist austerity, you would see practically pandemics erupting. You would see mass genocide. And the condition of the developing countries for the most part is the result of first a colonial policy, and then the continuation of that policy by the IMF, World Bank, and the leading financial institutions of this world. It is a cold-blooded policy to keep the markets happy, and the governments have long become the servants of these financial institutions.

The Murderous Madness of Malthusians

It is a complete lack of empathy, because otherwise this could not exist for about 50 years. It is in general a lack of interest to even find out about it on the side of the general population. Now, since about two years, we have an escalation of this policy in the West. It’s now called “shifting the trillions.” This was a decision made by the top central bankers and leading bankers in August 2019 at their annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they decided on a regime change to shift the power from being in the hands of governments to the central banks, which would determine not only the monetary policy but also the fiscal policy. In other words, the budgets and how investments occur in general. It was called “Shifting the Trillions.” There is actually a very interesting paper with that title which people should really read.

Then these policies were announced with different names by the World Economic Forum at Davos, where it was called the Great Reset, the Green New Deal in the United States. The Biden administration just released a fact sheet and a [40 page] report [mandated by its May 2021, Executive Order 14030 on Climate-Related Financial Risk], directing that all investments should go into Green technologies. Even earlier, Joachim Schellnhuber talked about the great transformation of the world economy, the decarbonization, basically saying that all fossil fuels and related industries are out, everyone has to go into renewables. Mostly, nuclear energy is not regarded as a Green technology, even so, there is some debate about that.

And now, all of this has to be finalized by the great COP26 summit in Glasgow, which starts interestingly on Halloween, the 31st of October. Therefore, a period comes to a head which was announced by Prince Charles in 2019, when he announced that the world has only 18 months left to save the planet. Naturally, the Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg had said there are only 12 years left, of which now two years have passed already. But what Prince Charles meant was that there are only three major summits which absolutely had to accomplish this transformation, or it would be too late. The first being the World Food summit, then the Biodiversity summit, and culminating now with COP26 in Glasgow, where actually all legislation and all governments had to be sworn in to go for this Great Reset.

All of this is in the name of stopping climate change. That is actually quite absurd. Anybody who has ever looked into climate science, which is very complicated and involves many different areas of natural science, will find out that the climate has been changing for millions of years. That has to do with the Earth’s position in our Milky Way galaxy; it has to do with processes in the Sun; it has to do with cosmic radiation. And now, in the name of protecting the climate, they are now pushing the biggest deception operation in history. It has nothing to do with the real reasons for climate change. The leading institutions of the United States, U.K., the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, are all proceeding on the basis of this first option I mentioned concerning the image of man. That man is a parasite, a pollutant, a burden to nature.

Klaus Schwab [founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum] has written a new book called Stakeholder Capitalism. In that book, he actually admits that the neo-liberal system is a failed system; something which was announced 50 years, prognosed by my late husband. What they mean by neo-liberal system is that paradigm which occurred for the last 50 years, which included outsourcing production into cheap labor markets, to have no more warehouses for production, but have trucks arrive just in time, and going public on the stock exchange.

Now naturally, it is quite clear that with the supply lines all collapsing, they want to have a new model. So, what Klaus Schwab says in this book is that after recounting economic infrastructure development details from Ethiopia, its railroads, agriculture gains, the Grand Renaissance Dam, even renewable energy, he insisted that it has to stop. He writes that the kind of development being undertaken in Ethiopia “reveals the central conundrum of the combat against climate change.”And now comes the important quote:

The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or Western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the desire to create a better future for oneself.

Now, that is quite something. Basically, what he says is that any attempt to overcome under-development, to overcome poverty, to create a better life, is what destroys nature. So, naturally, he calls it a conundrum; an unsolvable paradox.

That is why he wants to now have a new model called “stakeholder capitalism.” What that is supposed to be is, the ominous name, is “dematerialized growth.” There should no longer be investments in physical economy, but in financial titles instead, [such as] in CO₂ emissions trade, which is practically a nonexistent thing, you pay others, like the developing countries, to not produce, so that you can produce. To make money by speculating on non-investment of others.

Then, they have this new thing, the nebulous ESG, (Environmental, Social, Governance). That is about everything you can imagine, but it has nothing to do with production. What that means is, if this policy of the stakeholder capitalism is being implemented—and it is being pushed right now actively by the EU Commission, by the U.K. and U.S. governments—it means the de-industrialization of the so-called advanced sector. It means the complete destruction of the Mittelstand, because it makes energy and many other raw materials so expensive that they are unaffordable.

It for sure means the impoverishment of masses of population. It means more billionaires; it increases the gap between the very rich and the very poor. And it absolutely means no development for the developing sector; which in practice means a massive population reduction for Africa, Latin America, and large parts of Asia, and even pockets of Third World type conditions in the United States or Europe.

This is the intended takeover of a Malthusian world order. The idea to have the Malthusian world outlook to take over all institutions, to create a world government which is run by such a regime.

More Quotations from Malthusians

Let’s look at what Malthusianism actually is, and where it comes from. It goes back to the British East India Company, and you cannot think about that outlook without taking into account the practice of the African slave trade, the Opium Wars against China, the whole colonial policy against Africa, India, Latin America. Let’s look at the quote of Thomas Malthus from his Essay on the Principle of Population:

All children who are born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the death of grown persons…. We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality. And if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction which we compel nature to use.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.

Now, what this Malthusian policy, which was the policy of the British Empire, actually characterizes since then, is an extreme form of Calvinism, which means that if you are rich, that proves God is on your side because he has selected you. You do not have any need to have compassion for the poor, because it’s God’s choice that you are among the privileged. There are many other writers other than Malthus. There was Jeremy Bentham, who wrote A Defence of Usury; Bernard Mandeville, who had the incredible theory that private crime, private vice is necessary to stimulate the economy and leads to public good.

For example, if you have a murderer, this is very good for the economy because that means the murderer eventually needs a lawyer, who makes money; you need a judge, you need a court. And all of these contribute to the well-being of society, the public good. Naturally, all of these writings are complete lies and just a cover story, but nevertheless…. Then you have John Stuart Mill, who developed the idea of utilitarianism; namely that usefulness is the only criteria in everything which concerns society and the economy.

Naturally, this goes along with unbelievable racism. Not just racism practically against the poorer classes, but a racism against all colored people. Look at this quote of Bertrand Russell, who wrote in his book, The Impact of Science on Society in 1951:

The white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without help of war and pestilence.

I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer. War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective.

If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. There would be nothing in this to offend the consciences of the devout, or to restrain the ambitions of nationalists. The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s.

This was obviously the immediate basis for what Prince Philip had to say, who was the founder of the World Wildlife Fund. If you want to know one of the major reasons why the development of the developing countries is so absolutely nonexistent, you make a list of how many projects of bridges or dams, or railroads were not built because the World Wildlife Fund discovered an insect which was about to disappear if a bridge would be built there. Prince Philip said:

You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words, conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world…. Each new field that is cultivated means another field that is withheld from wild species.

Naturally, [for Prince Philip,] wild species are more important than the human species.

The same Prince Philip, in an interview with People magazine in 1981 answered the question, “What do you think is the greatest threat to the environment?” He answered:

Human population growth is probably the greatest long-term threat to survival. We are facing a major catastrophe if it’s not contained, not only for the natural, but also for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they will consume, the more pollution they will cause, the more battles they will fight. We have no other choice. If it is not voluntarily controlled, it will involuntarily be controlled by the increase in disease, hunger, and war.

In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus to contribute something to solving overpopulation.

Another major Malthusian expression is from Dennis Meadows, who was one of the two authors of the famous book The Limits to Growth, which was published and promoted by the Club of Rome. It basically had the ridiculous thesis that the resources are limited, and therefore we have sort of developed up to this point—which was 1972—and now we have reached an asymptotic barrier and have to go to zero-growth and reduction of growth. He said:

No, even 7 billion people are too many for this planet…. If everyone is allowed to have the full potential of mobility, nutrition, and self-development, it will be 1 or 2 billion.

Schiller Institute Defends Humanity

What characterizes the Schiller Institute, The LaRouche Organization is what my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, already in the 1970s, or starting in the late 1960s, had put forward as development plans for Africa, a full development plan for the entire continent of Africa with infrastructure, ports, railways, highways, energy production and distribution, communication. If that would have been implemented, which we had many efforts to accomplish, Africa would be today the most developed continent with the most flourishing agriculture, industry, etc.

We worked on a 40-year development plan together with Indira Gandhi in the beginning of the 1980s. We worked on Latin American integration with President José López Portillo. Because we were working on all of that even before the Club of Rome developed this limits-to-growth perspective, we had a very clear idea of how easy it would be to transform these continents and make them livable for every human being on this planet.

Therefore, when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth book, it was clear to us this was an onslaught from the side of the oligarchy. Lyndon LaRouche immediately wrote a counter book with the title, There Are No Limits to Growth, which is a scientific discussion of why resources are only limited when you stay on the same level of technology, and that it is uniquely human creativity which redefines what is a resource.

That is essentially a limitless process, and it is not limited to the planet Earth, it involves the entire universe, as we have now demonstrated by space missions bringing back materials from the Moon. Soon, we will have helium-3 imported from the Moon to produce fusion power on Earth. We are now talking about taking resources from asteroids. There are now plans to have a village on the Moon, cities on Mars.

So, it’s very clear that this whole conception of limits to growth was based on a fraud. It was basically a computer model of linear functions, leaving out the most important aspect; namely that the definition of what a resource is will be always changing by inventions of new physical principles which redefine scientific and technological methods being used in the production process. So, we countered that from the very beginning. I created an organization, sort of a predecessor of the Schiller Institute, which I called the Club of Life for the defense of life on this planet against these imperialists.

Just to give you one more quote from somebody who wrote a disgusting book called The Population Bomb—Paul Ehrlich. He says:

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies—often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.

And in an interview with The Guardian, Ehrlich said:

How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with the 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wildernesses. If you want a battery [cage] chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food, and everyone is kept just about alive, you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So, we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage.

That is the bestial view. Here is one last quote from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who is one of the absolute gurus of the British Empire. He always wants to be only called Commander of the British Empire. He was the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and later became the advisor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and was very influential on the recent encyclicals of Pope Francis. So, he wrote at the 2009 climate conference:

In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something—namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people.

Now, here we go, “below 1 billion people,” but we already have about 8 billion now, so what is the plan of these people how to do away with the so-called “superfluous eaters”? We had that already once 80 years ago—well, Greta Thunberg said the problem started in Great Britain, and what she meant was the beginning of the industrialization in Great Britain.

The Fight Through the Ages

Let’s look at what is the real fight between these two images of man and forms of society. Around the same time, in the late part of the 18th century, when these really evil ideas of the Malthusians developed, around the same time, Friedrich Schiller, the German Poet of Freedom, wrote a very important article called “The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon,” and there he contrasted the model of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta and that of Athens, as the two fundamental models of society which are in absolute contradiction, based on the corresponding two images of man, as I said in the beginning: man as an expendable parasite which can be killed off if there are too many; or man as the highest expression in the universe. And in this case, Schiller very presciently understood that Sparta was really the basic model for this oligarchical system, the basis for modern-day Malthusianism.

In this case Lycurgus, the ruler, had organized the state in such a way that if you look at it in the first view, everything looks very organized, everything is for the benefit of the elite, the state; but if you look a little bit closer you see that they actually have slaves, which they called helots, and if there are too many of those, you can actually kill them off and train your youth to shoot these helots until they’re culled, as I think it was Philip said is legitimate to do. And this he contrasts with Solon, and the wise laws of the city of Solon, and when Solon, according to Schiller, was asked, what is the purpose of society, he said, “Progression: That all citizens develop in the best possible way.”

Now, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a very beautiful article in the ’70s already, called “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites,” in which he confronts exactly these two models—and again, I would recommend this as reading material.

The Great Reset is actually based on this imperial model. It is maybe looking more modern, it uses slightly different categories and notions, but it is an exact copy of earlier oligarchical models, which have a long tradition, which have existed for at least the last 3,000 years, 4,000 or 5,000 years, and one can actually trace back the modern liberalism directly to the pantheism of earlier oligarchical societies, which always were based on parasitical usury for the benefit of an elite, of an upper class which treated the mass of the population as cattle.

They were always based on the Mother Earth cult, exactly like the Greenies, like the ecologists, or these people who treat nature and climate as a new form of religion. This cult appeared in the earliest different civilizations. You always had a Mother Earth kind of god on the one side, and you mostly had a male god, which was mostly in the form of a phallus symbol or a snake. In the Harappa Dravidian civilization, which was about 2,500-1,700 years before Christ; you had the goddess Shakti. On the male side you had the god, Shiva.

In the Chaldean civilization, you had Ishtar. In the Sheba Ethiopian civilization, you had Attar; in the Canaan civilization, Astarte; in the Hellenic Egyptian, you had Isis on the female side and Osiris on the male side. In the Phrygian civilization you had Cybele and on the male side Dionysus; and finally, in the ancient Greek cult of Delphi, you had the Mother Earth goddess Gaia, and on the male side you had Python.

What is the common characteristic of all these early gods and later the gods of Olympus in the Greek mythology, was that they were completely arbitrary: They would rule according to whims, they would not give laws which you could rationally understand, but they would make “rules,” like an early “rules-based society” where they would basically always look for the advantage of the ruling elites, and they would basically control man whom they regarded as being controlled by hedonistic impulses, and therefore in order to control these masses, you had to manipulate these hedonistic impulses. This happened in all empires, the Roman Empire, the circuses, the amphitheaters, having the Christians eaten by lions to bring out the worst in people—the worse they are, the better you could control them.

What is common to all these Mother Earth cults is a cyclical world outlook. There is no progress, there is the eternal return of the same, and it took mankind an enormous struggle to break through and break loose from this kind of an irrational domination of an oligarchy.

It is very fascinating to study how in the history of mankind, man did break free, and the first major such breakthrough was actually the Greek poet or author Homer. In his Iliad and Odyssey, he discusses how Odysseus challenges the arbitrary rule of these gods. So, this was the first time that man, at least in literature which is still available, was able to free himself of this irrational control.

The next major step was the Prometheus trilogy by the Greek poet Aeschylus, of which only parts still exist. But very clearly you can read there about the beautiful image of Prometheus, as one of the half-gods who separated from the gods of Olympus by bringing fire to man. And there are some beautiful descriptions if you read the play Prometheus, how fire enabled man to make higher conquest of nature, how he developed to have better food, to have better living conditions, and naturally why Zeus hated Prometheus for having brought this technology to man. And that is why Zeus had chained him to a rock, and the bird is picking at his liver for eternity, quite a brutal punishment. But, the Promethean man corresponds very clearly to the idea of man, the most advanced figure in existence in the universe.

Then the major next step in the liberation of man was the ideas of Socrates and Plato. What is the significance of especially Plato is that the collected dialogues and writings of Plato—Socrates is only being quoted by Plato—was to show man for the first time, in a coherent fashion, that man is not hedonistic; that man is the only species which is capable of ideas. That ideas are the real existence. And the world of sense-certainty is only the world of shadows; the kinds of shadows you see as if you are sitting in a dark cave, where the light from outside the cave is throwing shadows on the wall of the cave. What you perceive as the shadow is not reality—reality is outside the cave of sense-perception. This was a major step forward.

And still, one step beyond that was the emergence of Jesus Christ, of Christianity, because here you had for the first time the idea of man in the image of God the Creator. Now, since God is limitless in perfection, in omniscient power, man in the image of the Creator is, himself, not just an image, but as Nicholas of Cusa would later say imago viva Dei, in the living image—the image is living, the “living image of God” and therefore, with Christ, the cyclical world outlook has been absolutely broken through forever.

And it is the advantage and merit of Augustine, who wrote several centuries later, that the affinity between Platonism and Christianity is such that you find in Plato a lot of the things which were revealed later by Christianity, which means, Augustine concludes, that creative reason is able to identify what is being revealed. In other words, there is no contradiction between creative reason and belief, and this is a very important tradition in European philosophy: Those who believe that there is a coherence between science and religion, as compared to those who only believe that you can only trust the revealed word, which is completely separate and above science and knowledge, which you find today in the United States being a big controversy.

Ecologists, Nazi Defenders and Prince Philip

There was a book written in 1949, immediately after the Second World War and the Nazi period, by an author called Armin Mohler. He wrote a book called The Conservative Revolution. This is a very important book, because he describes how conservation, which is another word for the ecology outlook, that was a counter-movement against the ideas of 1776 and 1789, meaning the American Revolution and the idea of the republic, by a variety of Conservative movements: There were 400 such tendencies. One of them became the Nazis.

In this book, Armin Mohler makes a very important observation, where he quotes various authors and basically says: What happened with Christianity was that for the first time, the idea of the cyclical world outlook was interrupted for good, because with the emergence of Christ, being both man and God, and the idea of every man in the image of God, which came to the man through the person of Jesus Christ, you had for the first time the overcoming detonation of the cyclical world outlook, because it introduced the idea of limitless perfection of man.

This is actually very interesting, because at one conference, called “Religion and Environment,” Prince Philip said explicitly, referring to the cyclical worldview, he said, that in order to protect the environment and in order to protect nature one should go back to the pre-Christian mythologies, to the Mother Earth idea, to Gaia, to the cyclical world outlook. Because only if you think in this way, can you accomplish the goals of environmentalism.

This oligarchical form of society in which a small elite would be running things over masses which were kept as backward as possible, where only the privileges of nobility and the upper class, the royals, the kings, the barons, counts and so forth would be protected, that was at least for most of the European history, some forms of Asian history, and one would have to look at Asian history, Chinese history a little bit differently, but those were governmental forms which were dominant practically everywhere until the 15th century.

The first time you had governments which were not dominated by such oligarchical forms, occurred in the Italian renaissance. Already before, you had here and there, small forms of urban development, the role of science and crafts improved the living conditions of people a little bit. But the real big break came with the Golden Italian Renaissance, where now the role of scientific and technological progress is very explicit: the increase of education—this was helped a little bit later, also by Guttenberg and the printing press, which in Europe only appeared in the 15th century; in China it was earlier—an increase in living standard as a result of this application of science and technology; the increase in longevity. You had great artistic breakthroughs.

The Republican Nation-State Breakthrough

You had the emergence of the sovereign nation-state. Now, this is very, very important, because up to the 15th century, you had always imperial forms of government, you had emperors, you had czars, you had kings—even the very idea of kingdom was already a step forward from the standpoint of empire, and if you study the long, thousands of years of emergence of the nation-state, it is very fascinating, and you can see that the image of man and the form of government actually went parallel to each other.

Now, Nicholas of Cusa was the first to formulate this principle of the sovereign nation-state in his Concordantia Catholica, where he said that for a good government you need the consent of the governed, and you need a reciprocal legal relationship between the governed, the governors, and the government, where basically a representative has to represent both the interest of the state and those who are governed, in a reciprocal way. That is why the republican system of government is superior to a pure democracy. And why the sovereign government is the only form of government where especially in times of crisis, the interest of the people can be protected, and why all forms of supranational government are in the interest of the oligarchy, because you have no way to protect the interest of the people.

At the same time of the Italian Renaissance, you had a similar tendency in France, under the rule of King Louis XI, in which in 20 years of his rule there was a doubling of the living standard. And a watershed breakthrough of this tendency was the American Revolution, where, for the first time, you had the establishment of a republic; you had a Constitution in which the Preamble already said that the common good is what gives legitimacy to the government, not only for the present, but also to future generations.

There was, from the very beginning of this sovereign nation-state idea devoted to the common good which emerged in the 15th century, an opposition, which intended to destroy any form of society which would be based on the investment in scientific progress so as to increase the productivity of the productive powers. In the case of the Italian Renaissance, that opposition was Venice, the Venetian Empire, which immediately started to factionalize, to create unrest and friction, and to fight to maintain the oligarchical model, the empire.

The empire shifted its headquarters. Empires and people who belong to empires have no national loyalties, but they always work together on an international level, and they don’t really care if the headquarters of the empire is in Rome, in Byzantium, in Persia, in Venice, in Holland, in Great Britain, because they shift according to how things go, and they are what Lyndon LaRouche called a “slime mold,” which may change like the color and form of a champignon, a slime mold, but it remains the same regardless of whether it’s green, brown, stinks or not.

So, this fight between that form of society and a sovereign republic has been the principal fight for the last 600 years.

In the 17th and 18th century, there was the beginning of what would be called modern political economics on the European continent, and it was known at that time under the name of “cameralism.” Major contributing thinkers were Cardinal Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and Leibniz.

Leibniz was the first to develop the idea of physical economy, of the role of scientific and technological progress in increasing productivity, and in a very small, but important writing, Society and Economy, he talks about the role of academies to take care of social justice, of the development of labor power as the only source of wealth; of the importance to have a full manufacture in every country to be self-sufficient in terms of all supply lines, as we would say nowadays; to go for a higher qualification of all apprentices to become masters themselves, as quickly as possible; and the main rule of the academy, he said, is to spread love and trust among the members.

So, when you look at certain modern textbooks about the theory of Leibniz, what do they say? They say that he developed the ideal of an authoritarian welfare state with a metaphysical intention, where the statecraft coheres with the divine service, and the aim is to further the mental development and morality of the members of society.

Now, obviously, the idea that the economy should be in cohesion with the creation, the laws of the universe and the moral development of the people, that is obviously the exact opposite of the hedonistic conception of the British imperialism faction which we discussed before.

Nothing is more feared by the oligarchy, than a state that is furthering the moral and intellectual development of its citizens, which obviously is the basis of sovereignty, because only if you have well-educated, creative, and therefore, free citizens, can a country be sovereign.

China and Russia

This is the real reason why you have right now, such an incredible campaign against China, and why China is portrayed as the absolute enemy, opponent, competitor, adversary, and why all the think thanks and the mainstream media, and many governments and politicians, regard China as the absolute threat.

I can tell you from my own experience with China, which goes back to 1971—and all I’m saying about China, I have come to the conclusion of my own investigation and observation; and I’m not talking about something I read. I’m talking about something I’ve looked at in detail for now about 40 years, and I can tell you, that China is not aggressive. It is not imperial. China is not trying to replace the unipolar world of the Anglo-Americans. They’re not trying to coerce people. China is trying to create a new system of win-win collaboration, of what Xi Jinping calls “a community with a shared future for humankind.”

So why is this such a threat? Well, China has, for the last 30, 40 years, but especially the last 30 years, made the most incredible development you have ever seen. It’s an unprecedented historical, civilizational accomplishment, because they have lifted 850 million of their own people out of poverty; the Belt and Road Initiative, the New Silk Road, is now cooperating with about 150 countries, many of which have now for the first time had the chance to overcome the poverty left by the colonialist powers.

Now, if you think about the first quote from Klaus Schwab which I read to you, the fact that China is putting such an emphasis on the intellectual and moral improvement of its citizens, Xi Jinping talks about the need to have an aesthetic education for all students, to produce a beautiful mind, because only a beautiful mind can be the source of new, great works of art, then you understand why they regard China as such a threat! Because they are teaching literally millions and millions of students to become scientists, to become teachers, to become great artists, to improve morally and intellectually: that is exactly the opposite of what the Klaus Schwab model is!

That is why Putin is absolutely right when in a very important speech (which you should read) October 21 at the Valdai Discussion Club conference, he said it is very clear that the current model of capitalism is not working, and that we are now entering a new era; that this is a transformation which is going on in the world over a completely different caliber: He talked about the likelihood that things will get much worse; he talked about a coming cataclysm, and that the usual approaches don’t function. And he said:

After all, it is clear that when a real crisis strikes, there is only one universal value left and that is human life... Life is of absolute value.

A Wake-Up Call

Completely independently of Putin who made that speech two days ago, I wrote about two weeks or so a “Wake-Up Call” which most of you have probably read by now, where I, in the first part, discuss that people should not just look at this phenomenon or that phenomenon, the part of the crisis that concerns [just] them, [but] that all the different things that are going wrong on the planet, from hunger, to inability of countries to have vaccines against COVID, the hyperinflation, all of these things are symptoms of the fact that this system is collapsing; and that therefore Professor Guus Berkhout and I issued this Wake-Up Call, which should become the unifying point of departure to create an anti-Malthusian resistance of many, many forces in the world who oppose this present attack on the value of life as it is expressed by the Schwabs, and Philips, and Schellnhubers of this world.

In this Wake-Up Call, after describing the present situation, I developed several points which I think should be the points of discussion among many, many forces in the world, because we need to agree what image of man is the one we accept. And therefore, let me read to you these principles, which I think are very basic and should be the starting point:

1. Human life is inviolable. Man is the only species endowed with creative reason, which distinguishes him from all other living beings. This creative capability enables him to continually discover new principles of the physical universe, which is called scientific progress. The fact that the human mind, through an immaterial idea, is able to discover these principles, which then have an effect in the material universe in the form of technological progress, proves that there is a correspondence between the lawfulness of the human mind and the laws of the physical universe.

2. Just as the spatial expanse and anti-entropic evolution of the universe are infinite, so is the intellectual and moral perfectibility of the human mind. Therefore, every additional human being is a new source for further development of the universe and for the solution of problems on Earth, such as overcoming poverty, disease, underdevelopment, and violence. Taking care of each other is key in this ongoing development. It is the combination of creativity and empathy that transcends mere day-to-day exigencies.

3. Scientific and technological progress has a positive effect in that, when applied to the production process, it increases the productivity of the labor force and of industrial and agricultural capacities, which in turn leads to rising living standards and a longer life expectancy for more and more people. A prosperous physical economy is the precondition for the positive development of the common good, providing not only the elites, but all people with quality food, clean water, affordable and modern health care, quality education, modern communications and, above all, cheap and sufficient energy with high energy flux densities. Inherently safe third-generation nuclear energy and the future use of thermonuclear fusion are indispensable for securing mankind’s energy supply for an unlimited time. Unreliable energy systems and increasing energy prices are the mother of inflation. Poverty starts with energy poverty.

4. The purpose of the economy has nothing to do with profit, but with the happiness of people, in the sense meant by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, i.e., that people are able to develop all the inherent potentials they have into a harmonious whole, and thus contribute to the best possible further development of mankind. Or as the wise Solon of Athens said: The purpose of mankind is progress. It is the duty of good government, through its policies, to provide for the happiness of its citizens in this sense, beginning with universal education for all, the goal of which must be to foster beautiful character through education and the development of an ever-increasing number of geniuses. This perspective is in accordance with Vladimir Vernadsky’s conviction that the physical universe must inherently evolve in such a way that the share of the noösphere increasingly grows in relation to the biosphere. To be more specific, growth should be two-fold, creativity for the material necessities and empathy for the immaterial needs. Taking care of each other and our natural environment is presented in our slogan: “Prosperity for all,” in which all refers not only to us in the here and now, but also to future generations.

5. Man’s true destiny is not to remain an Earthling. His identity, as the only known species endowed with creative reason, is to explore space, as we did with planet Earth. What space pioneer Krafft Ehricke called the “extraterrestrial imperative,” or in a certain sense, the new educational effect of space travel on man, requires mankind to truly “grow up,” that is, to cast off his irrational impulses, and make creativity his identity, which has so far only been the case for outstanding scientists and artists of classical culture. In this phase of evolution, of love for humanity and love for creation, generated by recognition of the magnificence of the physical universe, it will have become natural that mankind takes care of all aspects of humanity, the planet, nature, and the universe at large with great care, because the fabricated contradiction between man and nature will have been overcome (new stewardship). Man does not exist in opposition to nature; he is the most advanced part of it. This is what Schiller called freedom in necessity, and is the concept that Beethoven placed above his Grosse Fugue: “Just as rigorous as it is free.”

This lofty idea of man and everything he has built, is what is threatened by the Hjalmar Schachts, Klaus Schwabs, the power-hungry political leaders, and the profit-hungry business leaders of the world. This is a wake-up call, addressed to all people, to resist the danger of a new evil. Let us prevent a return to the past, when an evil elite impoverished mankind and told us to be happy with such conditions.

Now, that is what we should discuss.