Can the U.S. Become Once Again,
A Temple of Liberty and Beacon of Hope?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The following Keynote Presentation was delivered to the Presidents' Day 2000 Conference of the International Caucus of Labor Committees and the Schiller Institute, on February 19, 2000.
The turbulence you saw on Wall Street yesterday, if you were watching, is ominous, but it is not in itself decisive. The turbulence which goes along with the threat of the collapse of the Japan economy, with new crises in continental Europe, and the threat of a general new Asia crisis soon, is simply part of a pattern which represents what we call a "phase-shift" in world politics.
Now, some people are saying, "Well, when will the crash come?" They're thinking about a 1929 crash. That is not what is coming. 1929 was partly systemic, but it was essentially a cyclical collapse, just like the 1931 collapse of the British pound sterling in September of that year.
This is a systemic collapse. It is a system itself which is incapable of surviving, contrary to the delusions which I understand are being spoken by the President of the United States, as we sit here today, and of yesterday.
It's an illusion. There's no possibility, there never was a prosperity. There have not been 107 months or 108 months of prosperity. There has been a delusion, shared principally by the upper 20% of the family income brackets of the United States, shared by the major mass media, which is most experienced in lying. But there's no prosperity, and there has been no prosperity.
As I've said repeatedly, if there were prosperity, why do they tell us that we're more prosperous than ever before, but we have to cut health care to save it? Why do those who say we are the most prosperous we've been, also say we'll have to cut Social Security to save it? We'll have to cut welfare and kill people to save the economy. We'll have to do many other things, in the name of austerity, to save an economy which can no longer afford what it readily could afford 20 years ago, or 30 years ago.
This system is finished; it is doomed. It is in a systemic crisis, and what you're seeing, as in yesterday's turbulence on Wall Street and the day before, was simply a new manifestation of a generally accelerating turbulence, a turbulence which represents a fundamental phase-shift in the state of the world financial system and economy.
Before the year is out, this financial system will be extinct. The question is whether we will be extinct with it. I can assure you, that if George Bush or McCain or Al Gore, were elected President, this nation would not survive the immediate years ahead, as a nation. It would disintegrate.
I can assure you, that if Al Gore were nominated the President of the United States by the Democratic Party, this nation would not survive.
So, looking at what appears to be the current trend, and looking at those facts as I shall deal with them here, or at least some of them, the question is how shall we survive?
What is required, is a new vision of mankind, different than what we have from most of the hustings, different than what we have from most of the press, different than you might think things are today, from looking around the world.
We've come to the time where either mankind grows up at last, and stops being silly children, which it has been generally most of the time, or else there's not going to be much of a human race on this planet, for some decades or generations to come.
We're now at a point where either we meet the responsibilities of being human, or we as a world with its existing nations, will not continue to exist for the immediate decades just ahead.
This is no time to say who is going to be the lucky winner. If you don't get the right winner, you're all losers, and all nations are losers. Everything that seems certain, everything that seems probable by the news media, by so-called trends--forget it. If those things happen, forget civilization as we have known it. It's going into the sewer.
Now, our job is to save it. Our job is to do what might seem to many people impossible, but we have some things on our side, as I shall indicate.
But the most important thing is this: In every time of crisis--crises which always come on because the generality of people are fools. We have no crisis in the history of the United States which was not caused by the fact that most Americans were fools, and their foolishness allowed certain conditions to develop, which brought the nation to a crisis.
Fortunately, in many of these crises, leadership stepped forward, and people responded to the crisis and to leadership, and got us out of the mess.
For example, take the famous case. There was a little broadcast done, which is truthful--unusual for television--about George Washington crossing the Delaware. And George Washington knew, that if he did not cross the Delaware that night, before morning, and waited till morning to cross the Delaware, to attack the Hessians and British at Trenton, that the United States would never exist.
So, he crossed the Delaware, against all kinds of advice, that night. He got there a little late in the morning, but he crossed all night. And he got there, and he defeated the British Hessians at Trenton. As a result of that, the nation survived that crisis, and went on to establish the independence which it had declared in 1776.
The same thing with Lincoln. Lincoln was elected almost as a fluke, but it wasn't a fluke, but because all the other parties were divided. And he as President, saved the nation. Not only did he save the nation by defeating the Confederacy and defeating the New York bankers at the same time, who were both in cahoots on that one, but in 1861 to 1876, under the leadership of Lincoln, with advice of people including Henry C. Carey, who was the world's greatest economist of the Nineteenth Century, the United States emerged, by 1876, as the most advanced and most powerful economy in the world, the most advanced in technology.
We were the wonder of the world then, as a result of the Civil War, and the way we approached it under Lincoln.
Germany imitated us, and the German economic miracle of the late Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century, were a result of the influence of the American model, the Lincoln model, to persuade Bismarck and others in Germany, to imitate what had been done in the United States.
Japan was lifted from an obscure nation, backward, hopeless, because it was inspired by Henry Carey and the Lincoln model, to copy the model of the United States, to build what became industrial Japan.
Russia was inspired. The great scientist, Mendeleyev, who was at Pennsylvania for the commemoration of the 1876 celebration, went back to Russia and organized the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and the development of the industrial development of Russia, together with others.
Similar things happened to a degree in France, after they got rid of Napoleon III, who was an enemy of the United States and nothing but a British stooge, and France developed. And the positive developments of economy in Europe and Japan, and also the inspiration to develop modern China, by a friend of the United States, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was a product of this great accomplishment of the Lincoln administration in winning the Civil War against a treasonous crowd, which is grabbing for power again through the rightwing conservatives and the Gore types in the United States today.
Despite that fact, in 1901, after the successful assassination of a President, McKinley, by a British crowd operating through Emma Goldman of the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City, that Teddy Roosevelt was brought to power, and Teddy Roosevelt, who was a son of the Confederacy--his uncle, his mother's brother, the one who trained him, shaped his career and his thinking and his policy, was head of the Confederacy's intelligence service, an avid defender of the slave system.
And Teddy Roosevelt turned the government over to the Wall Street crowd and the British. The Justice Department, in its present corrupt form, is a product of Teddy Roosevelt's administration. Even though the Federal Reserve System was stuck in under Woodrow Wilson, with the backing of Teddy Roosevelt, the creation of the Federal Reserve System by Jacob Schiff was done at the direction of the King of England, Edward VII, through his stooge, Teddy Roosevelt, and through his agent, Jacob Schiff.
So, institutions of the United States were taken over during the Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson administrations.
Wilson, that "great Democrat," was the man who relaunched the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, from the White House, openly. He was the kind of Democrat we have behind Gore and behind some of the people in the Democratic National Committee today, the Woodrow Wilson tradition of racism and Jim Crow.
But then came the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, another man. We came into a period of crisis.
Now, you should know the American people from the 1920s, as some of us remember them. And I have a vivid recollection of them. They were disgusting! This was the Flapper Era, this was the era of "honky-tonk." This was the era of all kinds of--the F. Scott Fitzgerald era.
Then suddenly, that era collapsed between 1929 and 1931. And the President, who remembered what the United States had been, Franklin Roosevelt, then the Governor of New York, ran for President, and brought back to the United States the principle on which it had been founded, a principle enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution: the General Welfare.
The only legitimate basis and authority for government, is a commitment of government to efficiently promote the General Welfare for all its people, and for all of their posterity. And Roosevelt, with whatever imperfections he showed, and with whatever limitations confined him, nonetheless restored this nation, saved it, carried it through a war, and gave us the foundations for every success we had in rebuilding this economy and this nation from the pit during the 1930s and afterward, into the middle of the 1960s, until we began to go thoroughly crazy and immoral again, probably worse than we have been at any time in this century, which we have continued to the present.
We are now the most immoral, most degenerate United States we've been in our entire history. And that has been the increasing trend of the past 30 years, especially the past quarter-century.
We're now again, because of the foolishness--not simply because of Wall Street. Yes, the Wall Street crowd and the British have done this to us. The new Confederacy coming out of the Southern states and elsewhere has done this to us. Al Gore typifies a corruption that has destroyed the Democratic Party from within.
The Republicans are barely human any more. Maybe you'll find a human Republican here and there. But they don't get much boosting in the news--not the major news media.
We're a degenerate people, and have become more so. And because we have become degenerate, this went on. We didn't change it. We voted for the fools who took us, step by step, beginning with Carter, for example, step by step, down the road toward Hell. We voted for them. The majority of Americans who voted, voted for them, because they were supposed to be "front-runners," whatever kind of disease that signifies.
And it is the American people, with their foolishness, a people which, by law, has the authority to choose its own government, which chose nothing but bad government, either by voting or by not voting. By voting and not thinking; by not voting, and not thinking. And said: "This is the way things are going. We have to learn to get along with the way things are going. We have to go along to get along."
Just like the AFL-CIO leadership now, who are not necessarily bad people, a little bit opportunistic, frightened. But they are voting for Al Gore--the leadership. If they get Al Gore as President, number one, there will be no organized labor in the United States. That's what Al Gore will deliver. He will free labor from its suffering--by eliminating labor!
If Al Gore is nominated, it's likely he will not be elected, but something like George Bush will be elected by Wall Street, in which case there will be no organized labor in the United States--not much longer.
So, what is the AFL-CIO leadership working for? Is it working in the interests of organized labor? Certainly not. It will insist it is, but it's not. But that's typically American. That's how American fools bring themselves into the destruction of our nation, which is already half-destroyed, or more.
So therefore, we have to address these problems. It's not a question of "how to appeal to the voter, how to appeal to the citizen, how to make ourselves preferred by the citizens." No. That won't work. The citizens' judgment stinks. They're not qualified to judge.
We have to change the citizens from the way they've been behaving, the way Roosevelt changed the citizens, in 1932-33, with his election campaign for the "Forgotten Man." Roosevelt convinced the American people they had been fools, and they had to stop being fools. They had to vote for the cause of the Forgotten Man.
Today, in a similar way, we must induce the American people to stop being the fools they have been too long, and to vote for the fundamental interests, in particular, of the lower 80% of our family income brackets, the forgotten men and women of the United States today.
We have to convince them they're fools. What's wrong, is not the politicians they've had, what's wrong is the citizens they've had. The ones who either voted, who voted like fools in the majority, or those who didn't vote, who were as big fools as those who didn't vote, if in a different way.
Now, that's what we're going to address today. What idea, what conceptions, must we induce the American citizen and others in the world to accept, to replace the foolishness which has been popular opinion for all too long?
Now, let's take--let's start with the question of this economy, this crazy, sick economy, this sick U.S. economy, this sick world economy, this sick U.S. government, including the Clinton administration right now, on economic and other questions. What's wrong with it?
Now let's look at this Triple Curve of mine. I think we've got somebody on top of that case. All right. This is--of course, this is what we're seeing, what you're seeing on Wall Street on the one side, is this growth of financial aggregates. You see this also in the family income in the upper 20% and other income brackets.
You see people going into credit card debt at 22% annual interest borrowing cost, in order to invest in things. They think they have more purchasing power, because they're borrowing more. And they're building up their personal debt. And the people in the upper income brackets, are the most insane of all.
They're investing, again, in this market, this growth of financial aggregates, typified by the so-called Internet stocks, which haven't actually--most of them haven't earned a nickel in their existence. And yet the value of these stocks is zooming.
Now, then take the second one, what's going on in the second one, the second curve. In order to--since 1966-70, we have seen a continual increase, generally, in the amount of money put into the financial system by central banks, including the Federal Reserve System, and by the private institutions which have some control over generating cash.
Now, this is going in, to pump up--as monetary turnover--to pump up the so-called value or yield of financial aggregates.
Then the third crucial phenomenon, is the collapse of real value, of physical value. That is, since 1966-1972, the actual net physical output of the United States, per capita and per square kilometer, as measured in terms of physical market basket--that means health care, that means education, that means power generation or investment in power generation, keeping it going, and distribution. This means maintaining sewer systems, water management systems, transportation systems, reversing decay in urban cities.
You know, we have this guy in New York, Giuliani. He's called the "Mussolini of Manhattan." He makes some of the streets run on time. That's New York City.
But then, look at the actual income and look at housing today. The bellwether of what's going on with the national income, you can see in this vicinity out here, where you have glorified tarpaper shacks, some with gold faucets in them, which are going for $300,000 to million-dollar mortgages.
They're being taken over by people whose income is chiefly in the upper 20% of family income brackets, who are working at jobs, financial services and related. When this bubble collapses, as it soon will, they will go bankrupt. They will lose their jobs, they have no qualifications for any real kind of work.
These $300,000 to million-dollar mortgaged shacks, tarpaper shacks, will be empty. No one will be available to pay the mortgage to bail them out. The banks will go belly-up, the mortgage companies and real estate companies involved, will go belly-up. And you'll see these cow pastures turning back into cow pastures, as these tarpaper shacks begin collapsing.
Imagine if somebody put a grand piano in one of these things? The whole row would go, in a chain reaction right away.
This is typical of America: Everything is cheap and flimsy and floozy. We don't produce anything of quality any more. You try to get a part to fix something--you can't get a part to fix anything. You don't even know who made the part. Even the company--say Ford, or General Motors, or somebody else--they don't know who makes their parts! The parts are buried in assemblies, which are assembled by somebody way off in some outsourcing location. If you want to buy a part, you can't buy the part, you have to buy the whole assembly. And it never comes on time.
We don't have--we don't have a functioning economy. We're going down the drain.
So, what's happened, is you have these three curves: Down--real. And people in the lower 80% of family income brackets, feel it the most obviously.
But those in the upper 20% of family income brackets--except the top one to two percent, who are not such big fools, who are stealing everything in sight, they're not investing in the markets, they're stealing--these guys make their living on illusion, a borrowed cash illusion. They think they have more wealth. They're afraid that people in the lower 80% of family income brackets, are going to take some of that wealth away. So they're out there, together with people like Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court, to defend shareholder value.
That means that a guy that bought a stock or a financial interest 10 seconds ago, has the right to take away your health care, in order to ensure his profitability on his shareholder value. Therefore, they want to kill anybody who constitutes a threat to a continued phony growth of their shareholder value.
Now, as some people have observed internationally, what this means is something's wrong with the state of mind of the typical American, even more so than the typical European, who also tends to be a bit crazy. But I can tell you, Europeans are not as crazy as Americans are. The Americans are, together with some people in Japan, are probably the most crazy people on this planet, because they believe in this stuff.
Well, what people would say, a psychiatrist would say, that the people, especially in the upper 20% of income brackets generally, are clinically insane.
Now, how would you define them as clinically insane? Because their idea of value, is decoupled from reality. In other words, they're schizophrenic, literally. They shouldn't be allowed to make their own financial decisions, or any other important decisions, such as who they should vote for. They're too insane to vote! And I'll get into this, what the problem is. You're dealing with clinical disassociation.
Now, the key thing here, which the Triple Curve refers to--and I'll come to a point that may surprise some of you on this--is that man's relationship to nature, and the difference between man and a beast, as expressed in this relationship of man to nature, is that man, through certain qualities, which we call cognition, is capable of doing what no monkey can do--or Al Gore, either!
And that is: actually discover a validatable, universal principle of nature, or other universal principles. And by transmitting the experience of those discoveries to their children and to others, mankind is able to accumulate knowledge of principles. And this accumulated knowledge of principles enables us, if we use this knowledge, to increase man's power in and over the universe per capita, and per square kilometer of surface area.
That's reality. And therefore, those qualities of mind which enable us to discover, or rediscover, and transmit by rediscovery, certain universal physical principles and other principles, like artistic principles, to coming generations, as well as to contemporaries, is the means by which man is able to increase our per capita physical power in and over the universe.
And that's how we survive. That's how we built our standard of living. That's how we increase our life expectancy. That's how we improve the demographic characteristics of populations. That's how we have become able to educate young people to the age of 18 or 25, as a generality, which we couldn't do before, when life expectancies were between 30 and 40 years of age.
So, the general improvement in the human condition, the conditions of the environment, the conditions of infrastructure, the conditions of standard of living, the conditions of life, of family life, the conditions of longevity; all of these things, come from this transmission, through a process called cognition of the discovery of universal principles.
Now, no animal can do that. No monkey, or Al Gore, can do. I mean, Al Gore has classed himself together with the monkeys, if you read his "Earth in the Mental Unbalance," or whatever's it called.
Because an animal can learn. We see dogs learning. We see monkeys learning. You see chimpanzees learning, and teaching their children what they have learned, if you call them "children," eh?
But they can't do what a human being can do. They can not discover and validate a universal principle of nature, or a universal artistic principle. They can not transmit these principles, which constitute what we call "culture," from one generation to the next, use that culture to organize society's behavior, and improve that culture to the benefit of future generations--unleash a process of improving mankind's condition. No animal can do that.
Now therefore, sanity is a quality which is peculiar to the human species. There may be such things as animal sanity, and there is. But human sanity and animal sanity are different. Human sanity, is focussed on the ability of the individual to relate to other people, in terms of principles of cognition; that is, not only to make discoveries of principle or to rediscover these principles, as in school or as in family relations, in the family. Where parents don't have latchkey children, they spend time together. They may eat the evening meal together, which I understand is a rare event these days.
And in the course of family relations, there are discussions, where the leisure hours of the family are spent, in part, on discussions with the children, and the children raise questions. And "How do you know this?", "How do you know that?", the child is saying. "Why? Why? Why?" at the age of three and four. "Why? Why? Why?" "Why, Daddy?" "Why, Mommy?" "Why, Daddy, why?"
And in a serious reflection, "Well, I'll go out and show you why. I will show you how it works." And in this kind of relationship among parents and children, a certain kind of sanity is encouraged and fostered, a sense of personal identity is established. And then, through family relations, by relations among children and grandparents and so forth, neighbors and so forth, a child has a sense, through cognition, of their identity as a continuity of an identity which they share with their grandparents, great-grandparents, and those who came earlier. So the child begins to get a sense of the child's place in the whole of human existence, the child's place in eternity.
And when a child in former times, when we had decent family relations, would be asked typically "What are you going to do when you grow up?", the child would respond, usually, with a reply which reflected that. The child would have a sense of the future, of his own future identity; would have a sense of what people before him, or her, had contributed, and how that child was going to contribute something additional to that, and make the world better through his choice of profession for the future.
We don't have that today, in the same way. The schools don't teach that. They discourage that. The schools are destroying our children, particularly those who come through the National Education Association, through the track defined by the National Training Laboratories, of Kurt Lewin and company. Teachers are now destroying our children. Helga will deal with that tomorrow in her report on how some of our children are being destroyed under your noses by the Internet, for example. And by schools.
So, we've lost--we lose that. But this is what sanity is: sanity is seeing yourself as a member of the human species, having a sense of the good things that were transmitted from humanity in the past to us in the present, through grandparents and parents and others. A sense of obligation to do something good with our lives while we live, and to pass something on, improved, to coming generations.
That's morality. This is always expressed in terms of man's relationship to nature, and is expressed in ways in which we cooperate with one another, in order to master nature for the improvement of the human condition. That's essential morality, very simple morality.
Now, these people, who believe in shareholder value, don't believe that. First of all, philosophically, in the educational systems which are taught today, like radical positivism or game theory or things of that sort, or information theory; if your child is being taught information theory, or game theory, your child is being destroyed. Their minds and souls are being destroyed by teaching the ideas of Norbert Wiener and John Von Neumann, and people like that. They're being destroyed under your eyes. They are incapable of moral behavior.
These are the little children who, from the age of eight or nine, will begin to kill their parents, in the Columbine-type syndrome, which Helga will address tomorrow. That's where we're going.
So, what you're seeing here, is you're seeing on Wall Street, people who are associated with the upper curve, the upper 20%, the people who dominate those who actually vote, the people who the politicians appeal to in the name of money--"my money," "my money," "my money"--and say that other people must suffer, by reduction in health care, by elimination of essential services, by cutting Social Security, all for the sake of the Internet and globalization, and other kinds of lunatic, utopian conceptions.
That's what our problem is. We are now the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and we are Sodom and Gomorrah because we chose to be; because the pacesetters of our society, largely those from the generation between the ages of 35 and 55 especially, have become so corrupt in the main, that they're only concerned with what?
As I said in respect to this Detroit campaign, what's the behavior of the American voter today? The American voter votes the way they live. How do they live?
They live like the Roman proletariat in the period of the First Century B.C. civil wars in Rome, or under the Emperors. They live on bread and circuses, on handouts, begging for handouts. Politics is "You vote for my handout." "I'll vote for you if you vote for my handout," as opposed to somebody else's handout.
And for entertainment: boxing, World Class Wrestling--a great moral experience. Or before a television set, watching pornography or violence, with ever-increasing extreme, and more and more blood and ugliness. Satanic violence.
Entertainment. Football games, baseball games, hockey games, basketball games, gambling games. Mass gambling.
Look at what they're doing on Wall Street--it's gambling. The Internet is largely gambling. Derivatives are gambling. The NASDAQ stocks are gambling. It's a great casino, it's the Big Crap Table, where more money is in the side bets than going on the table itself.
Entertainment. Ah! The sexual excitement of making money! Even if it's not real--Monopoly money! And the excitement of identifying with the fellow who's winning the game, even if he's killing somebody, as you see on television entertainment.
So, just like the ancient Romans, that degenerate population of the Roman Empire, which died because it was morally degenerate. And all of European history, every piece of degeneracy in modern European history, gets traced precisely to the admiration and legacy of the Roman Empire, as it emerged as a hegemonic force in the Mediterranean from about 200 B.C. up until the present time.
"Romanticism" means Roman values, ideas of Roman law, Romantic law. Ideas of competition, or Hobbesian ideas--all of these come from admiration of the Roman heritage, as opposed to the Classical Greek. This Roman heritage, which has come to the fore again, like syphilis, in our population, which you see reflected in "entertainment."
What is entertainment? Why do people vote for politicians? Because they find they have "media value," "media appeal." Why do they vote for them? Because the person who votes, is not in the real world. They're like the person living on the upper curve. They are disassociated from reality.
Like--take labor. Take the leadership of the AFL-CIO, as expressed by Sweeney, who presumably is an intelligent person, who presumably ordinarily would probably agree with me on most of the things I say.
But now, he's in a fit! He's in a fit to vote for somebody, to use muscle, the labor movement's physical muscle, to ram through a vote for Al Gore, when his very success in doing that, would ensure that organized labor is destroyed, and the conditions of life of working people throughout the United States, will be destroyed.
Is that not insanity? A man who is so dissociated from reality, so imprisoned to a media value, an entertainment value, that they lose sight of the reality, that they will put their muscle into bringing about their own destruction? Isn't that mass insanity?
Now, we have another problem. And it involves a problem posed by the available solution. The solution to our problems today, is to have the whole system go bankrupt, and that has two aspects to it.
First of all, now, as in 1932, the American people are so crazy, in the majority, that they will not come to their senses until they get a big, wet fish slapped in their face. That big, wet fish is the collapse of the financial system. And for a short period of time, there will be an opportunity for the American people to take some action, which enables us to save them from a deep depression which would probably mean the extinction of the United States if it hits, as well as much of the rest of the world.
The system is gone, people know it's gone. People living in these glorified tarpaper shacks out here, that you can see on the landscape, burgeoning, will suddenly be without jobs. Banks will be shut down, real estate companies will be shut down. These people have no place to get a job, people who have been depending upon working two or three jobs, they're going to lose two or three of them, probably the best-paying ones.
You're going to have massive hordes of people, probably involving 20% or more of the population, who will be suddenly plunged into the kind of poverty which is experienced by the uncounted unemployed today--people who are not counted on welfare any more, not counted as unemployed, because they just don't count them any more. And these people in the upper 20%, who are hit, will go into the same category.
Banks, whole towns, will shut down. Whole services will shut down. Deliveries of groceries will stop. Milk will stop in many areas of the country, because the financial system is broken down. And people will say "Somebody do something."
Well, I know exactly what to do. I know exactly--there's no problem. We'll have to do everything that President Clinton says we shouldn't do, everything that Al Gore says we shouldn't do, everything that McCain says we shouldn't do, everything that George Bush, if he thinks at all, will say we shouldn't do.
You know, the Bush family reminds me of the Addams Family of American politics. And you've got--what do you call it, "It"? This is George Bush--George W.
But, therefore--and this was very much like Lincoln in 1860-61, when all politicians in the Democratic Party, which was the party of racism until Roosevelt came along-- The Democratic Party has an unbroken heritage of racism from the time it was founded by Martin Van Buren, with the first stooge being Andy Jackson, until Franklin Roosevelt came along. And Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt were the first change in the Democratic Party of any significance, which led to a Democratic Party worth doing anything except flushing it, eh?
It has an unbroken history of racism, and degeneracy, and treason, from the time that Andy Jackson was elected, up to the present time, essentially except for this Roosevelt period and the Kennedy period.
So, you had the Democratic Party was treasonous. You had New York bankers who were also treasonous, but in a different way. They were determined to split the country into several parts, as you had this fellow August Belmont, who was the head, the kingmaker in the Democratic Party, who ran McClellan for President against Lincoln in 1864.
Now McClellan refused to win the war. He would fight battles, but he would refuse to win them. He refused to follow up on them. So Lincoln fired him. McClellan was controlled by Belmont, and Belmont ran him for President on the basis of a "separate peace" with the Confederacy. Therefore, McClellan was in fact a traitor to the United States. And the Democratic Party was a pack of traitors. Most of the New York bankers were a pack of traitors.
But, despite that, a President who was elected by a minority, became President and led this nation somewhat to safety and to great achievement. Roosevelt, under somewhat different but analogous circumstances, did the same thing.
We have now come to a time when the same thing has to happen again. Accepted-opinion "leading candidates," the so-called front-runners, they can't cut it. They can't deal with it. When a crisis comes in which the American people have their illusions popped, and they start screaming for salvation, rather than for their shareholder values, then they will demand that somebody step forward, and present real solutions, solutions which make sense to them, because there are precedents which show that these kinds of things worked in the past.
And that's the only chance this nation has. But there's more to it. We have to look at the world situation.
For the past two years, or year and a half, especially since the summer of 1998, the world has been marching toward the direction of a new world war. You see the fanatics who are talking about a war with China. You see the AFL-CIO is virtually talking in the same direction these days. You see war breaking out between Pakistan and India. You see Indonesia disintegrating.
Mexico is threatened. Ecuador is disintegrating as a nation, Colombia is on the verge of being disintegrated by a narcoterrorist gang, with the support of the Clinton administration's State Department. A bunch of drug-pushers. Madeleine Half-bright and company are pushing drugs. I don't know, maybe sometimes she doesn't get there because her broom gets stuck in the wall or something.
But, then you look at Venezuela: disintegrating. Brazil's ready to explode, Argentina is disintegrating. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is disintegrating. Indonesia, of course, is disintegrating, and so forth and so on.
And you have, then you have the George Bush people, who have gone to their old crony, Sharon, in the Middle East, to try to break up the peace effort of Clinton and Barak, Prime Minister Barak, and to get a war going between Israel and Iran, among other things, and to accelerate the war against Iraq, as Al Gore is demanding again.
And you also have the tendency to get a war going involving Russia. Not only Russia, but Russia and parts of what were formerly the Soviet Union. You have disintegration going on in the Balkans--disintegrating. New conflicts erupting. Conditions in the Balkans, in the Kosovo area, are worse than when Madeleine Albright and Gore began meddling over there--much worse--and getting worse by the day.
So, the entire world is headed in the direction of confrontations which are expressed both in the Democratic and Republican Party. We are headed for world depression and war, probably a different form and vector than during the 1930s and 1940s, but nonetheless, the same general direction.
We have a world that's in a mess. And I assure you, that if Gore, McCain, or Bush were elected, the United States will be involved in a general global holocaust within a short time after that. It's inevitable, just as inevitable as the consolidation of Hitler's power by the killing of Hindenburg and von Schleicher in the summer of 1934 made World War II unstoppable--inevitable. And we're now moving toward that kind of point of no return.
If you want Al Gore, if you want McCain, if you want Bush, you're going to get a world depression and world war, in some form. And perhaps the United States will not survive it.
So therefore, we have to think about more things than just how the United States can survive this depression. That's not too tough. We simply will go back, of course, to the standard of experience, the successes of the U.S. economy from 1933 into 1958 and somewhat beyond, when we came out of a depression under Roosevelt's leadership.
Despite dumping some of Roosevelt's programs as soon as he was dead, we continued some of those provisions in the form of the original Bretton Woods system, and they served the United States and Europe and some other parts of the world, well. We did not do too badly, we had growth, actual growth. We had greater stability. We had an improvement in average incomes, we had movements toward greater freedom.
We had, for example, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, was a product of the World War II generation, which picked up the mantle of the former struggle for Civil Rights, supported it, and then, with a genius like Martin Luther King, as a leading figure, who was able to crystallize this into some genuine achievements at that time. All the good things that happened were a result of that period.
So, therefore, the obvious thing in the United States is to say "What we've done for the past 30 years and longer has been a terrible mistake. We're going to defend the nation-state, we're going back to the kind of economic policies which worked then. We will not necessarily do exactly the same thing, we'll make some reforms, some improvements, with respect to that, but we're not going to go back away from that, we're going to go forward from that starting point of reference."
Now, how are we going to do it?
Well, most of the world in which we live, is populated by people in Asia. The leading nations are China, India. China's well over a billion people, India is nearly or if not over a billion people. You take other parts of South and East Asia, it's quite considerable. Then you take Africa, which is a hellhole; the Balkans, which is a hellhole. South America and Central America, which are becoming hellholes. You put these things together, and you say the majority of the human race is being flushed down.
If we're going to create an order of world affairs which deals with this situation, provides a solution, we can not, by ourselves, solve the problem. We must, through the leadership of our President, go out to other nations, and take emergency action, together with those other nations, to build a world arrangement among nation-states, under which we can all survive.
Now first, that means simply going back to the type of monetary system of Bretton Woods. It means putting the whole, stinking bankrupt system into financial reorganization, the way any good bankruptcy lawyer would do, or bankruptcy judge would do. Freeze things that have to be frozen, and sort it out as you can.
In the meantime, make sure that the business continues to function, that people stay employed, that people with savings are able to draw against those savings, personal savings. That we maintain our communities, we maintain the integrity of our institutions, and we begin to grow out of the mess in which we found ourselves. Basic Roosevelt approach. Do it again.
But, we have to do that in the world system. Now, for reasons I shall indicate, you can only do that with the sovereign nation-state. We must eliminate globalization and everything that this typifies, immediately.
The first action: globalization, WTO, and everything like it, and free trade, goes out the window, immediately. Because you can not save the United States, you can not save the world economy, unless you immediately cancel globalization, in all its manifestations, and go back to the protectionist model of sovereign nation-state, which means we must create a world system based on the perfect sovereignty of sovereign nation-states. That's the first principle of any workable agreement for the United States and for its prospective partners in other parts of the world.
Now, this presents to us a very interesting problem. It has always been the intention of the founders of the United States, including from Europe, before the United States existed, to create on this planet a community of perfectly sovereign nation-states. That was the specific intention established during the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance in Europe.
It was as a direct result of that Renaissance, that you had a nation called France, founded in the latter part of the Fifteenth Century, under Louis XI. And shortly after the death of Louis XI, a couple of years later, those forces in France which had been associated with Louis XI, backed Richmond to get rid of Richard III in England, and set up, under Henry VII, a form of society in England, a kingdom in England, based on the same principles of general welfare which had been used to establish the sovereign nation-state in France under Louis XI, where Louis, in a period of about 22 years, doubled the national income of France, with these kinds of reforms. There were very few technological improvements as such, simply using known technology and fostering its better use.
And the same thing more or less happened in England under Henry VII. Even after the travesties of Henry VIII, even under Elizabeth, this continued to some degree during the course of the Sixteenth Century, as is manifest, typified in cultural developments, by the role of Shakespeare, who was a part of this same tradition, and expresses this Classical Greek tradition.
So that the ideas which came here, which were brought here from Europe, on which the nation-state was founded, were based on two considerations. First of all, these were ideas, principles, which had been developed in Europe, based on the Classical Greek model, and a rejection of the Roman model.
When religious wars in Europe, following the developments of 1511-1513, created a situation in which it was impossible to consolidate a nation-state form in Europe, a true nation-state form, people in Europe moved to the Americas to establish new nations in the Americas.
One of the first efforts, you had a friend of Cusa--Cusa's the central figure of the Renaissance, the central intellectual figure. And a friend of Cusa's, once the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople occurred, moved to voyages around the world, through the oceans, to come behind the Ottoman Empire, to find allies for Europe for the cause of building this new kind of society, the nation-state.
And of course, one of the key figures, was a fellow called Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. And he drew a map, based on ancient knowledge, a map of the world, which was based on the discoveries of Eratosthenes and others, who estimated, correctly, the size of the world, based on Eratosthenes' estimate, and drew a map, which had some of the real estate in the wrong place, but calculated where, based on ocean currents and things like that, where the land lay on the other side of the ocean.
And Columbus got a copy of this map in 1480, corresponded with Toscanelli, and went to Isabella of Spain, to do just this. And they got stuck in the Americas, and that's how you had the Spanish colonization in the Americas. And later the Portuguese established what became Brazil on the same basis.
And the other expeditions, the same thing. So the intent was always, from the beginning, from the time of the Renaissance, was to reach out around the world, and to engage other nations in forming partnerships around principles, the same principles that were used to establish the sovereign nation-state in Europe.
And because of the problems in Europe, where we have not had a sovereign nation-state in the true sense established in Europe yet. What you have are parliamentary governments, which are vestiges of feudalism, which have been reformed under democratic pressures.
But you still have the feudal element in the financial-oligarchical form, sitting behind this power, which overthrows these parliamentary governments when they don't like them, as you're seeing being done in France and Germany right now, where the parliamentary government is being used to destroy the government itself, by financier-oligarchical interests centered in London.
You see we have the same thing in the United States, where a bunch of traitors, typified by Henry Hyde, the Dr. Jekyll of Illinois, moved in to try to impeach the President of the United States, on scandal, in exactly the way that European parliamentary governments are overthrown, and tried to insist, in the Congress, on a parliamentary rule for impeachment of a President--the same kind of parliamentary rule which is used to overthrow a parliamentary government in the continent of Europe or in England, for example, or in Britain. The same thing. The same thing was done to get rid of Macmillan, to bring in Harold Wilson. That kind of thing. So, they tried to do it here.
Only in the United States, were we able to establish a form of government actually based on the principle of sovereignty, the principle of the General Welfare, which in its design was modelled according to the intention of the Golden Renaissance in the Fifteenth Century.
And for that reason, Europeans regarded the United States in such phrases as a "Temple of Liberty," a "Beacon of Hope," for the world.
Now, that's what we're supposed to represent. Whether we represent it or not today, is not the question. The question is: Can we come back to representing what is our true manifest destiny? To be the nation-state which is the pivot for bringing the peoples of the world together, in a form of cooperation based on certain principles, essentially the principle of the General Welfare, and based on the principle of sovereignty of nation-states so constituted.
Now, this means, that we have to reach out to China, India, as well as countries in Africa, and Central and South America, continental Europe; we have to reach out to these nations, to form such a community of principle; the same conception which was had in the Renaissance, the same conception which I'm expressing today. To bring these people together around an idea.
Now, Roosevelt, in his own sense, as he proposed back while he was still alive, in fighting Churchill, on the postwar world arrangements, had the same idea: To eliminate Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French colonialism and imperialism, eradicate it totally at the end of the war, and establish a world based on sovereign nation-states, with which the United States would share a partnership, based on the general welfare of all parts of the world and all nations.
We must do that again. Otherwise, we do not have the solid basis for bringing together other nations, which are being estranged from us increasingly by the AFL-CIO, for example, as well as by the wildmen in the Congress, as well as by the British. We have to bring people together in the conviction that they're coming together for a principle, which they are persuaded is a true and trustworthy principle.
And that we wish to establish a community of sovereign nation-states on this planet, as the only ruling force on this planet. Not a nation, not an empire, but a community of sovereign nation-states, in which we play the role of insisting upon the legacy of the founding of our republic, of coming back to our own true principle, and saying "We are prepared to join with other nations in defending that true principle together. If you trust the principle, you can trust us. If you can trust yourself, you can trust us, and we can work together."
Now, this involves something much deeper, and that's the tough point sometimes for some people to make. The truth is, that for all known history, with a few spotty exceptions here and there, which were fairly short-lived, like the reforms of Solon of Athens at the beginning of the Sixth Century B.C., or the efforts of Plato and Socrates, and things like that; all humanity, including most of Greek society at that time, ancient time, was ruled under a rule of law, which is called Imperial Law.
That is, everything we know about history, even prehistory, indicates that mankind has always been a beast to man. And the Renaissance was an expression of an attempt to end that, to treat mankind as man, not as a beast.
You look at every form of society, beginning with the first--take Mesopotamia. The first known civilization in Mesopotamia, was founded by people from India, who spoke Dravidian. They were not Semites. The Semites were wandering tribes, who had no form of political government of any sort. They were just tribes.
So these Dravidians settled in the southern part of Mesopotamia, and founded a culture called Sumer. And this culture, because of its intrinsic problems, collapsed.
And the Semites, who had been colonized by the Sumerians, and who had copied their form of writing from them, developed a Semitical language variety of Sumerian or Dravidian culture. This became known as Mesopotamian culture, as distinct from what happened with Semites on the other side. You had some Semites who invaded Egypt, as Habairu, who became assimilated into Egyptian society, or partly so, and left Egypt with Moses, with Egyptian culture. And the two cultures, Egyptian and Mesopotamian, were immiscible. There were completely different taboos, and there's no way in which you would get a Moses out of Mesopotamia, because the cultures were fundamentally different.
But the Mesopotamian culture is notorious. It's sometimes called the "Babylonian model." It's what the Apostle John in the Apocalypse refers to as "the Whore of Babylon, by which he signifies that the Roman Empire, and its culture, are the Whore of Babylon, that is, the reviver of the tradition of Babylon.
Now the Babylonian and Roman tradition, presumes that some people own government, personally. Either an emperor or an oligarchical group. And that other people are human cattle. That means that the ruling force, the empire, or the oligarchy, regards other people as "conveniences"--as the slaveowners in the Southern states regarded their black slaves. Or also, virtually regarded the poor whites.
That when they became too numerous, cull the herd. You breed them for "utility." You breed them to the degree they're deemed "useful" to those who "own" them. You encourage the populations you want, to the degree you want them. And when you think they're excessive in numbers, or becoming too frisky, you cull the herd. You either cull the herd by culling the absolute number of them, or you just go out and kill the people who are too intelligent, because they're too much of a problem, too much of a danger.
And that's the way society has been run. That was the way Roman society was run, that was the way the Code of Diocletian, the Roman Emperor, dictated the law, which became the law of Western feudalism. People as property. Serfdom was people as property.
You have, for example, the Physiocratic Doctrine of Dr. Quesnay, the early Eighteenth-Century prote@aage@aa of Antonio Conti, an enemy of Leibniz and what Leibniz represented, who said that the owner of the property, owns the people and all of the wealth that lives on it. And the people live at the sufferance of the landowner, in the same way that cattle live and are culled or raised on a farm.
Now, this idea of something different, a different kind of society, began with Christianity. It began in the same period of time, a Christianity which fused with the ideas of Plato and Socrates. It was typified, for example, by Philo of Alexandria, one of the Jewish rabbis of that period, who was also a collaborator of the Apostle Peter in Rome, against Nero.
So Christianity, in adopting the Hellenistic culture, the Platonic tradition in the Eastern Mediterranean, used the Hellenistic or Greek Classical tradition, as a way of spreading Christianity, and organizing people in Christianity around this new idea, that all persons are actually made equally in the image of the Creator of the Universe; and therefore, that all persons must be treated equally as being made in the image of the Creator of the Universe.
And then you get a very literate conception, particularly with the help of the Hellenistic science philosophy, as to what that meant: the Socratic idea of reason, the idea of cognition; that the individual person differs from the animal, in one respect. That they are capable of cognition, they are capable of discovering and validating the discovery of a universal physical principle, and also Classical artistic ideas about what the principles are of behavior in cooperation among persons.
And after a long struggle against feudalism, within Europe, you had manifestations like St. Augustine, who represented that struggle; Isidore of Seville, who represented that problem. Or the Augustinians, the Irish monks, the spread of the Irish monks, the Saxon development in England; the spread of that in the form of Alcuin into France, the establishment of the initiatives by Charlemagne in that direction; the efforts of the other great thinkers from that time on, in the same direction, including the great Dante Alighieri, the same idea.
To form a nation-state--and the idea of a nation-state was not clear, but the idea of a state, that a people are not cattle, and therefore, they must be administered in their own language, and their own language must be given a literate form of expression, as Dante worked to do, and insisted. And they must be governed in their own language, according to certain principles.
And so the idea of the nation-state grew. And the effort to crush it, to crush these ideas grew, with the Welf League revolt, crushing of civilization in the Thirteenth Century, Fourteenth Century. Half of the population of Europe was wiped out. Disease prevailed, insanity, mass insanity very much like you see in the Democratic Party today, prevailed.
And then you had a Renaissance, because these ideas, which had caused the catastrophe, were discredited, and new ideas, typified by the Renaissance, the Greek Classical idea as opposed to Roman or Latin ideas, came into vogue.
And so therefore, we had-- The idea of the nation-state is new. Now, the point here is this, is this idea of the modern nation-state belongs to Christianity, specifically in the sense of Augustine, in the sense of the Platonic view of Christianity, the view of the Gospel of John, or the Epistles of Paul, for example, as opposed to some other interpretation.
Now, this view has always been also ecumenical. That from the time of Christ, the Jewish population, the literate Jews, also spoke Greek, or literate Greek. They were familiar with, educated in the Greek of Plato. Philo Judaeus--Philo of Alexandria--was typical of that. The collaboration between Peter, the Apostle Peter, and Philo against Nero, is typical of that.
So from the beginning, you had this collaboration among Christians and Jews, in particular, on a religious basis, as an ecumenical agreement on these ideas of the conception of man. It is the same ideas which were expressed by Moses Mendelssohn, who continued to the end of his life as an Orthodox Jew, and explained that, in an ecumenical sense.
In a later period, you had, beginning especially with the Abbasid Caliphate, you had the same kind of collaboration developed among Jews, Christians, and Islamic peoples, Muslim peoples. An ecumenical principle: We don't cut each other's throat over religious issues. We look for the common principle, the principle which unites us in a common principle, and let the other religious differences be sorted out in that context, in terms of political forms of society and relations among nations.
So therefore, to understand this principle for us in the United States or Western Europe, it's most easily understood from an ecumenical view of a Christian principle, a Christian-Platonic principle.
Now how, then, do we deal with the populations of Africa in general, many of whom of course are part of the Christian community, or Islamic community?
But how do we deal with the populations of India, or of China, or Southeast Asia in general? How do we deal with a world which has a different religious-cultural matrix behind it, and how do we bring people together around a common principle, free of the danger of religious warfare, which some people are trying to raise with respect to China, from the United States today? How do we do that?
Well, you have to become very good missionaries, like a famous priest, Ricci, who was responsible for introducing ideas of Christianity into China until the Vatican made a mistake and shut it down.
How do you convince a person, simply, without the use of Scripture as authority; how do you convince a person, that there is a fundamental difference between an animal and a beast? How do you do that? How do you convince an atheist of that?
Because a Christian will say "Well, the human being has a soul." You say "Well, that's a piece of Christian Scripture. Prove it. Prove that there's something called a 'soul.' Not on the basis of inspiration, not on the basis of Scripture, not on the basis of teaching. Prove it!"
Prove it to a Chinese, prove it to an atheist, prove it to someone in India, or Southeast Asia. Prove it to someone in Africa. Prove it!
How do you prove it? You prove it, in the same way you should educate children. You demonstrate exactly how cognition works. You demonstrate that mankind, and mankind alone, and the individual mind alone, is capable of generating solutions to otherwise insoluble problems, solutions which can be proven to be true by experimental methods, solutions which represent universal physical principles.
Once you have demonstrated that fact, you've demonstrated what Al Gore denies to exist--a fundamental difference between a beast and a human being. Al Gore says we have to reduce the human population, in order to make way for the beasts. He's trying to move in on us.
How do you prove that's absurd? You prove it by showing cognition. You demonstrate it by showing how man, through cognition, through discovery of principles, increases mankind's power in and over the universe, in measurable ways, in ways which result in improvements in the human condition. Greater life expectancy, better conditions of life, higher levels of culture, better conditions in home life.
For example, isn't it better to have one wage-earner in the family and have the family together most of the time, than have this three jobs in the family and commuting all over the place and never getting together and having latchkey children--and you don't know what's happening to them--on the street or in school? Isn't that better?
So therefore, aren't there cultural conditions of life, which go with that, which are better, which are necessary for those standards of living? Isn't that what the game is all about?
Therefore, once you have recognized that this principle of cognition demonstrates a fundamental difference between man and the animal, and also demonstrates that these discoveries are individual discoveries. That every mind that makes a discovery of principle, or contributes to spreading a discovery of principle, as a single individual, is making a contribution to all humanity, to the degree that new ideas are shared. And Classical culture is a way of learning how to share those ideas, emotionally and otherwise, among people.
And therefore, if you're going to do what we have to do, you're going to have to make the fundamental issue of politics, once again, the definition and knowledge of the difference between man and an animal. Don't be preachers, be evangelists. Don't be preachers, be missionaries. Outreach. Go to other people, and show that you know what you're talking about. Be able to demonstrate to them, the truth of an idea in a cognitive way. Don't preach at them, engage them. Evoke that from within them which is a sense to them of beauty within themselves.
You know, why do people do anything--good people. Why do they do good things? Cotton Mather, one of the founders of the United States, in a sense, wrote a paper on "To Do Good." The purpose of life is to do good.
Why do I do what I do? Because I love to do good. Why do scientists do what they do? To make money? No. No scientist really does it to make money. You can't be a scientist and make money. That will distract, it will detract from your ability to be a scientist.
Why do you become an artist, a Classical artist? To make money? No, you can become a rock artist to make money. You don't have to think that way.
You do things that are good, to be good. Why do you do that? What's your motive? To be good. To get approval from someone? No. Most of the time you won't get approval. People don't like good people. They make them uncomfortable. "This guy's looking down his nose at us, you know, because we're down here rolling on the floor, or something, which is our culture."
Why do you do that? Well, let's take a look at this business of cognition. Think of yourself as a person of cognition, and think about the fact that you're all born and you're all going to die. And when you look at life that way, and you take the whole of your life, knowing that it had a beginning, and more important, it has an end.
What's important? Is what's important the pleasure you get in the next moment? Is pain, avoidance of pain, what's important? Of course not. What's important to you, is the question, like a little child saying "What am I gonna be when I grow up?" A sense of "who I am after I'm dead. Who was I, before I was born? What's important about me? What's my identity in humanity? What stays? What can never be denied me, even after I'm dead?"
If I have played, in the scheme of cognition, a useful role in promoting those discoveries of principle which enrich mankind, make it possible for mankind to be better, to live better, to accomplish more, then I am useful to all humanity, past and future.
And that is what it means to be good. It comes not from a sense of this or that, rewards or this. It comes from simply a sense of the importance of being an individual human being, in each your own way. And you do good, not to get pleasure, not to get rewards, but because you have no choice, because you were born, and you're going to die. And if you know what's real, you know what's important is what you do with the life you have
It's like in the New Testament: the talent. You are born into this life with a certain talent. Your development gives you a certain talent. And what do you pass on when you go?
And the idea of being something which is more than just a rubber stamp of the past, the idea of being a necessary person implicitly in the eyes of future and past humanity, that's the drive to be good. That's why people will sacrifice.
Why do parents sacrifice for their children when they do it properly? Why are they willing to do that? For pleasure? Or is it not that in creating children, they are establishing a commitment to the future, to make the future, to defend the future.
They're not sacrificing, they're realizing themselves. They're doing something good, they're building something good, which is their reward--to be good.
Now that's the difference between humanity, moral humanity, and the kind of problem we have today. What's wrong with the Americans? The typical American, has no sense of the future. The typical American, has no morality. They're going no place!
Like the typical Baby Boomer. You ask: "Where's the future?" "I don't go there."
Pleasure, getting through the next moment with pleasure, or maybe the pleasure of having pain for some people--whatever their kick is these days. The guy who wants to enjoy losing his mind on LSD, because he "doesn't like living there."
Well, the problem with humanity today, is this chasing after things which are things, of momentary pleasure, of senses of power, all these kinds of things. They detract from us. They make us behave like--what? As in Gulliver's Travels, they make us behave like Yahoos, rutting in the ditch, losing the power of speech.
You want to see it? Take the English-speaking vocabulary of a typical high school graduate from 1940, as compared with the typical English-language vocabulary of a high school graduate today. We're becoming Yahoos! The vocabulary of a Baby Boomer graduate as opposed to one from a previous generation: we're becoming Yahoos, pleasure-seeking Yahoos who have no purpose in our existence and don't want one. "We don't go there."
That's what our problem is. And we have to have, leaders of our country and leaders of other countries, have to come to an understanding of this. The only bond among human beings which transcends national boundaries or cultural boundaries, is the sense that we're all made equally in the image of the Creator.
That equality is expressed in but one way, by our power of cognition, to make validatable discoveries of principle, and to transmit those by replication, in concert with others.
No other species known in the universe, has that quality. No other species is able to develop ideas which the universe, by its very design, is implicitly compelled to obey, which is the meaning of physical principle. When we discover a true physical principle, then we as mankind, in acting on that principle, can utter that command, that principle as a command, and the universe by its very design, is obliged to obey us.
We are the only species created to be able to change the universe, in respect to principle. We are unique, and we are all equal in sharing that quality.
And our business as nation-states, is to create nation-states to order our household affairs as we organize family affairs. And as families of nations, to work together to realize what it is in this universe to be a human being, a unique species, the only species created by the universe, which is designed, by its very nature, to be able to change the universe itself for the better, by command.
When we understand that, then if we can make that evangelical proclamation to representatives of other nations, as well as among the best thinkers of our own, then we can meet together with trust, and take this miserable planet we have, and put it back together again.
And one thing more, if we do this. The history of mankind, heretofore, as I've said, is a history of doom and resurrection. Whole cultures are doomed by themselves, because they're immoral, rotten, and degraded. What dooms them, is their lack of sense of what it is to be a human being. They become preoccupied with their own momentary pleasure-seeking, in whatever form they define it.
In the pursuit of pleasure-seeking, they adopt practices which lead that society to its own destruction. And it's only when the destruction threatens, that sometimes, when leadership appears to inspire a people to regret their bad ways. That, as with the case of Lincoln, or as with the case of the formation of the first United States Republic, as with the case of Roosevelt, that sometimes, a leader appears, in time, to prompt a nation to revive the best in itself, as Solon of Athens spoke of such matters, and to save it.
But often, in the history of mankind, the history and prehistory of mankind has festooned its beaches of wreckage of civilizations which did NOT survive, because either there was no one to lead them out of their self-imposed destruction, or because they were just simply not salvageable.
Now, we must save mankind now from the horrible thing that threatens it. But we must also yearn for a higher objective, a more durable objective. Can we not reflect on the kind of thing I've discussed here, and can not we say isn't it time to imbed in our educational system, in our institutions, a perception that humanity has a propensity for becoming less than it is. It loses sight of existing to do good, and accepts some kind of a lower standard of purpose or mission.
And in doing so, it brings itself into a time where it leads itself toward extinction. And sometimes, leaders appear in a timely fashion and the people respond, and the society revives itself from its doom. But often, not.
Can we not end these cycles of doom and sometimes resurrection? Can we not at last, imbed in our culture, a true conception of man, of man as something special, as man is a creature of cognition, so that never again, if we have once saved this civilization from the doom which now threatens it, that we can look forward, and hope, that never again will that kind of mistake be made, the kind of mistake that's led us to the present crisis?
Thank you.
