Dialogue with LaRouche
This is an edited transcript of the discussion which followed Mr. LaRouche's Feb. 1 presentation to the combined East and West Coast youth cadre schools.
Facing the Question of Immortality
Q: I have a question about knowing and about learning. I've worked on various research projects, including discovering the genetic root of cardiomyopathy and various other things, like researching the nervous system. And I was wondering why these research programs aren't as effective as they could be; or why you think that the M.D.-PhDs that I work with don't have the creative ability, so they can come up with the idea of discovering the root of these principles?
LaRouche: This very problem is, of course, one of the contributing reasons I answered a question, some years ago, at a conference—a side session on youth organizing at a conference in Virginia: What do we do, since the universities stink; how do we get an education? I said: Well, let's start with Gauss's—in 1799—exposition on the issue of the fundamental theorem of algebra, and proceed from that to history.
The point there, of course, is that Gauss did something very important at that point, in this paper: He attacked the two most influential and dangerous mis-leaders in scientific work in that time—Leonhard Euler and Joseph Lagrange. And the curse of science to the present day, is that the ideas, the empiricist system, or its positivist outgrowth, as represented by Euler and Lagrange in that matter—the anti-Leibniz forces of Euler and Lagrange—has been the curse of all scientific work to the present time.
Most scientists, today, even if they're competent in some degree, are fundamentally incompetent in the most fundamental principles of science. And, what Gauss does—young Gauss, the student of Abraham Kästner, attacks d'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, on this issue.
The basic issue—he defined the complex domain, even though the complex domain was implicitly defined before then, even by Kepler, and before Kepler by the Classical Greek geometers. That is, the pre-Euclidean, Classical Greek geometers, typified by the Pythagoreans, and the School of Plato. This is the ancient Classics.
Now, as Plato emphasized, the idea of discovery is based on a very simple, and what should be obvious, principle of, among other things, biology. And, if you don't understand this principle, how can you know anything about human biology? What's raised by Plato, is the point that you do not know the universe from the experience of your senses. The senses are something which you get from sense organs, which are part of your biology—just like the sense organs of any dog, any monkey.
So, human knowledge is not based on sense perception. That only qualifies you to get you into a zoo cage, as a monkey, or ape. Plato makes the point, and then explains it, he brings it up in the analogy, the heurism in The Republic: that what we call sense perception, is a result of biological tissue inside the human body. What we think we sense, with the mind, is not what happened. What we sense, is the effect of something on these sense organs, which radiate, like shadows, something they were stimulated by. The question is: What is outside your skin, which tickles your sense organ, which then causes your mind to say, "What is it?" "It's an experience." "Yes, the experience is true. But, it's the experience of your sense organ, not the experience of the world outside your skin."
That's the beginning of knowledge. That's the beginning of science.
An Ontological Paradox
Now, how do you know, what exists outside your skin? How do you know what exists beyond the scope of what your sense organs reflect to your mind? You have to find an aperture. What is the aperture? The aperture is called a "paradox," an ontological paradox. You find that the sense organ, sense-certainty picture of the shadow, is not consistent. There's something wrong about it; there's an error. And, what I did yesterday, by aid of the work of Bruce Director, in the presentation on the question of Kepler's discovery of gravitation—I just touched on one aspect of that. It's much more complicated than that. But, the aspect is, that Kepler noted, that in the Aristotelian effort to derive physical principles of the universe from sense-certainty only, as did Copernicus and then Tycho Brahe; in the attempt to do that, they assumed that simply by observing mathematically—shall we say, "statistically"?—that a certain regularity of pattern, which means essentially circular motion or linear motion: to assume, that the principle lay in the regularity of this motion, looked at from the circular or linear standpoint.
Now, what Kepler observed, by more precise normalization of the observations of the Solar System, is that the orbit of Mars was essentially elliptical, not circular. Secondly, that the rate of motion, along the pathway, the trajectory of the orbit, was not uniform motion, but was non-uniform motion. Also, that the orbit was not around the center of the ellipse, but around one of the two centers of the elliptical point (Figure 1).
Now therefore, you have the motion conform to one thing. If you take the area from the position of the Sun, to the perimeter of the orbit, and look at the motion a short distance after that; draw another line from the Sun to the perimeter of the orbit. Now, look at the elliptical area, so defined by that measurement, and Kepler determined, that the area, the amount of area subtended by motion, was always an expression of equal time. That is, that it was equal area, equal time.
Now, this meant that there was a harmonic organization between the two extremes. You have A and B are two points of the ellipse, central points of the ellipse. One of these points, let's call it A, which for us is generally the Winter season, we're the shortest distance from the Sun; then you have from that, to the Summer season, which is the longest distance to the Sun for us, in the Northern Hemisphere.
Now, you take the two areas, and compare them. Harmonically, they define a harmonic relation. And he, later, in his following book, expanded on this, to show that the organization of the Solar System conformed to something which had to do with these harmonic relations; which Gauss demonstrated, then, at the beginning of the 19th Century, by showing, that what happened is, that when Kepler had predicted the existence of a former, disintegrated planet, in an area between Mars and Jupiter, that actually, there was such a disintegrated planet, which is called the Asteroid Belt. Which has, harmonically, the characteristics of the missing planet defined by Kepler.
So therefore, you had with Kepler, the definition of a universal principle, in which the principle itself, corresponds to nothing which is intrinsically visible. You don't see gravity. You don't touch it. You see the effects. Ah! Sense perception. The sense organs can react to the effects of gravity, but they don't "see" gravity as such.
That's a principle. Science is based on this notion of the Platonic method.
Now, what happens with the case of the empiricists—with both Aristotle earlier, and with the Aristotelian method used by Claudius Ptolemy, by Copernicus, and by Tycho Brahe—there is no principle. There is no universal principle. It's all confined within the interpretation of sense certainty, as being the primary reality. Anything outside sense certainty, is some mysterious thing, which has nothing to do with the physical reality. It's out there. Whereas, in this case, we see that what is invisible, to the senses, can be known by the mind by examining a paradox, such as the paradoxes addressed by Kepler, in treating the Solar System.
This means an overthrow rejection of Aristotle. It means the overthrow rejection of Galileo. It means the overthrow, rejection of all the empiricists, including Euler and Lagrange. This is the method, of course—the method of Kepler, is also the method of Leibniz, on a higher level. So, what happened in the 18th Century, the so-called Newtonian faction—Newton was essentially a bum, who stole everything that he ever discovered; he was half-true, and he couldn't get it right even then. So, the Newtonian faction, typified by Leonhard Euler and Lagrange—Lagrange was a protégé of Euler—attacked Leibniz by saying, "There is no such thing as this infinitesimal. There's nothing outside regularity!" Outside the regularity of what might be called a "Cartesian manifold." That is, the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Cartesian manifold.
So, what Gauss attacked them for, was this: that, no: There are principles outside the domain of the Cartesian manifold, which actually control the universe. And therefore, you can not derive laws of the universe, physical laws, consistent with a Cartesian manifold. There's a different universe, which is the real universe, whose paradoxes are reflected upon our sense-certainty, which he called the "complex domain." And, it was the denial of the existence of the complex domain, as real, by Euler and Lagrange, which is the problem.
Now, this is a problem of method. The problem of method is denying the existence of efficient forces, in the universe, reality which exists outside sense-certainty. Which we know only by the Platonic method of examining the paradoxes of sense-certainty, and discovering and proving the efficient principles, which cause these aberrations from so-called assumed sense-certainty.
The prevalent method of mathematics and mathematical science, as taught in the English language and other languages, today—the empiricist method, the positivist method—is to assume, that if you have a sufficiently sophisticated mathematics, you don't need physics. That everything that happens in the universe, can be derived from a mathematics, based on a certain set of fixed definitions, axioms, and postulates. The problem is, that the physical scientist, who does experiments, and does important experimental work, before being accredited with this discovery, which may be a genuine discovery, is forced to restate what he has discovered in terms defined by Euler, Lagrange, and such successors of Lagrange as Augustin Cauchy, or Clausius, or Boltzmann and so forth.
So therefore, the problem, today, in science, is that the scientist is a prostitute, and there are very few exceptions to it. Every scientist, who does something competent, can get himself certified, or paid, only if he prostitutes himself! He must, after having discovered something in one way—validly, by experimental methods—now, has to turn around and prove, that he could have discovered that in a completely different way, consistent with his assumption of sense-certainty. And it's that moral corruption, which pervades in science today, in the teaching of science, which is the source of the problem you referred to.
On Russian Composers
Q: I would like to ask you to discuss the Russian composers, I guess, in terms of the major eras after Peter the Great, Alexander II. And really, I'm curious about composers in the 20th Century, and what was different then, that shaped their attitude in the face of the political situation?
LaRouche: Hmm! Okay, this is a sticky wicket!
As most of you probably know, in early 1946, I had returned from Burma after the close of the war, and was stationed briefly in a replacement depot camp outside of Calcutta, called Kanchrapara. And, I was coming out of the jungle. And I was starving for music, and I found a couple of co-conspirators, and we dug up everything that represented music, in terms of musical scores, pianos, whatnot—everything. And, we would have a regular session, daily, among us—just getting back to civilization, out of the jungle.
In this process, one of the things I dug out, or we dug out—but I was so transfixed by it, that I didn't pay much attention, for the moment, to the people around me, until they afterward had agreed that they had been impressed, too. One was an HMV, that is, the British Victor company, pressing of a performance of a Tchaikowsky symphony, conducted by Furtwängler. Furtwängler was a conductor I knew by name, but not by experience at that point. And I tell you, I was frozen in my seat. Because this was Tchaikowsky, who is not my favorite composer—he's rather sloppy in terms of the kind of music he produced; a well-meaning, sentimental guy, who was persecuted for his work.
But, what happened is, that Furtwängler, as typical of him, went to the core of the score; did not perform the score. Idiots perform the score in music. Competent people perform the music, instead of the scores. That doesn't mean they violate the notes, but they don't play the notes. Because, if music could be the notes, you wouldn't have to have musicians: You would just look at the score, and they would radiate into your mind. So, the point is, a score is a code. It's a code, like a written language.
If a language can be interpreted by a dictionary method, the method of that idiot, Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court Justice (that fascist bastard, as otherwise known), then there wouldn't be human beings. Because there would be no ideas communicated, because a language, in a literal sense, can not contain an idea. The way I just defined the ideas, in terms of the previous question. An idea lies between the cracks of sense-certainty. An idea is a principle, which you can not touch, you can not see—eh? You can not smell (preferably), and so forth. It is something, which is conveyed to you, by a paradox, a contradiction. Just as a principle of the physical universe is communicated.
So therefore, when ideas are communicated by means of language, they're communicated by irony or metaphor. That's why people who graduate from universities today, are so stupid, when it comes to poetry. Even people of your parents' generation, generally—even if they're so-called "well-educated," can not recite an English poem competently. Just can't do it. And, this is also with some German-speakers, reciting German poetry, who can recite it in a literate fashion, but the ideas don't come across. Because, the irony is not there.
The same problem arises in music: It's irony!
Now, what happened is, Tchaikowsky came into a period, in which you had had a person called "that bastard," "that criminal," Carl Czerny, had brought a young fellow called Franz Liszt, a pupil of Czerny, to Beethoven, for an audit. And, at that point, Beethoven was asked what he thought about the work of young Liszt at the keyboard, and he said, "He's a very talented boy, but under the influence of that criminal Czerny, it's going to be terrible."
And, what happened is, with the rise of the Romantic movement in Europe, especially after the Battle at Jena-Austerlitz, that a great wave of cultural pessimism spread throughout Germany, in the form of Romanticism. Goethe, for a time, became a raving Romantic for a while, just admiring this "great man" Napoleon. Hegel, of course, became a fascist, after the battle, because he made a theory of the state based on his sexual fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte. The Nazi theory of the state is based on Hegel, derived from Hegel; derived from Hegel's crony, Savigny, who was Marx's law teacher; and derived, later, from Carl Schmitt, in Germany, who was a follower of this school of law.
So, the Romantics would try to imitate Classical composition. Classical composition means, essentially, Johann Sebastian Bach. It generally means, for the student, someone who can actually—unlike some people—can actually perform the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier. And, very few people who perform it publicly can do it. We have one fellow, who does a very good job, who is András Schiff. I heard his performance of the Goldberg Variations, on a piano keyboard—it's a two-manual harpsichord composition, and he manages to do the thing brilliantly, on a keyboard. I was absolutely astonished.
But, someone who actually understands the principles of counterpoint, of Bach, and who understands how Bach's principles of counterpoint shaped the way in which, indirectly at first, Haydn was influenced; the way Mozart was directly influenced, from 1782 on; the way Beethoven was trained; the way Schubert was affected; the way Felix Mendelssohn worked, in his music; the way Schumann worked; the way Brahms worked—this is a totally different proposition.
Now, Tchaikowsky was strongly influenced by the Romantics. And therefore, his compositions were tailored to the Romantic. But, what Furtwängler did—which is why I say it's a sticky question—what Furtwängler did, was took this composition, this symphony of Tchaikowsky, which is usually performed in the usual sentimental slop form, and he made this a highly disciplined, precise Bachian reading of it. So, what Furtwängler did was not to misrepresent Tchaikowsky, but, to go in, and look at the composition, and find an intent within the composition, which was a valid musical idea, and to conduct the composition in such a form, that instead of the Romantic slop, which most conductors find richly deployed in the score, pulled it away from the Romantic slop.
And, this is the kind of thing you get, for example: You have elements of Shostakovich, which show a struggle with the same kind of strain of idea. So, there's no simple thing, as Russian composers. Russia, because of the condition of the Tsarist oligarchy, and other things, had great difficulty in developing many Mendeleyevs, in music, or elsewhere. Or many Vernadskys, in music or elsewhere. Because the state was a backward form of state, which Alexander II and so forth, had tried—rather effectively, with the help of Mendeleyev—to transform. And then, the "Troubles" came in.
So, it was not the optimal condition. You will find, in terms of song, that the forms of song-settings of poetry, Classical forms, are generally restricted in Europe, to the Italian and German model. You find that other language groups do not produce the same effect. Because, as recently, in an interview—probably some years ago, but recently published—of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he made a comment, that the development of the German Lied is closely intertwined with peculiarities of the German language, the Classical use of the German language. You find the same thing in the Italian. The German Lied and the best Italian model, like Verdi, are all derived from the concept of the Florentine school of bel canto. As we showed in one manual, on this subject,[1] there are certain differences between the German and the Italian, in terms of bel canto, how it's handled. But, the principle is the same. And so, the competent Classical Italian singer or German singer, is trained in the Florentine bel canto, either in the Italian version or the German version—or both.
And therefore, the irony, the principle of irony, which is shown, in a very essential way, by Bach's conception of well-tempered counterpoint, contains an inherent irony, which generates an idea. So that the composer, in composing a work, composes a whole work, before writing a single note down. It's all in the mind! It's one idea!
The question, as for any Classical composition, any serious scientific composition: The person who writes the composition, knows exactly what he's going to write, before he puts the first word on paper; and knows it from beginning to end. Because he knows his intention of the idea he's going to put across. And therefore, he's going to write it in a way which puts in the contradictions in the right place, to try to move the reader, from one point to the other, to the idea. So that the beginning and the ending, come precisely at the right point. Not an extra note is added, nor one subtracted. Everything there is essential, because he's written this thing, under the influence of an idea.
Now, sometimes, he'll make changes, improvements in his score later, but they'll always be consistent with the intent. He says, "I didn't express my intention adequately. I have to make this change." Which Beethoven did a number of times. For example, the most famous case, is in his third movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata, the Opus 106, in which he added two chords, at the beginning of the movement, which he added afterward. Which actually, you read it, and you say, "It's obvious, why he did it." It did make the expression of the idea much more effective, especially when you look at the composition as a whole.
So, that's the difference. Music has to be based on the ideas. It has to enjoy a culture in which ideas are communicated among the people. The person who is a great artist in a culture, always is in conflict with the culture.
Take the case of Brunelleschi, which I've cited before: In the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, he had a conception of how to build that cupola, which was otherwise impossible, according to the accepted doctrine of the time! He had a clear conception of the solution, and people would say, "Well, what's the form?" As if there was a form that would stably hold together, once you'd put it up. He didn't start that way. He said, "How can you build this thing, so that, at each stage of the construction, it won't fall apart?" And, he used the famous "hanging chain" principle, which he used explicitly (Figure 2).
So therefore, he had a conception, of how to complete the cupola, which took a number of years to do: Before the first stone was moved, he knew exactly what the finished composition was going to be. And, this is the same thing that is true, in all science and all art.
And the problem was—in Russia—this, in terms of Classical artistic development, this did not develop. What you will see, as in the case of this Tchaikowsky case I mentioned, by Furtwängler's conducting, that you can see that all competent Russian composers were very responsive to what they saw accomplished by the Bach tradition in Central Europe.
Marriage, and Classical Composition
Q: I recently re-read your paper "In Praise of Monogamy," on married love. And I was curious about this, because the idea that you're going to open yourself up and give yourself completely to one person—it's a beautiful idea, but I don't quite—I'm married! But I don't quite know what this idea is!
LaRouche: That's usually the case! People discover what marriage is, after they do it! . . .
Q: The question that I have, is: In organizing somebody at the literature table, what is the difference between the type of love that you have for somebody with whom you're married, and a person that you want to organize, to help develop their soul? Is there a difference?
LaRouche: Fortunately, you came to an expert!
No. See, a good marriage is like a good Classical artistic composition. It starts with an intention, and if the intention is valid, the composition works out. It's that simple!
You see, there's an interaction; there are ironies, there is interaction, in a marriage, which make it strong. It's not strong because of something, or this or that. It's because it's a process of collaboration; it's a process of work. It's the unfolding of an intention. It involves people outside the marriage, in the sense of what your impact of the marriage is, on people in the society around the marriage. What's the marriage's impact on the people around it? If it has a good impact, fine.
And, you approach it the way you would approach a serious, Classical musical composition. And think of it in those terms. And it will work—I mean, if you've got the right notes, to begin with.
You know, you have to have at least a couple, in any Classical musical composition! And, once you've got that couple, you now can say, "Is there an idea here, in this couple?" For you to start, if there is an idea, an intention-idea, which can be developed into a full composition, then you've probably got a good case.
What Do We Mean by `God'?
Q: I've been thinking a lot lately about the creation of the universe and the idea of God. My question to you, is: If God created the universe, what created God?
LaRouche: Hmm. I'm not going to say "I did"! We'll eliminate that proposition, right away!
No, the point is: What do you mean by "God"? Before you define something, as being how is it built, you have to know what it is!
Okay. Now, what do we know? Let's go to Vernadsky; we'll go to one of the stronger sides of Russian culture: Vernadsky. What did Vernadsky accomplish, and how does this apply to this question of God? And, Vernadsky, if he were standing here, would tend to look at me—"maybe I agree with you"—that kind of thing. You find that there are three phases in the universe, three phase-spaces. There are what we call, from the standpoint of physical chemistry, which is his standpoint: You have the so-called "abiotic," in which there's no necessary evidence of anything that would be called "life" in the universe. None of the effects require the existence of life. Or, of intelligence. There may be intention, but not expressed, active intelligence.
Secondly, you find, as Pasteur, Curie, and so forth demonstrated more effectively—and also, Vernadsky himself—who developed a comprehensive demonstration of the universality of this principle: Is that there is a principle in the universe, which is not to be found in the abiotic; a principle of life, which is universal, whose manifestation is, that it produces physical effects, in the universe, which can not be produced by abiotic processes. For example: The atmosphere could not be produced by an abiotic process. The waters, the ocean, were produced by a living process. Most of the sedimentary material, including soil, of this planet, were created by a living process. Could not be produced by an abiotic process.
Then, thirdly, you have effects, which are physical effects, on the universe, which are produced by the intervention, of the discovery of universal principle—effects which can not be produced in any other way; effects, such as the fact that man, who biologically, if he were not intelligent, would be either Henry Kissinger or some form of ape, would never have exceeded several million individuals on this planet, under the conditions of the past 2 million years.
But, man is now over 6 billion people, at latest estimate. How did this happen? Because of the principle of human intelligence, that is, creative intelligence—the discovery of principle. Therefore, we know that intelligence is unique.
Now, then it goes to a next phase: What is intelligence? We discussed it before. It is the ability to discover a universal physical principle; or, the equivalent kind of principle, a principle, which produces, universally, certain specific kinds of effects, which can not be produced, except by that principle.
What about human intelligence? The ability to discover a universal principle? How does it occur? It does not occur by a discussion. It may occur in the context of the discussion. But, the discussion doesn't generate it. It's generated within the mind of the individual. It's generated in the form, initially, of what's called a "Platonic hypothesis." And, if the hypothesis is proven experimentally, then you called it a "principal principle."
Now, the problem then, the next thing you have to do, is you have to communicate that. You can communicate that, not by wiring. Wires from one head to another will not do the job. As a matter of fact, they will tend to prevent the job from being done—as Al Gore showed, with his idea of the "Wired Society." It's done, by replicating the experience of discovery, in the mind of a second person.
This is, for example, optimal Classical humanist education. What does the teacher do, in a class, in communicating a discovery to a group of students? The function of the teacher, is not to say, "Learn this, or I'll kill you! Learn this, or I'll flunk you!" The function is, to stimulate, in the body of students, an act, a discussion; an active ferment, where you pose the problem. You say, "Here's a contradiction! How do you deal with this contradiction? How do you explain it?" And, when you get them all hot and bothered, then you begin to get a discussion. You steer the discussion as a teacher, by throwing more and more things in, to provoke them—once you've got their attention—so that, they themselves begin to make and experience this kind of a discovery, an hypothesis.
Once one or two catch onto the idea of the hypothesis in the class—a class of 15, or 20, is a good optimal number—then, you get a discussion among the students. And so, now, the whole idea, "What are these hypotheses? Which one is right? Why is this one wrong? Why is this one right?" Then, the instructor will intervene a little bit more—not to give the show away, but to steer consideration of additional facts, which will help the student body.
Now, they're in focus on the question; it's now a controversy. Now, they're really engaged. And, they will begin to hypothesize.
Then, the instructor will say, "Well, how would you prove which hypothesis is correct, if any?" "Would you do this?" Or, "would you do this?" Or, "what would you do?" "Which of you guys is right? Or are any of you right?"
At that point, you begin to focus on an idea. And, if you find the right experiment, and the right hypothesis, they'll walk out of the class, and everybody will have a fairly good idea—some will know; others will have an idea of what they don't know; and that's the process of healthy education. Which is not accomplished by rehearsing people in computer-scored, multiple-choice examination.
This Wonderful Universe
So, now, what does this tell you? This tells you that the act of discovery of a universal principle, a principle by means of which man increases man's power in, and over the universe, as a species—this is creativity! For mankind to be able to increase mankind's power in and over the universe, is a creative act. That's what we mean by "creativity": The discovery, and proof, of a principle, by means of which mankind is able to increase mankind's power to exist, in and over the universe.
So, this is a result of a spark, of a sovereign act, within the confines of an individual mind. A sovereign act.
Now, we say, "universal principle." We have this universe, wonderful universe. It has a real collection of entertainment in it. One is called the "abiotic" division; the other is called the "living" division, the division of life; the other's called the "intellectual" division, or "discovery," "cognitive." It's a wonderful universe. How's it organized? It's organized on the basis of physical principles! Discoverable, physical principles, which are efficient! We don't know anything else—except these universal principles, which are efficient. That's all we know! Everything else is guess-work: a stab in the dark.
Well, what about these principles? Where'd they come from? Did we create them? Well, not exactly. We discovered them. They existed beforehand.
Ahh! So, life always existed in the universe! So, intelligence always existed in the universe! And, intelligence is sovereign. It's a sovereign act, of a sovereign individual. Therefore, the universe is God. And the character of the universe is, that it is a sovereign personality.
Does the universe have a beginning? No.
Does it have an end? No.
Does anything exist outside it? No.
So, how could anything have created it? The universe is the universe. We call it "the universe," because the principles we discover, are universal. And, there's nothing outside what we discover, that controls the universe.
Therefore, the universe always existed. There was never anything outside it, before it, behind it, or after it. The universe is governed by a principle of creativity, of principles that we, as man, are able to imitate God, by discovering! When we discover a pre-existing universal principle, it becomes our property. We can use it. The universe has changed, now, because man, as a willful agency, in the universe, can change the universe, by adopting a pre-existing principle, and using it.
Before, after, when, who, what? No! What we know, is all that's all that we know! We don't know anything else! Once we identify what we mean by a "universal physical principle," we don't know anything else. That's why Descartes and Euclid and Aristotle are such idiots.
The Question of Leadership
Q: On Martin Luther King Day, Michelle did a class on Martin Luther King. And, before she did the class, I'd been thinking about some things. She told me about how King wanted to get rid of the ghettoes and things like that. And, it sort of sparked an interest of my own, on education—I guess for everyone, not just the ghettoes. . . .
And, I have a design class. And we had to come up with 100 ideas for a certain project. And the entire class could only come up with 30 ideas. And, that shows a kind of fracture in the way we think, I guess. And, I was wondering how we could change that, in the school system?
LaRouche: We're in the same ballpark, to come back to the same thing I started with. Don't look for particular ideas, of how to reform education. Look at the fact, that the so-called "leading followers" of Martin Luther King—those associated with him, after he was murdered, all failed. Starting with Jesse Jackson—the older Jesse Jackson; I think the son is a little bit more interesting. But, they failed. They all ran to the government foundations, different foundations. They all began to peddle their rear end on the street, in one way or the other.
What was the difference between them, and Martin? A very fundamental difference. And that goes to this question of education: the question of principle, the question of leadership, the question of the tragic versus the sublime. Martin, like Jeanne d'Arc, had no fear of immortality. As I know the other people around him, to the degree I know them—and I know some personally, closely and so forth, and I have some very good observations by close associates of that operation, who know something about it. They all were deadly afraid of immortality.
Martin was murdered. We don't know exactly who ordered the murder, directly. We know who ordered the murder in general: It was J. Edgar Hoover.
The murder of Martin, was a part of the 1966-1968 Nixon campaign for President, based on the so-called "Southern Strategy." And, the point was—and these guys, who organized the "black power" movement, organized against Martin, on behalf of Nixon! And, people wouldn't admit it. They wouldn't admit it: that they were the tools, of the Nixon crowd. And, of J. Edgar Hoover, and so forth. It all came out in the wash a little later. Gradually, we began to find out what their real careers were, who owned them.
And those who were not corrupt, in the sense of being intentionally corrupt, were cowards, like Hamlet. As all of the leaders around Ralph Abernathy, my dear friend, you know, the same thing. They all became corrupt! They ended up working for the Moonies! Or similar kinds of things. So, they betrayed the cause.
Now, you go back to this issue of Frederick Douglass, when you're talking about education in general, particularly the education of Americans of African descent. You're talking about Frederick Douglass, and what he represented. What was Frederick Douglass's standard for the struggle for freedom of slaves? The highest level of education possible, is the road to freedom. What you are, how you develop yourself—that is who you are! Not whether you've got chains on you or not, but who you are! You're a slave, if you're a slave in your own mind! If you can free yourself of the slavery in your own mind, you can free yourself of the slavery of the chains, in due course.
Frederick Douglass represented that.
Now, what did these swine do, immediately after Lincoln was shot? They took the system of education, of the struggle for freedom, typified by Frederick Douglass—who was a great thinker; whose son was an important Classical musician, and so on and so forth. And they said, "We must not over-educate the freed slaves, because they will be discontented with the kind of employment they're going to get. So, we must not educate them above their expected station in life." This is the beginning of Jim Crow. And, it was done by the so-called "pro-abolitionist" crowd from Boston, and other similar kinds of places.
Equality of the Mind
The problem here, all along, has been this idea of "relevant education," for Americans of African descent. Crap! Every American's entitled to the same opportunities in education. The same kind of education; the same kind of knowledge! This cultural relativism, just means somebody's going to be on top, and somebody's going to be on the bottom. The idea of equality, true equality, which is, first of all, equality of the mind. We don't want children to learn something, which is "relevant" to their condition of slavery. We want them to understand something which is human. Their power in humanity. Not this so-called "game," which the Ford Foundation and others plugged.
And, if we have this understanding, on the question of education, that what Martin represented—don't forget the fact that he was a very well-educated person, in his own way; Boston University graduate in theology, divinity; well-educated. And a very superior person, who was sitting there, in Alabama, fairly obscure, when the ministers associated with him, recognized him as being an exceptional person, of exceptional talent. And, they voted him in, to take this job. And he accepted it.
And, he went on, from that experience of taking that job, to become the leader of a struggle for freedom, a true struggle for freedom. He became so successful, that they killed him.
Because they understood the principle of tragedy: If you kill the one guy who's leading a movement, who represents the sublime, you can destroy the movement. Whenever you have a movement, which is based essentially on one leading person, who's a competent leader, who represents the sublime—as Martin did! See, Martin wasn't struggling for African-American freedom: He was struggling for the freedom for everybody! That was his power! Everybody knew that Martin was a world leader, a national leader. He was not a leader of an under-class.
And his idea was, that you eliminate the under-class, by establishing equality. And he was for everything! He should have been President of the United States! Morally, he was qualified to be the President, where others were not: Because he represented the sublime. He was willing, as he said, in his mountaintop speech, to put his life on the line, for the sake of a fundamental change in society; not a change for persons of African descent—a fundamental change in society! To bring about a just society.
And morally, he was qualified to be President of the United States, on the day he made that speech. Because that's the commitment we should require, of a President, is that kind of commitment.
And, when they chopped him off, and other people, who were otherwise well-meaning, who had worked with him, without his leadership, they were impotent! And, the whole thing disintegrated.
Why was it done? It's obvious, to anyone looking back—it's obvious.
Nixon, in 1966 had gone to Mississippi, in the aftermath of Johnson's signing of the two civil rights bills. And he'd gone down there, and he met with the Ku Klux Klan, and Trent Lott! And Trent was probably a member of the Klan at that time. And, they started what became the "Southern Strategy": To get all the racists in the Democratic Party in the South, to come over to the Republican Party behind Nixon. And, thus the Republican Party could take over the Presidency, and they could establish fascism in the United States, under a Nixon Administration, directed by Henry Kissinger.
And Henry Kissinger was a product of, what? Henry Kissinger was a product of—the Nashville Agrarians! The Nashville Agrarians were the grandsons of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan! Henry Kissinger was educated, where? At Harvard! By a Prof. William Yandell Elliott, who was a member of the Nashville Agrarians. The New York Times, and the literary societies in the United States, or literary magazines, are being influenced largely by the Nashville Agrarians. The racists were taking over America!
And, Martin Luther King was the biggest threat they had to their program. So, they killed him.
And, when he was toppled, everybody around him, who had been associated with him as followers, went the other way. And Jesse Jackson was the first. Jesse Jackson was not standing anywhere near Martin, when Martin was shot. But Jesse went out there. Got on a plane. Got to Chicago. Rubbed some blood on his shirt, and when out there, and said, "I was standing next to Martin." And that was the first time he became known as a "PUSH-er."
So, this is the issue. What is needed here, in the case of education, is leadership, which can be trusted, by people who are confused and in doubt. People need inspiration, of leadership they can trust. If a Martin Luther King were alive today, with his qualities, and started an education movement, that's where he'd start. He'd say, "We've got to do this. We've got to go to the mountaintop." And, people who are reluctant to take that kind of education, would seize it, because they were following a leader, just as some people in France followed Jeanne d'Arc. A hero, who represents the sublime. Who inspires in people around him, the confidence to do something.
Yes. We can provide the other ingredients. The ingredients required for the American of African descent is the same as anybody else's. No difference: They're Americans! I know this, because I've worked with Africa. The typical American of African descent has no idea, in the world, what Africa is! They're Americans. They don't know anything about it. I know about it. I've dealt with this for years, for decades. They're Americans!
And, they have to stand up on their own conscience, and their own dignity, and say, "We are Americans. We have the right to be part of the leadership in policy-making for this country. And we have a right to access to the knowledge we need to do that job."
And, I would start and say, as I've said, often enough: "Martin Luther King should have become President." If they hadn't killed him. If that idea gets across, you won't have a problem in getting people to accept the kind of education they need. If they see the inside of Martin's mind, as I have. This man was a great man; and we lost him.
And we need leaders who can inspire. Who can be recognized as people, as inspiring, who are valid, as the other people around Martin were not valid. They ran the other way. There was no established national leadership of the civil rights movement, once Martin was shot. They all ran the other way. And, that was the great demoralization, which destroyed it. Then all the funny-funnies took over, from 1968 on. And I was there. I was involved in it.
And, so the first thing? Yes. What I otherwise say on education, what we need, but it won't work, unless you can inspire the recipients of that proposed education, to desire it. And to have an image of themselves, which is not a second-class image. Which in the history of the so-called "black education" in the United States, since the Civil War, has been dominated by this thing: "Let's not educate them above their station." And, if you say, "No, Martin should have been President," then, that's a different image. Then, education becomes important. And the Frederick Douglass image, then, becomes the connection to Martin Luther King.
What Happened to the Soviet Union?
Q: My question was, what fundamentally caused the collapse of the Soviet Union?
LaRouche: Ah-ha. I did!
It's true. You should know it, you have a right to know it. I've already declassified it, but I'll declassify it again for you. It was formerly a big national secret, one of the most precious national secrets of the United States.
To make it short. I had already understood what the problems were, the security problems, the failures of the Soviet Union, and so forth and so on. Now, my concern was that, as we approached the end of the 1970s, with nuts like Brzezinski running loose—and Brzezinski was absolutely dangerous, he's a lunatic, a dangerous lunatic—that with the policy we had, of so-called Mutual and Assured Destruction, and the way systems were going, we were headed to the great likelihood of an actual nuclear war, or nuclear exchange, thermonuclear exchange. And therefore, I worked on the question of, how do we stop this? What do we do, to end this crazy Bertrand Russell policy, of preventive nuclear war?
Remember, preventive nuclear war was a concept first introduced to the United States government by Bertrand Russell, the so-called pacifist. Anybody who thinks Bertrand Russell is a peace-loving person, or a good person, is some kind of a jerk, or worse. He's no good, he's evil. He was probably the most evil man of the 20th Century. He made Hitler look minor by comparison.
So, my concern was, how do we stop this? So, in my Presidential campaign, to tried to make sure that Carter was not re-elected—I wasn't afraid of Carter, I was afraid of Brzezinski. In 1979, I issued a paper on strategic defense. Now, the point was, my proposal was, that the United States and Soviet Union, could jointly develop systems which would, in due course, would eliminate the danger of a ballistic missile attack, that is, the effective danger of a ballistic missile attack. and if everybody knows you can't win a war by a ballistic missile attack, even partially, then they're not going to fight the war.
And, therefore, the question was, how to get that across.
In the beginning of 1980, I was on a platform in New Hampshire, and presidential candidates were seated in a row, like goony birds on a string, up before an audience of about 3,000 people, in this New Hampshire motor hotel. It's now been torn down since. And Reagan and I were sitting up in a corner, because the candidates were arranged alphabetically, and Reagan, as R, was the last one in a row, and I was sitting next to him. So, we got into a conversation, which aroused his curiosity.
And also, what happened was, that Bush's attacking me, in New Hampshire in that period, resulted in Bush making mistakes where he threw the nomination, the Republican nomination—Bush was supposed to be the frontrunner, then. Reagan was the second runner. Bush was supposed to win the nomination. Bush lost the nomination, because he got into a catfight with me. And Reagan won the New Hampshire primary, and won another primary in the Carolinas, and it was over. Reagan was going to be the President. And this was well-known, that I had destroyed Bush, as I had destroyed a few other people in that process.
So, he's elected. At that point, November of 1980, I was down in Washington—I came back from Europe, on other business. Went down to Washington to meet with a number of people, in the incoming Administration, as well as Democrats. In the process, what I did was—which was typical of visiting firemen going into Washington in a transition period, of an incoming Presidency, is you go in there, and they say, "What's your agenda? What do you want to lay on the table, that we should consider for the incoming Administration?"
Ballistic Missile Defense
So, I had a long list of things, which I had in mind, and one of these was on this question of Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense, by using new physical principles. Nothing happened directly at that time, but I already had friends in various parts of the institutions of government, and a Soviet representative in New York, at the United Nations, had approached one of my associates, and had suggested that they wanted to have a new channel of discussion with the incoming President.
So, I had a report written up of that, and I forwarded it into the White House circles.
The answer came back, "Will you take on the job of running a back-channel negotiation with the Soviet government?" I had a little back and forth discussion, quickly, and I took the job. It was not a deployment; it was just an arrangement: a private citizen, serving as a back-channel connection between the National Security Council of the United States government, and the Soviet government.
So, in this, I laid this proposal out, and what I did in a special way, is that in February of 1982, before actually beginning the discussion with the Soviet representative, we had a conference in Washington, D.C. About 400 people attended, people from all kinds of government, particularly military, U.S. military, and so forth, all came in.
So, I laid out what I proposed, there. I said, "We must, the two superpowers, must come to an agreement on this principle: that we can develop such systems, and by cooperating on agreeing to develop such systems, which can defeat ballistic missile threats, not right now, but in the future—by coming to that agreement, we can end the threat. And if we apply these technologies, to developing Third World countries and so forth, these new technologies, this can be the road to elimination of the nuclear conflict threat.
I presented this to the Soviet government, beginning February, shortly after that, the week after that. And this continued to my last meeting with the Soviet representative—others met with him later—but my last meeting with him at that point, was February of 1983. At that meeting, the last meeting I had with him, he gave me a report-back from the Soviet government on my proposal. And I had said, "If the President of the United States, President Reagan, were to make this offer, how would you react?" I never said the President was going to make the offer; I said, if we makes the offer, how would you react?
So, in February of 1983, the report-back from him, from Moscow: Andropov, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, said, "no!" Flat no.
And, I said in response to him, I said, that's very foolish on his part, because, if what we've been discussing, is Soviet policy, and you go ahead with that policy, I can assure you, that within about five years, the Soviet Union will collapse.
I later, shortly after that, repeated that forecast—that, there's a danger, with this policy on the part of the Soviet Union, which was a very aggressive policy—that under these conditions, the Soviet economy could not take the strain, because of its rotten condition, and the Soviet economy would collapse, within about five years.
As you know, in 1988, I made this press conference in Berlin, on Columbus Day, in which I said, the Soviet system is about to collapse. It'll probably start in—it will start in Poland. Germany will be reunified. The capital of Germany will probably be designated as Berlin, the future, again. And we now face the challenge, the next President is going to face the challenge of the disintegration of the Soviet system, and how we react to the disintegration of the Soviet political system.
And so it collapsed.
And then, I was put in the jug, for that reason, to get me out of there. They were going to kill me. If I wasn't put in the jug, they wanted to kill me. There was a plan. It was an official line: If he beats the case, if he beats the charge, we're going to kill him.
But, I survived. And we had the broadcast, the national TV broadcast, network TV, in which I re-presented, included, the details of my televised report at Berlin, on the coming collapse of the system, and the proposal.
And so, the system collapsed.
Remember that President Reagan, on March 23, 1983, made the offer publicly to the Soviet Union, exactly the offer that I'd indicated to the Soviet Union, he might make. If they had accepted that, at that point, even for discussion, world history would have changed, and would have taken a different line.
So, the significance of that today, in response to the question, it gives you an idea of why I have confidence, in what I as an individual can do, in dealing with a world problem today. I've been there several times. When history has hung on whether the U.S. government, or others, would accept what I proposed, at a critical point, as a necessary policy. Every time my proposals were rejected, they suffered. And every time they were accepted, minimally, at least, we got some gain. So, I have a confidence as a leader, which is why I answered the question immediately the way I did. I sank the Soviet Union. Not because I sank it, but because when the Soviet government rejected what I had proposed that Reagan propose, after Reagan proposed it, the Soviet government doomed itself, as I said would happen at that time.
MacArthur vs. the Utopians
Q: Do you know why MacArthur failed to organize a successful resistance, to the Utopian takeover of the early 1960s, and if it is actually possible that a man such as he, had an incomplete understanding of, or commitment to, statesmanship?
LaRouche: . . .The way to look at this, is that in the Summer of 1944, when the U.S. forces had broken through in Normandy, the Wehrmacht was defeated, in principle. That the end of the war was inevitable, or virtually inevitable at that point. Now, up to that time, Franklin Roosevelt had led the United States out of a depression, to become virtually the only economic power on this planet. And had won the war, effectively.
At that point, Roosevelt's enemies in the United States, who had had to put up with him, because he was saving the economy they had wrecked under preceding Presidents, and because the war had been won, on which they depended on him entirely, for his leadership. They said, "We don't need him anymore."
At that point, he had a Vice President, Wallace. Roosevelt himself was ill, as a by-product of having suffered poliomyelitis. He was a young man, relatively speaking, but he was in the process of dying from overwork, because of the complication of having had poliomyelitis as an adult. So, the enemy, the American Tories, the Wall Street crowd, went to work on two fronts.
First of all, they were determined to get rid of Roosevelt, and thought they could get rid of him, simply by waiting for him to die, which they expected would happen soon. On that point, we had a friend who died more recently, Max Corvo. Max Corvo was the chief of OSS operations in Italy, during the war in Italy, and he later became a friend of ours, a friend of mine, and he was very close to the head of the OSS, Donovan, who, in the period I'm speaking of, had walked out of a meeting with President Roosevelt, ashen-faced. "It's over. He's going to die." Which we got from Max. And Max was reliable on this kind of thing.
So, what they did, is, they put in an idiot, a nasty little idiot, Truman, as Vice President. Because they figured, Roosevelt's going to die, and you had Truman, a Winston Churchill ass-licker, who's going to do everything the British wanted, against the Roosevelt policies in the post-war period.
So, he became Vice President, and then Roosevelt, on April 12 of the following year, died. At Warm Springs.
Now, in the meantime, there was a change in military policy: the bombing policy; the firebombing of Tokyo; the bombing of cities in Germany, like Magdeburg. A whole group of cities were bombed for no military reason, simply as killer operations. Firebombing. Magdeburg was destroyed. Dresden was almost destroyed. By a needless bombing, done, with the aid of the Americans, under British direction, under so-called Bomber Harris. And this thing is now all over the place in Germany—the books are out, for the record—the rage against the United States and Britain, in Germany, right now, is tremendous, on the basis of public exposure of this killer bombing, this racist bombing, against Germany—needless bombing against civilian populations during that period.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was totally unnecessary. There was no military grounds for this bombing. Not a single U.S. life was saved by that bombing. None. The idea that a million lives were saved, is a total lie, invented by people like Buckley.
MacArthur had before that, before the surrender, had written a report, or directed the writing of a report, which was his opinion, to Washington, stating that Japan was defeated, there was no need to invade. Eisenhower was presented with, by the Administration, the Truman Administration, with the report that Truman was thinking of dropping the nuclear bomb on Japan. Eisenhower said, independently of MacArthur, "It's crazy, Japan is a defeated nation, don't do it."
The bombs were dropped.
They were dropped because of Bertrand Russell, whose policy was preventive nuclear war.
So, what happened in this period, is they cooked up a phony war, between the Soviet Union and the United States and Britain. It was orchestrated by the British. Why? Why was this phony war orchestrated? Stalin had no intention of attacking the United States, or Western Europe. None. All a lie. Truman, and Churchill, cooked it up. Why?
Because of Bertrand Russell. The doctrine which took over, with the Truman nomination in the Democratic nominating convention of the Summer of 1944, was what is called the utopian doctrine. The doctrine of H.G. Wells, and his Open Conspiracy. The doctrine which had been orchestrated through the nuclear community, by Bertrand Russell personally. Bertrand Russell was the orchestrator of the doctrine of preventive nuclear war. "We bomb them now pre-emptively, to force them, and force the world, to give up national sovereignty, and accept world government."
This is the policy of the Al Gore of the Bush Administration, Dirty Dick Cheney.
Okay? So that's the policy.
MacArthur, like Eisenhower—Eisenhower, with all his "Eisenhowever"—adhered to the traditional defense doctrine and the traditional foreign policy of the United States. MacArthur did not fight any unnecessary battles in the Pacific. The Navy did, the Marine Corps did. Iwo Jima was totally unnecessary. MacArthur said, you take strategic points, you control the entire Pacific logistically. Japan is an island nation. It can not survive without raw materials from her neighboring countries. If you effectively blockade the main islands of Japan, Japan must surrender. You don't have to kill anybody more. You fight battles where you have to fight them, in order to establish the control, logistical control points, over the Pacific region. Once you've established that, you've won the war. It's not kill-power that's important; it's logistics. It's strategy, logistics.
So, that's MacArthur's policy.
The Navy, which is more crazy, or one faction of the Navy which is more crazy, more pro-British—and that's a whole other story—went into wars, conducted independent wars, independent of MacArthur, in the Pacific, to get their dibs in, for their policies.
So what happened at the end of the war: You had a fight, which is going on to the present day. The professional military, especially the Army and Marine Corps, the ground forces, their policy is—. The policy of the war against Iraq is insane! They may not say it publicly while they're still serving, but they'll say it as retired officers. And they'll have their friends say it, if they don't want to say it themselves. The U.S. military is opposed to this war, as a piece of insanity.
But this crowd, that wants the war, are the utopians, the same people that launched this policy: essentially a right-wing, New Roman Empire, world conquest, "everybody's our slave," "terrify everybody," etc., and "use nuclear weapons to intimidate people into line."
There is no war against Iraq. There's a war against the Islamic world. It's a kind of Roman imperial limes war. And that's what the issue is. MacArthur represented the opposition to that; he was the leader, really. He was the greatest military leader the United States had, in that period. They got rid of him! And they gave us the Moonies instead. That's true—but that's another story.
Solar Power Is Nuclear Power!
Q: My question is, why should we have nuclear power, versus solar power, and how exactly the gang-countergang operations work, with a lot of these modern leftist movements? So, that's my question.
LaRouche: Okay. Because solar power is idiocy. Actually, solar power is nuclear power. Where do you think you get solar power? From nuclear fission and fusion, in the Sun.
You want to eliminate nuclear power? No solar power.
Also, this whole idea of energy is crazy. You know, I believe in Don Quixote when it comes to windmills. We need Don Quixote now, for a useful mission! He's an important character of fiction, but now he can be an important character of reality. He can get out there with his lance, and knock some of these things down, and get this ugliness off the landscape. These ugly things, these monsters up there, sitting up there snarling, killing birds. They kill birds! Bird-haters!
Now, this goes back to a piece of scientific idiocy, which was understood already—the problem was understood by Plato, already. The concept of power, as opposed to that idiot Aristotle's concept of energy. So, when people talk to you about nuclear energy, or solar energy, they're Aristotelean idiots, who shouldn't be talking. They should be monkeys, and not talk. They can chatter, but not talk.
Because, the issue here is power.
Now, power is reflected in various ways in terms of energy, relative to what people call energy. Power has two features, generally, descriptively, in the form of energy. This is not where power comes from, but this is what power reflects, in terms of energy language. One, is energy-flux density. What is the intensity of energy, apparent energy, per square kilometer, cross-section area of motion? It's called energy-flux density.
Now, compare the energy-flux densities of various modes of power generation. Solar power is the least efficient. As a matter of fact, the use of solar power is insane. Because solar power has a very important use on this planet: Light. Light! What we want is more vegetables. We want more foliage. We want the deserts to bloom. What we want to do, is we want to get areas which are too hot, to cool down. We want more moderate weather. We want to turn the deserts into areas where people can live, under normal conditions.
How do we do that? We increase the biomass. Increase the amount of growth.
Now, for example, trees will absorb about ten percent of the solar radiation hitting the Earth's surface. It's very good. Take ten percent of the solar energy, in a certain area; convert it into trees. You moderate the climate, both for Winter and Summer. You take an area which is a quasi-desert area, or desiccated area, and you convert it into a place where people can live. You convert areas which are useless, into areas where you grow food. So therefore, we want to manage what we're getting in terms of solar, heat radiation. We want to manage it, for the benefit of living processes on the Earth. Including man.
For example: If we plant enough trees in the high plateau, or relatively high plateau, of southern India, we would probably lower the average temperature in the Summertime, by five to ten degrees. They need trees. . . .
So, we've got our western land. You've got the Great American Desert. Look at Southern California. Look at what's happened to the aquifers. This is insane! Look at Northern Mexico; what we're letting happen there is insane. The conflict between Texas and Northern Mexico over water is insane! And therefore, the thing with the solar radiation, is to organize its use in such a way as to enhance the biosphere. Be kind to Mother Nature. Enhance the biosphere. Don't waste solar energy on trying to power television sets.
Turning Water into Fuel
Now, therefore, the other aspect is, that we waste a lot of money, by taking gasoline as a fuel all over the landscape. This is insane! Why should we do that? We don't need to have gasoline as a fuel, or diesel oil as a fuel. We don't need that. If we have a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor—. Let's take a very specific type of a nuclear reactor. The so-called UNIK model, developed by a friend of ours, who is now deceased, Professor Schulten, which works. This model is a self-regulating reactor, which operates in a range of between 120 and 200 megawatts. That is, as the reactor becomes hotter, it tends to shut down the rate of reaction. So, it keeps the rate of reaction within a certain range.
With a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, you can generate in an area, or say, a complex of them—instead of putting up a 1.2-gigawatt reactor, you put up a bunch of 200-megawatt reactors as a test, and you put them up quicker. Because the big thing about the large reactors is, you have to pour concrete, and you have to cure the concrete. So, therefore, it will take you many years, up to five to six years, to complete the reactor, and you have to spend and invest all the capital in it. Why not build smaller reactors, which you can complete more rapidly, and make many of them, in an area? You can put these things, they're easy to put in, you put them, they're self-regulating.
Now, but with these kind of reactors, we can turn water into a fuel! Very simply. You use high-temperature reaction to disassociate water, producing a hydrogen, or hydrogen-based fuel. You can use fuel cells, you can use other vehicles, you can convert from the use of gasoline, or diesel fuel—which is a highly inefficient fuel, relatively speaking—to a much more efficient fuel, which is a hydrogen, or hydrogen-based fuel.
So now, instead of carting oil all over the county, with pipelines and natural-gas lines and so forth, you use natural gas where you have it in excess, as a chemical feedstock. For fertilizers, things like that. You take petroleum, and you ship the use of petroleum to chemical feedstocks, which is what it's most useful for. Burning petroleum is very inefficient. Use it as a chemical feedstock; the benefit to humanity is much greater per ton consumed.
You would turn the Middle East into production, a chemical factory, to produce feedstock, which would be used by the world, rather than burning the stuff up, and polluting the atmosphere. Much better. Then you would produce the hydrogen-based fuels, in your local region, so you wouldn't be carting this stuff all over the place. The problem with other methods, is, they generate a lot of waste. Burning oil generates waste. You can't really be too efficient with that. Coal is terribly wasteful. Hauling fuels all over the country is very costly, and very wasteful. Don't do it.
So, why not have a new system, which can generate the fuels where we need them, and have them available on a standard, in every part of the world, or in every part of the United States, in particular?
So, therefore, there is no problem with it. If you're afraid of nuclear energy, die. Why? Because you have nuclear actions going on in your body. Radioactive potassium reactions, which are an essential part of life. You don't like radioactivity? Don't lean against a brick wall. You'll get more radiation than from a nuclear reactor. A brick wall will do it all by itself.
What happened is this, very simply. To sum it up: 1964, there was an attempt to turn the United States from being the great producer nation of the world, per capita, per square kilometer, into a parasitical consumer society, which would live by sucking the blood of other parts of the world, and destroying our own people, and turning them into a bunch of dummies, which has been done with our education system now. So, as a part of that, they attacked technology.
Now, the first attack was not on nuclear energy. The attack on nuclear energy happened after 1972. But the rock-drug-sex counterculture, a key part, a leading edge of the campus radical movement of the mid to late '60s, was essentially based on the "end of technology." Destroy technology. Go to a consumer society. Which means a parasitical society, like the Roman Empire. And the attack on nuclear energy, was determined to stop progress.
Take the other case, the case of DDT. There was never any reason to ban DDT. The campaign against DDT was a complete fraud. People are dying today, because DDT was banned. It was one of the most efficient, most harmless types of insecticide available. You have people dying of West Nile virus, because of a lack of DDT. This was done to stop technology. It was done as part of the war against technology, to transform us from a producer nation, into an imperial consumer society, a predator preying upon the rest of the world.
And therefore, this campaign against nuclear energy, was a massive campaign of brainwashing. And someone who's afraid of nuclear energy, and prefers solar or something, they have to be a brainwashed zombie. And they should be told that. Because only by knowing they're brainwashed zombies, can they free themselves of the slavery.
Launching a Classical Renaissance
Q: You were talking about, that the way that we're going to make a change in the world, is by organizing a youth movement here in the United States, and using the power of the United States to shift the world. My question is, what's the role of the youth movement in places like Germany and France, and Peru, Philippines, etc.?
LaRouche: The other side of what we're doing—which is not different, but it's just a different facet of the same thing—what we're doing is we're launching a Classical Renaissance. Now, in Germany, if you see Germany, and look at the educational system, you realize that the people who did their abitur before the Brandt reform in education, were almost a different species than the people who were victimized by the changes in education since the Brandt reform. So, therefore, what's happened is, the German population has been culturally mangled, if not destroyed, by this change in educational policy.
As I've said, an effective youth movement, of what we're doing, is a university on wheels. And, therefore, what we're really doing is, we're having fun. The basic thing is, we're having fun, in my sense of fun. I keep telling people, "Have fun." You're having fun by taking a stinking, smelly, terrible world, which doesn't function, where people are abused, where they have no sense of morality, or personal purpose for living, pleasure-seeking, but no satisfaction. It's like the prostitute in hell. Seeking pleasure, but never finds satisfaction.
And instead of that, is a sense of enjoying life. Enjoying being human. Knowing what it is to be human. Enjoying being human! Being happy because you're human. And this state of happiness, because of humanity, which is called the "Erhabene": the sense of the sublime.
And it's both the purpose and the instrument. If human beings can be happy human beings, as they should be, they have, by being happy, the power to address any problem, because they can't do it any better, any other way. And to enjoy the fact that you're such a person, gives you the strength to do what you have to do. If you're happy at what you're doing, you have the strength to do what you're doing.
A great inventor, a great discoverer: How many years do you think they spend working on some of the more important discoveries they develop? They devote a good part of their life to that. Why should they do that? Why should they do that?
Why should you want to go to a university, secondary school, a university which is a good one, in which you enjoy yourself? You enjoy yourself in the process of developing knowledge and competence, knowing that's your mission for that part of your life. So, you take that period, which may run to a dozen years of your life—from beginning of secondary education to the time you may graduate with a doctoral degree, in something else, get professional status—to devoting your life, to developing your ability as a human being! And your source of happiness, is being a human being who is doing that!
This happiness, in this way, is what Leibniz means by happiness. What the Declaration of Independence means by happiness. Because it's Leibniz's argument against Locke. Happiness. Happiness, joy in being human! Joy in doing things that a human being should do! Joy in knowing that the power to be happy, is the power to deal with all kinds of problems that humanity faces. The joy of making a discovery. The joy of being able to perform music well. These are joys, per se!
Great drama is joy. Why would somebody put on a great drama? Why would one put on great Shakespeare, or great Schiller, for example, as drama? Why? Why would they devote their lives to doing that kind of thing? Because they enjoy it—in the highest sense. They know it's important. They know the conveying of ideas, the ability to communicate these kinds of ideas, from the geniuses of the past to the present—it's important! What's your emotion when you're doing it? You're happy!
You may be fighting and squabbling about the thing, but you're happy about the fact that you're doing that. You have a sense of satisfaction with your own life. We need in Europe and elsewhere, we need people who are mobilized, happily, to undertake the great missions which stand before humanity as a whole. And if you have happy people, who are happy in that way, you'll do it all.
And our purpose, after all, is the self-development of humanity. And the natural condition of a self-developing humanity is called happiness. And, therefore, you want people to be happy, not in the sense of sensual satisfaction, but in pleasure in the fact that they have a talent—it's called a mortal life—and they're spending it wisely, and they can laugh at death, when it comes, because they spent their life happily.
We had a great friend of ours, Gertrude Pitzinger. She was a great alto. She died a couple years ago. She was a great friend of ours for some time. One of the greatest singers in Germany in the period of the 1930s, until she left the stage, to continue working as a teacher, a coach, for others. You should hear her, some of the things she recorded. She was absolutely magnificent. And a magnificent personality.
Shortly before she died, Helga and I had a meeting with her. Her brother was there, and another friend. She knew she was about to die, and she wanted us over there, for a meeting. And it ended up, we had a discussion. The first time I met her, I walked into her room, and she sang the famous second song from the Frauenliebe, from Schumann, for me. She's that kind of person—playful. But then what she did with Helga, the last time we met, we were in her room, her apartment, a nice place, and she had recordings that she'd made all over the place. She had books, a whole library full of books. She no longer was singing, of course—she was 92 years old. But she would have Helga go in to her library, and say: "Go get this book. Bring this poem out. Now, you read the poem." And then she would turn to her collection of recordings she'd made in the past, and she'd pull it out, and put it on, and perform it, again. And they had this thing between Helga and Gertrude this way.
And toward the close of the evening, after she'd done this, she said, "What a wonderful life. I have lived to sing such great art."
The Spirituality of Man
Q: You speak a lot about man being made in the image of God, and having the divine spark of reason, that sets us apart from the beasts. Do you believe also in the spirituality of man, being another distinct quality of man? Spirituality being our personal ability to communicate with God, through prayer and study, that gives us motivation, and inspiration—in a sense, the Holy Spirit?
LaRouche: Well, let me put it this way. You will never see a chimpanzee praying to God. Now, the significance of that is, that you have to be human. And you have to be human in a very distinct way. In the way we've defined creativity.
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is a word which, when properly used, connotes creativity. Connotes man in the image of the Creator. Man acting as in the image of the Creator. Man making discoveries. Changing the universe! Changing the course of history! Changing the conditions of mankind! Acting for God, by discovering universal principles, including Classical artistic principles, which are also universal physical principles. Developing these principles, which puts the power of these principles in the hands of man. And once the will of man, the creative will of man, has engaged and adopted these discovered principles, mankind is able to change the universe.
And that is man's essential worship of God.
The other thing is the reflection upon the nature of universality of the universe, and of the nature of God. For Christians, also another thing is involved. The question of the personality of Christ.
European civilization was being destroyed by the Romans. This consolidation of the Roman Empire occurred under Augustus, and Christ was born, under Augustus, who was a real pig. A worse pig was the Emperor Tiberius, on whose order Christ was crucified, through his son-in-law, or his legal son-in-law under Roman law, Pontius Pilate, who was ordered to execute Christ, at a time that Tiberius was giving the order from Sicily, upon the Isle of Capri, on which he was living.
You say, what is the mission of Christ? The mission of Christ was to save European civilization, and world civilization. As is said. As made clear in the Gospel of John, and by the Epistles of Paul. It did!
What did Christianity do? It took the Platonic heritage, as made clear by John's Gospel, made clear by the Epistles of Paul, and, despite the Roman Empire, which is one of the greatest evils, Romanticism, which dominated Europe until the 15th Century, from 200 B.C. to approximately 1400 A.D., dominated European civilization, and beyond. Mankind was saved from total degradation, by the persisting influence of the Christian mission.
And therefore, what we mean by spirituality, from that standpoint, is that the quality which we call cognition, the ability to see beyond the sensual, to discover the universal principles which control the universe; and to utilize these principles to control the universe, is an expression of a principle which is known as spirituality.
For example. The dialogues of Plato, including the supplementary one, the Laws, are called in theology, spiritual exercises. We had a friend of ours, who died of cancer recently, a Cardinal [Francis Xavier Nguyen van Thuan], from Vietnam, who wrote a book [Testimony of Hope: Spiritual Exercises Given to Pope John Paul II], which was based on a series of presentations he gave at the Vatican on the order of John Paul II. The book is on spiritual exercises. It was on a certain part of his life experience, but it was the method of spiritual exercises. And the book is available, and so forth. But he died, unfortunately. He was the head of Justitia et Pax, who was considered at one point, a potential candidate to succeed John Paul II as Pope. And then he died. A great friend of mine.
And so, the spiritual exercise, which is actually the principle of discovery, is the dialectical principle, the Socratic dialectical principle of Plato. It's the principle of Paul. It's the principle of the Gospel of John. And this principle was saved, for mankind, by Christianity.
It also played a part in Judaism, through the radiation of Philo of Alexandria. It was reflected in the tradition through Spain, of Moses Maimonides. It was reflected explicitly by Moses Mendelssohn, in Germany in the 18th Century. It's also in certain parts of the Islam of the Abassid dynasty—the same principle.
That is, you have three powers in the universe. The power which we call the abiotic; the power which represents life, as an active principle, or what life represents as an active principle; and the power of cognition, which is called spirituality. So, therefore, how can you pray to God, unless you are in tune with God? How can you speak to somebody, whose language you don't speak? You must speak that language. The language of spirituality, is creativity.
The problem today, is you have cults, which called themselves religions, which have rituals, which have nothing to do with God, but they have to do with a denial of God, by saying, "I've got an `in' with this little guy under the floorboards. And I've got it fixed so that he's going to make me rich, and my enemies poor. And `God, please, make my enemies suffer! God, please get those black people wiped out; I can't stand them any more!' "
You know, that kind of prayer. That's what you've got. That is not Christianity. That is something else, and there's too much of it around.
But there is really a quality of spirituality, which is perfectly understandable scientifically. Why not? I mean this is our universe! Why should spirituality be something outside the universe? Why should it be some special deal, with something under the floorboards of the universe? It is not.
The problem here is, with the idea of prayer, is, most people don't know what they're praying to. Or why.
Classical Art
Q: I've read your essay, "Believing Is Not Necessarily Knowing," and what I think is really interesting is how you look at these two things, as social sciences and physical sciences, and how they're really joined by the same method. Well, I've noticed that in our society, and in schools, in particular, students tend to have this either, "I'm a science and math student," or, "I'm an art and history student," and, particularly, I always classified myself as the science, math student, and I see how this has affected me, negatively, and the culture in general, by the fact that people have a lack of appreciation for great art. And because of that, they don't quite understand history, as an unfolding artwork.
So, I'd like you to comment on the dynamic of that in the noösphere, and how we can address this with people. Because there's a lot of emotional attachment to, "This is my artwork, my music, you can't tell me what's right or wrong."
LaRouche: The problem is, is you step on people's toes when you say, "The only art is Classical artistic composition." Now, you take most of this garbage which you see plastered all over the walls in various places, you think: "Who urinated on that wall? That's not art."
"No, that's a work of art. You can't say that about that work of art."
Or smeared it on something else, you know.
Now, the point is, the best example, which I've said before, you probably know it very well, by now. This question of Brunelleschi's Dome. And the principle that you have to recognize is, there's a mystery which many sculptors who call themselves artists, don't know. That's why they make such bad sculpture. They can't do decent sculpture, so they say, "Well, I got this mysterious thing. I'll paste this here. I'm inspired. And you've got to look at this. It's wonderful I'm inspired. My drunken friends are inspired by this, too. What's wrong with you?"
But, the point is, you take the great discovery of Classical Greek sculpture, which was then replicated by Leonard da Vinci, as a matter of principle, in terms of his paintings, and drawings. The principle, the difference was this: Instead of doing tombstone figures, dead people standing—it's like a tripod method of standing. Like the Archaic Egyptian, or the Archaic Greek. What was the difference? Between Classical sculpture and this Archaic form?
It's that you had a certain off-balance characteristic of the Classical sculpture. Off-balance. You couldn't fit a Euclidean or Cartesian universe—it's non-Euclidean, anti-Euclidean. Anti-Cartesian. And you had a sense that the sculpture, as you see with Greek Classical sculpture, for example, the sculpture was an instantaneous cross-section of something in motion. Frozen motion. An instant of motion. Eternity in an instant. Like Keats' poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth." Instantaneous. Frozen in time.
Now, what's the principle?
Then you look at Brunelleschi, and the dome. There's the principle. I recognized this, after this torment of a few months I went through, on trying to figure, how does it work? Remember. It was impossible to construct this cupola. The wood didn't exist to build it by the conventional Roman method. It was a cupola twice the size, essentially, of the Pantheon, in terms of structure. You couldn't build it.
How did he build it? He took a contract, and said he'd build it. How did he know he was going to build it? What everybody thought was impossible. He used a principle. The principle was the catenary. What's the catenary? The catenary is now known as the principle of universal least action. Leibniz's principle. What does the catenary represent? It's a physical curve. It's not a static curve, it's not a Cartesian curve. It's a physical curve, physical action. Just take a hanging chain. Test it, with this principle.
That's the principle of Classical culture!
Now, what Leonardo did later on: the same thing. He developed a new conception of perspective, which is based on the same principle. Leonardo demonstrated how to put the principle of Classical Greek sculpture in the form of painting. And you go into the thing like the Last Supper, in Milan, which I saw on one occasion, directly. I was very provoked by it. This has characteristics—this Last Supper, is actually a Classical sculpture. It's a painting, but it's a Classical sculpture. The eye of Christ follows you, wherever you go inside this Basilica.
You look at the thing—it changes. You stand there—it moves with you. You move, it moves, in your mind. It communicates to the mind an action.
Well, what is this? What is this principle of art, which does this? The principle of the mind. What's the principle of the mind? Well, what's the connection to the cupola? It's Leibniz's principle of universal least action.
The same thing is true in music, where there's the great problem with the "comma" of Pythagoras. We don't have Pythagoras's—we only have the report of what he discovered. Well, what he describes, if you replicate what he describes, what is described, what does he do?
He takes a monochord, like a single string on a musical instrument. Now you get a singer to sing up and down various scales, in various modes. And they were using modes. The singer is singing up, and down, in various modes. Now, if you try to put this on a scale, as a scale, and say, "What is the frequency of these tones, of these keys, individual keys, up and down?" There's a difference. In the bel canto approach, or anything approximately bel canto. They're different.
In a violin playing, you get the same thing, right? Your fingering is slightly different. How's it work? The performer does not actually think of frequencies. The performer thinks of music, in the mind. Like a singer. And they will just do it that way. We demonstrated this with Norbert Brainin, for example, at his performing. It's in the mind!
And what Pythagoras actually demonstrated is, by a physical experiment, of a monochord, and having the singer sing against the monochord, and noting what the positions were on the monochord, which fit this frequency, vibrating frequency, obviously, he came up and said, "There's a gap." There's always a gap, up and down, there are gaps. This interval of gap is a "comma." This is not a mathematically derived function, which some idiot tries to get. This is a physical phenomenon, which is the essence of counterpoint. The essence of counterpoint is essentially that.
So, you find all through art, in painting, or literature, the principle of art is—in literary composition, as in poetry—is a combination of musicality, and irony. Including metaphor. And the way people use commas—if you follow the New York Times style book, you can not communicate ideas. You don't put enough commas in.
What does the comma mean? A comma means, when written, it means there's a voice change, of some kind. Now, any qualified singer, bel canto-trained, would recognize what that means. And you want to see that demonstrated, take the great Classical Lied, German Lied, Classical Lied, or Verdi. Take it. Take these parts, what happened? It's a break, a shift, a shift. I've often cited the last of Vier Ernste Gesänge, the last line, in the close, ". . .aber die Liebe." And there's a change. There's a key change. Everything is changed. And it's a slight break, it's also a continuation of the line, with a break in it. And you're in a completely new dimension, with the "aber die Liebe."
So, these ironies, which you use commas and other marks of punctuation, and so forth, to get across in written form: If you think about how you should speak what is written in poetry—you don't recite words. You must present ideas. And the way you do it, is by always using these musical qualities of vocal shift. You have register shifts available to you; you have voice coloration shifts available to you. You have the elements of surprise.
For example, Furtwängler, Furtwängler's technique. Furtwängler demonstrates that the composition does not start with the first note. Never. Some of the greater performers recognize the problem: that they can start with the first note, but it doesn't work. What Furtwängler would do: He'd rehearse people. Great artists always do this. Rehearse people. The audience is waiting. The orchestra is waiting. They know he's going to give the stroke. They don't know when.
And he plants the idea beforehand in the rehearsal. So, the element of surprise. So the composition starts before the first note, and ends after the last note. There's that space between—you change space, so to speak—before the first note, you have a pause, and you're controlling the pause. Goes up; control the pause. You end it; you control the end. And this frames the whole composition, so it's a unit idea. You catch the performance by surprise. Not fully by surprise, you catch them by surprise, to make sure that the counterposition, the counterpoint, the formal counterpoint, is significant, but you've got to think about the counterpoint, as a general principle, not just a principle of how you compose a bunch of notes, in various parts.
So, therefore, you look at it, and you say, "What's the difference between science and art?" It's the same. The problem is, that on the one hand, science is not science, when you try to derive it from the formal set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. And art is not art, when it's splashed on the wall. There's a scientific principle. The difference is: In art, the subject is the relationship of man to man, or man mastering the universe. In science, the subject is the individual understanding man's relationship to the physical universe. But it's the same thing. It's connected by the fact that art is a way in which to communicate physical science.
How Do We Know the Universe Is Knowable?
Q: What is the principle that allows us to know that the universe, as a whole, is knowable?
LaRouche: Just one question?
Okay. It's a matter of knowledge. You have to start from knowledge. You can't start from outside knowledge. All you have outside knowledge is contradiction. The first thing is: What's a contradiction?
Either you have a chaotic universe, or one that makes sense. Now, if it's not chaotic, and makes sense, the first thing about a universe is, it must be a universe. Which means there's nothing before, after, or outside it. And never was. Right?
Secondly, that the principle that you adduce, must always exist in that universe, throughout that universe. If you deny either of those things, you don't know anything. That is, if you deny the universe's existence, if you define the restriction, "What do you mean by universe?" if there's nothing in it, outside it, or before it, or after it. Number one. That to be universal, a principle must be always-existent, efficiently, in the universe. There's nothing outside, no condition outside, before or after, in which that is not true.
That's the question of scientific method.
Therefore, the inverse is, that if you've validated a discovery, then it is a universal principle. Then you get the qualification . . . but it's not all! This gets into the question of Riemann.
Now, Gauss, under the influence of Kästner, was the first modern figure to pose explicitly the question of what is a principle of physical space-time. What Gauss identified essentially, in his 1799 paper, which I keep emphasizing, is that there's nothing that exists outside the principle of universal physical space-time. There are no definitions, there are no axioms, there are no postulates, which presume, which pre-exist prior to physical principles.
Therefore, the universe is composed of only the interrelation of universal physical principles, which I've just said earlier. There are three types—the Vernadsky types: the abiotic, the living, and the spiritual. No other physical principles exist. They're not known. No one has ever found one.
Therefore, the universe is composed to those universal physical principles, which fill out these categories. All of these principles are interactive, or, as is said, multiply-connected. So, therefore, the geometry of the universe is these principles. We don't know all of these principles. Life is the discovery of additional principles. But the significance is, the principles we know, are the principles we can act upon. Therefore man's action on the universe, is defined by the interaction of all those principles which we know, which we're utilizing to act on the universe.
We don't know what we don't know. But the difference is this: What we know of the principles of the universe, are principles which existed before we exist. They were always there. By our adopting these principles, these principles come in our power of practice. Therefore, what we know is our ability to change the universe! And we don't know anything more. All we know is, there's more to discover.
So, therefore, in a Riemannian geometry, the number of known principles, universal principles, is the only physical geometry which is allowed. That does not mean that these are the only principles that exist; we have more yet to discover. Gauss reduced this question to a question of curvature: that as we add new principles, as efficiently considered, in respect to the universe, the curvature of the universe of our action, is changed. So, what you can measure is the curvature of the universe.
For example, when we introduce new physical principles, to change the environment—that is, to change the infrastructure of society—even if we don't change the productivity in any factory as such, within the factory, or farm, we've increased the productive powers of labor in all factories and all farms, by making transportation more efficient, by improving the power available for production, by improving water supplies, by improving health care, by improving education. Without doing anything inside any factory, just by adding these changes in infrastructure, we change the curvature in which the action in the individual plant, the individual farm, occurred. Which means there's more power. Your action is more powerful, even if you didn't do anything to change it otherwise, by changing the environment.
So, by adding new principles to our repertoire of practice in the universe, we change the curvature, or the effective curvature, of our action on the universe, and that's the way we get a gain in productivity.
These are things we can know, we can demonstrate. By being able to demonstrate them, we also know what the area is, that we don't know. And we know that the way to solve many of our problems, is to look for those new principles, which we've not yet discovered.
The Influence of Mohandas Gandhi
Q: I have a ton of questions I wanted to ask you, but I have to reduce it to one. I wanted to know of your influence by Gandhi when you were in India, in the region; if you were influenced by the works of Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi; and in terms of leadership and strategy, and if this could be used, and how it could be used, with our youth movement now?
LaRouche: Well, not too much, actually. But a couple of important things.
Naturally, I was very interested in Gandhi. I thought that most people's appreciation of him, as I knew it at the time, was wrong. But Gandhi was a contradictory character, who went through a development. His key development was influenced by another person, Tilak. And you can't understand what Gandhi did, or what the Congress Party did later, without the impact of Tilak on the Congress Party, and on Gandhi himself.
Gandhi came out of that experience realizing that he had a problem: How could the Indian people, especially the Indian poor people, struggle effectively against the British Raj? That was his problem. Therefore, he recognized that there was a limitation. . . . So, he recognized that his tactic of struggle, and leadership of the average Indian person, in this struggle, had to be adapted to the capabilities of the people he was leading. And therefore he did things, which from one standpoint, would seem ridiculous, but from another standpoint, were not.
Therefore, he became more and more effective in understanding the Indian people, especially the poor, and understanding their limitations, and their ability to struggle. And therefore, utilize their ability to struggle, optimally. And he almost won; he did in one sense win. So, in observing the Indian people, and coming to understand them better, particularly when I was in India after the war, when I came back from Burma into the Kanchrapara-Calcutta area, and was dealing with the movement at that time, in Bengal, and trying to get to meet Gandhi on one occasion there—actually, two occasions.
Once I was going over in a train from Bombay to Calcutta, on my way into Burma, and Gandhi was in a train on the other side, and I was a U.S. soldier in this crazy train, with poor tracks. I mean, these were very poor living conditions. We would say in Germany, Holzklappe. Really tough! And I wanted to get across there to meet with Gandhi, and I was going to get the whole train of GIs with me. "Hey, you want to meet Gandhi! There's Gandhi. Let's go talk to him about this, what he's doing."
And then again, when I was in Calcutta, at the end of the war, I tried to get up—he was up in Dumdum. outside of Calcutta, and I wanted to meet with him, because I was very seriously considering doing some funny things at that time. (You know, what I do all the time!) And so therefore, at that point, I was in a period of meeting the Indian people, seeing the Indian poor and so forth, to get a keener appreciation of what Gandhi was faced with, as a leader, in trying to lead the very poor people, against the British Raj, which was a very cruel set of bastards. The British had nothing to learn form the Nazis; they'd already developed it themselves.
But that's what I learned from him: essentially that. It's a keener appreciation of—look at the weaknesses of the people you're trying to lead out of the desert, and to understand what they're capable of doing, and not to overestimate their capability, but to try to find a way that will work within their capabilities for struggle.
The Principle of the General Welfare
Q: I'm from Australia. Got a bit of a question here. While we build a movement to improve the opportunities, and general living standards, of people in the future, how do we look after the homeless, and people in ghettoes today, giving them a sense that they're not forgotten, and that they matter?
LaRouche: You look at the homelessness, as you see it in the streets of Washington, D.C., and you raise the question, "What is the morality of our government?"
Again, it's a question of the limitation of the homeless. They're not really much of a fighting force. They're a defeated force. There are cases of people who are homeless, who are not defeated. They sometimes get rather resourceful and clever, and maintain their dignity; but a lot of the homeless have lost their sense of personal dignity, in the degradation of their condition.
What we have to do with the homeless thing, is, rather than trying to treat this as a single-issue approach, is to strike the conscience of the nation as a whole.
Now, everybody in a sense is suffering, or most people in the United States today are suffering, conditions which are related to the condition of the homeless. Homelessness is an aspect of a much larger problem. Let's take the case of senior citizens with Medicare, Medicaid. Let's take Medicare in general. Let's take health insurance. Let's take the massive collapse of the hospital system in the United States. Let's take the collapse of doctors, who are being driven out of the profession, and people deprived of care. Take the regulation of pharmaceuticals. Take the question which I seem to have kicked George Bush into taking some attention to: the question of AIDS in Africa, and the availability of pharmaceuticals as generics, to help the Africans, who desperately need at least this minimal protection, which we could afford by these drugs. Which now they seem to know how to administer, even though it's not a success.
So, by our expression of one thing, the idea of the principle of the general welfare, as a fundamental moral principle, which is mandatory upon the United States by virtue of the Preamble of its Constitution. And to get people to find out in their own experience of life what homelessness means, in terms of other problems. By people losing their jobs, with no hope for re-employment. People losing everything. Losing health. Seeing their relatives die, because the health care's not there; it's been taken away. Seeing these kinds of conditions. To get the people of the United States to recognize that the fight for the principle of the general welfare, is a fight which can not be compromised.
Then, under those conditions, we'll say: "Homelessness? We end it. We end it!"
The problem today is, you can't do anything if you can't get the American people—you can do very little, and you'll be very ineffective. It's a losing war. Unless you can get the American people to reject this so-called system which we have now, and to go back to the idea of the general welfare. Government is not legitimate if it is not efficiently committed to the defense of the general welfare, of all the living, and even more important, more important than the living, are the unborn, posterity. If they will not accept that principle, this nation is doomed. And therefore, if you're dealing with any specific problem like homelessness, you have to start from that, and make it apparent to anybody, because he'll say, "I don't want to look at that. I can't be involved with that. Look, I've got to think about my own family to care about. I got to worry about my health care. I got to worry about my job. I got to worry about this!" He'll say, "I got my own problems, buddy! I got to take care of of me, my community, and my family! I can not be bothered with that thing out there!"
So, people cut their losses, and cut their morality, by disassociating themselves from something like homelessness, to the degree they can. And the reason they do that, is because we do not have a moral standard, accepted by the population in general, which equips us to cope with this problem. People would rather not look at the problem, and say, "I hope they don't camp in my neighborhood." And even the poor and suffering will say that. That's what I run into. They don't care. Because they say, "I can not afford to care, I've got too many problems of my own to worry about them." And therefore, as long as we have that attitude, there's nothing much we can do.
But, I think, on the other hand, that if we want to get really aggressive about this, we can make the issue of the general welfare stick, by going through all the issues, or at least a typificiation of all the issues. "What about this? What about this? Do you believe in the general welfare principle, or not? If you don't, then what are you complaining about?"
A Sense of the Sublime
Q: . . . In getting more younger people around the office, we've decided to read Plato, every week, read it out loud. A lot of us hadn't really read Plato seriously, and my question is actually about the Crito. There's something that I don't think I fully have resolved yet. And that is: Why doesn't Socrates escape?
Now, he makes his argument to Crito, basically saying what this culture, Athens and everything else, has provided for me, from birth. He makes it from the point of view of the culture itself, of the lawmakers, you know. And basically saying, "We provided for you and gave you so much, why would you look to destroy us by breaking our laws?"
Now, I don't really understand that concept. Society is looking, even though it provided for Socrates, it's looking to do him the greatest harm, by killing him. Although in the Apology he does say, "I know you guys want to do me the greatest harm; how wrong you are!"
But, for a counter-example, what about the American Revolution? You had people within the British system, upper-middle income, who were provided by the British system—education, food, everything else. Yet they still chose, purposefully, to act upon and destroy and undermine that system, through revolution and violence.
I know that when you were condemned to jail, there were probably a lot of "Critos," probably giving you the opportunity to live, either in Europe, continue your life's work comfortably—and I guess my question is, relative to my problem with the Crito: Why is it that you chose to go to jail, rather than to maybe live somewhere else, and continue your work?
LaRouche: Well, that's a good question. Well, it was obvious, I had no choice. I had no moral choice.
You see, it's like a soldier in war. If you don't like the war, you think you're going to get killed, you don't go in and say, "I'm going to leave here and go fight another war." That's number one.
You also have to look at the Phaedo, and you have to look at the question of the sublime. I had people with me who were being indicted, and so forth, and their cowardice stuck out. And what you would have is, lawyers typically would come to them, and say, "Look, you're going to lose. You've got to cut a deal with the enemy. If you cut a deal, they won't be too hard on you, and you will live to fight another day."
That argument was made to me, and I kicked it in the head. And at the time we were in Alexandria, and it came up, and my associates didn't tell me what they were planning to do, because they knew I had said no, and they knew I would reject it.
So, I came back to the States after a trip to Europe, and I'd been sold down the river, by my associates. Because they had accepted the argument, they were so frightened, they'd accepted the argument of making a compromise, to live to fight another day. And from that compromise, some of them never came back.
When you're a soldier in war, and you have a mission, you have to think like Jeanne d'Arc. You have to have a sense of the sublime. A person who walks away, as I refused to, would not be morally fit to lead the United States today. Because I did not walk away, I am morally qualified to lead the United States today. If I had walked away, I would not be qualified.
And that's what is said by Plato, and probably said by Socrates himself. It's the same principle, the principle of the sublime. You have one life, and, as it's said in the New Testament, in the idea of the talent, you have only one mortal life. It's finite, and you don't get another. . . . So, all you've got is the choice of how you spend that mortal life. And you spend it in a way, without fear of immortality. And I can spend life without fear of immortality, which is the primary qualification of a leadership of this nation, under these conditions.
The reason I'm unique, above all, is not the fact that I know more than most of these, all these other politicians put together, in terms of what needs to be done now. The fact is, I'm morally qualified, because all of them are Hamlet, and none of them, has the ability to face the question of immortality.
And, the point is, when you think of the effect of that, and you look later in the 18th Century, when Moses Mendelssohn wrote the Phaedon, which is his commentary and exposition on the Phaedo of Plato, which deals with the same thing—the question of the soul—and he answered the question properly. But for Plato, that idea would never have been understood. Without Plato's expositions on the questions surrounding the death of Socrates, this would never have been understood. Christianity would not be possible without this. The implication of Christianity is exactly this: Why did Christ die? The exemplary act of the sublime. The expenditure of the talent of mortal life, for immortal purpose. And there are such things as immortal purposes, and I know that. And I understand the weakness of the people who do not have that sense of immortality. If you don't have it, you can not lead.
That's why I spoke about Martin Luther King earlier. Martin was an exceptional leader, precisely because he was unique among those, and had this sense of immortality. He was a real preacher! Most of the preachers I wouldn't trust with a Bible. They treat it as a weapon against Christianity.
Scientific Farming vs. Environmentalism
Q: I'm from Southern California, and I'm an organic farmer by trade, and an environmentalist. My question today is, what role does organic farming play in producing quality food for the world, and clean water, and rebuilding our supply of topsoil, and ensuring quality land for our future generations?
Also, Mr. LaRouche, if you could touch on the non-food petroleum-based products, such as artificial colors and flavors and preservatives, which are currently tainting our food supply, it would be greatly appreciated.
LaRouche: Well, if you're a good farmer, you're a good farmer, period. That's principle number one.
This hype about organic farming—I know how this got started—it's really not true. You had some horrible practices in terms of industrial farming, and also in marketing. The problems of agriculture, and distortions of agriculture, are largely a destruction of the policy of infrastructure development, in the United States.
We never developed the control of the northern branches of the Mississippi, or the Missouri. We never did it. We never developed the system. We also broke down everything we did to develop the farmer. I'm talking about the real farmer, the farmer who develops the land area, develops better quality crops, who engaged in scientific investigation of how to develop better crops, the kind of farmer who is ahead of the various resources of the government, and the agricultural institutions, ahead of them, in terms of successful innovations in farm production. We destroyed the American farmer, who was doing an excellent job in quality of food.
And the so-called additives and so forth, that's really not that. . . . Neglect is a greater problem than anything else. Not enough food is the greater problem than anything else.
Now, this was part of this brainwashing of the American public, which came from about 1964, which started with this terrible woman, this liar, this degenerate, Rachel Carson, with her Silent Spring. And everything that was said from that point, by that faction, was a crock, an absolute crock.
But I'd say, a good farmer is a good farmer; produces a good quality food. Why should anybody bother him? He's an asset. I don't care if he wants to be organic or not, it makes no difference. Let the other guy do it the other way, too. And there is no danger. If we have a competent Agriculture Department, and proceed on science—not the phony science which has taken over in the name of environmentalism, as in the case of the banning of DDT, a completely fraudulent operation—if we have competent agriculture, and a competent institution, we will develop good food, because the farmers will do it.
I want to put the farmer back in, the family farm, or the multi-family closely held farm of 200 to 400 acres, or somewhat larger, or the ranch of a couple thousand acres, in some cases, I want the independent farmer back in business. I want him protected by our government—just the same way I want the entrepreneur protected. I don't want the giant corporations running everything. Because they don't run the economy for the benefit of the nation! The honest entrepreneur runs his operation on the basis of pride, pride in what he's doing. Whether he's an entrepreneur, a manufacturer, a machine-tool operator, or a farmer—he takes pride in what he's doing! The farmers I knew, the independent farmers, took pride in what they were doing. They were good people. They may have had some problems here and there, but who doesn't?
The problem here is, our national policy should be to promote quality agriculture, with scientific backing. Get these frauds out! If somebody wants to be an organic farmer, let them be an organic farmer. If they produce a good product, it's fine. No quarrel with me. And more power to them.
Canada and the Idea of the Nation-State
Q: I'm from Montreal in Canada. I was reading some speeches about Louis Joseph Papineau, who was an old politician in the 1830s. I don't really know him a lot, but he was saying that he really understood what the British effort was, to really ruin what was going on in the United States. And Papineau was really conscious of that, and at one point, he said that the only way that the United States can really achieve their goal, is by getting Canada to really scrap the British influence, and to become a nation-state; because he talked a lot about how the parliamentary system is crap.
So, I've worked on this idea of what a nation-state should be, but the definitions that I got from different politicians, like Daniel Johnson, who received Charles de Gaulle—for me it sounds a lot more like dividing, than really uniting a nation. It's really like a sociological study; there are some faults there. So I would just like you to comment on what is a nation-state, exactly?
LaRouche: Well, we're talking about a modern nation-state, and a modern nation-state has two phases. First of all, the first modern nation-state was developed out of Italy, out of the Renaissance. But the first one was in France, actually, under Louis XI, and this was the work from the efforts of Jeanne d'Arc; and then Jacques Coeur, who played a key role in developing the Dauphin, who became Louis XI, and that was the first modern nation-state. That is the first state which was constituted on the basis of the principle of the general welfare: that government has no legitimacy, except as it is dedicated, as a sovereign, to the promotion of the general welfare of present and future generations of the population as a whole.
In other words, if a government doesn't do that, it is not a legitimate government.
The second was, of course, England. That was copied by Henry VII, and the philosophy of Thomas More is exemplary of that tradition.
Now then, in 1511 through 1648, Europe went through a holocaust, in which the idea of the nation-state was not obliterated entirely, but effectively was eliminated. What happened is, the Venetians, largely with the Hapsburg religious war—where Spain and England had been allied with France, and so forth, in trying to crush the Venetian influence, the Hapsburg influence—the Venetians won and therefore drowned Europe in recurring religious war, from 1511, through 1648.
In 1648, Jules Cardinal Mazarin had succeeded in orchestrating the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars of that period. His protégé and associate was, especially, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert founded the first—after this period of religious war—founded the first design of a modern nation-state, and in France today, one can still see the works that were done during this administration of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, which illustrate how that was being done.
Then you had Louis XIV, who was a piece of work, who was actually a predecessor, in intent, of Napoleon Bonaparte—and that was destroyed.
The result, the ideas of Colbert and the work of Colbert, was embodied in the continued influence of Leibniz, with his development of the modern conceptions of economy, from 1671 through his death in 1716. And it was the Leibniz model which became the modern nation-state.
Now, on the other side, as the Hapsburgs were being contested, also by Venetians, there developed around the Netherlands and England, in particular, and parts of Switzerland, the Burgundian part of Switzerland, there developed what became the Anglo-Dutch liberal model, or the empiricist model, exemplified in England by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and as an Anglo-Dutch model specifically, by John Locke and Mandeville, and people like Hume, Adam Smith, and so forth. So this model was a model which is not a true nation-state, and the problem in Europe, and the problem in Canada also, spilled over from the British monarchy, is, that these are not truly nation-states. Because, as I've emphasized, as again this past week, as long as a slime mold called a central banking system, operates independently of a government, and imposes conditions upon government, there is no sovereignty for that nation. If the banking system, and financial system, and monetary system of a nation, is not controlled by the government, exclusively, without any alien influence, you don't have a nation-state.
Now, the problem of Canada was always just exactly that. You had two things. The development of Quebec was started actually by Colbert, in the colonization of Quebec, where he took whole families, including my ancestors, and dumped them in Quebec, from villages in France. That's the way it was done. And so, from the beginning there was a current in Quebec, into the middle of the 19th Century, in particular, which was always for this model of nation-state, the freedom from England, which took various forms, various expressions. And which tended to an alliance, during that period, with the United States, or at least some portion of the United States.
So, it's a legitimate question that comes up again. My approach to it today, of course, is that we don't have to fight a war about this, to achieve the result. If the United States were to come under my Presidency right now, I could solve the problem very quickly. And sometimes there's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. And that is, if we create a system, a global system, through renegotiation of the bankrupt present monetary system and financial system, through bankruptcy reorganization, of an international community of principle, among respectively sovereign nation-state republics: Under those conditions, then we would have in the Western Hemisphere, a partnership of the type proposed by John Quincy Adams, a partnership among nation-states, largely, at that point, on the basis of large-scale cooperation.
For example, the development of NAWAPA. In northern Canada, we have a tremendous amount of water, fresh water, which is flowing into the Arctic Ocean, which doesn't do much good up there. If we move that south, we change the character of the Northern Hemisphere, because we now, with the water from the south of Mexico, from the high-level area, moving north, you then create a new system of water management, like the NAWAPA project, and this becomes a basis of large-scale cooperation on energy, water management, transportation, and development generally.
So, then we would have a reconstruction of the sovereign nation-states of South, Central, and North America, under which you could have, in effect, the influence of the United States would be sufficient, such that Canada would automatically orient itself toward its primary role, which is that of participation in this great project for the Americas.
So, therefore, at this time, we don't need to fight, essentially, a war, or a revolution, to get the independence of Canada. There's another way to skin that cat. And that is, if the crisis itself forces us to create a great reform, globally, because of this financial-monetary-economic crisis, the very means which are required to effect that reform, would create the context in which naturally, you would have an evolution in that direction, and the question would then be, the consciousness among Canadians, of the advantage of that arrangement, and then you could realize the result.
But you have to create the situation where the Canadians themselves would understand and accept that idea, as an important idea. And with support from the United States, and from the Americas, of that type, I think they'd join it.
[1] A Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration, Book I (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1992).
