How Youth Can Uplift
The `Failed Generation'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Lyndon LaRouche made the following remarks on Sept. 5, 2004, as part of a panel "The War Plan for November" at the Labor Day 2004 Conference of the Schiller Institute and the International Caucus of Labor Committees, Audio and video archives of his address are also available.
Now you have two-thirds of the picture; now, we'll go for the other two parts of the last third.
First: Now all get stretched out on your couch. I'm going to interview you. Because you have to reflect upon yourself, and take a self-critical view of your own mind, to understand how to actually win this election campaign. It's something that most Democrats won't do, and some would not even understand the terms I'm using on this question.
We, essentially, at this stage particularly, have to do it.
The Universality of Human Culture
You see, mankind is a voluntary animal—which means he's not an animal. Because all beasts respond to their biological conditioning, by their so-called genetic heritage, and by certain external conditioning, which determines their behavior. Their behavior is set at birth, or in the early infancy following birth, by the conditioning of their genetic potentiality. Conditioning by environment—how well they're fed, whether they become weak, or so forth—but, it's sort of predetermined. And no animal species is able to change the destiny inherent in it, by both its genetic heritage, and its immediate environment in the first moments of life, after being born.
Human beings are creatures of will. That is, they have a genetic heritage, but in terms of functioning of human beings, they are all alike. There are no human races; there is only a human species, which is the human race. And this is easily demonstrated in a melting pot country like our own, or in other countries which have a large immigrant population and diverse immigrant population, as France, and Africans particularly, in Europe. It's demonstrated, that properly educated, properly developed, in the proper general environment of development and encouragement and opportunity, that all human beings, as types of human beings, or classifications of human beings, have equal potential.
One of the more extreme arguments on this comes from Australia on the question of people from so-called indigenous tribes—which are not indigenous, really, at all, but who have been classified by British intelligence, or British lack of intelligence, as being a sort of "missing link" between ape and man. And you have some of the great minds who have come out of Australia, out of this strata of the population.
You see the same thing with the American Indian, historically, as in the case of the development of a Cherokee culture, until Andrew Jackson killed it, by his military raids to break up the Cherokee nation, which was the only nation of that type, the only group, which had become a nation, in the sense of having a culture which is comparable to what we call culture in European language, with its own language, its own written language, its own educational system, its own self-administration system. And Andy Jackson moved in, to make sure that this thing didn't get settled too solidly, in the territory it was then occupying. And some of them were killed, some were driven to other parts of the country, some were driven down to Florida, into the Everglades, to become part of this combination down there.
So, people are all the same. They are of the same species, and they're a species different than any animal. And the qualities and potentialities within the members of the species, on the curve, is the same as in every other one. It's opportunity and motivation, in the development of the young person, which determines to what degree that potential is risen.
Now, the problem of humanity, in general, is that the division of humanity is not that of race; it is not that of nationality: It's that of culture.
Now, what do we mean by a culture? A healthy culture is typified by the yearnings expressed in ancient Greece (it wasn't called Greece then), but by a group of people in that part of the world, whose principal cultural legacy—that is the leading edge, the cutting edge of its cultural legacy—came from Egypt. It came from the Egypt typified by the astronomical instrument implications of the Great Pyramids of Giza, 2700 B.C. approximately, about 5,000 years ago. So, this astronomical culture, this scientific culture—it had other features, as well—was transmitted to two groups in what became Greece later, which emerged from the dark age of that region, in Ionia and in Athens, in particular. Also by a population which became very closely related to Athens, in Northern Africa, in the area called Cyrenaica. This is the famous area of the Peoples of the Sea, of the people who were most closely interrelated with the Etruscan culture and also the culture of Ionia and Athens.
So, this culture was typified by Thales, by Heraclitus, in a sense by the legacy of Homer, and by the Pythagoreans, who were the most characteristic people in this respect, inhabiting the area of Magna Graecia, which is what we call today Southern Italy, around Taranto and so forth.
These people had a culture, which developed what they called "spherics." Now spherics has two characteristics, in the sense that it looks up to the stars, looks up to the heavens, and by looking up in the naive way—the best sense of naive, in the sense of Cusa's docta ignorantia; looks up and recognizes it does not see something out there, predetermined. What it knows is what it's looking at, it's looking at what is apparently, a great, vast spheroid of unknown distance, of unknown diameter. We're looking up at this, and we're seeing movement in the nighttime sky; or, if you go down into a deep well, you can see the nighttime sky in the daytime, particularly in an area where there's not a lot of moisture in the atmosphere.
So, they observed these movements. And these weren't the first people to do that: Because, there were trans-oceanic cultures which preceded the existence—by thousands of years—the existence of the Egyptian culture. Which already had, as we know from certain traces, that there actually were trans-oceanic and other cultures, which were roaming the seas, at the time up to 30,000 years ago or so, when the mass of Europe was mostly under a big ice cube; and therefore, there was not much habitation going on on the continent of Eurasia, at that time, except in South Asia.
So, the people were living—where were the people? They weren't living inland. There was no real development of cultures in the desert, or in the inland forests, or so forth, of human culture. The development of human culture occurred in the oceans, in the coastal areas near rivers, in which you have things like fish—the abundance of seafood is the most primitive availability of securing a food supply to maintain a community of population, in a fixed position, or relatively fixed position. And we know, because there are traces of ancient knowledge of the periodicity of the movement of the northern magnetic pole, which is essential for certain types of trans-oceanic navigation: which means that the compass was being used by ancient cultures, more than 10,000 years ago, for trans-oceanic, maritime navigation.
So, these are the kinds of experiences which give mankind a sense of what kind of a universe we're living in: Mankind, looking to the stars, sees us, on this planet, in the universe. And the way we see what we see, when we look at the stars, or the movement of the planets, we see a universe in motion; with certain things which are relatively fixed, periodically fixed motions, and some things that are a little bit more irregular. And from studying the problems of both the combined fixed motions and irregular motions, and the coincidence of these changes in motions upon the conditions of life inside places such as Egypt, such as the setting of the times of the Nile—crucial turns in the Nile, were associated with certain astronomical positions of certain stars—they developed a concept of spherics, in which they made no Cartesian assumptions, no Euclidean assumptions! The universe we're living in, is a giant spheroid, and we're observing spheroid-like motions, within this area. This, then, becomes the notion of universality: a kind of universality which you know, not because you assume it's true, but because it's demonstrably true, as in the case of these astronomical observations. And therefore, you say, "What determines our life in this universe, this universality, are those things which can be expressed within assuming that the action's occurring in a form, which is characteristically spherical, not linear."
So, we had, in the emergence of pre-Aristotle Greece, centered upon Athens and the Ionian tradition, and certain traditions of Magna Graecia, and passed through the work of the great Solon, who defined for the first time, the concept of the possibility of the nation-state of all citizens, without slaves or underlings. That degenerated, but, the attempt had been made, and the memory of that attempt, its tradition, was preserved into the point of the founding of our republic: The guiding conception, of creating this republic on these shores, was to create that kind of society—the perfect republic, as sought by Solon, as defined and sought by Plato, as embodying the conceptions of science of the Pythagoreans and Thales and Heraclitus, and similar people.
So, there is a certain universality in humanity, a certain universality in culture, in a healthy culture; that healthy culture always takes this form, of the same form I just described: of spherics, of seeing the universe, which appears to our senses as a giant sphere of unknown distance and unknown dimensions, in which are certain changes we can discover with our minds. And by using observation of these recurring changes, which man called "principled changes," or calling them "powers"—the power to change the universe, from a simple fixed position to something with some fascinating singularities in it. And learning to use those singularities, such as what happens with Sirius, the star Sirius, in respect to the time of the flooding of the Nile and things like that: the idea of universality, and the idea of a science based on both universality, but also universality seen from the standpoint of the cognitive instrument of experience being spherical in nature, not linear.
This is a conception of truth. Not a conception of absolute knowledge of everything, but a conception of the process of truthfully knowing. Not knowing everything, but, truthfully knowing something. Something which most Americans are not able to do these days: knowing what you're talking about.
When Oligarchism Takes Hold
Now, the opposite to that, takes a certain form. The characteristic condition of mankind, up to the establishment of modern European civilization in the 15th Century, which was a revival of the Greek tradition, in freeing man from the ugly, lying tradition of Latin! Of the Latin cultural tradition: Cicero and things like that, excepted. The characteristic of mankind, was that human beings lived chiefly, either like animals, in degenerate societies, which are not a natural human condition; but the pathological form of human existence, was rather, a society in which a very few people either herded, or hunted down, other people as human cattle.
For example: The lower 80% of family-income brackets of the United States today, think of themselves in terms which to an objective observer would be called "human cattle." [animal noise] Mr-r-r-r! The hunted cattle—like today, for Cheney and Bush, if you are considered a person of Islamic pedigree, you are to be hunted. And people are called "terrorists," are to be hunted. They're not to be defeated: They're to be hunted down, and killed, and tortured, and maimed, and other little sadistic things that his wormy mind likes to do, or likes to see done.
But, in general, in what's called "civilized society," people are not hunted down, like animals, like wild animals: They are herded! They're allowed to be born (sometimes)—and they're told when to die. When people wish them to die—"go die!" "We'll help you. Look, you're no longer a useful cow, you don't give milk any more: Please go die! We don't want to feed you. We want that for ourselves. You're occupying space we wish to steal."
That's the way it goes. That's what's called a "civilized society." That is what's been, in the past 40 years in particular, the predominant culture, the reigning culture and opinion of the people of the United States. You say they don't believe that? Well, their hands, their behavior says they do believe that: That's what they vote for. That's what they express opinions in favor of. That's what they do. So, whatever they think they might believe otherwise, that is what their hands and their feet and their mouth are doing! They are certifying that "I am herded human cattle. I know how to behave myself!"
And the youth don't like that, in their parents. Because, the behavior of behaving themselves by the parental standard of the Baby Boomer, is very destructive! It's cruel, and destructive! Vicious. And they don't like it.
The Failed Generation
And they don't like it, not because they're right, in a sense. They don't like it, because they have recognized that their parents' generation is historically useless. That it is a failed generation. The generation that came in the United States, and most of Europe, that came into maturity as late adolescents or young adults, going to universities or similar experiences in life, after 1964, is a failed generation: the Baby-Boomer generation. And this is international.
Now, the failed generation came in, considering itself the "Golden Generation." They were better than mankind before. And they had the Vietnam War, to prove it! They had the missile crisis, to prove it! They had the assassination of Kennedy, to prove it; the assassination of Martin Luther King, to prove it! But they didn't become Martin Luther Kings in honor of Martin Luther King; they went in exactly a way, directly opposite to where he was leading the nation.
So, it became apparent, over succeeding generations, that the Baby-Boomer generation went from triumph, when it was breaking the code, when it was taking LSD—"Mommy! I'm taking my clothes off, and the boys are watching!" This is what they were saying! Triumph! "You have your industry. We are going to shut down your industry! We are for a post-industrial society! Mo-m-m-y! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! I'm gonna break your machine!" "Daddy, I'm going to steal your car, and wreck it!"
Then, they began to rise to positions of power, in the Democratic Party, and to positions in government. They became Senators, and Presidents, and things of that sort. And they considered themselves triumphant: "We have established a new tradition! You are not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube—we don't believe in toothpaste!"
"We are it! You must meet the standard that we represent!"
And young people, looking at Mother and Dad, each living in a comfort zone, which is a kind of sordid fantasy-life: "Mother! Are you there?" "Father? Who's your mistress?"
"Wake up! Hey! Wake up! There's a world here! I'm here! Look, come out, Mommy! Come out of your hole, Daddy!"
And the world is crashing around them. And then, they get to the point that their parents are looking at them in a certain way. One young fellow just passing out of adolescence, talks to his neighbor, his friend, his sibling, the neighbor, saying: "Y'know, what I'm worried about"? The guy says, "What're you worried about?" "You know, I think we're being kicked out of the nest?" You get these pressures. You get to be about 16, 17, 18: The parents want to control you, but they want you out of the house. Coming back, only for ritual, you know, worship of the adults, huh? You know, "Come back and behave yourself. We're going to have a ritual, and you're going to sit at the table, and you're going to admire us and praise us and keep your mouth shut." Hmm? Quite a feat, to perform.
So, at this point, young people, about four or five years ago, began to—in large numbers—began to come to a general conclusion: Let me use a term that our dear friend Mr. Cheney used, is "fucked up." They'd say, "This is—this is, definitely—." And, they not only say that, they say, "Look, don't waste your time with these guys. They're not coming back into the real world! We're being thrown out in the streets anyway. We're living on practically nothing, which shows that we're geniuses, huh? Just don't pay any attention to them! Because, you'll just feel miserable, and commit suicide or something if you pay attention to them."
Because you realize that that generation is a "failed state."
Now, you, out of sentiment, and because they're your parents' generation, you would hope that somehow they can be rescued from what they are. But, about four or five years ago, as you became 18 or so, you began to say, "The case is hopeless. They're not listening. They're not about to listen. They're not in the real world—they're into fantasy-life. Look, Mother's in her comfort zone, again! You can't talk to her, when she's in her comfort zone. She's having a fantasy-life."
And they're cast out. Like a horde of migrants, cast on the beach of society, being told to fend for themselves. And they have no future. So, that's where the great division has occurred.
Living in the Simultaneity of Eternity
Now, we have to put the older generation and the other generations on the couch: How did this happen? The principle which I've described as a "fishbowl syndrome," is the answer. In a world in which people search for truth—you never completely know the truth, because there are always many things to discover. And life is, in a sense, a journey through a process of discovery, of discovering what people learned before you, and then going on to learn things that they didn't know.
And so, you start, as a young person. You're born, you start doing investigation, as you stop being purblind. And you get to a point, where you become a contributor to net knowledge, in one way or the other, or the practice of it. And you move ahead until one day, you find you're going to die. And you move on.
But you have a certain kind of immortality, because you're a transmission belt, in ideas and knowledge, from previous generations, from various parts of mankind, into the future. And, you are concerned, as you were concerned about the meaning of your life, less about what you're getting, than about what you're giving, both in terms of being sure that something valuable from the past is not lost with your death, and that the future is enriched by your having lived.
So, you don't live for what you get out of being alive. You live for a sense of what you are contributing to all humanity, past and future, by having lived. That is a healthy, sane human being. That conception of immortality. Not in another world, but in this universe. In the simultaneity of eternity, in which all ideas are universal, they live in the past, they live in the future, whether we know them or not. All efficient principles that govern this universe live in the past, and they live in the future. We live with them, simultaneously.
When we partake of such things, as the process of development and transmission of these ideas, we are living in the past and future of eternity. We are living as minds, as human souls, in the simultaneity of an eternity, and to the extent that we can find our identity, or recognize our identity in that place, as an immortal being in the simultaneity of eternity, who, as a human being, as a mind, has no beginning, and no end. You are universal, an individual, who dies as a biological individual, but in another capacity as a mind, your mind touches eternity, past and future.
When your identity is there, and you think of yourself, when you compare with the great artists and the great inventors that you know from the past, with whom you're familiar; and you think of them today, you realize that they are living for you, that Leonardo da Vinci touches you. That Nicholas of Cusa, Plato, touches you, today—more efficiently, and more effectively, and more beneficially, than the person whom you were talking to on the street yesterday, or the teacher you had the day before.
That becomes the strength to face the truth about the nature of your own existence, and the nature of what truth is: the discovery of the universe, not simply as what your senses tell you, but your ability to peek behind the fallacy of those mere shadows, which are your sense-perceptions, to see the real universe, which is a universe of powerful, efficient, universal principles, which we discover, and, if we're wise, we use, to change the conditions of life of humanity, in the universe; to increase man's positive role in the development of the universe. As, for example, Vladimir Vernadsky, in his conception of Noösphere, defines man's functional role in the universe: the role of people such as himself, who change the universe, but do not change its laws. They merely discover, and bring the mastery of those laws and their use into human practice.
But, most people don't live that way; they don't live as individuals. They live as human cattle, who find their identity in images pasted on the wall for them, by corrupt people. And the typical forms of imprisonment in European culture, apart from the simple savagery, is Aristotle, or the empiricism of Paolo Sarpi, which is the prevalent culture of the United States, today. Both of these are forms of sophistry. Aristotle was a sophist! And the worship of Aristotle—or Descartes, who was an empiricist; or of Kant, who was a combination of being an empiricist with Aristotelean complications.
Aristotle typifies the enemy of humanity and God, within European civilization, because he denies the possibility of hypothesis, denies the possibility of the actual discovery of a universal principle, living behind the mere shadow appearance of experience. A principle which, by its nature, extends throughout the universe, the simultaneity of the universe, beyond beginning and beyond future.
And our identity, our sense of what our function is, as a living person, is to take ourselves out of this childish state, of seeing yourself as a biological animal reacting in the world of sense-perception, into becoming a true human being, an immortal human being; as, for example, Rev. Martin Luther King expressed himself before he died—as a matter of fact, the night before he died—of immortality. Martin Luther King was not a practical man: He was a great man. Practical men are not great men. They're too tied up with what are the rewards they're getting. They're too tied up with delivering practical results to some guy, who may not be deserving of it. They're not concerned with saving society, and saving humanity, and bringing humanity into reconciliation with what a human being is, which is not an animal.
It's a unique creature, among all living things, who, despite being mortal, as all animals are, has something beyond animal mortality: the ability to transfer one's own identity, through the process of maturation, through childhood, infancy, so forth, into becoming an immortal person. A person whose motives, whose intentions, whose joy, is to imagine themselves as looking back from immortality, into the state of affairs of mortal life, and saying, "I did something good. Look at that! Look at that. Look at that. What a beautiful thing has happened, as a result of what we passed on, to mankind after us."
That's a true human being. One who has no, as we say, "hang-ups"—about life, or anything else. Who can face anything, that Hamlet could not face.
The `Flight-Forward' Problem
And take the case of Hamlet for an example of this: Anybody who gives any different interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, knows nothing about Classical drama, nothing about Shakespeare, and nothing about life! Because Shakespeare understood this. And all the interpretations of Shakespeare which are silly, which are those usually taught as academic standard courses, and lectures, and interpretations, fail to grasp the point: the point expressed succinctly in the drama as a whole, but especially by the Third Act soliloquy.
Why? And this is the problem we deal with, say, with John Kerry. Why does Hamlet, a soldier, who plunges fearlessly into the fray where his life is at stake at every moment, and does it without hesitation, say, "I'm going to be a fool. I'm going to do something foolish"? Why? "I can't stand the noise in my head! Caused by fear of the unknown thing that is going to be me, when I'm dead! And, for that reason, I will commit an absolutely insane act, get myself engaged in a battle, and get killed!"
We see this all the time. It's called "flight-forward" in combat. It was typical, for example, in World War II—flight forward. We had a guy, who's got a Medal of Honor, and probably some Medal of Honor winners got them for being cowards, because, faced with the fearfulness—not of battle—but faced with the fearfulness of waiting for the battle, he'd either crawl into a foxhole and wait for somebody to drop a hand grenade into his foxhole, for protection; or, rip his shirt open, and take his rifle—and "Charge!" the machinegun nest. And get killed. And, if he wasn't killed, he was considered a Medal of Honor candidate. It's called flight-forward.
Hamlet is a case of one of these types. Two types. One type is the coward, like Cheney, the successful draft-dodger, the "artful draft-dodger," a Dickens of a fellow, huh? Or, the case of the coward, the quivering coward, the President of the United States, who quivered cowardly in the National Guard. As opposed to someone who can step forward and face the challenge of universality, which all the great figures of history, all the great historians—which Martin Luther King typifies; which Jeanne d'Arc typifies for us today, and similar figures: the ability to step outside the limits of mortality, knowing you're going to die anyway.
It's like the parable from Matthew of the talents: That life is a talent, mortal life is a talent. It comes, and it goes. The question is, is how did you spend it? Was it that you just used it up? You hid it? You protected it, in a miserly way, your passions? Like your parents, living in a comfort zone? Typical of this talent, they don't do anything: They sit there, in their comfort zones, trying to protect themselves from reality, in the foxhole of fantasy. Or, out like an existentialist, charging to get killed. A fool.
Or, do they respond by saying, "Wait a minute, what am I doing, here, which makes my life useful to all humanity? Am I being an angel? Am I, on this brief mission through mortal life, am I performing some mission of which I need not be ashamed, when this tour of duty ends?" That's true courage. That's the ability to face the truth.
Sophism in Physical Science
This is also true in physical science: Lies in physical science, the ones that are taught in textbooks, are all based on this fear. Science in the United States and other countries, today, is dominated by what? By a Babylonian priesthood! Which says, you will memorize the following prescriptions, and you will interpret what you do within the bounds defined by these prescriptions—whether you think they're true or not! And if you don't believe them now, you better learn to believe them! Because your career depends upon it: Your career, your marriage, your status in life, depend upon accepting the conditions which are put upon you, by an implicit Babylonian priesthood. Which is called, "popular opinion." Or, "the way we are supposed to think."
So therefore, what people develop is, they develop the acquisition, as typified by Aristotelean dogma, as typified by Euclid, who actually is responsible for Euclidean geometry which is taught in schools today—or was taught in schools—by a "fishbowl syndrome." You adopt certain things, shibboleths, like the belief that certain things are self-evident; that there are certain definitions which are self-evident, which you don't have to prove, they're simply obvious to you. There are certain axioms, which you must accept; you have no right to change them! If they're not self-evident to you, you're out of the club! You're not accepted. You try to speak, we don't hear you. If you don't accept the axiom, you can't speak!
There are certain postulates you can use as a sophist to twist things a little bit: These are rules for lying, called postulates, forming of postulates. And the limit to that. The Cartesian manifold: "You must have Newton!" Now, Newton didn't actually discover anything. He was discovered, by some people, the way a child discovers a doll, and they used him. And they put labels on him, like a little girl, playing doll-house. And they said, "This doll will do this. That doll will do that. Newton was going to do this," and he did it. As a doll does it. Not that he had any cognitive processes—he liked to play with magic. You know, witches' magic, and that kind of thing. But, he said, "There is no hypothesis!" Hypothesis is precisely the act of discovering truth. And most of Newton is one big lie: The universe is not organized that way.
So, we have beliefs.
The `Fishbowl' Mentality
Now, what happens is this: These systems of belief, whether they are more or less beneficent, or malignant, in their character, have one feature in common: All societies based on these beliefs are doomed, sooner or later. This gives to history a cyclical characteristic. That a society like the Baby-Boomer generation, which is sort of a sub-class of this, which comes to a set of beliefs which are generally accepted by the Baby-Boomer generation, is a fishbowl mentality. The world today is run by the fishbowl mentality, which is characteristic, also, of the Baby-Boomer generation, whether they think so, or not.
Therefore, society, in the practical decisions, not only of governments and of major institutions, not only in science, but in the way people react to challenge, the challenge of provocation, the challenge of experience, are governed, not by reason, but by an attempt to rationalize what seems to them an instinctive, natural, self-evidently right reaction, to some kind of stimulus. The result of that is, that the society goes through a cycle, in which, at first you have the ascendancy of a new cultural trend gobbling up, taking the place of a previous cultural trend. Then, as this cultural trend settles in, as becoming the dominant one, as is the case of the Baby-Boomer generation—the Baby-Boomer generation, now gaining power over society as a whole, for its collective opinion, or its collective way of forming opinion, now leads society to a point of destruction.
At that point, the attempt to find solutions which fit popular opinion, or which become readily acceptable, is the way to commit suicide. And we are at such a point. This, the world system, which has developed in the past 40 years, which is the fruit of many things, but it is the fruit of an instrument, the Baby-Boomer generation, which is controlled by a Venetian tradition, a financier-oligarchical tradition. So, a financial oligarchy is sitting there, and manipulates a whole generation, through means of what is called varieties of Baby-Boomer culture.
This Venetian power, this financier power, moves this generation into power—in business, in government, and so forth; in the press, everything is constrained by this new sophistry, and this is a sophistry as evil, as radically sophist, as anything in the time of ancient Athens; has now brought civilization, under the control of the generation, by the manipulators of the generation, as typified by sheepherders such as Strauss, Shultz, is moved now to the point of the destruction of civilization. The reaction among the sheep, the Baby-Boomers, is to say, "We must find practical solutions, within the framework of acceptable popular opinion." But, it is "acceptable popular opinion," as defined by the Baby-Boomer generation, which is sending us to Hell! And the continuation of adherence to that, is fatal for all humanity!
Shatter the Chains of Illusion
If you accept the Baby-Boomer generation, you will be in, soon, an inescapable fascist trap, from which civilization, as recognizable today, will no longer continue to exist. Therefore, if you're going out to try to find a way to "win friends and influence people" by appealing to things that do not cause conflict, you are finished! If you're trying to be acceptable, you're finished. Only the "dangerous prophet," the virtual Elijahs of prophecy, can survive at a time like this. Because, what you have to do, is you have to break the spell. You have one instrument, to break the spell: And it's young people trying to bring their parents' generation out of insanity. You go home, you know, it's like visiting the lunatic asylum. You talk to your parents, and hope that somehow, by talking to them, you'll bring them back, this time, to reality. On "visiting day." You know, holidays, family events, and so on.
So, what you have to do, is you have to change people. You have to shatter the chains of illusion. You have to shatter the culture. Therefore, it is presenting that—which they will initially tell you, "never do that, you will be unpopular." I've been unpopular for a long time—and I've been right! Why? Why have I been unpopular and right, at the same time? Because I'm dealing with a generation that's clinically insane.
Their parents' generation—my generation—were cowards. They produced children, who were worse than cowards, they were the children of cowards: the Baby-Boomer generation, which turned from a society which was a productive society, to a post-industrial, fantasy utopia.
Now, their children, the youth of today, the children, the young people of the age of our youth movement, they are saying, "Our parents are insane!" That's the essential message! That's why people from the Baby-Boomer generation have to be kept away from trying to manage and direct the youth. Because the youth are saying, it's the older people who want to direct them and train them, who are insane! The youth have much to learn. But they're not going to learn it, unless they are freed from the chains of the older generation's overriding and overreaching opinion! That's the issue.
But, the kick in here, is—where the youth come in, is the parents' generation are still human. They may not seem to be human, but in there someplace a human being still resides. And they can be touched by love, particularly love for their children and people like their children, of the youth movement; they can be touched by that, to come back into reality, under certain shocking conditions. Because, within that, there are innate qualities of the human being, which can be touched upon, in periods of crisis, to bring something beautiful out of something that seemed remarkably miserable.
How FDR Wielded the Power of Love
When I was growing up, before the Crash and immediately afterward, before Roosevelt, I can tell you that the 1920s—and I was fully conscious of the morality of the generation of that period—that my parents' generation were utterly immoral. These were the generation produced, essentially, by the aftermath of the assassination of McKinley. This was the Horatio Alger generation, and that kind of thing—a totally degenerate population. This was the "Charleston" generation, among one of its characteristics. Anybody who wants to dance the Charleston, has to be, really—they're a candidate for treatment by an orthopedic surgeon! The mental treatment is impossible; maybe an orthopedic surgeon might do something for them. But, they were degenerate. But, they were hit by the shock, where their fantasy world was blown up, by 1929 to '33, they as chickens went to pot. Under Hoover.
So therefore, Roosevelt touched them, by the power of love. Roosevelt said, "I love our forgotten man and woman. I'm going to rescue them. This is their society; I'm going to rescue them." And the power of love, which is not expressed by catering to a poison—you know, you don't say, "Mommy, I know you like your poison. I'm delivering it for you." You say, "Mommy, I'm taking your poison away from you, because I love you, Mommy." That works, under certain conditions. (She might shoot you under other conditions! You know how mothers are, these days.)
But, it works! And that's what we're going to do. We are going to love the population, with all its shortcomings. Because, it is now going through an experience which is comparable to, but worse than 1929-1933, in this country. The act of love is to present the truth.
The Corruption of `Money'
And, the way the culture is presented, the corruption is presented, it's presented in the form of money. The characteristic of the Baby-Boomer generation, in particular, unlike the previous generation—see, the previous generation of Americans became, in the 1945-1963 period, a completely hedonistic population. They were corrupt as hell! But, they thought they had to actually earn a living, by producing something. At least the majority of them did. And therefore, the previous generation actually believed in a productive society, that they had to make themselves respectable, by being able to say, about themselves, "I am a productive person," or "I am doing something which is contributing to the contributions of a productive person." We were a productive society. We were proud of it, with all our faults.
The Baby-Boomer generation was told that the older generation was evil, because it was productive! And was told they should be existentialists, who were looking for their sense of pleasure, and don't be productive; and destroy their parents' emphasis on productive society. This is the basis for the Green movement. The Green movement is actually a fascist movement, committed to destroying everything that has to do with actual, rational production and science. Go back to nature, and be as unnatural as possible, in the process of doing so.
So therefore, while the previous generation, prior to the Baby-Boomer generation, believed in money, as a self-evident king of society, they believed that money was the power to purchase, and to enjoy purchasing. Whether you enjoyed the product you purchased or not was a matter of indifference: The power to purchase was what was important. You might complain about the result, but you still would do the same thing. The Great American Consumer was the biggest sucker in the world.
But, this generation does not believe in it. Therefore, we have to address the same thing, in two forms: The older generation believed in the power of money. This was the generation that was converted to monetarism: the belief that economy is organized by money. If you get money as purchasing power, that will make the economy work. The Adam Smith idea is, if you get money as purchasing power, and you spend that purchasing power, that invisible gods under the floorboards of society, in reality, will somehow magically produce the best result for society as a whole. Which naturally, as you see, produces the worst result: free trade, as opposed to fair trade.
The Baby-Boomer generation believes in money as the power, the power to purchase, but doesn't believe you have to actually earn it, or produce anything. They're against it. They believe in the "bounty of nature," that's what their argument is. They say: Production does not produce wealth. You have to destroy production, and confine yourself to living on the bounty of nature—naked Physiocratic doctrine, that's their ideology. They are fascists, in ideology.
So, now what we have to do, is therefore, if you're going to transform this population's ideas, you have to concentrate on changing what? Get them free of the mythology, the fanatical, Satanic, religious belief, that money as purchasing power is the basis for an economy. That's why they say, "We must cut taxes, to make a better society. Cut taxes (by cutting health care); cut taxes (by cutting food); cut taxes (in order to shut down industries); cut taxes (to bankrupt the United States, so we can get cheap things with our money abroad, from slave labor in South America, China, etc.)."
We have to free people from that fetish, not just argue against this, or this, or that. We have to go to the axiomatic assumption, we have to go the beliefs which are actually imprisoning people in a kind of fishbowl ideology. The way we do that, is very simply, we shift the emphasis, as we're doing, as was mentioned this morning [at the conference panel on "Reanimating Dead Economics—ed.]. We shift the emphasis, to ideas about looking at the economy, from a non-money standpoint. And then looking back, and seeing that money is necessary, when created by a government, but that money must be managed to meet physical requirements, not physical requirements managed to meet so-called idiotic money behavior. As long as people believe, "You're right, it's wrong, it shouldn't happen that way, but it's happening. It has to happen that way—don't you know about free trade? Look, experts about money disagree with you. All the experts about money disagree with you. Your ideas are nice, but you're a utopian! You're not in the real world, which is a world of money as purchasing power. And you've got to put money, first! You've got to balance the budget, first! And, after you've balanced the budget, you can get something. But, you gotta worry about getting money! That's your problem. Because, if you get money, your problems are solved."
If you get money, you are bought.
What you have to say, is that money is created properly, only by government. By sovereign government. It has to be regulated by sovereign government, so that when it flows through the economy, it will do what it's supposed to do: stimulate the processes of investment, as well as circulation of goods; investment in capital formation, in infrastructure, technological progress in manufacturing and farming, and so forth, and the spread of this goodness, of physical economic progress, and the condition of human life around the planet. Therefore, you say, "When we say, we don't have a dam over here, you guys don't give a damn. This is where your problem is." But, they say, "Money!"
"Okay, look: We're going to have to cancel all this money anyway, so don't worry about it. It's going away."
Here's what's important: Are you, in this process, are you going to have food to eat, a house to live in, a productive place of employment, a community that provides the essential services of life for a community or agricultural area? Are you going to have those things, on which life and progress depend? On which civilized existence depends—are you going to have those things? You have to decide on these criteria (and education is a physical thing, because it teaches you how to develop physical power, over nature, and improving nature).
And therefore, we have to shift the program, from who gets the money, because money is now becoming worthless. We have to create a form of money, a form of generation and issue of money, to replace a bankrupt monetary system. Get it! The entire world monetary system is bankrupt! It is going to be put into bankruptcy. Large chunks of this are going to wiped off the books! Otherwise, total chaos.
But, we can't do without money; therefore, government is going to have to create money. Under our Constitution, by Act of Congress, which authorizes the President to issue money through the Treasury Department. We're going to have to regulate the way that created money is used to maintain the economy and make it grow.
What're we going to do that for? According to monetary principles? No! According to principles of what is good, physically—to keep people functioning, working, living, making society progress. The way the founders of this country conceived it.
And the greatest single prison, in the mind of the American people, that makes slaves of most of them, is this damned belief in money—the god, Money.
Money is only, necessarily, an instrument of government, created by government, put into circulation and regulated by government, to be a reliable instrument for the people, in matters of trade and investment. To the effect that the result of this spending investment of money, results in a better physical result, for all of the people, and their posterity.
There's a Higher Authority, Above Ideology
And so, therefore, that's going to be the emphasis on this. But, we have to recognize what the problem is. What the Democratic Party does not understand, in being, in a sense, whores of popular opinion, is, they do realize that what has to be changed, most of all, is themselves. We've come to a time, where the old system based on the old set of beliefs, considered popular opinion today, have failed. We are in a failed generation and a failed society.
But, we're not in a failed human race, because, apart from ideology, there's a higher authority. The authority of truth in the universe, knowable in the sense that scientific truth is knowable, if imperfectly. And therefore, we have to get people to look at the real issues, the real issues of the physical conditions of life: Who gets health care, who doesn't? Who lives, who dies? Who has a place of meaningful employment, or not? What communities are able to maintain organized life, secure life, or not? These physical things are paramount. And money, and the management of money, is merely a tool, by which government, chiefly, takes responsibility for assisting, as the Massachusetts Bay Colony did, in creating money—the first creation of money in North America was by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which created a very fine money system, which was associated with a spurt of great growth and progress in Massachusetts, until about 1688-89, when the British moved in, to crush it.
So, get the money ideology out, and we no longer talk about money as such. Money is now insane—it has no relationship to reality. What we talk about in the campaign, we talk about physical values. We demonstrate, by appropriate methods, which I've referenced, we demonstrate what that is: We go to change the minds, and change the opinions of the people. Not like prostitutes, showing dirty pictures to them.
