The Crucial Role of the United States
In Saving Civilization Today
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's keynote to the European Schiller Institute/International Caucus of Labor Committees conference in Idstein, Germany, on Sept. 24, 2004.I shall repeat today, inclusively, a few of the things I said at the seminar yesterday. So, those who heard it yesterday, will mark forbearance. It is important to repeat:
You are now living in a time whose importance exceeds any in the memory of any living person on this planet. What will happen between now and the date of the inauguration of the next President of the United States, will be the greatest turning point in history, for better, or for very much worse, in a very long time.
The situation is not hopeless; but, on what I know, as of today from the United States, from the inside of the Kerry campaign, for example, one never says that one has won a war, until the war has actually been won. But I feel like Friedrich der Grosse at Leuthen, facing the Austrians where he thought he was outnumbered. And because he thought quicker and better, the outcome was successful on that day.
We're in such a situation.
The report that Bush is ahead, is utter propaganda and nonsense. No one, at this stage of a campaign, of a hotly contested campaign, knows who is ahead. No one knows, in such an election situation.
So anyone who is saying the question of the contest is settled, is a fool; perhaps an idiot. Because in elections, predictions such as that can not be made, particularly under these kinds of circumstances. The decision has not been made. And today, in the course of today's presentation, I'll indicate what some of the factors are, which will decide how this election goes, and what the outcome will be.
Later you will hear from Dennis Small, who is here; in another presentation, he will present some animations and other materials, which are quite relevant to what I will say now on this occasion today. You will also hear—I presume, knowing Jonathan Tennenbaum fairly well, and knowing what he has chosen as his subject—that I have left to him certain things, on Riemannian economics, which, I'm sure, he will do very well. And I understand that is going to be a wrap-up of some of the discussion at this conference.
So, it's all going to be a piece, throughout the conference, which in the end, will all come together, all the parts will converge, on a single result, a single objective.
All right. Now, what's the situation?
A Collapsing World System
We have been presented in a book, by a certain U.S. psychiatrist, who, based on evidence in the public domain, has indicated the mental problems of President George W. Bush. George W. Bush being an idiot, in a sense, that is, incapable [audio break] ... he's a puppet primarily of Dick Cheney, but also of others.
Cheney is an evil man. As a matter of fact, Cheney has made an agreement with the Washington Post, to have an attack published on me a week from Sunday. I don't know if it'll still be published, but Cheney's behind it. It is the same Cheney, who is the key man behind the deployment of terrorist forces against Russia, through Chechnya.
But Cheney is not merely a puppet-master of the President of the United States. He is also a puppet of the British monarchy: specifically, the Blair government, including Liz Symons. He is also a puppet of his own wife, who is the smarter member of the family, who has the higher-ranking connections to the British monarchy and to the Blair government.
The targetting of Russia—which is a very serious question, because you're talking of the targetting of a thermonuclear power, which is being driven, despite its weakness, to a state of rage. And the Russian government knows, already, that it was these forces from the United States and Britain, who are directing what is called terrorism, against the Caucasian region adjoining Russia.
So, this will not go on too long. And the President of Russia will not too long pretend to cooperate with the President of the United States, under these conditions.
We are already in a condition, on two points, which amounts to the threat of a dark age throughout this planet coming on fast, during the interval now and the inauguration of the next President. First of all, we have a general economic breakdown of the world as a whole, concentrated in Europe and the Americas. Other countries have not fallen as badly, such as India or China, in the recent period. But the world as a whole is collapsing. And if Europe and the United States collapse economically, the whole world will collapse, in a chain-reaction fashion; not because of the conditions as such within their countries, but because of the impact of the collapse of Europe and the United States.
Europe today is bankrupt. That is, there is no possibility, under current trends in Europe, that European economies could continue to operate, because the cost of maintaining the society throughout Europe today, is greater than the income generated by production and other means in those societies. And the rate at which that discrepancy is going to increase, under present trends.
Now, if Europe and the United States go into chaos, you can be sure the chain-reaction effects will be, the world will go into chaos. Because at the same time, we have an international monetary-financial system, which is in its death-agonies. The IMF, in its present form, the financial systems attached to the International Monetary Fund, are in a process of collapse. Whether the collapse will come tomorrow morning, Monday, or sometime in January, is uncertain: But every leading banking circle in the world is now preparing for a general collapse of the entire monetary-financial system. They're simply lying about it, except among themselves, because they don't want it public until they're ready to deal with it.
So we're dealing with a world system, which is about to collapse. And it is precisely for that reason, as in two world wars of the last century—for systemic reasons of that type—that great wars, or similar kinds of conflagrations, coincide with great financial and economic crises, and social crises.
The Problem in Europe
Because—. Look at the European situation. What is European civilization? We'll get hard into this, and some Europeans will be offended by what I say, but it's true. It has to be said. Europe went through a long struggle to solve the greatest problem of humanity, up to the present time, of all known humanity. Through all known history, up to the present, the characteristic of government (or what passes for government) has been that a small portion of the total population treats the rest of the population as either herded or hunted human cattle. And this section of the population rules, not only by domination, by physical means, and playing one force against another, but by keeping people stupid. The way to make people accept the condition of being human cattle, is to stupefy them to the level of being human cattle.
And this is done by education, or mis-educational systems, or like the propaganda systems and cultural characteristics, which have taken over Europe and the United States since about 1964, especially under the influence of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a real fascist organization, whose intention was to destroy the cognitive ability of the population to think for itself. And instead gave them sex, and similar kinds of degraded mass entertainment, to occupy themselves and one another's sexual organs with, as a substitute for actual thinking or knowing.
So we have a stupefied population. The level, the quality of education in universities and other schools, in Europe and the United States, is far worse than it was 40 years ago. The people of the United States are stupid, relative to the population of 40 years ago.
This has been done deliberately. We have been transformed, in the case of Europe, from the part of the world which created the wonders of modern civilization, of modern scientific and technological progress, and the increase of freedom in a way which corresponded to an improvement in the general standard of living.
About 40 years ago, in the aftermath of the assassination of Kennedy, the aftermath of the missile crisis, and the launching of the U.S.-Indo-China War, the world underwent what has been called a "cultural paradigm-shift." The United States, in particular, which had been the most successful in dealing with the Depression—that is, the United States, under Roosevelt, had emerged from a Great Depression, and had become the most powerful economic nation, and in other respects, on the planet. The existence of the United States, under Roosevelt's influence, saved the world from what took over Europe! Fascism.
It took over Europe, under fascism from 1922-1945, by a group of bankers, who were called Synarchists: a bankers' syndicate that controlled the so-called independent central banking systems of the European nations. As in the case of Germany: The only chance of saving Germany from Hitler, lay in overturning the power of the Bank of England's control over German banking institutions. Because, without those measures, the German people could not save themselves from what was coming down from the outside as Hitler.
The same was true of all Europe, all continental Europe, outside of Russia, outside the Soviet Union. They all collapsed into fascism. They collapsed into fascism, because they were unprepared, to take the challenge of eliminating the existence of a parasite, which comes in the disguise of so-called independent central banking systems. And which makes man, and nations, the slave of money! Which these banking systems and financial interests control.
The power of the United States, its advantage strategically, is that under our Constitution, no banking system under our Constitution, can control the people. In a case of a general bankruptcy, the function of the government of the United States, is to put the bankers into bankruptcy reorganization, by the government, and to protect the people against the rapacity of the greedy bankers. That's what Roosevelt did: He put the banking system into bankruptcy reorganization. He launched programs of expansion in a nation which had collapsed by one-half, in terms of average income, over the four years under Herbert Hoover; and made us the most powerful nation in the world.
It was our role, which, coupled with the resistance of the Soviet Union—which was made possible by the support of the United States; and with the fact that the British joined us, who were also quite fascistic in their inclinations, but they didn't believe in surrendering their power over a world empire to a continental German tyrant. The only reason that Churchill opposed Hitler, was that Hitler was not British. And therefore, the British reluctantly joined the United States in fighting Hitler. And but for the margin of leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, this world would have gone to Hell.
We're now facing a repetition of that same kind of fight, in a worse condition now than then.
Because then, at that time, our population still believed in production. We still believed in agriculture; we still believed in industry; we still believed in basic economic infrastructure.
Now we don't. We've changed. We now believe in globalization. "Shut up! Don't work any more. Get the slaves in the Third World to work for you, with cheap labor! They'll supply your goods. Shut down your stores! Open up Wal-Marts, where you buy the produce of cheap labor! Disemploy your people! Save money, by cutting your infrastructure. Cut your health care! Cut your social security systems! Cut your education! Accelerate the death rate among the sick. Do all these things to balance your budget, for the benefit of the bankers who own you!"
And the connection is simply this: The system we've lived under in Europe, as opposed to the United States, which is called "capitalism." It's not—you know, Marxism was actually a branch of capitalism. I'll refer to what that is about—as people in Saxony probably understand that. Hmm?
Origins of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism
We came out of the medieval life, which was the so-called ultramontane system, a system under which Venetian bankers for over 500 years had controlled Europe, through their alliance with Norman chivalry. And they had a system of debts and debt collection, where they parasitized Europe, destroyed all attempts to form sovereign governments of nations, and they globalized Europe. Globalization is nothing different, than what the Venetians did, with a murderous Norman chivalry, who were the predecessors of the Nazi SS, throughout all of Europe.
When the great Venetian system collapsed, in the 14th-Century new dark age, where a third of the population of Europe was wiped out—half the cities, the parishes of Europe, disappeared, as the result of a crisis comparable in some characteristics, to what faces us and threatens us today. In other words, if you continue to support the IMF; if you continue to support austerity measures; if you continue to kill people by depriving them of health care; if you continue to make them ignorant, by depriving them of education; if you destroy their communities: We are going into a dark age. Because we are not producing enough, currently. We're not maintaining the production of infrastructure, production of manufactured goods, of production of foodstuffs, instruments of health care and protection against epidemics—we are not maintaining those systems! If we take those systems away, we begin to die. And the death rate accelerates. That's what happens in dark ages in the past, as in the 14th Century in Europe.
The fortunate part of the 14th Century, was that the legacy of people such as great Classical scholars, Dante Alighieri, Petrarca, and so forth, and the Christian tradition of the Augustinians, for example, intervened into the crisis, to create a Renaissance. This Renaissance replaced Latin as the ruling force in European thought—Latin, which had become the instrument of slavery of the European populations—to return to Classical Greek culture, as a thing to study for creating a society based on a modern nation-state. This unleashed, in Europe, in the 15th Century, a great revolution, out of which the first modern nation-states—that of France, under Louis XI and that of England, later, under Henry VII—emerged.
The Venetians then struck back. They tried to destroy this institution. And between 1511 and 1648, the Venetians launched religious war; they organized and conducted religious war, and related kinds of warfare, throughout Europe, until 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia. The intention was then, as typified by the role of Colbert, the heir of Cardinal Mazarin, to develop a modern nation-state, based on the principles of scientific progress and revitalization of what had been accomplished by the Renaissance.
But then, you had an idiot, Louis XIV, who was sucked into wars set by Venetians plotters. And these wars destroyed to a great degree, what France had tended to become, as the organizer of a revival of civilization in Europe. That revival was typified by not only Colbert himself, but by his protégés! Which included, in one sense, Gottfried Leibniz, and others. Or the heirs of this movement, which went into Saxony and effected a revival from the Thirty Years' War, in the work of Bach and others. Look at what happened out of Saxony, out of Leipzig. The city of the revival of German culture! Which Bach merely typifies, and which Leibniz typifies.
But this was frustrated again. It was frustrated because the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system had risen to supersede and replace, and to continue, the Venetian system: England emerged as the dominant force, in contest of rivalry between the Dutch and the British.
And then there was the so-called Seven Years' War. And through the Seven Years' War, in which the British financed and played one part of continental Europe against the other; and they paid Frederick the Great, Friedrich der Grosse, in order to keep the war going. And then at a certain point, when they had achieved their objective, they stopped financing Friedrich der Grosse.
Out of that mess, in 1763, in the Treaty of Paris of February 1763, came the establishment of the British Empire. It was not an empire of the British monarchy. It was an empire of the British East India Company. The other name for the British East India Company, during that period, throughout the 18th Century, was "the Venetian Party." It was a creation of Venice.
Europe's Project in America
So a great crisis existed for Europe, for those who cared: How could Europe, having destroyed the great opportunities it had, the opportunity of the Renaissance, the opportunity of the Treaty of Westphalia, the opportunity nourished by the leadership of Colbert, typified by the work of Leibniz, echoed by the influence of Bach—how could this Europe, again, seek to build what it had intended to build? To build a society which is based on what was the essential Christian principle, that man, all persons, are made in the image of the Creator of the universe, and have those creative powers which distinguish man from beast. And therefore we can not treat people as human cattle! We must not subject them to the status of human cattle. We must not hunt them down, as the Romans hunted down people they didn't like, for sport, as human cattle.
We can not treat them as human cattle, as those who are running the war against Islam, intend to do. To treat Islam as a target of human cattle to be slaughtered! And thus, to generate a religious war, which would destroy civilization around the world.
How could Europe resist, after failing twice to consolidate two great victories? The victory typified by the Council of Florence, the ecumenical Council of Florence, and the victory typified by the miracle of Cardinal Mazarin's leadership in creating the Treaty of Westphalia. The Treaty of Westphalia, on which all international law in Europe today depends. There would be no international-law tradition in Europe, except for the Treaty of Westphalia.
How could Europe hope to find freedom for its people, from these oppressions? They turned to North America. They turned to the English-speaking colonies of North America.
The turn began earlier. The roots of it had happened in the Massachusetts Bay Colony earlier. It happened in about 1753, when people from Germany—for example; scientists, like Kästner and others, began to spread their influence, to make connections into North America, to this noted scientist, Benjamin Franklin. And around Benjamin Franklin, the forces of Europe which were dedicated to the Leibniz tradition, to the Bach tradition, reached out to North America, to the circles of Benjamin Franklin, as an outstanding scientist and leader of the American cause. In the hope of building in North America a great republic, a republic which had in its eyes the vision of Solon of Athens, which had in its eyes the vision of the great Renaissance. How to build a republic which would become a model, to strike back into Europe, to bring the existence of such republics into Europe itself.
The 'Pursuit of Happiness'
And we almost succeeded. We did succeed in creating a republic, the only republic on this planet which was based on a true principle: the principle expressed, essentially, by Leibniz's phrase in the Declaration of Independence, the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Now let me explain this, because this is pivotal for understanding what the issue is: What did Leibniz mean, by "the pursuit of happiness"? What did he mean, gratification? No. Happiness is a quality which is peculiar not to animals, but to human beings. What makes you happy? Let me tell you the good news: You're all going to die. Right? Now, knowing that you're all going to die, how can you be happy? Unless there's something in your life, which is more important to you than mortal life itself. Something that you do with your life, which makes it meaningful. Which allows you to anticipate dying with a smile on your face: As a Christian believes, with a "victory over death!" You die with a victory over death, because your life has meant something.
What does it mean? Well, what is man, that man should have this quality of happiness? Man is creative. Every animal species is limited in its potential for existence, by its inherited genetic characteristics, as a mortal living thing. No animal can willfully increase its potential population-density. Now, if man were an ape, which some of our politicians seem to imitate, then man would have never had a potential on this planet, in excess of several million living individuals at one time—most of them pretty miserable. How many people are living on this planet today? The estimates are over 6 billion.
The greatest amount of this increase, and the highest rate of this increase, began in Europe, in the aftermath of the new dark age of the 14th Century. It began because of a revolution, which placed the value on that quality of the individual, which makes the human being in the likeness of the Creator of the universe: the ability to discover the principles which run the universe, and to utilize the employment of those discovered principles, to change the universe around us for the benefit of mankind.
That is how we are able to have 6 billion people living on this planet today.
Now, if you are a person who locates your identity, not in your physical self—not to look at yourself in the mirror, as if you were a baboon, and say, "I'm a good-looking baboon!" Or your sexual prowess or something of that sort. But, if you locate your identity, in that which makes you in the likeness of the Creator, the expression of the power of creativity, to discover the lawful principles of the universe, and to employ them to solve and overcome the problems that mankind confronts; to make the planet a better place in which to live, for all living things, as well as merely the people on it: That is happiness.
Since we're all going to die, the only thing that meets the test of happiness, is what can you do, to die with a smile on your face?
That's what happiness is! That's Leibniz's conception of happiness—which this evil fellow Voltaire could never understand, and despised. So, that's what the principle of the U.S. Constitution was in the first instance.
And this was against Locke explicitly. Against the British Liberal system. Against the very foundations of British Liberalism, and Dutch Liberalism. That was the foundation of the United States. But that was not enough. We needed a Constitution, of a Presidential system. And that was a tough fight.
But the principles of the United States Constitution, are embedded in the Preamble of the Constitution. The Preamble of the Constitution is the fundamental law of the United States, to which all other features of the Constitution are accidental, are subordinated. And to which all laws are subordinated. No law has a right to exist, which violates or opposes the principles of the Preamble of the Constitution. No part of the Constitution, no interpretation of any part of the Constitution, has any right to exist, if it's inconsistent with the intent of the Preamble of the Constitution.
What is the Preamble? The right to sovereignty, national sovereignty. To govern our own affairs, which we can not do, unless we are sovereign.
Secondly, we must subordinate all considerations to the general welfare of all of the people. You can not have some preferred people, some less preferred people. All of the people have a right to live.
We must not merely content ourselves with our living. We the living, do not own this planet: It belongs to those who came before us; it belongs to those who come after us. And therefore, the law must be: We must serve the interests of those who come after us, our posterity.
That is the law! That law was not something invented in the United States. It was crafted in the United States, as law. The conception came from Europe. It was what the greatest minds of Europe, the greatest leaders of Europe, such as the 15th-Century Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, had fought for. But people found in the soil, at a distance from Europe, or at a so-called safe distance from Europe, the opportunity to implant there, a republic so conceived, and with a mission, not merely to serve itself, but to be, as Lafayette put it, later, "a beacon of hope and a temple of liberty for all mankind."
The raison d'être of the United States is to be that! And when it is not that, it fails in its own essential self-interest and mission. Our mission is not to rule the world, or to attempt to do so. Our mission is to be that, which assists and provides the rest of this planet, the opportunity to realize what Europe sought to realize in the great struggles against the legacy of the Roman Empire. That's our special capability.
Abraham Lincoln is probably the President of the United States who most clearly typifies, precisely, this principle of law, this notion of law. He saved the world by defeating the Confederacy, the principle of slavery. He was probably the greatest President the United States ever had. The most consistently great President, morally.
And that is the job of the President of the United States today.
Bankers' Fascism
Europe has many things to contribute, which are essential for the saving of humanity as a whole, in the coming period. The problem is, Europe does not have, at present, the kind of political institutions which, of themselves, are capable of meeting that responsibility. There are no true republics in Europe. None. Not by the standard of natural law.
There are Europeans who have a European cultural tradition, which has embedded in it the attributes required to create great republics. But it has come to the time that every time there's a crisis, in Europe, particularly a monetary-financial crisis, the bankers take over. The bankers prevail, as they did in the spread of fascism from 1922 to 1945 on the continent of Europe.
The governments, the people, were not capable of saying, "The general welfare of the people comes first. The bankers come last." Particularly since they're cover stories. They're not honest creditors. They're people who have created a system to suck the blood, and loot and oppress the people. We tolerate them up to a point, where the system is threatened; where the lives of people are threatened, where cruel deeds are done, in the main. As is being done by the IMF against Argentina. A perfect case of fascism is Annie Krueger, the representative of the IMF in dealing with Argentina. (We refer to her in the United States, as the mother of Freddie Krueger. Some people know what that means.)
This is fascism. This is evil. Just as evil as Hitler. But who's doing it? The IMF, the International Monetary Fund. Who's it doing it for? It's doing it for Venetian-style financial oligarchical interests, which control central banking systems, which control the national banking systems of most countries in Europe, and which turn as predators on man. This is why Hitler was brought to power. And this was a project, planned at the time of the Versailles Treaty. Probably Hitler himself was not planned, but the operation was planned by the Synarchist International at the Versailles Treaty meetings!
And Europe could not save itself. And therefore, the responsibility of the United States, because of its position, is to, as we say, get its act together; adopt its mission. The mission for which Europe created it! The mission of bringing to other parts of the world, the rights to have truly sovereign republics, in which all of the people of a nation can participate, consciously and knowledgeably, in the management of their affairs, can be educated as to what the principles of law and history are, which should guide them in choosing their decisions. In creating institutions which they control, which perform this function for them, called government.
We have to free the world for that.
People Come First
Now, at present we are in fairly decent shape, from my standpoint, in the United States. Kerry is not an all-around genius. He's a very ... [audio break], that when a conflict arises, between the financiers and the welfare of the people, government must act to defend the people, and the financiers will wait.
That means, essentially, that—. Take a situation such as now in Germany. You have upwards of 8 million unemployed in Germany, at the last estimate, these last reports. Over 8 million people out of work. When you take the amount of wealth that those 8 million people could produce, if employed properly, then Germany would not be bankrupt. It'd be perfectly fine.
How do you do that? You draw upon existing financial funds? Not really. The money doesn't exist on which you can draw. You have to create it. You have to create it so that it's solid. How do you create it? By action of government! You create money. You spend the money. For what? To put people to work, of course. But that doesn't work by itself. If we just spend money to employ people, then eventually you're going to have inflation. You have to spend it wisely, for the right type of employment. You must spend it for things that will have physical value, 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now. If something will have physical value, in the sense of being useful to society, 50 years from now, then you can afford to go into debt, at reasonable rates, for 50 years, to have that.
That will immediately give you the ability to employ more people. To bring the government into balance, the nation into balance. This is what Roosevelt did. This is what we did, that's how we won the Civil War against the British agents called the Confederacy. This is the American System. We are sovereign in the creation of money, but we must be prudent and wise in the way we create and use that money.
The Challenge of Eurasian Development
Now, what do we have in the world today? Just to give a picture of the optimistic side.
You have the largest concentrations of population in the world today, are typified by the cases of India and China. China has over 1.3 billion people, India has over 1 billion people. You have a similar situation along South Asia, Southeast Asia—and North Asia. These are areas of different cultures, differing cultures, which often have cultural disagreements—and cultural disagreements within their own borders.
But these are also areas in which the amount of usable land area is limited, under present technological conditions. China has land area, more than India does, but it's mostly poorly developed, and therefore the advantage of having the greater territory is not there. What these countries lack, also, is not merely land area; what they lack is, for example, minerals. They don't have the mineral resources required to allow them to not only expand their population, but to raise the standard of living, and raise the level of productivity of their people per capita.
Therefore, what do you do in Europe? You say, "Hey, that's our market." Yes, China has some modern industry. India has modern industry, but they don't have enough. They don't have enough to meet the needs of governments which are concerned to bring justice and prosperity to all of the people. Therefore, you must have some large-scale development projects, which are beyond the immediate capital resources in the countries of China, India, or elsewhere.
So what can we do with Europe, or the United States? We have—with what we've shut down, but which is culturally embedded in our culture, we have shut down the ability in technological progress, to create these kinds of things, that these countries need from us. So, why don't we make a treaty agreement, long-term treaty agreement, with countries in Asia, the greatest concentration of population, and the greatest concentration of poverty, outside of Africa, on this planet? Why don't we make long-term treaty agreements, two generations ahead? Why don't we create capital funds, by treaty agreement? Why don't we crank up our industries, to prepare ourselves as nations, as a mission for nations, to meet the needs which these countries have, and express?
Isn't that the way to live? Isn't that what is implicit in the Treaty of Westphalia? To give the advantage to the other? Isn't the road to peace and security on this planet, to give the advantage to the other, for sovereign people to commit themselves to the benefit of their neighbor? And to bind themselves together, in ties of interdependency, by these commitments to give the advantage to the other?
Think first of what you can do for somebody else—and maybe then, your own requirement can be met, if they think the same way toward you.
Now, who can do this stuff in North Asia? Central Asia? Who can take the vast mineral resources in North and Central Asia? Who knows how to develop these mineral resources, and how to process them, and use them over the future, to maintain them, as a supply? For the benefit of the expanding demands of South, Southeast and East Asia? Who knows that? Russia.
There's a building on the square, Red Square, as it used to be called, the Vernadsky Museum, the geological museum, and the people working in that museum, associated with that, represent the knowledge which is necessary for solving this great problem which affects immediately China.
We can develop this area of North and Central Asia. But to develop it we can't exploit it; we must develop it. You can't get the mineral resources you require from this area by exploiting it, looting it. You must develop it. You must populate it. You must build up cities. You must build up industries. You must build up systems of maintaining life, plant life and so forth. You must do all these things.
It means you must take this whole territory, and develop it, not loot it.
Well, to develop it and not loot it, you have to have some people sitting on it. Well, we've got Russians. We've got other people. We can create international institutions of education and cooperation, which are capable of this kind of task. And our mineral resources are not limited to this part of Asia. Or to the Great Shield in Africa. Or to the great resources of South America. The oceans! The greatest source of minerals on this planet is in the oceans, and underneath them. That's the greatest part of the surface of the planet. We have to learn to manage the mineral resources of this planet.
Now, go back to Vernadsky and another thing, just to get a picture about how we have to think about economics. Forget money! Money is an idiot. It has no idea of what to do. It will behave badly in any case, given the opportunity to do so. So, talking about free trade, and free circulation of money, and globalization—only an idiot, and particularly a suicidal idiot, would seriously think about such a proposition. Money is something which should be created by government, and since money is an idiot, government has to regulate this disease, called money, which it has unleashed on society. You do that by methods of regulation.
And let me indicate some of the physical characteristics of this.
Vernadsky's Approach
Let's take the case of our friend Vernadsky, a great scientist, a great follower of Mendeleyev, who's also a very creative person, who dealt with these kinds of things I referred to about how to develop Eurasia. Now, what did he do?
In his major work, he did many things. He was an all-around genius. But one of his last achievements was to define a concept of the way in which the planet is organized, a concept which very few scientists today have ever seemed to have understood. He went back to ancient Greece, to pre-Aristotelian Greece, to the Greece of the Pythagoreans and Plato and so forth, to a concept of the nature of science, which these Greeks developed, on the basis of understanding Egyptian astronomy, which is the basis of modern European science. It's rooted in Egyptian astronomy. And when we look back to about 4,700, 4,800 years ago, to the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, and you look at them for the astronomical instruments they were designed to be, you have an insight into what ancient Egyptian astronomy was.
And it was from this, it was from this which the Greeks called the Spherics, from which Greece defined the creation, the inception, of modern European science.
Vernadsky went back to that, and recognized that there are three principles which govern the way the life on Earth is composed, and in the universe. First, from the standpoint of experiment, scientific experiments, there are things we consider inorganic. That is, the principles involved in these particular processes, do not require any consideration of intellect or life to function. In other words, you can define these processes quite effectively, for your purposes, without taking into account the existence of life as a principle, or cognition as a principle.
We have a second area, of those kinds of processes which we know largely as fossils. The history of the Earth. The products of life. Things which could not exist on this planet, except as a result of action of a principle of life, as distinct from inorganic processes.
And this he called the Biosphere. The planet is using, the planet is getting more and more of the fossils of living processes, and proportionately less and less of simply inorganic forms. The planet is being transformed, as it were becoming, itself, a living creature! Through the spread of the increased composition of these fossils. The Biosphere, and the processes of life which regenerate, and expand, the Biosphere.
Then you have a third one, which no lower form of life has, as a principle. The principle of cognition, or what the Greeks call hypothesis, by which the human mind is capable of discovering the universal principles in the universe, which otherwise are not found in life, or in non-living processes.
(Now you begin to see the pure idiocy of information theory. An information theorist is not a scientist, he's a quack. And don't trust him. He probably steals, too.)
Therefore, now, what are we talking about, on this planet? We are human beings. We're living on this planet, and we hope to be soon living also on some other planets. We're going out there—it's inevitable, unless we destroy ourselves before we get there. We're just going to have to go out there, because it's part of the Solar System. The Solar System is a system. We have to learn how to manage life within the Solar System. We're going to have to go out and explore the Solar System, to learn how to manage life from the standpoint of the processes of the Solar System. And we'll get out there to find out something about things we didn't know about, on Earth, which actually affect life on Earth.
But, what are we doing? Just in the way that living processes have transformed the planet, into one into which human beings could be born, so the development of the planet by man, the fossils of human activity, large water projects, large systems which do not exist in nature, have been created to make life possible, human life possible, where it's otherwise not possible. To enable us to sustain large populations, where only small populations could otherwise exist.
So, we are building up the Noösphere, the accumulation of fossils, which we sometimes call basic economic infrastructure: the water systems, the power systems, all these systems. We're building them. Schools, hospitals—it's all part of this. It's part of the Noösphere. Building up systems which take a bigger and bigger percentile of the total planet's mass. We create that.
We created these conditions, which enable us to increase the potential population-density of the planet, which raise the standard of living of the individual on the planet, by enabling people to be more productive. That's real economy.
Discovery: The Basis for Real Economics
So our function in economy is to think in these terms, today, because the planet is becoming crowded—crowded in the sense that processes have overtaken us, to the point that we have to seriously manage the planet. You can't go running around in some strange area and setting up a kingdom or something, as was tried in earlier times. You have to develop an area, to accommodate a larger population. To develop an area to provide a higher standard of living for that population. You must change the totality of the environment. You must do it in a scientific way.
Now, here's where the rub comes. Here's where the idiots come from, like Marx. Or Engels, in particular. And this was the problem with Saxony: They had the Engels influence over there.
Engels said that man's progress—man was just an ape, who progressed because of the opposable thumb, which is scientifically nonsense, just at the start. Man is not an ape. Man has a quality which no ape has, which Vernadsky recognized. Man has the power of creativity. Man is a creature in the image of the Creator, and this ability is of an intellectual nature, a human intellectual nature. The ability to make scientific discoveries, hypotheses, and prove them experimentally, and to change the conditions of life and behavior of mankind.
Now, this ability to discover is not a group-think operation, and all of our youth who've gone through this process of dialogue know that. It's an interaction within a group of people, but the impulse of action comes from the sovereign mind of the individual. Therefore, in society we have this apparent paradox. Progress depends upon a collective agreement to development of the world in which we live, in a certain way. That we must agree upon; otherwise it doesn't work. We don't cooperate. It doesn't happen.
But: The incentive, the spark, which enables us to discover the principles which will then serve us, comes only from one source: the creative powers of the individual human mind. No one has ever seen the creative powers of the individual human mind at work, from outside that human mind. No one could. You can't measure it physically. It does not fit the nature of the Biosphere. It's a higher quality which exists in the universe, which is very interesting to theologians, because it says that God exists in the universe. Otherwise it couldn't happen. And God also exists in man, otherwise man couldn't do it.
So, it's not in the plants, it's not in the little bunnies, and so forth. It's in the individual human mind, a sovereign individual mind, which is capable of making a discovery, and achieving a peculiar kind of immortality.
Take the case of Archimedes. Now, Archimedes was not the greatest discoverer in ancient history, but he's a good example. Archimedes made discoveries which are very thoroughly documented, because some French people got to collecting all these things. His writings are well documented. Now today, a student, in fact there's a student in our youth movement, in particular, who will do that, maybe in the university or not, where they're lazier, but in our youth movement they would—take a discovery by Archimedes. Take the problem as he defined it. Recognize the anomaly which he used to make a discovery of principle. Now reenact in your own mind, the mental act of discovery which Archimedes did.
Now, what have you done? You, with your living tissue, have observed something that Archimedes did. You've gone through the same experience, and now the same idea he discovered comes popping out of you, in your living tissue, as if he were alive today. This is what culture is, human culture is—the transmission of ideas of that nature. Scientific ideas, Classical artistic ideas.
These things are then re-enacted, in the minds of the people to whom we transmit these discoveries. Often we know these people personally. The greatest discoverers are usually known to us. Great people, who are an influence upon us, they're known to us. When they die, you can relive in yourself what happened in their mind, if you really shared it. That is our relationship to mankind before us. All of humanity lives in us, who are living today. And our pursuit of happiness is to ensure that we live in the society we're creating for tomorrow.
That's the basis for physical economy. Money is just a nothing by itself, a simple piece of paper. It's a fiction. There is no law of money. There is no law of free trade. This is all gibberish. Money is something we have to manage, because it's an idiot, but we have to manage it to a purpose. We have to manage it, not as the communists said, where the proletarians instinctively, through their gut or something, secrete wisdom, collectively. But we have to manage it through the process of the individual, development of the individual mind. Through the intellectual process in that higher sense.
And we have to create a society in which we are causing more and more people to participate in society, not as human cattle, but to participate in the sense of, "We want to have happiness," and happiness as a sense of living, as an efficient part of the future. Not biologically existing, as a part of the future, but existing in the benefit, which we give to future generations.
We think of ourselves as embarked upon a mission in life.
The Courage To Face Immortality
The other aspect of this concept of self, comes up in military science. It's typified by Shakespeare's case of Hamlet. Now, the case of Hamlet is quite relevant to thinking about John Kerry. What was Hamlet in real life?
Hamlet was a brave soldier. Kerry was a brave soldier. Whether you like the war, as he didn't, or not; he fought as a brave soldier. He was capable of giving orders on the level of a captain or a major, perhaps a colonel. He was good at it. But he was not—he lacks one thing: Just as Hamlet, a similar skilled soldier, who could get somebody behind a curtain, with one stab of a blade of his knife, but he could not face immortality. He could not face the issue of command. He could not face, in a sense, what Friedrich der Grosse faced at Leuthen, of putting his whole force in jeopardy, by his decision, as his responsibility. The responsibility of command.
See, the sergeant, the lieutenant, the captain, the major, will get by if he does a good job. He will sacrifice himself, but on the basis that he has confidence in the leadership of his forces, that his effort will not be a waste. That if he is spent, he will be spent to a good purpose.
But then, take that same brave soldier, that brave leader of the unit, put him in the position where his nation's existence depends upon his willingness to make the kind of judgment upon which the future existence of that nation depends. You get a Hamlet, who would plunge to death in some exercise, rather than face what lies beyond death, the question of immortality.
The problem we have today: You have all these nuts running around saying they're religious. But most of them I know, don't have any sense of immortality. They don't have a real sense of immortality. Someone comes along and promises them an elegant suite on the other side of life, beyond death, and tells them that they won't have to pay next month's rent if Armageddon comes today. That is not a sense of immortality. A sense of immortality is more for the Christian, for example, of Christ's expenditure of his mortal life, for the future of all mankind.
That is the quality which, you know, the quality of a great saint, a great apostle, is that quality, of the ability to competently exercise command in leadership, which is the most vital problem we face today. We don't have a single known leader in Europe who is capable of doing that. I don't know of any in the United States except me, who could do that.
So, what we're going to do is this. We're going to take a very good commander, in the lower rank, a Kerry. Very intelligent. Strongly intelligent. A man of good character. Forget all the shortfalls—many people have shortfalls. But when it comes down to a balance, this guy is not bad. He can do the job. I have available to me now, from the institutions of the United States, and from friendly contacts with people of responsibility in other countries, I've available to me now, access to the best possible advice which can be given to a President of the United States, under these conditions. Therefore, we have to build around such a choice of a national leader, we have to build an institution of government, that is, a living institution of people in government, who are capable, collectively, by their interaction, of making the kinds of decisions that a great commander must make.
We must have no less mission than saving this planet. Don't worry about this country or that country, next week or next year. Get your mind off that. The issue is, to save civilization, which is now in jeopardy.
We're faced with something far worse than Hitler. Even though Cheney is not much—he's just an animal—but the system itself, the system of the planet, the condition of the planet, is far worse than it was back in the 1920s. We need extraordinary leadership. The United States must provide that leadership. I'm confident from what I know of Europe, that if the United States would provide that kind of leadership, that there are forces in Europe who would quickly respond, because they want a way out. As we saw today, with the message from our friend, our Iraqi friend [see box]: There are forces in the Arab world which would respond. They simply want the kind of leadership with which they can work, to get us out of the hell we're in.
There are forces all around the planet who will cooperate. I know many of them, or know of them. They would cooperate. But who's going to step forward first? The nation that must step forward first, is the United States, because of its position of power, among other reasons. And we have, we have a very good chance now, of getting rid of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Those who say otherwise, don't know what they're talking about. We're on the edge.
If the Kerry crowd does not fail—and, as you know, I'm on the inside of this—if the Kerry crowd does not fail, and I think it will not fail, we'll win, and we're through this safely. It can't be guaranteed, because the war has not yet been won. But we have a winning capability, a winning position, a winning potential. And we must think like a commander, as a commander should. I have to think, not of "what if we're defeated, what if we don't succeed." No. A commander does not think like that. A commander is committed to the result—absolutely, unconditionally, committed to the result. As I am unconditionally committed to defeating what this Bush-Cheney thing represents.
Now, from this we must learn some lessons, as we come out of this, and I think we will come out of it.
The Principles of Westphalia
We must learn, the time has come, we can no longer play games with humanity, the way games have been played in times past. We now have to go to something like the Treaty of Westphalia, and say, "This planet, yes, we must have sovereign nation-states, because if we don't have sovereign nation-states, you don't have a mechanism by which the individual person can participate culturally in running their own nation." Therefore, we must not have any globalization. People can understand ideas only through the culture which they come out of. They may come out of that to understand on a global level, but they have to work within the cultural antecedents of language, and so forth, they live in. They must have their own nation, as they choose. Otherwise, they are not individually sovereign.
But we must understand, that while we must seek sovereignty, we must also understand sovereignty as the great Cardinal Mazarin understood it. The sovereignty of a system of nation-states, depends upon a deep devotion, of each and all those states, to the advantage of the other state. That every nation must think about what he can do for humanity as a whole, or for particular parts of humanity. It's what you do for others, which is the greatest source of security you have in your own nation. To the degree that you think competition and rivalry are the requirements of patriotism, you're an idiot, and you just end up with another one of these crises.
So, I can dedicate the rest of the subject of economics to these two stalwart characters whose names I have mentioned. Dennis Small, who will present some of the work we're doing in the United States, to make clear the principles of economics, to people who have been unfortunately poisoned, had their minds almost destroyed, by studying economics today. This will free you from that.
Also the question of the environment, where I described the Noösphere and Biosphere, this is something I think Jonathan will deal with from the standpoint of Riemann: It is, that the increase of productivity does not come so much from what you do, on your job; the increase of productivity comes largely from the environment which is created around the job you have. Just as the development of electrical power, even if there were no change in production, is one of the greatest single sources of the increase in productivity. So, therefore, the environment which people ignore—that is, the creative environment—is the most important, and I'm sure Jonathan will take care of that quite adequately. We've discussed it a lot, and I know he's well prepared.
Thank you.
