Dialogue With LaRouche
These are selections from the question-and-answer period following Lyndon LaRouche's keynote address to the Schiller Institute conference, "The Eurasian Land-Bridge Is Becoming a Reality!" held in Kiedrich, Germany on Sept. 15-16, 2007.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: We will have now a half-hour for discussions, and I assume that you are burning with things you want to say about this speech.
Belief in Human Senses Introduces Fallacies
Q: The question I have is very much related to the topic you went into, Lyn. My name is Karsten, from Berlin, Germany, for people who don't know me. I was thinking a lot lately, in working on the breakthroughs of Kepler and his discovery, not only about his discovery as such, but a connection between an axiomatic belief-system you have in working on science, and thinking in general, especially in the field of social relations, or even in economy, which you have often talked about, especially in the latest paper on "Music & Statecraft: How Space Is Organized": How you have certain axioms and beliefs governing social dynamics, certain social processes.
And since you were just now saying, stressing the point that we have to get rid of all the assumptions and beliefs which we've been taught, I was just wondering if that works exactly in same way, when you make a scientific breakthrough, when you sort of see that the axiomatic systems you believed so far, have certain axioms which you only discover after working a certain while, which you then overthrow and introduce a new system. Or, if there's some fundamental difference between a breakthrough in science, and a breakthrough of, let's say, the physical behavior of a society.
Lyndon LaRouche: Well, that's what I've dealt with on this question of music and physical science: that the most common mistake that's made is the assumption that the sense of sight has one independent thought, and the sense of hearing has another meaning. In point of fact, what we should have recognized a long time ago, is that neither sight nor senses are anything better than scientific instruments, and have the same kind of fallacy as scientific instruments. As I cited the case of Helen Keller, the woman who as a child, lost her sight and hearing, and how she was able to develop a sense of social space, physical space, without sight or hearing. And so, the demonstration is that the human mind is the instrument of knowledge, not the senses! And therefore, the dog sniffing at something may not be best way to go, to follow the dog in the way you can go. You don't rely upon sense-certainty. It's the human mind that's important, and the discovery of physical principles is an example of that—real physical principles.
You take the case, for example—the key thing is, Galileo: a fraud and a faker. And the influence of Galileo, who was actually a sort of a high priest for Paolo Sarpi, in developing this crazy system of empiricism, uses one method. But Kepler uses another method: Kepler's thing, especially on the question of his so-called "Third Law," the harmonics, recognizes that there is a different sense organ than either sight or hearing, expressed in the laws of the universe: something which is neither. And that is what he wrestles with, in dealing with this question of the organization of the Solar System.
There are many other aspects of this: Pasteur's work always points in that direction. Vernadsky picks up on Pasteur's and related work and points in that direction.
From the standpoint of Riemannian physics, as opposed to Cartesian thinking, this is rather obvious, to one who's been working in the field. But the problem is, the role of sense-certainty; and it shows itself in bad taste in music. People who like rock music are obviously incompetent as scientists, and I think that's what's wrong with much of our science. Because, if you don't understand that the faculty of hearing is an essential scientific instrument, like an experimental instrument, that sight and hearing are scientific instruments which come "in the box" with our body! Hmm? But they're just instruments, of the body.
It's the mind of man, that makes a discovery. And in the mind of the man, there is no difference between Classical culture and science. They're the same thing: One deals with the aspect, which looks at it from the standpoint of social relations as such, which is art; and the other looks at it from the standpoint of man's relationship to the physical world on which he acts. The dichotomy is the problem.
Balance Between Public and Private Investment
Q: Good afternoon. I'm Michael Molberg from San Francisco. You mentioned the term proper balance between the government investment in infrastructure, and private banking investment or private industry. My question is: How do you go about determining what that balance is?
LaRouche: The way I do it, is very practically. You know, I've had this war of vengeance against bad academic programs. And what I've done is, by getting these teams of young [adults], down in the "the Basement," so to speak, who've been working on various major things in science—they started out working on the Pythagoreans and Plato, and we brought them up to taking on Kepler in two phases; and they're now dealing with Gauss, and Gauss is much more interesting, in a way, than people would think. And they'll go into a Riemann program.
Now, what happens is, you have here individual minds, and they're individual. What we do in the Basement, and there are about six or seven people directly involved in each of these teams: In the Basement, we have them go through the rediscovery, independent rediscovery, of the problem which they're assigned to. We don't give them a textbook to read. We tell them, get everything, get everything, and solve the problem.
So, what you're dealing with, is that the power of creativity, in this case, as in other cases: The power of creativity is a power of the individual, sovereign human mind. It's a potential—it may not be developed, but it's a potential there. Every human being is capable of creativity. It's a sovereign capability of the individual.
On the other hand, you have cooperation required to accomplish common tasks, common tasks including defining policy. So these teams have exhibited that. They each are working, and I do not interfere in it, unless I think it's absolutely necessary to prevent a catastrophe. They do the work themselves, and all the work that they've published, they did. I didn't do it. I set up the framework for them to work; they solve the problem. And they've made me very happy, because I've been convinced all my life that this is the way to educate people, not the so-called "classroom method," but this thing of taking a great challenge, of somebody's great work from before, and really trying to master it! Master how they discovered this. What did they discover? Not how'd they get the "right answer"? But, how did they discover a principle? And it works!
The same thing is true in the economy: You have certain things that are necessary, as in infrastructure, in order to provide a context in which human individuals in society can make their contribution. Including contribution of personal leadership, one's own initiative. Therefore, we want to maximize the role of individual initiative, particularly as it pertains to the idea of principle; and applying principles, to solve problems that other people didn't solve.
So therefore, you want a premium on this power of innovation, of leadership in innovation. But at the same time, you want to provide a structure, which is a social structure, appropriate for this individual action. What we call infrastructure, is essentially the area of society, where the structure provides the optimal opportunity for the expression of the individual initiative. Wherever possible, we want the individual initiative to be made number one, number-one priority. But! In order for it to be a number-one priority, we must first deal with the problem of providing the infrastructure for it.
And, look at the history of mankind, the history of the science of mankind, history of other things—it's always been that way!
The problem is, creativity is not understood: But individual creativity is a sovereign quality of an individual. That I can prove. I've proven it myself. But, what people don't understand—they try to find a mathematical formula, or something like that, by which they can come up with a formula, whether as a mathematical formula, or a rule of behavior, to contain people's behavior in a fixed framework.
Now, in this universe—I agree with God on this, you know—in this universe, the universe is always developing. So anything you already know, is not the answer to something. There's something you have yet to know, that's not given to you by fixed structures. Therefore, you need the individual activity, which is making the changes in knowledge, in insight, which is not built into the system. So that a good system, is one which provides something which is not built into it. It's another way of saying that von Neumann and Russell were idiots, because the idea that they could have a fixed system—there is no fixed system that's good! The universe is not a fixed system. Clausius was a fraud; Grassmann was a bigger fraud. The British science—Maxwell was a hoaxster—all these fellows who talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they're all liars or fools! There is no Second Law of Thermodynamics in the universe! It doesn't exist. So, if you want to be in conformity with the universe, you want a good system to work from, as a platform, but you want the optimal creativity, individual creativity, applied, to improving the platform, and to expanding it.
So therefore, the key thing here is, understand that's the rule (which is my role, hmm?), but at the same time, try to create the circumstances in which a greater percentile of the people in society do that.
I saw this, you know. The large corporation is often too large. You will need, sometimes, large corporations or enterprises, to take on a certain task, as a required task. But, what happens is, the large corporation tends to become bureaucratized, and stultified, so that you take people out of these corporations sometimes, and put them into smaller businesses, and they will do more creativity! Whereas in the large corporation, it'll get killed.
So, you need this balance. There's no formal answer to it. It's, wherever you can find people who are more creative, try to turn them loose, and try to find a reason why they should be turned loose. You know, you see somebody on a job, you say, "This guy's too creative to be doing that. Can't we find something else for him, that will bring out his potential?" You see a potential in the guy, and you find that what he's doing, he's not going to go anyplace, with his potential, in that job. So you try to find another job for him, one that is more likely to bring forth his potential.
And to believe that in humanity around us, that you find in society, there's always people out there, that you can always find among the individuals you know, someone has really got a talent, for creativity. And you try to think about, how can we find a way to get them to express that?
That's what free enterprise should be.
The United States Is Not an Empire
Q: Is the U.S. now an empire like the British Empire?
LaRouche: No, see, it's the wrong sense of empire. The Romantic version of empire is actually false. All empires, that I know of, are actually based on oligarchies. It's not controlled by an organized state. An empire is not a responsible state. It's based on the rule of an oligarchy. As a matter of fact, all empires are based on what was called the Persian model—known to the ancient Greeks as the Persian model.
For example, the Peloponnesian War was a product of this kind of thing. The formation of the Roman Empire was of that form. Actually, if you go back to the Cult of Delphi, which antedates the emergence of Greek civilization in its civilized form, you find that it was always run by financier groups. Because you'll find around the Cult of Delphi, you have these little shrines, which are called the depositories, the treasuries. And then you take the highway from the Cult of Delphi, down to the coast, to the seaport, and you find, what was happening, is you had these ships going out, practicing usury throughout the entire Mediterranean region. And one of these probes went up the mouth of the Tiber, in Italy, in the middle of the Etruscan culture, and found a fortress on a hill. And running short of women, they captured them and raped them, from the nearby tribes. And eventually took over the Etruscan empire and destroyed it—and destroyed all possible traces of the Etruscan empire, to conceal this fact!
But Rome was nothing but a creation of the Cult of Delphi, by this kind of method. And who ran it? It was run on the basis of usury! Financial usury! What was Venice? The Venetian empire was the same thing.
What's the British Empire? It's nothing but an echo—the British Empire was not created by the British! Or by the British population or by the English population. It was created as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, of Paolo Sarpi. And after the fall of Venice, or the collapse of Venice, the Venetian bankers moved up, took over the Netherlands, and then moved in and took over England, with William of Orange! The British Empire was never an empire in the sense of an empire of a nation. The people of empires were never treated as people. They were treated as subjects—not citizens, as subjects! And they were run by an empire, who told them that the bosses knew what was good for them.
For example, my ancestors, my English ancestors, came from the British Isles, the first of them, during the early part of the 17th Century. Another branch came, of course, by way of France. And then later, I had the Scottish and Irish coming in, in the latter part of the 19th Century. Why did they come to the United States? To get out of there! And those who didn't get out of there, were stuck with being there, and being captives of an empire.
The empire is not a representative of a people. It's something which has put them in cages. And if you break the walls of the cage, as immigrants did into the United States, then it's no longer an entity. The animals have fled.
Find Out Who Rabelais Really Was
Q: Hello. I'm Theodore from Lyon in France. I have read a lot on Rabelais, who is a French humanist from the 16th Century. He took the culture of his time, the stories about chivalry which people were reading a lot, which was a very poor culture. But he took the culture of his time to elevate it. And now we have the same problem in the culture of today, with things like rap music. So, I wanted to do the same as Rabelais, by writing some poems, to try to elevate the culture in this way.
LaRouche: Rabelais, of course, was one of my heroes many years ago, decades ago, actually. But you have to think of him in the tradition of other great satirists. And you look at Rabelais, and he's really very interesting, because he's one of the most learned and most able minds of his time—as a physician, and he went through various religious orders, and these sorts of things. And he had an insight into what was wrong with the educational system in Paris at that time—which he had a lot of fights with.
So, I think the difficulty people have sometimes with Rabelais, is they have to step back and look at him, in the same way you look at Cervantes. Cervantes was less developed in some respects as a writer, but this is the same thing. Then you go back to ancient Italy, with Boccaccio, sitting there watching from across the [Arno] river to the scenes in Florence, and imagining the scenes that he describes in Decameron; the scenes that Boccaccio describes from a time of the great Black Death. If you can look down, where I was sitting, into the streets, and treat that as a stage, and then place the things that he's describing on that stage, then you see what he's doing: He's showing you the disgusting characteristics of the population of Florence, which had led into the antecedents of the great Black Death—under the reign, of course, of the Lombard bankers, of that time.
Rabelais, in France, fleeing from one place to the other for his life, as a great thinker of his time, wrote in the same way as you find in the Decameron of Boccaccio—the same kind of thing.
You see this attempt to do the same thing: You have Spain. Spain is a horror-show under the Habsburgs. It's an evil empire, destroying itself. So Don Quixote is written—on what? The king is a fool, Don Quixote; and the rest of Spain are a bunch of dumb peasants, Sancho Panza. And the whole thing is a farce. But here you have a man, who's a very serious person, Cervantes: Cervantes is a veteran of wars, he's a wounded person, he's a skilled playwright. But what does he write? He writes this! It seems ridiculous: It is ridiculous! It's intended to be ridiculous! Rabelais intended to be ridiculous! And so we have with the Decameron, Boccaccio—he's intentionally ridiculous.
You'll find moments like that, something like that also in others, but those are the paradigms. So, enjoy Rabelais, but try to find out who he really was, and what were his times, what were the conditions, and what is he reacting to and how? And then, you can sit back—and you can laugh! You can laugh in the right way, not at the stories as such, but what fools they were!
When you think about the France of Jeanne d'Arc, you think about the France of Louis XI, you think of the great mission, which actually established the first modern nation-state in Europe. Oh, it's based on the principles of the Council of Florence—but, it was the first modern nation-state. And the second modern nation-state, or commonwealth, was that established in England under the inspiration provided by Louis XI. Then you see what happened to France afterward: You see a great nation, which had been a leader in culture in that period, is suddenly degraded into these horrible circumstances of crisis through misleadership and corruption, which were going on.
And then you can laugh, properly. Because your laughter has a higher quality. It's a sense of "this is only silliness, this is only stupidity." And it has happened to a great people and a great nation, this stupidity. This criminality, this degradation.
And that's the highest sense of humor: It's a comédie humaine, hmm? In the best sense. Rather than a Balzac.
How Can the Democratic Party Be Changed?
Q: I'm from the Schiller Institute in Copenhagen. One thing I don't understand, is that you're always talking about how it's important to change the Democratic Party. But how should it be done? I think, isn't it actually more important to change the Republican Party? Because the Republican Party has been taken over, by the so-called neo-conservatives.
LaRouche: Well, the point is, see, when you operate in politics, you have to accept your fate, as I do. I don't accept fate in the sense of submitting to it. But I'm realistic about what the situation is.
Now, the truth does not necessarily lie in your immediate experience. This is the thing that many people have difficulty in learning, and understanding, and it's especially difficult in these times, these times of cultural degeneracy.
But from my time on, I understand cultures, because I think of culture in terms of thousands of years, particularly about 3,000 years of European history. That's my culture.
Now, I know how ideas are transmitted, developed and transmitted in European civilization. I've seen it go down, by reliving those things. For example, you had, at the point of the development of the Pythagoreans, a great development; the immediate followers of the Pythagoreans, and collaborators, a great development. Then—a great degeneracy! The disgusting took over!
But, did it die? Did the good die?
No, the good lived. The good was a thread which came up, again and again, in European civilization. Often over a long period. What is it? It's the connection. What's the connection? The connection lies in ideas, in ideas of experience. And when a people has, in its past, a certain experience which is transmitted in the culture, even through the subtleties of the spoken language, the musicality, stick to it.
The American culture—the American culture, my culture—comes from people who landed in Massachusetts in the early 17th Century. And they began the process which became the United States. Then you had great figures, like Benjamin Franklin and others, who built a nation: the first true republic on this planet. A commonwealth, also, but a republic. With a commonwealth constitution—take the Constitution. The Constitution comes from the commonwealth produced by the authors of the Council of Florence. It is reflected in the great Treaty of Westphalia, the great Peace of Westphalia: That's the commonwealth, to understand it. That's what we believed in Massachusetts, in that period.
That's the great struggle of those who stayed with the cause of the independent United States, as opposed to those traitors who went over to the British East India Company, the Tories, the so-called American Tories.
You take Franklin Roosevelt: Roosevelt was a descendant of Isaac Roosevelt, a banker, who worked in New York City with Alexander Hamilton, against pigs. Franklin Roosevelt, in his graduation proceedings from Harvard University, wrote a paper in commemoration of the work of this ancestor, on the American System. Roosevelt was not some guy who stumbled into office, but someone who found himself in an historic situation, and he took that knowledge, and people who shared it with him—and he saved civilization!
In the Democratic Party today, that tradition still exists as a living tradition. And what we have, in the Democratic Party, in the mass base, is an ability to respond to that tradition! We have people who are cowards, who are cheats, who are traitors, and everything else in the Democratic Party. All parties tend to have those afflictions. But they're in the party, and you take the response that I get on this legislation, on housing and banks, the response in the people is strong. The response at the top of the Democratic Party is weak. At the very top, some people agree with me totally, and are willing to act. They're a little bit frightened. But in the base of the party, the base of the people: They're with me.
And they are with me, because that tradition exists within them, within their culture, from earlier generations. It was transmitted.
Ideas are the most important thing in history. And real politics is based on ideas, not current opinion. And what you're doing, if you're a missionary, or if you're a politician of the type I am, you are reaching out to what you know lies in people, within them, to bring it forth. You don't limit yourself to what you think they're showing as their tendency now. If you try to reform a drunk, it's the same thing: You try to hope there's something human in there, that you can reach. It's the same thing: Can you look into your population, which is behaving like pigs, can you take those pigs and turn them back into human beings? Is there something in them, a streak of patriotism perhaps, which often comes out as an expression of patriotism, can you evoke a patriotism within them, which will bring this quality which is embedded in them as part of their culture, forward, and take over?
So, that's what I do. And I'm doing a fair to good job at it! And we just have to do a better one, that's all.
