The Brunelleschi Principle
[PDF version of this transcript]
Dec. 8—This is excerpted from the internet broadcast of Lyndon LaRouche’s discussion with the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee on Dec. 7.
Diane Sare: Good afternoon. It’s Monday, Dec. 7, 2015, known by some as Pearl Harbor Day; I’m Diane Sare and I’m filling in for Matthew Ogden, and we are joined over YouTube by Bill Roberts, from Detroit, Michigan; Dave Christie and Mike Steger who are both in San Francisco, California; Kesha Rogers, from Houston, Texas; and Rachel Brinkley from Boston, Massachusetts. And here in the studio, we have Ben Deniston and Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC Science Team, and of course, Mr. LaRouche.
And I imagine you have some words for us:
Lyndon LaRouche: Yes, I do. On the beginning of the past week, on Tuesday, I ‘incompleted’ a thing that I was doing, because it got out of order. But what I did was present the actual case of Brunelleschi; and Brunelleschi’s importance in the whole history of science is unique. So he’s not something like a fill-in in any sense; he created a completely new conception of what mankind’s mental powers are. And nothing had ever been done like that, up to that time, that we know of,—maybe scattered things, or so forth,—in history.
But what the problem today is, that most people have no understanding,—even people who are called scientists have no comprehension whatsoever of what Brunelleschi’s work was based on. And I spent a good deal of my life, both in direct education on this thing, and also in doing research, which I did with my friends in Italy who were specialists in this also. And so, even to this day, the average person has no comprehension of the principles of science of Brunelleschi. It’s just backwards. What happened is, of course, the collapse after Nicholas of Cusa; he was pushed aside from history for that time, and the whole thing was a terrible thing.
 creative commons/sailko
Brunelleschi’s dome, as seen from the bell tower nearby.
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And Leibniz played a very crucial role in repairing that damage, but it was not adequate. He did a great job, but it was not adequate on this point. And so therefore, I had spent a lot of my life, from that point on, on Brunelleschi. And most people today,—even though Brunelleschi is a well-known name among scientists,—the interpretation of his work is often mixed up, screwed up.
A New Factor in History
Because the difference is that people think that history can be recorded as a simple continuity. That does not work. Because most of history is breaks, breaks in human history; and evil periods and broken per?iods came into existence in the history. And so then what Brunelleschi did, was that he brought in a concept of science, which is unique in terms of what is known today. Most people who were educated in this, have no comprehension whatsoever of what Brunelleschi did. It’s all available there for people, if they were to study it enough; and it was brilliant. It was absolutely unique. And so I would say today, the problem is that in our organization in itself, and other locations, that the lack of understanding of the work of Brunelleschi is the reason for the source of the stupidity shown by even many of our own members in this thing. And therefore, it’s extremely important that we realize that we are facing a great change threatening us. And the Obama Administration is an example of the great danger to the existence of the human species.
And this kind of thing which is expressed by the work of Brunelleschi, is actually the solution, the key to the solution to understand actually how things were intended to work.
And so we have mostly in our organization, our organization has no real comprehension; most members have no comprehension of what Brunelleschi did, of the importance of what he did. Even though all the work is published, it’s there and so forth, but it’s not done. And therefore, I think, one of the things that is a weakness in our own organization, is our failure to understand an actual comprehension of Brunelleschi.
Sare: Well there are two aspects of his work that I was reflecting upon this week, as you were speaking and discussing it. One is his design which is perhaps the most famous of his work, which is the Dome in Florence, where people have assumptions, like your wife referenced the Communist Party wanting to fill in the holes; but his understanding of harmonic ordering principles of the Universe, and also the necessity of having more than one principle, as Kepler did as well, which is not just visual, but it’s two senses, you could say. And the assumption by people who haven’t done this work, or haven’t studied it, is that it was just,—things didn’t precisely mesh, and therefore he made a mistake, or he didn’t know what he was doing. As opposed to saying perhaps the people making that assertion are the ones who don’t know what they’re doing, because they haven’t bothered to try and understand the principles of the Universe, as a living, developing growth process.
LaRouche: The problem is also, more particularly, the lack of a continuity in the experience, even under his work. He was not wrong in anything he did, but the people who have studied him often are completely mistaken. Because what happens, is, as I emphasized in my remarks on this last Tuesday,—is that you introduce a new factor in history. And what I laid out on Tuesday,—what I started to lay out there,—is that all these things do not have a continuity.
Why? Because if you look at the actual history of nations, you’ll find there are breaks, very significant breaks; of Charlemagne is an example, all these kinds of things, they were all breaks, so there was no continuity! So the idea that you know the past, on the basis of your experience of a trend in things,—but the trend is not the maker. And Brunelleschi made it very clear, that you had to get rid of all these assumptions that there’s a continuity in history, a simple continuity, where one part of the society goes to the next part of society. What there is, in fact, has been great breaks, like Brunelleschi, who has concentrated on that issue, the great breaks in history up to that time.
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The tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, built between 1182 and 1215 in the Aachen Cathedral, which Charlemagne had commissioned during his reign (800-814).
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And most people have no understanding, and I think most members of our own organization have no comprehension of what this issue is. They don’t understand him. What happened later, at that point, when he was dead, he’d been freshly dead,—people just lost it, they had no comprehension. You got implications of that from Kepler. You have implications from Kepler in particular; but especially, Leibniz. Leibniz is the great figure, who actually gives you the greatest degree,—and Shakespeare,—gives you the greatest degree of continuity of mankind, for the span of Shakespeare’s life. He had a comprehension of this kind of thing.
Sare: Well, the other point that came to mind was that people think of this Dome as being part of the architecture of the church. But, if you go to Florence, what you discover is that the Dome is the architecture of the entire city; that it has actually created a certain dynamic, because of its presence. So it wasn’t just an organization of the church, per se; it was actually an organization of the population of the time. And to the present, because it has that effect even to this day.
All Progress is in Leaps
LaRouche: He was the only one who had the competence to do that. [laughter] That’s the fact of the matter! He had this particular competence. And nobody among his contemporaries had any systemic comprehension of this. None.
 Brunelleschi’s dome in its Florentine setting.
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But the point is that what he represents with his method, is the only valid method for trying to understand what mankind today, means. That’s where the problem comes in. And they all say they want to be practical. They want to pass examinations. They want to get this. . . .
So what I’m stressing,—I will go back at this, and get this thing pushed through, at least in a simplified way so that the members understand something about these things. Because most of our members have no comprehension of what the meaning of all this is!
They don’t have enough history, for example. If you don’t know people in history, leaders in history, you really don’t understand what the whole story’s about. Because the breaks are very important. And even come up to modern times, for example, the importance of these developments is unknown. Even people in Germany who were involved in developing the water system, had up till that time, no understanding of what this was all about.
And so what the greatest problem is, is that we have people who say they’re scientists, or at least they’re experts simply, and they don’t know what they’re talking about. Because they don’t understand that there are breaks in man’s knowledge in the course of history. And it’s extremely important today, that we have an understanding of that now, because we’re dealing with a global process. And you cannot understand the global process, unless you understand how the breaks in history function to shape the way that history actually works.
Jason Ross: The need for Brunelleschi, at least for what he had done at the Dome, had been set up actually a half-century earlier, when the decision had been made to build the Cathedral, in such a way that eventually, that sort of Dome would be required, even though no one at the time knew really how to build it.
So then, when Brunelleschi entered the competition, and when he was chosen to complete and build the Dome. . . .
LaRouche: He had a great sense of humor about that.
Ross: He really did! Because people said, why should we give you the contract? How are you even going to build this? And instead of telling them, he told them a joke about why they weren’t able to think properly to be able to figure it out, but that he knew what to do. And then when he did go through with it, the approach that he took was one that was very important for what Kepler did later. Brunelleschi’s approach to it was not to approach architecture from the standpoint of geometry, but from physics: That you can try to make a shape that you would like to have, but maybe the bricks and the stones won’t agree with that. You actually have to. . . . [laughter]
LaRouche: That’s where the Kepler leap comes into play. You come at a certain point in the century, a difference. And what had proceeded from his work, now you find in Kepler,—you find again the consequence. Then you get a leap again with Leibniz, and so forth. So, therefore, if we don’t understand the leaps in history, . . . you know, the organization of society collapses; repeatedly, it collapsed! But somebody brings it back, but it doesn’t bring it back as a continuity. It becomes a new development, which becomes the liberation, which frees you from the weakness of the preceding culture.
 creative commons/Andrew Gray
Statue of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
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And that’s what you do, like dealing with a Galactic problem today: The Galactic thing, as against Kepler, is a leap.
And you have other things that are leaps. And you can see this in the system. And if we’re going to be efficient, as human beings, to deal with the challenges that mankind faces in space, you have to change your view from looking at it as: “I’m a man; my people remember certain things. These is the way this society, led step-by-step-by-step, to that point of launching.”
Achievements of the Dead
And that does not work! You have to shift your identity from being that you are creating something just because you’re a man at that time, and you have to realize that what you’re actually doing,—you have to shift your point of view to the higher portion, the whole, as opposed to the detail. And that’s where the problem is.
And that’s what happens today: people, they are practical people, and they are therefore stupid people. Because they may have knowledge, but they don’t have knowledge of the process by which mankind progresses. If you can’t understand the Galaxy today, you really don’t understand science.
And now we have to take the challenge of: what’s the Galaxy mean? Or what’s the galactic series, which is another, more complicated version of the whole thing; but that’s the principle; that’s not the complication, that’s the principle.
Ben Deniston: It goes to what mankind really is as a creative species. You know, I think what you’re saying, is that the practical way is treating mankind as if you’re an animal or something, an animal species. You’d be saying, well, to solve the current crisis, we need to just look back at what we did before, and then re-establish what we had prior. Versus, the very idea of mankind is that we can always create ourselves anew, at a higher level.
But I think your emphasis on the idea of the breaks, I think is critical, because it is,—it’s a non-continuity; the creation of a fundamentally higher state of existence, which doesn’t really have a continuity from the other one, and that’s, I think, a reflection of what real creativity is; what a real creative process is, of the generation of something new, which is the product of what the human mind can do, uniquely.
LaRouche: Exactly. . .
Deniston: The human mind has this unique ability to create a new physical existence in the universe, which would never exist without the action of the human mind, specifically to do that. And that’s the substance of what enables mankind to move forward.
LaRouche: And that defines the meaning of mankind. Without that, you don’t get it, so you get leaps. So you get leaps. So if you take Vernadsky, you have one thing, but you have an apparent leap, but it’s not really a leap as such, it’s a culmination of something that breaks loose, as if it had a different significance.
And so you can trace the thing with Brunelleschi, you can trace—well, his antecedents, by going back to his antecedents, you can get a better understanding of what he accomplished.
But the point is, the accomplishment. . . . With the personality of human beings, you can’t say that you located it in the person as such; the living person who dies,—that is not the way you can define the problem. You have to find the connection which creates the leap into progress, as opposed to a continuity. You don’t know what the process is, until you live it and find out what the mystery is; it’s sort of: when you go to Kepler, you get a leap; when you go to the Galactic System, you get a leap. You get all kinds of leaps in the Solar System and through the whole thing itself. And it’s the understanding that this is the mind of man which is creating mankind, not the other way around.
And the problem is: people running around and just saying, “well, I died,” or something. And that is not the meaning of life. And people saying, “well, he had a good life, and that meant this. . . .” is not a good consequence. Because it’s that things burst free as if in pulsation, and you find people die; then you find people who have died, and they made the leaps in terms of what they accomplished by the effect of their own life. And there was no real evidence there that shows you a continuity; until you look backwards.
And when you look backwards, now you see what the connection was. But you didn’t know if beforehand. You only knew it as some signal in terms of the social process, and then you recognize that something new had been introduced. Like Leibniz, for example, did that. And also some other great people did that in the same way.
So mankind is able to reflect on what mankind has accomplished when an interim period occurs. Then you are able to discover something, by recognizing it, when before you had been unable to recognize it. And the idea of the recognition of the future is what’s important; that’s where the continuity lies.
No One Else Ever Did This
Sare: You definitely don’t want to continue in a linear fashion. Because if you say that where we’re going has to be based on this current trend-line, then we know where we’re going, which is the extinction of the human race: So it really is urgently necessary for people to have a conception of a break and a conception of a change in direction, which is a break from what you think is your current status.
LaRouche: Einstein. Einstein made several breaks in his development of his work. Breaks! Actual breaks. And the world around him was completely ignorant of the significance of those breaks. And he understood. With each case, he made a discovery, and the discoveries were successive; but the impulse for doing those kinds of things was there within him. And when he died, we lost track of what he had accomplished.
And that’s where the problem arises. And the problem we have as an organization: we have a bunch of people who think they’re “smarties.” They think that they know things; they think they know things when they don’t understand this issue! What is the progress of mankind? What do we mean by the “progress of mankind”? And that’s where the failure is.
People say, “well, you have to be practical.” And when someone says, “you have to be practical,” I say, “you’re stupid.” And I’m right, every time, right on the mark! [laughter] And it’s not modesty, it’s honesty. So it’s not a question of modesty, it’s a question of honesty: You shouldn’t argue things that ain’t true. [laughter]
So I think this is what I’m concerned about right now, because we can do that, and of course I did a lot of it when I was working in Italy, in particular. We were working on a lot of things of this nature, and we were having a grand old time! We were going out near this area where the Cathedral is, and I just had fun all the time with this thing! It’s just—you know, it’s something you enjoy doing. It’s something you are gratified by the fact you were able to do something, to make a discovery.
Deniston: It seems as if you can look at the Twentieth Century in two phases: You know, people I think maybe more immediately, might recognize the more recent past two generations, where there’s been no growth—we haven’t developed fusion power, we haven’t developed nuclear power. People look back and say, it took 50 years to go from the first flight, first airplane to going to the Moon. And it’s been 50 years since we’ve gone to the Moon, and now we’re nowhere. And it’s a reflection of just this “no progress.”
But I think what you’re raising, is that this is kind of the effect, the result, of two generations prior, when you had this attack on something more fundamental; those are the expressions. The deeper issue is, what is society’s self-recognition of the creative powers of the human mind in mankind? And that’s what you saw viciously attacked with Russell; that’s what Einstein was holding out against.
You’ve obviously spent much of your career, you’ve often referenced that you got a lot of your start going against this “information theory,” and cybernetics, all of this being an attack on recognizing creativity as a true principle, as a true substance; this type of creativity which creates these breaks, we’re talking about, and how that was just viciously attacked in this earlier period around the turn of the century, into the postwar period.
And then this later effect we’re having, of people accepting the green movement; you know, people accepting that! People accepting shutting down our space program, not going with nuclear power. That’s an effect of this earlier process, which erased the recognition of what makes mankind different from other forms of life on this planet. An actual insight and recognition of that. That’s what we have to return to, waging the fight on that battle, not just the effects of that process.
LaRouche: One of the processes in this whole thing which is crucial, is that people become defensive, because they’re up against popular opinion, a formation of popular opinion by societies. And they have these things they believe in, these ideas they believe in as we see in various parts of society. And you realize that they have no conception of what we would call, legitimately, the progress of mankind. Not mankind as something there, but the process of development of mankind’s accomplishments.
And it comes out in the form of leaps. Brunelleschi was really unique in this respect; nobody else ever accomplished anything like what he did, no one had ever accomplished it that way. And you had things from Leibniz, you actually got things from other sources of the same kind of thing. But the idea of the location of man’s creative powers, that’s where the problem comes up: they don’t recognize what mankind’s powers are, as a continuity. The continuity is not an event; the continuity is the process which generates events, progress.
And therefore, when we put people in schools, we educate them in schools, and they become idiots. Why? Because the dog didn’t teach them any better! [laughter]
Man is Not of the Flesh
Rachel Brinkley: You see the correct principle of education in the Pazzi Chapel, which you’ve also brought up, that Brunelleschi created, which was—you made the point that you “sing” to it, and it “sings” back to you. And you also said Brunelleschi got rid of straight lines, which is funny, because an architect uses a lot of straight lines. But he created a geometry that was—an architectural structure that was a harmonic principle, or you sing to it, and it sings back to you.
And then Kepler later brought up this idea, built on the idea of harmony, saying also that harmony is not something that’s in the terms, but it’s in the mind. The comparison of the terms in the mind, so it’s a process in action. So there are also no straight lines there. So you get the idea that he employed a principle which was unobservable, and he made it visible that you could only see when you sing, in his structure.
LaRouche: Yeah. That’s exactly true. That’s exactly how it works.
And you see what’s wrong with education in the Twentieth Century, and beyond. And therefore, if you can’t attack the Twentieth Century, as a practice, for its practice, then you become incompetent, and that’s where the problem comes up. You try to say, “well, I worship an evil god,” that’s what it amounts to saying! Wall Street worships only evil gods! [laughter] And how do we get rid of those evil gods?
It’s like Satan, you know, for example. I think many people in Manhattan find Satanists are running loose in the community.
Michael Steger: That’s for sure. You also raised this question of Leibniz in China, in this discussion of Brunelleschi. And there’s something unique, because if mankind survives into the Twenty-First Century, it will be because of the process of development that China has now initiated, which really does come from Leibniz’s own insights into China; but then the follow-through and development of that by you and your wife Helga, in introducing those concepts into China’s orientation, which have created the potential for a break. And if any nation is dedicated to a Brunelleschi-like development, at this point on the planet, it’s China.
And really, the lack of courage, the lack of commitment of the American people to take on Obama, to take on this Satanic quality, if that can be provoked or inspired, which is I think somewhat what you’re getting at with this “leap” question, this commitment to what mankind is, then you have the potential to consolidate that orientation, a Brunelleschi-like orientation on the planet today. But the lack of that courage, that cowardice of the American people, is the destruction of genius. It’s the destruction of creativity: And that has to be addressed. That’s the strategic failure today, in the United States, this recognition of what mankind truly is.
LaRouche: Exactly! Mankind is not of the flesh. Mankind’s flesh is merely a conveyance, to move things from one place to the other. It is the effect, not the cause. And when mankind sees that mankind is the causal factor, not the other way around. And therefore, you don’t want people to become stupid. And the practice of society in schools today, as in California, in the educational system, is to make people stupid. I think Holly?wood is probably an example of that. In order to become successful you had to be stupid, that is, Hollywood-style.
On the Edge of a Vacuum
Kesha Rogers: I wanted to say, on this principle of the building of beautiful cities,—that’s been a subject-matter that’s come up quite a bit. The one thing that caught my attention when you brought up the whole discussion about Brunelleschi, is the idea and the principle, embodied in what is necessary to bring mankind and bring a culture,—from, as we’ve seen with the United States’ current culture of complete degeneracy,—up to the standards which would be even understood and necessary for how you actually create cities which exemplify the true meaning of human existence, and human creativity? And we don’t have that standard right now.
So even if we talk about the development of these great projects and building beautiful cities, it only would start from linear building blocks of a process,—versus actually, when you brought up Brunelleschi, one of the things that came to my attention was, “Wow, well, why wouldn’t we have everything start from having created a cathedral built from this very Brunelleschian principle that would expand out, and every part of your city would be built from that foundation; which would start with a totally revolutionary principle in terms of the development of mankind overall?”
So that was something I was thinking about: is that what you just brought out, is something that bears on how we take people out of this degenerate state, and actually revolutionize our thinking about the upshifts in the progress of mankind in that very realm.
LaRouche: Yes. It’s quite relevant.
Steger: Well, it seems to be also the same idea in principle governing what you’ve done with the Manhattan project, Lyn, the same kind of concept of what we’re generating, and developing that as a unified characteristic of a nation, from a higher principle.
LaRouche: Exactly: That’s what I think is essential for me, to do! Is exactly that. Because most people in society today, in the trans-Atlantic region and others, don’t have any comprehension, of what the meaning of the human mind is. They just don’t have it. They see it’s a shadow, all they see is a shadow, they don’t see a substance.
Now the substance is not of the flesh, it’s not of material as such, as such. But the effect reveals itself as an effect. And once you say, “this was an effect,” not “this was the truth, or this was the actuality,” it’s the effect, as such; and that’s what you get with Brunelleschi. All his work was all of that nature. He was a man way ahead of all of his time, way ahead! And his creativity was forceful, and Kepler depended actually on the implication of the radiation of Brunelleschi. He would never have accomplished it without Brunelleschi.
And when Kepler got onto this question about the Solar System as such, he got into a completely new area. Then he died; Leibniz was born shortly after that, relatively speaking, and then you have the development of Leibniz. Then you have the death of Leibniz. And you had an anxiety, because there was no new Leibniz That’s what happened; we had approximations of people who had these kinds of skills. But Leibniz was irreplaceable.
And everybody was awed, all the evil people were awed—“is he going to die! Is he going to die? Is he going to die?” And they were all betting on his dying.
But what they did, is they took the idea of his death, and said, “This is removed.” What he had accomplished: “This is removed, history has ended. History is shut down.” And you had, in history,—you got lots of these things of collapsed culture, and the people of those cultures, were dead, in general—dead! Then somebody would come along in a new Renaissance, and in that condition somebody would rediscover what had been lost. And so the history of mankind is a series of leaps of this nature, where society seems to make progress, and then fails. There’s a gap; there’s no newness to the whole process. Then, time passes, and if you’re lucky, then you get a new Renaissance. And if the Renaissance is not sustained, then you get another vacuum.
And what we’re living in, is we’re living on the edge of a vacuum, which can be a source of destruction of mankind, unless we change our ways and fill in what Brunelleschi did in his way. Because when Brunelleschi had died, and Cusa had also died, you had a period of the most evil religious beliefs, lasting a whole century. Until Leibniz emerged, and became the signal, or the signator, of discovery.
 From a fresco by Masaccio (1401-1428) in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, a purported portrait of Filippo Brunelleschi.
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Then when Leibniz died, then the forces of evil came back into play; then you had some people in society who would sustain the intention, but you have to think of the number of Presidents in the United States who were evil. A whole stream of Presidents of the United States were all evil! A whole bunch of them; and you saw that recurring again, as an era of evil.
And then Abraham Lincoln’s intervention, with his backer and so forth. And what’s happened is exactly that. Then you find that the people who are most important for the future of mankind are killed! Not fortuitously, but intentionally.
Why Einstein Was a Threat
And so therefore, these kinds of understandings are the kinds of things that enable people to really scrape together the information they need. But the point is, mankind is not located in the flesh as such; mankind is located in the creative powers of mankind. And it’s those creative powers and the nature of those creative powers as a relative standard, which is the thing that defines the purpose of the existence of mankind.
Rogers: One thing you see is a defeating or rejection of sense-certainty, or this empiricist Cartesian view of the universe, a rejection which was expressed as maybe you could say, a continuity amongst all of these great figures.
LaRouche: Yes, it is, but it’s in passing, because if these people die, and they don’t have people who maintain the continuity of this legacy, then society collapses. And what happens is, you’ve got the killing of the Kennedy brothers, for example. What was the effect of the killing of the Kennedy brothers? Who did it? Why was it done? What was the effect? Where was the solution?
We tried to do it, with Reagan, we tried to do that. I was assigned to do that. And when Reagan was then shot, he was weakened,—that is, his ability to function and to control the society was weakened; he still had his own opinion and so forth. Matter of fact, the Bush family crowd tried to make a mockery of him, and he opened up his new speech that he was going to give, and he began a series of jokes: And the Bush people said, “uh-oh! Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it, that’ll backfire!”
Unfortunately, that’s what happened. So I got dumped just exactly for that reason; I was dumped precisely because I was continuing that purpose.
Sare: Well, they attempted to kill him; you were dumped; Indira Gandhi was assassinated, there were a series of efforts to prevent the development.
LaRouche: Absolutely. Her murder, by the British, coincided with putting me in prison. The same purpose. And the President was working with her. I had made the contact for establishing this standpoint of cooperation between the President and her. Shut down! And the history of India was turned down, because of the break that followed her assassination,—same thing.
There are similar aspects, in my direct knowledge which I know of, of just exactly this kind of thing.
Bill Roberts: Einstein’s a good case of this, too, because you can see why Einstein was so brutally attacked if you understand his appreciation, for example, for Kepler. Because he knew exactly what Kepler was doing; he praised Kepler as knowing that a further understanding of the organization of the universe, had to be found in the mind, first; and then you find it in the universe.
But in order to get there, you have to painstakingly, get rid of, basically, all the crap; all the Aristotelian garbage that had been built up over hundreds and hundreds of years. So you can understand exactly why Einstein was seen as such a threat, why he was attacked, and why his leadership couldn’t be allowed to be the current that people would follow in the United States and other places.
LaRouche: Yes. And that is what we have to,—as we assembled here, in this moment,—what we have to be concerned with. You have to see that there is no simple continuity, of human development; but that there are a succession of leaps, and that those leaps continue—just imagine that Kepler had lived, instead of dying when he did; dying of lack of nutrition essentially. And he was wandering around there on the field of battle, trying to play a role for his own family and for other purposes. And there was a discontinuity.
And between the death of Kepler and the rise of Leibniz, you see the gap. And the importance of that gap, the fact that it was a progressive process, and if you get into the details of Leibniz’s development,—which has a whole history in itself, it’s actually brilliant. But then, when there’s no one to continue what Leibniz represented when Leibniz was dead! And the forces of evil were delighted! They were screaming around “is he dead yet? Is he dead yet?” And only when they were assured that he was actually dead, they triumphed! And that became the core of the Eighteenth Century.
Pearl Harbor and Today
Sare: One thing before we close today which I did want to ask, since you’re the only one among us who was actually present and living when Pearl Harbor was bombed,—and that is today,—and I think that was a break in a certain direction, if you have anything you’d like to say about that?
LaRouche: Well, absolutely! I think we had great generals, including one who dealt with the Pacific Ocean region, MacArthur. And what did they do with him? They bounced him out! He was the greatest military leader that we had at that time: They bounced him out. What happened as a result?
And this is how it works! And therefore you have to realize,—like the members in Congress,—what members of Congress are really evil clowns. Not because they’re evil as such, by intention—though some are—but because they’re stupid! And stupidity is a crime!
Deniston: Especially if you’re in charge of a nation.
LaRouche: Yes. And this Obama thing is something which is a British thing. The whole thing, the whole problem that we’re dealing with, was and is and has been the British system. The British system is the thing that has to be destroyed. And Obama’s a key tool of the British system, so his career has to be destroyed, permanently! So nothing like him should ever come back again into the history of the United States. And that’s what the problem is.
We have to understand what the problem is, and you have to understand it, because if you don’t understand it, then you’re not capable of dealing with the threats against humanity.
Deniston: And you look at Obama, and I think it’s just worth emphasizing your demonstration of the validity of the method you’re talking about now, because you didn’t wait for popular opinion to go against Obama; you didn’t wait for him to start droning innocent civilians; you knew that this was what the principle was, and you went after him, you led the fight against popular opinion. You were kicking the crap out of our own members and the general population on this war threat, years ago, when the popular opinion evidence wasn’t there. That’s been crucial in actually getting out front in leading the fight against this now. I mean, it was the winter of 2011-2012, that you were calling out the threat on this thermonuclear war under Obama’s watch.
So it really is, I think, what you’re saying about the role of individuals in actually creating an intervention, not just going with popular opinion. . .
LaRouche: Yeah. The absence of what we should have been a supply, or shall we say, a flow of discovery, and it’s the flow of true discovery, as such—not, “I have discovered this”—but the fact of the process of discovering something new. You don’t discover something as a fait accompli; you come to understand a revelation—“Oh! This is what I must do. This is the vacuum, I’ve got to deal with this vacuum; I’ve got to satisfy that vacuum,” and that’s how mankind progresses.
That’s what Einstein did; just take his history of his discoveries, it worked exactly that way. He went with a series of events of discoveries. And each one he rejoiced in,—then he said, “well, that’s not adequate, I’ve got to do this next.”
And that’s the way things work. But if you take the point, and you don’t have a decent education system,—like the California education system, it’s destructive! And if the pupil in the school system tries to open his mouth for an independent view or question, he could be bounced! In Manhattan, leading teachers in Manhattan are bounced, for this kind of reason!
And therefore, that’s the thing we have to concentrate on, the general thing we have to deal with. Because we have the ability to stimulate progress; but then you’ve got the forces of evil, in the educational system, for example, in Wall Street and so forth. Garbage! Absolute garbage! Degeneration. And this is what destroys mankind. That’s what frustrates mankind. And that’s why it’s important to kick what has to be kicked, and kick it far away from where it is.
Sare: All right. Well, that’s a good challenge. [laughter] Is there anything else? I think we’ll accept that as the challenge for the immediate future. So with that we’ll sign off: Thank you for joining us, and stay tuned to larouchepac.com.
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