November 26, 2007

LaRouche to Youth

Your Mission Is To Learn To Think Like a Real Human Being

Editor’s Note: EIR is publishing these remarks by Mr. LaRouche for the first time.

This is an excerpted and edited transcript of remarks delivered by Lyndon LaRouche to members of his LaRouche Youth Movement in Los Angeles, California, Nov. 26, 2007. Subheads and embedded links have been added.

On the 25th of this past July, I announced that we had already entered the closing phase of the great collapse of the world economy.[fn_1]

The concession has now been essentially made in most parts of the world: The system has collapsed. It’s in the death agonies. It’s going to flop around on the sand a little bit and in the swamps and wherever it inhabits—but this thing is now finished.

Various states, such as China, have responded to the event which occurred in this location, and it has shaken the world.[fn_2] At the same time that China was announcing the significance of the conference we had here and the address they gave, came their admission that the system is dead. We are in the final phase, the closing phase, of a world monetary system which died effectively between August 15, 1971, and 1972. The system is now dead. It’s just flopping around, the way dead things sometimes do.

This means that we are entering a completely new phase of history. It also means a great psychological change in the climate of the world and in the United States. No longer are people going to be able to react the way you found them reacting in the recent period. But you don’t have to be panic stricken, you don’t have to be anxious, you don’t have to be terrified, you don’t have to be hysterical—we’re winning.

You don’t have to jerk around. You don’t have to be afraid. They may come to kill you, but you don’t have to be afraid of other things! You know, just this minor thing: they might kill you; that’s all. They would like to torture you, but they hate you too much to torture you—they want to get it over with, they want to kill you now!

So now everything is on our terms, and that’s the way you have to handle it. Your problem is to be right. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t get jerky. Don’t go wild. Don’t scream. Be cold blooded, enthusiastic, and it’s yours. Take it. They have no solution for this thing. There’s no master plan they’ve got that’s going to get them out of this mess. They have no solution on their terms. It doesn’t exist. It’s either our terms or they go to hell. They may go there anyway, but….

That’s where we stand. Now you have some people who get anxious, particularly young people, because their parents are insane. They don’t listen to their grandparents, so they just get panic stricken [panting] like a puppy.

But you don’t have to be anxious. We’re right. The battle plan is not complete, but what we’re doing is the only right thing there is to do. They were wrong. We are right. Now you have to be Daddy. You have to take these guys, in a sense, spiritually by the hand, and lead them to safety. These are your dumb sheep, and you’ve got to get them to safety. Don’t worry about the kangaroos, we’re working on the sheep.

That’s the really significant thing. We have won. We have won a battle. As I’ve declared for some time, this system, as it was put into shape in 1971–72—the post Bretton Woods system—was doomed. It was just a question: Would they wake up to that fact and change back? Reform in the direction of the Roosevelt conception I proposed? Or would they go to doom? They chose to go to doom. They have reached their destination. There’s no hope for their system, and we have no reason to compromise with their system.

We have to be concerned with the human race. Because if this thing goes the way it’s going, with no change from the current direction of policy, as is typified by the presidential campaign out there now, then the whole civilization goes into a dark age. And when you consider what will happen in a world population of over six and a half billion people when the system collapses—a dark age means a collapse of the world population down to levels of somewhere under a billion people within about a generation or so. They can’t tell exactly how fast. But the general idea is clear.

So it’s our duty to save humanity from that scourge. What we have proposed will work. You saw a sample of this and the reaction from China on what happened here, my address here, and that has shaken up the world. It coincides with what is coming out of Europe and elsewhere, with the general admission of leading banking institutions that this system is finished—that this is not a short-term process.

For example, you have the members of the Congress—I don’t know what kind of Congress it is, but it’s a Congress. I don’t know what they do with that Congress. I wonder if they take any prophylactic preparations for the diseases they get with that kind of Congress!

But they all came back from their little vacations, their Thanksgiving vacations, where the turkeys had eaten them. They came back and the world was no longer the same. There’s special ways of avoiding what we’re pushing with the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, so they tried something and it didn’t work. They said: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going to bail out the banks. We don’t need to listen to you. We’ve got a little solution.” They came back and the announcement was: The little solution is in trouble! It doesn’t exist anymore.

Now, what are they going to do? They’re trying to stay with their system and their illusions, their dreams, their fantasies. You know how baby boomers are—they always like to seize their fantasies, and live out their fantasies. “You’re trying to take our fantasy away from us. You want us to be realistic? What are you doing to us? You’re spoiling our party!” (Or potty or whatever it is.)

That is, essentially, the situation. We are at a turning point in history, and you are in a position where you’re part of the leadership of a bunch of frightened sheep, who just lost all their dreams and all their confidence. It’s all spoiled. The important bankers and financiers, the ones who really talk in Europe and elsewhere, are saying the party is over—this system is finished. This is a long one. This is a big one. This is a deep one. And there is no solution in sight from this standpoint. The party is over. The party is ours.

Something for You and Your Age Group

That’s what I’ve been working on for a long time. And so I can speak in the terms I have spoken here, because I can sit back and say, “Okay, that is settled. Who is right and who’s wrong?” That’s just been settled in reality.

Now, that means something for you and your age group: You have to grow up. You are no longer young people going to your parents to bail you out, hmm? You are responsible for the consequences of your action, because people are going to listen to you. They may scream at you, but that means they’re listening to you. That’s why they’re screaming. You don’t even have to speak—they hear you, they hear your voice inside their head: “I know what you’re going to say. I know what you’re going to say. Don’t you dare say it!”

It’s this sense of maturity. You’ve got a highly confused and disoriented population. They don’t think this can ever happen, that we can ever win. Therefore, you’ve got a bunch of mental cases on your hands that you’ve got to give some intellectual and emotional support to, because they’re inherently demoralized. They’re planning to be failures.

I’ve been trying to get you guys in particular to understand what physical economy really is, what the social process is—to understand that you don’t know physical science if you don’t know music, as is demonstrated by the case of [Johannes] Kepler in terms of the solar system, as opposed to simple gravitation. The solar system cannot be understood the way it’s taught in any university. It’s incompetent.

The ‘Basement’ and the ‘Gauss Project’

That’s maturity. We’re trying to achieve that. What we have coming out now—it’ll be some time because this is a very challenging thing I gave to them—we have a group in the basement that’s trying to finish this Gauss project.[fn_3] When they started the Gauss project, I took them aside and said, here’s what I’m getting you into: Gauss is brilliant, and anything he claims to know is, to my knowledge, true, but he never tells you the truth about how he made the discovery, or rarely does. And therefore your job is not to try to learn how to repeat the kind of thing that Gauss published; that’s not the mission. The mission is to discover what Gauss never told you, which is the method by which he actually made his discoveries.

[Carl Friedrich] Gauss was perfectly conscious of the methods by which he made his discoveries, he just didn’t tell people about them. You have to figure it out. So I warned them about this, and they’ve gone at the project in that way. I said: You have to take the connection between what preceded Gauss, and what followed. And that is essentially from [Gottfried] Leibniz to [Bernhard] Riemann. There are some other figures in the process, but that’s essentially it.

Gauss is significant as a connection between the work of Leibniz, the century of Leibniz, and Riemann. And if you don’t understand that connection, if you don’t see Gauss as that connection, you haven’t understood it. So you’ve got to, with your own mind, experience what Gauss actually experienced, but didn’t tell you. And you do that by living through the process of discovery.

They’ve been doing that, and it took them a good number of side roads to travel. And I think now, to my satisfaction, they either understand my statement then or nearly understand it.

It will take a little more time to do this Gauss project. But until you understand that the work of Riemann is a direct continuation of Gauss, if you think that Gauss is somehow in contradiction to Riemann, you’re wrong! Most people think that—they’re wrong.

A Real Geometry Lesson

Let’s take one thing personally about what the problem is of this wrongness. I was very fortunate in life in the sense that I became conscious of this problem at a certain point, on the day I entered the first Euclidean geometry course in secondary school. I walked into the room, and by the time I left that classroom after about 40 minutes, I knew I didn’t believe in Euclidean geometry.

I used to be fascinated by visits to the Charleston Navy Yard, outside of Boston. This was not merely a Navy yard, but being a Navy yard, it had a lot of construction going on there—repair work, construction. I was fascinated by the construction. I was particularly fascinated by the way supporting beams were constructed. And obviously the idiot thinks that—according to Euclidean geometry—if you have solid metal, it’s stronger than if you have metal with holes in it. And you look at girders and you find they’ve got holes in them, or they have cross pieces—which are the same thing as holes.

Now why is that stronger than a solid piece of metal of the same material? Because your solid piece has too much mass in it. It’s like the Eiffel Tower: They keep taking pieces out of it to make the thing stronger, because it has too much weight in it. So the question is: What is the ratio of weight of the supporting structure to the ability to support the structure? The point is, if you can reduce the weight without losing the strength, then you have a stronger structure.

Now you can’t just take pieces out—you have to do it in a certain geometric form, a certain physical form, so that you’re using the material of the structure, like a supporting beam, using it in a more efficient way. So it’s doing more work, but you have reduced the weight. So the ratio of the weight to supporting strength is very important. If you can lessen the weight without losing support in strength, you can support more than you could the other way.

On the basis of that experience, my thinking of geometry was related to this case of the steel girders. We have to know how to cut the holes in these beams in order to build strengthened beams, as an example. By the time I had said that, I looked around the class and I realized I didn’t believe in Euclidean geometry. And therefore, my great advantage in approaching science and many other things is I never believed in Euclidean geometry, in any shape or form. I didn’t waste my time and waste half my life in educational processes trying to believe in Euclidean geometry or Cartesian systems.

Most people who deal with economics or anything else, you’ll find that they consider themselves academics. Like an economic forecaster—what do all these economic forecasters do? They assume that the world is Cartesian. They assume that you have balls floating in empty space—which is the inside of their head actually—and that these balls are projected, and once you’ve set them into motion they go out through infinity on the trajectory you have set. It doesn’t work that way at all. The universe is dynamic! There is no empty space, except in the minds of certain professors and similar kinds of people. There is physical-space-time, not matter, space, and time.

But why would people believe in this Cartesian system or Euclidean system? Because they’ve been brainwashed by Sophists to believe that that’s the way they have to think. I had the advantage in that I never believed it. Most people in society—and you can observe this all around you today—most of the problems of society today involve people believing in unnecessary things, and they carry that baggage around their neck, and it strangles them. They can’t think. Our advantage, my advantage, is I never wasted my time on that kind of garbage. I didn’t believe in it.

If you look at it from that standpoint, you will see why my approach is Riemannian, because the problem was to get rid of this garbage. The assumptions about straight lines, about axioms, postulates—get that garbage out of the way. Define science without that. And then, as some of you know, if you go back to the Pythagoreans, you find that the Pythagoreans with the quadrivium already knew this. Plato already knew this before Euclid ever existed.

Euclid is the guy who ran to Egypt. (Exactly why he ran there, what crime he committed, we don’t know.) He was a member of the Sophist cult. If you think about it, most European science is derived from the Sophist cult of Euclid, from the axioms and postulates of the Euclidean system, or similar system. The Cartesian system adds a factor to it but it’s essentially the same thing. It’s even worse than Euclid. It assumes sense certainty. It assumes that sight is science, and that sight and hearing are different. It says that physical science is sight, and that music is hearing, and they’re different. Poetry is hearing, it’s related to music—it’s not scientific. Rembrandt is not scientific, Leonardo da Vinci is not really scientific because he doesn’t stick to that division, the ancient Greek sculptors are not scientific, because they didn’t stick to that division.

Then you get this business with Kepler, which some of you went through, on the harmonics. What determines the organization of the solar system? What defines Kepler’s calculation of a principle of gravitation in the solar system? It’s based on ignoring sense as such, and realizing that no sense perception or thought of sense perception corresponds to reality.

The Fallacy of Sense-Certainty

The universe is not empty space extended indefinitely. The universe is finite! The size of the universe is “one.” The volume of the universe is “one,” as in the case of gravitation—everything in the universe is affected by gravitation. Therefore, gravitation encloses the universe, and there’s nothing in the universe which is not under the reign of gravitation, or similar processes. The universe is finite! But it’s expanding in respect to itself.

All these ideas are elementary ideas. You find them in the Pythagoreans, in the quadrivium. There are no axioms, postulates, or assumptions. They don’t exist, they’re not needed. You don’t have to assume that more mass in the beam makes it stronger—it actually makes it weaker. Therefore, you realize that the senses—sense certainty—is idiocy.

The world is not what you see and hear. The real world is what your mind is able to understand, by recognizing the fallacy of sense perception as such. What you see and hear is not reality. Your senses are simply like instruments that you develop in science, experimental instruments, and the instruments don’t tell you what reality is. It is the human mind’s ability to integrate the evidence from this instrumentalization, to combine, as Kepler did in the case of determining the planetary orbits, to define the meaning between two contradictory phenomena: sight and hearing. There’s also smell, especially when it comes to what’s taught in schools today.

Sense perception is nothing but instrumentation, in the same way that we build scientific instruments to investigate the subatomic regime, where there is no sense perceptual penetration. So how do you know what’s in there? People say: “Well, it’s Cartesian space.” It’s not Cartesian space. There’s no such thing as Cartesian space. There’s no such thing as all these objects, nuclei, swirling around—that’s not there. The whole thing is a wave function, it’s a physical wave function, which we know by giving up the idea of a Cartesian space.

And so the advantage comes from getting away from the brainwashing of believing in sense certainty and the interpretation that what you think you see and feel and hear is reality. All truth in science is quite different. The same thing is true in economics. There’s no way that you can understand economy in mechanistic terms.

Creativity Is a Uniquely Human Capability

There’s another factor here, which is even more important, and that is creativity. What’s the difference between man and a beast? Beasts don’t have creativity. Any animal species has a fixed relative potential population density. Man does not. Mankind willfully increases the number of people that can live and the quality of their development on this planet. There’s no limit. If we were apes, as some people try to be, you wouldn’t have more than a few million individuals on this planet that would be called human—just like the great apes. We’re pretty much physically like a great ape. Weaker, but the same thing. So don’t monkey around with yourself—you’re not a great ape.

What’s the difference? Great apes can never think in human terms, because they don’t have creativity. There’s a certain kind of creativity in the universe which allows living processes to exist, and shapes their development and determines their capacity—but they can’t think creatively. They’re almost as bad as baby boomers. They can not think creatively. They gave up on it.

Human beings are creative—the universe is creative! There is no Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s a fraud! It’s concocted by a couple of corrupt idiots. The universe is expanding, the universe is developing—it’s going to higher and higher states. We have this solitary Sun out there, all alone, spinning rapidly. When you’re all alone I suppose you do spin rapidly, like a baby boomer looking for a date!

The Sun, in the form of a disk, is spinning out this material, this plasma. What we know of this is that the Sun irradiates the disk, and the radiation we know to be polarized. How do we know that? Because we know the table of elements—you could only get up to iron if the plasma were not polarized. So the solar system is generated like a fractional distillation process, where the material is distributed—just like the Keplerian planetary orbits. The elements up to uranium are generated in this way.

But then it goes through an evolution. Because this chemical table is part of a process of creation—the Sun doesn’t have the chemical table, the Sun produces it. It’s a process of the whole solar system which produces this chemical table.

But life is not there yet. There is potential, there are useful things for life in the Periodic Table (some elements and some isotopes are specific to life, others are not). Then you get living processes coming where there was once just the Sun. Then you get, in this process out of living elements and living processes in the solar system, you have the emergence of living human beings—who can think.

But you don’t just have the solar system, by itself. You have a galaxy. The weather in that solar system is largely affected by something in that galaxy called the Crab Nebula, which is an exploded star, and it sends what’s called cosmic rays. The Crab Nebula protects you (sometimes) because you’re getting a lot of dangerous radiation coming out of the Sun. You have to watch out for that Sun. And sometimes the cosmic ray radiation coming directly from the Crab Nebula interferes with the solar radiation hitting Earth. And therefore, you have a somewhat safer environment because something out there in the galaxy, far away from you, is intervening to save you.

Then you have other galaxies, you have hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, and the whole thing is one big dynamic mass of interaction. These are not little separate things all by themselves—they’re interacting. The whole universe is interacting! The number of physical principles in the universe is increasing! The organization is going to a higher state constantly. The universe is anti-entropic. The law of entropy is a dirty lie. The universe is improving itself, and the job of man is to improve himself.

This is a far different conception of man, and of our life, than you find among the typical baby boomer today running around without his seeing-eye dog to guide him. And that’s what we have to understand about ourselves. That—if we are human—we are the instruments whose nature and behavior corresponds to this universe in which we live, which is anti-entropic. A self-developing universe, a self-developing human species. The work of the individual in society, essentially, which gives the individual value, is the individual’s contribution to this anti-entropic development of mankind itself, which enables, from one generation to the other, mankind to achieve higher states of existence—to support a larger population, in a better state, with more significance to face the problems of the universe.

We are like the local repairman—the old Maytag repairman went out of business and most of us are sitting in the basement doing nothing. We’re not supposed to sit in the basement and do nothing. We’re supposed to get out there and do things. We’re supposed to change the situation, to make mankind’s role in the universe better, more powerful. And to find an immortal meaning in one’s life—that what you contribute by creativity lives on after you, efficiently, and continues to improve mankind’s power, to improve the universe.

No monkey can do that, and very few baby boomers either, because they gave it up. They gave up the essential quality of humanity: The creative powers of man, the development of creative powers. They say: “We accept Euclid, we accept a fixed universe, we can’t change.” And then you say: “Wait a minute, I smell something here.” And you go back to the Prometheus trilogy of Aeschylus, and you say: “Wait a minute, I just saw what they’re doing to us.”

We are told we are not allowed to think in terms of creativity—that we are lower forms of life; we should never have started to use fire; we should all be environmentalists, like Al Gore, of “16 tons and the company store.” That’s what he is! He’s the guy that owned it, that’s what the song is about. He’s the swine who owned it and did those dirty things. And he’s getting to the 16 tons himself right now if you ain’t noticed that! And he ate the company store!

We’re not supposed to be like Al Gore, we’re supposed to be human. The problem with the baby boomer, especially the ’68er is that they believe in environmentalism. If you’re human, you believe in changing the environment to make it better, not in protecting it from change. That’s the Prometheus issue. What’s wrong with this society essentially, morally, at the bottom, is the environmentalists. That’s why the ’68ers are such a menace, because they’re environmentalists. Satan is an environmentalist. He’s made in the image of Gore.

Live Your Life for a Necessary Immortal Purpose

Your problem as a generation, now that you’re coming into your own as a result of the things that happened over the weekend, your destiny is not to think of yourself as like a baby boomer. That’s poison for you, that ruins your reputation, among other things. You’re supposed to think as a creative person, as a creative being, whose purpose in life is, by the time you’ve passed on, to contributed something which will make the universe better after you. That’s your sense of identity, that gives you the courage to do what you have to do.

It’s like the soldier who dies in battle for the sake of his country. Why should he die? Does his life lose its meaning because he died in battle? Not necessarily. If his struggle and sacrifice means something for the condition of mankind afterward, his mission is immortal, and his life is justified. Baby boomers are essentially cowards for just that reason, they have no raison d’être. They may have excuses for the right to live, but they have no purpose in their life. There’s nothing in them, according to their intention, that is going to make the universe better when they’re dead. They will not have contributed anything to make the universe better. They will say: “We want to keep things going the way they are. We want to have more pleasure, less work. We want to have this; we want to have that.” They have no sense of immortality.

How does a baby boomer want to die? They don’t want to know what’s coming. They don’t believe in their own children. As they get older and get weaker, they have no sense of commitment to their own children. Why? Because they’re thinking about dying. They’re thinking about how they’ve got to get their pleasure while they can, because there’s nothing that comes after them, for them. They want death to come silently, without purpose, and not be able to ask themselves the question of what their life has meant. They don’t like their children anymore. They may like them how they like toys, but they don’t like them—they don’t have a sense that their children and their grandchildren are the meaning of their life.

We contribute to coming generations to make humanity better, to protect it, against decadence for example; to enable coming generations to achieve things for humanity that the present generation have not achieved. And we think of our life not as an experience, but as a mission.

The mission is to do something, to change the world for the better, and to understand that happiness consists in doing that. This is what Leibniz meant by the “pursuit of happiness”—to make your life meaningful, a meaningful existence for humanity afterward; to build a new society out of this mess we’re now living in; and not to let humanity make the kind of mistakes we’ve made in the past two generations since Harry Truman.

That’s what it’s all about. And that’s why the science is essential. That’s why the music is essential. That’s why all these things are essential: To develop yourself into the kind of instrument man should be, the individual person should be. Not to behave like baby boomers who are destroying themselves, discrediting the meaning of their very lives, and who don’t want to have any change in that—they want to cling to the illusion that life and current policy is good—it’s not!

What’s good is the great creative exemplars, creative scientists, creative artists, who have contributed something of permanent value to humanity after them. Their life is justified, there’s a good reason for them to have lived. Ask yourself! Can you say to the universe: “I was needed. I had to exist. There’s a mission I performed. There’s a purpose in my life—a purpose which lives beyond me.”

So don’t get trapped into thinking you’re replacing the previous generation. Your job is to become what man must be. Your job is to be horrified enough by what the baby boomers have become, what their generation has become, to never let this happen to mankind again.

We are in a nation which has a peculiar advantage in its history for that purpose. Because of our nation, we have the opportunity to make this kind of change. And the opportunity is now put in our hands by these events. Things are going to change. Our job is to see that they do change—not just change, but to not lose sight of what it is to be a human being, a real human being; to live for an immortal purpose for mankind in the universe; to make the universe a better place to live in; to make humanity a more useful part of the universe; to rejoice in what our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will accomplish, because we have made it possible for them to do that. Never get talked into an accommodation to baby boomer ideology—that’s poison, that’s death.

Seek a higher mission. The mission of the poet and the scientist, the mission of beauty in that sense—the beauty of being a human being, the kind of being that is capable, as no animal can, to make the universe a better place to live in, to improve it, to change it for the better.

So that’s what’s put in our hands. We have now a chance, only a chance, to win. And if we win, let’s not waste it. Let’s see we never go back to what has happened in these recent years.

Have fun!

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