August 7, 2011

LaRouche on
‘The Pact of the Human Soul’

Editor’s Note: EIR first published this dialogue in Vol. 38, No. 31, August 12, 2011, pp. 12-15.

Aug. 18, 2024—In the following dialogue, edited for presentation here, Lyndon LaRouche develops the idea that true courage stems from an individual’s love for humanity, and that human creativity is the characteristic that makes mankind the immortal species.

Question: We’re facing an extraordinary change in human history, to the magnitude that we’ve never been faced with before. And what is unique about our situation, is that you, Mr. LaRouche, have forecast exactly the position that we’re in. And that is the way out of our situation, if people have the competence and the confidence to view history in the way that you do.

So, while these are extraordinary circumstances, this is an inflection point in human history, and I think it’s worthwhile to discuss where we are, how we got to this point, and what we have to do immediately, at this point now, to secure a future, a meaningful future.

Lyndon LaRouche: Yes. Well, the key thing, first of all, is, you have to have a certain degree of courage. It’s a special kind of courage, not just the courage of the soldier as such, but a courage to face ideas, real ideas, and to realize that the human species is an absolutely unique species; there is no species other than man, to our knowledge presently, which is capable of actually creative thought. Animals can be creative biologically, and in effects of biology, but animals can not create new conceptions of mankind.

For example, the way life works is, it’s the imagination, the creative imagination, as typified by great drama, typified by great music, and things of that sort. This area of the imagination is like a playground, in which people are trying to come into a conception of ideas, conscious conception of ideas, human ideas, and it’s in this domain that science comes. Science comes out of this imagination, the creative imagination, out of metaphor, this kind of medium.

And out of that, you have the struggle of mankind. We’re always going from an earlier condition of mankind: In the past, there were 2 million people maximum population, up to this time. And we’re living in that kind of environment, where mankind is experimenting. We also live in a universe that’s creative. The universe is never constant, contrary to the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Contrary to that, it’s always the creative imagination of mankind. It’s also the innovation in biological experience: That this creativity is what must, and does, move mankind forward. In other words, if we try to be the same kind of species all the time, exactly, as animals do, we, like animals, would die out. Matter of fact, about 98% of the animal life on this planet, and other life on this planet has died! Is dead! The fossils!

It Is Creativity That Moves Mankind Forward

Only mankind has that specific quality of being able to self-develop in such a way that mankind is potentially an immortal species. And our job, in leadership, is to provide that factor of immortality of the human species, which lies in human creativity. And what’s happened, essentially, is the effort of a ruling force in society which wants to control mankind—the so-called oligarchical principle—to limit mankind’s numbers, to prevent mankind from knowing too much science, too much progress, and always to keep mankind down, underneath the control of an oligarchy. And that’s the oligarchical principle.

So the main struggle of mankind has this twofold character: First of all, mankind can and must develop, in the sense of scientific progress applied to man’s condition. It must change. It must change inside the universe. It must be truly an immortal species, one that survives, where ordinary species would die out and become extinct. So that’s the great struggle.

And so therefore, we have a struggle against ourselves, in the sense that we have to make these discoveries and implement them. We have to struggle, at the same time, against the oligarchical tendency in society, which is to keep mankind down, just as we’re seeing with the British Empire, or Obama, who’s a British agent, now. This is the enemy of mankind!

And the problem is: Will mankind show the courage, first of all, to recognize the improvements that must occur for mankind’s benefit? Secondly, we must resist evil forces, such as this President Obama! He’s evil! He’s nothing but evil in everything. He oozes evil! And I’ve been in this business for a long time, struggling against this sort of thing. And I think I’ve done a fair job; I could probably have done a better job, but that’s it.

And that’s where we are. We are in a process now where mankind’s existence is now in grave danger: If the British Empire and what we have in Europe as governments, or “governance,” as it’s called today, and a similar thing in the United States, prevail, the entire planet will go into a dark age. And it could be a dark age from which mankind never returns. It could be the end of the human species.

And so therefore, our motive is, first of all, to defend humanity, to defend humanity against its own folly, against the oligarchical principle. The second thing is to find in ourselves the power of discovery, first from Classical artistic composition, then going down to the application of that power of creativity to other things, such as science. And those are the great challenges which mankind faces. That is our mission, that’s our duty.

Question: That’s precisely what we’re doing as an organization. This is the challenge to the American people right now: They’re facing this oligarchical principle. They may not know, they may not call it that, but that’s what it is. You can’t explain what’s happening with this President, or with this Congress, in terms of the party system any more, because it’s way beyond and above that. We’re dealing with an historical enemy with a very particular motive, which is to lower the population of the planet. And the American people are faced with that. They’re confronting that. It’s becoming clearer and clearer what they’re handling.

But the challenge to the American people and the challenge to people worldwide is what you identified: which is identifying what man is, identifying what the actual role of mankind is in the universe. Because if we just take on the challenge of the crisis our enemy has created for us, if we just take on the crisis they’ve created alone, there’s no chance that we’ll make it. But if there is a resurgence, and an understanding, or a struggle to understand, what we are outside of the crisis they’ve created—what we are just inherently—there’s real power in that.

Mankind Is an Immortal Species

LaRouche: I’m an older person. I happen to be creative, but there’s much left to be done, even if we apply the existing creativity to solve these problems, which we could solve. But then, I’m going to die. Like all people, I will die. I’m now at an age, where I’m riper for that harvest than I was when younger.

Therefore, the challenge then becomes the transition from you, as an emerging leader in society, and my role, in continuing that, in pushing you and other people like you, to make this kind of creative surge forward. And I will pass on. But we will be participating.

One clear example of that is the role of creativity. For example, we make inventions; a typical example that people can understand: We make an invention; this invention enables mankind not only to increase his power, but also to make up for the problems, the new demands that come upon man—so, this kind of creativity. And the way it occurs in terms of inventions.

I live; as long as I live, I may generate ideas. These conceptions give mankind a chance to move forward. But then the time will come when I will die. Now, two things happen: First of all, if these creative principles, which have been developed by earlier generations, are realized in the future, that means that mankind is an immortal species. We are not personally immortal; but to the extent that we’re creative, we’re an immortal species. And the ideas that we contribute to society are permanent contributions to the human society.

We are therefore an immortal species, based on mortal beings. And the key thing in life is to grasp that connection. To say that we’re creative and die, doesn’t tell us the story. If we, in our own lives, who are about to die, can contribute something that is permanent, which will outlive our death, and be a benefit to mankind in future times, we have achieved the purpose of immortality. And that is the crucial thing.

If people can actually face, with open minds, the fact that we’re each going to die—but look at it in the right way, then we are impassioned to make the contributions, to discover the principles, to do the work that is immortal; Those discoveries of principle which are immortal, which pass on from one generation to the other. And thus, the dead live in the living; because what the dead do, if they have done that in their lifetime, they are alive, not as in the flesh, but they’re alive in principle. They’re part, an active part, of human society.

And that’s the difference between man and the beast. The beasts—we eat beasts! We don’t eat people. Why? Because the person, the human being, particularly the one who participates in these discoveries, is implicitly immortal. And that’s the meaning of life, the meaning of life that even the dead can live, the dead do live, if they’ve lived that kind of life. And it’s that principle that is the challenge to society today.

Look at the whole idea of the Greenie movement. The Greenie movement is a declaration of death. The Greens have no reason to live, because they make no contribution to the development of mankind, in man’s destiny to become a creative species. And by becoming a creative species, [man] becomes an immortal species: That even though we die, we are still participating, through our work, in what is to come. That’s the great challenge.

And this is reconciled, these discrepancies and other things are reconciled, when we think about the nature of human mortality and immortality. And the problem we have in society today, is a lack of that sense of immortality.

The whole Green movement! These are essentially people who have made a commitment to death, to uselessness, to becoming a beast, to creating humanity as an extinct creature, by denying creativity.

And we have to show courage. But it’s not courage in the sense of “we did something.” It’s courage that we have to transmit to our descendants, we have to transmit a commitment to the perpetuation of this process of creativity. And it is that that unites us as human beings: that we die, we’re vulnerable, but we create. And the existence of leaders who maintain that devotion to creativity and its benefits, those are the only appropriate leaders of society. And that’s what we see around us today. That is what people fail to recognize under the present cultural trends.

We have to restore that again, that commitment to the future; that commitment, that relationship between the deceased and the living; the pact of agreement which may be called the “Pact of the Human Soul,” that which transcends mortality.

A Commitment to Humanity

Question: It’s all there for anybody to have access to, and you have people all around the planet who are very interested and impassioned to become political leaders, scientific leaders, cultural leaders. And this, what you’ve just described, is available to people, because it actually is reality.

And therefore, the political fight that has to be waged now becomes defined by that. And it becomes very obvious that the only thing that will work is a defense of mankind in those terms, and everything else will not capture the attention of a younger generation. And if it does, it will only be through some sort of manipulation. Because, whether a younger generation understands it or not, that is the reality that they’re living in, and therefore, this as a subject of a political campaign has to be immediately on the table, explicitly.

LaRouche: Well, you face that yourself, personally. You’re a younger person, just under 30, and you have adopted a commitment, a political commitment of this nature. And that is the reality, isn’t it? So you have a commitment to the progress of society; that’s your meaning of your life.

And that’s the meaning of, for example, my relationship to you, is the same: My job is to create the stepping stones, the process by which you take over. But we take over, not merely by taking over, in terms of a heritage, or some succession, of winning some contest. We take over in terms of passing on the responsibility for continuing the change in the universe, which we must be part of doing.

So, even though I will die, and you will live in this period, I’m satisfied, and you have to have the courage to be satisfied, too.

Question: Do you think that there’s a science to this? What would it be called?

LaRouche: Love. What do you mean by “love”? You mean a commitment to humanity! You see children, you see all kinds of people, and you want them to live, because of what they mean to us. But above all, you want the process of human creativity there, to activate the succession.

So we have to have the courage, to create children; we have to have the courage to accept death when it will come. We have to devote ourselves, in the meanwhile, to those kinds of commitments which mean this continuity of progress. That humans—all life in the universe, in terms that we know it, in terms that we measured in billions of years, all life is creative. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a fraud! Because the existence of living species is constant progress in what we might call the energy-flux density, constant rise in progress. There is no Second Law of Thermodynamics; that’s only for idiots, not for people.

So the thing that ties us, is this courage for progress, the courage to make discoveries, to rise to the new levels of competence, which the continuation of the human species requires. It means putting back the NASA program, other things like that, immediately. Go back to progress! We call it the “Extraterrestrial Imperative,” which it was called by a famous scientist friend of ours. We have to commit ourselves to the “Extraterrestrial Imperative,” in that sense; the kind of progress which enables mankind to go from Earth to other places, to have an influence on other parts of the Solar System and the galaxy. And those are our immediate objectives.

And this goes with the love of children, why you love children, why you should love children, why you should even have them, hmm? is this kind of thing. And this is what we must transmit to one another, from one generation to the next: this devotion, to continuing the struggle for progress.