THE LAROUCHE SHOW
MySpace, Facebook Turn Youth Into
Cyber-Fodder for New Hitler Movement
[PDF version of this transcript]
Here is an edited transcript of The LaRouche Show of Nov. 2, hosted by Harley Schlanger, Lyndon LaRouche's Western States spokesman, who was joined by two members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, Oyang Teng, whose article "Video Games and the Wars of the Future," appeared in the Aug. 10 issue of EIR, and Cody Jones, a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee. The show airs every Saturday afternoon, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time, at www.larouchepub.com/radio.
Schlanger: On today's program, we are going to examine and dissect the movement which was designed to create a mass-based fascist movement, targetting the youth of America for recruitment. As we will demonstrate, this movement was launched by a gang which is using a model that is centuries old, going back to Paolo Sarpi and Venice. It's a movement which is anti-science and anti-technology, yet it claims to be a product of the so-called high-tech revolution. It's a movement which, while proclaiming to be decentralized and anti-hierarchical, is actually controlled by the highest level of the financial oligarchy. And, while proclaiming itself to be democratic, it's transforming those in the 16- to 30-year-old age-group into stormtroopers, cold-blooded killers for a fascist movement.
I'm talking about two interrelated aspects of the so-called digital revolution: Interactive websites, such as MySpace and Facebook; and violent video games, which are already leading contributing factors in mass murder, as in Littleton, Colo., and last Spring at Virginia Tech University. In remarks last Tuesday night [Oct. 30], Lyndon LaRouche identified these computer cybernetic operations as "mental cemeteries, aimed at trapping the entire youth generation, and turning them into cyber-fodder for the new Hitler movement."...
As you know, a part of my function over the years, has been to look at the culture, or rather the accelerating degeneration of culture, so we can create an awareness of how the present-day financial oligarchy launches synthetic movements to destroy human creativity, reducing the majority of the population to the status of what LaRouche calls "human cattle." One of the things we've discovered is that the ultimate weapon in social control, is to convince youth that they are voluntarily, democratically, and with free will, "choosing" what is, in fact, mental slavery. You two recently presented a forum at a cadre school on the origins of cyberspace as a mechanism of social control, so I'd like to begin by asking first Cody, and then Oyang, to summarize your findings.
Wiener and the Cult of Cybernetics
Jones: Okay. I had centered on the figure of Norbert Wiener, who, people may know, was a student of Bertrand Russell, who committed his whole life to one-world government; who had proposed nuking the Soviet Union, prior to his finding out that they themselves had developed the bomb; and who had written numerous attacks on people like Leibniz and Bernhard Riemann, who are at the foundation of Lyndon LaRouche's own intellectual development and his discoveries in physical economy. And so, effectively, what you have with Wiener, who coined the term "cybernetics," and had developed the whole idea of "information theory," was an attempt, as you had mentioned earlier, Harley, to revive or bring back to the forefront, the tradition of Paolo Sarpi, which is the tradition of eliminating creativity, eliminating discovery, and clouding it over with the idea of "information" and linearization of that discovery process.
And so, what he does in his book Cybernetics, is, he starts off with saying, we can eliminate such things as trigonometry from our investigations in science, particularly as it relates to the computer, which, in effect, is to eliminate that whole arc of development, that LaRouche has emphasized, going back to the ancient Pythagoreans and Egyptians in their work on Sphaerics, up through Riemann's work on hypergeometries.
Schlanger: Well, in doing that, Cody, Wiener is actually following an old model of attacking the original discovery and trying to formalize it, right?
Jones: Right, exactly. And that's exactly what he does. He says, the thing which is more appropriate to dealing with the so-called science of information theory, is to use formulations that come out of Brownian motion, as opposed to elliptical functions, etc. Brownian motion is simply the idea that everything is random, and that everything can be understood by simple statistical analysis. You can't really know principle, you can't know the truth behind anything, but you can get statistical analysis and an idea of how random events will probably turn out.
And so, in doing that, he had, as you said, wiped out the idea of discovery, wiped out that whole arc of development that LaRouche has been pointing to, and replaced it with this formalization, a sort of "flat Earth" view of reality, and created an alternative reality.
Schlanger: In one of his articles, Wiener said the science of cybernetics is the study of effective messages of control. So that's somewhat interesting there. But he reduces human creativity to an interface between man and machines, and says that, essentially, humans are organisms through which bits of information flow and are processed. So that's where you have the destruction of the creative idea, right?
Jones: Exactly. If you look, for example, at the work that's been coming out of the so-called Basement teams [members of the LYM, working on fundamental scientific discoveries, in the basement of a home in Loudoun County, Va.], they've been looking at the development of things like elliptical functions, higher transcendentals—these are things where singularities pop up, as paradoxes from a lower system as you try to approach a higher system. What Wiener does say, is, we can eliminate that, and replace those singularities with infinite approximations. It's tantamount to the idea that you could square the circle: that we can replace the circle with an infinite series of straight lines and angles. And by doing that, you eliminate the actual creative process, and the whole history of the development of modern science.
Schlanger: Now Oyang, why don't you pick up from what Cody has just developed in terms of the framework launched by Wiener in cybernetics. How did that end up getting transferred into the computer revolution?
Teng: Well, I would also just add, in terms of Wiener's work, if you look at the way that he describes the science of cybernetics, he's pretty self-consciously aligning himself with the tradition of Zeus, because he even goes through the parable of Prometheus, but says that the lesson to draw from that, is that every time we make scientific discoveries, it comes back to bite us, and therefore science has to be effectively controlled by an elite; and makes a very big point of saying the entire universe is governed by the law of entropy. And so, if the entire universe is simply a chaotic, random process, then, in that context, he says, we study cybernetics, which are these local areas, where certain systems are trying to fight this tendency toward disorder. But the effect being, that you eliminate universals from any consideration of cause; that you're simply looking at what he calls "feedback mechanisms," through the flow of information.
So, if you think about the way people talk about globalization today—the Internet revolution, the Information Age—all of that was already laid down as a pattern by Wiener's work. And what came afterwards, is basically reducing the entire universe, and therefore societies and human cultures within that universe, to just a sort of random accumulation of different interactions.
The appeal of MySpace and all of these social networking sites, is that you've got no constraints. And if you think about the video-game world, this is a very well-documented history. This came out of the research that was done, starting with the Defense Department, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA—it became DARPA—and that was all coming off of Wiener's work, and looking at how you create command and control systems in the military. And it's well-known that this then laid the foundations for things like the Internet, the personal computer, and increasingly, as you get into the '80s and '90s, as the idea of the "Information Age" becomes the idea driving economic policy, then it becomes the fusion of entertainment and the military.
That is to say: "We've got to create a military that's adequate to a world where there's going to be no nation-states, and therefore, we're going to have to be drawing from a population which is increasingly submerged in virtual reality; these are going to be the foot soldiers for the 21st Century." And that became what today is coming out in the form of things like Halo 3 and these other video games, which is directly the product of research going from the military, crossing over to the entertainment "industry," and using the theories of Wiener and the people that came after him, to say, "Well, we're really moving into an era of post-humanism. And the human individual is going to be simply, effectively, a digital system, or something that can be interfaced with a digital system." And that's really, in terms of the cultural aspect, behind what you've got in the video games, this is what people are putting themselves into as they sit in front of the screen for four or five hours at a time.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Schlanger: Okay, I want to go into that a little bit more.
Now, Oyang, I wanted to follow up something that you brought up, which is the role of ARPA, or later, DARPA. The defense community was very much involved in the beginning in the work on computers, but there's a mythology out there, which is promoted by people such as Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue, which is, "Well, the defense community was trying to develop it through mainframes and gigantic systems. But fortunately, a bunch of pot-smoking hippies infiltrated this defense community operation in the [San Francisco] Bay Area, and provided the anti-hierarchical, democratic quality which we see today in the Internet." I'd like to know what either of you have to say about that. How do you refute that argument?
Teng: I think the key is, if you look at someone like Timothy Leary, you look at some of the gurus of the counterculture back in the '60s and '70s, who were the icons of the LSD drug culture—you know, the "tune in, turn on, drop out" phenomenon—these guys themselves said that virtual reality and the cyberculture was an advancement on the kind of social control and mind-altering experiences that you could have with even something like LSD. As Leary said, the biggest problem we're running into is this commitment, this Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality. He said, this has plagued Europe and the United States for centuries.
And so their whole polemic was against the idea that there is such a thing as reality. And it's not a surprise that these are the guys who come out as the leading promoters of a virtual form of economics, in the form of globalized hedge fund operations, computer modelling, and the idea of using the Internet to replace production.
So they were self-consciously in the driver's seat in the transition from the counterculture to the cyberculture.
Schlanger: You mentioned something really interesting there about this idea of replacing production, and this is one of the points that LaRouche has been unique in making, in connecting this idea of cybernetics with the post-industrial society. And I've just been working on Alan Greenspan's autobiography, where he talks about how we've "moved beyond matter," in the economy. It's now the "light economy." And there's this whacked-out piece by John Perry Barlow, who is the former so-called "lyricist" of the Grateful Dead, called "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." And in it, he says, in cyberspace, there is no matter. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders! He says, we are forming our own "social contract," but it's a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
Cody, I wonder if you could comment on that?
Jones: Well, what you see with cyberspace, is the "end of history" doctrine. Because, as LaRouche has pointed out, history really is a higher-order succession of discoveries—discoveries of principle, whether it's in science, or art, or statecraft.
In cyberspace, discovery has been eliminated, because you're in a fixed system, with a fixed set of axioms, where everything that you do, has to take place according to some logical deduction from that system. So, by its very nature, creativity, discovery of a new principle, is banned. Hypothetically, you have someone like Wiener, who discusses the possibility that computers or machines could start to produce other machines—they could become self-replicating. Well, even were that to take place in that system, you'd be still operating based off a fixed, logical system, whereas, say those machines started to come up against real boundaries, in terms of depletion of resources, etc., that system would never allow for the discovery of a new principle, of a new resource, to overcome the boundaries which they are running up against.
And this is indicative of the problem we're running into in our modern economy, which is, people who think from this standpoint, have no idea how to now deal with the kind of real boundaries we're running into in our physical economy, like lack of water, energy, breaking down of infrastructure, etc.
So, it really is a disease which is dooming mankind right now.
Social Engineering by Computer
Schlanger: Well, Cody, let me bring this to the question, also, now, of the social engineering websites, like MySpace and Facebook. You're one of the founding members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and we, on the West Coast, noticed that there was a hunger among a section of the youth, seven and eight years ago, for truth, for purpose, for meaning. I'm wondering, have you noticed that that's changing a bit now, as we have younger people who have grown up completely immersed in virtual reality and the computer revolution?
Jones: Yeah, of course. You still have the singularities. You can't completely kill the human spirit. But one thing which many of us have discussed and noticed, is that, on the campuses now, the ability to interact socially has been almost totally destroyed. Just carrying out a simple conversation, human-to-human interaction, where you actually use your speaking voice, and have to communicate an idea in real time to a live human being—that's really been destroyed.
So, you're seeing just a general literacy level, and an ability to interact socially, that have been severely crippled. And obviously, as LaRouche has made the point, and as our movement has been committed to, it's really through the social process that new ideas are communicated from one human being to another, through metaphor, through paradox. And to the extent that that's being attacked and destroyed, it's really an attack on the ability to communicate new ideas.
Schlanger: And how prevalent is MySpace with people we're meeting now, say, who are freshmen, 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds?
Jones: It's quite prevalent. You have this phenomenon, that a lot of people like to claim that they're not on it, because it's becoming one of those things, where it became so cool that now it's not cool any more. But we've actually caught some of our contacts: "No, I'm not on MySpace. That's not cool any more." And then you go on MySpace and look up their name, and their page pops right up.
So, it's very prevalent, it's a dominant form of social activity in today's culture.
An 'Open Conspiracy
Schlanger: Here are two quotes from the so-called co-founders of MySpace: One is a guy named [Chris] DeWolfe, who said, "This generation wants to be known, they want to be famous. MySpace facilitates that. This generation is self-involved." And then he later describes MySpace as a "lifestyle choice." The other founder, Tom Anderson, who is supposedly everybody's friend, says, "I think of it [MySpace] as the reality TV of the Internet."
Now, Oyang, you wrote on the question of the violent video games. I assume that's quite prevalent also. What was the most startling thing you discovered from looking at this?
Teng: Well, number one, the axioms behind the research that led to this stuff are actually out in the open. This a perfect example of an "open conspiracy," which is generally the most dangerous kind: You don't have to go searching behind the curtains to find out why this is being used to destroy a whole generation of people. Wiener is very open with it. The people who are carrying out the research today, the front end of the research, the simulation technology, which is being fused into the entertainment/mass marketing of these games, these guys really believe in the fusion between the human being and the machine, as effectively a "cyborg."
And these are people who probably grew up with a little too much Robocop and Terminator, and this kind of outlook. And science fiction actually plays a huge role, if you look at the literature, and even just in the nature of the work itself, they are kind of flagship institutions for simulations in video-game research, as it paired with the military: this outfit down in the University of Southern California, called the Institute for Creative Technology. And their mandate—maybe it's their unofficial mandate, but it's open and explicit—is to create the "holodeck" from the Starship Enterprise: Which is the simulations room where, effectively, you can create reality inside of a room, any kind of reality you choose. And this is really what these guys are driving for. Their view of the world is totally dissociated.
Schlanger: Both of you live in California, where in a sense, we're having a social experiment of a fascist, George Shultz, working with a Democratic fascist, Felix Rohatyn, to create a governor who some think is a cyborg; who is there to impose fascism, through cuts in social welfare, cuts in education, cuts in health care, while portraying himself as a "man of the people." So, in a sense, we may already be further down this road to the Brave New World than most people think.
Jones: One point on that, Harley. It's important for people to know that, as we mentioned with people like Wiener, one of the first cybernetics conferences, one of the attendees there was a guy named Kurt Lewin, who was part of the social engineering project that came out of the '40s, and developed into the hippies movement. One of the protégés of Kurt Lewin, was in fact, George Shultz, who studied under Lewin, and then went and studied under Milton Friedman. So, he sort of brings those two schools together, and now he's controlling this cyborg, as you said, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Murdoch: the 'Digital Immigrant'
Schlanger: Well, we decided on this program, we're going to be fair and balanced, as Fox News claims to be. So, we've invited the owner of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, to come on the program, to present the other side of what you've been hearing so far.
So, let me welcome him: Good afternoon, Mr. Murdoch, or should I call you, Sir Rupert?
[LYM member Aaron Halevy is heard, with a heavy "Aussie" accent, impersonating Murdoch.]
"Murdoch": G'day, yes, that's fine.
Schlanger: You described yourself recently as a "digital immigrant." Why did you decide to buy MySpace.
"Murdoch": Well, y'know, it really has to do with just trying to advertise, that's a big part of it. I think this is an area in which my news enterprise has not been involved. And getting involved in the Internet is an important area to conduct business, and I think we can make a lot of money of it. So that was the initial conception. We spend a bit here in the investment, but you do have an access to a lot of people, a lot of people consuming ideas, spending their time on the Internet, a lot of young people. So, that was the idea.
Schlanger: What about the charge that some people make, that you wanted MySpace as part of a profiling operation.
"Murdoch": Uh, well... well, in a certain way. It's important to have the ability to see what people are into, to see their likes and dislikes, so you can, again, like I said, advertise to them. We do have a certain way of monitoring the way people—what movie they like, what books—well, they don't read books any more; what video games they like and things like that. So, we can use that information and sell it to different companies and advertise back.
Schlanger: Now, this is a question that may get you a little upset, because you have an image as a conservative. But what do you say to those who way that MySpace is nothing but a "digital meat market" in which people invent identities for purposes of hooking up for sex?
"Murdoch": Ha-ha-ha... Well! That's obviously a bit of a stretch. I don't necessarily think that everyone's doing that. I mean, there's big discussion about—you want to socialize, you want to meet people that you may not meet. You know, young people today are very anti-social, so to speak, so this gives them a chance to express themselves freely. And honestly, I think, part of the problem is, these days, religion is becoming less and less effective. And so, people start thinking, "Well, I don't want any God or anything controlling my decisions, my emotions." And in the end, what this creates is a condition where people can decide for themselves, where they can engage in what they like, and what they dislike, and no one can tell them what to do. I think that's the real point here.
Schlanger: Well, it sounds like you're buying into this line that it's "democratic."
"Murdoch": Oh, definitely. Well, it's even beyond democracy, or anything. It is, I think—it's globalization to its extreme. It really does knock down the borders. It creates a totally free market, in which people can decide what things they're going to consume, with no one really telling them what to do.
Schlanger: What would you say to the charge we've made on this program, that MySpace is really just a component of psychological warfare against youth, on behalf of a fascist movement, run by financial oligarchs, such as yourself?
"Murdoch": Well! Y'better watch what you say. Because, really, it does go back. I mean, you look at Bertrand Russell, I mean, he's one of my mentors, one of the people that I associated with, maybe back and forth, in between when I was working for Lord Beaverbrook during the time of the Nazis and afterwards, and you know, the idea in the beginning was to have a society where we could get rid of dictatorships, get rid of government in general. And y'know, Huxley and Adorno, they had different ideas on this, and y'know, you want to try to convince people, basically, that they're making their own decisions. And that the conclusions they come to are purely their own. So, in effect, as Huxley said, you create a concentration camp without tears.
I mean, honestly, I think that's where you and your fellows belong, because, uh, the things that you're doing are not really useful in this economy, and that's one thing I did want to make sure that you and anyone else here listening, has a certain understanding of: that this is not really going to be in existence much longer.
Schlanger: So you actually believe that globalization will succeed, and that you can induce youth to destroy their own minds?
"Murdoch": Oh, definitely! I mean this—it's not something—what's in their minds, is not necessarily anything that is valuable. I mean! I dunno, we've been monitoring different things, Harley—we've been watching what you've been doing, and obviously I think that you should be eating grass—you and your friends here. Because, y'know, these things are not necessary any more: We can have one nation. We don't need nation-states, we don't need any of these things.
Y'know, Bertrand Russell, he had the conception that, as I said, religion plays a reduced amount of control on the population, but the media, movies, newspapers, things like that, are increasing in their ability to help people make decisions on what they should think. Now, I would put the Internet in that list, for sure.
Schlanger: Well, Sir Rupert, we hope you'll stay on. Maybe Cody and Oyang will have a question for you. But for the moment, we'd like you to be quiet and sit back and listen.
"Murdoch": Oh, yes. Can I get their last name—Cody What?
Financiers' One-World dictatorship
Schlanger: So, Cody, how accurate is this characterization of Rupert Murdoch, in your thinking?
Jones: Yeah, I think it's right on point. It's very clear, if you look at the figure that was mentioned, Bertrand Russell. He, himself, had been very explicit about his intention to create a one-world government, a one-world dictatorship. And Murdoch is simply an expression of that ideology.
Schlanger: And Oyang?
Teng: I would agree.
Schlanger: Now, when we look at something like what happened at Virginia Tech, I don't know if you were in the War Room [the LYM operations center] at the time, Oyang, but there was an effort to bring up this issue of video games. And one of the things we discovered, is that Bill Gates and Microsoft—Gates just pumped some money into Facebook—that Gates has a vested interest in these video games. Oyang, would you say something on that?
Teng: We'd done some work looking at the financial control over the whole video-game apparatus, they made a big deal about the fact that it's surpassed movies in terms of gross sales worldwide and in the United States, and so forth. So what you find, when you begin to look at the control, the financial control of things that people think are just part of their culture, part of the youth culture, something that's their own, actually you find that it only exists to the degree that it's been financed, supported, funded, and created by hedge funds, by the biggest financial players in the world. And Gates plays into this thing.
There was a famous movie clip circulating, which you can find online, which shows him actually entering one of his own games, Doom, and blowing away a couple of the demons in Doom, as part of a promotional package for Microsoft.
So, these guys, a lot of them, someone like Gates probably believe some of their own propaganda about the wonders of virtual reality. And I don't know if Gates quite fits into the category of top oligarch in the world, but one of the problems with these guys, is that they are—actually because of inbreeding, and maybe inbreeding through Internet chatrooms, and other things—they have actually reduced the quality of the gene pool among the oligarchy: So these guys are not too bright. And actually, you can see that in the fact that their financial system is collapsing.
"Murdoch": No, no. No, it's not. Actually, if you look at the Dow Jones, and the Wall Street Journal, you can see clearly that it's not collapsing. That's a lie.
Schlanger: Now, Cody, let me ask you a question on this: Because we talk to a lot of people, who argue that MySpace is just a way of communicating, a way of staying in touch with their friends—
Jones: That's right.
The MySpace Fantasy World
Schlanger: When you run into somebody who says that, how do you answer them?
Jones: Well, first off, you have to ask them: What are they communicating? To differentiate between exchanging information and trying to find a way to exchange bodily fluids, and actually communicating ideas. And that's effectively what MySpace is: It's just a way for people to avoid reality, and avoid discussion of ideas, and sort of let their inhibitions run wild.
So, the best way to deal with it, is to make fun of it. I don't think anyone, if you really corner them, can seriously say that MySpace is a means of "communicating profound ideas respecting man and nature."
Schlanger: I've heard people say that fascism, the essence of fascism, is trying to stop people from getting on MySpace. Why would someone say something like that?
Jones: That's part of the brainwashing. If you look at the history of, say, the fascist movement in Germany, it came out of the cabaret movement, which was a real free sex, sex with anything that moves, pure decadence.
Schlanger: It was a counterculture.
Jones: Yeah, the counterculture. And that's what then spawned the fascist movement in Germany in particular. Now, it was out of those same networks, that the people came that then produced that counterculture which is now the essence of the current MySpace. What goes on there? That's what it is: You're free from any constraints of physical reality. You can be a pedophile, you can be a rapist, you can be a killer, you can be a dope smoker, you can do whatever you want, free of the constraints of reality and morality, and physical economy, etc. And so, it is the basis of a fascist movement, as LaRouche pointed out: Because when you get someone in that fantasy state, if all of a sudden you pull the plug—the lights go out, the power goes down, because we haven't invested—you're going to have a bunch of enraged, homicidal killers.
Schlanger: Who know how to kill now, because they've been on these video games.
Now, I'm going to read you a quote from someone who claims to be a very successful practitioner of MySpace. This is from a profile on MySpace in Vanity Fair. This guy says: "I know guys who are not even as good-looking as me, who get laid like crazy because of MySpace. I'm actually shy. There are women I wouldn't go up to at a club, but I'll e-mail them on MySpace. For some reason, you get on there, and all the barriers come down. Girls will say things they'd never say to you in public. And there's the mystery element, the intangible thing. 'Is he real?' It makes them want you more."
I mean, a part of this is just an unleashing of the fantasy and libidos, exactly as Aldous Huxley described in his Brave New World, hmm? Oyang, you want to comment?
Teng: Yeah, and of course, the way that people now learn economics, whether it's through school or just what they're getting from popular culture, is that the fundamental driver for economics, today, is your libido, anyway. So if you have access to more, I think as that guy's quoted, "more ass" than ever before, then really you're playing a fundamentally important role in the economy. That's the rationale.
Schlanger: Now, we brought up this question of the interface of news, sports, and entertainment. Of course, Sir Rupert, that's what you're doing with Fox, right?
"Murdoch": Oh right, definitely. Y'know, the way I see it, you've got a certain amount of time; people have more time, because there's not that many jobs. So, one of the things is, you can monopolize their time: You've got iPods, you've got the Internet, you can actually purchase that, and try to take that away, y'know, advertise to them the entire time. That's what you can do in sports, you can do that with sex, everything. It works very well.
And the thing I think you guys are all wrong on, is that you see it as bad. Because, honestly, I see this is definitely, this is what people want. I'm just providing them with what they want themselves.
Schlanger: Isn't that the whole purpose of virtual reality? Cody, you were talking about this earlier, in terms of the attempt to free oneself from the sense of responsibility about society. If you're trapped in a fantasy-world 24 hours a day, you can see the auto industry close down, houses being foreclosed, banks collapsing, but you're still online in your fantasy—until you can no longer pay the electric bill. So, isn't that basically what we're talking about?
Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of it, is that if you look at people's entire education, the way they're raised, and then the economy that they develop in, they grew up in a world where the idea of being able to intervene to change a reality which they may not like, has been robbed from them: The sense of the human intervention into reality to change it for the better, has been taken away. And that would otherwise potentially create frustration, revolt, etc., so then that's pacified through presenting them, "Well, here's your alternative. You can't actually change the world, but what you can do, is you can change reality through the Internet, through these kind of MySpace fantasies, etc." So it becomes a way to—it really is a concentration camp of the mind, "without tears."
Teng: I want to say something, too. Because, people probably know that LaRouche PAC—we've got a website, which our intent may be a little ways off, but it's to take over the Internet with Reason. But the key to the effectiveness of our website, versus say, something like MoveOn.org, is that our website is effective and active because it's based on what we're doing as a movement in real life, on the ground, around the world. And it functions to actually further, and deepen the dialogue around the actual strategic nature of the situation we're in. As opposed to just throwing up a website, and saying, "Well, if we can get X number of people on, and somehow aware, then that is going to magically create the kind of mass, spontaneous social change that's needed."
And that's really no different than the mentality, the ideology behind the free market, which is that you've got this mysterious "Invisible Hand," which is going to somehow regulate the universe. And more often than not, as we've pointed out to people, it ends up spanking people. And it's part of the whole idea that you give up any kind commitment to responsibility for the direction society goes.
Schlanger: Well, you know, they say that Bush said to Greenspan, "Is that the Invisible Hand in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" [laughter]
What we keep coming back to then, is this question of human interaction, as opposed to people in a process of self-discovery in virtual reality. Which, of course, is not a process of self-discovery, it's a process of masturbation.
Now, I want to get back to this question of real discovery then, as the counter. Because I hope we get some people to listen to this program, and if you're listening to it, you can tell your friends to get on it, and it's archived at http://www.larouchepub.com/radio/archive_2007.html. And we intend to follow this through: We're going to continue a campaign, we may be putting out a pamphlet, titled, "Is Goebbels in Your Laptop?," because this is an important issue.
A Real, Creative Life
But we also have to present the solution, and this is where it gets a little more difficult. But both of you have been involved in the choral work, you're involved in the science work. What is it that is the counter for someone who's looking for identity in a phony, made-up identity posted on MySpace, or the sense of power you get from massive kills in a video game: What's the counter to that?
Jones: Well, the counter to that, is primarily the work that's being done, in the Virginia area, in the Leesburg area; out of the Basement; and also the music work. Where, what you find, and this is the principle that Leibniz had brought up, it's the principle upon which our nation is founded, which is that real human happiness is derived through discovery of principle, and the communication of those discoveries to other human beings. Developing a sense of immortality, through discovery and through passing on a greater potential to the next generation, that that's what lives beyond you.
And so this is what we're doing: reviving the arc of development of that process of discovery, and the history of creativity on planet Earth.
"Murdoch": Listen, listen! You're making me sick, over here, with what you're saying! This is the most stupid thing I've ever heard! You're trying to say that ideas have some kind of effect on society, or on history [laughing]. This is childishness.
Listen, let's put Harley aside here. Let's look at the facts: You guys are young, you're bright. Why don't you guys come back into college? Get a degree, I can even help you out, and get you guys into something where you can actually change something. Because really, working with this, doing these discussions, singing, these things are going to have no effect, and actually, I think I've done with this! [hangs up]
Schlanger: I think we just lost Sir Rupert. He's probably going to go play with his mouse.
A Presidential Election Year
Oyang, we have a question that was e-mailed in on the MySpace [section of www.larouchepac.com] and the Presidential campaigns. I see that, I think on New Year's Day, there's actually going to be what they call a "MySpace Presidential Debate." And the person writes in to us, "It looks like this has invaded the Presidential campaign. What about that? What about young people and the Presidential candidates?"
If you have any thoughts on MySpace hosting a Presidential "debate," I'd like to know that. But what about this question about getting young people involved, not just sending e-mails, but actually out in the street and organizing?
Teng: Oh, I wasn't aware that the Presidential candidates were looking for new sex partners, but ... maybe that's a scandal we'll have to follow up.
But I know Cody and I both joined the LaRouche movement during a Presidential campaign. It was when LaRouche was running his own Presidential campaign, and LaRouche has never made a distinction between electoral politics, and engaging the youth, and how to create a Renaissance. That was never something that was dichotomized as separate things. And the whole idea that the way you appeal to youth is with beer, music, and bribes, which is effectively how these operations are run, itself shows the kind of view that these guys have of not just youth, but of human beings in general.
Because, if you look at the election last year, we actually unleashed a revolutionary process inside the youth generation, the 18-to-35 generation, around the midterm elections. And it was around a campaign to expose the inner workings of the Lynne Cheney campus Gestapo operation. But in creating a mass effect around the country as part of a political mobilization with the idea that the youth were going to be responsible for the direction of the country, and engage people in an actual dialogue around what ideas are needed for the future of the country. And then, saying from that, how are we going to implement it—that actually unleashed a process where you had record numbers of youth voters come out, to put the Democrats in with a landslide.
Now, I've heard the argument that this was done because of blogs and chatrooms and things like that, and I always have to wonder: If it was simply a matter of just getting enough people online with information, we never would have had Bush, either the first time, or definitely not with the reelection.
Schlanger: This gets back to the question of human interaction. And I'd like to direct this next question to Cody. We have a rather long e-mail from John, who writes about his excitement of going back to the ideas of the Founding Fathers. And he said, he initially discovered LaRouche from reading Dope, Inc. and then, The Political Economy of the American Revolution. And he's very excited with the work that's coming up now, with the American Patriot Files, the revival of the study of the American System around James Fenimore Cooper.[1] Cody, do you want to say something about that project?
Jones: Yeah, one thing that LaRouche has recognized, in addressing both this problem in the MySpace, Facebook, etc., is that this is a consequence of our having been robbed of our sense of history, of where this country came from, and consequently, losing sight of where it's intended to go. So, what's been launched, is a project to really delve deeply into the ideas, and the figures who shaped and made America possible. And one of those leading figures is James Fenimore Cooper, both in terms of his communicating the ideals of the United States, what it's intended to represent. But also as a figure who embodied the method of real intelligence work, which LaRouche has often pointed to: that intelligence is not the spook world that is often portrayed, but intelligence is understanding the fundamental battle between oligarchism and the humanist fight, typified by Plato, Cusa, up through Kepler, etc., and the Founding Fathers. And so, embodied in that, is James Fenimore Cooper as one of the leading figures in shaping the period that led into, then, the Lincoln revolution.
So, this is something which the youth are now embarking on, and really trying to understand, what is our real history? Where did we come from? And how do we move forward from the dark age, we're presently collapsing into?
Schlanger: It seems that a common point that both of you have been making as members of the Youth Movement, is that, in fact, the momentary, or moment-to-moment titillation that one gets from the so-called entertainment of the Internet, is actually dwarfed by the genuine emotion, and passion, and excitement of discovering that you have a mind that can affect events in the world. I presume that's a big part of what you're talking about. So, what are you doing on the campuses up in the Bay Area, Oyang, where in a sense, you're going head-to-head against the cyberspace, Silicon Valley—you know, some people think "Silicon Valley" is the women on MySpace. But there actually is a Silicon Valley up there, and you've got people who have made huge amounts of money, essentially with swindles on the New Economy. How do you communicate these deeper ideas to people, when you meet them on campuses?
Teng: This is the difference between living in a fixed system, and actually confronting one's mind and someone else's mind with the paradoxes of the actual universe. I mean, what you get with the MySpace/Internet/video-game phenomenon, as Cody was mentioning, is just a more distilled version of a totally fixed, axiomatic system, which may be more and more sophisticated as you get better and better graphics, and more and more computing power and so forth. But you're always within a fixed, axiomatic, logical-deductive system. And that's how most people live their lives, whether they're in the Internet, or in general.
Schlanger: That's a "comfort zone" then. It doesn't challenge you much.
Teng: Yeah, exactly. There's this certain belief structure that you have to follow, and you think that that will get you by, day to day. What we do, is something as simple as confronting someone with a geometrical problem, the idea of working through, themselves, some actual scientific or simple geometrical problem, either at the table [where we organize], or coming into the office. And recognizing that even in the act of trying to discuss what's true, as opposed to having the terms of the discussion be what's popular, even the idea that you're going to try to figure out what's true, itself is a confrontation with the culture. And you'll find that most people, when given the right kind of environment, where they're not constantly bombarded with other stuff, that's what they're going to want to choose, that's what they're going to want to explore. And we've got to create the political conditions, where that's evoked in a larger and larger mass of the population.
[1] Patrick Ruckert, "The Fight for the American Republic: James Fenimore Cooper and the Society of the Cincinnati," EIR, Oct. 26, 2007; Anton Chaitkin, "The Patriot File, Unearthed," EIR, Nov. 2, 2007; Roger Maduro, "Rediscovering Mathew Carey; 'The Olive Branch': How a Book Saved the Nation," EIR, Nov. 9, 2007.
