MAY 1 LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST: BENJAMIN DENISTON
Creating the Future
[PDF version of this transcript]
Thanks, Megan.
Some of this comes directly out of our discussion with Mr. LaRouche earlier today, and his emphasis on including this as a featured part of our intervention in this point of the discussion. And I think, as you just posed it very clearly, it needs to be clear to people that Kepler provides a reference point for the creation of the future, for where we need to go, as much as what he did to define this revolution of the past, so to speak.
And this does not mean that he gives us some practical solutions or something. The average person will say: Okay, does he tell us, where to get the water now? or something silly like that. He doesn't give us a playbook that you can go run to. He gives us something more important than that. He gives us an understanding of how mankind is able to develop new solutions to new problems—a better understanding of, as Megan was discussing, how it is that mankind uniquely relates to the universe, and how mankind can change that relation. You know, these are the big questions that we are facing right now as a species.
In that context, an expression of that, we have this water crisis. We have a major crisis developing in California immediately; other locations in the Southwest are maybe one or two steps behind California. Other places around the world are also facing similar water crises. So let's take this in this context.
The water crisis in California—first of all, there are clear levels to the crisis, it's not just one thing. On the first level, we have a drought. We have an immediate drought right now. It hasn't rained much; there hasn't been a lot of precipitation for the past years. So the amount of water coming into the state is lower. That's one aspect, but that's not the entire picture.
You go to a deeper level: there's been no development in the state for water projects, these types of things, for nearly 50 years. For nearly 50 years, there's been no major investment in developing the water resources that we knew were needed. Desalination was put on the table—it wasn't done. NAWAPA was put on the table—it wasn't done. And so, for the past, almost 50 years, we haven't even been operating at breakeven; we've been actually drawing down the system in California. We've been consistently depleting the aquifers in the Central Valley, for example, for decades.
This current drought is not a new, out-of-the-blue thing. We've known we've been operating beyond the capacity of the water system of the state as it existed, for decades now. We refused to take action. And now we have a drought hitting on top of that, so that's creating a certain culmination in the crisis.
Brown versus Humanity
But there's another level, there's another aspect on the water crisis in California right now, which is the response of the governor. He is another layer to the crisis.
Governor Brown himself is a crisis in California. You have the drought, and you have the Brown crisis—that's an additional aspect. His response is to say, we're just going to impose a policy of—essentially, population reduction. Whether he is fully recognizing this or not, he is completely buying into the policy of the British Empire, the policy of Prince Philip, the World Wildlife Fund. He is fully on board with that entire program: genocide, population reduction. That's the policy response that he is putting on the table in reaction to this current crisis in California.
So, how do we handle this crisis now? What do we actually do, to address the imminent water crisis in California? Well, the first thing is obvious, we've said it, we're going to continue to say it: Get rid of Jerry Brown. The first step is, you take out the trash; get rid of the problem, get rid of the active factor worsening the situation, now, which is Jerry Brown.
But, that aside, that done, as we want to really elaborate here today, we also need the positive solutions. We need to act human, we need to act creatively. We need to create new solutions, create, in effect, a new future condition which doesn't yet exist. Something which Jerry Brown either doesn't understand, or he doesn't want. But either way, he is right now acting to suppress the people of California, to deny them their natural human right for creative progress. He is acting as a modern lackey of Zeus. That is what he is doing.
So the only true real solutions, aside from taking out the garbage—getting rid of Jerry Brown, getting rid of his policy—as Megan introduced this aspect of the discussion here, are for mankind to create the new conditions which don't yet exist. The action of the creation of new states, new conditions in the universe, which would never have existed without mankind's creation, without mankind's intervention. And the creation of these new conditions, new states, which are new to mankind himself—that's where the solution lies.
And that's what we want to discuss.
Mankind discovers things. We discover principles, we discover insights into how the universe operates. But I would say that the clearest, the most pure expression of this process, is that by that activity, we are enabled to change our behavior as a result of these discoveries of principle. We are enabled to do things which we simply couldn't do before.
So again, this is mankind: By his fundamental nature, mankind is a creative species in this respect. It's always doing something new, always going to a higher level. We're uniquely a species which continues to change how it relates to the universe. We're not defined by any particular relationship to the universe. We don't have an ecology; the way animals have an ecology. Human ecology is the potential to change our ecology, that's what makes us different from animals, that's what makes us human. So to deny that, to suppress that, as Brown is doing, as Obama is doing in a different sense, but in the same way, really, is true Zeus. It's a Zeusian genocide program. So that's the challenge we face right now in California.
But again, where do we find the solutions, true human solutions to this water crisis? How do we develop new ways to manage the water system, to deal with the water cycle, using methods which might not even exist yet, or haven't existed yet, or, if they exist, they only exist in very preliminary phases. How can we come to a new, higher level management of the system that we've never been able to develop before? Because if we're not doing that, we're not being human; we're not responding to the crisis as a real human species. We're just reacting, the way we did in the past.
So this is the issue, the issue that Mr. LaRouche has put on the table, or emphasized regarding this issue for a couple of years now, actually, when discussing the water crisis, discussing the situation. He was saying, forget just these off-the-shelf, old ideas; we're in an accelerated crisis, we've got to go to higher levels. Where are the higher levels? Where are the subsuming principles? What are the areas we don't yet fully understand, we haven't yet grasped, we don't yet fully understand?
Kepler's Principle
And this takes us to the galaxy, to the galactic system, and it takes us to Kepler for how to think about that, how to approach that. So you can ask, how did Kepler discover the Solar System? What's the importance of referencing Kepler's work here?
Kepler asked how the planets moved, he asked why did the planets move. But what he showed was that nothing in domain of sense-perception could ever account for the planetary motions. He was not the first; as others had done before, Kepler recorded the motions, and he also used other people's recordings of the motions. He could catalogue the effects. A map can be developed, charting the motions of the planets, charting how they move through the sky.
But the map does not tell you how or why the planets actually move, why they move as they do. You're cataloguing an expression, you're mapping a shadow. The effect can be seen, it can be recorded, it can be mapped, it can be charted, but the cause of that effect, the source of that shadow, can never be understood in these terms. That's what Kepler showed us. And he showed, and he even discussed very explicitly, as Megan referred to in his last work, his Harmony of the World: In there is a brilliant exposition on not just the laws of planetary motion, but the laws of how human mind comes to understand principles.
He doesn't just talk about some formula that tells you how the planets move. He goes through a whole exhaustive development of how it is that the human mind can even come to know that, from his own standpoint, as somebody who you should put some weight behind his idea—because he did it. So he was expressing his own insights, referring to Cusa's work, referring to this method of thought, how he was able to come to his discoveries.
And he says very explicitly and clearly, it's an action of the human mind which enables mankind to understand causes. It didn't come from experience, it didn't come from data from observation. It was a creative action that he generated in his mind. Something he uniquely made which wasn't derived from the evidence. It was something he had to generate, unique and anew, and in certain cases, explicitly, because the evidence he was presented with otherwise, was contradictory. It was inconsistent; it couldn't work itself in its own terms. So he was forced to come up with new conceptions, a new conception that he generated which couldn't have come from anywhere but his own action, his own creative discovery.
So this is a lesson for how we think about, how we relate to, the system as a whole. As a human being with a healthy human mind, you observe things, you observe phenomena. You recognize these phenomena as effects; you hypothesize what governs these witnessed effects, and ultimately the demonstration of the validity of your hypotheses, is, whether they enable you, if they enable mankind to change how he operates in the universe. Do your hypotheses allow mankind to do new things? To create new actions? In Mr. LaRouche's work on economics, you can measure this in a certain sense even more clearly: Do they enable an increase in the potential relative population density of the human species? Do they enable a measurable increase in the power of mankind to expand its influence on the planet and beyond?
In this context, where do we find these types of truly human solutions to this current water crisis—the crisis in California, the crisis in the Southwest? It is by going to these higher levels.
Now it's never complete and final knowledge. You never have a complete, final solution to the entire system. You develop these hypotheses; you demonstrate their validity by showing they give mankind an ability to be more effective, develop a greater power to act in the universe. But sometimes, we witness effects which we could say, violate our existing hypotheses. We see effects, we see phenomena which operate in a way our current hypotheses, our current conceptions, can't account for. And these are great. These inconsistencies—that's what we want. These are our ticket to the future.
These are indications not that we failed—oh, we don't get everything—these are indications that there's a new principle at play. There's a new factor in there that we didn't understand yet, expressing itself, in what we might call an unexpected deviation, an unexpected variation in the shadows, in how the shadows behave. We had some conception of what was casting those shadows, and we see they behave a little bit differently than we would have expected. That's what we want. Those are the types of things that we need to look for, in these types of issues.
The Water Cycle: A Shadow of the Galaxy
Then this brings us back to the water crisis, the theme here: How do we deal with water? How do we deal with the water situation in California? Again, you're dealing with a phenomenon, you're dealing with certain phenomena. We experienced aspects of this thing we objectify, we call as a "water cycle." We see the processes of the motion of water from one location to another; we see the transition of water from one state to another state, from liquid to gas, to ice, to solid, moving through these different states. We see water moving through different processes, through abiotic systems, through biological systems, through human economic activity. So you see all these effects, these phenomena, but no one thinks that the water cycle is a self-determined thing—maybe you find some people who do, but people don't think that this is some self-defined, self-determined process.
It's not hard to recognize, when you identify this thing you call a water cycle, that you're looking at the expression of certain principles acting, certain forces at play: the role of the Sun. The water cycle wouldn't exist if the Sun didn't exist. The heat effect from the Sun, the electromagnetic radiation from the Sun powers the whole cycle; it evaporates ocean water, it gets the sky filled with atmospheric moisture. The rotation of the Earth is a critical factor in determining how the system behaves, the motion of atmospheric water through the sky, related to the wind patterns and effects associated with the rotation of the Earth.
You have the action of life: Plant life, in particular, plays a major role in putting water back up into the atmosphere. Water that's on land that would have just remained on land— plant life is pumping it back up.
No one thinks the water cycle is some self-defined, existing thing; we already know it as a shadow. We know it's an expression of certain principles of action, it's an effect of something. But until now, we've defined the cycle as a shadow of these processes in particular, the action of the Sun; actions on the Earth, within the Earth, the ocean systems, what have you, action of life.
Well, what happens when we see evidence for changes, for variations which we can't attribute to any of these previously known principles? What happens when we see variations which we can't account for in our current hypothesized understanding of the causes governing the system?
This is really what we've been talking about for the past month on these shows, and on larouchepac.com. We're presenting you with these indications, this ticket, this wonderful deviation, this indication that something else is going on, which we can't account for in our current understanding, indications of another factor at place, which isn't currently in our hypothesized framework, which we used to define our understanding of the cause of this shadow we call the water cycle.
These are things we've discussed: You have our current understanding of how our Solar System moves through our galaxy, through the galactic system. By the old framework, that shouldn't matter to the water cycle, that shouldn't matter to climate, that shouldn't matter to how water behaves on Earth. But we see records that there's a relationship there. We see variations, deviations in the climate records, which don't correspond to anything we can define in the prior system, the prior framework of the limitations of the principles at play.
But we do see that it corresponds to this galactic relationship. We see indications, variations showing that as the Sun changes its strength, as the Sun gets weaker, as the Sun rises and falls in its amount of activity, and lowers its shielding of the Solar System from the influence of the galaxy around us, as the Sun lets in more galactic effect, so to speak. Again, we see deviations, variations in how the water behaves, in how the water cycle operate—where you have droughts, where you have excess water; deviations, variations which don't correspond to anything in the previous system but are directly related to how the activity of the Sun interacts with this larger galactic effect.
And we see these on time-scales of thousands of years; we see these in time-scales of hundreds of years, we see these on time-scales of tens of years. We even see indications of short time-scales of days, when the Sun will release large outbursts of plasma, of solar activity, these explosive events just above the surface of the Sun, that will release large structures of plasma, coronal mass ejections. When these things pass by the Earth, they can temporarily increase the shielding around the Earth, decreasing the amount of influence from the galactic system, and we see deviations, we see variations, in how water is behaving in the atmosphere, associated with the reduction of this galactic effect, this galactic input.
So these are things we've discussed, we've presented, we've written about, but they're all indications of something which exists outside of the current framework. And until recently, most people have been operating under this earlier assumption, that the water cycle is defined by activity in the Solar System: What the Sun does, what the Earth's doing; maybe you have a role for plant life, various phenomena on the Earth affect it, but that's it. Influences beyond the Solar System have been excluded under that framework; galactic influences are believed to have no role under that framework.
But now, with the evidence we're presenting here, we're clearly seeing otherwise. We're seeing these deviations, effects which we can't attribute to the prior framework, and which directly point us to this galactic system. And this is not work that I'm doing—this is work that's been done by a relative handful of scientists, who have the guts and the strength to pursue these frontier questions, who've been showing for the recent years, that you do have these effects, you do have these deviations, it does point you to these larger cosmic processes.
And what they provided us here, is this whole framework that we're pulling together that we can present to you, which tells us we can't ignore these deviations. We see that the shadow which is the water cycle, the effect of these forces as play, which we call the water cycle, is not cast solely by activity from within the Solar System. You have the casting of the effect of activity from the galaxy as well.
The Galaxy: The 'New Frontier'
So we have to understand the water cycle from this higher perspective, we have to include the role of the galaxy. We have to think on the level of the galactic system when we think about things as we thought as simple as how the water cycle behaves. We have to recognize that this cast shadow which we depend upon, which we call the water cycle, is an expression of galactic processes, as well.
Just to be a little more specific: This changes, in particular, especially how we understand how water behaves in the atmosphere. The Sun is constantly pumping water from the ocean into the atmosphere through evaporation, filling the atmosphere with water vapor. This is now giving us new insights into how that water behaves when it's in the atmospheric system. And most importantly, for the situation now, today, this gives us new insights into how we can begin to influence and control, what we should really call the cosmic environment of the atmosphere; how we can begin to influence and control, ourselves, the conditions of the atmosphere which we otherwise attribute to the activity of the galactic system.
And again, this is something we've discussed over the past month: We have these so-called ionization systems, these systems that have been developed and successfully utilized to affect and modulate these what I would call "cosmic" conditions, or the "cosmic environment," of the atmosphere, to influence how the water behaves up there. We've discussed the success of these systems. We've shown that we can increase precipitation; we've shown that we can bring in new flows of atmospheric moisture, over the land, bring it from above the oceans, above the land. We've shown that we can begin to tap into this vast potential of the atmospheric water system.
But the way we're doing so, is again, by controlling the conditions of the atmosphere, which are created by, and associated with, the effect of this galactic system, that we're affecting and influencing the cosmic environment of our atmosphere.
So I would say, look at this the way Kepler would. We've been discussing some of the effects here, some of the particulars, but how would Kepler see this? As Megan stated very well in the introduction, Kepler demonstrated, mankind is not an animal: Mankind is not bound by his sense-perceptual or biological experience, the way every animal species that we know of is. Mankind is gifted with a unique capability of the human mind, something which exists outside of and beyond the senses. And it's the ability to generate creative actions by the human mind, unique to the human mind itself, which is what enables mankind to make these changes, to fundamentally change how we relate to the universe.
If you mention the Solar System, foolish people think of the Solar System as some array of objects individually floating around in some big void of space; that's their conception of the Solar System. What did Kepler show us? He said, that's a shadow, those are effects. They're the result of a cause. And it's mankind that can uniquely understand that cause, and understand that cause in a way that we can act in that domain, of cause; act in the domain of that which generates the effects, generates the shadows.
It's not about the size of the space or the scale of the time, the way people normally think of these terms. It's a different conception: It's about, where does the generative principle exist? What is it, how can we understand it? And how can mankind generate his own similar effects, and utilize them, and express himself as that type of force in the universe? How can mankind cast his own shadows of creative action, not just react to other shadows?
So I think this is the type of conception that Kepler gives us that we absolutely need today, because, you know, he didn't solve everything—and I don't think he would have wanted to solve everything. I think he would have enjoyed the idea of new challenges, looking to the galaxy, looking to the supergalactic structure that we're encompassed by.
Today, we have to look to this next frontier; we have to look to the galactic system, as a start. Again, not as a collection of objects, a collection of different things, but we have to make an effort to understand what are the principles generating this system, this process, these effects, in the unique way we see it expressed. And how can we not just try to define it in some academic sense, but how can we look to act in that domain? How can we think of mankind as moving toward the potentials of casting shadows of creative action, associated with what we might call a galactic principle? That's the level that mankind is now looking at, the level that mankind can go to.
So if we want water, if we want water for California, if we want to solve the water crisis in California and other regions, other states, other parts of the world, we have to be human. We have to be like Kepler.
