LAROUCHE’S FOUR LAWS:
Man’s Unique Nature
by Tony Papert
July 28—Only the adoption of Lyndon LaRouche’s June 8, 2014 “Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now,” can save the trans-Atlantic region from a “general, physical-economic chain-reaction breakdown-crisis.” If you intend to be anything more than a mere bystander, or worse, in this onrushing crisis, you must read and understand the Four Laws.
What I hope to do here is to improve your insight, if possible, into the great premise underlying LaRouche’s Four Laws. That premise, as he makes clear, is the totally unique nature of the human species in the entire universe. Only man creates new forms of existence never seen before and otherwise impossible. Only man creates the future; only man creates the future existence of humanity; and only man creates human creativity itself.
This true human nature is most accessible to visionary scientists,— and there is no true scientist who is not a visionary.
Space pioneer Krafft A. Ehricke, who became a close co-worker with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche during the 1980s, was such a visionary scientist. Writing in the dark days of the early 1950s (in the first volume of his work, Space Flight), he reached back through millions of years of evolution to recall “the enormous effort” which “water-borne life” had undertaken “to adapt itself to existence on land.” He likened that to man’s stepping out into space,— not through biological evolution, but through the new quality of the human mind.
 NASA
A Saturn V (500-Foot Test Vehicle) at Pad 39A at dawn in the Summer of 1966.
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Thoughts like these of Ehricke’s permeated the space pioneers,— it is known that Wernher von Braun compared Neil Armstrong’s stepping onto the surface of the moon, with that “enormous effort” through which life moved from the ocean onto the land.
In a magnificent work written in 1966, which looked back from the year 2000 on what he foresaw would be man’s progress in space since 1966, Krafft Ehricke said that now (in 2000) an average of two flights per month are taking off from earth for other parts of the solar system,— plus incomparably more satellite and moon-launches. Most of the spaceships travelling through solar space are powered by controlled fusion using the deuterium-helium-3 reaction. Ehricke does not simply name this reaction; he goes into great detail about both the reaction itself, and how it can be controlled and used for a rocket engine. But he notes that the deuterium-helium-3 reaction will not hold first place for long,—because already man is moving toward mastery of matter-antimatter reactions.
In a memorable passage, Ehricke recalls how mankind had freed itself from the death-cult of the 20th Century, to embrace its new-found freedom:
We, in the year 2000, look back at the twentieth century as the years in which the new era was finally born after centuries of incubation in the minds and hearts of great men and women of many nations. The twentieth century is the gulf which separates the last century of the old era and the first century of the new one in which values, outlooks and frames of reference are quite different. The hour of birth, be it of a life or of an era, is the hour of truth in which pain, doubt and fear challenge, and the intensity of their onslaught causes the compensating forces of strength, confidence and bravery to rise to rare peaks of intensity and power. The world seems to break apart under the agony of this unmerciful confrontation of the old and the new. The great symbols of the space age, namely, rocket technology, nuclear technology and modern electronic technology were born in the dark days of World War II. But, since war can never bear peace, the rockets remained missiles, the nuclear devices remained bombs and the radar did not cease to be the ear which was anxiously listening for the signal of death from the hostile world of “the other side.” The past was lost, the future not yet won; and mankind shivered in the feverish chill of hostility, hatred and death-fear unleashed in the succession of wars and confrontations.
These were the realities.
Throughout those years, a small group of people of many nationalities, while facing those realities, refused to surrender their vision of missiles-turned-spacecraft, of nuclear power becoming a means of propelling space vehicles to other worlds and of radar waves reporting exciting discoveries from deep space. What they suggested seemed at first impractical, inconsequential and without utility or payoff. But we now know that they had built their case on the solid foundations of long-range logic and realism . . . . Space became a very real challenge to man; and there was no way back to the old days. There never is. [“Solar Transportation,” American Astronautical Society Science and Technology Series, vol. 10, Space Age in Fiscal Year 2001, An American Astronautical Society Publication, 1967, p. 164]
Let us conclude with Krafft’s retelling of the beginning of the space age with the first successful launch of the first cosmic rocket, the German A-4, later called the V-2, on October 3, 1942.
Those were the “wild west” days of rocketry and space flight. You didn’t have to be miles away. You could almost stand beside the rocket, and I was on the roof of one of those high-rise buildings, actually looking down to the launch complex, just a few hundred meters distance. And then came the countdown and ignition. The system lifted off with a roar. It lifted up straight, and, of course, we all screamed with delight. It hadn’t exploded on the launch complex. The guidance system seemed to work. . . it looked like a fiery sword going into the sky. Then came the enormous roar—the whole sky seemed to vibrate. This kind of unearthly roaring sound was something human ears had never heard [before].
You know, it’s very hard to describe what you feel when you stand on the threshold of a whole new era, of a whole new age that you know will be coming. It’s like those people must have felt—Columbus or Magellan—that for the first time, saw entire new worlds, and knew the world would never be the same after this. . . This is the feeling many of us had.
For me, it was absolutely overwhelming. I almost fell off the roof, I was so excited.
When we came down together we congratulated ourselves. We knew the Space Age had begun and Dr. Dornberger made a very moving speech at the time, and said, “Well, this is the key to the universe. This is the first day of the Space Age.” [Marsha Freeman, Krafft Ehricke’s Extraterrestrial Imperative, Apogee Books, 2008, p. 16]
