FIRESIDE CHAT WITH WILL WERTZ, SEPT. 8
Lyndon LaRouche Is the Soul
of the United States of America
The following comments were adapted from a presentation made on Sept. 8, 2016, the 94th birthday of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., by William F. Wertz, Jr., on the LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat.
September 8 is Lyndon LaRouche’s 94th birthday. He was born in 1922. And he’s probably the youngest one among us from the standpoint of his power of reason.
I think the basic point here is that the world is on the verge of seeing the fruition of what Lyndon LaRouche has fought for, steadfastly, over a period of decades: the development of a just, new world economic order, which is consonant with the actual nature of the human species as the only creative species. And we’ve seen these developments proceeding with great density and rapidity even over the last week: There was a conference in Vladivostok, the Eastern Economic Forum in Russia. It was followed by the G-20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, which was followed in turn by the ASEAN summit and the East Asia Summit in Vientiane, Laos. In addition, the UN General Assembly will begin on Sept. 13th. Later, on Oct. 15-16, the annual BRICS summit will take place in Goa, India.
What these developments represent is a commitment to an economic order which is oriented towards development of this planet and of the productive powers of all human beings, and at the same time a commitment to the exploration of space, which is mankind’s true residence, in a certain sense, since we’re not really earthlings, as Lyndon LaRouche has often said.
Coinciding with these events, there will be a Living Memorial for the victims of 9/11 this weekend in the greater New York area. This is the 15th anniversary of 9/11/2001 attacks. And the Schiller Institute New York Community Chorus will be performing Mozart’s Requiem in four locations—starting on Friday in the Bronx, Saturday in Manhattan, Brooklyn on Sunday, and then Morristown, New Jersey on Monday night. These concerts are really designed again to bring justice to the fore, not only for the victims of 9/11 directly, but also, indirectly, for the victims internationally, which includes all of us, who are victims not only of the attacks, but also of the cover-up of the attacks and the further crimes facilitated by the attacks and the coverup. And this is something that Lyndon LaRouche had proposed that we have—a Living Memorial. And this is coming on only the second anniversary of Lyndon LaRouche having initiated what he called “the Manhattan Project.”
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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. participating in a recent LPAC TV Policy Committee broadcast.
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We have these developments in the United States, which have a potential to change the United States of America at a crucial moment, and these developments in Manhattan are occurring at the same time that we have the development of the New Paradigm internationally, centered on Asia, but not limited to Asia. And all of this is occurring in the context of Lyndon LaRouche’s birthday today, Sept. 8.
I want to urge people to think in terms of Lyndon LaRouche’s actual significance, and this is not a significance which is merely in the past. This is his ongoing significance, it is a living significance because he is still active, in a way that redefines being active as being a creative force in the Universe. I think one can say that Lyndon LaRouche is the soul of the United States of America, and he has been so over these last several decades. This country would be in far, far worse shape if it had not been for the fight which Lyndon LaRouche has waged, going back to World War II, and perhaps even before that in high school, where he challenged false authority by refusing to accept the axiomatic assumptions of Euclidean geometry, because he knew that the universe was not based upon perfect linear extension but rather was characterized by curvature.
The New Ideas He Created
He wouldn’t just accept things that most of us did accept as early as high school. He operated from the standpoint of the authority of the power of reason: You should only accept those things which you can actually prove through your own exercise of reason. It was Nicholas of Cusa who said that the soul is the power of reason, and that’s why I said that Lyndon LaRouche is the soul of America, and that his importance to the world is highly underestimated. It’s important for us to reflect on what he has done at the moment in which his work is coming to fruition. It’s not that the results are finally in, it’s not that the political war has been won once and for all, but the dynamic has now been established: The old system is passing away and the new system is coming into existence.
When the Soviet Union fell, there was a pseudo-intellectual by the name of Francis Fukuyama who wrote something called The End of History and the Last Man, and his whole thesis was that with the fall of the Soviet Union, British predatory capitalism had won, and therefore history had come to an end. And yet, everything that we see right now is just the opposite of that. This predatory British Empire capitalism is itself on the verge of suffering the same fate as that of the Soviet system previously.
Fukuyama’s whole thesis was completely fraudulent. It reminds you of those who argue that the Creator created the Universe, and at that point there was nothing else the Creator either needed to do or could do. So what this Aristotelian view argued was that creativity was not an ongoing act of principle in the Universe. It was the philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria who was the first to counter this view altogether.
What it brings out is the fact that man, as Lyndon LaRouche is insisting, is creative, and that creativity is not a linear extension of contributions from the past. A Renaissance is not merely a revival of that which had been known in the past. It is something completely new. As Lyndon LaRouche said about a week ago, “creativity is something which comes out of the blue.” And that is what characterizes Lyndon LaRouche.
And we don’t often advertise this now,— and I think that is a mistake,— but Lyndon LaRouche is foremost an economist. He is the most successful forecaster alive today, or actually who has ever existed. And in looking back, I mentioned his rejection of Euclidean geometry, but one of the things that comes to mind when you look at Lyndon LaRouche’s history, is his rejection of the writings of Norbert Wiener, particularly of a book called The Human Use of Human Beings: The Cybernetics of Society. And what Wiener—I don’t think he’s related to the other notorious Wiener from New York today—argued is that the Universe is entropic. And again, this is something which most people in society accept, all the institutions accept it: They believe that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is universally valid, and that entropy increases. And all of the false ideology which has become predominant in the world, especially since the 1960s but even before that, is based on this false notion of the primacy of entropy.
Lyndon LaRouche,— and this is a crucial turning point as he relates it in his autobiography, The Power of Reason,— upon his reading of Wiener, rejected this notion as emphatically as he had rejected the related notions of Euclid. What Wiener argues in that book is that the Universe is entropic and even if you have a negative-entropic, or a negentropic development locally, you can counter entropy locally for a short period of time, but the more successfully you counter entropy, the more rapidly entropy will exert itself and exert itself more viciously. For Wiener, progress itself is counterproductive, in that it leads to increased entropy.
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EIRNS/Stuart Lewis
Schiller Institute chorus performing Mozart’s Requiem at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph, Brooklyn, NY, as part of a four-concert living memorial by the Schiller Institute, on the weekend of 9/11/2016, to victims of the 9/11/2001 attacks.
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So this is a complete denial of humanity’s creativity and the fact that through human creativity, man is a force in the Universe which is anti-entropic, and that the nature of the Universe itself is anti-entropic as opposed to entropic. This, I think is really the crucial distinction that Lyndon LaRouche arrived at, which led him then to his economic forecasts, starting in the 1950s, and his development of the LaRouche-Riemann method of Economics, in which he laid out the perspective that man’s development in the Universe is characterized by his making scientific discoveries, creative discoveries, and those being implemented in terms of technology so as to develop capital-intensive modes of production which redefine the resource base and allow for an increase in what Lyndon LaRouche called the potential relative population-density.
He Never Stopped Fighting
The latter is a scientific term which he invented. It didn’t exist before. It expresses the fundamental anti-entropic principle of human nature and of human economy, which runs completely counter to the idea that we’re now in a post-industrial society: We don’t have to develop industry; we don’t have to go to the Moon, as Barack Obama said, because “we’ve been there, done that.” LaRouche’s idea rejects the whole notion that there are limits to growth. It’s a rejection of the idea that we’re suffering from overpopulation, because what we’re actually suffering from is underpopulation and the failure to develop the mental powers of the population.
These conceptions are fundamental to Lyndon LaRouche’s breakthrough in economic science, which, as he put it, is the queen of all the sciences, because it’s the basis for human existence. And in that sense, I would maintain that Lyndon LaRouche’s contribution in terms of economics is the underpinning of the New Paradigm which is now in the process of establishing itself on this globe, and is the only hope which we in the United States have, to the extent to which we move to get Glass-Steagall passed, to implement LaRouche’s Four Cardinal laws, and to bring the United States into this Asian geometry.
Everything positive that’s occurring right now in the world is something that Lyndon LaRouche and Helga LaRouche have fought for. For instance, if you look at his Power of Reason book which was published in 1988, the final chapters are on “Asia, the New Economic Frontier,” on the space program, and also on his marriage to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and the importance of that in terms of what they have commited their marriage to, over these succeeding years.
Now the only way that we’re going to take back this country, given what’s passing for a Presidential election, is the extent to which we create a movement in this country. And that means not just mobilizing yourself, but mobilizing other people to fight for the country. That’s why I started out with the question of Lyndon LaRouche’s importance to this country. You have look at his history. After World War II, many people came back and they just gave up the fight. They had fought fascism, whether it was Japanese militarism or the Nazis, and they came back and they found the country had been taken over through Truman, resulting in the period of McCarthyism. They then ran from the fight which they had just devoted themselves to internationally.
Lyndon LaRouche did not give up that fight. He knew the importance of what Roosevelt did, and he knew that Truman would take the country in the opposite direction. He met with other soldiers who approached him in India, where they were after Roosevelt had died, and he told them he was very concerned because a “great man has been replaced by a small man.”
So here you have an individual, all by himself, coming back to the United States, not giving up that fight, developing himself as an economist during the 1950s, developing his first economic forecast of a recession in the late 1950s and continuing along these lines. Then he gets into the 1960s and he recognizes that there are no real institutions which are fighting for this country and for humanity. In the late 1960s, he intervened against the New Left and created what was called at that point, the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an independent organization, the core of which still exists to this day!
In other words, he was combatting people who were saying, at that point, that there couldn’t be another Depression, “because we have built-in stabilizers.” But LaRouche said, no, this economic policy is leading not only to recession but an economic collapse. This was demonstrated by what happened on Aug. 15, 1971: Nixon announced that he was going to abandon the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system set up by Franklin Roosevelt, that he was going to decouple the dollar from the gold reserve system, and that he was going to impose price and wage controls and austerity.
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EIRNS/Alan Yue
1971 debate of Lyndon LaRouche (with pipe) with Abba Lerner (standing).
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At that point, LaRouche argued in a major article in our newspaper of that time, that either we go forward with what he called at that point “expanded social reproduction,” which was his conception of economic development, or we’re facing fascism. And in that year, he had a debate with a liberal economist by the name of Abba Lerner at Queens College. And in the debate Lyn, not through debaters’ points, but rather by just developing the truth, forced Abba Lerner to come out and say that if Germany had followed the policies of Hjalmar Schacht, “then Hitler wouldn’t have been necessary.”
But who was Hjalmar Schacht? Hjalmar Schacht was the guy who helped bring Hitler into power, and then as Economics Minister under Hitler implemented the fascist austerity policies Hitler needed to enforce.
So the point was that LaRouche confirmed his analysis by defeating Abba Lerner in this debate, and LaRouche’s organization grew by leaps and bounds during this period. The basic thrust was against the ideology of the New Left, because the New Left believed in limits to growth, they believed there was overpopulation, they believed that we’re in a post-industrial society. That was their ideology, an ideology which is in fact fascist.
And you go forward from there, and Lyn continued to fight, not only in the United States but internationally, and this is one man doing this, fighting for a policy of economic development, putting forward his proposal for an International Development Bank. In 1976, the Non-Aligned Movement had its summit in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at which the Foreign Minister of Guyana Fred Wills, with whom we had been in contact, gave a speech calling for a moratorium on Third World debt so that you could actually have economic development of the Third World. This was a result of the influence of LaRouche.
And LaRouche then decided to run for President against Jimmy Carter. He did a half-hour TV show, exposing the policies of Jimmy Carter as destructive to this country and endangering the world by bringing it to the brink of thermonuclear war. By the late 1970s, some of the people in the intelligence community who had worked with Roosevelt, began to work with LaRuche, and he became the person, even before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, who was formulating policy for the new Administration, including what later became the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) enunciated by Reagan.
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Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche (left) conversing with Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan at a campaign event in New Hampshire in 1980.
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And the enemy couldn’t stand that, and so you had the assassination attempt against Reagan, and then after the ’84 election, in which LaRouche ran again, you had persecution of Lyndon LaRouche and his associates, and the jailing of LaRouche in 1989 by the Bush forces.
And yet, he comes out of jail, and he continues to fight! How many people would do that? What is the quality of his mind that led him to continue to fight like that? When the people who served with him in World War II gave up the fight, he continued to fight. He then formed the LaRouche organization all by himself in the 1960s and ’70s. He was then thrown into jail and came out of jail and continued to fight. And he is still continuing this fight at the age of 94. I think you have to look at the fact that he is motivated by an actual commitment to creativity—his own creativity and the evocation of the creativity of others, on behalf of humanity and humanity’s mission.
And it’s that quality which we have to find in ourselves and evoke in other people, that sense of mission, being willing to combat public opinion, to think through and make sure you’re right, but to stand even if you have to stand alone on behalf of what is true—that’s the quality that Lyndon LaRouche represents. There are very few people throughout history who have that quality and who are actually creative in the real sense of being creative.
I was thinking of what he had said the other day, in a private conversation, about how creativity is not based upon reviving great ideas from the past and building on them, but rather it’s developing something completely new. And one example that comes to my mind is Nicholas of Cusa, who proved that you could not square a circle, as Archimedes had said you could. Archimedes’ assumption was that you could square the circle, that you could come up with an approximation through inscribing a polygon within a circle.
Nicholas of Cusa’s discovery wasn’t the linear extension of Archimedes. It was a rejection of Archimedes, and a discovery of the fact that circular action is ontologically superior to polygonal action, because it’s not linear. For instance, if you have a circle you can create a square by folding the circle twice. And you can create other polygonal figures within a circle. But you cannot go from a polygon to creating a curved circumference. So the circle is actually transcendental in relationship to a polygon. And that was a completely new discovery! It had never existed in human history before.
And that’s the quality of thinking that’s actually required: You find that in Einstein, you find that in some other individuals. And that quality is really what we have to make clear to people, this is what really makes people human, and this is what we need to advance humanity, this kind of thinking.
And so, in organizing others to organize, we have to also really look in this deeper level as well. There’s an immediate necessity for action on Glass-Steagall just as there was to declassify the 28 pages on 9/11. But at the same time, there’s a deeper understanding that we have to have of what mankind requires, and develop that in ourselves and encourage that in others. Throughout much of his life, Lyndon LaRouche has been demonized. He was railroaded and thrown into prison, and you have to appreciate what he’s done and what he represents for the future. This country is in bad shape, but think about what shape it would be in if it were not for the fact that Lyndon LaRouche has played this central role in the history of this country over the last several decades. The possibility of shifting the direction of the United States would not exist, if it were not for Lyndon LaRouche.
And then I think in that context, it’s important to really reflect upon what it is about him that has allowed him to do that. Because I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude. But it’s not just a question of saying “thanks.” It’s a question of really thinking about what he continues to do, and thinking through what it’s necessary for each of us to do, in terms of our own contribution, but also in terms of helping to develop a society where others can emerge who have the quality which he has had, and which is essential for humanity.
It’s not just the immediate actions that are necessary,—as necessary as those are. It’s also necessary to reflect upon this deeper question. And I know that that’s what people are going to be thinking about this weekend, in the New York area, with the performance of Mozart’s Requiem, which is a profound reflection of man’s immortality. And it’s that immortality which you have to have in your mind’s eye as you go through life, as Lyndon LaRouche continues to do.
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