The Hypotheses Underlying
Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws
and the World Land-Bridge

by William F. Wertz, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

The following article is an adaptation of a speech given on January 6, 2018 to an audience in Oakland, California.

May 15—I have found that in many cases there is an insufficient understanding of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, and in some cases a tendency to pragmatically reduce the Four Laws to a lifeless four-point formula. In some cases there is a tendency to cherry-pick one or another of the Four Laws—for example, to emphasize only the First Law, a return to Glass-Steagall, or only to support the Fourth Law, the urgent development of fusion power. In one case that I am aware of, a resolution was introduced into a state legislature which focused exclusively on the First and Second Laws (Glass-Steagall and national banking), omitting the Third and Fourth Laws. In other cases, two resolutions have been simultaneously introduced into the same legislature—one supporting Glass-Steagall alone, and one supporting the Four Laws as a whole, with the implied assessment that Glass-Steagall alone might have a greater chance to be adopted.

What all of these approaches reflect, in varying degrees, is a failure to see Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws as one coherent living principle, an anti-entropic, self-subsisting positive conception of the necessity of the self-expansion of human labor power in the form of creative mentation. In many cases, such approaches reflect propitiation of the prevailing false axiomatic assumptions of the very Anglo-Dutch liberal imperial system, which the Four Laws as a whole are designed to challenge and replace.

Challenging False Axioms

Properly understood, the Four Laws polemically challenge those false axiomatic assumptions, which stand in the way of human progress. As necessary as the re-enactment of Glass-Steagall is, it alone will not solve the problem. For example, the separation of commercial banking and speculative banking existed even in Mussolini’s Italy. Glass-Steagall, without national banking, without a scientific conception of productive investment of credit, and without the concept of the necessity of generating a higher-order economic platform, will solve nothing.

President Trump has endorsed Glass-Steagall and the American System of Economics, but does he support the Second Law, national banking? He references Alexander Hamilton, but at the same time he supports Andrew Jackson, who dismantled the National Bank, which was and is an essential aspect of Alexander Hamilton’s American System.

The Third Law, credit for increased productivity, is even more controversial. Neither the advocates of Milton Friedman in the Republican Party, nor of John Maynard Keynes in the Democratic Party, have any scientific conception of productivity. The Republicans are insistent on balancing the budget, and the Democrats, with their Green ideology, are opposed to precisely those technologies which are productive and thus would contribute to the necessary anti-entropic development of the economy.

With respect to the Fourth Law, not only is there an inadequate appreciation of the need to develop a higher-order economic-cultural platform as represented by the development of fusion power and the exploration of space, but there is a concerted effort to prevent such a development. After all, shouldn’t we rather concentrate on more appropriate technologies like solar and wind power, and the recycling of dog poop? Doesn’t such an emphasis encourage false technological optimism in violation of the law of entropy? Shouldn’t we rather focus on solving our problems here on Earth?

The Underlying Hypotheses

Today I will address the underlying hypotheses involved in Lyndon LaRouche’s proposed Four Laws and in the policy of the World Land-Bridge, because if we are to succeed, we must understand the revolutionary ideas which generated this policy, and simultaneously examine those false axiomatic assumptions that stand in the way of its implementation, unless decisively rejected.

The Four Laws are not just four points. There’s a matter of principle involved in them, and what I hope to do today is to provoke you to think about what exactly that principle is, because it’s the fundamental principle of human progress. It involves the Sublime as defined by Friedrich Schiller. It also involves hypothesizing higher hypotheses as defined by Plato. Those two concepts, Schiller’s notion of the Sublime and Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis, are the operative principles behind the Four Laws that you have to understand if you’re going to understand what’s entailed in the world that we have to create, looking into the future.

The illustration of the World Land-Bridge that appears on the cover of the new pamphlet produced by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery, is highly suggestive. It depicts a specific angle, which is not the typical angle or the typical view of the World Land-Bridge. When I first saw this, it immediately brought to my mind Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As you can see, the North American land mass is represented as an arm extending toward the Eurasian arm, and what you have is a gap, the Bering Strait, between those two extensions. Unfortunately, Michelangelo is very oriented toward muscles and not brains; and, of course, he depicts the Creator as a muscular human figure creating a muscular human being, Adam, as opposed to the notion of the Creator who creates man in his own living image as a creative being.

This latter conception is that of the new Adam as depicted in Raphael’s Transfiguration, which also appears in the Vatican.

In a certain sense, the contrast between these two paintings embodies the task which we have before us of creating a new paradigm in which a new man, as a creative species, is able to emerge in the world. The World Land-Bridge has a definite, necessary physical-technological aspect—however, that is not primary, but rather, what is primary is the creativity necessary to create it and the increase in human creativity generated by its creation.

Creativity and the Sublime

In I Corinthians 15:45, the Apostle Paul wrote: “The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam (which is Christ), a life-giving spirit.” The word for “spirit” in Greek is pneuma. The point is that the new man is not just alive, but is life-giving for others. Another translation of pneuma is creative fire; and of course, in the Transfiguration, Christ as he is transfigured, is engulfed in light which is meant to represent creative fire or intellect. In distinction to Christ who is creative fire, some of the Apostles who are with him on the mount are actually blinded by the light and recoil from the announcement that Christ is the Son of God.

At the base of the mount, a boy is pictured who is in some way incapacitated, and the other Apostles pictured there are unable to cure him because they lack faith in the creative power embodied by Christ, who later cures the boy when he descends from the mount. Eventually, the Apostles, to the extent that they stop recoiling and embrace Christ as the manifestation of the Logos, or creative reason, develop that capability on their own.

In I Corinthians 15, Paul continues: “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead came also through a human being, or just as in Adam all died, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life.” Nicholas of Cusa in his On Learned Ignorance makes the point that a whole resurrected man is an intellect; and in one of his essays, On Searching for God, Cusa writes: “Our intellectual spirit has the power of fire in itself.

The Transfiguration conveys the power of creative reason, and it is that power which is the basis for transforming the face of the Earth through the Eurasian Land-Bridge, including a tunnel or bridge across the Bering Strait. It’s through this process that we actually get to the point where man can be truly man, that is, he can actually be in the living image of the Creator and act on his capacity for creativity.

Multiply-connected Universal Physical Principles

The reason I’m starting in this way, is that Lyndon LaRouche wrote the following in an article entitled, “Who Needs Brains, When We Have Muscles?”:

“[T]he root definition of grand strategy lies in the multiply-connected character of two sets of universal principles. . . . [T]hese are, respectively, sets of universal physical principles, and also sets of universal principles of social relations, the latter typified by the greatest works of Classical artistic composition. The multiple-connectedness among these two sets of universal principles, defines the means by which mankind increases our species’ power in and over the physical universe, and also the means of cooperation by which that physical power is developed and effectively applied.”

LaRouche has emphasized particularly in his book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, and in The Coming Eurasian World that ridding the planet of the Anglo-Dutch liberal tradition is the absolute precondition for preserving civilization.

Thus, the issue before us is not just defeating an attempted coup by British intelligence and the British Empire against the Presidency of the United States. If we are going to succeed in implementing the Eurasian Land-Bridge and in enacting LaRouche’s Four Laws, a much larger issue must be addressed.

Edgar Allan Poe: the Pathway to Truth

The American poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “Mellonta Tauta” which gets at the crux of the issue. Poe writes there that if you believe that there are only two pathways to truth, empiricism and logical deduction, then your mind will be controlled by the oligarchy, by imperial forces, because neither of those forms of mentation is valid—neither empiricism, which is based on sense perception, nor logical deduction, which assumes certain fixed categories of thought from which the human mind is only capable of coming to logical deductions. If you accept that, then there’s no place for creativity, which is the actual condition of mankind as the sole creative species that we know of in the Universe.

Poe says that if you believe that the only way the mind functions is through empiricism and logical deduction, then you are reduced to a condition of merely creeping and crawling. In contrast, he says that the actual nature of mankind is to soar through what he calls conjectures, through hypothesis, and he cites Johannes Kepler, the person who discovered the principle of universal gravitation, as an exemplar of this method of hypothesis, which should be characteristic of all human beings.

This is important, because unless you yourself examine the assumptions underlying the way you think, you are subject to being controlled by the Anglo-Dutch liberal system even as you deny such a thing even exists. How many people have said that the British Empire is not really functional any longer, that the Queen, her consort Philip and her son Prince Charles have no power? How many people accept without question that if there is an empire it is the United States of America, which is a deliberately false construction spread by the British Empire?

The way that empire operates is by controlling the way you think; that’s the significance of Poe’s short story—he understood that. He was an American patriot who understood that in the early 1800s. This was also understood by the leaders of the European Renaissance.

Nicholas of Cusa, for example, argues that when the Apostle Paul said that he was raptured into the Third Heaven during his Damascus Road conversion, he was transported into the realm of creative reason, thus transcending the First Heaven, sense perception, and the Second Heaven, logical deduction.

Rembrandt: Can You See?

One of the best examples of this understanding is Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

Of course, Aristotle is the leading philosopher who promoted logical deduction based on sense perception. In other words, the categories from which you deduce conclusions logically, ultimately come from sense perception, and according to Aristotle, human beings are trapped in this self-reflexive theorem lattice without access to creativity.

In his painting, Rembrandt directly attacks this central Aristotelian conception. If you look closely at this painting, it is Aristotle who is blind intellectually; whereas Homer, who was physically blind, is the person capable of vision. Rembrandt gets across Aristotle’s empiricism by having him put his hand on the head of Homer, as if through sense perception he’s going to solve the mystery, for him, of what allowed Homer to be a creative poet.

This same issue was addressed in the The School of Athens by Raphael. Many argue that Aristotle is just a continuation of Plato, that he was actually a student of Plato, and in that capacity completed the work of Plato—but Raphael ironically makes it very clear that Aristotle and Plato are diametrically opposed. The figure with his hand pointing up to the heavens is Plato. He is carrying his book in his hand, the Timaeus, and the Timaeus is a discussion of creation. Aristotle, on the other hand, has his hand pointed downward towards the ground, and he is carrying his book, The Ethics. The book is leaning on his leg, so if he moves, the book will fall to the ground.

Fight Aristotle: Fight Slavery

In The Ethics, Aristotle puts forth a defense of slavery, whereas in the Timaeus, the conception is that each human being is capable of creative reason and that’s the basis for creation. What Raphael is doing here is demolishing the false notion that Aristotle was in the tradition of Plato, when in fact he denied creativity and Plato’s conception that man participates in eternal ideas.

Many people say, “Well, the British Empire is not militarily strong; it doesn’t physically occupy countries in the way it did during the 1800s and even into the 20th century.” But that’s not how imperialism works. Fundamentally, imperialism operates from the standpoint of control of the mind.

You have to examine your assumptions, and also examine the assumptions of other people. I would say the vast majority of American citizens and many throughout the world do not do that, they do not examine their axiomatic assumptions, and therefore they’re controlled by the very system which they deny exists.

The British Empire of Slavery

Think about the effects, for instance, of Parson Thomas Malthus. Today, the ideology which has become prevalent within the West is the argument that industry is destroying the environment, and human technological activity is creating climate change to the detriment of animals and the planet Earth.

Thomas Malthus was British and he was an instrument of British imperial policy, including in India, and his argument was against population growth. He said that agriculture can only grow arithmetically, but human population grows exponentially; therefore, you have to reduce population—and of course, by extension, you also have to reduce technological development. That’s one of the ways in which people are controlled. Thomas Malthus was an agent of the British Empire, and he operates to this day within the minds of our fellow citizens and policy-makers.

Look at Charles Darwin, another agent of the British Empire, who enunciated a false notion of evolution based on the notion of survival of the fittest; whereas, in fact, the evolutionary development of life is actually brought about not by the survival of the fittest, but by an unfolding of what is latent in the creative process of the Universe in the first place. Evolution is actually based on love and reason combined, not competition. All you have to do is look at the human species and how it has evolved—not biologically, but how it has evolved socially; it is through reason and love for mankind and for the truth that results in scientific breakthroughs, or what are called hypotheses, which can then be technologically implemented to the benefit of all mankind.

Malthus and Darwin are two British pseudo-thinkers, actually propagandists, who continue to this day to control the thinking of most Americans in one way or the other.

Or, look at Adam Smith: The American Revolution was fought against the free trade doctrine as espoused by Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations, and yet, an entire spectrum of political life in our country still adheres to the idea espoused by Adam Smith to enslave the colonies—free trade.

The American Revolution Opposed
Adam Smith

At the same time, you have others who adhere to the views of a later British so-called economist, John Maynard Keynes. In a very real way, the Republican and Democratic Parties are divided between these two British ideologues—Smith and Keynes—who put forward two bogus conceptions of so-called economics, in opposition to the American System of economics, in order to effectively trap Americans, among others, in this intellectual prison of empiricism and logical deduction.

Other British ideologues in the service of Empire include Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells. Bertrand Russell, the pacifist who proposed to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the then Soviet Union, and proudly proclaimed that he was not a Christian based on the alleged crimes perpetrated in the name of Christianity, which pale in comparison to his own.

H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy put forward the conception of globalization, in opposition to the principle of national sovereignty. His conception was the precursor to Tony Blair’s justification for regime change under the guise of the “Responsibility to Protect,” a policy implemented by successive U.S. Presidents.

Look as well at Halford Mackinder, who developed the British Empire’s Russophobic notion of geopolitics.

Or, look back a little further at John Locke (1632-1704), who in contrast to the American Declaration of Independence, which called for the Leibnizian idea of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” put forward the opposite conception which is the basis for slavery, as in the case of Aristotle, of “life, liberty and property.”

The Axioms of the Anglo-Dutch Empire of Slavery

The point I’m making here, is how does the British Empire, or the Anglo-Dutch system, control the way we think? It is through these kinds of false axiomatic assumptions, which assumptions the victim firmly defends as if they were his very own.

The Anglo-Dutch liberal system came into power in 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, after the Seven Years’ War, or what we call the French and Indian Wars. And at that point, the British East India Company took over large portions of India and eventually China: It was an empire based on a private corporation with its own army.

Although the British East India Company and its partner in crime, the Dutch East India Company, no longer exist as corporate entities, the model persists. Take for instance the World Wildlife Fund.

In 1961 Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, i.e., the Dutch, founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He was its first president. Prince Philip became the president of the British branch of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, and continued in that position through 1982; he functioned as the president of the World Wildlife Fund International from 1981 until 1996. Now he’s president emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund. And what is this? It’s the core of the environmentalist movement, a Malthusian, genocidal, anti-human movement that has taken over the thinking of institutions and of people throughout the world.

This Anglo-Dutch system persists and continues to define the prevailing false axiomatic assumptions of thought in the United States and elsewhere.

The Elephant Hiding in the Middle of the Room

In his book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, Lyndon LaRouche called this the elephant defecating on the bed of the honeymoon couple. The reason I’m raising this is because the new paradigm of the World Land-Bridge will not prevail if the world does not rid itself of this Anglo-Dutch liberal system. We have to rid ourselves of the false axiomatic assumptions of this system, otherwise, we will be controlled to our self-destruction by that same Anglo-Dutch imperial system, which we are told doesn’t exist.

This is crucial. It is crucial in terms of the battle for the World Land-Bridge. It is crucial in terms of the fight to implement Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws.

The Four Laws are a total assault on the false axiomatic assumptions of the Anglo-Dutch liberal system. And the only way to succeed is to understand that, as the Apostle Paul was told, it is necessary to kick against the pricks.

Now, let me address Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws from the standpoint of Friedrich Schiller’s Sublime, and Plato’s Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis.

Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis

As I have stated, the Four Laws are not merely four points. The Four Laws are not an objective four-point program. You have to look at the operative principle: It’s a living principle of the universe, which is expressed in these Four Laws, and as such it’s also an expression of the living Constitutional principle of the Preamble of the American Constitution. The Preamble says, “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Now, look at LaRouche’s Four Laws. The first law is “the immediate re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law, as instituted by Franklin Roosevelt back in 1933, without modification as to principle of action.” And the fundamental thing that the Glass-Steagall law does, is it makes a distinction between productive investment that promotes the general welfare, the common defense, and other principles of the Preamble of the Constitution, and speculative, predatory activity. Specifically, the original Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagall Act) is an “Act to provide for the safer and more effective use of the assets of banks, to regulate interbank control, to prevent the undue diversion of funds into speculative operations, and for other purposes.”

The Glass-Steagall law is based on the constitutional principle that the only investors who are defended are those who contribute to principles as defined by the Preamble of the Constitution; that is contributing to the well-being of the population, and its continuing advancement, as opposed to speculative activity.

LaRouche’s second law is, “A return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined as National Banking,” as we had under Alexander Hamilton. We had a version of that under Abraham Lincoln with the greenback policy, and we also had a version of that policy under Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s. But, the nation has not had such a national banking system during a great part of our history. But when we have had such a national banking system, credit has been generated for the purpose of promoting the general welfare.

Credit Is Not Money: It’s the Future

How that credit should be extended is fundamentally a voluntaristic notion. It’s based on the fact that mankind can extend credit, and if mankind extends credit for productive activity, then mankind is actually enhancing the further development of the human species and of the population of the country—”We, the People . . .”

With respect to the Third Law, LaRouche writes, “The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention to increase the physical-economic productivity and standard of living of the persons and households of the United States . . . by reliance on the essential human principle, which distinguishes the human personality from the systematic characteristics of the lower forms of life . . .” So, again, you have here, the distinction between man, as creative, and lower forms of life.

The next portion of LaRouche’s third law I think is most significant: “The ceaseless increase of the physical-productivity of employment, accompanied by its benefits for the general welfare, are a principle of Federal law, which must be a paramount standard of achievement of the nation and the individual. Every individual in society has the right derived from natural law, to pursue happiness, to participate in the uniquely human process of upward anti-entropic growth, the creation of a higher platform of society to bequeath the next generation.”

So the idea here is coherent, as Lyndon LaRouche says, with the principle of perfectibility embedded in Federal law. The Preamble says that “We, the People, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” So again, you’re dealing here with anti-entropic improvements in employment, in order to enhance the general welfare. And I think the further point here, is the creation of a “higher platform of society, to bequeath the next generation.” Here we are discussing the question of anti-entropic growth “for our posterity.”

Anti-Entropic Growth

This notion of a platform is something I’m going to come back to, in terms of Platonic hypothesizing.

LaRouche’s fourth law is: “ ‘Adopt a Fusion-Driver ‘Crash Program.’ The essential distinction of man from all lower forms of life, hence, in practice, is that it presents the means for the perfection of the specifically affirmative aims and needs of human individual and social life. . . . A fusion economy is the presently urgent next step and standard for man’s gains of power within the Solar system, and, later, beyond.”

Thus, the Four Laws are not just four points of a minimal four-point program. They’re also not in isolation from one another. You cannot advocate Glass-Steagall, without National Banking, or without creating a higher-order economic-cultural platform for society as a whole based on a scientific concept of productivity, and without emphasizing the frontiers of science, including fusion power and space exploration.

So, in a very real sense, this is a challenge to all of the false axiomatic assumptions of the Anglo-Dutch liberal system, the zero-growth conception that I went through earlier. Lyndon LaRouche is talking about the “ceaseless increase of the physical-productivity of employment.” This notion runs against the conception that the universe is entropic. It runs against all of the green ideology, and all of the Keynesian ideology, neither of which make any distinction between productive and nonproductive forms of investment. And it rejects the entire free-trade dogma of Adam Smith, because what it’s putting forward is that man can and must, voluntaristically, based on reason and his love for his fellow man, commit himself to an economic policy which promotes the general welfare of all.

With the Four Laws you have a coherent statement of fundamental principle, of man’s relationship to the entire Solar System and the Universe, the same principle that is embedded in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

Schiller: The Love of Mankind

Now, the basic thesis that I want to develop is the following: This love of mankind is the issue of the Sublime, as defined by Schiller; it’s also the issue of Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis of Plato, and it’s also the concept of Prometheus. This notion is reflected in the contrast between the Creation of Adam by Michelangelo and the Transfiguration by Raphael, that is, the contrast between the first Adam and the last Adam. In contrast to the false axiomatic assumptions of the Anglo-Dutch liberal system, which is the enemy of such progress, there is a consistent principle, as expressed artistically in Classical art, which is the Principle of the Sublime, the Principle of Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis, and at the same time the Principle of Prometheus.

As you know, Prometheus gave man fire. Remember what I quoted from Nicholas of Cusa earlier. He said, “Our intellectual spirit has the power of fire in itself.” Remember also the quote from Paul in Corinthians, “the last Adam, a life-giving creative fire,” or “spirit”—that’s the nature of man. And that is what has brought about advances in human society throughout history, to the extent mankind has been able to defeat various forms of imperial rule, the current expression of which is the Anglo-Dutch/British liberal system.

The Gift of Prometheus

Prometheus gave man fire, in opposition to Zeus, who was the embodiment of the imperial system: Zeus did not want mankind to be educated, to be able to develop his creativity. Zeus wanted slaves, as did Aristotle, and nothing more, because slaves are easy to control. So he denied creativity, whereas Prometheus gave man not only fire, physical fire, but he also gave man a method of thinking, which is the Platonic method of hypothesizing, as Edgar Allan Poe describes that in “Mellonta Tauta.”

Specifically, there’s a dialogue called the Philebus by Plato, in which he says:

There is a gift of the gods—so at least it seems evident to me—which they let fall from their abode, and it was through Prometheus, or one like him, that it reached mankind, together with a fire exceeding bright. The men of old, who were better than ourselves and dwelt nearer the gods, passed on this gift in the form of a saying. All things, so it ran, that are ever said to be consist of a one and a many, and have in their nature a conjunction of limit and unlimitedness.

Now, there are two ways to understand that conjunction: The one is to view it from the standpoint of the imposition of a limit upon the unlimited. Lyndon LaRouche, in his 1994 paper, “The Truth About Temporal Eternity,” states,

If the human species were to adopt any fixed hypotheses as permanent, that commitment would lead toward the extinction of the human species. Fixed modes of human productive and related behavior, must lead toward an entropic collapse of the human species.

The alternative conception, developed by Plato in his Philebus, is that there can be a conjunction of the limited and unlimited, in which you have an unlimited family of higher-order limits. And this is the conception of Higher Hypothesis, also presented in his Republic. In other words, given a certain mode of production, that mode of production is a certain kind of economic-cultural platform, and that hypothesis defines the economic activities, the resources, and so forth, upon which that mode of production is based. If you stay in that one mode of production, mankind will experience entropy and he will be destroyed.

Any Fixed Hypotheses Will Lead to Extinction

So, what’s required? What’s required is the development of a higher-order hypothesis: The conception of an unlimited succession of limits, of hypotheses that redefine the entire theorem lattice. This would be the equivalent of going from a mode of production based on burning wood, to a mode of production based on coal or oil; or nuclear fission, or fusion. So, in a very real sense, this conception of developing a higher-order economic platform is Plato’s conception of Higher Hypotheses.

What we’re talking about here, is the concept developed by LaRouche in his Third and Fourth Laws, the creation of a higher-order anti-entropic platform based on fusion power and space exploration, an expression of the necessity of developing higher-order hypotheses to overcome the apparent “limits to growth” in a society based on a single, fixed hypothesis that defines its social and economic activity.

A further point here is increasing the rate of what LaRouche calls “potential relative population density”: The true metric for economy being man’s power over and in nature, through higher-order hypotheses that represent scientific breakthroughs that allow mankind to apply new, more productive technologies, on behalf of man’s general welfare.

The point I would make, is that Plato’s conception of the capacity to hypothesize higher hypotheses constitutes the basis for increasing the rate of potential relative population density, because you’re increasing the power of the average individual over nature, through this capacity to hypothesize higher-order hypotheses.

LaRouche’s Four Laws express this conception of hypothesizing higher hypotheses in behalf of promoting the general welfare of all the people. This is a Promethean conception, as developed by Plato. It is the method of thinking of Prometheus, not just the gift of physical fire.

Prometheus Did Not Regret His Deed

It is also Schiller’s notion of the Sublime. Schiller wrote two articles on the Sublime, in the earlier of which he puts forward the notion that Prometheus is sublime. He writes: “Prometheus was sublime. Since put in chains in the Caucasus, he did not regret his deed and did not confess that he was wrong.”

It is this Promethean conception of man, in which man soars, in which man engages in hypothesizing the higher hypothesis—which is the conception of man, the new man, under the New Paradigm, which we have to be committed to building, in opposition to the false axiomatic assumptions which control us otherwise, which are an expression of the Anglo-Dutch liberal imperial system.

This conception of the Sublime is expressed by Friedrich Schiller in his play, The Virgin of Orleans, about Joan of Arc. Schiller’s point is that as in the case of Christ, man—in this case a woman—even in dying is free, insofar as he or she is making a willful decision, based on his or her love of mankind, and the love of truth, to make a contribution to the future of mankind, to man’s posterity—and that’s what Joan of Arc did. She fought the British, the Normans who were entrenched in northern France, and were trying to take over all of France. As a result of her efforts, the first nation state in human history was created in France under Louis XI. And at the end of the play, Schiller says, “Brief is the pain, the joy shall be eterne!”

Beethoven and Joan of Arc

That’s the conception of the Sublime. Her situation was similar to that of Prometheus, who in Prometheus Bound was bound on a rock by Zeus, for eternity—where an eagle ate his liver, as a means of torturing him, to try to get him to give up, to confess that he was wrong, to not continue with his contribution to mankind.

You have a similar situation with Beethoven: Beethoven, at the age of 28, was already becoming deaf. In the year 1802, he wrote his “Heiligenstadt Testament” for his relatives:

For my brothers Carl and [Johann] Beethoven

. . . Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. . . . I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it pleases the inexorable Parcae [that’s the Fates] to break the thread. Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready. — Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eighth year, — oh it is not easy, and for the artist much more difficult than for anyone else. — Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul, thou knowest that therein dwells the love of mankind and the desire to do good. . . . Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery. . . . — With joy I hasten to meet death. — . . . Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely.

The attitude expressed here by Beethoven reminds one of Shakespeare’s comment, in his play Julius Caesar, that “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”

J.S. Bach’s Passions

You have the same principle expressed in Bach’s St. John Passion where, after Christ is crucified, an alto sings an absolutely powerful aria, bringing to the fore this sublime conception. In translation, she sings:

 

It is fulfilled!

All hope for every ailing spirit!

The night of grief

Is now its final hours counting.

The hero of Judah wins with might

And ends the fight.

It is fulfilled!

 

Initially she echoes Christ, “It is fulfilled!” But then suddenly she breaks from the night of grief into a new paradigm. She sings joyfully: “The hero of Judah wins with might and ends the fight.” One of the works of music which Lyndon LaRouche has cited, particularly, reflecting his understanding of the importance of Prometheus, is Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, which culminates in the final song based on I Corinthians 13. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.” Which then concludes: “And now abideth Faith, Hope, and Charity, these three. But the greatest of these is Charity.”

All of human progress has been based upon this Promethean conception, a conception of the Sublime, contributing to posterity knowing full well that we all die, and yet, remaining true to one’s love of mankind, and love of Truth, even in the face of death, as Christ did and Joan of Arc did—and as Beethoven did.

Beethoven: Every Man Becomes a Brother

Beethoven wrote the “Heiligenstadt Testament” in 1802. He wrote his Ninth Symphony between the years 1822 and 1824. Think of the gift that that represents to mankind! This is the setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy. I would suggest that particularly the opening stanza to the Ode to Joy, is, in fact, reflective of this Promethean conception. It begins, “Joy, Thou beauteous Godly lightning.”

And what does the joy of the fire of creative reason produce?

 

Thy enchantments bind together,

What did custom stern divide,

Every man becomes a brother,

Where thy gentle wings abide.

 

What better expression do you have of a win-win perspective? What better expression of promoting the general welfare, not only of one’s own country, but of the human species? That’s what Schiller puts forward there. That’s the symphony that Beethoven, throughout much of his life, had wanted to compose, because he was motivated by the love of mankind, and by a will to do good, despite his ailment. Can you think of a bigger ailment for a musician to have, than not to be able to hear, to be deaf? And yet, he continued. He triumphed morally. He wasn’t motivated by money, as he himself said, but by Virtue, and he produced the Ninth Symphony, an extraordinary, Promethean statement on behalf of all mankind.

I’ll conclude at this point, because what I wanted to get at is this underlying principle behind LaRouche’s Four Laws. We have to be motivated on this level if we’re going to be successful in destroying the false axiomatic assumptions which control us and much of the world—the Anglo-Dutch liberal system, which unfortunately has taken over much of the thinking in the United States, for a considerable period of time. We have to destroy that, and we have to be able to recreate man, in the living image of the Creator: We have to have that kind of a Renaissance.

We’re talking about new physical principles, on the one hand, as LaRouche said, and what does that mean? It means transforming the biosphere from the standpoint of what Vernadsky called the “noösphere.” That means developing fusion power, a new platform altogether. It’s not about merely filling potholes, or repairing roads, or building railroads per se. It is about developing a new economic and cultural platform, and doing that repeatedly, throughout the future, with new platforms, once the old platform has reached its limit. That’s the fundamental issue which is before us.

And so, when you organize, you can’t just organize for Glass-Steagall. You have to organize for the broader Renaissance conception. That’s the perspective that we have to have. And if we have that perspective, this is going to be a wondrous year. We will defeat the British coup against the Presidency, we will enact Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, and we will join the World Land-Bridge. We will become truly man, a life-giving spirit.