Jason Ross

The LaRouche Movement’s Role in Defeating Malthusianism

This is the edited transcript of the presentation delivered by Jason Ross, to Panel 3, “There Are No Limits to Growth in the Universe,” of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 13-14 Conference, “All Moral Resources of Humanity Have To Be Called Up: Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species!” Mr. Ross is Science Advisor to the Schiller Institute.

Setting the Stage

The FLOP26 which just concluded in Glasgow, Scotland was intended to be the signing of a global suicide pact, in which nations great and small, rich and poor, would commit themselves to energy and other policies that would impoverish and kill their people, prevent new stages of development, and turn over sovereignty from nations to supranational financial and consultancy institutions, operating at the behest of a global oligarchy centered in the City of London and Wall Street, with key assistance from Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C. and other places.

But despite the unhinged demands from the Queen of England, former Bank of England chief Mark Carney, from hapless President Joe Biden, and the conveniently deranged Greta Thunberg, the conference did not succeed in its broadest ambitions. Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin didn’t come. Nations such as Nigeria and India absolutely refused to take many actions that would hamstring their ability to grow—actions such as forswearing the use of coal, of setting aside enormous tracts of lands, taking them out of human development; and committing to changes in agriculture and water use that would significantly reduce their potential human populations and living standards.

Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement have over decades built up the intellectual armaments, the historical understanding, needed to resist these efforts to instill panic to rush countries into destroying their livelihoods, and to instead put forward a positive vision.

Not from Socialism

So where does the push for ineffective energy and a stifling litany of regulations come from? And how have Lyndon LaRouche and his movement fought it?

I’ll give you a hint: this push is not from socialism. The Queen of England was not planning to come to FLOP26 wearing a dress inscribed, “Tax the Rich.” (She might more likely have appeared in a more “modest” apparel reading: “Eat the Babies.”

The Bank of England isn’t into labor unions, wealth redistribution, or economic progress to lift people out of poverty. (Although it does support such “impotent left” ideas as racial essentialism and making an enormous to-do around trans issues, presenting them as of paramount importance. This creates fights that distract people from what are truly the largest issues.)

Oligarchism

But no, this Great Reset policy, the Build Back Better hogwash, the Green New Deal—this brew of deadly policies does not come from socialism. Lyndon LaRouche and his collaborators have traced out the origins in oligarchism itself.

To understand this, LaRouche pointed to the story of Prometheus, as told by Aeschylus, to understand oligarchism. Prometheus saved the human race from absolute destruction by the Olympian god Zeus, by playing a trick on Zeus. Later, Prometheus stole fire itself from heaven and gave it to mankind, creating our species as distinct from the animals, as knowledgeable, as the truly human species that we are. Zeus was so enraged that human beings were now raised up toward his level, that he condemned Prometheus to perpetual agony and torture for threatening Zeus’s identity, which lay in his superiority. This is what motivates what we see today as the Green policy.

These ghouls of Glasgow, the witches and warlocks of the World Economic Forum, the foul specters of sustainability and Environmental, Social, and Governance ESG policies, the royal wraiths—these ill spirits are attempting to create a new supranational elite of finance and bureaucracy that wrests control from national governments, thereby effecting the “regime change” that had been announced already at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August 2019 by BlackRock.

The Goal

The goal? Depopulation, poverty, and maintaining an oligarchical system in which a privileged few live in mastery over increasingly immiserated masses.

Consider the August 1988 words of Prince Philip [as reported by Deutsche Presse Agentur]:

In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.

Yes, the Queen’s consort believed the world population should be dramatically reduced, with population reduction on a scale far beyond what Hitler sought to achieve.

Or take Sir David Attenborough, who would have as a subject for his next video narration, his wish that you and your city were eliminated to make room for a majestic slug, And I don’t mean the Queen. He is the patron of “Population Matters,” whose website enthusiastically says:

We can bring about the end of growth sooner and achieve a more sustainable population size—but only if we take the action needed, now.

David Attenborough himself is quoted on the website:

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder—and ultimately impossible—to solve with ever more people.

The goal is depopulation, and it has been pursued for decades.

Energy-Flux Density
and Potential Relative Population-Density

In 1983, Lyndon LaRouche wrote There Are No Limits to Growth—a book penned in opposition to the Club of Rome’s fraudulent book called, The Limits to Growth, which called for limits to development and human population, under the argument that mankind was on a development trajectory that would exceed the limited resources available to us. LaRouche wrote There Are No Limits to Growth to set forth his own insights into the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

There are no fixed limits to human growth—certainly not any fixed limits that we are anywhere near approaching. Nor are natural resources “limited” in the way that most people think. Through discovering new physical principles and developing new technologies, our beautiful species expands the repertoire of resources and power sources available to us, repeatedly overcoming what look like limits.

Forests were saved from overharvesting and destruction not simply by creating nature reserves, but by developing the use of coal. Coal is able to replace wood for heating. It was able to replace charcoal that was used for making metals. But coal also opened an entirely new domain of power: the wide scale adoption and use of the steam engine, which greatly increased the productive powers of human labor and opened for our species an entirely new level of well-being, a new platform.

Aluminum, for example, which was once so difficult to produce that Napoleon reportedly ate off of aluminum plates while serving his guests on mere gold. Aluminum has, through the creation of the electrical age, become so cheap that we use it to wrap food and throw it away.

Nuclear power, the fuel source which embodies, per gram, not a hundred times more power than coal or gas, not a hundred, hundred times more than petroleum, but a hundred, hundred, hundred—a million times more power. This enables enormous efficiencies of land use and human labor in providing, handling and mining the fuel.

So it makes you wonder. Where is the support for nuclear power among those expressing supposed concern about a climate catastrophe? Is the goal actually to save the planet? Or is it something else? Is it depopulation?

Lyndon LaRouche

In a 1998 speech, LaRouche expressed his view of the relationship between the creative mind, scientific discovery, technological advance, labor productivity, and the higher levels of culture it unlocked:

Lyndon LaRouche (video): What the Greeks mean by an idea, and the difference from the Archaic art, is that the Archaic art represents a sense-perception. The Greek Classical art, or the paintings by Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, represent ideas. There’s a difference. One is an image based on the senses, which is what you get on television, isn’t it? Television entertainment is based on no ideas, but sense-perception: blood, violence, and sex. You see it, you feel it, you sense it: “Man, that’s real!” But it’s not.

Whereas an idea is something else. The term “idea” means a principle. For example, the common case of a principle is a scientific principle. The idea of gravity. Did you ever “see” a gravity? Did you ever actually feel one? No, you didn’t. You may have thought you did, but you didn’t. Did you ever see a principle of nature? Did you ever shake hands with it, smell it, lick it, touch it, sniff it? No, you didn’t. But, these are ideas, and they are valid, and they tell us something. They tell us that principles control the universe. Something you can’t smell, you can’t see, you can’t touch. You can’t lick it, you can’t taste it, and yet it controls the universe. It’s called a principle. It’s called an idea. All art, great art, is based on ideas, which have nothing to do directly with the senses. Artistic ideas come from contradictions in the senses. As Classical art comes from dissonance, from contradictions, from the development of forcing you to find an idea, to find an irony, a metaphor, an idea. Scientific principles: ideas.

This is where we get to the part about the difference between monkeys and people:

There are four steps to forming an idea, and I’ve reduced it to the form which occurs in science. In science, you have, as we have this contradiction, this ontological paradox, this difference between the image of an economy, from the standpoint of money, from the standpoint of financial accounting, which is fraudulent. But they still collect bills on that basis. Then you have the other conception of economy, which is based on physical production, and things which are essential to physical production, such as education, health care, and science services. So, you have two images of economy. The fact that the two somehow intersect, means that there’s an irony here, there’s a contradiction, there’s a metaphor. And you’ve got to explain that metaphor, to understand how an economy works.

Oh, there’s another thing, which is that you have a principle in so-called physics, or mathematical physics, called entropy, which says, in effect, that any mechanical system will run down. If an economy is a mechanical system, and all financial accounting is based on mechanics—the principles of mechanical interaction—how can you have a financial system which generates profit? How can it? Every mechanical system, if it continues long enough, runs down. Now, if something runs down, how does it produce more? Every mechanical system always produces less. Therefore, by definition, no economy which corresponds perfectly to a financial accounting system, could possibly have a profit.

And yet, if we look at the history of mankind, we find that mankind, whose potential population-density on this planet, as approximating that of an ape, was never more than 3 million people on this planet. If mankind were an ape, which is what Prince Philip claims to be, then at no time could there have been more than several million living human individuals on this planet, in the past two million years of the ice ages. At no time. That’s the ecological potential of an ape, or an ape-type species.

How did we get to several hundred million people, living individuals on this planet, during the medieval period? How did we get to 5 billion people on this planet recently? Obviously, we’re not apes. Obviously, we grow. This growth in population depended upon technological progress of various kinds, also artistic progress. Man’s increased power over nature depended upon the growth of income, standard of living, lessening morbidity rates. You can’t educate a child to the age of 25 if the parents are dying of morbidity at the age of 30-35, can you? You can’t maintain such a society. Therefore, there had to be more. There had to be improvement, there had to be increase. This is no entropic system; this is no mechanical system; this is no financial accounting system. It doesn’t explain anything. There’s some source of some increase of man’s power over nature, which intersects the process of production, which accounts for this progress.

Ad Astra!

Jason Ross: Instead of worshipping nature itself as some new religion, we must increase our power over nature, to improve it and ourselves.

We must get our noses out of the mud and instead of looking for ways to literally use bullshit as a fuel source, let us redirect our gaze upwards, to the heavens, to the stars whose power source—nuclear fusion—we must master. And let us look to our friendly Moon, which has kindly been collecting in its soil the special isotope helium-3, the perfect fuel source for nuclear fusion for use here and in space.

If you want real solar power, don’t collect the feeble light captured from our sun 150-million km away. Re-create that solar power here with nuclear fusion, using as its fuel the helium-3, which is emitted by the sun, and far more useful, no offense to plants, than the light that comes from it. The helium-3 emitted by the sun offers us something totally new.

So in our future, a generation or two ahead, that future can look back to this moment as the time that we as humanity made a choice to reject once and for all the Malthusian idea of oligarchy. Instead, this is the time boldly to announce that mankind is pursuing the next level of technology. a new level of technology, opening up a domain of living standards and scientific pursuit, a transformation comparable only to the transformation created through the steam engine or the discovery of electromagnetism.

From such a future, two generations ahead, in which there is economic productivity a full order of magnitude, a thousand percent beyond our current conditions. Looking back from that time, our descendants will be proud of the courage we showed today.