Megan Dobrodt

Moderator’s Opening Remarks

Megan Dobrodt is a member of the Board of Directors of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation. This is an edited transcript of her opening remarks as moderator of Panel 2 of the August 14, 2021 LaRouche Legacy Foundation’s first online seminar: “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971: So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Economics?”

The LaRouche Legacy Foundation was founded in late 2019 at the initiative of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, with a mission of making accessible and disseminating the life’s works of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. to promote their study and assimilation around the world, with a goal of making LaRouche’s great discoveries a conscious part of policy making, and therefore the shaping of civilization into the new paradigm.

To that end, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation has undertaken several initiatives, one of which is embodied in this first online seminar in which you are participating. Other areas of our initiative are to publish the complete works of Lyndon LaRouche, Volume I of which I will hold up here. Volume II is expected later this year. Volume I is available here on the website, www.larouchelegacyfoundation.org.

Another area of our initiative, which we are just embarking on, is to create a full, online digital archive—a Presidential-style online library of Lyndon LaRouche’s works. I would encourage everyone to go to the website and subscribe to our email list to receive updates on that.

Now, to our panel.

The discussion in Panel 1 focused on Lyndon LaRouche’s unique discoveries in the science of physical economy, and the role that his forecasts and his personal interventions played throughout the 20th and the first half of the 21st Centuries.

As I hope you gathered from that earlier discussion, Lyndon LaRouche was a scientist, in the highest sense of that word. All scientists are, essentially, forecasters. They apprehend the future before anyone else, detecting the presence of a universal principle which has been acting in the present, but up until that moment of discovery, has not been a conscious part of mankind’s domain of action.

This morning in Panel 1, Helga Zepp-LaRouche discussed this as “a prescience, a foresight,” this Promethean power. And, as we learned in that earlier panel, this insight into the unique place of the human mind in universal creation, was key to LaRouche’s discoveries in physical economics.

For more than fifty years, LaRouche forecast not just inevitabilities, but more so, the potential, the possibilities that belonged to a future, guided by new principles, both newly-discovered and newly-created. And that is why LaRouche’s genius resonated with Presidents of nations, physicists, students, artists, and many others, with whom LaRouche and his wife, Helga, formed great and productive life-long friendships.

To lead us into our discussion in this second panel, the theme of which is “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” we’re going to hear from one of those great friends, Norbert Brainin, who was the first violinist of the famous Amadeus Quartet, and with whom both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche had a very special bond. After that, we’ll hear, once again, from Lyndon LaRouche himself, who will introduce you more fully into the top of this afternoon’s discussion.

So, here is [a video excerpt of] Norbert Brainin, speaking at a seminar on September 20-22, 1995 at the Dolná Krupá Castle in Bratislava, Slovakia, which is sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the Slovakia Friedrich Schiller Foundation, headed by Dr. Jozef Mikloško (whom we had the privilege of hearing from this morning). And the seminar is on the topic of Motivführung, or motivic thorough composition, a concept which is very much at the center of economic forecasting. Mr. Brainin speaks in German with English subtitles.

[Begin video:]

Norbert Brainin: I am really here to illustrate Motivführung. It is close to my heart. I’ve carried it around with me for a long time, and it never really resonated with anyone else; and the only person who immediately understood it was Lyndon LaRouche, and that is the bond between us. The contemporary researchers, the Mozart and Haydn researchers, they absolutely don’t understand it. They notice it, they know it exists, and have also written about it, but beyond that, they don’t deal with it at all.

[Speaking after a performance by a string quartet]: Good, thank you. There is hardly a note in there, that cannot be traced back to the principal motif. That is the most important thing about the whole matter of Motivführung. And it is an important step in the entire development of the art of composition. It’s a watershed, I’d even say. It is of utmost importance. It lends a certain unity to the entire composition which is not immediately apparent when you’re listening: You hear only the music, but you feel that everything is organic. Haydn, for example, before he created his Op. 33—his previous quartet opus was Op. 20, nine years earlier, and he didn’t know how he could keep on with it. And then, he hit on it. And he called it Motivführung, an altogether new method of composing.

The next composer to employ this method was Mozart. He had gotten to know the Op. 33 quartets in Vienna. I don’t know if Haydn had spoken about it, but the fact of the matter is, Mozart understood it immediately.

Beethoven adopted this method. He said—there must be a statement somewhere, in a letter or somewhere—“before I knew this method, I could not consider myself a full-fledged composer.” It is a revolution without parallel, and has implications not only for music, but also for life, for politics, for economics, for poetry, for science. In this sense, these composers are scientists. They are not merely note writers and composers—there are lots of those—but this handful of musicians are scientists, and philosophers of the first rank. [End video.]

The entire seminar can be seen here.

Megan Dobrodt: And now, we’ll hear from Lyndon LaRouche, speaking at a Schiller Institute Conference in 2011. As you’ll hear in this [video] clip, LaRouche elaborates that principle addressed by Brainin, and brings us to the broader, underlying consideration—the principle which is the foundation for our topic on this panel: what is determining, and what will determine, mankind’s future.

[Begin video:]

Lyndon LaRouche: [speaking to a July 3, 2011 European Schiller Institute Conference]. This is truly the most important of all strategic questions we have to face today: the fact that the human species is absolutely unique in its capabilities. There’s no other species in the universe, ever known to have existed, or could exist—even though we have not fully explored, of course, the Crab Nebula or similar parts of the great galaxy which we’re involved in, called the Milky Way. There may be many species with cognitive powers out there….

Our organization in the United States has spent a good deal of effort on concentrating, inclusively, on just this question: How old is life? How long has life existed in this galaxy, or within some place in it? What is the nature of mankind, which has been on this planet only for a few million years? There was no human being on this planet, to the best of our knowledge, until a few million years ago.

And yet, we’re talking about billions of years of this galaxy, during which all living processes known to us have come into existence. And all life is creative, but there’s a sad part: that over 95% of all known living species have been rendered extinct, as failures, in their time. The question, therefore: Why, in these times—when we have entered a period in which there will be more great kills of living processes, at this phase of the movement of the Solar System through the galaxy—why should we be so presumptuous as to imagine that human life is not about to disappear as the dinosaurs did in the last great kill?...

What is there in us, that is not in other living species known to us, that might, somehow, miraculously, pronounce a destiny for our human species which we grant to no other living species? The name for that specific quality, which we know in the human species, which does not exist in any other known living species, is a quality of creativity, which is absolutely unique to mankind….

So, what is human then? What is it about us that’s potentially human—which is human naturally, but potentially human—which will enable us to survive where no kind of animal species ordinarily could survive? Because we are able to develop a form of mind, which is not delimited by the notion of five senses, of five original senses. And it is when we go beyond that, into higher realms, and when we attune our minds’ orientation to experiments which do that, that mankind manifests the true distinction of mankind from other species. And demonstrates a potentiality, for the ability of mankind to survive, where no animal species would have the kind of capability needed to make the kinds of adaptation by which man can cause his own survival: This is called creativity!...

And therefore, what we have to do, you have to have a population which is sensitive to this aspect of the human mind. This aspect of the human mind is the location of human creativity. And the promotion of that aspect of the human experience, Classical artistic culture as an expression of the principle of metaphor, is the principle of ordinary discovery, principled discovery. And when you take this kind of thinking over into the department of the practice of physical science, the same thing! And there, you have an example of the role of Classical musical composition, as in the illustrative cases of both Max Planck and Albert Einstein, in particular—and Vernadsky also! You get a demonstration that in the department of Classical artistic composition, in which the mind is experimenting with the attempt to discover principles, and expresses the yearning for that experimental result as the incentive of creativity for the human mind. That is creativity. It is getting outside the ordinary habits, or habituation, of life….

And it’s on that, on the sensitivity to the senses we don’t have, but which exist in the universe, and which we discover as existing in the universe; or, we may even create a new principle in the universe—and that has been done before! It’s when we think in those terms, rather than the vulgar sense of argument and all the interpretations and so forth which don’t mean a damned thing in the end!—that creativity lies….

The problem of society today, is that this precious knowledge, which I deem personally, precious, because of the way I’ve experienced it, is the secret of humanity, and supplies the sense of intention, of purpose, which impels us in directions of discovery, to discover principles, universal principles, of physical and related action, which cannot be defined by the modes of so-called sense-perception.

What moves you in great music, in a great performance, is not sense-perception: It’s something which lies independent of sense-perception, which grips you! Because it comes outside the domain of your sensorium! There’s a kind of magic and mystery in the great achievements in musical performance, for example, the greatest ones: Because it’s a contrast among various kinds of sense-perceptual activity—you find something which grips you more than anything else, you can not define a single sense which is responsible for it! It comes like magic. It’s not magic: It’s really humanity. [End video.]

Megan Dobrodt: As with Panel 1, our audience today and our speakers on this panel are from around the world. I’ll give a quick overview, before introducing our first speaker.

First, we’ll be hearing from Jacques Cheminade, who is the head of the Solidarité et Progrès party in France, and a former Presidential candidate. We’ll hear from Roberto Fritzsche and Eduardo Fernández from Argentina, presenting ideas on LaRouche’s relative potential population-density. We’ll then hear from Harley Schlanger of the Schiller Institute, a long-time friend, collaborator of, and spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche in the United States. Then we’ll hear from Fred Huenefeld, another Board Member of the Schiller Institute, like Harley, and a political leader in the United States from Louisiana. We’ll hear from Sen. Theo Mitchell, a long time friend of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and a former State Senator from South Carolina.

And finally, we’ll have a group of presentations to end our panel on the topic of “LaRouche in the Universities, and the recruitment of a new generation of young people.” In that, we’ll hear from Gretchen Small, of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation; Itos Valdes, of the Philippine LaRouche Society; Carolina Domínguez, of Mexico, along with some of her young collaborators from Colombia and Mexico; and José Vega, from the United States.

I want to remind everyone that you can email us at questions@larouchelegacyfoundation.org—and please do email us with your questions—during and after the panel presentations.