Jason Ross

LaRouche and Leadership

The Schiller Institute’s Oct. 15 Youth Conference, “Build the New Paradigm: Defeat Green Fascism,” drew more than 100 youth activists together in New York City, with hundreds more participating on line from countries all over the world. This is the edited transcription of Jason Ross, Executive Director of The LaRouche Organization, speaking to the morning panel, Panel 1. His extensive graphics are not shown, but the video of his presentation is available here.

I am super happy to be here with this incredible group of speakers, this wonderful crowd here. My topic is “LaRouche and Leadership.” The world demands from us leadership that can create a platform for the future—a thought-through, developed program for the future. It demands of us a method of thinking—and expression of a method of thinking—that’s able to develop a thought-through program for the future, and an ability to collaborate to make that a reality.

We have to be able to express to people what’s going on, certainly. We have to be able to share with them what will be going on; what we want that future to look like, and give them a real vision for it.

A Short History of the LaRouche Movement

I’d like to talk about the LaRouche movement.

If we take a look over the years at the programs for the industrialization of Africa: This is a program from several decades ago. This is a report we put out just a few years ago that I co-authored, Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa. We’ve had programs, as Helga had mentioned; Operation Juárez, a program for Latin America. Here’s President López-Portillo speaking at the UN, and meeting with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in Mexico City. LaRouche has had a long-standing relationship with Indian leaders, including Indira Gandhi, and also in 2001, in his meeting with President K.R. Narayanan in India. Programs for Thailand, to develop a Kra Canal.

We’ve had the economic ideas able to make this a reality. The International Development Bank proposal; what would be able to replace the failure of those Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank, the IMF. They’re not doing what Roosevelt would have wanted them to do, so LaRouche wrote an alternative, an International Development Bank. Here’s Fred Wills, the Foreign Minister of Guyana, discussing this at the United Nations General Assembly in 1978.

The LaRouche movement has worked with leading scientists from around the world on the most important scientific breakthroughs necessary to create the next chapters in the book of human history. Leading among those—nuclear fusion. Here’s LaRouche with leading scientists. After the government shut down Fusion magazine, we created 21st Century Science & Technology to discuss world issues like defending the planet from asteroids; developing a nuclear NAWAPA to address continental water issues from a continental basis. Taking water from where it isn’t needed, bringing it to where it is needed, like California. This is what we’ve done.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, as expressed by Ronald Reagan in 1983, was a LaRouche vision to use new technologies—energy, particle beams, to be able to build a global defense system against nuclear missiles. To work with the Soviet Union for a defense against the devastation of nuclear war, to bring down that threat, and to have great economic growth along the way.

He worked with great musicians. Here’s Norbert Brainin, the head of the Amadeus String Quartet. With singers in Italy. We see people working with LaRouche on a proposal to go back to the tuning of Giuseppe Verdi, who was not only a great composer, he was a Senator in Italy. One of his bills: To set the tuning at the right level for the human voice to work at its best.

In the more recent period, the World Land-Bridge, coming out of a Eurasian Land-Bridge proposal. Lyndon LaRouche, Helga LaRouche saw the opportunity that came with the end of the Soviet Union, with the potential for ending that Iron Curtain divide, for collaborating across these barriers. The ideas were expressed directly. This photo shows Lyndon LaRouche in Russia, giving an economics lecture. He’s speaking here [not shown —ed.] at an economics meeting of the State Duma, where he was invited by Sergei Glazyev. Here is Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the eastern terminal of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, the idea that she had done so much to champion. And here, from 1997, our report, “The Eurasian Land-Bridge: The ‘New Silk Road’.” 1997! So, you can imagine how happy we are with the 2013 announcement by Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan of the Belt and Road Initiative, which goes with this.

The Current Crisis

In thinking through the present crisis, the showdown between a dying system of Anglo-American finance from the City of London and Wall Street. But not just Wall Street! The City of London and Wall Street—the British Empire. There’s a showdown between that dying system and that nascent system that Daniel [Burke] described in the beginning, that we see being led and moved forward by Russia, by China, by India. The escalation of the conflict between the two has not stopped; if the causes of that conflict are not addressed, removed, and replaced, we will have a nuclear war, and we’re going to die. That’s the threat that we face today.

So, something has clearly gone terribly wrong, and I want to address one aspect of leadership in this, which is how you come to conclusions.

Opinions

So, I’d like to ask a question: Do you have a right to your opinion? Do you have a right to your opinion? This is not the same as, do you have a right to express an opinion, which we see a lot with social media censorship and other censorship today. But, do you have a right to have an opinion? What sort of opinion? Pizza toppings, TV shows, politics—sure, we have opinions.

Because of elections, we’re asked to weigh in with our opinions on an election every couple few years. And that makes a lot of people think that they have some reason to even hold a political opinion; that they’re competent to have one, because they’re asked about it all the time. But, let me ask, do people have strong opinions on the physics—or existence—of dark matter? Is that something that everybody thinks they know about and can weigh in on, on Twitter? No. Does everybody think they know the best way to raise an alligator, or how to use p-scores in statistics? How to repair a jet engine? No, people don’t think they know anything about that. How about the effectiveness or dangers of vaccines? How many people have opinions on this who maybe don’t have any business coming to strong conclusions on these matters? Maybe you do.

How about climate change? Do middle-schoolers–What do we know about science in middle school? Hell, what do we know about science now? But do middle-schoolers actually know anything about how the whole Earth is changing based on carbon dioxide? They can’t know that! It’s not possible. They’d have no basis for even knowing that. So, why do we praise children for expressing views that they couldn’t possibly know? What kind of message is that sharing to young people? Go out and have a strong opinion about something that we know you couldn’t actually know anything about.

Is knowing important? How about Russian propaganda? How many people say, “Oh, this has all the telltale signs of Russian propaganda,” as though they’ve been studying it for decades. And as if it’s even true. Talk about misinformation! “This comes right out of the Russian play book,” they say. What Russian play book? What else is in this Russian play book? They don’t mention it; they just make these claims. So, all around us, we’re propagandized to take false positions. But really, and I think more importantly, to think in a way—to draw conclusions—in a way that takes away from us the process of reaching a reasoned conclusion.

Some form of popular opinion, or group identity: That replaces objective truth and the process of discovery. Fitting in with the group—it may be a good group—becomes a substitute for developing a real method to make sure you know what you’re talking about. So, we need to use our very precious mental energy and time to develop our ability to come to useful conclusions—to universal principles that work.

So, let me talk about two ways that people avoid this. Just two examples of how people avoid leadership. One, the belief that a mass grouping of people—workers, as characterized by some schemes—will seize the reins of power and make good decisions. What decisions will these workers, however we define that, make? Will they be good decisions? It’s hard to do worse than what we’re doing right now, I’ll give you that. But, do you actually know how economics works by virtue of having a productive job? I’m sure you have some insight, but people can be wrong.

A second way people avoid leadership is to say that “the British free trade system, the free market idea, this is the best way for progress. If everybody tries to make money on their own, this causes growth. That’s really all there is to it, the government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.” What are they saying? “I don’t know what to do, and I refuse to be accountable for figuring it out. Let the market do it.”

So, in both of these cases—the workers and the free market, that decision-making process—leadership is being fobbed off on someone or something else. You’ve got to take that leadership yourself. So, you have to make choices when you propose a policy. You must pick priorities.

The Human Carrying Capacity

The World Land-Bridge? It’s a policy; it’s a proposal. It’s the result, it’s the expression of the way of developing policy. How do you think through what that future is going to be? What are the principles of economics? In thinking through this, the first step is to forget about money. Forget about finance; put that to the side. That’s not economics. You can’t measure wealth in terms of money, of dollars, of any scalar, quantitative value in that sense. Start instead with physics; physical economy. In a certain area of land, per square kilometer, or acre, or what-have-you, how many people can you support with your current level of technology, with your current level of culture? How much land would be required for a hunter-gatherer society? How much space do you need, to go around looking for some berries or whatever? It’s a lot of space. How much land is required per person to support an agricultural society where, instead of hoping that you find something to eat, you plant seeds and you know exactly where you’re going to find the plants that grow up. How much more efficient is that? How have we changed the carrying capacity of the Earth? The human carrying capacity, by changing our relationship to nature? Add in irrigation; how have you changed that potential population? Add in metallurgy, the Bronze Age. We’re able to make metal tools. How has that transformed the physical economic wealth? The steam engine, which we never could have had without the Iron Age and precision. How does that transform the potential productive powers of labor? How does that improve the potential living standards of the people of this planet, when you can take rocks out of the ground—coal—and turn them into motion? That’s almost like magic, if you go back and think about it. How did that transform society? How many dollars was that discovery worth? It’s a stupid question. You can’t answer it that way.

By expanding our repertoire of scientific knowledge, we increase the potential relative population density—the number of people who could be supported. As Lyndon LaRouche put it:

This is the rough measure of the superiority of one level of culture over another. This is the measure of economic progress.

The superiority of one level of culture over another. Can a culture be superior to another? Is this a way of measuring it? He said,

Only societies whose cultures commit them to successful technological progress as a policy of practice, are qualified to survive and to prosper.

Look at the cover of his 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth. [audience applause]

The rich heritage that should be ours—of the amazing discoveries that brought us to this point, the inside view of the history of how we figured all of these things out—that’s not provided to us; that’s hidden from us! We don’t do that in school, do we? What is the basis of a scientific advance? What is the basis of discovery? Will machine learning replace us? Will it be creative in discovering new universal physical principles? Two examples.

Education Based on the Discovery Process

Some people today think the Earth is flat; it isn’t. But, did we know that before satellites? How did we know that? How was it that in Egypt, 2,200 years ago, Eratosthenes was able not just to say the Earth is round, but to measure how big it is. Two thousand two hundred years ago, this was figured out. You can do this yourself, by connecting via Zoom with another classroom if you have some geographical distance. Did anybody do that? Did anybody in school measure how big the Earth is? Why not? It’s a fun thing to do. You get to be inside the mind of someone from Egypt 2,200 years ago, who measured the biggest thing around. Why don’t we do that? Do we get to re-experience that joy of discovery?

Another example. You’ve probably heard a rumor about a triangle like this [a right triangle], that a²+b² = c². This is a pervasive rumor in our math classes. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but do you know that it’s right? How many teachers go through how this was figured out—getting your hands dirty, looking at triangles, working with areas, and then saying, “Oh, this isn’t the start of a lesson. This is the end of it. We figured this out.” How long could that take? A day or two?

In terms of why this is left out, it’s not because I’m saying that triangles don’t work that way. The point is, we don’t know everything; we’ve got more discoveries to make. So, why is that discovery process left out in education? We spend how long in school? How many hours, how many days, weeks, months, years did you spend in school? And how much of it was getting to recreate real discoveries from the past—getting the sense that your mind could figure out, just like those people had, a new idea? Getting the sense that you and your fellow classmates all had in common that fact that you were made in the image of God, and able to understand with ideas in the mind? To have concepts that have power in the physical world?

How much does an idea weigh? How does it taste? How much mass does it have? Stupid questions. But these ideas, a thought that we have, unlike a thought that a dog has—if they have thoughts—our ideas are able to transform how many people can live on this planet, are able to create states of nature that don’t exist otherwise. Aluminum metal: You don’t find that on Earth; we make it. That’s just one example.

That needs to be the focus of society, certainly of education. But that’s got to be the basis of a political movement, too. Both to get a sense of the inside track of where economic growth comes from—because it comes from those kinds of thoughts—and a sense of what we need to do socially. What are we, as people together?

‘What Will You Be Capable of Becoming?’

Let me bring these thoughts together and conclude.

Lyndon LaRouche insisted on a movement based in education, in which the movement’s members’ experience with that process of discovery in science, music, and art, gave necessary insight into the foundation of economics, into what we all have in common as human beings—an idea affirmatively of the universality of human beings. We hear a lot about our differences today. What actually do we have in common as human beings?

The birth of the Golden Renaissance in the 15th Century came through thinkers who saw each man and woman as made in the image of God the Creator. This was their view. Whatever your opinions on this might be, this is what the people thought who created the Renaissance—that our minds, as like a miracle, are able to develop concepts that have power in that world outside of us. How many of those principles do we get to experience? That’s something we need to change.

The universe needs more people. More people to experience the joy of learning, the joy of discovery. More people to figure out how we’re going to go to Mars. More people to cure cancer and other diseases. More people to develop nuclear fusion. More people to work on matter/anti-matter [reactions as an energy source]. More people to make breakthroughs in biology that are going to transform our lives, our health, crops, things like this. We need more people.

The World Land-Bridge is more than rail lines; it’s not a way of getting from point A to point B. It’s more than development corridors, where you see the availability of transport across a region as transforming the economic potential of that entire area. Because now you can bring in electricity, water; you’ve transformed the potential of what you can do in those areas by being connected. It’s more than that. It’s more than a policy. The World Land-Bridge is an expression of a vision of the human species; a real, developed idea of the human species.

Today, we see the leaderships of China and Russia implementing a new world system very much in keeping with what the LaRouches have put forward for decades, what the LaRouche movement has put forward for decades. We see India moving in this direction. We see nations in Africa, Latin America, the so-called Global South not going along with what they’re told by the Anglo-American elite.

We see a new world coming into being. Whether we succeed in having such a world, versus dying in a nuclear holocaust, is a decision that may be something for the matter of days and weeks ahead of us, not months or years. So, your leadership is demanded today. Your future leadership is demanded today. What will you become capable of doing?

“I’m no Martin Luther King,” you might say. Was Martin Luther King? What did he do to make himself capable of the challenges that he took on? What are you willing to take on to make yourself that leader for the future? I think that’s the question we should think through, and I would encourage everybody, specifically to move on this; to register for the classes that the LaRouche movement will be holding on these topics of economics, of science, of music—larouche.info/classes. The first series on economics will be starting soon. We need to develop in our minds the real inside track of what that uniquely human capability is, so that we can make the policies and provide the leadership that the future demands of us today. Thank you.