Schiller Conference Shows
Neither a Unipolar nor Multipolar World,
But a Community of Principle

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this article]

April 16—As governments and leaders from all over the world prepare, either to confront, or to flinch from what could be humanity’s greatest moment of decision, the international Schiller Institute, armed with the method of scientific discovery of the physical economist Lyndon LaRouche, has used its April 15–16 conference, “Without the Development of All Nations, There Can Be No Lasting Peace for the Planet,” to successfully place the work of four great thinkers—Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Schiller and Lyndon LaRouche—at the disposal of those governments, leaders and, indeed, the citizens of a growing, worldwide “republic of the mind.”

Representatives of several governments participated in the conference-process, for several hours, and expressed an excited surprise at the quality, level and depth of the questions posed, and the discussion of solutions in which they found themselves engaged. Whether it be war or peace, or prosperity or poverty, the necessity for a new security and development architecture was strongly enough felt to allow for ground-breaking applications of the most profound philosophical concepts to the most “practical” of circumstances.

The presentations of the extraordinary group of speakers on the first panel Saturday morning, April 15, are published in this issue. The subject of that opening panel was, “The Growing Danger of World War III Underlines the Necessity for a New Security Architecture.”

Importance of ‘Principles’ before ‘Programs’

In her opening remarks on the Sunday fourth panel of the conference, moderator and Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, summarizing the conference up to that point, said,

I think the discussion in all three panels, but especially the last panel, made very clear that, given the extraordinary circumstances in which mankind finds itself—the enormous pressures: in the last panel, the question of hunger, food, the need to keep the economy functioning—nevertheless, it’s not so easy to find a cohesion among all these different interests. And that is why I think this discussion about the principles on which the new paradigm must be built, is extremely important.

And actually, when I thought about it last November, when I proposed these principles, it was clear to me that it would not be enough to just have programmatic points. I think these programmatic points in one sense are the most easy to agree upon, because this is what everybody encounters: the need to have sovereignty, because without sovereignty, the individual cannot participate in the government; the urgent needs of mankind to overcome hunger, poverty, to create a modern health system in every country, to have access to universal education, to have a credit system which can finance all of that, to have the necessary infrastructure in every continent to deal with the actual security architecture.

All of these things are difficult, but they are manageable, provided one has more fundamental philosophical principles on which different representatives of different countries can agree. And I think that is the one thing which is mostly lacking. Because I have not seen any forum which addresses that from a scientific standpoint, to actually solve it. And I think the Schiller Institute there has a special role.

While the multiple proposals for action placed before the conference will be discussed for implementation in the immediate days ahead, the most important new factor for reflection by the participants, including the speakers, will be the challenge placed before all assembled to recognize that there is no viable choice to be made between the counter-positioning of “unipolarity” and “multipolarity.” At the conclusion of Panel Three, keynote speaker Dennis Small offered a spiritual exercise of sorts to the panel:

There’s been much discussion already over the course of this conference about the multipolar world as an alternative to the unipolar world. And I would like to leave you with a provocative thought which will take us into the next panel.

Lyndon LaRouche often said that when you are given a choice between two alternatives, choose the third. The idea of the unipolar world is equivalent to Hobbes, that is to say, man is a beast. He cannot be trusted to do anything other than to kill his neighbor. It’s a war of one against all. “We need a Leviathan. We need a unipolar world. We need somebody to run the show.”

The “opposition” to that, of a multipolar world, is the idea of the Enlightenment, the idea of Rousseau, and of Voltaire—of a “social contract.” It’s premised on the same idea, that man is essentially a beast, and only knows what his senses inform him about, but you can establish peace by some sort of a social contract among the parties. Each group is allowed its own area of influence and you leave it at that, a social contract. Now this is Voltaire’s idea that everyone should be allowed to cultivate their own garden. Voltaire and Rousseau were in fact very much part of the same Enlightenment process.

But Voltaire was attacking a more fundamental idea, which was the idea of Leibniz. People will know from [Voltaire’s] Candide that that was an attack on Leibniz’s concept, which is neither of a unipolar world, nor of a multipolar world. It is a different definition of the identity of man. It is the idea of Cusa, it is the idea of the one humanity being primary to the multiple nations that sovereignly form part of it. And our concept of a new architecture for security and development must make the leap above a division of a unipolar and a multipolar world into an entirely different definition of what society must look like.

New Security Principles or Annihilation

A harmony of interests will now either be achieved through the establishment of a new security and development architecture—and that in the immediate years ahead—or there will soon be no knowable possibility that the human race will survive.

Since, however, the majority of people on the planet desire the happy outcome of durable survival, the problem is, in one sense, pedagogical. How can people be induced to do that which they desire, yet believe themselves unable to achieve? That is where the Classical principle and method of creativity, whether applied in the field of drama, music or the plastic arts, can dispel tragedy by discovering and revealing, if only by implication, a new physical principle of action never before experienced or portrayed in that unique way.

The pursuit of happiness (a world harmony of interests) by the deliberate increase, through scientific and technological progress, in the potential relative population-density of the planet’s human population, can be the unifying mission of a newly organized community of principle, that will form the basis of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted for the world, at the end of World War II, embodied in what should have become the United Nations.

The post-colonial reorganization of that United Nations body; the just restructuring of the international monetary system; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall separation of human from zombie banking practices; the revolution, not in military affairs, but in medical science and universal health care; and the recognition of the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Health Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative as in the interests of humanity, and therefore in the interest of all nations, is the mission for which LaRouche qualified his associates, and for which his associates must now qualify the world.