Lyndon LaRouche’s
Present and Future Power

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 25—“The everlasting universe of things flows though the mind,” Percy Shelley tells us. The mind’s infinite capacity to know is necessarily larger than the infinite objects of knowledge to be known, or else they could not even be conceived. “A container is always larger than the things that it contains,” says St. Augustine. Therefore, the mind, for example, is larger than Shelley’s everlasting universe of things. On this basis, Augustine argued that the mind must be immortal, or as he states, “the mind is immortal, and can never be killed.”

Lyndon LaRouche is such a mind. As of his physical passing away on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, the life that was Lyndon LaRouche is now a subject in and for itself. As economist, as statesman, as thinker, his role will be increasingly powerfully manifest in the future, which is his present. That is a forecast to now be employed, not merely “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Lyndon LaRouche is the originator of the idea of potential relative population density, as a physical economic principle. This idea locates the relationship between the creative discovery by an individual of a principle of physical change; the demonstration of that physical principle to others through a unique, repeatable experiment; the universal replication of the experimentally proven principle by the manufacturing of tools; and the application—through changes in manufacturing techniques—of this new “machine tool” principle to improvement of the conditions of production, life, and knowledge, of the society as a whole. The result, and purpose of this, is an increase in the capacity for creative discovery, not only of the original creator, but all members of society touched by that creation. This increases the creative potential of the society in ways that cannot be enumerated or calculated mathematically, but can be metaphorically represented as an increase, not merely in the magnitude, but in the power of that society to transform itself at will. The society has gained a new characteristic; it becomes a society of a new type.

It was this principle—of the application of creative thought to the productive process—that Alexander Hamilton referred to as “artificial labor.” This is the true basis for freedom and independence. This was the underlying “revolutionary characteristic” of Benjamin Franklin’s personality, seen both in his scientific discoveries and in his development of the networks that would create not only the American Revolution, but the American republic. (It was why Franklin’s 1729 essay on population would gain the undying enmity of the British Empire, leading Parson Thomas Malthus to plagiarize the Venetian cleric Gianmaria Ortes and “produce” his abortion called An Essay on the Principle of Population.)

It is the celebration of the capacity to increase this creative power of the human mind which is the subject of Classical composition in general, and Classical musical composition in particular. In his 1989 article, “Beethoven as a Physical Scientist,” LaRouche states:

My most important discoveries, in every field which I have contributed, are based upon my successful refutation of the famous Kantian paradox reasserted in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant asserted two things of relevance here.

First, he insisted that although creative processes responsible for valid fundamental scientific discoveries exist, these processes themselves are beyond all possible human understanding. That I proved to be false, and from that proof developed an approach to intelligible representation of those creative processes, and hence the implicit measurement of technological progress as such.

Second, on the basis of the first assumption, Kant argued that there were no intelligible criteria of truth or beauty in aesthetics. The toleration which has been gained so generally by all modern irrationalism in matters of art, has depended upon German and other acceptance of this thesis on aesthetics advanced by Kant and Friedrich Karl Savigny later.

They Are the Future

The purpose of the Schiller Institute’s February 16-17 conference, given the news of February 12, became to immediately acquaint people with the philosophical outlook associated with Lyndon LaRouche as that is best identified with LaRouche’s International Caucus of Labor Committees. The “Labor Committees,” created by LaRouche in the 1960s, and defined only as a system of conferences, espouses a method of organizing—not a structure, or procedure, but a method—that proposes, debates and then validates by testing, all ideas that purport to be identical to, or congruent with, the mission of increasing the potential relative population density of the planet as a whole, in accordance with LaRouche’s discovery. We here supply the record of the conference in its near-entirety.

Happy is the man who, in the pursuit of wisdom, discovers himself. Happier still, is the man who, in teaching the path to wisdom, discovers others who have perhaps not yet discovered themselves. Happiest of all, is the man who, in living wisdom, will discover those he will never meet, but who will think of him as their teacher, brother and friend. They are the future for whom the life of Lyndon LaRouche is written.

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