Would You Have Been Optimistic in the
Middle of the 14th-Century Black Death?

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

Jan. 23—With the benefit of hindsight—which of course is always 20:20, as the saying goes—you would have been optimistic. Or at least you should have been. Because out of the 14th-century Black Death, which nearly wiped out Western civilization altogether, came the 15th-century’s Golden Renaissance and the greatest flourishing of classical culture and science yet produced by Man. Don’t you wonder how that came about?

Today we are in the throes of a pandemic that is sweeping the planet and will get worse in the short term. Newly mutated strains of the coronavirus have begun to appear; most national health systems are not equal to the task of keeping up with the disease and its victims; the COVID-19 policies of nearly all governments in Europe and the Americas are in shambles because of their submission to the austerity policies of Wall Street and the City of London; and perhaps worst of all, there is growing irrationality in large parts of the population, who reject science in favor of organized lunacy such as the “Q” fraud and related games.

On top of this, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute President, has repeatedly emphasized, there is the aggressive drive of the British Empire to impose a Green Global Reset, which proposes to intentionally cut the planet’s population down to perhaps 1 billion people, through a combination of decarbonization, denuclearization, and overall deindustrialization policies. Those forces have just won a significant victory by stealing the U.S. election from Donald Trump, who was always against the green approach, and putting Joe Biden in the White House, whose very first act in office was to rejoin the ultra-green Paris Accord.

What, then, are the grounds for optimism?

First, there is the reality of the physical economic constraints that these British policies are already crashing into with full force. Just look at the insanity of the green campaign to fully convert Europe’s automobiles to electric vehicles, when electricity is already in such short supply that a Europe-wide blackout almost occurred January 8. Has anyone bothered to look at what the bill of materials would be for such a Zero-Emissions plan?

Secondly, there is the reality of Man’s characteristic capability to act on his new creative discoveries, to not play by the existing rules of the game. For example, viable health systems must and can be established in every country in the world, as part of a bankruptcy reorganization of the international financial system in order to restart the physical economy. This will require in-depth cooperation between the U.S. and China, in particular. This is just the beginning of the global economic recovery plan required, including the creation of 1.5 billion productive new jobs.

In June 2003, statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche reflected on the issue of optimism and pessimism in a speech he delivered in Queens, New York:

The other aspect which is important as I see it, around the world today, is pessimism. In the United States there is great pessimism; there’s an affliction of pessimism in politics. What we sometimes call corruption in politics, and it is corruption, is a fruit of pessimism. People say you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube; you can’t change the way things are going; you can’t improve the political system; you can’t solve the problems; you’ve got to learn to live with the problems—pessimism. And pessimism leads to corruption. And around the world, the same problem—pessimism, pessimism in Africa, especially in black Africa, pessimism in Europe, pessimism in Eastern Europe, and less so in China. China is more confident, but fear in Korea, fear of what might happen, fear in Japan.

So, the most important thing, in my view, in my experience in leadership, is optimism, not arbitrary optimism, not false optimism, but knowledgeable optimism. The knowledge that we can, if we will, do the things that have to be done.