EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2021

‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses...’

April 5 , 2021 (EIRNS)—There is an old Spanish proverb, widely attributed to Renaissance giant Miguel de Cervantes, which goes like this: “When you see your neighbor’s beard being shaved, it’s time to put yours to soak.” It is an appropriate comment, albeit from the standpoint of a peasant, regarding the interconnected nature of processes that determine causality in the world.

Leading American epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, stated over the weekend that Americans should judge where we stand in the fight against the pandemic by looking at the world picture: “We’re in a category 5 hurricane status with regard to the rest of the world. We’ll see in the next two weeks the highest number of cases reported globally, since the beginning of the pandemic. In terms of the Unites States, we’re just at the beginning of the surge.”

According to a conservative estimate issued by the IMF on the eve of their annual spring meeting, the pandemic has already led to a 20% plunge in average income in the developing sector. World Bank President David Malpass reported that the pandemic has driven 100 million people into extreme poverty worldwide, while a full quarter-billion suffer acute hunger. But these are all serious understatements of the problem.

EIR has shown that the underlying physical economic collapse created by 50 years of disastrous free trade economic policies, a collapse that the pandemic has merely brought to the surface, has produced a real unemployment rate of about 45% worldwide. And now Biden’s global Green New Deal would dramatically worsen all of that.

There is a crying need to quickly provide 1.5 billion new productive jobs across the planet—jobs building the needed great infrastructure projects and related industries long-specified by Lyndon LaRouche. America’s problems will only be solved by returning to the principles on which our Constitutional republic was founded: the Good of others, both in economics and statecraft.

That same economic collapse of the entire trans-Atlantic sector is the driving force behind the war provocations originating in the British Empire and their American sidekicks, a danger which in recent weeks has made Ukraine into a most dangerous flashpoint for superpower confrontation.

In light of these considerations, Helga Zepp-LaRouche today addressed the underlying principles required to solve the ongoing global breakdown crisis, principles exemplified in the work of the international Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites which she founded.

“Let me just restate it for the record: The Committee for the Coincidence is not social work. It is a method of thinking: It’s not a prescription, it’s not even a health approach or a food approach. It’s a method of thinking. Because the very idea of Nicholas of Cusa of the coincidence of opposites came out of a long and deep theological discussion. The gist of it is that to achieve a level of unity, you have to jump behind the wall of coincidence—it’s not even the coincidence of opposites, it’s behind the wall of coincidence of opposites. You have to make a mental exercise, you have to train your mind to think hypothesis, to think change, to think something new, to think a higher unity.

“It’s also a way of developing compassion for the whole world. You have to have a certain amount of thinking like, of God, but as a vis creativa, the imago viva Dei. It’s not an ‘image of God,’ it’s the ‘living image of God,’ and it is the idea of a power which is supposed to be inside your soul, in your heart. And the whole idea—it’s not a static concept. How do you get the coincidence of opposites? Through change! And that change is something which is a process of perfection, in which the different elements work with each other in a contrapuntal, fugal way. Think about a fugue: How a great fugue develops, where one element lawfully leads to another, and the whole thing is moving toward a higher plane. It’s a method of thinking!

“And since most people are either nominalist, or positivists, or empiricists, or—you can make this list longer—most people do not think properly! The whole method of Lyndon LaRouche was to absolutely get people away from sense-certainty, get away from all of these flaws of thinking...

“And I’m deeply convinced, if we do not make people better people, you can forget it. The whole idea is getting people to think of mankind as a whole, the universe as a whole... Lyn was perfect in that! He would go to any country in the world, and he would get people from all walks of life together, and they wouldn’t even think that they were politically opposed, because they would listen to Lyn, because he would speak, in such a way that they all were completely mesmerized by the wisdom Lyn expressed.”