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This transcript appears in the October 16, 2015 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
LYNDON LAROUCHE OCT. 10 DIALOGUE
WITH MANHATTAN PROJECT:

The Mission of Man and
How We Pursue It

[PDF version of this transcript]

This is a transcript of excerpts of Lyndon LaRouche’s Dialogue with a Manhattan audience on October 10. The dialogue was moderated by Dennis Speed.

Dennis Speed: Okay, we’re ready. I’d like to say a couple things today before we start. Some years ago, about 31 years ago, the Schiller Institute put out a book called The Hitler Book. It had an introduction I just want to refer to. That book was a contribution to understanding the then-current situation in Germany, and it said, “Its publication has become necessary because processes now at work within the German population are to a large extent unknown to that population, and to such an astounding degree that we must not only draw upon the history of the Twentieth Century, we must proceed from the fact that Germany has never come to terms with its past.” Then the book went on to describe the character of Nazism.

The reason I wanted to reference this book, put out at that time by the Schiller Institute, is because this week, we have this spectacle of the erstwhile President of the United States going to Oregon, because of a mass shooting that happens in Oregon, at the same time as the President of the United States bombs a hospital in Afghanistan, knowingly and deliberately, without any question. And then, at the end of the week, we have two more shootings, one in Texas and one in Arizona. Yet, people want to ask the question, “What’s really going on? We don’t understand these processes.”

As everyone knows, we have made it our business, day in and day out now for years now, for eight years of the Obama Administration, nearly eight years, to point out that we’re dealing with a Satanic personality, and there is an implication for all of us, for every day he stays in office, for how much more dire the circumstances of the United States become.

So we’re meeting today, in a particular time, with a very important action having been taken by Russia, but still with an action untaken in America. And every hour that goes by, we see the consequences of this.

So I just wanted to say that. I hope you don’t mind, Lyn. But I was too—you know, this was too much. So, would you like to make opening remarks other than the ones I made? I couldn’t stop myself.

Lyndon LaRouche: I’ve got the picture.

We’re in a situation now which is absolutely unique. There’s never been a condition like this in terms of the history of the United States, but we have, on the one hand, a very dangerous situation, which is typified by Obama himself, as being the example of relevance. And the other side, we have the questions and answers which we may want to deal with in order to make ourselves happy, in a sense of saying, that if we can deal with this concept of what Obama has represented, if we can understand it,—even though it’s an enemy policy,—but if we can understand it, we can then find a solution in our own mind for what the solution might be. And I think that’s what’s crucial right now.

Speed: Great. Thanks a lot. So, the first question is here.

Cures for New Diseases

Q: It’s B— from New Jersey. I get this sense, and I can give a personal note to this, that there’s a real change occurring particularly around this flank that Putin has opened up. And I think it’s not quite what we saw at the completion when the U.S. astronauts landed on the Moon; but it’s more like people getting a sense that “we can do this.” You know, not that we did it yet, but that we can do this.

And the personal note I would take on that, is that recently I had a close family member who really has never quite accepted what we’ve been saying around Obama; in fact, while I was down in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday talking to congressional offices, they called up my household, and even after having just gone through surgery and just starting recovery, they called up not to discuss their own situation, but to discuss with another family member of mine what was going on with Glass-Steagall. And was adamant about that, they did not want to talk about their surgery; they wanted to know what was going on, and had found out that I was down in Washington, talking with congressional offices about this.

So I get this sense that you’re seeing—and I’ve seen this in congressional offices, too; in fact, a meeting I had yesterday, and we were discussing Glass-Steagall and that, and among other things, when I brought up Syria, the staff member said, “Man, Putin is really kicking butt.”

So I did just want to put that out there, and see what your thoughts are about this?

LaRouche: No, it’s quite appropriate. Putin has actually created a new state of organization in the United States, by doing something which has never been done before. And what he’s done has shocked much of the planet, because maybe not some special parts,—but this is really a remarkable operation. And what it means essentially is, that mankind has a higher message to deliver to the rest of humanity. That’s exactly what this is, it’s a precedent. You know, a lot of things come out of that. I suppose in most of the discussion other things will come up, that is something we can reference back to, that the fact that there is something which is extremely important, and which, I think, in the course of this dialogue, and so forth today, will come more clearly; by taking parts of what I know about and take each part and then we’ll see what happens when we get into that dialogue which is coming next.

kremlin.ru
The global confrontation personified: President Putin and President Obama meet at the United Nations, Sept. 28, 2015.

Q: My name is L—, and I’ve worked in health care for many years, not as a nurse, but for an organ procurement organization. Within that context, I was present at the closing of two hospitals in Queens, Mary Immaculate and St. John’s Episcopal. I also noted a hospital in Brooklyn, in Brownsville that was a trauma center, and that hospital had been put on the list by the Berger report. But the doctors became very concerned, because they knew the patient population that they serve; so five, high-power doctors within the hospital went up and met with the head of the Health Department, and they promised the Health Department, they said, “give us our hospital back, and we’ll make it work!”

I make this comment because there is a severe problem in health care today. Brookdale was able to bring their hospital back online, but that report comes out yearly, and I think this is an example of how our country has deteriorated. And so this was just a comment.

LaRouche: And it was a perfectly relevant comment, because what you’re dealing with,—you’ve got to look at a broader part of the thing, and the detail you represented is actually typical of a larger problem. And that is we don’t understand what the meaning of human life is. And when you’re talking about health care, you’re talking about human life; you’re not talking about a disease, you’re not talking a particular problem, you’re talking about human life. Because the things you will find in health care, go wildly beyond what anyone had known before.

And so therefore, the question is, what is this magic principle, which most people have never fully understood before, at least in the particular examples? What is the thing that makes us enabled to solve that problem of the previously unknown case? In other words like a sickness that comes on, and there was no precedent for that sickness, at least in terms of the practical expression of it. And therefore, the question is, what is our ability as mankind, to investigate, and successfully so, solutions for previously unknown diseases.

youtube
The population at risk: A hospital in the Cincinnati metropolitan area about to be demolished in July of 2015.
Putin’s Operation is Unprecedented

And the unknown diseases as just a typical case of the thing; there are other applications of the same thing. Mankind must qualify as mankind, to deal with previously unknown kinds of diseases, and problems as such. And that is something which we’ve lost, we’ve lost that kind of ability which was there two generations earlier; you know, I’m an older man, and so I know things like that, two generations earlier.

So that’s it. We have to understand that we don’t know a fixed solution. We have to have the ability to discover a solution for a problem we had not previously known. And that is, of course, the acme of the practice of medicine.

Q: My name is I—. I’ve been following fairly closely at least the news coverage of the war against ISIS in Syria and the surrounding area. I guess what’s come to concern me, and I wanted your comment on it, was the fair number of reports in the press that the U.S. military or CIA is supplying TOW missiles to the so-called “moderate” jihadists in response to the Russian initiatives. And there’s generally a lot of talk of aiming to mire the Russians in Syria the way they were bogged down in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

So my question is, to what extent do you think the United States will actually start intervening non-covertly, to bog down the Russians, in this war with ISIS, and more openly support ISIS?

LaRouche: Against Putin, I don’t think Obama or people like him have any case. I think they have no option of that nature. Whereas what Putin has done has never been done before, that kind of operation. Imagine, here are people, take planes; they fly them over unprecedented distances into covert or quasi-secret locations. They do it again and again. It’s unprecedented in the recent history of warfare, in conflict.

White House/Pete Souza
A grave threat: Obama in the Oval Office, Oct. 5, 2015.

So Putin has brought into existence, not some miracle statement, but a developed idea, a developed concept of practice, which has done this job. Otherwise, it would have been impossible. If Obama had dominated the area, the whole thing would be a disaster. It’s a difficult problem now; they have complications. For example, Germany is part of this whole picture, even though it’s not a neighbor of that picture. But that’s a problem to handle.

And I’m sure that Putin now has now got a clear understanding of what he’s doing; he probably is going to make innovations, because it’s his nature to make innovations,—not to just go through a repertoire, but to look at his ability to affect something. And that’s what he’s done. And it’s what Obama has no comprehension of! And most of the leaders in Europe have no comprehension of it. There’s some people in China who have a comprehension; there are other people in Asia who have a comprehension, and know what it involves.

But this is something new. It is not an exact model of anything; it is something new which was improvised and developed by Putin’s leadership. And that’s the way you get it. You have to find solutions for previously unknown diseases, previously unknown problems. And the art of the thing is, where is the leadership which is prepared to adequately deal with unknown conditions, preconditions? And that’s what’s happened with Putin. He’s moved in on something that has never been done before; it has aspects which look like something that has existed before, but it’s not.

And therefore, Obama has gone wild. And Obama of course, launched this attack on the hospital and murdered people! Just plain murdered them. He not only did it, but after he was warned that he was doing that, he still continued it!

So this is the kind of problem. The problem now is we’ve got to change the characteristic of the way in which the United States and other nations, just aren’t doing it right. They’re failing again and again and again. There are some people in every part of this European area, and elsewhere, who are working in the right direction.

No Deductive Solutions

But the actual solutions are generally unique, of important issues. You start with an understanding of the nature of what you suspect the problem is. But then you find the problem is not quite the thing you thought it was beforehand. And therefore, you have to have the ability to react to that fact, and find a solution quickly. In other words, you start with a probable approach to solve a problem, which is already something good. But in order to defeat the problem, you’ve got to go a step further, and make discoveries of things that you, yourself, had not even thought of before.

Q: May name is R—, I’ve been born and raised in Brooklyn all my life, and the greatest change I have seen in all my time is the change of how society thinks. If they thought conservatively, or that I could do it, in our days, and you went out to do something, you just did it. But now, everybody’s so ultimately liberal, that somebody vile as Obama got into office, they don’t think who’s running, assess the politicians that are involved and that’s what’s getting us in trouble. And all the colleges have all these liberal professors, all these schoolbooks are twisted; they don’t give’em American history to tell’em what we are. So, how to get people back on the right thinking, I think is a great challenge, and I’m wondering if you have an answer for that.

LaRouche: I think I have a good answer for that. I’m not a perfect person but I happen to know a few things, and I probably know more than a lot of people, because of my experience, and the nature of my experience. What we have which is the problem, is the wrong conception of the meaning of mankind.

Now, mankind is unlike any animal. Mankind has no truly animal characteristics. They say we do, but we don’t. I have a nice puppy; she’s about four years old, she’s a very sweet little puppy, but she’s a puppy! She’s not a human being; she’s not capable of developing human solutions. She will sense doggie solutions; she will mimic what she is capable, as a dog, of doing, and she’ll be very happy with the fact that she made the discovery of a new toy or something like that to play with, or a new game to play with.

But mankind is unique. There is no species that we know of which is like mankind. There’s no animal that we know of, that corresponds to mankind. But mankind has a value which is often suppressed, by mankind, because mankind operates out of ignorance, largely out of ignorance, and our population in the United States has actually depreciated, degenerated, in respect of my experience in my early life,—that is when I was doing various things back in the 1970s and 1980s and so forth. The kind of things I did then, are things that most people in the United States did not have the experience of. I was privileged in that respect.

But what my point is, is that I understand that you cannot assume that you can make deductive solutions for the future of mankind. Sometimes you’ll find something which is useful and which has a deductive character. But the future of mankind depends on a principle.

The point is, what is the nature of mankind? If mankind is unique, what makes mankind unique, relative to all known living processes, including the high ones? What is it? It’s the fact of the relationship between the living human being and the deceased human being, those who died or are about to die, because of disease or age or so forth. Mankind is the only species which is actually voluntarily capable, by its own means, in bringing mankind to a higher level of development. No other species can do what mankind is capable of doing, of true creativity, of a type which no animal has. And the importance of mankind, is that we as human beings, must in the course of our life, reach the achievement of that, the ability, before you die, that you will have contributed, in your society, somewhere, and given something which mankind had never had before as an opportunity. And therefore, our mission in life is to live a life, if we can, in such a way that we bring mankind to a higher level of mankind’s potential as a species.

And that’s what’s missing. People don’t see it. They say, “Oh, people die. So-and-so died.” Yes; but what is the consequence of his living or her living, in the process? Especially as the aging process goes on. Does mankind produce a level of development of our species, our society; and can we say, yes, we weep for the death of a valued person. But, what you count on more: did that person make a contribution to the advancement of mankind’s ability for the future?

Reach Upward

And that is what the issue is. We lose sight of it, we say that death is the end of mankind. But maybe the person who has died has made a contribution to mankind as a whole, for a future. And that is what you’re looking at. Einstein, for example, in his time, is an example of that, Albert Einstein. And he was the only person who had an accurate sense of the purpose of human life, as no other scientist of his time had ever achieved. And that’s the example that I would hold out; there are other examples of the same nature, but that’s a more recent one and a more comprehensible one.

U.S. Army/Carmen Burgess
A World War II veteran salutes on the celebration of the 60th anniverary of victory in 2005.

Q: Hi Lyn, this is A—, here again in the city. I wanted to raise with you for discussion the experience that many of us had earlier in the week on Wednesday, in our visit to D.C. It’s a trip that I’ve made numerous times over the past couple of years, though it had been a while. So what was different about it, for me, it was the question that came up in how does this in my mind serve the process of these discussions with you on a weekly basis, oftentimes twice a week, and not just the crisis itself.

So, yes, being down there on numerous occasions was helpful as an experience. And we generally meet with aides or assistants that are younger. And the first thing that occurred to me, was that, why should I approach this any differently than I had in the past, when, really, I’m talking to a young person like I would in any one of our deployments? And that I was going down there with the outlook of being aggressive, not looking to debate, or give a history lesson or a background or a defense; but rather to give a very straightforward account of the crisis as it stands now, and the way out of it, based primarily on your successful record as a forecaster, that is unmatched.

Then, as you would in a street deployment, see how they respond. In some cases, a Wall Street lackey was before us, and before he actually packed up to leave,—always this kind of miracle meeting comes up that he has to leave to. But you know that, and that was fine, because that, too, had an effect; let’em run.

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EIRNS/Eli Santiago
LaRouche PAC organizers near the United Nations hold a rally on Oct. 5, 2015.

However, there were some young aides there, that had a very different response when you present them with the straight-forwardness of the truth, and now, you’re actually in—it’s brief, but there’s a dialogue; they have questions, they want to know. They’re no longer, even for a brief period, a lackey or a Representative, we hope, of that particular Representative’s office that we’re in. And so, for the first time, I felt I had now the potential to build on a relationship that’s useful, within that office, where it might not have existed otherwise. And again, I point to what I think is just the natural process of working through these discussions with you, where this comes together. And this time I did not feel like I left anyone’s office with my tail between my legs, or feeling like I did not say that which needed to be stated.

So that’s in essence what happened, and I think this is true for many of us that went. Obviously, like I was once new to the process, there were those that were new and didn’t say much. But I think for most of us that have been doing this for a while, that may be a fair assessment of how we approached it.

LaRouche: There are two aspects to it, what you outlined. Two aspects. One, you have the exposure to people that you can exert some kind of influence on. That is not always, in itself, useful as such. But it may create a doubt, or a concern (as the Quakers would say), in terms of what the experience is that the person or persons you’re talking about would consider.

But the other thing, what you’re looking for is to reach upward, is to do it as much as you can, reach upward. That is, to try to enlighten the persons you are addressing. It doesn’t mean it has to be explicit, it may be just influence. You make a suggestion, and the person may be influenced by that suggestion, not in the sense of a solution, but saying “I’ve got to add that into my repertoire, and I’ve got to think about it.”

That’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the ability to increase the number of people who are responsive to being educated in that sense, being provoked into making discoveries; or not making discoveries, but something’s bothering them; they want to solve that problem. They find the problem is challenging, and since they like the idea of that challenge, they want to bite on it for a while. And that is often what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create an influence within our society, an influence, and let the good evidence fly wherever it will fly, wherever it can induce an improvement of the outlook of people. And what you have to do is, then, is you have the specialists, who become more qualified in getting at this problem and getting solutions, and that’s essential.

Our Divergences Can be Helpful

But you have part of society,—as long as society is responding to the idea of the future, of solving things which constitute the future, either among a group of people, or as something absolutely new. And they are very closely related. Obviously, the most important thing is the discovery of new discoveries, of qualities of mankind’s future; like a new invention, a true invention, a new scientific principle, which I have a lot of experience with myself.

So therefore, these kinds of things are kind of a mesh, with people with various degrees of progress, or potential progress, as opposed to people who are not making progress in that way. That’s the way you have to look at it. And those who aren’t performing, well, you put yourself in favor of the person who is doing something, or is moving in a way to direct something. And you got little less effort on behalf of trying to persuade someone who is not willing to take that route.

Q: Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche, this is S— from Manhattan, and I want to ask a modified question from last week. I asked what you thought about the President of Argentina asking about calling Barack Obama a traitor to his nation and to the world; in context to Xi Jinping and his hard-line stance on building a New Silk Road and a win-win situation for the entire world. How can we take those two aspects and combine them together and march forward as a political action committee?

LaRouche: They’re really both closely related. As a matter of fact, if you put them in the same environment, you wouldn’t see the difference; you would see the same kind of convergence, that they would be happy to discuss whatever differences they had, in that context. Because, the thing is, mankind must develop; mankind must acquire the future, the mastery of the future. And as long as people are working for the future of mankind, efficiently doing that, more or less efficiently, or teasing people out of it, or stirring people up, so they begin to catch a new idea they hadn’t known before,—that’s the way it works. It has to work that way.

What we do in that case, we have a lot of divergence among our own people. But, divergence is not necessarily bad. There may be some people that get it quicker, some people never get it and so forth; but in point of fact mankind is reaching out, will find themselves drawn into reaching out. Many people don’t become inventors by intention, but sometimes they get lessons from history, which come upon them by surprise. So that has to be included.

Q: [follow-up] Also, I just found out something urgent, before I arrived. It got leaked from the TPP that all someone has to do, once the TPP is actually up and going, is make a single complaint about one of your videos on whatever platform it may be, YouTube, Google Talk or whatever, and they have to take your sponsorship on their website down. How do you feel about that? That’s a really huge step of censorship and Nazism.

LaRouche: The question is there’s a criterion which you’re always working with. You’re not working with an isolated criterion. You’re basing on a general truth, and you have all kinds of truth and non-truth floating around the atmosphere. So what you’re concentrating on first is those things which are valid. Now, the question is what degree of validity do they represent. But as long as we’re getting progress, and we’re not getting resistance to progress, we don’t want to complain too much. Because what you want to do is you want to spread the influence, which leads people to converge upon goals which are necessary for mankind. And if you can move people to do a little more thinking, about scientific matters and other matters, that itself is progress. Mankind is not just an isolated brain. Mankind has a manifold capability; human beings have manifold capabilities. And therefore, what we want to do is we want to stimulate those kinds of capabilities, and harvest them, and find a good place to harvest them. And otherwise, we’re looking for the progress of mankind, and we assume that the progress of mankind has something to do with the interrelationship within mankind.

Our Job is to Educate

Q: Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche, I’m I—. The other day I went to Washington with other members of the group. And it was quite astonishing to me to see how some of the office aides were so defensive, in the way in which they were just trying to shield their bosses, I mean the Representatives. But before we left some of the offices, we were able to maybe plant a seed in some of the aides’ mind. I have an extensive experience with people working in offices, because this has been my type of work, because I used to teach people how to be office workers.

But I think there is something in Washington which trains those people to be dangerous. I have a way about me. I left a few little seeds as a reminder, to some of them. I told one gentleman that Wall Street is running on the money of drug money, so there is no real money on Wall Street, but drug money. He was like red in the face.

In one of the offices J— and I went and were talking to a gentleman, who said he had a meeting, but he just wanted to avoid us. So, you know, we planted a few seeds in his brain, and I hope he will be able to use that to the advantage, because I let him know Glass-Steagall was implemented in 1933, and Clinton destroyed it in 1999, so he can do the math.

So, I would like to know from you, what would you suggest about these young office workers who are dangerous in Washington, D.C.?

LaRouche: Well, obviously, the reason they’re dangerous is because they were cultivated to be dangerous. Most of them didn’t go into the idea of being dangerous on their own, but they find themselves as subordinates of some people; and then there are some cases who are really outstanding thugs, or something like that. And that’s the difference.

So the problem is, how do we deal with this problem? Which means we have to assess the people who are in government, or in similar kinds of positions, like teaching and so forth. And you don’t want the bums to influence the schools. You wish to have people progress, and progress along a route of truth; what is actually truth, as mankind may be able to discover truth, where they hadn’t know what the discovery was beforehand.

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“The Country School” by Winslow Homer, painted in 1871.

And so therefore that’s the issue. The issue is, you have people who are operating on good faith, they may make mistakes, but they’re not malicious in terms of their mistakes; they’re just doubtful, they just don’t know. Well, our job, therefore, is to try to educate them, and to try to exert influence which will educate them. Because it’s not always the person who educates the person, it’s sometimes the education occurs as a by-product of their experience. And if you find it working that way, just accept that, right away, get to work on it.

Q: Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche, R— from Brooklyn. On Thursday night we had Jeff [Steinberg] on the Fireside Chat, and we were talking about how we would get rid of Obama, and how we would get the Glass-Steagall Act in, etc. Now, if we did get the Glass-Steagall Act in soon, assuming tomorrow we got rid of Obama, and he was put out under our Constitution, Vice President Biden would be automatically President. Is there any indication that Biden, as President, would be more likely to put the Glass-Steagall Act into effect, sign off on it?

LaRouche: On his own volition, no. He might be induced to do it, but it wouldn’t be his intention. He’s been corrupted too long and too deeply.

Q: Mr. LaRouche, my name is A—, good afternoon.

LaRouche: Good afternoon, good to see you again.

Q: Always a pleasure to see you. I wonder about the thing about the hospital bombing, is just the top of the long laundry list of all the things Obama’s done. He should be removed under the 25th Amendment.

LaRouche: There’s no question about that. There’s no real question. Think about the history of the Bush and Obama Administration in this succession. What happened to the people in the United States, what happened to them during that tenure of the Bush Administration, the last one, and the Obama Administration? This was absolutely destructive! And the conditions of life inside the United States are really perilous. This is so evil, it’s beyond belief. But Obama was the worst.

What Science Really Means

Now, Obama was a more characteristically evil person. And the Bush family,—one Bush was very bad, but the other one was just stupid, and that was the problem. But with Obama, coming into his full flurry, or whatever it is; from the first time, I challenged him early in his first term in office, and he got very angry about what I did, in my reporting of what was wrong with what he was doing, the corruption he’d already embodied at that time. So, that’s the way things go.

Ziad al-Mehwari
Obama policy: The results of a May 15, 2015 drone strike in Yemen, in which up to 26 civilians died.

But the problem is that the destruction that was accomplished under the last Bush Administration, and now the Obama has been one of the most evil kinds of destruction of the people of the United States, the culture of the United States, the most evil thing that’s happened so far. And I’ve known a lot of the history of this nation of ours, and Obama has been the worst of them—absolutely criminal. If you look at the history of Obama’s family and look at him as a young boy, and talking about his stepfather there. That this guy was absolutely evil, absolutely evil. And Obama has been absolutely evil, in the full record of his Presidency. And that guy should have been thrown out of office before he got in there.

Speed: Lyn, this is from somebody who’s not here today. He’s a former English professor at this institution, CCNY. He’s Eric Larson. He wrote a book, A Nation Gone Blind: A Nation in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. He was an English professor [LaRouche laughs]—and he watched the drawing and quartering and emulsification of the English language and its usage for 33 years here.

Here’s what he said; he couldn’t be here today. He lives in the Upper West Side, and he said: “Ever since we met last week, I’ve been pondering, assessing, fretting, and thinking.” He says, “My outrage is immense, my sorrow bottomless, my anger high, but also my nature is timid and my temperament reclusive. I watch and listen but almost never speak unless in very specific situations like teaching a class, where I’m absolutely certain of my position and my relationship to the other.” And he says, “All this has to do with why I’m more of a writer than an activist.” But what he said at the end, he has this phrase, which I figured you might have something to say about. He says, “That fact or tale is pretty much told in the end of the Nineteenth Century.”

So I decided I’d bring this up, first because he’s not here, but because he’s turning around in his mind the destruction of language usage. He was very surprised to find that a chief mentor of his, Reid Whitmire, as I believe was the man’s name, a poet laureate, was a roommate of James Angleton.

LaRouche: [laughs] Oh-ho-ho!

Speed: Yeah. And Eric was very surprised to find the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the way that actually affected most of the people that taught him. And that was what caused our discussion. So I wanted to just put this in, because I had given him some of the things you’ve been saying about language, that have been in some of the discussions, so I just wanted to put that in at this point.

LaRouche: Yeah, this is a big subject, if you want to get what you’re presenting in that statement of yours just now. That is a very difficult thing to deal with, from the standpoint of method. Because what mankind requires is the acquisition of the power to advance the condition of mankind.

Now the whole history of mankind has been generally flip-flops, and all the other kinds of things that have gone on in the history of mankind. But there is a pattern there nonetheless, which is a pattern of progress. There are periods of great progress, by some people or by even a larger portion of the people. But what happens in this kind of situation, what you are referring to, is actually not progressive. The idea of imposing a kind of pedagogy upon a population can be a very destructive force, and when I think what I know of the Nineteenth Century, which I was not in, except my father and mother were in that area, but I spent most of my life, so far, in the Twentieth Century. And what you just presented I find disturbing, because that’s not the way we get progress.

Sometimes you get an accidental contribution to progress, which will be an exceptional case. But I have a different idea of what mankind’s future must be, how mankind must shape his future, what science really means. And I’m a devout scientist in that sense. I don’t endorse things if I don’t have confidence in that as something worth believing, and what you just presented would irritate me greatly, because that’s not the way I want to live. I want to live creating the future of mankind. The important thing is creating mankind’s future. And the importance of mankind as a species is, it’s the only species which is actually able to create the future. And all persons who are honorable persons and accomplished will do the same thing. They will provide a solution to the unknown, what had been previously the unknown.

Rising Above Prior Generations

And that’s the only thing you can have confidence in: People who can find in some aspect of their life, a contribution to the creative powers of the human mind, but not just the human mind, as such, but the human population. I believe in the importance of man’s progress past the point of man’s death. And the purpose of society is that mankind must be able to qualify as making a contribution to the intrinsic future of mankind in some degree, in some way. But without progress, without that kind of progress, there is no virtue.

Q: Hi, Lyn, this is S—M— from the New Jersey/New York operation and I’m wondering if you can help me shed light on the apparent dichotomy between what we’re doing politically, in terms of the impeachment of Obama and the taking down of Wall Street, and what we’re doing with singing, why we sing.

You have some funny things that happen, when we’re in the field organizing, where people will come up. A lot of our signage is geared towards Glass-Steagall, impeaching Obama, and then we invite someone to our chorus, and they give you a funny look. Or, we have people who are coming to the chorus, who may not actually be—you don’t know where they stand politically; so you’re singing in the chorus with them and you’re not sure if you’re going to scare them away by saying, “Hey, we’ve got to get Obama out; he’s a bum.”

I have some ideas on what we’re doing with the chorus, but I’d like it if you could help me clarify that.

LaRouche: No, I think the point is. If you’re talking about Classical composition, what we call Classical composition, which includes, in particular, of course, Mozart and others of that type,—that has its own merits; that progress of music has its own merits. And there are earlier developments in the earlier centuries, which are the same thing. Nicholas of Cusa, for example, is an exemplar in this matter. As many people may already know him or know his identity already.

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EIRNS/Dana Carsrud
LaRouche PAC Policy Committee member Diane Sare and the New York City Community chorus, at a musical evening on Sept. 26, 2015.

So that’s where the thing lies, and the question is, how does mankind rise above a generation which has previously lived? How does mankind make a contribution to the future of mankind, an explicit contribution to the future of mankind, something which mankind has never known before in terms of type? And our objective should be that we insist that we, if we are able, will actually create something which belongs to the future.

Now this happens in families; it happens with all kinds of people,—that people, before they die, may often make a contribution to the future of mankind, a kind of contribution which reverberates into the future. And that is probably the most appropriate prototype for mankind’s progress. Can we each make a contribution which is a contribution to the future, to create something which has never been known before, or a factor which has never been known before, which is valid for mankind.

Because when mankind dies, people die. Can they achieve the success of their own development which is a contribution to the future of mankind? And everyone should—the idea of the school system as such and the child developing through successive layers of education and so forth. But progress, in that sense, systemic progress, is I think the measure of what defines mankind as successful. It’s the ability to create an influence within society, an influence of principle in society which brings mankind into the area of something which mankind had never known previously. That’s the principle of the thing.

Q: Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche, thank you for taking my question. I was reading a book for some class that I took, and it was Richard Duncan’s The New Depression. And he spends a lot of time giving all the math for QE1, 2, 3, and so forth, but he doesn’t go into any connecting the dots, because of course he’d never get a job again in finance if he did. [LaRouche laughs]

I had a question about the destruction of money through debt, and I was wondering, is that a pathway to a new currency? Since most of what is purported to be wealth is really digital on the books; it’s not printed currency or physical. And yet, you see when companies go bankrupt, that have a great value, because they become insolvent with no cash flow, their assets are sold off on pennies for the dollar. And that of course is a part of boom/bust capitalism; it’s for the benefit of whoever is holding the cash. Or has enough digital figures in their balance and their check balance to buy up everyone’s physical and real assets. So even Stiglitz said something the other day, someone mentioned it to me here from the group, that the Greek debt, it could just be figured out if it was done through electronic payments and reorganized that way.

So my final question, is this digital currency really where it’s headed? There was a section in Obamacare, and it’s supposed to be implemented in early 2013, that people are supposed to get RFID chips, and then what follows on that, is eventually people would get money through the system. And I noticed this years ago, that all of a sudden, they were just giving out—it wasn’t food stamps any more, but they were done through credit cards through Chase! And even in the farmers market in Union Square here, in New York, everyone is having this; it’s like one out of six people in the country is on a food subsidy. And Chase makes money on that; even when they interview someone from Chase Bank, he sort of like smiles slyly and says, “yeah, they do very well with that.”

So is this where it’s all headed: digital currency and the RFID chip?

Shut Down Wall Street

LaRouche: I think the point is, look at Franklin Roosevelt’s role in this thing. And you understand, this was never true. This was never a true operation, at all. Because Franklin Roosevelt created a reform, which lasted, first of all as long as he was in service. But also, when he was being booted out of the Presidency, by being squeezed out, along with his companions, there was a destruction of the economy of the United States which followed immediately after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. The day that Franklin Roosevelt actually died, was the beginning of the end of the policy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Nuclear Energy Institute
Despite well-meaning attempts by various presidents, there has been no net progress in the United States since FDR died. Here, President Eisenhower signals the start of construction of the country's first nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pa. in 1954.

After that, there had been people who tried to do an honest job,—some leading people from the military service of World War II; some other people of the same category; some other people in a later period, who meant to do well. But generally, the problem of the United States has been, that since Franklin Roosevelt died, there has been no net progress in the welfare of mankind in the United States, none! Everything we’ve gained, if you look at it,—and I’ve been through the whole thing, especially coming out of World War II,—I tell you, there was nothing ever good, in net effect, even by well-meaning Presidents, because they were either killed, like Kennedy; he was killed, he was murdered! And his brother was murdered, other people were sabotaged. Reagan, was assassinated; he didn’t die, but he was assassinated by a Bush, a member of the Bush family. And I was a key person in the service to Reagan. And so, in due course they got rid of me: They threw me in the jug. It was a fraud.

So the point is, the fate of mankind, since that period, since the best period, the Kennedys and Reagan and others who were decent people; but since that time, we’ve had very little. We had some things from Bill Clinton, in two terms. The first term, he was successful; the second term, they really muscled him out. They let him complete his second term, but they ruined him in the process. It was done by the Republican Party leadership and it was done, also, by order of the Queen of England, who personally did that! Since that time, we’ve had no good Presidents. And that’s reality.

So we have to get back to the point that we actually get a Presidential system, a true U.S. Presidential system, and we have to get it quickly. And we have to take some of the actions that Franklin Roosevelt had used in his term of office. We have to shut off Wall Street! Wall Street has to be shut out completely, just shut it down! No payments to them, nothing! They’ve got nothing coming to them—except pain. And we don’t want to have too much pain running around.

But anyway, that’s the point. We’re dealing with a point where you can’t say, this and that period, and this and that period were somehow characteristic. The point was, the process is what’s characteristic. And the ups and downs of the development of the process, the ebbs and flows in the process; and most of the stuff in the Twentieth Century has been crap. And Franklin Roosevelt was an exception, and some other people were, who also got killed in due course. So that’s the way it is.

Now the point now, is, what’re we going to do, to fix that? What’re we going to do, to fix what the United States was intended to be? What was it? What is it? And how do we make it work? How do we bring it in and make it work? As an idea of a progress of mankind, a progress of the human species! A progress of mankind!

We all are going to die; all people die. It’s what happens in the course of time. But! What is the meaning of the life which was lived? And what must you do, to make that life to be lived, as meaningful for the progress of the future of mankind? That’s the only way to deal with it.

Q: [About Wall Street.]

LaRouche: Oh, Wall Street. Well, we can put Wall Street—oh, very simple thing: First of all, we have a lot of buildings in Manhattan, tall buildings! Some smaller, some not so pretty, some not so attractive. But we have them. Now what do we want to do with all these dumps, which we call the Wall Street area? Wall Street? Well, what we want to do, we want to get these guys, the Wall Street bunch, throw’em out. Throw them immediately out, because they’re all bankrupt, they’re hopelessly bankrupt. They have no merit to them, no value to them. Just dump’em out.

GDFL/Beyond My Ken
The headquarters for Standard and Poors on Wall Street, ripe for conversion into something useful.

Now we take those buildings and the skyscraper buildings in the Manhattan area, and the other areas of these types, of some value; and we take’em over. Who? Not ourselves, no. We say, this is a property of the United States, as a property. So Wall Street sinks. And we let Manhattan take it over, and get a new system of economy. We take over these buildings which are not otherwise usable by human civilization, and we use those buildings now for various kinds of purposes. Some of them, the large skyscrapers have some very useful purposes, very convenient, a very convenient way of simplifying the matter of getting around inside Manhattan; in that alone, among the functions we can supply, by just taking these things over.

But the first thing you must do, is dump Wall Street. Wall Street must be discarded, it must be shut down. It must become nonexistent. And it has to come fast. Because we can’t afford Wall Street any more. [laughter]

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