Helga Zepp-LaRouche
The LaRouche Legacy Foundation

Ramsey Clark, the attorney for Lyndon LaRouche at the point that LaRouche was unjustly incarcerated, talked about the idea that the “LaRouche people were the book people,” referring to the story Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, which takes place in a time when human knowledge was being persecuted. And what happened was that a group of people who refused to allow civilization to die, became “books.” They were each the living embodiment of a different work. Lyndon LaRouche was a living embodiment of over 2,500 years of Western civilization, and much more besides.

We have created the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, which has the aim of preserving the work of my husband and make those works available to the whole world. We want to put out his Collected Works, and that is a big job! Anybody who has known Lyn, knows he had written, on a good day, 80-100 pages—print ready!—with all the footnotes, with all things which normally editors would do. I have not counted it yet, but if this Collected Works series reaches 50, 60, even 100 books, I would not be surprised.

Then we have all the videos. We have the letters, memoranda, personal correspondence with important people around the world, in governments and so forth. So this is a gigantic job, which I think, in terms of the historical significance of Lyndon LaRouche, is absolutely crucial. I think it is almost—I don’t want to call it a tragedy, but I want to call it an unbelievable coincidence, that one year, approximately one year after he died, on February 12th of last year, you have the absolute fulfillment of all the things he said, many, many times, in speeches, in conference addresses. And if you now look, the breakdown of the whole system—he had said it many times, in many ways, with many predicates. And I know that many people will say, “Yeah, that’s LaRouche, he exaggerates, it will never come to that”—now we are here! If you read what Lyn said in the ’70s, in the ’80s, in the ’90s, in the 2000s, you will be surprised.

This first volume contains three of his most important economic works: So, You Wish To Know All About Economics?, The Science of Christian Economy, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, plus some other writings. I would really urge you to get a copy of this book, and make it your joy, to acquire every single book as it comes out, at least two per year, maybe quicker, which the Legacy Foundation wants to do. I want you to contribute, so that we can speed up this work—make it your own question to preserve the legacy of Lyndon LaRouche.

Let’s go to the video I made last year to try to give you some of the reflections of why I think this is important.

Reflections on Nicholas of Cusa and Lyndon LaRouche

Many of you have participated in the outstanding memorial for my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, or you have viewed the video in the meantime, and then, you got a taste of what a beautiful mind my husband really had, and how important the ideas are for the world today. As a matter of fact, I would put him on the same level of thinkers who maybe you have only one per century, and would change, through their intellectual contribution, the entire body of knowledge of their time, and lay the foundation for future generations to come. So I put him on the same level as Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Einstein, because he contributed to all of the works of these great thinkers something unique: the LaRouche method of thinking. And I am absolutely convinced, that if we would publish right now his collected works, which is a gigantic task, because he was one of the most prolific writers of this time, it would have the same effect as the introduction of Plato to the Italian Renaissance.

Now, let me explain to you what I mean by that: The Italian Renaissance was prepared by many factors, by the work of Dante, Petrarca, many sculptors and great painters, but what really caused the spark to really make the Renaissance what it became was the introduction of Plato and the thinking of Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas of Cusa belonged to a circle of humanist thinkers who believed that you had to go back to the original documents of all times, of all events, and manuscripts.

So in this capacity, he was sent by the Pope to find out if the Filioque question was in the documents of the early councils of the Church. Now, the Filioque was the question which had separated the Orthodox and the Catholic Church: It was the question, does the Logos emanate only from the Father, which was the belief in the Orthodox Church, or does it also emanate from the Son, Filioque [“and from the Son”]. Now, Nicholas went to Byzantium, and he did find all the manuscripts of the early councils of the Church, which did contain the Filioque.

The Reintroduction of Plato into Europe

This was a complete breakthrough, because that meant that he could persuade the fathers of the Orthodox Church to come to the Councils of Ferrara and Florence. So, in 1437-38, he came with a delegation of about 700 people, the Emperor of Byzantium, the Patriarch, and many scholars; he traveled from Greece to these councils. On the way, he talked to people like Georgius Gemistos Plethon, the 83-year-old adviser to the Emperor and the top scholar of Plato in Greece. Plethon wanted to introduce Plato, to have a Renaissance in Greece, and he was refuting Aristotle. He thought that Aristotle had absolutely misrepresented Plato’s ideas, or he was not capable of understanding them. He said Aristotle is completely incompatible with Christianity.

So, the dialogue between Nicholas and all of these scholars, meant that Nicholas had a breakthrough, already on that trip. He came to develop a method of thinking which he was very self-conscious about, and he said: I’m now saying something which no human being has ever thought before, and that was, the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum. This is the idea that the One has a higher value and higher magnitude than the Many, and that the human mind can always overcome contradictions by developing a level of reason on a higher plane which gives you a way to solve problems which were not soluble on the lower plane.

And that idea, indeed, was a complete breakthrough in thinking. Aristotle said, you cannot have something being true and its opposite also being true. All these thinkers, including Nicholas, said this is a completely low level of thinking, because you remain on the plane of contradictions, while Nicholas in the Apologia Docta Ignorantia—his rebuttal of a scholastic professor from Heidelberg, Johannes Wenck—said Aristotle is really at a very low level of thinking, like the ratio of an animal, but no better. While the method Plato developed, and which I now develop further, is like creative thinking being conscious of itself. It is like standing on a high tower, and from that viewpoint, you can see the searcher, that which is being sought, and the process of searching, and that gives you a completely different approach.

Now, this delegation arrived in Ferrara, and there were many lectures hosted by Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, to whom Cusa had dedicated his De Docta Ignorantia, and all these scholars then listened to Plethon, and Bessarion, who was the Archbishop of Nicaea, and they were introduced for the first time to the entire works of Plato, which in the rest of Europe, other than Greece, had been completely lost after the fall of ancient Greece, after the Peloponnesian War. There were a few copies in some monasteries, but nobody could read Greek, and when Petrarca tried to learn Greek, he couldn’t find anybody who would teach him, so he never was able to access it. But he knew that this guy, Plato, had to be extremely important, because Augustine, in his writings, referred to Plato’s writings.

So, these lectures sparked an incredible intellectual ferment, and fortunately, among the listeners was somebody from a very wealthy family, namely, Cosimo dei Medici, and he financed a crash program for the translation of the works of Plato.

The combination of Cusa’s writings and the emergence of the entire works of Plato laid the foundation for the paradigm shift which separated the Middle Ages from modern times—the Middle Ages being characterized by scholasticism, Aristotelianism, belief in witchcraft, superstition. And then, the new ideas, the new paradigm, a new image of man emerged, and a completely new conception that there was the possibility of infinite perfectibility of each human being, that science and technology could study the laws of the universe, and that this would be the basis for the improvement of living standards, an increase in population: So it was a complete revolution, and it laid the foundation for everything good coming out of European history for the following 600 years to come.

Why Publish the Collected Works of Lyndon LaRouche?

I am absolutely convinced that the publication of the collected works of Lyndon LaRouche would have a similar, if maybe even more powerful effect today. Because, what do you have today? You have, in the West, a complete cultural crisis. You have a collapse of moral values; you have the sciences dominated by utilitarianism and the idea of profit. Many scientists are just bread-scholars: They work for their salary, but they are not trying to find truth. I mean, this is a known phenomenon among all the faculties around the world, that if you are given enough money, you publish whatever you are told to publish.

Now, the cultural collapse of the West is obvious to everybody—the drug epidemics, the terrible youth culture, the ugliness in the so-called arts, and many more such phenomena. So, I’m absolutely convinced that if we publish, now, as quickly as possible, the collected works of Lyn, it will spark an incredible excitement, because the ferment already exists: Because while the West is in a Dark Age, that is not the case for all of the world, because the New Silk Road—sponsored and originated by China—that spirit, the Spirit of the New Silk Road, has already caught on in about 126 countries which have joined the Belt and Road Initiative, and who have the idea that there will be a completely new time, when poverty and underdevelopment can be overcome.

I participated just three weeks ago in the Asian Dialogue of Civilizations, which was an extraordinary event in Beijing. Forty-seven nations participated. They were all very proud of the ancient Asian civilizations, going back many thousands of years—5,000 and more—and they were conscious that many of these civilizations were cradles of all of humanity.

A Dialogue of Cultures

They think that the Asian Century is coming, or has actually started, and that the West is in a condition of decay. I think what the Asians are doing is great; it’s a great inspiration. But I also think we cannot leave Europe, the United States, to collapse, but that we need to have an approach by which all countries and all continents prosper at the same time. I’m absolutely convinced that this can be done only by having all countries join the New Paradigm, that we will then develop Africa together with the Africans; that we will overcome underdevelopment in Latin America, in Asia, and all the pockets of underdevelopment in the United States and in Europe. We will incorporate a Dialogue of Cultures, bringing back the best traditions of all Classical cultures, especially the world’s most advanced thinking, which is the thinking of Lyndon LaRouche, and we will spark a fundamental Renaissance in the sciences and the arts, and spark the whole discussion of the image of man, much like what happened in the Italian Renaissance, this time happening for the future of all of humanity.

If you think that is a worthwhile idea, then I ask you: Be generous and help us to make that work. You can help in many ways. Contact us, and we will find a task for you to be a part of this exciting project. We also need your financial support to do it, but do it in the spirit which is upon us, now, to shape a new epoch of civilization, which we hope will be an age in which human beings relate to each other as human beings—that the future of mankind will be like the relations between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller, or Albert Einstein and Max Planck, and that nations will relate to each other in a completely new spirit, something which Nicholas of Cusa called the spiritorum universorum. That is the New Silk Road Spirit, and the works of my beloved husband are certainly the crucial spark that will make that possible. [end video]

Go Forth and Multiply

We want to send out copies to many libraries internationally, so we do need support to do it. If these books were available to students, for curricula, I’m absolutely certain that the specific method that my husband developed would proliferate—we will hear more about it in the next hours, and tomorrow—the specific LaRouche method of thinking, which is the most advanced thinking that mankind has produced so far.

Now you may say, “She says this because she loved her husband.” It’s that also, but it’s more than that. I’m certain that the contribution that Lyndon LaRouche has made is of absolute importance to the solution of world problems today. And that is why I want you to buy the book, to think how you can help, and think about spreading the ideas of my husband. You will be completely shocked to see what he said, and how early he said it. As you heard with the two videos of him that Dennis played at the beginning, much of what he said is as up to date as if he had said it this minute. And that unique power to anticipate and to make a correct prognosis, and then come up a solution, that is something which must be studied by many, many people around the world. That is what I want you to know.

Volume One of Lyndon LaRouche’s works has just been released and is available for purchase at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation.