DENNIS SPEED

The LaRouche Method:
Seed-Crystal of a New Culture

Dennis Speed is the U.S. Northeast Coordinator of the Schiller Institute. This is his address to the Schiller Institute conference, “Dona Nobis Pacem—Grant Us Peace, Through Economic Development,” convened in New York City on Saturday, June 9, 2018.

Dennis Speed: We chose to call this panel “Choosing Creativity—Not Tragedy—In Economics and Statecraft.” We are going to try to place Cicero, who is not here with us—Lyndon LaRouche—in the room, rather than the various Brutuses and Cassiuses and Julius Caesars and others that might occupy, or seem to occupy, the tragedy of today’s landscape.

President Donald Trump does not intend to be a tragic figure, but many Americans intend him to be that. The American people, unfortunately, don’t really exactly understand the concept of tragedy.

One thing about Lyndon LaRouche, and our association—those of us privileged enough to be with him for so many years—is that Lyn and his association always had a really good time. We had a lot of fun, and have a lot of fun. And the way we do that is by destroying axioms.

Lyndon LaRouche rediscovered the American Presidency, particularly in the aftermath of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King. Of course, his collaboration with Ronald Reagan is a very important element of that rediscovery of the American Presidency. He demonstrated to all of us, to the world, as he put it, “I only have to convince one guy -and that’s the President of the United States.” And that’s what he did in the 1980s, around what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative.

He wasn’t very loved very much for that: He spent five years in prison as a result of that successful, very happy, and very (in one sense) humorous assault on the institutions of the oligarchy.

The Significance of Dr. King Today

We’re going to go right now to Lyn, and let Lyn speak directly to you, as Presidents speak. He spoke in January of 2004, at the very point that something would come slouching toward Bethlehem out of Chicago, called Barack Obama. Speaking in Talladega, Alabama, on the occasion of the Martin Luther King celebration, here’s what he had to say:

Lyndon LaRouche: We’re in trouble. . . . Look at the world. The world faces a great crisis. And he United States faces a great crisis, in dealing with the world. The largest concentrations of population of the world are in China, for example, at one point, 1.3 billion or more; India over 1 billion; then you have Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the countries of Southeast Asia: This is the greatest concentration of population on this planet. It’s an emerging part of the world. The question is, what’s the relationship of the United States to these people of Asia, who represent, by and large, different cultural backgrounds, than those of us in the United States or in Western Europe?

How are we going to find peace in a troubled world? How are we going to find reconciliation in a troubled world, with countries which have turned against us, because of the war policies of [Vice President Dick] Cheney and some others?

So, we face the situation.

Now, go back a little bit, to the time that Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President. Now, think about something some of you know about: Think about the status of the Black Caucus, Legislative Caucus, or Black Congressional Caucus, in 1993, when Bill Clinton came into the White House. Now—go through the list of names: Where are those people, and their replacements today? There has been a winnowing out of the political achievements, throughout the country, of the black caucuses.

This is the problem I deal with constantly, actually from 1996 on. It became worse, accelerated, brutally.

So, we do not face a new problem today, in one sense. We face the same problem, in principle, that Martin faced, and faced successfully. And I would propose, that in the lesson of Martin Luther King, and his life, there is something we can learn today, which brings him back to life, as if he were standing here, alive, today. There’s something special about his life, his development, which should be captured today, by us, not only in addressing the problems of our nation, which are becoming terrible; but the problems of our relationship with the world as a whole. How are we going to deal with these cultures that are different than our own? With an Asian culture; with the Muslim cultures around the world—over a billion Muslims around the world; with the culture of China, which is different than ours; the culture of Southeast Asia, which is different than ours; the culture of Myanmar?

They’re all human. They all have the same ultimate requirements, the same needs. But, they’re different cultures. They think differently. They respond to different predicates than we respond to. But, we must have peaceful cooperation with these people, to solve world problems.

Then you start thinking about someone like Martin. And I want to indicate, in the context I just stated, what the significance of Martin is, today. . . .”

Speed: That’s how a President speaks to citizens of the United States, and that’s what Lyn was doing in 2004, during his last campaign. Because Lyn understood Martin Luther King as part of the American Presidential system, just as Lyndon LaRouche has been for many decades now.

“What, Really, Are the Labor Committees?” is a document that Lyndon LaRouche wrote in 1977. I’m going to quote from it. It will surprise some of you, but that of course is kind of the point of today.

At the beginning of that particular section of this document, he wrote:

“The Labor Committees”—which was the original organization of young people that joined Lyndon LaRouche—“are a cadre association of political and physical scientists, modeled significantly in fact, upon the networks of Freemasons associated with Benjamin Franklin, during the last half of the 18th century, an association with the same fundamental world-outlook and objectives as Benjamin Franklin and his associates.”

Later in that same document we find: “Not only was Benjamin Franklin widely acclaimed as the father of electricity, he was generally regarded by humanists as the organizer of human society, as the German intellect Johann Gottfried Herder wrote of him during that time.”

“In a meaningful sense . . . Ludwig van Beethoven can be considered the leading American composer. During Beethoven’s youth in Bonn, Franklin’s influence was notable in the university at Bonn, which was a hotbed of German republican humanism. Franklin’s autobiography was a major intellectual influence among German humanist circles. During the last years of his life, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was under the influence of Franklin’s ideas, apart from his composing one, rather known, minor composition for the musical instrument, the glass harmonica, which amateur composer Benjamin Franklin had invented.

“More directly on Beethoven, there is conclusive evidence that the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is dedicated, in fact, to Benjamin Franklin.”

So, that’s Lyndon LaRouche. And that’s why many of us have associated with Lyndon LaRouche for as long as we have been, proud to be associated. Shocking, new ideas about creativity, changing the view that people have of how they think things are.

The Long Arc of History

In 1978, Lyn wrote for the Campaigner magazine, “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites,” in which he documented that the real war in Western civilization for a 2,500-year period, was between Plato, seen on the left, and Aristotle, on the right, between the concept of humanism based on the idea of scientific and artistic creativity as the birthright of every individual, and the opposing idea that people are to be subjugated, that there are different species, there are different “races,” and that some are superior to others.

Lyn described what he called the “machine-tool principle.” This was part of his revolution in economics, to give the idea of how you move from a conception—how creativity becomes productivity. And this idea, that you take the current level of development of human reason, and by creating a discovery of a valid hypothesis, and by applying that through experiment, repeatable experiment, to the human mind as a whole, humanity is uplifted by generating new conceptions never before existent in the universe; and that that is the basis of productivity, and that is the basis of economic progress.

This form of machine-tool principle, when used properly by a society, develops levels of human productivity and capability which are expressed in what Lyn has called “potential relative population density increase.” That is, not merely the number of people increases, but the number of people at a higher standard of living increases, in greater concentrations, per square unit area.

The world is therefore not only not overpopulated, the world needs more people. If, for example, if the United States had 3 or 4 billion people, it still wouldn’t be overpopulated. China has 1.5 billion people and is not overpopulated. But that idea, about which of course we heard Barack Obama say something to the Africans, is exactly the opposite of the current, popular idea of the entirety, nearly, of American culture today. Go out on the street, and you ask people, particularly as they watch the homeless and so on, that are right outside this hotel, whether they think the United States needs more people, and you know the visceral response you’ll get.

That is the product of British ideology and of the domination of the American mind by Aristotelian thinking. So, now instead of that application of the machine-tool principle as exemplified by the control panel of the Space Shuttle, we have its strange modern incarnation seen driven on the streets of New York by an aging baby boomer.

The space shuttle control panel exemplifies LaRouche’s application of machine tools. This modern incarnation is something a lot of the younger people know all about. That photo is the final, ignominious conclusion of the baby-boomer generation. [laughter] I took that picture about two days ago, sitting in my car, being assaulted by a lot of noise outside, and I turned around and somebody was playing AC/DC or a similar cacophony.

In order to relieve you all of that unseemly sight, we’re going back to Lyn. Let’s go to Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin. Lyn’s ability to use his conception of creativity to forecast, is the primary thing that distinguishes him from every other economist alive. And we’re going to give you an excerpt from that 1988 speech at the Kempinski in Germany.

Lyndon LaRouche: Many today will agree, that the time has come for early steps toward the reunification of Germany, with the obvious prospect that Berlin might resume its role as the nation’s capital.

For the United States, as for Germans, and for Europe generally, the question is, will this reunification process be brought about by assimilating the Federal Republic into the East bloc’s economy, or economic range of influence, or can it be accomplished in a different way? In other words, is a united Germany to come into being as a part of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, as President de Gaulle proposed, or, as Mr. Gorbachov has desired, a Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic?

Speed: That press conference took place on Columbus Day, 1988. The Berlin Wall was up. There was a Soviet Union. All those things existed. But Lyndon LaRouche gave a speech that was later made into a nationally televised broadcast, as part of his Presidential campaign—we placed that speech on nationwide U.S. television. In it he forecast the unification of Germany, a year before the Berlin Wall fell, and two years before that reunification occurred. How did he do it?

The document, “We Must Build a Bridge from Hell to Purgatory, as a 650-Year Historical Cycle Ends,” is a transcript of the keynote speech delivered by Lyn at a Schiller Institute conference in 1994. At a different times, we have talked about Lyn’s conception of economics, and Lyn’s approach to it. At different times, we have talked about what made him a unique figure. But it was the looking at history in arcs, large-scale cycles, that allowed him to actually see, not merely, “predict the future.” For Lyn, the idea that the future determines the present, is this conception of history. Earlier today, Helga referenced his book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years. That book is right now unfolding: It’s the template of what is unfolding in our time. It also is the guide for our organization now, as to what it is we intend to see happen, as we cause the Presidency today to realize what Lyn was trying to do, in his several Presidential runs, and in particular in his Presidential runs of the period from 1988 until 2004.

Forecasting as a Creative Act

In 1975, the first kernel of what today is called the World Land-Bridge was proposed by Lyn after a return from Iraq. In April 1975, he proposed what he called the International Development Bank. The pamphlet, “How the International Development Bank Will Work,” priced at $1, was gotten out in hundreds of thousands of copies by our organizers, directly to the American people. That meant going to plant gates, to unemployment centers, to street intersections and to airports, and organizing the American people around the seed-crystal of what you now see that has evolved in Asia.

LaRouche’s 1990 Oasis Plan, the plan for Southwest Asia (also called the Middle East), was a proposal that he was working on at the same time as his International Development Bank proposal. It’s not well known by a lot of people. We issued a pamphlet titled, “Secure World Peace with Economic Development: Implement LaRouche’s Oasis and Productive Triangle Programs.” The idea of the Productive Triangle, which then became the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and then became the New Silk Road, and later the World Land-Bridge—that idea was evolved by Lyn, while in jail: He went to jail because of his successful organizing of the American Presidency in 1983.

And so, sitting in jail, and hearing the news about the Berlin Wall falling, his response was to formulate this conception, called the Productive Triangle, and to have us, as an organization, with Helga Zepp-LaRouche leading that organizing—go out and organize on a plan that he literally created out of his head, in a jail cell!

We have in our presence, as an economist, like it or not, a genius, whose ability to forecast was based on a creative method, a conception that he has demanded that an organization of his associates replicate.

He has not been an armchair intellectual, as I think people know. Lyn is highly combative. And we’d like to now show you something that some of you will know, but for those of you who don’t, the following is from a webcast from July 25, 2007—before the famous collapse of markets and so forth and the housing bubble.

Lyndon LaRouche: There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none! It’s finished, now! The present financial system can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on, and it will be unstoppable! And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get.

Speed: Now, that was not news that Lyn had not tried to deliver, and warned people about, much earlier.

In 1995, his famous Triple Curve (Typical Collapse Function) had described this process in geometric terms, in which the idea was that as less and less investment is made into the physical well-being of the economy, combined with an out-of-control Casino Mondial—developing with derivatives and so on—a point of inflection will be reached. You see there at the top of the chart, the the curves for the financial aggregates and the monetary aggregates have crossed. It is at that point that a condition of physical economic breakdown in our economy is created. So that when Lyn delivered his 2007 forecast, this was something that had already been preceded by twelve years of warning people about what was going to occur.

It’s also relevant that the year after his Triple Curve first appeared in 1995, Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke at a conference in China, in June of 1996, on the New Silk Road. We did not simply, Cassandra-like, predict disaster. We moved to create something different—creativity instead of tragedy, and that’s been basically the idea throughout.

In 1997, Executive Intelligence Review published a special report, “The True Story Behind the Fall of the House of Windsor.” It may have seemed like a long time coming, but what we reported then is exactly what you’re living through now. That report (augmented by the recent reports that we’ve been releasing), tells the story of what is about to occur to the British Empire. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t occur back when we wrote it: It simply is the case that with much of what Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute do, using Lyndon LaRouche’s method, is to present things that often become manifest later, though conceived earlier, because actually, that’s the real impulse of history. When you’re thinking about the future, when you’re trying to actually conceptualize where mankind is to go, you seem to be speaking before events. But the truth of the matter is that most people, having been inundated with British ideology, don’t see the present.

For example, today’s present is what you see in China; but actually, today’s present more importantly is what you read, if you read Lyn’s Earth’s Next Fifty Years. That is to say, that the colonization of the Moon, the mining of helium-3 on the Moon, the development of the African continent—so that what we have in Africa is perhaps millions of people who are possessed of the kind of genius of a Mozart, of a Beethoven. That is the reality of the present.

Lyn’s fight to establish, or re-establish I should say, the American Presidency in that image, has been the dominant characteristic of his economics and of his fight in the United States.

What Each of Us Can Do

Here is another excerpt from LaRouche’s Talladega speech:

Lyndon LaRouche: It wasn’t just that he [Martin Luther King] was a man of God: It’s that he rose to the fuller appreciation of what that meant. Obviously, the image for him was Christ, and the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. That was his source of strength. He lived that. He had gone to the mountaintop, at a point that he knew his life was threatened by powerful forces in the United States. And he said, “I will not shrink from this mission, even if they kill me.” Just as Christ said, and I’m sure that was in Martin’s mind, at that point. The Passion and Crucifixion of Christ is the image which is the essence of Christianity. It’s an image, for example, in Germany, or elsewhere, where the Bach St. Matthew Passion is performed. It’s a two-hour performance, approximately. In those two hours, the audience, the congregation, the singers, the musicians, re-live, in a powerful way, the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ. And this has always been important: To re-live that. To capture the essence of what Christ means, for all Christians. And Martin showed that.

The difference is this—and I’ll come back to Jeanne d’Arc (or Joan of Arc, in English). The difference is, most people tend to believe, “Yes, I wish to go to Heaven,” or something like that. Or, don’t. Don’t care. But, they are looking for answers within the bounds of their mortal life. They’re thinking of the satisfactions of the flesh. The security they will enjoy, between the bounds of birth and death. Whereas, the great leader, like Martin, rises to a higher level. They think of their life, as the Gospel presents it, as a “talent.” That is, life is a talent, given to you: You’re born, and you die. That is your talent, what you have in that period. The question is, you’re going to spend it anyway. How are you going to spend it? What are you going to spend it to secure for all eternity? What are you going to do, as a mission, that will earn you the place you want to occupy in eternity?

Martin had a clear sense of that. That mountaintop address, for me, struck me years ago—clear: It was just a clear understanding of exactly what he was saying; what he was saying to others. Life is a talent: It is not what you get out of life; it’s what you put into it that counts.

Speed: There’s a famous passage from King that people know, and we’re only going to refer to it here. The passage is:

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!

“And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

That is Lyndon LaRouche’s economics, stated by Lyndon LaRouche in his way, as King expressed that principle in his way.

What’s important is that, as we, this week, consider the tragedy of 1968, we consider that tragedy only as embedded within the creativity that takes us from 2018 to 2068—the next fifty years. To see it, in other words as an inflection point in that 2,500-year battle between the Platonists and the Aristotelians, and to recognize that, in our time, and in our presence, has dwelt an individual, who has personified for all of us, what each of us can do, if we make ourselves an instrument of history, that can in fact create a new cultural paradigm and shift the world upward, from Hell to Purgatory, even, perhaps, Paradise. [applause]