You’re Human!
Do You Know What That Means?

by Robert Ingraham

[Print version of this article]

PART I OF A SERIES

There is a great deal of confusion about what it means to be a human being. The human identity is one of magnificence, beauty and great creative power. At this historical juncture, it is necessary to reassert what mankind is capable of accomplishing.

* * *

June 25—Today, the human species, of which you and I and all of us are members, is presented with perhaps the greatest turning point in human history. A moment of great change—change which will affect the lives of each one of us—stands before us. Greater than you would dare imagine. This is not an exaggeration. It is right in front of us.

As this is being written, nations and peoples from every corner of the world are coming together around the vision of a New Paradigm for peace, cooperation and economic development. This already involves more than one-half of the human race. The conditions of life for hundreds of millions of people are being uplifted. Water projects, energy projects, transportation projects, schools, hospitals and other modern facilities are being built all over the world. Despair is being replaced by hope, and people’s lives are being changed for the better.

The driving force behind this dynamic is the China-created Belt and Road Initiative. Please, don’t be stupid enough to fall for the line that “China is trying to take over the world.” China is doing precisely what America used to do; it is building great projects. The many, many sovereign nations that have joined with China in these efforts, have done so as partners, not underlings, and these construction projects have created millions of jobs and great opportunities. We, in the United States—as well as the people of Europe—could join this effort. We could begin building too. The door is wide open.

Yet, most Americans take little or no notice of any of this. It is as if it didn’t exist. Almost no one talks about it.

Some might blame this failure to recognize what is right in front of us on the lying news media, others on the dismal state of public education. Others, still, might once again resurrect the overused outrage about “corrupt politicians in Washington.” None of this is particularly useful, or even true. The problem is not that “someone out there” is “keeping us in the dark” about these great developments. No one is forcing ignorance and apathy upon us. We are doing it to ourselves.

You see, we have a problem. We now have a world situation which is the most hopeful, and with the greatest potential for human advancement, than at any time since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, now 55 years ago. This is actually the greatest moment of your entire lifetime. What transpires in the weeks ahead will affect the future for all of us. It will affect your future, and the future of your children. Yet, the majority of our people do not recognize the existence of this stupendous opportunity.

The Invisible Enemy

The problem we are dealing with, the enemy we face, is not in Washington, or London, or Beijing, or Moscow, or in the news media. It is not “out there.” It is, as Shakespeare insisted, in ourselves. We have a great enemy, but it is not one that most people recognize. The enemy is our culture. Not someone else’s culture: our culture!—that which defines how we think, what we believe, and what we attach our emotions to. Culture is not something “external” to who we are. From the moment we are born, to our last day on earth, we breathe in the spores of this culture. It shapes everything about us; and even if you rebel, and begin to denounce the flagrant degeneracy of what flows from Hollywood or San Francisco,
the cultural octopus defines what you think can be done about it. We are all part of the culture, and the axioms of the culture determine how we think about what is possible.

America was once a nation that “built things.” Our heroes were people like the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison. Europe, as well, can point to a heritage of great minds and leaders. Where is all of this today to be found? Where is the impulse to create that which is new, that which is revolutionary, that which will benefit mankind? In our current culture—and in the views of your friends, relatives and co-workers—how much value is placed on the development of creativity? How much time and effort is spent—in child-rearing or even just friendship—in creative investigation?

The culture of today’s trans-Atlantic society is almost devoid of any comprehension of what it actually means to be a human being. The self-identity of people—their own sense of what their life could be or how their actions might affect the future—has shrunk. The creative spark which carried the human race forward for thousands of years, from Plato, through the Renaissance, and into the space age, is today almost non-existent in the trans-Atlantic world. This is not an exaggeration. It defines the crisis in Western society.

What has been destroyed is any notion of what it actually means to be a human being. This is particularly true for those born after the murders of Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy. The joy of discovery, optimism for a better future, the excitement which once pulsed through the minds and hearts of Americans as Neil Armstrong headed for moon—all of this has been largely lost, and human passion is now directed toward the most banal, the most cynical, and the most self-destructive.

Do you think what is being said here is an exaggeration, or irrelevant? Look at what people do today for “entertainment.” Look at the TV shows; look at the movies, look at the video games. It is all the excrement of a society with a death wish. If you have stomach enough, consider that the top most-visited sites on the Internet are all pornography sites. Protest all you want, but this is now who we are as a people. The poison of pleasure-seeking existentialism in America and Europe is omnipresent, swirling about us, engulfing us, and asserting everywhere that individual human existence is meaningless. Pessimism reigns. Human beings who are enslaved by such self-imposed cultural and mental chains, can not act for the future, because they lack any truthful basis for hope.

Certainly, there is goodness in every human being, and thousands of acts of goodness take place every day. We are human, and despite what the culture demands, it is in the nature of all humans to be good. But as the culture decays, the goodness grows weaker and is dragged downward, as if by a quicksand which no one can see or explain.

Will You Be a Victim?

This total destruction of American and European culture didn’t just “happen.” It didn’t just “evolve naturally.” And it is no accident. Since no later than 1914, the magnificent cultural heritage of Europe and the United States has been under siege. The culture with which the people of America and Europe are now victimized, is the end-product of more than a century of deliberate moral and intellectual debasement.

People used to believe in human progress, in the beneficence of human civilization. In truth, this is the underlying intention of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. Two 20th century world wars, followed by more than 40 years of a “cold war” which threatened human extinction through thermo-nuclear annihilation, destroyed most of that optimism.

The British Empire—the empire which most people refuse to believe still exists—created and then took advantage of these catastrophes. For more than a century, through certain mouthpieces such as Bertrand Russell,—and many others—the British elites have hammered at the Platonic-Renaissance conception of the human identity, determined to obliterate it. Human progress is the enemy of empire, of rule by the few, and if you destroy hope for the future you can more easily keep people in chains, much as tens of millions of Americans today are kept in debt slavery—and other forms of slavery.

Unlike many well-intentioned but impotent American patriots, the British aristocracy has always understood that the greatest weapon in their arsenal is cultural warfare. They did it in India. They did it in Africa. This is what the universities of Oxford and Cambridge exist for—to devise cultural, philosophical and religious means to control people all over the world. This is why the birthplace for the non-science of “anthropology” was at these two universities: to develop ways of defining a false sense of the human identity and to spread these lies to universities in dozens of other nations.

The belief in science, in progress, in human creativity was to be eradicated. This has been going on for decades, as deliberate oligarchic policy.

The end product is what we see today. American and European societies are now under the diktat of a cultural regime that demands a morally-indifferent hedonistic human identity, a bestial identity, one grounded in sensual appetites—one which has no commitment to a more productive future. This is now proclaimed by nearly everyone as axiomatic human nature. It is everywhere, battering people with the non-stop drum-beat that you are just an animal.

It is the cultural mass-lobotomy of our people, as if the higher notions of human purpose and destiny were cut out and left lying in a bloody tray in the operating room.

The damage that has been done is gruesome to behold. Take the case of young women in our present-day trans-Atlantic society. It would challenge William Shakespeare to compose such a tragedy. Today, young women are victimized, almost from birth, with a pornographic self-image. Once we had women of great personal courage, such as a Fanny Mendelssohn, a Marie Curie, or a Rosa Luxemburg—individuals who fought tenaciously for a creative universal identity. Where is that commitment to the future today? Where is the courage to locate one’s identity in the creative development of one’s own mind? Today’s culture is all about the body, all about the flesh. The effect this has had on high school and college age young women has been devastating.

Additionally, with the recent cult of polymorphous “gender identity,” young women—as well as young men—are told that the primary choice confronting them is, “What sex do I want to be today?”—gay, straight, bi-sexual, trans-sexual, trans-gender, non-binary gender specific, trans-whatever. This is now how people self-define who they are—through sex. In earlier times, people could joke about this; but now it is the inescapable cultural paradigm in Europe and America.

Accompanying this downward plunge has been the staggering leap in the deliberate drugging of our people, to the point today that perhaps as much as a third of our population is under the influence of drugs. The picture presented by Sam Quinones in his Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, is not only terrifying, it is all true. And it is only the tip of the iceberg for a population saturated in the regular use of heroin, Oxycontin, cocaine, methamphetamines, hallucinogens, marijuana, Adderall, Prozac, Xanax, Ecstasy, Ritalin, and other legal and illegal mind-altering substances.

The Future

This is all coming to an end. We are in the terminal phase of the system of oligarchic empire. The major financial institutions in London and on Wall Street are all de facto bankrupt, and the empire is now thrashing about and lashing out—an imperial system that can not possibly survive. The growing world-wide consensus in support of a New Paradigm for peace and development heralds an entirely new future for the family of Man, one in which individual human contributions—and life—will have a purpose.

As a people, we are now presented with a moment of great opportunity. A magnificent future beckons. Yet, the culture holds us in chains. What is required is a new spirit to animate our people—to animate ourselves. The necessary catalyst for such a transformation lies in the ability for growing numbers among us to begin to rediscover the joy, the power, and the potential of what it means to be a human being—to come to grips with a rigorous understanding of the magnificent nature of our species and the limitless potentials which lie within each of us.

Let’s start at the beginning. . .

I. A Unique Species

Far more than 99 percent of all plant and animal species that have existed since life first appeared on Earth are now extinct. This includes not only microbial life from billions of years ago,[fn_1] but mammals, birds, amphibians and marine life which appeared over the recent millions of years. Given the historical record of the evolution of our planet, it is accurate to say that all living species are foreordained to suffer extinction. All, except one. Only the human species has the potential to overcome the fate of other creatures—to continue as an ongoing living factor in the development of the universe.

It is worth thinking for a moment about the truthfulness—and the implications—of the above paragraph. Today, students are routinely taught that a human being is merely an animal, perhaps a “clever” animal, but one nevertheless bound by the restrictions which govern all biological life. Probably, most people believe some version of this, but it is utter bilge, and accepting such nonsense is the first step toward a denial of what your real potential is as a human being.

Humanity’s brief, yet shocking, record speaks for itself. Since the first appearance of human culture two million years ago, all human beings have exhibited a quality of Mind that absolutely separates the nature of the human species from all other living creatures. Lies to the contrary, there can be no factual dispute to this reality. Humans are not animals.

The species-mortality which distinguishes all other creatures from mankind is to be found in their subservience to nature, i.e., they exist biologically and hereditarily within nature, entirely dependent on the conditions of life which exist at that moment in time. As the planet, solar system and galaxy change—sometimes in abrupt and cataclysmic fashion—these creatures possess no means to surmount those existential crises. Thus, “extinction events” have occurred again and again throughout the long history of our planet. The birth and passing of individual species are inseparable from changes wrought by galactic, solar, and terrestrial processes.

Whose Human is Human?

Extinction is not mankind’s destiny! The human species need not suffer the fate of other living creatures. To arrive at the reasons why this is true, however, will require some concentration and mental work.

Unlike lower-ordered species, Man does not exist within nature. We are not controlled by nature or dependent upon nature. In fact, the long history of the human species is one which conclusively exhibits the human ability to take mastery over nature, to develop and transform nature, or what Vladimir Vernadsky calls the biosphere.[fn_2] Mankind possesses a power over nature which all other living creatures lack. At the same time, and with even more shocking implications, it is legitimate to say that mankind does not exist even within the universe, as if some heteronomic biological creature, buffeted about by “dead” inorganic galactic forces.

This may seem like a ludicrous statement to some, but consider that the relationship between the creative nature of the human mind and the processes which underlie the universe have been a subject that has been at the heart of human investigation for millennia. It was Plato who first explored this relationship in his discussions of the One and the Many. The same subject was attacked again by Nicholas of Cusa in his investigation of the Minimum and the Maximum. Later, Gottfried Leibniz took up the same challenge in his work on the Monad.

What Plato, Cusa and others investigated, and what they established, is that we do not live in a chaotic universe, but rather one governed by principles, and that these principles are lawful. Our universe is one that has progressed in a manner coherent with universal principles of harmonic, self-developing creation. It is not a dead Newtonian universe.

What is truly shocking is that the ongoing creation of such universal processes—the self-evolving nature of the universe itself—resembles nothing so much as a motivic thoroughly-composed, well-tempered polyphonic classical composition. The work of Johannes Kepler and Johann Sebastian Bach is absolutely definitive in this regard, and there can be no legitimate argument with what they discovered.

What is even more shocking—earth-shaking—is that the ability of the individual human mind to compose agapic well-tempered polyphony is the “proof of principle,” for it demonstrates conclusively that the creative discoveries of the human mind are in harmony with the nature of the universe itself!—and that in the case of the human species, this is both willful (full of will) and conscious. This is true physics, as defined by Lyndon LaRouche in his seminal essay, “Poetry Must Begin to Supersede Mathematics in Physics.”

This is where the secret to the human personality is to be found. It is in investigating the harmonic and unfolding relationship between the individual human mind and self-organizing universal change that one must seek the truth about the actual human identity. The human mind is not in the universe; it is inseparable from a universal process of ongoing creating.

As Tony Papert wrote in a recent Preface published in EIR: “There is no abiotic universe of physics—there is only the one existing universe. In it, the principle of life and the principle of creative mentation are everywhere active, and Max Planck truly said that you cannot get behind or beyond consciousness, even in the smallest particle—if such particle were possible. This is the hylozoic monism of Plato and his successors.”

Aeschylus put it this way, in words he assigned to Prometheus:

But of wretched mortals he [Zeus] took no notice, desiring to bring the whole race to an end and create a new one in its place.

Against this purpose none dared make stand except me—I only had the courage; I saved mortals so that they did not descend, blasted utterly, to the house of Hades.

As we move through this discussion, there will be much detail and many dates, names and physical examples given. The purpose of putting this section of the paper at the beginning is to situate everything that follows. Don’t get lost in subsequent details; keep what is important foremost in your mind.

To be continued.

---