Fruitful Dialogue

We present here edited excerpts from the discussion periods following the two panels of the August 14, 2021 LaRouche Legacy Foundation seminar, “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971: So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Economics?” These excerpts are not complete, nor in order, but are arranged according to the topics of discussion. We begin with comments on the character, ideas, and method of Lyndon LaRouche by the panelists, and then present some of the questions posed by the audience and excerpt some of the most interesting answers.

On Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: First of all, I want to greet all of you, all good friends. I appreciate all the more what you are doing, in discussing the ideas of Lyn, because it is really very, very difficult—because I was just thinking, he passed away two years ago, and he was 96, so he would be 98 years old now and 99 in a few weeks, and a lot of people who appreciated the extraordinary work of this man, were of his generation, or even older, and naturally, most of them are no longer with us. So, I think it is very, very important that we join here, together, and you bring your different angles and levels of understanding, on the significance of this, so that we can hopefully relaunch a Renaissance of LaRouche thinking.

Kirk Meighoo: I really found the presentations to be excellent, and the very nature of the global reach of this conference is so important to the theme I was discussing and Lyndon LaRouche’s work, in terms of global solidarity: That is, for a truly global movement, something with truly global effect. Lyndon LaRouche was fighting for that and to produce that he went out and made international alliances, and it is so important that this continue.

And then for people like us, let’s say, for people in the Caribbean, in Trinidad and Tobago, from small societies, we are very concerned about the development of the world, but we obviously have a special concern about our own development. It is very heartening and encouraging to know we have allies around the world. Even in our own countries, however, people have given up the struggle, and have simply fallen in line with the dominant morals. And so, these prescriptions, these conferences, this movement, some of the excellent, excellent suggestions I heard today which were very stimulating and encouraging to me, this type of global solidarity is so important, for a small country like ourselves to know that we have allies in the larger countries around the world.

The LaRouche program, with the Four Laws, etc. being put on the international stage, requires this solidarity, which is reciprocal.

Jozef Mikloško: Helga today spoke about informatics, about cybernetics, about Norbert Wiener. It is really near to me, because I was 27 years in our highest Institute of Technical Cybernetics. It was in the communist time; it was the only possibility to do something reasonable in science for a mathematician. Therefore, I am able to understand, maybe better than others, also in America and Germany, that Lyn was really very well prepared in mathematics. I was always surprised when I saw that many algorithms, many theorems, many topics in mathematics, not only numerical analysis, informatics, complexity, and some other topics; but there are hundreds of topics in mathematics, and Lyn was really very well informed about many topics in mathematics.

Yekaterina Fyodorovna Shamayeva: Pobisk Kuznetsov proposed the complex unit of measurement—La [for LaRouche]. Today we have not simply, not only, a unit of measurement, but also a model, or parameter, which we call “quality of human life,” measured in units of power per capita. It is a great advantage, that we have the powerful scientific base of Pobisk Kuznetsov-LaRouche. Having listened today to these interesting reports, I would like to say that the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche can be called “cosmospheric,” in the spirit of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, who—I would like to remind you—wrote in 1941: “What we are experiencing is not a crisis that distresses the faint-hearted, but an extraordinarily great turning point in human thought. And, being at this turning point, we should be happy, that we are able to develop science.”

I believe that today one of our most important tasks is to unite our efforts to develop the fundamental-science base and to introduce these scientific ideas into practice. In reality, the effectiveness of any policy depends on the answer to the question: what are we measuring and how, in order to make our life, human life, better? And our joint work contains the answer to this question.

Optimism

Jacques Cheminade: I’m very happy to see, through a process of discussion, that we had the first LaRouche youth movement in the 1960s, with Paul Gallagher being an example of it. Then, a second LaRouche youth movement in the years 2000s [with Megan Dobrodt an example]. And now in the 2020s, we have a third LaRouche youth movement. All these LaRouche movements create an accumulation of power, and this accumulation of power has to be better and better. So, you have the sense through the discussion of improvement. This improvement is so necessary in this historical moment, which is the moment of danger of the pandemic, danger of war, danger of lack of conditions for a true human life. So, in this situation, where you have a tremendous danger, you have at the same time the best opportunity to foster the change. I’m very glad to see that people are in their best shape to accomplish that change.

What Gretchen Small said [in her presentation] on the need to spread the ideas of LaRouche is extremely important in this coming period, if these ideas are [to be] experimented with socially, and in a political and an economic way in this society. I think that we have a tremendous opportunity in that sense. If I would deduce or induce from the situation now, I would be very pessimistic. If I see that, as LaRouche saw things, and as these young people who spoke see things, I would be very optimistic. I am very optimistic, because it’s a reasonable hope and it is something that goes beyond normal political activity to recover civilization. I think this sense is what people expect at this very moment of history.

Harley Schlanger: Reflecting on what Jacques just said, one of the points Lyn always made in discussions when I was young, when I first met him, was that there’s no such thing as current events. You have to see your life as being a part of history, part of an arc of history. And from listening to the presentations of both panels today, having lived through many of the events that were discussed, it made it really clear to me how privileged we are through Lyndon LaRouche to understand these, not as single events, as particular instances, but as part of a coherent whole of the advancement of human civilization. Or, if we don’t succeed, the destruction of that civilization.

Optimism is at the heart of this. If you see yourself as living a life that will lead to a better future, and you dedicate yourself to that, and that dedication now means you have access to the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche’s life, you can make those ideas real in your own mind. We saw that with the young people, the work that Phil Rubinstein and Leni Rubinstein and I did in the 2000s with Lyndon LaRouche to build the second LaRouche youth movement; that was the message we tried to bring. It’s a message that is as real today, and as important today, as it ever was.

So, I find this conference quite invigorating and generating a renewed optimism. Of course, I’m always an optimistic guy, but I think this is something that just is quite profound, and I hope people got the full sense from this whole conference of the moment of opportunity that we have in front of us.

Roberto Fritzsche: I’d like to express my joy for this meeting. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for participating in this excellent discussion with all of my colleagues present today. We’re also expressing the great optimism that Lyndon LaRouche also expressed with regard to the future of humanity. And with regard to us, the need to construct a new economic model, a New Paradigm based on the principles which Lyndon has developed.

I express optimism based on the need to spread the new knowledge that has been presented to us, and spread it further, and to start to expand that knowledge based on beginning to leave that old paradigm and to do so in the way that Plato himself has expressed it in his parable of “the Cave.” Where the crucial question is whether we want to find ourselves inside the cave, or outside that cave. I believe that the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche are the path to build that future for all of humanity.

Moral Strength from Great Ideas

Carolina Domínguez: I think the first challenge is to study and understand LaRouche’s discoveries. And I would like to clarify that the issue of LaRouche and the reason that we’re studying him, is not an academic matter. It’s because we’ve all discovered—those of us who are in the movement and some friends as well—that if you take up one of the ideas that LaRouche mentions—whether that be Kepler, or Leibniz, or Beethoven—and develop out the ideas that LaRouche mentions in any one of his articles, it can take you months or even years, depending on how far you’ve advanced.

But when you do understand that idea, that gives you strength, that gives you courage to defend. When you go to the office of a congressman to talk to him about physical economy, and since he is “politically correct,” he is not going to run you out of his office. But what he’ll tell you is, “Oh, I’ll read that later.” And you have to have the strength to tell him, “No, we’re going to talk about this now.” Where does that strength come from? Why do you have that strength? Because it’s something that you developed; it’s something you discovered as well. And that is what we take to all areas of society, to know that what you’re proposing—what LaRouche said—why that is correct. And this allows other people to see within themselves that same strength as well. And that will make them want to study LaRouche to be able to feel for themselves that same strength, that same courage, to be willing to defend their own people.

This is what we try to inculcate in the new youth that are participating in our activities. It’s not a matter of them being more intelligent. What’s at issue is that they be more moral and carry these ideas out into practice; and in that way inspire others to do the same thing. That’s how I see it.

José Vega: I guess a lot of what I see around me is also defined by where I’m from, the South Bronx. I’ve lived here for quite a while, and it’s hard for people to become aware of the world around them. They’ll say, “Well, I got my own problems. I got three kids I’m raising on my own, and I’m a single mom.” Or “My roof just fell into my apartment”; or just, “The subway’s late every day, and I’m just tired and stressed that 80% of my income goes to my rent.” I can see that.

But in the youth, it’s even worse, because they’re kind of blind to those excuses. Their parents make sacrifices for them, so that they don’t have to, and yet, they get caught up in things like the culture today, where they watch movies and videogames, and they engross themselves in the lore of “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings,” rather than wanting to discuss great ideas.

And one of my favorite things to do is to basically put my friendships on the line and just challenge people and say, “Hey, how about we put aside your personal problems for a moment—which aren’t really problems—and we talk about the world, for a moment? And we talk about the fact that there are people who are in a much worse situation than you’re in?” At first, they fight me on that, and they confront me on that, and say, “Why do I care about another country around the world, when we can’t even fix our own issues here?”

A lot of it is the suicidal culture we’re in, where you have a rate of young people today killing themselves, because they see no purpose in themselves, or they’re told that they’re a plague on this Earth. And one of the ways that I fix it, is to just go at that axiom. So, when I do challenge them, it actually seems kind of ridiculous, their problems.

Here’s an example to try and clarify what I’m trying to say: I have many friends who are surrounded in the drug culture, and when we go into why it is that they are actually involved in what they do, why they’d rather smoke pot every day, and play videogames all day, rather than confront the world, well, we get to the real issue. It’s not that they don’t see themselves as great people or anything, it’s that they don’t think that they can do anything about it, because of the culture and the world that they’re surrounded in. And when we made that discovery, we had an hour-long discussion as to what exactly can we do? Because we’re not politicians, we have no power, and so on and so forth—or so they think.

So just to wrap up what I’m trying to say, the culture has given people an excuse to say, “I have no power, and the only thing I am is an animal and a pollutant, so I might as well enjoy the time that I’m here on this Earth, rather than actually fix the problems.”

Schlanger: José is absolutely on target in his comments. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the other day, asked this question in the webcast we did: How did the world get into such horrible shape? And I think if you look at all the work that Lyn did, so much of it is centered around the attack on Classical culture, the deliberate attempt to destroy the idea that’s at the center of Classical culture, the creative potential of man, the development of true empathy for your fellow citizen

And if you attack that, and you take that away, and you reduce people to being creatures of senses, the Hobbesian view that we’re in a Darwinian struggle, we’re in a jungle, it’s a fight of each against all—once you take away the potential to engage in beauty through great poetry, great drama, the tragic dramas of Shakespeare and Schiller, for example, so that you’re left with soap operas and rap and drug culture and country and western, you know, typified by such songs as “If You Want To Keep the Beer Real Cold, Put It Next To My Ex-Wife’s Heart,”—when people are in that kind of cultural environment, it becomes almost impossible to look at the prospect for what it would mean to create 1.5 billion jobs, building a global transport system.

So, I think one of the great contributions of Lyn is to make the connection between culture, science, and economics. And I think that’s something that, I hope, 100, 200, 300 years from now, people will look back at the work of Lyndon LaRouche, and see that his work on that enabled us to escape the horrible culture that was created, deliberately, by an oligarchy out to destroy man.

Academia

Domínguez: I want to say something about what José was just talking about. When we were in the universities, recently, organizing around the times of the pandemic, we of course met a number of economics students, and one of the young women among the students that we met, told us that her political economy professor came into the classroom and told her that more than 50% of the population in the world are poor. And she was crying—I though she was overdoing it a bit—but she said the reason she was crying was that her professor told her that the purpose and goal of that university, which is one of the best universities in my country, that the objective for the economics students is to be in that 50% of people who are rich.

She had thought that the idea was that they were going to teach her how to lift the other 50% out of poverty! But that was not the idea. I mention this because many of the professors at the universities are bread-paid scholars. The only thing they’re concerned about is their wages, and to make sure that their students never do better than they have done. And if to do that, they have to kill off the soul of their students, they will do that.

But when you get to know LaRouche, and he tells you that the economy is in order to improve the standard of living of the population, while, in the same process being happy, you confront those professors. And many of us did just that. And they flunked us! They threw us out of school, they cancelled the conferences that we organized. But, when LaRouche talked to us about those professors, he said we had to inspire them to be better people, because they had lost something.

And I believe this is part of agapē, to feel the need to convey to another person an idea that you have been able to prove is true. And that the courage to do this, not anger, but the internal strength to do it, comes from knowing what they stole from you, and this isn’t fair, for any student in any university. They stole Bach from us, they stole Beethoven, and in the universities, there are no books to study about many of the issues which LaRouche has raised. And when you are aware of what they stole from you, you cannot allow that to continue. So, our movement is the opportunity to be able to do justice for all of those who did surrender, who turned off their own souls.

‘Have Fun!’

Cheminade: I want to pick up on something Carolina said: All academics are servants of the oligarchy. So, you can’t, among them, find friends; sometimes there are examples who are different, but it’s very rare. So, the best way to organize them is to gently ridicule them, what Lyn usually did, what he did with Abba Lerner.

This raises the matter of organizing: Lyndon LaRouche was the best organizer that I ever met. Why? Because he constantly identified with what was good for humanity. If we are inspired by that, people immediately recognize it, somehow—some being furious, others being very happy to see that finally happening in this universe as it is. This has two upper levels: If you look at the level of the necessity of the Four Powers meeting to create a future for humanity, it won’t work as such. It will only work if it’s inspired by the power of ideas, and the power of ideas is what Lyn and Helga constantly develop and each of us should be a reflection of that in this fight.

And also, it’s the same at the level of organizing a person. Lyn always said, it’s not at all trying to find an area of agreement with a person, to see if the person thinks like you. It’s to appear to the person, to spread inside the person the spark of creativity and then everything changes. You have to constantly try and think of how you are going to accomplish it. But you have to have all the pleasure in doing it. That’s why “Have fun” was always what Lyn said, “have fun” is to organize. And I think this conference is really about that, and about our future organizing.

Gretchen Small: This may seem like a funny thing to say, but one of the things that is notable in most of the discussions we’ve heard from many people who knew Lyn, spoke about his love of telling us, “Have fun!” And that’s who Lyn was. I often thought when he was running, we should put out a very simple bumper sticker which was something along the lines of “Vote LaRouche! Vote Human for a Change!”

I think this is the other thing that you hear in all of us who have spoken along the way, including those in the morning panel, is that people remember either their first encounter with LaRouche, whether it’s reading, whether it was hearing him speak, whatever, or meeting him personally for those of us who were lucky to have had that opportunity. But it had an impact; from the very beginning, you knew you’d been touched with an opportunity to not be little. The clip of him from his September 1, 2001 speech at the beginning of this seminar, where he addressed the innate quality in all human beings that the oligarchy attempts to crush at every opportunity; it’s the innate desire not just to live, but to have one’s life contribute to the greater development of the human race. So, when he discusses there that opportunity, he said “I saw what I had to do, and when you join me in this, you are no longer little. You are no longer a little person in a little town with little impact upon the world. But you, in joining this, can actually participate in the development of the universe as a whole.” And that’s what people respond to; that’s what as youth—those of us who met him when we were youth. Other people came on; look at Fred Huenefeld. He came forward with the same thing.

I think the most exciting thing from today is the scope of the international places where we have people saying “LaRouche is critical to my ability, the ability of my country to participate in the great task of civilization. And I’ve used him as a basis for making decisions; I’ve learned from him. I want other people to learn from him.” This is Russia, China, France, Argentina, Mexico, across the world. We know there are people listening in Africa, who sent out messages to their friends in Africa along the same kind lines. I think this is pretty exciting. By bringing Lyn, we can both save the human race and save that quality in people that people are looking for in their own lives.

Sen. Theo Mitchell: One thing is that [LaRouche’s] works speak for him. We need to create a political science course for Lyn, in his name, and give him the credit. It took time for Bach and Beethoven to be recognized for their contributions, and consequently this is the role the LaRouche Legacy Foundation can play in bringing back a number of the things that our friend did in regard to economy and U.S. history, and perpetuate it, in his name and his memory and his contributions, and the things that he actually fought for and fought against.

He was a victim of the Justice Department for five years, came out [of prison], with no bitterness, but yet, he was never given the credit for what he actually established, at Swarthmore, in the [Congressional] Black Caucus Foundation, and what have you. He needs to be on the university campuses and college campuses; his works need to be known. The works need to be expanded. The International Monetary Fund stealing money from poor people, to keep ’em poor.

And he was right! And as a result, his name and legacy should be perpetuated and remembered for all times, for working for poor people, and standing up for sick people, and making no excuse for anybody, except that they stole the money that was meant for the people to benefit from. Thank you!

Schlanger: I’d like to come back to the reason for having this conference, which in broad terms was to take advantage of the fact that we’ve now gone through 50 years, an arc of history, in which a decision was made that has affected the lives of every single person on the planet. Lyndon LaRouche warned about it, he warned it was coming, and he devoted the next 50 years of his life to reverse the effects of this decision, and he did it by showing us who did it, what their intention was and how they can be defeated. Not defeated as a negative force, but by bringing out the best in mankind. He’s left us the power of his ideas, and we owe it to him as well as to the future generations, to use that power to create a better world.

Cheminade: The way LaRouche and his writings are going to be seen in the future, depends on what we are going to do now—and that’s our challenge. I’m worried that if we don’t do what we have to do, we face the real danger that there won’t be a human society in the future. We are in a moment in history, where a few people should take responsibility for all. And I think these young people from Ibero-America are precisely challengers for that, and I thank them for that.

Questions and Answers

Forecasts, Not Predictions

Question: Lyndon LaRouche always said he was making forecasts, not predictions. What’s the difference?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think the answer lies in what I tried to touch upon in my earlier presentation. A forecast includes a foreknowledge. It’s a prescience, what Cusa calls forevision, that you already know the necessary outcome for a cause to succeed. In other words, you start with a positive conception yourself, and then you measure what is happening in reality, that either it furthers that cause, or it damages it. And that way you can actually make a forecast about the effect of an event, or a trend or a tendency, being absolutely guided by what you already know the necessary next step should be.

As compared to a prediction, which I think is more belonging in the realm of statistics and linear thinking, that you project sort of “trends”—even if you have complicated models, you project a trend. I would say that anything having to do with algorithms is a prediction, it’s a model. And we see right now, in the case of all these climate models, that they are completely arbitrary, that, in the case of climate, they’re very incomplete, because climate is much more complex, obviously, than even the most complicated algorithms.

Forecasting, I would say, is a science, and prediction is sort of a trial and error.

Artificial Intelligence

Question: “Many commentators and analysts are saying that AI [Artificial Intelligence] in the next few years, will advance to such an extent, that computerized robots will be able to take over so many areas of human employment, making many millions of people unemployed. What can be done to control the growth of AI, so that it does not forever destroy human work and livelihood, but is paying, so that the wonderful, humanistic goal of full employment, through rational manufacturing and infrastructure can be achieved for the benefit of all humanity?”

Zepp-LaRouche: I think in one sense, concerning AI, what applies to all technological progress, is that it tends to free man from manual labor, from muscle labor, that in former times people had to work like oxen, and it was a big liberation that technologies would start to take over more and more, those hard labors, even if it meant for a certain period of time, that a certain section of the population would get unemployed. But concerning AI, it’s like with all technologies: The technology as such is not good or bad. It’s a part of how the evolution of mankind in the universe progresses.

The big question is always, what is the quality of the human being who deploys that technology? One should be happy if there are more robots doing lots of work, so be it. Then let’s have education programs so that all the people can be trained, can educate themselves into the most sophisticated areas, and become more productive. So, per se, that could have a big benefit. If the intention of people employing AI is good, it has a tremendously good benefit, as we have seen in the ability, for example, of the Chinese to cope with the pandemic much, much better, simply because they have a much more integrated AI contact tracing, data evaluation about the disease and affected people; and since the Chinese population are 90% happy with what the Chinese government does, I would give them the benefit of the doubt that this is all being applied for the good of the people—contrary to the propaganda of the Western media.

Naturally it is good if there is a medical augmentation, where organs and parts of the body function can be remedied; like I was mentioning the Kurzweil reading machine. There are other medical augmentations for people who are disabled. So, there can be an enormous benefit of it.

But there is also a discussion about the use of AI and the merging of machines and the brain for a military application. And then I get really worried, because the military, again, it’s not good or bad; either you have the tradition of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Lazard Carnot, where the military is—you know, the officer is the model for society; the army is integrated with society and has actually a role as being a good example. Now, that is a positive tradition which comes out of the Prussian reformers and certain traditions in France.

But then I read this horrible book by Samuel Huntington The Soldier and the State, which is sort of the bible of a certain section of the military-industrial complex in the United States, and they talk about increasing of the killer ratio, making the soldier more “efficient.”

So, therefore, I just want to problematize these things. It is not the technology. The technology—you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It is the nature of human beings to always invent new ideas, new principles. But it is absolutely a question, who is the human being employing this? Is it a person employing these technologies for the common good? Then it’s wonderful. But if it’s used to build a dictatorship, if it’s used as you see it right now, with the Green Deal policy, an eco-dictatorship which suppresses the development of the developing countries, then it is horrible!

I agree with Krafft Ehricke, the great German American rocket scientist, who was also a board member of the Schiller Institute, who said, he fully agrees, you need the aesthetical education—Friedrich Schiller, all the other beautiful humanists—to make people more noble. So that is my short answer. And I think we have a tremendous challenge because that idea of making people beautiful characters, beautiful souls, of emphasizing what LaRouche said is the essence of everything: Love, agapē—that is the most lacking right now. I’m more worried about the lack of love, than I’m worried about the growth of AI.

Mikloško: I’d like to underline that Lyn, very much emphasized the knowledge of history, mathematics, which means also informatics, and Classical music, which should be a little bit underlined, today. And he also was very keen toward Christianity for the good, for the family, for children, for education, and so on. These ideas should not be also forgotten.

Secondly, artificial intelligence—I was for nine years the coordinator of artificial intelligence in the former Czechoslovakia. We had, in Bratislava, the international basic laboratory for artificial intelligence. For five years I was chief of this institute; in five years, 232 people [were trained] about artificial intelligence, from 12. After the Velvet Revolution, I’m sorry, but it was cancelled.

But I’m not afraid of artificial intelligence. Of course, man is much more important, than artificial intelligence, and there are many expert systems, speech synthesis, analysis, of course, robotics is very important. But always, man must be the decisive force in this whole system. Therefore, it’s very dangerous to leave it to the computer, this real-time analysis of data from the internet, when a billion people are controlled, and everybody knows about the tendency for them for mechanizing worldwide politics. It’s very dangerous, and especially before elections. In our country, maybe two or three times, one person, who really was not the best, but then we learned that they had very expensive and important systems for analysis of data, to influence people in elections and many other things.

The artificial intelligence is only for helping us, and of course, never can be better than man, and then our brain, which is absolutely number one. And no computer can do the same thing as our brain.

Meighoo: Once when I met, I think it was Richard Black, when I was in New Jersey at one point, he gave me a whole packet of old EIR issues and other documentation from the LaRouche movement and Lyndon LaRouche—amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. And one of the issues, from I believe 1984 (I wish I could remember the volume and issue number), he was talking about the American System.

I was reading through other things in EIR, and Lyndon LaRouche had a critique of information technology theory, which in ’84 was basically the same thing as what we’re talking about with artificial intelligence. And he just had such a profound critique, that has stuck with me forever since I read that, about why the whole basis of that school of thought, research, etc., is founded totally erroneously. Because they have this information technology theory, that somehow, information is put into the human brain like into a computer, like as if we have a disk or something, plugging into our head, and our brains are reading it, when that is not the case at all. Right now, there are sound waves going through electronic equipment, and there’s no direct input of data into a hard drive that our brain is reading! It is a metaphysical process, and this is one of the flaws of AI theory, this idea that consciousness arises spontaneously from material.

And the whole incorporation of metaphysics and the importance given to metaphysics, just like the ancient philosophers, it was crucial to ancient philosophy to integrate physics and metaphysics. And I think it really ties in, to the questions asked to Helga earlier about forecasting versus prediction. In my understanding, I would say that what I see with Lyndon LaRouche’s work, and which I identify with very strongly, is: with forecasting—and if I may paraphrase, or phrase it in my own way—it’s tied into the idea of telos, the Greek notion of telos. This is a metaphysical notion that only the human soul can tap into, to understand the nonlinear aspect of development and growth, whereas the algorithm, the modeling and so forth, is typical materialistic, linear thinking that is totally different from the way that the universe, and the world, and life, actually unfold, which only human consciousness can do. And so, these are quintessentially LaRouchean ideas and concepts, that I wanted to share.

The LaRouche Legacy

Question: To Sen. Theo Mitchell: “As someone who knew the works and personality of LaRouche, how do you think that those works, his life and discoveries, will be seen over the coming centuries? How do you think that the youth of the future can take advantage of, and even surpass, LaRouche’s discoveries?”

Sen. Mitchell: Look at the panel, look at the participants, look at the places in which LaRouche has left his legacy, and the people, the young people. The whole thing about it is, that is the legacy Lyn worked so hard for, believed in, and to leave. I remember several trips I made on behalf of others, and places, including Mexico, places in which he was heralding great things. And he still is.

[LaRouche thought that] the International Monetary Fund exploited the poor and fattened the rich. As a result, he detested it, and did all he could to abolish it…. But, remember all the data that he provided for the Executive Intelligence Review, EIR, the information that he disseminated. He was a walking encyclopedia; a man who basically said, “No!”

I was so proud to have the opportunity to introduce him to the National Conference of Black State Legislators, who tried to assist him. I was proud to be able to work the Cannon Building and the Russell Building and get out EIRs with some of his programs—Bretton Woods, Glass-Steagall, matters that we don’t hear about now. But I’m glad to see Harley Schlanger still active and working seemingly tirelessly on behalf of the Schiller Institute still. But it’s wonderful seeing all of the young people who have taken up the mantle and will deliver it sooner or later.

LaRouche in the World

Question: To the two speakers from Argentina: “What are your plans to expand the application of LaRouche’s ideas in your country? For example, what about the province of Tucumán, which borders the brother nations of Bolivia and Peru, and elsewhere, so as to make us a single nation; a suggestion the LaRouche youth could disseminate LaRouche’s ideas on physical economy in schools and polytechnical universities. Thank you for your excellent presentations and regards from friends.”

Fritzsche: Thank you very much for the question. Perhaps the [best] answer [is] to address the problem, not only for Argentina, but for all the areas of the world: how to unite our views, our thinking, such that in this extremely critical moment of history that we’re going through, that we have the necessary and sufficient motives to unite humanity, on the basis of a New Bretton Woods to not differentiate between the “first world,” the “second world,” and the “third world;” calling forth both the creative and the productive powers of all of the people, as this relates to energy matters, as it relates to transportation. This would have to have a multi-modal form, and with all of those forms, to be able to complement these matters that we have present in today’s world, such as generating energy through nuclear fusion power.

Such productive developments are matters of great importance to every country in the world, for example, such as China is carrying out with the New Silk Road. That very same New Silk Road is the Silk Road that could be implemented in Latin America as well, to join all of our efforts from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. And to fill out this entire idea, I would like to ask my friend and associate Eduardo Fernández to complement this thought.

Eduardo Fernández: To do so, to complement this idea, we have to take into account, the entire Latin American area. We cannot simply leave matters circumscribed or limited to just one country or region, because the issue of development is the most important thing about the legacy of Lyndon LaRouche.

Development, which is first and foremost human development, as a divine spark, created in the image and likeness of God, and as such, man cannot be limited or circumscribed as if he were simply an animal. So, in that regard, what we have to keep in mind, first and foremost, is man’s human and moral development. The psycho-social-cultural development of man, that is the social aspect of man, and to understand that a society does not fulfill itself, if all of the men and women of that society are unable to fulfill themselves. And to have a culture pointing in the direction of human development and not a counterculture of rock and drugs. That is why the physical economy has to be in the hands of moral human beings, and not in the hands of evil men.

Economics as Agapē

Question: “The clip from the Abba Lerner debate recalled for me the real difference in LaRouche’s approach to economics, to everyone else’s. Contrary to the academic, detached, abysmal science generally taught, LaRouche viewed economics as requiring passion, creativity, and most of all, agapē. Could the panel comment?”

Small: There is a concept we’re working on here at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation. It’s related to how, if we have an opportunity to get on the campuses, depending on the COVID—how this thing develops—but to get out there and to pick fights, so that people become very clear on the complete difference between what is prevailingly taught, and what actually is needed, which is what LaRouche is talking about.

Dennis Small, my husband (then my boyfriend [in the 1970s])—brought Lyn down to Swarthmore College, where we got him to give an eight-class series. And what came out of that is a concept of what you could call “intellectual hegemony.” We want to establish LaRouche, in your community, your university, in your country, whatever it is, as the intellectual point of reference, the point to which people have to answer: When you’ve gotten that, that’s what you call “intellectual hegemony” in that sense. Not that everybody agrees with you, by any means, but that people have to answer in their own minds, what they think, what their axioms are, as compared to what Mr. LaRouche is saying.

Swarthmore is a very small college, maybe 1,500 students at the time, maybe 1,600; but I can tell you, that LaRouche had 150 students at the first class…. In eight classes, he just went through the entirety of the world, the worldview, the philosophy, the economics, the whole thing. A lot of it I did not understand at the time: I can tell you, though, the thing that amazed me, was the taste I got from him of how the human mind works, and the power that’s involved. And that I, by recognizing the effect LaRouche’s approach had on my mind, I knew that I could participate in that, also.

And so this all culminated in a debate. It was such a debate in the whole campus—it was in the local paper, The Phoenix, the campus report, everybody was talking about it—that the absolutely idiotic economics professor there, Fred Prior, felt he had to answer, and he agreed to debate LaRouche. Prior set out to prove that LaRouche was not a Marxist economist. Now, this was really funny! The whole Quaker meeting house was totally full when this happened because this had been the leading issue with anybody who was at all politically active on the campus for three or four months. So, people turned out for this.

And I went in, going, “What’s my man going to do?” a little bit. And I can tell you, walking out, it was an amazing taste of what was just asked about. Because Fred Prior had gone through Karl Marx’s Capital, he had all the quotes, and he answered all the quotes. He said, “LaRouche says this..., and Marx doesn’t say that, in fact what Marx says...” And LaRouche presented what the world crisis was, what his concept of how to deal with it was, what the human mind was. It was two completely different universes! I had never had such a visceral shock of what a constipated Aristotelianism is, versus what the human mind in action could do, as in that debate. I mean, maybe because it was a hot one for me, and a definitive time. But that was really incredible, because Fred Prior didn’t care, about the results.

There’s a long story about who Fred Prior is; they made a movie about him. He was probably a CIA agent; he denied it. But it’s called Bridge of Spies; if you’re interested, you can see it. I’m not going to go through that here. But he actually wrote, he used to quip—and this came out when he died many years later—that he used to say that “An economist sees that something is working in practice, and then questions, but does it work in theory?” As opposed to what LaRouche went in with, as you heard in the Abba Lerner debate: that there are consequences to ideas.

One of the things we really want to do with this, is establish intellectual hegemony, whether it’s the kind of thing Ron Wieczorek has done in South Dakota, where, not at the universities per se, but in the small state of South Dakota, small by population, he has established LaRouche, and himself as a representative of LaRouche, as an intellectual reference for anybody who wants to think about how to get out of the crisis.

And that’s what we’ve got to do, and to do that, I think people have to read LaRouche. They have to read it because, you don’t necessarily understand everything the first time you read it. It’s a world, it’s a whole universe, you’ve been presented with. But as you go through reading him, you might get frustrated at one point, “I don’t know what this is talking about!” And then you get to another point, and you say, “Oh, wait—that I get—and that must be what he was referring to in this other place that I didn’t understand,” and your mind begins to reflect upon itself. And you begin to experience within yourself your own power of mind, and therefore, as Carolina was saying, you have the courage and the desire to go out and communicate this to other people.

Marxism, Neoliberalism, and Christian Thought

Question: “Within LaRouche’s economic postulates, what does he see as the fundamental difference between the economic vision of Marxism and neoliberalism? Does social Christian thought have a place within LaRouche’s philosophy?”

Mikloško: It’s a very good question; it’s a topic for a conference, or a seminar. Three words from a question from before: forecast or prediction? Lyn had a gift, a talent from God: He understood the trend in politics, in culture, in social science, financial economics in the world, and therefore, he could see 10 or 20 years forward. And really, in this sense, he was like Old Testament prophets: He could say something, and really, in years, it would be fulfilled. It was like, as if he had his eye on others, said something absolutely unusual, but it was well said.

And I think that today, liberalism, is like Marxism—it’s out of the future. We had 40 years of Marxism, which was really very hard, and very ideologically dangerous, absolutely bad, and we said, “Enough!” I’m very glad that Marxism-Leninism is out of today’s importance in ideas.

There is a big mistake if somebody says that the Soviet Union from the past is the same as Russia today. It’s absolutely something different! Therefore, this should also be mentioned, that Russians have no more Marxism-Leninism.

In the Catholic Church, there is the social teaching of the Church. There are many papal encyclicals. The year 1991 was 100 years since the first social encyclical [Rerum novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891]. Also, from non-religious people—there are many very important and good ideas from people from the street, and this is not only money, not only sex, not only business, and freedom, sense of order, but also the third dimension is mentioned there. And the social teaching of the Church, like in our documents, our encyclicals, are very important to study. Really, they are good ideas for today.

Liberalism is absolutely out of this. It’s another topic, but I don’t want to speak about it now. They are now dangerous. The liberals can get into the politics, but hopefully not.

Meighoo: I don’t mind saying a short thing on this: Marxism and neoliberalism appear to be opposites and at a certain level of analysis, perhaps they are. But fundamentally they are both materialist philosophies and do not cater for the human soul—do not recognize the existence of the human soul. And so, they suffer, whatever differences they may have at a certain level of analysis, at a deeper level of analysis, they’re absolutely similar, in that they are focused on material and do not incorporate the soul. Whereas something like Christian democracy has a fuller view of humanity, of telos, of purpose, and that’s I think a fundamental thing that we should keep in mind.

The ‘La’

Question: “Could the Kuznetsov school of science promote the introduction of the “LaRouche,” the La parameter for LaRouche’s potential relative population-density? Could we hope that the Russian Academy of Sciences approves it? And is there some project to publish a study comparing the ideas of LaRouche and Dr. Kuznetsov?”

Shamayeva: Thank you for the question. I will try to answer it briefly.

Can the school [of Pobisk Kuznetsov] facilitate introduction of the La unit of measure? For this, we need to do several things organizationally and scientifically. Today we really do need, in Russia, in the Russian language, to publish in concise form the main ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, so that we can have a broader circle of readers, including support within the scientific community; and to convince young people, to explain to the younger generation the special nature of the relationship between our scientific schools, in order to put LaRouche’s ideas into practice.

Among the steps to take most immediately, are needed: to apply, in the institutional framework of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to the Committee for the Popularization of Scientific Heritage, with a report by the Institute, or a joint one, for an articulation of the initiative—what you have proposed, and what we have been discussing productively here—within the Russian scientific community and perhaps the international scientific community, as well. I don’t see any obstacles to continuing to develop and introduce this unit of measurement as an alternative. And there is demand for this among our politicians. Therefore, to introduce it we simply need to make an organizational plan for our joint work.

Paul Gallagher: I wanted to raise something else, in response to Miss Shamayeva’s last comment, and that is that both she and Dr. Vitrenko earlier, in different ways, are raising the question of a new international monetary system. We are talking about an event in 1971, of which LaRouche was uniquely able to be aware of its coming beforehand, and what might happen, and since then, effectively we have not had any international credit and monetary system. We’ve been living in a state of progressively increasing financial chaos, as a result. Some people have discussed this.

Now, it’s obviously very important in answering that question, that Dr. Vitrenko raised in particular, how to approach the return to fixed currencies arrangements, linked to a gold reserve, together with the implementation of bank reform, bank reorganization on the Glass-Steagall principle in every country participating, in order to really make credit flow for development. And I think that the issue of the La, as Kuznetsov coined that potential term, goes to the heart of this question. It was dealt with in Lyndon LaRouche’s very, very important paper written July 18, 2000, called “On a Basket of Hard Commodities: Trade Without Currency,” in which he addressed this question about how a New Bretton Woods could actually be set in motion, and what the relationship of productivity and of currencies of the different major powers that would launch it, what they would be, and where they would come from. And I think that the La, as a measure of energy-flux density, and alternatively, of relative potential population-density, this is an essential part of the answer to that question.

So, I’m really just calling attention to that paper in 2000 of LaRouche, I think one of the most important, and one of the most studiable papers that he’s ever written, certainly on this subject. And it really goes to the basic question that we’ve been discussing in other ways, as to whether there are simple trends, and we simply look at trends and project them; or whether we are aware of what is not in the trends, but should be—in other words, what the trends are about to hit, like a brick wall, and break up, as a result.

There’s nothing more central to the difference between LaRouche’s ability to forecast, in writing, for example, the 1957 recession, its severity and its length; as opposed to, then, perhaps the most important economist in the United States, Arthur F. Burns, who was Eisenhower’s chief of economic advisers in his first term, and then Federal Reserve Chairman under Nixon. Burns had a model. It was a very famous and celebrated model of the business cycle in capitalist economies, and on the basis of that model, and projecting of trends, he very proudly forecast a long, and strong recovery from the 1954 recession, and sought to really aggrandize himself in the administration by that ability to predict this coming long and strong recovery, which, of course, hit a brick wall in 1957, and Lyn’s ability to forecast it.

So, I’m just really raising that paper and that question, which I think Dr. Vitrenko also raised earlier: What will be the measure of productivity and of growth in real human productivity among the various nations that launch a new international credit and monetary system? That’s very important.

A New Bretton Woods

Question: “Is there any prospect for a New Bretton Woods conference? How can we organize the United States and other countries to be part of it?” And: “Did Lyndon LaRouche have an empirical basis for measuring creativity? What is the relationship between that idea and his idea that genius can be taught, and that a nation encourage creativity with its policies?”

Meighoo: In terms of the New Bretton Woods, there’s an objective necessity for it. However, the push to war, the Russophobia, the Sinophobia in the West is making that objective necessity very difficult, and so we must mobilize and overcome the hawks and the neocons and so forth. That’s a political project, I would have to say.

In terms of creativity, that is so important, especially for small societies, small islands like us. We are full of creativity! The great thing about creativity is that it resides in the individual. The individual can be one person in a city of 10 million, or one person in a village on an island, somewhere else, and this human creativity touches the entire humanity. It is something that we must also concentrate on, and it links up to the other questions, about Marxism and Christian scientific creativity, which are really part of the nontangible, metaphysical part of human existence. We almost always must take that into account.

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think the need for a New Bretton Woods system is extremely urgent. If I think about the enormous sums of trillions which float around the globe every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, at nanosecond speed—this was what Bill Clinton had addressed, I think it was in 1997. This was what got him the impeachment: because he dared to call for a new international financial architecture, and then they launched the Monika Lewinsky affair as an immediate reaction.

I happily remember, that in that period, Natalia [Vitrenko] and I joined in a call for convening a New Bretton Woods system, which at that time was supported by, I think, hundreds and thousands of parliamentarians and other influentials. And I think this is very urgent, because we have a hyperinflationary tendency which is very visible, and it will not be “temporary” as the Federal Reserve is trying to tell people: Hyperinflation is something that once it’s in the system, it tends to grow, like in 1923 in Germany.

So, I think that discussion for a New Bretton Woods conference, is extremely urgent. The G20 probably will not go for it. Maybe it has to be generated in some other circles and then gain momentum. Especially the developing countries have a lot to gain if there would be a New Bretton Woods system in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And they have a lot to lose, if the schemes of such people as Mark Carney would ever be fulfilled. I would suggest that out of this meeting, we may come up with a new call for such a Bretton Woods conference.

On the question of creativity: Lyn had contact with thousands and tens of thousands of people in his life—all ranks, from heads of state, trade unionists, industrialists, students, fishermen in Peru, shoemakers in Italy—I mean, endless, long lists of people! And I think what everybody appreciated about Lyn is that he sparked this spark of creativity, because just talking to this man, you would be lifted out of two-dimensionality into the complexity of the real universe, and people would respond.

Lyn has made so many people’s lives more productive. For some, only for a period of time, because they didn’t have the stomach or stamina to stay the course; for others, it changed their whole life, and we still find people all over the world who say that Lyn changed their life by just opening their eyes and opening this spark of creativity.

The goal of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation is to spread his works into as many languages as possible, to conduct seminars more in depth than even this one, which is a sort of first start of the LLF; to have a program of involving a real discussion about his ideas. I think we could really create a renaissance of beauty, of creativity, and assembling a force of people who are determined to bring this world into a better era of civilization. This work of this Foundation can spark creativity of millions of people, if we do our job.