A Discussion About the Art of Optimism

This is the edited transcript of the Discussion Session, which concludes Panel 4, “The Art of Optimism: Using the Classical Principle To Change the World,” of the Schiller Institute’s Sept. 10–11 Conference, “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.” The full video of Panel 4 is available here.

Jason Ross: We’ll hear first from Carolina Dominguez in Mexico. She is the coordinator of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Ibero-America.

Carolina Dominguez: Jacques Cheminade said earlier that there’s a problem of pessimism, which isn’t intrinsic to the individual, rather it’s generated by the educational process. We’re carrying out here in the universities our campaign called “LaRouche in the Universities,” although we’ve expanded this to institutions, the streets, and everywhere. This initiative came about because if we were truly educating people in our education system, we wouldn’t be facing this kind of systemic crisis we now face. To be able to inspire youth, one needs to do this by example. That’s what I’ve seen in our deployments.

Nations in Ibero-America have been catalogued as “under-developed” ad infinitum. LaRouche gave us the tools to discover that that does not need to be true. Just because we are youth in Ibero-America, we are not condemned to under-development—intellectual under-development, nor moral under-development, nor of the soul or of any sort.

Jacques Cheminade: Beethoven said that, confronted with his own life, he felt at the same time happy and unhappy. Unhappy, because what is happening in his time was not good. Very happy, because he knew there was something in humanity that his music would resonate with in the future and elevate the human mind of all.

I think about that at this moment of history in the 20th Century, and this is very important for students in general—not only in Mexico, but in the whole world. In the 20th Century, there was mainly a step backward in politics with really a criminal situation that we are reaching today. But at the same time, advancements in science—I mean Einstein, but also people who are less known, like Alexander Friedmann in Russia whose father was a ballet dancer and his mother a pianist, which is a good combination for a scientist. He established that the universe was expanding. It was a big debate with Einstein. So, there was this optimistic conception that there is a unity in both the expansion of the human mind and in the expansion of the universe itself.

When the young generation gets a sense of that unity beyond the games of images and the destruction of their minds through the combination of seduction, addiction, and then frustration; when you create that in their minds through music and science together, then they have an optimistic view of the universe, then they will be inquiring, searching for what’s good. Like Lyndon LaRouche, if you always are developing the minds of the people who are around you, this search for something better, that curiosity for what is coming in a better world—in the best of all possible worlds—then you have with the students the capacity to change and to give a sense of freedom, and this freedom is coherent, intrinsically with the necessity to improve our universe.

Kepler and Ideology

Dominguez: In our organizing in the universities and the streets, the Kepler work, the work on reproducing his ideas, has saved a lot of useless discussion with people on sophistry, whether things are bad or good. This allows the mind of the individual to drop their defenses and admit “OK. Fine. I just don’t know,” and then to be willing to learn what has been correct in economics. My question to Megan Dobrodt on this is, how do we, in the sense of Kepler, get rid of that fear of not understanding or reaching any conclusion, and identify the proper paradox which is needed to solve the problem. Or are all paradoxes correct?

Megan Dobrodt: Carolina, what you said about the work on Kepler saving a lot of time, cutting through the sophistry that people are trained in, not just in universities, but all of education leading up to the university, is really true. LaRouche wrote and spoke a tremendous amount about education—what education is. Education is not the memorization of facts; it’s not posturing. For me, the epitome of everything I hated about the current educational system is expressed in a debate team. I’m sorry if I’ve offended anybody on the debate team, but on a debate team, it doesn’t matter if you’re right; it just matters if you can convince people that you’re right. It’s a real tragedy. Opposed to that, LaRouche always demanded the standard that education is the rediscovery of principle. You don’t know something because you read it in a textbook, or you were told by a reputable authority. You know something because you discovered or rediscovered for yourself that it was true.

Kepler is one of the most generous scientists that I’m aware of, in terms of writing out each step in his process of discovery. That’s why he’s so wonderful for the self-education of a youth movement—to be able to sit down and have Kepler himself walk you through every mistake he made; why he tried this tangent or side path which he thought might get him somewhere, except it failed, but, oh no, it made him think of this. He walks you through everything.

Another reason Kepler cuts through these kinds of silly arguments you might get into on campuses which aren’t really getting at the substance of the thing, is that if you work with somebody on these ideas, you can get them to be gripped with those questions: How do I know, or do I know, that the planets go around the Sun, rather than the Sun goes around the Earth? Do I know that for myself? Do I know that the planets move in ellipses, or was I just told that?

If you can get somebody to do that, and if you can actually sit down with them and work on Kepler or build the Platonic solids—take that instrument that I showed a picture of, that little monochord’s vibrating string, and help them generate the musical scale. It’s fun! It’s natural for the human mind to take joy in discovery.

Doing that can help dispense with all of these other silly things that people thought they were supposed to think were so important. They gladly throw them away for something which is much more fun, much more human, much more truthful. That is the essence of recruiting a youth movement of potent political leaders who are self-educated to replicate not just the specific discoveries and thoughts of those who came before us, but also the mode of creative thinking itself.

When you work through the discoveries of Kepler, Gauss, Leibniz, LaRouche, you’re practicing a mode of creative thought. That really is most important, and it’s connected to the kind of joy in the soul that Jacques was referencing with the issue of optimism. That’s what makes a good political leader.

On the paradoxes, that’s why Kepler is so great. Because he had an artistic mind, because he believed that the universe had to be beautiful and knowable, he had this underlying feeling for when he was pursuing something and ran into something which was merely just a shortcoming in the measurement versus an actual ontological paradox which was the result of a new principle that he hadn’t yet discovered. So, I think Kepler can be really great for that.

Dominguez: I also want to know from Anastasia the impact that the magazine Leonore has had among youth. How people are responding to these kinds of documents that are important for educating individuals.

Anastasia Battle: In terms of Leonore, we’ve gotten back emails in from people who have subscribed. We got one not too long ago from an older man who printed out portions of Leonore and gave it to his daughter. He said that for the first time in his life, he was finally able to have a real conversation with her.

In terms of growing with the youth movement, we had a very wonderful cadre school just a few weeks ago. Helga has given us the idea that we have to make a breakthrough in ideology; we have to have an ideology project. Some of these new people coming around are in Karl Marx networks, so we’re thinking: “How do I help them through the ideologies that they’re fixed in?” There are some fun ironies that come in. Lyndon LaRouche kind of takes you through some of those things. We’ve also created an online forum where people can bring forward their original work. Some of the younger guys have already put through some ideas, we have papers coming in which will be published in future Leonore issues. Our next issue will be coming out soon.

Dominguez: And for Dennis, I have a question on Leibniz. We’ve had various workshops on Leibniz who was very clear that we had to have a new economy, a physical economy. Leibniz was also clear on the need to educate the next generations to be able to produce that economy. How do we take this education to the institutions? What do we do now, pragmatically, to rise above the immediate hot-button issues like abortion, LGBTQ, and so on and turn toward a discussion of profound ideas that do not simply adapt to the popular agenda of the moment?

A Revolutionary Process

Dennis Speed: To answer my question, I want you to first listen to a short video clip, in which you will first hear from the former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark and then from Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the 1995 “Independent Hearings to Investigate Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

Ramsey Clark said: “The purpose can only be seen as destroying—it’s more than a political movement, it’s more than a political figure. It is those two, but it’s a fertile engine of ideas; a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche at those same hearings said: “The most important [thing] in history is ideas, especially those ideas which move mankind forward, ideas which make the lives of generations to come more human.”

Speed: The first thing you have to do with anybody who’s coming around our movement or wants to take us seriously, is to make it clear to them we are involved in a revolutionary process. We are about ideas, and that is dangerous to people who are in the status quo; but we are also about ideas because they are the greatest pleasure of humanity. The things we have to combat, whether it’s “woke” culture or the various multiple sexes and so on, is this idea of utmost pleasure. This is the idea of Locke—that man tends toward, and the aspiration of mankind is, for the utmost pleasure. What Leibniz said against that was, “I do not know whether the greatest pleasure is possible. I believe rather it can grow ad infinitum. I believe that happiness is lasting pleasure,” which is completely different. He said, when you don’t have reason, people tend to what they think are present pleasures, but actually those things may be the worst thing for them.

The fact that that has become the dominant practice or dominant culture is not accidental. It was an ideological and, if you will, philosophical intent which goes back hundreds of years which shaped the present culture that we’re in. That’s what has actually happened. So, the things people see themselves doing, they think that they chose to do them? No, that was all something that got discussed in an intense debate between Locke and Leibniz, which was so intense at the time that Leibniz’s book was not initially published. Although he did try to circulate it and did circulate it as much as possible in England among his faction, which was still vying for power.

But I think that the idea is to see Leibniz as a universal mind. Lyn is the next one like that. People often look at Lyn’s writings and think that they’re very political and so forth. Well, how about “Cold Fusion, Challenge to U.S. Science Policy,” which LaRouche wrote back in 1992? He was in jail! It takes a summary of the state of science and poses to the United States as an entity—but not to the United States merely—how you can investigate the entire frontier of science at the time. Lyn did it, and he did it from jail.

One of the things you find if you’re doing intellectual work is that you “run out of steam,” that is, you don’t have the ability somehow to think clearly, or think of the next idea, think in depth. He didn’t have that problem. People who visited him or saw him, remarked about it. Jozef Mikloško talked about it in his tribute to Lyn: “I found that I was talking with him for six hours, and he didn’t just know these things; he knew them in depth.” Norbert Brainin has said about Lyn the same thing.

What people are looking for is that pleasure, that area of happiness that only this kind of intellectual pursuit allows one to feel or to encounter. Friedrich Schiller talked about the education of the emotions to achieve that kind of idea, that kind of depth. Look, this is a battle. And a lot of the battle is internal; it’s the thing that Mohandas Gandhi said: “It’s my experiments with truth. People keep talking to me about this revolution they say I made against the British. Actually, the thing that was important to me was what I wasn’t doing, and I usually failed in those battles I was fighting against myself. These other things that you’re referring to, yes, they are important, but they are secondary to my own experiments with truth. Not that the Salt March and the other things weren’t, but.…”

Inspiring Youth With a Sense of Hope

Dominguez: My question for Helga is, how do we show that sense of hope that has nothing to do with what people are living through in reality. In reality, people are experiencing very discouraging situations. How do we show that if it is something they’ve never seen in Colombia, in Chile, in Mexico, in other countries? In Haiti, they’ve lived through under-development their entire lives. How do we give them a sense of that future the way Lyn showed it to us? How do we provide that sense of hope to the youth so that they can feel that internal sense of strength to fight for a new, just economic system?

Zepp-LaRouche: My answer to that would be that you should try to get more contact with the Asian countries. Looking around in the world right now, that’s where the momentum is. I’m not just talking about China; I’m talking about all of Asia. I was so happily reminded when K.A. Ganesh in this video of Lyn’s tour around the world [see Panel 3] was saying that they are working on the realization of a new world economic order. That was probably 20-30 years ago; a long time ago. Now, it’s happening!

I think that the Spirit of Bandung is much more alive in Asia than any other place in the world. Maybe in some African countries as well, but in Asia, I know it for sure. Two or three years ago when I was participating in an Asian dialogue of cultures, which was a huge event where all Asian countries were present, the spirit was so different. They are absolutely convinced that the Asian Century has started. They have the idea of allying, naturally, with the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN. But they also have the idea of reviving their own Classical tradition and 5,000 years of history in many cases; but with a clear orientation of the future.

I can only say that if I compare the mental outlook of people in many Asian countries with the absolute incredible pessimism in Germany and many European countries, and even in the United States which has become “German” in this respect which is terrible, I would suggest that people in Latin America focus much more on what is happening around Asia. It’s good to be a patriot, but you have to be a world citizen as well. I’m absolutely convinced that in the next several months, huge events will come from Asia. So, I think it’s very good for young people to not be just limited to their own country, but to become world citizens, especially now, when an epoch is ending, and a new epoch has already started. There are many countries of the Global South that are building a new system.

Many years ago, I joined this movement because it was an international movement; because Lyn promised that the developing countries had to be developed. When you are a young person, you have a much bigger sense of injustice than when you get old and get sort of accustomed to things. So, I would really use this Global South cooperation, with the LaRouche youth movement which we have to build much more consciously.

Ross: Before we move on to other questions that have come in, I’d like to ask Helga if you would like to say anything else in response to the presentations so far.

A Renaissance of Classical Culture

Zepp-LaRouche: The idea of a renaissance of a Classical culture is really important. Lyn wrote in many different places that society cannot be saved if we don’t get the majority of people to think in terms of Classical art, beauty, Classical composition. Look around in the leadership of the world today. Who in Europe in a leading position has ever spoken in depth about Leibniz, about Schiller, about Humboldt, or Beethoven? I have not heard any one of them do so. The last Social Democrat in Germany who knew anything about the Classical period was Carlo Schmid, and he died 40 years ago. It’s a shame! The people today have been educated by the Frankfurt School, by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, modernistic music, or pop music. The present head of the cultural work in Germany, was the manager for a terrible, horrible pop band. So, that’s about the level.

I think that the occupation with true beauty is the only thing which forms the character, and that is intelligible. That’s the difference between Schiller and Kant. Schiller had this idea about Aesthetical Education, and that only through the occupation with great art would there be an improvement in the character of people. While Kant said there is no lawfulness in art; an arbitrary arabesque—something somebody throws against the wall—is more beautiful than a piece of art where you can recognize the design of the composer. Kant was a terrible person, and he and Savigny were responsible for this division between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, which Lyn so beautifully reunited.

To get young people to see the beauty—what I have done in the past repeatedly—was to just take pieces of music, for example, Marian Anderson singing some very beautiful Spiritual or some Classical song, and play that or show that; and then have some absolutely horrible Lady Gaga or Madonna or what’s this young lady who always rides on a wrecking ball which rips down buildings. It’s just total ugliness, and people have to get the sense of what is beautiful and what is ugly.

It has been a method by the oligarchy to poison people’s minds with ugly things. Ugly clothes, ugly paintings, ugly buildings, because ugliness has a depressing effect. Think of what Jacques was talking about. I wrote articles a long time ago that cultural pessimism is a mental disease. It is something which should be treated; it is not a healthy state of mind.

So, the preoccupation with beautiful things and to understand why they are beautiful. Why are Renaissance buildings, architecture beautiful? And why are the Houston glass buildings ugly? That’s something one can explain: the Golden Mean. You can understand the beauty of poetry, the form of poetry, the content of poetry. These are all things which are completely forgotten. The beauty of the letter exchanges among the great thinkers—Leibniz’s letters with Huyghens, or Schiller’s with Humboldt or Koerner. There are so many beautiful things. If you compare those letters to today, you have texts, you have tweets. That is how deep we have sunk, and that is why we have to have an absolute revolution against this and fight for beauty. I think the occupation with the galaxies and space at large, especially the James Webb Space Telescope, is really a donation from the heavens, quite literally, because it forces people to think about the questions Megan was talking about. I think that’s the way we can break the idea that people are just Earthlings.

Dissonances in the Universe

Ross: Let’s build on that with a question for Megan that came in by email about the James Webb Space Telescope. Kynan writes:

Much has been discussed on this principle of harmony between humanity and the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many things about our universe and has unleashed a new set of principles which we are obligated to discover. The TRAPPIST-1 system which Megan briefly talked about, illustrates that, but it’s incredibly interesting that this system follows the same harmonic ratios of our own planetary system. So many parts of the universe! There are many galaxies, and various stars that we have discovered. They seem to follow principles we already know, but there are small differences, as Megan pointed out.

Why is it that the Creator includes these small differences or dissonances among the various systems of the universe? What does that imply about the nature of the universe, and will these contradictions ever be fully resolved as we uncover more and more knowledge?

Dobrodt: On the question of dissonance, listen to the quartets of Mozart. There’s a famous one called the Dissonance Quartet. People should listen to that. But take any of these quartets of Mozart, Beethoven; take the fugues of Bach.

What’s the function of dissonance? You have two minds on this; you have the Modernist school that Helga was just referencing that uses dissonance for dissonance’s sake, as purposeful ugliness. But in real Classical composition, that’s not how dissonance arises. It’s not just something thrown in to spice it up, or even worse. Dissonance arises as a lawful consequence of the unfolding of a composition. You have these many independent voices; each member of the string quartet with their own lines developing in a certain way. And that brings the voices temporarily into dissonance. It forces the mind of the listener to hypothesize the direction of development. Where is the composition going? It’s a way for the mind to be able to leap ahead, to be able to hypothesize the potential resolution of the paradox.

Dissonances, cracks, paradoxes in the data of the universe at large, these things you’re raising—I think that’s their function. Paradoxes, disagreements, dissonances arise as a way for us to hypothesize and peer into what did we not know; what did we not yet know, which is actually generating these motions or actually generating this phenomenon. In terms of the planetary systems, it’s so funny that we’ve only really studied one solar system, out of trillions and quadrillions of them. You look at what the dissonances in these planetary systems, or between planetary systems, could indicate to us. We do need to make this breakthrough of the larger galactic system. Each of these solar systems is being controlled by its star, the gravitational effect of its star. But that star is possessed by or animated by the galactic principle. What is that galactic principle? We still haven’t discovered that. What is the intergalactic system principle? That’s going to show up in motions or features of these planets.

That’s what we have to be looking for in these cracks and these dissonances.

Enthusiasm Starts at Home

Ross: In your presentation, Jacques, you talked about Carnot and his sense of work; the enthusiasm of Louis Pasteur. You brought up that somebody asks, “Well can’t someone else do it?” What would give a person the confidence to say, “I’ll do it. I’ll be the one who does that.”

Cheminade: Something that inspired Carnot was looking from the highest standpoint. He was educated in part in living through what was bringing down his nation, the horrors of the Ancien Regime, the horrors of the Revolution. He tried to find a pathway to break, in a positive way, with the negative ideology in his own country. LaRouche always told us that we have to face the ideologies in our countries that prevent us from stepping ahead and fulfilling our mission to save humanity.

A few weeks ago, I visited the house of José de San Martin, the Argentinian hero, in Bologna, Italy. What was lacking to San Martin and Simón Bolívar when they met in Peru? What were their limitations? And what, in a certain sense did Carnot have, relatively beyond them. It’s not because he was French; on the contrary, it was because he faced the French ideology. I think that’s the first thing to do.

Dennis talked about Leibniz sitting down with Peter the Great at the end of Leibniz’s life—he was dead a few months later—and had this conversation with him about how he could reorganize his entire society using the idea of these universities. Think about this as the core of the actual American Revolution, not a jingoistic America.

Lyndon LaRouche was the highest expression of this potential in contemporary times, especially in his grasp of the idea of physical economy. And the way that he would convey this in all these different programs for all these different countries—whether it’s India, or China, whatever—the seeming infinite ability of Lyn to just call upon this inside of himself on behalf of other people. If we can in some way inspire people to think about this—just realize what was done in the last several decades to prevent them from knowing this—you will see a revolution unlike any that we’ve ever seen in human history. Not merely because it’s Lyndon LaRouche, but because of the number of people who’ve been denied this, and the number of people that are now aspiring all over the world to change that and change their circumstance.

The Imagination

Ross: Let me read this question from Bernie:

Is the realm of possibility limited only by our imagination? If one accepts that our imagination is boundless, then can one, by contemplating the proposition that there is a boundlessness of possibilities, could we consider that the universe—or even an infinite number of universes—have existed?

Battle: Yes, you’re limited by your imagination, but you’re limited by the principles that bound the universe which your imagination should also abide by. This comes up when you’re talking about composition, because as Helga was bringing up, you’ve got people just throwing things on a canvas and saying it’s art; or screeching “Du hast” and having Satanic rituals and calling this art, or whatever they’re doing. That’s not creativity; that’s not what this is. When you’re talking about making discoveries about principles, making discoveries about these things and then expressing it, you’re using your imagination to provoke the minds of other people. That process is understandable by all human beings, and Einstein called it “understanding God.” That’s how he described it.

The Microcosm and the Macrocosm

Ross: Chris submitted a question: “Lyndon LaRouche spoke of the principal sameness, the relationship of the microcosm and its seeming opposite, the macrocosm. How can this be reconciled?”

Dobrodt: I would suggest looking at LaRouche’s writings where he wrote about what he called “the triads.” The first triad was Cusa, Brunelleschi, and Kepler. The next more modern triad was Planck, Einstein, and Vernadsky. There is Planck’s work in the very small with the quantum, the seemingly smallest thing in existence, and what Einstein showed us with his theory of relativity and other work about the universe as a whole. But in both of those, you have these paradoxes, these commas.

To resolve them, LaRouche said you have to go to a higher principle that can reorder our thinking about both of those things. He pointed to the work of Vernadsky on life and cognition. That life and cognition are actually the principles which are shaping the development of the universe. They’re higher than non-living abiotic physics. So, if you want to resolve the paradoxes and contradictions which seem to exist between the very large and the very small, you have to go to that higher generating principle that you weren’t including before.

Cheminade: There is an old saying by Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and theologian, “The eternal silence of infinite spaces scares me.” So, people quote that as something in itself. It’s absolutely not! What Pascal says is, it is the thinking of a libertine, the thinking of a cynical pessimist.

As for myself, when I locate in my mind the capacity to resonate with this universe, I know that there is a creative principle, and I feel happy about it. The more I don’t know of what it is, the more I can’t reach it, the more I think that there has to be a composer and a composition to this universe. And it challenges me to know more and more.

This was expressed in another way at the end of his life by Nicholas of Cusa. He said that there is self-subsisting power—called posse ipsum. You can never have this power, but what can you do is, you can always search for it, and in the searching you find things about your universe, and this makes you think of further things that you would never know. But you are happy that they are in this universe. It gives a sense that you are part of it, and part of this generating principle.

Zepp-LaRouche: For Nicholas of Cusa, the macrocosm and the microcosm were governed by the same lawfulness. There is actually a very simple proof of that, that is, that an idea generated by the human mind is immaterial, it doesn’t weigh anything, it has no extension. But if it is an efficient idea and leads to a change in the physical laws of the universe, it changes the physical laws of the universe. The human mind is the microcosm. It can only do this because there is a correspondence in lawfulness.

This is a quite simple, but profound thought. In a certain sense, Leibniz had the same conception with the monad. The monad being a reflection of the entire lawfulness of the universe. Both are developing in an unlimited, negentropic way. There is no limit to the self-perfection of the human mind, and by the same idea, the universe is developing in an anti-entropic infinite way. So, that’s a very fascinating thought.

Dialogue with the Minds of the Future

Speed: This is a way of having a conversation about this—that the idea, also that the monad, is a simple substance, and that it cannot be destroyed. It comes into existence as a whole, and goes out of existence as a whole, so to speak, but it cannot be destroyed. That’s an interesting and very important idea, when you’re thinking about these, and thinking about how these were understood.

One of the most important things, of course, is that these ideas are theologically based. In 1983, Lyn wrote a piece called “The Science of the Human Mind,” reflecting on Dante Alighieri, the poet. That the three sections of Dante’s poem—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise— each composed of 33 cantos, and each one with its own system and geometry

When you reach Paradiso what it’s defined by is not merely the concentric spheres of Heaven that you can see in various illustrations. People try to claim they’re Ptolemaic; actually, I don’t think so. In Dante’s conception of geometry—it’s the ensemble of the three books, it’s not that you can just take each one as you choose, because it’s one poem. He’s the poet, he’s writing it. But there’s another element: the way he moves through Paradiso in his dialogue with Beatrice, a dialogue he was unable to have with Virgil, although Virgil led him through both Hell and into the earthly paradise sections of Purgatorio.

The reason I think these ideas are really important to consider is, when you look at something like the Brunelleschi Dome over the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral (the Cathedral of Florence, Italy), you recognize that this takes years and years to conceptualize and build. Anticipated by 1290 or 1295, construction didn’t begin until 1420, and was finished in 1436.

The first architect to work on it, Arnulfo di Cambio, created Santa Maria del Fiore. He knew that someone would solve the problem of how to construct a cupola on top of it. It was a great problem that he left to be solved, but he had every confidence that a mind would come, who would solve it. So, he was in dialogue with a mind that he could never know, but whose nature he knew before it existed.

The time we seem to be in, can be changed by us, as Paul said, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye. Because when you look at China, Russia, as was said already Asia, Africa, and you look at people in our own countries who want to do something different, it’s clear that the potential to do that is there. As Leibniz said, this is the best of all possible worlds, so the issue is making that possibility a reality. That’s how you get mental health; that’s the way we’re going to establish the ability to become sane again.

Outflanking Popular Culture

Ross: Let me pose a question that came in for you, Helga, from Cedric, about Asian culture. He says,

“What Helga says about Asian optimism is very true, but the mass culture of K-pop, manga, anime, video games from South Korea is flooding our youth in the West. How do we outflank that?”

Zepp-LaRouche: Concerning Asian culture, I agree that Pokémon also came from Asia—Japan. Pokémon was the gateway-drug for violent video games, so I agree. But that is not really Asian culture. Have you ever seen the beauty of Chinese calligraphy, Chinese paintings, Literati painting where painting, poetry, and calligraphy are in one? In order to understand the meaning of the piece of art, you have to know all three of them, because it is the metaphor resulting out of the three together. Or take the beauty of Asian poetry, the wisdom.

I made a speech 20 years ago on why Americans should go there, talking about the ancient Silk Road. I think people should really travel. I know now with COVID it’s almost impossible. But if you go to Thailand, to India, to Yemen, to Syria, to Malaysia, just any country, and you start to look at the cultures which are all very different, you realize that you are discovering entirely different universes. I think the problem is that if you travel around now in some German or American cities, you have one strip mall, then you go to the next town, you have the same strip mall: Kentucky Fried Chicken, the next drugstore, they’re all the same.

I discussed this with Rev. James Bevel, who I once took to my hometown of Trier. He got completely silent, and I asked him, “Why are you not speaking anymore?” He said, “Well, I will go back and talk to the mayor of Washington, that we have to build new cities which are using beautiful architecture.”

If you want to talk about this in religious terms, there must be a reason why God has created different cultures. Or, if you’re not religious, you can ask why is the universe composed in such a way that different cultures emerge?

I think the answer lies in the unity in diversity or diversity in unity, and the absolute richness of human creativity. There is a reason why the human mind is capable of producing so many different beautiful things. However, if they are on a Classical standard, they are united by universal principles. That is what makes you rich. How boring it would be if there were only one culture, only one readymade shirt, fit for all. People have to have the experience of this. Go to Italy! Italy has 85% of all the cultural goods classified by UNESCO—85% in Italy alone! Do you know any of those? Well, maybe some?

The human species has produced such beautiful things, but they are so different. And you only recognize the richness when you know at least a good portion of them. So, you can go to a museum where you can virtually now visit exhibitions. There are so many ways how you can develop a curiosity about other cultures. I think this is the most-healthy thing you can do, not to get stuck in your Johnny-one-note.

Ross: Let me just add one clarification that Cedric added. Cedric says, to be more concrete, he deals with many young people who are deep in that popular Asian culture that he had mentioned, and most of them are faced with depression or suicidal ideas. He’s coming at this, not from dissing Asian culture, but from working with young people who are affected by this.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yeah, but that’s what I tried to say. He should introduce them to the beautiful side, and not to manga [Japanese comics or graphic novels] and these kinds of things, in order to get the difference across.

Cheminade: Manga and these things are so ridiculous and so repetitive. Jean Bodin, in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, says—and this was in the middle of the French religious wars—that the true statesman, in this case, has to compose the harmony of the dissonances. He meant that without dissonances, the universe would be a frozen universe of Aristotle, and there will be no creation. If the dissonances were to prevail over everything, they would destroy the universe.

So, the political composer should be inspired by the musicians and compose a political society where he would make these dissonances coincide at the higher level, and create music of the state. It’s a very beautiful way to make the connection between art, music, and also science. Because he said that if you can’t develop agriculture at the same time as manufacturing, you can’t be believed, you can’t be followed.

Classical Composition

Battle: I was just thinking about the problem with the youth culture. Depression and suicidal thoughts are very prevalent. There have been official studies that say 25% of youth have some kind of psychological trauma or problems like depression. But it’s a lot more than that. In looking at just the intention of what you see in popular culture; just looking at manga, for instance. They are actually trying to make you crazy by creating these repetitive thoughts. “You have to try your hardest!”

I used to watch some of this stuff when I was a kid; it was very popular. Pokémon was very popular. But it’s just this “triumph of the will,” of the greatest. We really have got to get out of this brainwashing; that’s really what this culture has been. It’s a brainwashing operation to create cognitive dissonance and prevent you from being able to think.

How do we do that? We do it through Classical composition. We do that through working on Classical art, Classical music, and Classical science. I really want everybody here to pick up something. Pick up a project, whether it’s a paper from Schiller, what Megan was bringing up with Kepler and harmony. Pick up something and make it your mission this week to figure it out. And then try to present it to somebody else. I guarantee you’re going to feel so much better by the end of week, given all the stuff that comes at you. But you’ll really notice the difference.

Read LaRouche!

Dobrodt: Jacques, I don’t know if you know this, but Kepler read Jean Bodin, and he actually quotes him in his Harmony of the World in Book 3 on music, to try to get across what is the universal principle of harmony. It speaks to Kepler’s quality of mind and what he saw himself as the effect he wanted to have on society as a whole—that we can bring this principle of harmony into social relations, into government, and into society.

I want to encourage everybody to read LaRouche. LaRouche is the most profound thinker on the subject of many topics, but specifically the human mind. What is human creativity? Lyn, through his own creative thought, but also through his great friendship with some of these incredible thinkers throughout history—Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, so many others, was able to develop the most advanced notion of the creative principle in this universe.

I want to encourage everybody to read LaRouche. Go to the LaRouche Library; get the volumes of Lyn’s collected works and begin digging in and studying these things.

Cheminade: I mentioned a poem from Lazare Carnot. He was not one of the best French poets, and since the 17th Century there have been very few even half-good French poets. Carnot was thinking how, with the means he had, to create a blossoming of great souls; not for themselves, but for the common good of all. All of us, particularly when you are young, when you feel you have to be creative, you should write poems, even if they are not perfect, as Carnot wrote in the shadow of Schiller, Keats, or others—Shakespeare.

You can write in that way and muster your inner drive to break through the ugliness of society imposed upon you. It will unleash in yourself some unexpected things; much more than you would expect at the beginning. At the end, you will discover what LaRouche called laughter, music, and creativity.

Non-Violent Direct Action

Speed: If you could solve the problem of traveling at the speed of light—let’s be more ambitious and say you could go 50 light-years an hour—if you did this over 24 hours, that’s 1200 light-years a day; that’s 438,000 light-years a year. If we’re trying to get to the galaxy IC-1101, which is a billion light-years away. If my calculations are right, we can do that in 245 years traveling at 50 light-years an hour. This seems to illustrate that whatever we think about the limitations of the universe, we have a lot of work to do before we can explore much of it.

I want to try to say something here about the true revolution that Leibniz and his friends and his ancestors and descendants talk about in terms of this being the best of all possible worlds. We can sit here and discuss something like this, despite the fact that clearly, none of us are going to see anything like the kind of revolution that would actually allow us to actually ever visit these places. Except, they’re in our minds; and that is the amazing fact about the human mind which is not the brain. That’s something to say to several of the people who are out here these days as the major scientific thinkers of our time.

But there’s a level in terms of the revolutionary process that I wanted to reference. Helga presented a paper to the two-day online International Conference of the Association of Asian Scholars on “Revisiting Gandhi: Peace, Justice and Development,” October 30-31, 2020, for the celebration of the 150th birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and delivered a speech, “Gandhi’s Vision for a New Paradigm in International Relations, a World Health System, and Direct Non-Violent Action In Times of Social Breakdown.” The idea was that Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and others were taking something successful with the American Revolution and raising it to an entirely different level. Because the problem, of course, in the American Revolution or many of the other revolutions that came subsequently, is bloodshed. The problem is, they were violent. The defense of humanity in the case of the Second World War was necessary, but 100 million people died in the course of it.

There’s a better way to do things, and what has been proposed by the Schiller Institute, and which Helga initiated through a set of conferences, including this one, was that we force a deliberative process among all of humanity to resolve this problem of the most fundamental, far-reaching changes in our planet’s history, without violence.

Some people might think it’s more possible to get to IC-1101 than to solve that problem, it would seem really not to be as daunting. I think it’s a different order of problem in one sense, but it could be the case that we decide to work together as a human race to do this. Because there’s so much that has been done by so many to bring us to this point, and it seems to me that anybody who is young, hearing what we’re talking about here today could become excited about the prospect, that maybe you are the person who, like Mandela, like Gandhi, like King, change the world in ways that are permanent.

That’s what this movement is about. That’s what we mean by the idea of revolution and change.

A Time to End Colonialism

Zepp-LaRouche: I want to endorse some of the requests from the previous speakers. Read Lyn a lot; it’s very important for your soul and your mind. Then, write poems; absolutely important because it forces your mind to not think in terms of prose. If you write a good poem, you can’t be deductive or have Flat-Earth kind of thinking. You have to think in metaphor, otherwise it’s not a good poem.

I was recently at a space conference and had some wonderful discussions with some of the organizers. They had one big concern. They said, we have to get across to people about space. We have to go out there, because once you are out there, everything will have a different perspective. Our great friend, the German American rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke, with his notion of the extraterrestrial imperative, had the same idea. Once man is in space, the identity of the human species changes towards reason. You can’t have a freak-out and leave a spaceship; you’re not going to get very far. So, you have to be reasonable and rational.

This idea of The Woman on Mars; Lyn always had the idea that space travel and building cities on other planets was absolutely the next step in our evolution. That is really in terms of the time one needs to get to this other galaxy Dennis was speaking about, it’s like the person who started to build the cathedral in Florence, not knowing how the cupola would be put together with the catenary approach. But building it in the confidence that this would happen.

In the same way, we have to make sure that the human species will be the immortal species by surviving when the Sun goes in a turmoil, and we cannot live on Earth anymore. We better have colonies on other planets in other solar systems. We have to be confident that we will solve a lot of these problems, because it is in the nature of human beings to be creative.

Finally, to bring it back on Earth, I think we are in a very exciting period, because these countries of the Non-Aligned Movement are now on the march. I can only encourage you to follow that very closely, because right now there is a revolutionary momentum taking place. They are determined to end colonialism forever. I think that that is really the unfulfilled promise of the American Revolution.

Get people to understand that the developing countries have all the rights we have and end colonialism in its modern form. Do that with the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, with the spirit of nonviolence. This is not just being nonviolent; it means to get your mind pure. Gandhi had a whole bunch of efforts and exercises he would do to make sure that not even the slightest violent thought would enter his mind. I think that that is something. Take your mind as seriously as the food you eat, or even more so. The more you start to work on your own identity in this way, the more you will approach Nicholas of Cusa, who talked about the sweetness of truth. He said that once you discover the sweetness of truth, it will be sweeter than any beautiful thing you can imagine eating or drinking, because the sweetness of truth is the highest sweetness you can accomplish.

There is a lot to be conquered, and all the reasons for optimism. If you know somebody who is depressed—your colleague or your friend—take him or her by the hand and show them what is there. When you do something for another human being like that, it makes your own soul healthy as well. So, in this spirit, let’s build a revolutionary movement to make a better world.

Ross: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Dennis Speed, Megan Dobrodt, Jacques Cheminade, Anastasia Battle—thank you all. Thank you to everyone who joined us on this two-day Schiller Institute conference, which is coming on a week of major activities, recollections, celebrations, and initiatives of the LaRouche movement. We look forward to our work together.