This article appears in the June 23, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Lyndon LaRouche’s View of
‘The Vernadsky Strategy’
[Print version of this article]
Schiller Institute representative Jason Ross presented the following paper to a Eurasian Scientific Conference on Fundamental and Applied Problems of Managing Sustained Development in the System ‘Nature—Society—Man’ held in Moscow, May 23–24, 2023, at the State University of Management. The conference was dedicated to celebrating the outstanding scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, born 160 years ago.
Greetings to the conference! I am Jason Ross representing the Schiller Institute, founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of the late Lyndon LaRouche.
It is an honor to address this State University of Management forum celebrating the birth of the great V. I. Vernadsky.
Today I will present the views on Vernadsky expressed by [the late] Lyndon LaRouche—the American economist, statesman and many-time presidential candidate, and friend of Russia and in particular of Russian science—and I will present the contemporary application of those views through Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.”
1. LaRouche’s View of ‘The Vernadsky Strategy’
The World Situation
In a 2001 article “The Vernadsky Strategy,” Lyndon LaRouche identifies Russia as one of only a very few cultures on this planet capable, at that time, of “conceptualizing the initiation of global solutions” to world problems. He points in particular to the role of Vernadsky:
The figure of biogeochemist V.I. Vernadsky should serve as a key unifying figure, for the contribution of the science of Russia and Ukraine to the unified development of Eurasia as a whole.
The choice facing the world, LaRouche writes, is
between an efficient commitment to the cooperative economic development among at least most of the peoples of Eurasia; or, world domination by a new form of the old imperial maritime power of Venice’s financial oligarchy, an Anglo-American “new Roman Empire.”
But there is a cultural and scientific outlook necessary to cause a world choice for development:
No nation of western or central continental Europe has a present instinct for truly sovereign national-policy initiatives which might be contrary to the English-speaking powers.
But there is Russia!
[W]estern Europe can not survive the present trends, except through relevant long-term cooperation pivoted upon a willing role by President Putin’s Russia, and the fact that Russia, by its deeply embedded national-cultural instinct, is capable of thinking in terms of global solutions….
LaRouche explains that Russia is also crucial for cooperation among the states of Asia. “A group of nations, brought together through aid of triangular cooperation among Russia, China, and India”—and Russia has a unique role in bringing this about—gives an opportunity for cooperation that were otherwise virtually impossible to achieve, LaRouche says in 2001.
Vernadsky’s Role
The concepts of the biosphere and the noösphere developed by V.I. Vernadsky are of crucial importance today in properly understanding basic economic infrastructure—the platform, the man-made environment through which production is situated—and in expanding the frontiers of science, as well as our understanding of what science is.
LaRouche summarizes Vernadsky’s most significant contribution:
[Vernadsky] emphasized the anomalous, but unavoidable evidence, that living processes produce measurable physical changes in non-living processes, changes which non-living processes themselves do not produce. He defined this as the biosphere.
He also emphasized, similarly, that the intervention of the human creative-scientific powers into the biosphere, produces measurable forms of physical improvements in the biosphere, which are not generated without such human intervention. He defined our planet, in which living processes transform non-living ones, and cognitive processes transform living processes, as a noösphere.
[This] organization of his own and others’ experimental discoveries of anomalies and principles, into the form of a concept of the noösphere, represented a necessary revolution in the world’s way of thinking about scientific knowledge in general.
This concept demands new lines of research.
Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere challenges us today
to pay attention to known, and previously unknown features of the physical principles which distinguish living processes from non-living ones.
LaRouche warned of the potential emergence of a crisis in infectious disease, against which new defenses are required.
Vernadsky’s scientific role, including his having built upon the work of such thinkers as Pierre Curie and Louis Pasteur, has put Russia in a unique position to advance work on this field.
A New Concept of Science
In his work The Study of Life and the New Physics, V.I. Vernadsky points to how the revolutionary work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein has re-defined even the basic terms of physics—space and time, energy and matter. Today, a renewed understanding of life and cognition, through a revolution in approach made possible by Vernadsky, still remains.
LaRouche identifies a division in the pursuit of scientific understanding, between the Classical method of Plato, Nicolaus of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, G.W. Leibniz, Carl Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, among others, versus the explicitly un-principled method of the empiricists.
Notably, all of the empiricists … insist that life is, in principle, a product of mechanical principles. The latter extremist view, is typified by the reductionist ivory-tower doctrines of those who insist that life is merely a product of molecular biology.
The same problem in understanding the unique phase-space of human cognition leads many today to consider mind an epiphenomenon of the brain, an emergence from biological processes themselves based on chemistry.
As Microsoft’s Sébastien Bubeck et al. acknowledge in their recent article “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4”:
Perhaps the only real test of understanding is whether one can produce new knowledge.
Precisely! The hypothesis of new physical principles, as by Johannes Kepler, differentiated him totally from all preceding astronomers, who sought merely to “save appearances,” to accurately predict results. But a new principle, must necessarily contradict certain existing beliefs, rather than flowing from them.
Again, LaRouche:
The work of specialists in relevant types of anomalous biogeochemical effects must be fostered, and teams of gifted young students and professionals employed and equipped, so that we might fill up the numerous experimental gaps in our studies of relevant anomalies.
2. Application to Today: Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s ‘Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture’
At a conference in Nov. 2022, Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed what she called “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture”:
The new paradigm which will be characteristic of the new epoch, and toward which the new global security and development architecture must be directed, must eliminate the concept of oligarchism for good, and proceed to organize the political order in such a way, that the true character of humanity as the creative species can be realized.
The ten points she has provided to spur discussion, as “food for thought and a dialogue among all people concerned to find a basis for a world order guaranteeing the durable existence of the human species,” arise from a view of man expressed in her tenth principle:
The basic assumption for the new paradigm is that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.
This capability of infinitely perfecting our species demands “space science, biophysics, [and] thermonuclear fusion science” as drivers today.
From such fundamental research come the principles that underlie technology and are the source for all fundamental economic growth. By the means of scientific advance, infrastructure development, financial reorganization towards a credit system for needed large-scale investments, and a commitment to provide every human being with access to a universal education, we will eliminate poverty in every nation on this planet and extend life expectancy and health.
To do this, writes Zepp-LaRouche, “The new global security architecture must eliminate the concept of geopolitics by ending the division of the world into blocs.” Instead:
The new International Security and Development Architecture must be a partnership of perfectly sovereign nation states, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter.
To this end, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the Woman from Trier, concludes: “World Citizens of all countries, unite!”
3. Conclusion
I conclude this talk by quoting, again, from LaRouche’s April 26, 2001, article “The Vernadsky Strategy”:
Vernadsky serves us now as perhaps the most appropriate, personalized image of the benefits, for all mankind, of pursuing the core development of the new Eurasia cooperation, the development of its basic economic infrastructure, as the enduring gift of this cooperation to all future mankind.
LaRouche concludes his article:
Therefore, let the actual thinking process of the great Vernadsky be replicated in the minds of the professionals and gifted students of today. To bring that desired effect about, one should begin, by remembering his name.
Let us dedicate ourselves to this mission!
Thank you.
