Solidarité & Progrès Paris Conference

We Need a Campaign of
‘Learned Ignorance’

by Diane Sare

[Print version of this article]

The following is an edited version of the written remarks by Diane Sare, delivered to Panel One of the Nov. 8-9 Schiller Institute-Solidarité & Progrès Paris conference, “The Emancipation of Africa and the World Majority, a Challenge for Europe.” Mrs. Sare, a long-time associate of the late statesman and physical economist, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., is a former candidate for U.S. Senate from New York. Panel One was titled, “Responding to the Cry of the People.” Subheads have been added. The video is available here.

Good morning. I think I’ll start with what just happened in the New York City Mayoral election, because some of you might be interested in that, and because a friend of mine read me what the German newspapers are saying about it—I’m sure the papers in France are not so stupid!

As some of you may remember, I gave a speech this past July in Berlin, where I said that the children of Gaza would save the United States. And I’m sticking to that. I didn’t say Zohran Mamdani will save the United States, just to be clear. There is a difference. The difference is the poetical principle, which is what moves us. I don’t know what Mr. Mamdani plans to do, and even if he is brilliantly successful, he is the mayor of a city, not the President of the United States. But a poetic impulse moves the hearts of humanity as a whole, and the election of Mamdani is a reflection of that.

A 34-year-old Muslim immigrant, born in Uganda, parents from India, self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, won an election for an office, mayor of New York City, which is seen as a stepping stone to the Presidency (which he is ineligible for, not being born in the United States). That is, this is one of the most powerful offices in the United States. The $115 billion budget of New York, is greater than the economies of over 100 nations.

How did this occur?

What happened is that, using October 7, 2023 as a pretext, the murderous [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu regime and his British handlers, with massive funding and weapons from the United States, began a war of annihilation against the impoverished civilian population of Palestine.

New York is a city of immigrants. Over 150 languages are spoken in Queens [one of NYC’s five boroughs—ed.]. Since the Palestinian people have been forced to leave their homes for many years now, there are many of them, all over the world. They talk to people, they use social media, they documented the monstrous crimes being committed against children and other unarmed, helpless people—and millions of Americans responded, particularly young people, college students who said, “I don’t want my government involved in a genocide. I am responsible for my government, I am responsible for where my university spends its money, what it is invested in (universities are like giant hedge funds these days), and I am going to use my power as a citizen in a republic, as a student in an educational institution, to make my voice heard.”

So, thousands of students filled the streets of New York and occupied their campuses. The Zionist lobby, which is closely intertwined with Wall Street—think Jeffrey Epstein—went berserk. They started arresting people, and canceling their degrees. That was a brilliant tactic—Norm Finkelstein, a Jewish author and peace activist, whose parents had both been in concentration camps, predicted that the campus protests would evaporate over the summer break in 2024, because, he said, the parents were going to come down on their children’s heads: “I am not spending $350,000 for you to go to Columbia for you to waste it all by getting arrested, and ending up with no degree!”

And you had Zionist-fascist congressmen, like Elise Stefanik from New York State, hauling university presidents before the Congress and forcing them to resign.

Then, after [Donald] Trump was elected [President] (and many Muslims voted for him, by the way, because how could you vote for [Joe] Biden?), anti-genocide protestors, or even people who simply wrote editorial columns, students with green cards, who were in the United States legally, were arrested and threatened with deportation.

So the campus movement was squashed. But the electoral process still existed. In 2024 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (which should be forced to register as a foreign lobby group) spent hundreds of millions of dollars defeating anti-genocide members of Congress. This angered people, including many Trump supporters, who thought that they had voted for “America first” and found out that it was “Israel first.”

MAGA Loyalists Revolt

There is also a revolt against the AIPAC narrative among President Trump’s MAGA loyalists. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent three days in Las Vegas bashing [American conservative political commentator] Tucker Carlson and [Georgia Congresswoman] Marjorie Taylor Green as “anti-Semites” who are a threat to the “conservative movement.” There is a brawl within the Heritage Foundation, because its president, Kevin Roberts, refused to distance himself from Tucker Carlson.

Columbia University, which is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is in a very Jewish neighborhood. I petitioned there to get on the ballot for the 2024 election. I wore a “Ceasefire” button. One person told me that the Upper West Side synagogues were split 50/50 for a ceasefire. Now, according to Norm Finkelstein—a Jewish author whose parents were holocaust survivors—60% of American Jews believe Netanyahu is committing war crimes, and 40% believe he is committing genocide.

Thirty-three percent of Jewish voters in New York cast their votes for Mamdani.

Of course, the other big factor in the election was the economy. Most young people cannot afford a house, or, frankly, even rent. The average automobile costs $50,000. In 1973 my parents paid $67,000 for the four-bedroom house I grew up in. Mamdani campaigned for a rent freeze and more affordable housing.

President Trump helped Mamdani by posting “Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self-professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!”

According to Mamdani’s campaign, they had 104,000 volunteers who knocked on 3 million doors. He received over 1 million votes, over 50%.

He also picked up some endorsements from some slimy, unreputable people, like snake-oil salesman [and U.S. Senator from Vermont] Bernie Sanders, and Congresswoman AOC [Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Democrat from New York’s 15th CD], not to mention the disgusting pro-Zionist governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, who was stuck in a pickle, because she had driven [Andrew] Cuomo out of the governorship to take his place, and so couldn’t possibly support him.

This is what I mean by a poetic principle. Mamdani, himself, might turn out to be terrible. Or he might be good, but blocked at every turn. The election of Mamdani reflects a dynamic that has its own existence separate from the person who became mayor. What does this mean for you? For us?

A Revolutionary Moment

We are in a revolutionary moment. The moment Lyndon LaRouche described when he said, “You turn on the light switch and the water starts running. You turn off the water, and the lights go on.” That’s how the world is working for the billionaire elites who think they control everything. Everything they try to do to save their system, whether it’s printing money, not printing money, or censorship, won’t work. And by the way—they are also bankrupt—the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury had to pump $50 billion into the banks overnight last Friday, just to prevent chaos.

So, we have an urgent task, which is very personal for each one of us. We must not allow ourselves to be little people; we must become big people quickly. LaRouche once said to me and a group of us, when we were younger, running for office, that the mark of a great leader is not that they march around telling other people what to do, but that they create more leaders. It’s not a competition!

Do you think that the planet has too many leaders right now? I think we have too many pompous idiots, who parade around in self-deluded fantasy states. But true leaders?? No! We are suffering from a lack of leadership. How do we become leaders?

Well, the first thing, as Pope Leo XIV just reminded us, when he spoke about Nicholas of Cusa—and Helga is the world’s leading expert on Cusa—Cusa echoed Socrates: that the most important thing, if you wish to lead other people is to recognize that you don’t know! That we don’t know anything! We must have faith, and we know that there is a principle of perfection—that the creator of the universe has created perfectly, but that we, in the sphere of our short mortal existence, can only strive to be less imperfect; that we must be open to the joyful process of learning something new, which brings us to a higher understanding than we had previously.

So, we must be prepared over and over again to abandon ideas which we had held previously which turn out to be wrong. The amazing paradox for us all, is to know that Truth does exist—it’s not “your truth and my truth” and that sort of nonsense. Truth does exist, but in our lifetime, the best we can do is to apprehend it less and less imperfectly—and that is the beginning of wisdom.

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The amazing paradox for us all, is to know that Truth does exist—it’s not “your truth and my truth” and that sort of nonsense. Truth does exist, but in our lifetime, the best we can do is to apprehend it less and less imperfectly—and that is the beginning of wisdom.

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It is from this standpoint that we can end war and instead focus on our common enemies, which are those things that would prevent us from developing our creative potential, namely poverty, disease, war, and fear.

This is a short excerpt from a speech Mr. LaRouche gave in 2008 to a Washington, D.C. audience.

LaRouche put it this way [video]:

We are peoples on this planet, of different cultural backgrounds. We depend upon our association with our culture … or what becomes a common culture, to cooperate with nations of other cultures, and to define common aims of mankind, common goals of mankind—I’ll refer to one here, today, of that type. This is something we’re supposed to have learned in 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia: The aim of victory lies not in war, but in peace. In the peace of peoples who have replaced killing each other, with cooperating with each other. And using their differences in cultural background, as the basis for their cooperation, not for their conflict. And to use the weapons of warfare, only as is necessary to maintain and defend that peaceful order, with a minimum of effort, a minimum of conflict when necessary.

So therefore, the time has come, instead of saying, “Who is the enemy?”— I can tell you who the enemy is: the British Union Jerk. That’s an enemy; there are other enemies. But how do we overpower our enemies? What’s the best way to overpower our enemies? To conquer them? No! Conquest is not victory! It’s to dissuade them from continuing to be enemies! And how was that done in 1648? It was done through the Peace of Westphalia, of putting the benefit of the other, above one’s own. And if people do that, then, you have a system of cooperation, a Westphalian system, as it’s called. That was Roosevelt’s intention: to create a global, Westphalian system. You take leading nations of the world, which at that time, were the United States, China, and Russia—the Soviet Union, then—who had conflicts! Very serious conflicts. And you take these nations, and bring them together by working, each for the benefit of the others, the common benefits.

Now, in terms of policy. How do you take all these airy-fairy ideas and make policy out of them?

What do people need to be able to develop their talents? Is it helpful to be housed? To have adequate food? To have decent healthcare? What about teachers? Libraries? Great artists and scientists, concert halls and laboratories?

This is what confronted the founders of the United States 250 years ago.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

How do you create a form of government which allows the human individual the greatest possibility of developing their mind? Of making a contribution to the future development of mankind? This is why the American Declaration of Independence says that our inalienable rights are “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” not, “Life, Liberty, Property.” What a stupid “right,” Property?? It’s over when you die!

So, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, to do this. So, what does that mean? It means you better study physical economy! It means you have to know how to ensure that the future generations will be more numerous, live longer, and be smarter and happier, even than we are today, here at this conference—and we have to master these ideas quickly!

This is what I fear: In the United States right now, we have a government full of stupid people, who think they are smart. Isn’t that the worst thing? It’s one thing for someone to be stupid, which is not really acceptable, but they won’t harm others if they keep it to themselves—but to be stupid and believe that you’re a genius is very dangerous!

I’ll give you one example, and you’ll see what I mean. A couple weeks ago, the Russians announced the successful test of the Burevestnik missile. It’s a nuclear-powered missile that can fly at low altitudes because of its virtually limitless source of energy, making it undetectable. This missile made a trip of 14,000 km. That’s pretty far!

So, some moron in the Trump Administration decided that Russia has “tested a nuclear missile.” They didn’t test a nuclear missile, you idiot! They have designed a nuclear-energy-fueled missile which can fly around the world, probably a few times, before someone decides what target to hit. And yes, it can carry a nuclear warhead, but it doesn’t need to, because like the Oreshnik missile, right now, no one in NATO can stop it.

But what does President Trump say? “We’re going to resume nuclear testing, because Russia and China are already doing it!” How stupid! Does he know what he’s talking about? Does he care how the rest of the world responds to that? And then, our idiot, tattooed Secretary of War [Pete Hegseth] doubles down and gives a speech about how this makes us all more secure; that is, testing nuclear bombs is going to make us all secure.

Do you see what I mean? These people are stupid! And being stupid, and holding powerful positions in a nuclear superpower, they are very dangerous. So, we need a campaign to end stupidity in high places! (Low places, too, but that’s the next phase.)

We can name it after Nicholas of Cusa’s important work, On Learned Ignorance. We’ll call it the “learned ignorance” campaign, and we can be happy and relax by admitting that there is so much about our universe that we don’t know! And as we discover things we didn’t understand before, we will have more power over nature, and we can raise the standard of living for our fellow human beings.

Let’s organize our nations not to be enemies, but to recognize that we share a common interest in the development of the human species, as in Helga’s Ten Principles, the final one being that we are each individually, and as a species, capable of becoming less imperfect tomorrow than we are today. There’s no reason to wait. We can start now.