What follows is the Feb. 15 keynote address of Lyndon LaRouche to the Presidents' Day conference of the Schiller Institute and International Caucus of Labor Committees. The conference theme was ``Toward a New Bretton Woods.'' Subheads have been added.

This will be an interesting coming week. We have, among others, some guests from Ukraine and Russia, and, during the course of the week following the conference, we will have a public event, in the Washington area, and we have people who will be speaking, senior representatives of their professions as economists in Russia and Ukraine, as well as, naturally, two of them here are elected officials.

And the purpose is to give, firsthand, official Washington and people in the United States generally, a fresh view, from participants and eyewitnesses, of the nature of the crisis which threatens the former Soviet Union, and, also, eastern Europe as well. It's something which official Washington does not understand. I think, from what I've heard, that there will be a representative turnout of the official eastern European think-tank people, to hear what is to be said. The important thing is to present to the United States, and particularly into its nation's capital, a fresh view of a crisis which our government, and people around it generally, have yet to comprehend.

Now, what we'll do these two days, is a very focussed conference, very much limited, in terms of its essential subject matter, or its underlying subject matter, presenting various aspects, some of the leading aspects of that subject matter.

We are in very `hard times'

There are people who, in these times, more and more, high-ranking and official people in the United States and in the financial community, in politics, and others, are speaking of the imminence of a systemic collapse of the present international financial and monetary system. We are n a time where these statements from the higher-ranking authorities, are matched, in most parts of the world, by what are called political mass strikes.

They're somewhat like strikes, in the sense that people decide to go out in the street and oppose policies, or oppose institutions. But, they've occurred before in history, and they're not like economic strikes. They are {political} strikes. Sometimes, you get political mass strikes which are short-term, in one part of the world or another, and things quiet down after some changes. Life goes on.

But then you get, sometimes, as presently, wave after wave after wave of political mass strikes, coming like waves of a straight storm along the beaches. And the waves are mixed with the trees falling, i.e., banks: financial crises. And then people are living like people in a town upon a seashore beset by a hurricane coming in from the sea. People are living, more and more, in every part of the world, including in the United States, in what we called, in the 1930s, in the period of that Depression, ``hard times.'' People today, in the United States--

Let's speak of those who are in the lower 80% of income brackets of households. The typical family requires two to three incomes in the household, {not} to successfully achieve the real standard of living, in terms of purchasing power, of quality of material goods, necessities, health care, education, and science services that they could receive 20, 30 years ago with one to one-and-a-half incomes in a household.

It's like the joke that was going around during last spring, during the election campaign, when President Clinton was advised to say there are many million more jobs being created in the United States. And then some guy with a loud voice from the gallery shouts out, ``Yes, and I just took three of them!''

People may object, because they have illusions about the situation, which I'll come to. They may object to the use of the word ``depression'' to describe the present situation. But they would not object, not {sne} people, and not people in the lower 80% of income brackets, to the use of the term, the alternate term for depression: ``hard times.''

People used to live in cities or towns, and the places they lived, were close to the places in which they worked, usually factories or something else. People worked on farms. They had a relatively stable family life. The parents were in the home nearly every day, both parents, and one parent was there most of the day. The children had nurture. And the commuting to work, if it wasn't simply walking, was feasible and cheap. You took a trolley car, a bus, or a short drive. Or you'd car-pool for five or six miles with a neighbor.

No, not today. Look at your cities. There are no jobs you can walk to in the cities, from one place to the other. You lose a job one place, walk to another place, get another job? No! It can't be done. There are not that number of workplaces. And, certainly, there are no jobs you can walk to, on which you could sustain a family with a moderately good skill at employment.

Now, you must drive miles to get to your place of work. Both parents usually must drive to work, and one will take an extra job, and maybe somebody else in the household takes an extra job. You don't live in the city any more. You were driven out of the city. You live in a suburb some place, as in Northern Virginia, many miles from your work. You commute to work an hour to an hour and a half, to two hours a day, to and from work. Maybe both parents do that.

What you can get in the suburbs, is a shack which is priced between $150,000 to $250,000, newly built--and it will last, as long as there are no heavy windstorms. It looks gentrified on the outside, but it looks like a box on the inside, a cardboard box, maybe with a little gypsum added to it.

The schools? {There are no schools worth talking about these days.} If you look at the content of education, look at the class size, look what's done to the pupils. Look at the universities. Our universities are a {farce}! Most of our {leadng} universities, such as Stanford University, for example, in California: a farce! Carnegie: a farce! University after university, a farce. Community colleges springing up, providing people with education who couldn't get access to a four-year college, or couldn't afford it. What do they get? Junk! Junk food for the mind! They come out knowing nothing, except getting some opinions.

And, even in the cow colleges: What's the course in philosophy that's taught--around here? Well, it's usually the existentialism of a Nazi philosopher named Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger, who said that every person comes into society as an ``alien to humanity,'' and is ``thrown'' into society against their will, in which they fight, as in a jungle, against alien beasts to survive. Now, this guy was a real Nazi. He was also the lover of Hannah Arendt, prior to the time that Hannah left Germany, for known reasons. And, she shared his philosophical views, even though she didn't share his Nazi Party membership. He was a leading official.

And, what you'll also find taught in most universities, in the philosophy department, is another proto-Nazi: Friedrich Nietzsche, the forerunner of the Nazis, an existentialist of a similar stripe and color. And, these people: ``Children are as if thrown into society,'' as Heidegger says. And, in universities, in philosophy departments, they're mostly thrown to land on their heads.

So that, in terms of physical conditions of life, and in terms of cultural conditions of life, of nurture, of intellectual nurture and culture, these are hard times! {Very} hard times.

And, most of you know it. If you are in excess of 55 years of age, you are in mortal danger. If you get a cold and go to the hospital, somebody's going to be standing over you, a nurse or somebody else, asking you to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. They may {kill} you in the hospital.

Doctors are afraid to treat you. They have to check the computer, to see if the malpractice practitioners of medicine, of Wall Street, will allow you tobe treated. You get surrogate treatments, which don't work. The rate of morbidity among senior citizens and others, is rising; the rate of morbidity among children and young adolescents among poorer families, is rising.

The future of humanity is at stake

Then, most people don't believe any more in our government. Fifty-one percent of the eligible voters did not vote in the last national election year, last year. Why didn't they vote? Because they are persuaded, not that the politicians have the wrong policies; that point was passed a long time ago. They now are of a much more profound opinion, that these politicians, this Congress, and this Executive branch, is incapable of making any changes in policy, which would not be worse than those terrible policies already in force.

You have the President of the United States, sitting in the midst of the greatest crisis in humanity's modern history, world crisis (I'll get to that). And, what are they talking about? They're talking about ``fixing up this,'' ``fixing up that,'' arranging it so that you can get to parties, or something.

But the issues on which the future life of humanity, and the existence of grandchildren or great-grandchildren for people in this room, for example: those are the questions which are on the table. And, {these institutions don't wish to hear about it.} They want to talk about ``austerity, austerity, austerity, austerity.'' ``We must protect Wall Street at all costs. We must protect the financial institutions at all costs. We must not have a collapse, at all costs. We must throw as many babies into the furnace of Moloch as is necessary to appease the gods, so that our banking system and our Wall Street people, who pay the largest amount of contributions into political campaigns, don't suffer inconvenience.''

As a result of this pattern, which is true all over the world, especially so in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact area, where Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. George Bush, her poodle-dog, did some nasty things in the early pat of this decade, you have conditions like those in the United States. Different, but of the same species; different varieties, but the same problem.

As a result, in direct response to either the Maastricht atrocity into which Europe has entered as a partnership, or, simply because of IMF conditionalities, or IMF-dictated policies, masses of people, in increasing numbers, are repeatedly going into the streets, with increasingly red-eyed political mass strikes.

In France. In Belgium, for example. Belgium is a perfect example of this. In Belgium, you had some enemies of ours, back from the 1980s, 1970s and 1980s. There was an operation run against us politically in Europe, out of the back door of NATO. It involved something out of Brussels. Now, these people, or this group of people, who were engaged in these operations against us, quite openly, as back door of NATO people, turned out to be a bunch of satanic child-molesters who have been caught, and identified: are the ring, in terms of murdering children in satanic rituals.

Now, the parents of these children, of some of these children, and others, are justly enraged against the Belgian government, which had been working assiduously to cover up this scandal. The same group of people who are these child-molesters and murderers, who are already hated by the population on this account, turn out to be some of the people pushing the most violent and most savage austerity in Belgium.

So, we have mass strikes in Belgium, repeatedly, coming out with a focus, twofoldly, on: Get rid of the murderous child-molesters, who are the same people behind the IMF-style or Maastricht-style policy.

You have, for similar reasons, Kohl, who has been chancellor of Germany for almost 15 years, is now placed in jeopardy, because of his role in stubbornly, and stupidly, I might add, clinging to the so-called Maastricht policy, which is destroying the German economy, and destroying Europe.

Mass strikes have broken out in Greece, over the same issue. Mass strikes in South Korea, which early brought about the fall of the government there, for similar issues. And, as I've noted, the cuckoo fell last week from the nest in Ecuador, for the same reason.

In Spain: The German economy is being shut down in Spain, because the Germans, in their infinite wisdom, decided to scrap their own production, and buy cheaper parts from Spain--``outsourcing,'' it's called, or ``outhouse-sourcing,'' in some cases. To use cheap labor, with no particular technology added; the strip-down factory. This phenomenon is all over the world. People talk about ``outsourcing''; runaway shops, some people call them. Other people call them ``economic prosperity comes from the Third World.'' Bunk!

In the nineteenth century, the colonial powers of Europe would go to a country, and loot it. How? By setting up plantations. This started in the sixteenth century, with the Portuguese, who discovered that you could use plantations, and that's how the mass slave business occurred in the Americas. There were the Portuguese, and then the Dutch and then the British followed in the Venetian track of black slavery. Only this time it was {mass} black slavery, human beings being chewed up by Moloch, in order to feed cheap labor for plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean.

We had mines. This was done all over the world; not necessarily slavery, but something tantamount to it. Forced labor, into plantations and mines, to produce for the profit of the colonial powers. And the level of existence of the majority of the population in these countries, collapsed.

Today, they've added something to plantations and mines. They're called factories; in northern Mexico, they're called {maquiladoras.} And Mexico has been ruined, its economy has been ruined, by becoming a country for outsourcing. Thailand: the government is in danger of falling, and the country is in danger of going into a collapse, over the issue of the effects upon Thailand of outsourcing. Malaysia is not far behind. Indonesia is in crisis, partly because the Portuguese, along with the epublicans and the British, are trying to destabilize Indonesia. Myanmar is being destabilized for the same reason.

'The ultimate horror show'

So, all over the world, we have these and similar kinds of things, converging upon the ultimate horror show, which is what the British Commonwealth, helped by George Bush and his friends, are doing in mass murder in Africa.

For example, as I say, in the countries of Burundi and Rwanda, the population is somewhere on the order of magnitude of, probably about a few--in the teens of millions. Of this population, recently, about 2 million or more were put at jeopardy, by an invasion of Zaire, by forces under the direction of the dictator who is called the President of Uganda, Museveni, who was recently here in Washington, who is nothing but a puppet for the British, in an operation in which the governments of the dictators of Eritrea, the puppet-dictator of Ethiopia, and similar forces, using largely mercenary forces from veterans of the South Africa and Angolan wars, have invaded Zaire, for the purpose of destroying the country, carving up the mountainous part, which is rich with minerals and petroleum, and carving it up into colonial entelechies, which are ruled over by private armies controlled by corporations, such as the Barrick Gold which George Bush, the former President of the United States, represents. The ultimate horror show.

The same thing is in progress in Central Asia. The policy of Bush and his British friends in Asia, is to grab the strategic raw materials, the petroleum, the natural gas, and whatever food potential there is in these areas, in order to control--what? By controlling the relevant shields in Siberia, Eurasia generally, and Africa, by controlling these two things, in the case that all the economies and financial systems of the world collapse, as these fellows believe, rightly, is in process, and that the nation-state collapses and disintegrates in the manner which Gingrich demands, that under those conditions of chaos, these ellows, with their mercenary armies of cast-offs of various wars of the 1970s and 1980s, these veterans of those wars, these mercenaries; these wild geese, that fly over bloody fields; that they will control these resources.

And, firms like that with which George Bush is associated, or the drug-pushing Moon cult with which George Bush is associated, will control the majority, as property rights, held and defended by armed mercenary bands, on which the maintenance of any semblance of civilization in any part of the world depends. And, most of the world, as this crazy Samuel Huntington has spouted, will be condemned to a virtually abandoned territory: {terra incognita,} walled off as uninhabitable territory, ruled by nomad bands, and who knows what else, outside what remains of a decayed civilization.

That's the kind of world we're living in. There are comparable periods before this; not in the twentieth century. We could have had something like that, if Hitler had not been defeated. If Hitler had not been defeated, we would have had a one-world order less bad than that which George Bush tried to set up; and Thatcher. That's comparable.

We face the same danger in a new form today; but now, we call it globalization. Some call it globaloney, eh? We've had the fall of empires. We had the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, we had the fall of the Roman Empire in the East. We had the fall of the various Babylonian empires, and so forth. We've had catastrophes in which whole cultures, whether empires or not, have demonstrated their moral unfitness to survive. And most of what are falsely called primitive peoples on this planet, are relics of cultures which collapsed; and a poor, ragged Yahoo remnant of the former mighty empire, or culture, is called a primitive or indigenous people.

We could find, very simply, if this crisis is not halted and reversed, that we would go back to conditions, political and economic policy conditions, which, at best, are comparable to those found in Europe during the middle of the foureenth century, the period of the New Dark Age. At that time, there were between 300 and 400 million persons living on this planet, with relatively low life expectancies compared to today.

If we allow globalization, George Bush, and these things to go on, what will happen is that through famine, disease, and the kinds of strife we're now seeing unleashed, that the population of this planet will undergo a demographic collapse, from over 5.2 billion persons, down to levels of the fourteenth-century world or below; that 95% of the total surviving world's population, within 50 years from now, will have life expectancies on the order of magnitude of 20s or 30s, adult life expectancies; child mortality beyond belief; and, 95 percent or more will be, as the former chief editor of the London {Times} has desired, and so said, that 95% will be totally uneducated Yahoos, which is a word which Jonathan Swift used to described the population of England, under the rule of the rear-ends of royal horses, during the early eighteenth century, which we know, today, more recently in the United States, as Confederates: Yahoo!

This has not happened on a global scale, in known history. We've had empires collapse, but then, some other part of the world would step up.

For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire, particularly the collapse of Byzantium, or its mortal stays, was accompanied by the rise of a renaissance in northern India. This renaissance in northern India was associated with the rise of what became known as the Persian and Arab renaissance, or the Baghdad Caliphate, which was the partner of Charlemagne, in trying to bring some degree of civilization to Europe.

So that, in the past, one part of the world has collapsed, other parts have survived, civilization has gone on, or the current of it has gone on some place, at least in known history. And, relics of one civilization have reached out to those who were crushed culturally by the collapse of older civilizations, and humanity has gone on and on, to such effect that, ntil about 1966, one can say that, in known history, until a downturn which began in 1966, about 30 years ago, that the general progress of humanity, as measured in demographics, demographics overall of population, demographics of households, productive powers of labor, the cultural standard of life, has generally been upward, despite all the evils which have beset this planet, from time to time and place to place; until 1966, at which point the whole planet began to go down.

So, we are in a situation unlike anything known in world history, though we can draw lessons from catastrophes which have occurred, or near-catastrophes, in earlier parts of history. {There's nothing comparable to what threatens us today, in the known history of mankind.} And, in Washington, they're talking about better toilet seats for the unemployed.

How Americans became cowards

Now, we can speak of ``Someone behind this thing must be responsible.'' It would be nice to say that. People always like to blame somebody above. It starts out in childhood, where two-year-olds start to blame their parents for everything that goes wrong. Since they have authority, they must be responsible. Eh? ``I'm going to get God on them,'' or something like that, you know; ``they're doin' wrong.'' And, you get children who grow up to become very revolting. It starts out in childhood.

But, that is {childish.} And that's what I want to come to this afternoon. ``The fault lies,'' as Shakespeare once put these words in the mouth of one of his characters, ``the fault lies in ourselves.'' All of this 51% of those who were too disgusted, or too lazy, or too unmotivated, to turn out for a general national election, are guilty.

You saw that the world was lying in the ditch, the country was lying in the ditch, people were dying, things were wrong, policies needed changing. What did you do? ``I stayed home that day!'' Watching television--dirty movies, no doubt? ``No, that's immoral!''

But, do you support these policies? How many Americans--Oh, I'msure that it was less than 25% of the actual voters, who were shameless enough to call themselves Republicans, in this circumstance. Not all Republicans are bad people; we've got a few bad Democrats, too, and I could tell you about those, if you wanted to hear it. But, I'm not going to do that.

They {voted} for these guys! Oh, sure, there were only--The margin of Republican victory in the Congress over Democrats is about 10,000 votes. So, if 51% of the voters {didn't} vote, and of the 49% that {did} vote, less than 25% of the total number of eligible voters voted for these stinking policies of the Republican majority, where is the mandate for the balanced budget? There is no mandate for anything.

But, there {are} irresponsible people who willingly say that they're going to kill people, or increase their morbidity rates, in order to induce Gingrich and Mr. Lott (I believe he's a descendant of the famous Mrs. Lot of Middle East fame), to pass legislation which will increase the expenditure, tax expenditure by the poor, in order to make tax cuts for the filthy rich--and I mean filthy. You should see what they do on Wall Street--for the parasites.

We have a change in values in the society. Now, before 1966, in my lifetime, which doesn't quite reach a century yet (it may get there, if I'm not shot); in my lifetime, and in the lifetime of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, of whom, because of our family circumstances, I knew something, and in the light of our tradition in the United States, of those who made this nation, because we didn't want to be like Brutes--like British, that is. We thought the British System was immoral, and we wanted to have our own. We thought Locke was immoral, and we followed the pathway of Leibniz, not Locke; not ``life, liberty and property,'' but ``life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness''; not the welfare of the rich, but the general welfare, ``for ourselves and our posterity.''

We believed in production. When we bought something, we ooked at it from the standpoint of production. Most people who owned an automobile, prior to 1966, would pride themselves in being able to make significant repairs. It generally was a bad idea for them to repair the watch; but, most of the things, electronic and other appliances that were used by the typical American family, members of the family, young people as well as the senior people, could make significant repairs in the household, could make significant repairs on the automobiles and appliances, and other things they used.

If you were stopped by the road with a broken-down car, or some similar problem, it was likely that a passer-by driving by, stopping to help you (and they would do that in those days), would be able to provide the skills needed to help you get out of that mess. And you could work together, and do everything.

Most products, when designed to be sold, were designed to be {repairable.} You bought something, you wanted to have it repairable. You didn't want something which you would buy, and then throw away when it didn't work. Nowadays, people even go into marriage on that basis. ``Okay, I'll get married to this creature. If I don't like it, I'll throw it away and get a new one.'' It's part of the consumer culture, you see.

So, what happened is, some of you may recall this: Back in 1966, we had a fad which suddenly struck the draft-dodgers of 1966-68, who were concentrated largely on campuses, where you studied draft-dodging. It was the most popular subject. As a matter of fact, most hours of the academic day were spent in attending courses in draft-dodging. I saw it, I witnessed it. We have people in the room who can tell you in more detail about it.

So, among the draft-dodgers, there arose a cult, the cult of consumerism. And the cult went somewhat like this: ``We are trapped in this terrible bourgeois culture. We are trapped by our needs. We need this, we need that. We want diapers for our baby, for example.'' Or things like that. ``We {need} things. We allow ourselves to be entrappe by our needs, into becoming the victims of producers.'' ``You mean the people who own the corporations?'' ``No! No! Not just them! {All the blue-collar workers!} They're living at our expense. They're sucking our blood with their products.'' And, this became a movement.

The strategic Machine-Tool Principle

In my time, an earlier time, when you looked at a product or a problem, you looked at it in terms of how do you solve it? How do you produce what is needed to solve this problem? Short of wealth? How do we get more production? People unemployed? How do we create more {productive} jobs, not make-work? How do we give someone a job with some dignity, pride, where somebody's doing something that's useful for society? And, with all these things that need to be done, such as building dams so we don't get flooded in northern California, or building railroads, or building highways, or building hospitals, and all these kinds of things, there's work to be done. The welfare of society requires the work to be done; therefore, why do we allow somebody to sit in idleness, when we could mobilize the production, and make all of us wealthier, and solve our problems?

When we looked at a product, we looked at it in terms of quality of the production which it embodied. For example, take Germany. Now, Germany is interesting, or {was} interesting, up until recently, until Kohl was infected with Maastricht. It's a very dangerous disease. It may bring him down. And, Germany had high-priced labor, relatively, in terms of purchasing power, in terms of what they consumed, relative to the world. But, people liked higher-priced German products, over products from countries where labor was cheaper.

Why? Well, first of all, because German technology was superior, they were more productive; therefore, less labor was required, to produce a superior quality of product. Cheap labor is low-technology labor.

Now, how did that happen? Well, because in Germany, as in the United States during the nineteenth century, people around Alexander Dallas] Bache here, and his friends, like Alexander von Humboldt and [Carl] Gauss in Germany, set into motion what became known as the strategic machine-tool industry. And, every product in Germany, and for a time in the United States, was not simply produced by a worker. It was produced by a combination of work, productive labor, education, and the machine-tool sector. And, I've written a good deal about this; in an [{EIR}] issue coming out this week, there's more on it.

But, the basic way in which society functions, and always has functioned, the successes of society, are all based on a principle which the German model of economy represented, unlike the Third World model, which does {not} represent that.

The German model of economy is this. You start with a high level of education, universal education, if possible. Everyone gets a humanist education, that is, in the sense that you relive, in your own mind, as a student, the original act of discovery of a principle of nature or art. If you have that kind of education, you {know} what you're talking about. If you have the kind of education you have in school today, you {don't know} what you're talking about. You have only learned; and, your knowledge consists of mere gossip. That is, because the teacher, or the textbook, or somebody else told you it was true, you go on blabbering this thing as a truism forever, and say, ``I know|...'' You don't know anything, any more than the common neighborhood gossip, who just ``heard'' some place that somebody said something.

You start with that. When you have a sense of history, as the history of people before you, making discoveries of principle which enabled mankind as a whole to increase its power over nature, to solve problems, to provide a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy, better quality of family life; and you say, ``This is how it's done!'' And, you find in yourself that you {have} that creative power, because you've had the kind of education that brings it forth within you.

And then, wen you face a problem, an {unfamiliar} problem, you're able to solve and attack an unfamiliar problem with confidence, because you {know} how discoveries are made. You have re-experienced it. And maybe, if you're a little better developed, and more motivated, you may have made a few independent discoveries of principle yourself.

Now you take that kind of person, you put them, say, as a scientist or engineer, or a group of them. They set up a small family-style or similar kind of firm. And what do they do? They go to the local manufacturer or other people and say, ``We can make your product better, we can make your process better. Because we will bring science into play, to show you how to change the nature of your product, and improve also the productive process, by which you make the product.''

The German machine-tool sector, like what the U.S. machine-tool sector used to do, similarly, from its nineteenth-century tradition, or what we did in every war; or what the Soviet economy did, in the military sector. The same thing: strategic machine-tool sector. It's a high density of science, expressed as machine-tool and product designs, based on newly discovered principles or combinations involving newly discovered principles, to improve the quality of product and process, constantly.

So, you're not simply buying somebody cranking out a part, again and again; you're buying into a process which is incorporating improved technology at every point. And the reason you're able to do that, is because you have a labor force which is educated; not only educated, but a labor force which has the conditions of family and community nurture, which bring forth in the young person these potentials. That's the secret of modern society. And, that is what we've destroyed, and that's why we're in trouble.

Do the British own your opinion?

And the fact that so many of our citizens have gone along with this New Age, this new way of thinking--you know, if you don't like your sex, change it tomorrow! There's a course downtown, teaches you how to change your sex. Which is true, isn't it? It happens all over the place. You don't know by what appellative to address the person you met yesterday. ``What do I call you? Mr.? Ms.? Mrs.? What? What do I call you?''

So, the new ways are not good. But, what has happened--and you look at your entertainment, which is a reflection of that. As things have become worse, worse and worse and worse, a general decadence has set in worldwide in most of the world, or the world as a whole, over the past 30 years. People have fled from reality, into fantasy life, or what is called ``virtual reality.'' Not virtuous, virtual. They go rush to the television set!

How many hours a day is that thing on, and how many people are watching it? What do they watch? Look at the content of the programming. What's in it? What's the cognitive content? What's happening to them? Now, listen to the way they speak afterward. You see what's happening to our culture?

Then, you see what they do about schools. They do {nothing} about their schools. The schools are degenerating from the levels that they themselves knew when they were students. And they do nothing about it. They say, ``Well, I have to take care of my family.'' What about your child's mind!? Doing nothing. ``Well, we have to save expenses.'' What about the people who are going to die, if you don't have a hospital in this vicinity?

What if you have managed health care? How many people are going to die? ``We've got to save money.'' How many people are you willing to {kill} to save money? I recall that, in the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler said we've got to save money by getting rid of the useless eaters. Who were the useless eaters, to begin with? They were the chronically ill, those in mental institutions and people whose lives were not considered worth saving. In other words, what we call today cost-benefit analysis, as applied to medical practice. {This is what is in our culture! This is what most people on the streets, whether they believe it or not, feel obliged to approve of.} ``Well, the experts all agree...''; or, ``This is the agenda....'' ``This is their agenda. This is my party's agenda. Isn't this the popular mandate? Isn't this what people voted for in the last election?''

Yes: in 1934, ninety percent or more of the German population voted for Hitler! We haven't come quite to that level yet. We've only voted, what? Less than--only a slight majority for the Republicans in the Congress. We've not reached yet the Hitler level. {But we're on our way!}

And, that's the nature of our crisis, is that the people themselves are corrupted. You look at the politicians. What does poor Bill Clinton do? I know a little bit about poor Bill Clinton.

Now, he's one of the higher--a high-grade Baby Boomer. He's not the low grade, like most of the types, like Gingrich. He's one who thinks. But, he's very cautious about doing anything to spoil the purity of his administration's policy, by introducing actual thinking into the policymaking. It's called pollster, it's called triangulation. Sometimes, people call it opportunism. Others call it liberalism. You're not allowed: ``When you come into politics, you leave your morals outside, parked outside the door. Moral considerations don't apply. There is no right and wrong. Everything is relative.'' Cultural relative; and the cultural relative of these policies, turns out to be pigs, eh?

That's what's wrong with us.

Now, this is not an impossible situation. It's a terrible situation, but not an impossible one. We've had comparable experiences before, and we're back to the question of the mass strike.

The mass strike says that the way in which those in power think, is intolerable. ``And we refuse to submit. {We want them to bend, or even to break. We are out to break theirwill.} Not to cause them to abandon a particular policy, but to break their will, to cause them to abandon a way of making policy. It's not the product that stinks, it's the recipe. And we want the recipe changed.''

What that means, is the people are then using the government and institutions as a scapegoat for themselves. Look at how it works. The governments, people in governments, take polls. They survey popular opinion. People, knowing their opinions are being surveyed, have to go out and buy some popular opinion, at the right store. And they want to buy politically correct popular opinion. So they go to the {Washington Pestilence,} or the {Moonshine Times} here in town; or the {New York Slimes,} or Associated Pests; or the terrorist home journal, called CNN. Things like that.

And, they form their opinions by listening to talk shows on Sunday morning, or similar things. ``I know about what's going on. I keep up with things. I read the newspapers, I read the magazines, I listen to television, I know what's happening! I listen to the news, I know what's happening!''

They don't know a blasted thing. But, what they have done, is they have become a repository of what is called ``public opinion,'' largely manufactured, and largely administered by a very corrupt press, which is controlled by a few people who are mostly of British pedigrees, like the Hollinger Corporation, which controls the farm belt. People in the northwestern farm belt don't think any more. The Hollinger press, the little newspapers they own, does their thinking for them.

Practically every newspaper in the country is dominated by a handful of circuits. We've covered this in {EIR}: Hollinger, Murdoch, the {New York Times,} and Associated Press. NBC: British. ABC: British. CBS: British. CNN: well, they haven't discovered its species yet. But... It's all over the world.

But, these relative handful of magazines, where these things are cooked up, these recipes are cooked up, and then the mass media. Totally controlled. And, people are brainwashed quite literally brainwashed, in ways which Goebbels started, in a real sense, in the 1930s, the Goebbels propaganda machine, which the British immediately copied, and plagiarized, and did a much more effective job than Goebbels ever did in lying.

The United States, through the Radio Research Project and the Office of War Information and so forth, brought these policies into the United States. Edward R. Murrow was part of it; all the names of the old days were part of it. We were run by a bunch of psychologists, run out of the Tavistock Institute, and psychiatrists and so forth, who manipulate and shape the opinion of Americans.

For example, I used to sit, in consulting, from time to time, and I had clients in the garment industry, or in some other industry. Now, let me tell you about American women and their tastes. Because I sat there. And, I knew what women were going to like, nine months to a year before they knew it. Because it's programmed! {Women's tastes in clothing style is not determined by the women.} It's determined by the style industry, which determines this years in advance. And most of it is done by the aid of psychoanalysts, who try to figure out the lowest common denominator of women, and the highest skirt, or whatever. Or whatever.

That is characteristic. Automobiles are designed, not as Henry Ford designed them, for their utility, but for their appearance. Why do we change styles in automobiles every year? We do a little bit less of that. Why did General Motors do that? Because they brought down the Seventh Avenue knockdown principle of design, into Detroit. And, we bought cars because of the way they looked. We didn't buy the cars to ride in them. We bought the cars to park them in the yard, so the neighbors could envy them. Keeping up with the tailfins, it was called sometimes. That's what we are. But, in time, yes, we've become great fools.

What makes us human

But, you learn something, as you deal with various parts of the world, as I do. That inside people, thereis something that is not a fool. There is something which distinguishes man from all lower beasts. Mankind is the only species which is capable of discovering a principle of nature; that everything that we know, everything about culture, came in the form of discoveries of a principle of nature. And, if you have not studied, or reexperienced a good deal of the discovery made by people from even tens of thousands of years before--our knowledge of civilization is limited to about 10, 12,000 years, though we can infer a great deal from other kinds of evidence of what {must have developed} earlier.

The discoveries: we reenact those discoveries. All the ideas we have, came from individual people, and through the transmission by replication of those discoveries in the minds of others, everything we have. And, every newborn baby, and we know there's no genetic difference, in terms of so-called racial distinctions or ethnic distinctions. Ethnic distinctions are bunk! Cultural relativism is bunk, cultural relativism--there's another, simpler word for it. If you want to save on syllables, call it by a simpler term: racism. Every cultural relativist is a racist. Every human being has the identical same need: to be a human being. To be developed as a human being, to function as a human being, and something more, which I'll get to.

Every human being has this potential. The United States, which is a melting-pot nation, France is a melting-pot nation, Germany is not a German nation--there's no such thing as a German biological type. Germany is Slavs, and everything else, mixed in there. It's a melting pot. Most of the populations of the world, are melting pots. The Chinese are the melting pot. All people in that part of the world were assimilated into one particular--you know, China, of course, is the oldest culture on this planet, the oldest {continuous} culture on this planet; and therefore, a certain amount of commonality appears, from intermarriage and things of that sort.

But, there's no difference between a Chinese, Koean, Africa, or any European child, and what the best American child can do. It's all a matter of nurture, education, and opportunity. We're all alike. We're all the same species. We have no races among human beings. We have racism, otherwise known as cultural relativism. But we don't have races.

And thus, we find there's something good in every human being, from the time he's born. And then the trouble begins. Every person has this creative power which, for those in the Mosaic tradition, is called ``man and woman made in the image of God,'' which is nothing other than this power of reason, which does not mean logic, it means more than logic. It means, also, a quality of Love called {agapem.} They're inseparable; you can't have one without the other.

But, every human being has this potential. Every human being, in that sense, is potentially loveable. Some didn't make it, but they were potentially that. George Bush failed along the way. He was one of those guys that, in the Heideggerian throwing ritual, he landed on his head when he came to rest. Eh?

But, that is the human need, to participate in a process, in this brief span of mortal life we have, a process in which we can say that we have done something with our life, from beginning to end, so that when we're laid in the grave, we potentially are entitled to wear a smile, because we have done something which would not have happened for good, unless we had been born and lived as we did.

That is our truest self-interest. That is the self-interest which motivates the truly dedicated scientist, or the truly dedicated musician, or Classical musician, not the rock star. They don't have motivation. They're like beagles, they just have--they're born that way. Or un-born that way, or whatever. That's the quality. That's what we've lost.

You will see that Helga [Zepp LaRouche] will deal with this conflict, which I'll just describe, which has characterized Western European civilization over the past 400 years, essentially. And then, tomorrow afternoon, others willpoint out certain features of education, cultural life, which reflect what has been done to us by the enculturation and educational process.

Just think: All truth, including productive labor, the truth of productive labor, comes from the fact that the individual human mind is capable of re-experiencing, re-discovering, and embodying, fundamental principles of nature which then guide that person to be able to cope with the technology and related challenges of life. In addition, those persons can not merely replicate the knowledge which was given to them in this way. They have been trained to seek out the boundaries of knowledge, and to pierce those boundaries with new knowledge, especially when challenged to do so.

The secret of production is that man is not a commodity, labor is not a commodity, just as the Machine-Tool Principle illustrates: the German skilled worker, the German industry, begins with the Humboldt tradition and what it represents of Classical education, humanist form. It is expressed through the scientists and engineers who have embodied that method of progress, in design of products and productive process. It is reunified, as the person who has been educated comes into the productive process as an employee, and utilizes the improvements in the productive process, in the form of product and process which are presented, and is capable of doing so, because they're capable not of learning as monkeys learn. They're capable of accepting the challenge of discovering {what is the principle that makes this work?} Not, ``How do I repeat this?'' in the ``repeat-after-me'' Blab School style; but, ``{How do I understand the gimmick, the principle which makes this work this way?}''

Rebuilding the machine-tool capabilities

And, that is why highly trained people, highly motivated people in various cultures of this planet, are capable of miracles of productive power. Whereas people who are kept very poor, who are kept as low-paid labor, who live in crushed cultural circumstances of education and urture, who live in communities in which existentialism predominates, where man against man predominates, can not.

Our mission, if we can get this ship going right again, this ship of civilization, is to take those sections of the world which did have or do have this machine-tool capability, this strategic machine-tool capability, which includes, in large degree, Ukraine and Russia, which had one of the most important and largest strategic machine-tool capabilities on this planet, with engineers and scientists who are capable of doing that.

We have a shortage of that here. We have some. We have it in Germany. We have a little bit in Italy. We have a little bit in France. You wouldn't notice it, they don't show it in the shop window. We have a significant amount still left in Japan. We have some in Korea, we have some in Taiwan. A tiny bit in India, a nucleus of it in India. And in the rest of the world: nothing! China, a bit; but, nothing generally.

So therefore, what we're going to do, or must do, is to take these parts of the world, which have the greatest concentration of education and machine-tool potential, such as the triangular area in the center of Europe, which is historically the center of the development of modern world civilization, in terms of these technologies; and the United States, and Japan, and so forth. We work with the biggest nations which must rapidly develop machine-tool capability, such as China and India, which have a nucleus, but they don't have an industry.

We must therefore put together large-scale projects which involve the most populous nations, and the world in general, together with those centers which can provide the machine-tool capability, and deliver it to every part of the world.

In other words, the principle is that {the factory in Indonesia, or the factory in China, or wherever else, has a right to access to machine-tool capability and the kind of education and knowledge,} which is needed to do this. We must bring the whole world, economically, into this kind of arranement. If we can do that, we will have, because of the increase, even marginal increases in productive powers of labor in Asia, in China, in Southeast Asia, in South Asia. We're talking about two-thirds or more of the human population, right there. If you can increase, marginally, the productive powers of labor, the annual growth of the productive powers of labor in these parts of the world, what is the effect on the total wealth of the world as a whole? And all these debts, and all this poverty, and so forth, suddenly is nonsense.

What we could do in Africa--and you don't have to ask them to pay for anything. We've stolen so much from Africa, you don't need to ask for payment. You feel good about doing the job. Transportation grids: transportation-centered development corridors. Safe water. The mineral resources which Bush and his friends are trying to steal, with the aid of genocide, in the Great Lakes area of Africa. These countries can become, in a generation or two, essentially, by present standards, rich. And, we can, with the help of other countries which have the same commitment, which are machine-tool-oriented countries, we can make that possible.

And, in doing so, we are acting as individuals, in such a way that we can say to our children and grandchildren, who look up at us and say, ``Grandpa, what's going to happen when you die? What did you live for?'' ``So that {you} can see {this.}''

Democracy of opinion is not freedom. You see what reform and democracy means in Russia, or Ukraine, or elsewhere. Truth means a great deal. Freedom, especially freedom from various degrees of slavery, means a great deal. The nurture of that quality within the individual person which places them apart from and above all beasts, the thing which makes all humanity a single species, that makes the nation-state an instrument, not for separating mankind, but for bringing mankind together through representative institutions of self-government.

The problem we have, is this, and I'll just sum it up. Helga will handle her prt by herself. She's trained me well. But on tomorrow afternoon, we'll have a diversity of people giving reports, which are samplings of what's wrong with education. Put it this way: In not a single university today, in the United States or Western Europe, in any course, especially not social studies, especially not in modern language teachings, especially not science, not mathematics; in none of these areas is any person given a competent education. What is generally believed among the generation of those in leading positions in these professions today, is nonsense, is bunk; is worse than bunk.

The issue is this. The power of modern European civilization emerged from the middle of the fifteenth century. It emerged. It was long-prepared, long-prepared; the whole history of humanity tells us how this happened. But, the center of this was the understanding of the nature of man, that man is a creature with creative powers, set apart from and above all species. And, it is man, by transforming the world around him, and transforming his own powers and his own culture, who can meet these challenges which life presents.

As a result of that resolution in Europe, the population of the world, not just Europe, but the world, between, say, 1461, when the first modern nation-state was established in France, until 1966, when we began the countercultural downturn into the New Age, which has destroyed us since; the total human population of this planet increased from several hundred {million,} to {over 5 billion.}

The demographic characteristics overall, on this planet, of population and household life, in demographic terms; the productive powers of labor, and the available conditions of life within the family and for the individual, including the defeat of diseases which had plagued mankind almost helplessly in times past; this great achievement. And, this great achievement was based on an understanding that every individual has this potential, that this potential can be educated, nurtured. This potential can be organized in such a way, with a purpose: to uplift society in each nation, and in the world as a whole.

And, despite all the evils which have occurred in those past 500-odd years, this was, by and large, a success. It's the greatest success in all history. More progress was made in the human condition, in the past 500-odd years of the modern nation-state and its influence upon the planet, than in all human existence, perhaps going back a million to 2 million years before. This is the greatest success in all human existence, a realization of all the things that had gone before, to make it possible.

1966: The post-industrial paradigm shift

1966: we decided to throw it away. And, I'll just sum up what the difference is. I've written about it, but I'll just call your attention to the point.

I said earlier, that until 1966, we were culturally a production-oriented culture. And most of the developed nations of the world were. We had been that, for numbers of generations. We looked at everything from the standpoint of production. When looking at production, we looked at it in terms of {increasing the productive powers of labor.} Everybody wanted to increase their own productivity. They wanted to master new skills, new knowledge. They wanted to broaden horizons.

The conquest of space: Remember that when Kennedy proposed the manned Moon landing within the decade, and as those achievements began to move forward, the American people were inspired; because it is those kinds of achievements of nations which make the person within the nation, realize the importance of their living, and the importance of their contribution to that nation.

We were still inspired. But, something happened. We said, ``No, this is bad. We're now going into a post-industrial utopia. We're going to give the plants and animals more room to live, and fewer people to annoy them.'' And, how are we going to help the plants and animals? ``Oh, we're going to protect the deserts!'' Next we'll be protecting the diseases. We have recently, in the past 20-od years, we have been systematically, especially in the past 10, 12, protecting a dangerous lentivirus, called the AIDS virus. We've been protecting it, ensuring its survival, ensuring its success. Oh, we may limit--we may cull the herd occasionally, here and there, but we do not limit it. We allow it to have absolute success. Go where you want to!

We've sent it into South Asia, on a German sex tour, into Thailand. And, it was very happy there, and it stayed there. And then sometimes it comes back to visit Europe, from there. India is hit with it. We've changed our values.

Now, what that meant, was, let me just sum up my experience in management consulting, in an earlier period. What I saw, in my experience with industry and production, is that we always had a fight, in every case I went into of any importance. There was generally a fight between the production people and the people in the accounting and finance office. The people in the accounting and finance office, however useful their services might be, within restrictions, were always overstepping their capabilities, and presuming to direct production. And, people who talked financial doctrine, or monetary doctrine and financial doctrine in general, and accounting doctrine, are no good for production. You can not run a country, based on the principle, so-called, of financial and accounting practice. These principles have a usefulness, but they represent virtual reality, not reality.

Production is far different. Production is based on change. Never allow an accountant to make up a budget, if you want to manage a production of operations. Never allow a financial manager to make up a budget, if you want to manage a production of operation. Never allow a financial manager to make up a budget. Let him write up what he's told the budget must be, in financial terms, and present it. But, don't let him design it. He doesn't know how to do it. He's intrinsically incompetent. He lives in virtual reality, whereas production must live in reality.

The reality of prodction is: technological progress, development, education, innovation, changes; reality.

So, until 1966, partly influenced by military considerations, most of the countries of this planet, the major ones, had a military-productive national security imperative. And therefore, the machine-tool sector, in order to maintain and exceed parity with the likely competitors, was a powerful political commitment of those economies. The only people that could realize the objectives of military and related national security, were the production managers, and the scientists. And therefore, the scientist and the production manager, was the characteristic of the successful features of the U.S. economy, as other economies--as the Soviet economy, for example; the same thing.

Now, in 1962-63, after the successive missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination, the oligarchs who run the world, and, in large degree, run the United States from the top down, above government, decided that, by means of the treaty which they had forced upon the two nuclear superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, by this missile crisis, that they had created a situation in which no longer general nuclear warfare among major powers was possible. That only limited warfare, or surrogate warfare, such as that in Vietnam or, later, in Afghanistan, would be possible. Or terrorism, which is a form of warfare practiced by national governments, not by odd kooks in the bushes. It's just denied, it's just denied warfare, but it's actually fought by governments, through surrogates.

We decided that we no longer, therefore, needed to have the commitment to nation-state, and to directed scientific, military-oriented, strategically oriented investment in productive processes. So, at that point, promptly, out of the Ford Foundation and its Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara and other places, suddenly, all the think-tanks, the big think-tanks, which owned most of the political movements in the United States--ask who's on a foundaion payroll or grant, directly or indirectly. Find out. Anybody who's on a foundation grant, whether they know it or not, is an agent of the ruling oligarchy--even worse than a government agent. Often, they're also government agents; like most cultural relativists are government agents. It's the biggest problem we have in the civil rights movement, is all these foundation-controlled government agents, who spread cultural relativism. Our big problem. That's what set up Martin Luther King for killing. That's what's setting Minister Farrakhan for potential assassination now, are these cultural relativists, with this kind of crap.

``No, we don't need that [scientific and technological progress]! We're going to have a counterculture! We're going to take these frightened, cowardly Baby Boomers in college, and we're going to terrify them. We're going to use the terror of the missile crisis.'' You know, people were flooding into churches all over the place, in those weeks. You could not find enough churches to contain the people on any noontime in Washington or elsewhere, during the period of that missile crisis--'62.

And then the Kennedy assassination, and the big cover-up of the British assassination of Kennedy. Because it was done by British intelligence; that is known. That is proven, that it was organized by British intelligence. We don't have the proof of who pulled the triggers, the three triggers, the rifle-triggers. But, we know it was British intelligence. Bronfman's lawyer, from Montreal, organized it. That's a fact. And Bronfman's lawyer from Montreal, was the guy who was caught, red-handed, organizing the assassination of de Gaulle in France, in that same period. The same organization.

They terrified the American people. Johnson was terrified, President Johnson. As a result, these terrified draft-dodgers on the campuses, looking every night at the television screen and seeing the mangled bodies of people in U.S. and other uniforms, or no uniforms at all, on television, {horrified them,} that {they would o anything to anybody, including sex with a fireplug, to keep from going to military service.} And, in this condition of virtual mass psychosis among the college populations, the Baby Boomer population, they induced a cultural change, called the neo-Malthusian cultural paradigm shift, or the New Age, the rock-drug-sex counterculture, and all the kooky things that went with it.

Also, in 1969, promptly, the lesbian movement was organized in the United States, and the homosexual movement, which was already being organized, was organized afterward. We saw it in New York City. T-groups, organized under Tavistock Institute and other organizations, created this mass-recruiting to lesbian organizations, in T-groups. And, all the other things that made up the so-called Rainbow Coalition, were the same thing.

So, they introduced what was called a {cultural paradigm shift} in the U.S. population. With the aid of that cultural paradigm shift, as people in my generation became older and weaker, and were afraid of being broken off from their children, the country adapted to these--accepted these values. And, the crucial thing was when a certain part of the services of the U.S. government organized the breakdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, outside of Harrisburg, which was done by the government, in order to bring this about. Terror struck. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody did Chernobyl, the same thing. Every reason to suspect it was done deliberately, by somebody. This terror meant that our people accepted a change in values, which is today's political correctness.

Now, what happened? What's wrong with the accountant, what's wrong with the financial manager, as against the scientist and production manager, in terms of production?

The production manager and scientist deal with ideas, deal with development of ideas, with the principle of discovery, with the principle that every human mind is capable of making discoveries, re-enacting discoveries of principle made by people earlier, and going on todo some pioneering of their own, at least in facing situations.

For example, in the old days, in a competent classroom, in a university, if I were president of a university, and I caught an instructor, a professor or other instructor in that university, issuing written or oral examinations, in which all the questions in the examination were limited to those which had been rehearsed, for which answers had been rehearsed in the classroom, I'd fire him; or give him tenure in a manure pile, eh?

Because, in a competent course, you don't have Blab School education. You test, whether you in the course, and the student in the course, have actually developed capabilities to pioneer in solving problems beyond the outer limits of what you've covered in the class. If you have not done that, you have not developed their creative powers. And therefore you were a failure, the school is a failure, and the poor lout who took the course is a failure.

And, that's the standpoint of production. That's the standpoint of science. If you're sitting as a scientist in a laboratory or some research institution, do you want the guy next to you saying, ``Huhnh? What textbook did you get that out of?'' I mean, this guy, he's sitting there with his PC, trying to find the formula from what textbook. He can't think!

And, they do that in production. The worst people in production, are those like the Robert McNamaras and other low-lifes. What they do, is they say, ``You're only a worker! You're only a worker! It is the stockholders, and the people who put up the money! They are the ones with creative powers, that create wealth! You're only a worker! Do your job! Use your squash, you dumb banana!'' That kind of stuff.

That's not reality. That's what they do in the {maquiladoras.} That's what they do in these outsourcing plants. In the {real} factory, in the {real} plant, in the days that we put a premium on production, the suggestion box was very important, and the suggestion box did not have little kooky suggestions of the type you get today like putting a little bit of lace around the Kleenex, or something.

You would have working people in a plant, particularly the skilled ones, who would spend hours with their buddies, or by themselves, working through a problem, and they would submit a plan for dealing with some problem: how to do it better. That was the environment. They had pride in what they did. They had pride in the fact that they solve problems, they made the thing work that wouldn't work when it came on the factory floor. They didn't walk away from it because it didn't work; they {made} it work. They would even talk to the engineers and people, saying, ``This is what's wrong with what you've done.''

There was a constant, intensive problem-solving process going on, which revealed something, as the case of the American farmer in the postwar period. A fellow of my generation, who came back from the war, got some more education, and went out, and made a miracle in agriculture, by investing in technological progress, and was pushing the frontier of technological progress, constantly, on the farm, every season, sometimes 14, 16 hours a day.

Inputs and outputs are not economics. The input is what you need to do the job you have to do, and the way you have to do it. The output is a result of the intelligence you apply, this creative intelligence you apply, as a human being participating in this intellectual life with other human beings. It is the human mind, the development of the creative powers of the individual human mind, which is the source of the increase of the productive powers of labor. Infrastructure, power, all these things, are necessary preconditions to effect and realize that potential.

{But, it is ultimately the human mind, the development of its creative powers, the motivation of those creative powers, which is the source of wealth.} It is {pride} in the development of those powers, by the individual, who does not want to become ever less than that, which is the essence of human morality. Not to degenerate to something else; nt to be someone who merely follows a routine, stupidly, because he's taking orders.

How the empiricists begat accountants

Now, go back to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Go back to a fellow called Paolo Sarpi, who had a lackey. The lackey's name was Galileo Galilei. He also had an asset, called Francis Bacon. Galileo had a homosexual student, whose name was Thomas Hobbes, who was the lover of Francis Bacon. He was a mathematics student of Galileo. And, they begat John Locke, who begat Bernard Mandeville, who begat various people, including Dr. Quesnay in France, who begat Adam Smith, who begat David Hume, and so forth. Or, otherwise: empiricism and positivism.

The nature of empiricism and positivism, is a conception of man very much like that of the financial specialist, or the accountant-economist today. He conceives of man as being a particle in a gas, probably a stinking gas, such as the kind of gas theory that conforms to Thomas Hobbes's {Leviathan,} the theory of every man in war against all, each in war against all. The idea that the Seven Deadly Sins, or so-called British human nature, dominates every individual, that we react in a mechanistic way, on the basis of interests, selfish interests, greedy interests, like pigs' interests; denying absolutely that there exists a creative power of the individual mind, and that that creative power of the individual mind, which makes you something more than an animal, is your primary motivation. And, that's what's lost.

That's what's happened in this culture. That's what you're taught in school today. Where are you taught the truth? The very method of education used, violates--is Hobbesian. It is not truth.

I was talking yesterday with a friend of mine, whose son is just going into college, on the problems of surveying the colleges to find one which is fit for pigs, or, possibly, someone better. There's nothing! For those of us who know something, we look at the curricula, look at the teaching, look at the program, what's being taught at thehighest level of university at which people are getting terminal degrees--that means you're dead. You've lost the capacity to sustain life. That's our condition. That is what you read in your newspaper. Every interpretation of how events occur, all the explanations of why this country does this, or why that country does this, or why this revolutionary does this, or this revolting person does that: all in terms of this Hobbesian empiricist-positivist logic.

The idea that man is something sacred, the idea that the individual personality has creative powers, the idea that the individual has individual {rights} because they have these qualities, that you can't shove somebody off into a morgue, simply because your accountant says you ought to do that, to balance the hospital's budget or the HMO's budget. That's immoral!

We have the power to solve the problems which are posed by these questions. In the old days, in the productive society, when Grandma got sick, and we needed to pay the medical bills to keep her alive, we'd all scrounge to find some way to raise the money, to keep Grandma alive. Today, we say, ``Go in and tell Grandma to sign that piece of paper.'' That's the Hobbesian world we live in.

Finally, this. Mass strikes are good. They can have bad results, but they're good. Because when the point is reached in human affairs, that the institutions which govern us, and the opinions of the people who are governed, have deprived the nation of its moral fitness to continue to survive, there must come some event which shatters the smugness of generally accepted opinion, and opens the doors for considering alternative ideas, ideas which do not have these defects. These must be ideas which do not discard the past, but which comprehend the past as a process, which recognize the great degree of human achievement in everything we represent today. We don't throw that out the window, and start with the New Age from scratch.

But, we have to sort out ideas which sort out the good from the bad, in the past of human exisence, in which to say, ``{This} is the way we have to go.'' And, it's very simple. We've just got to get the President of the United States, I think, to, at an appropriate moment, a moment of crisis, when he can come out of his hidey-hole and expose himself as actually thinking, to say, with the power of the President of the United States, to a number of other nations, ``We are going to meet this weekend, in an emergency new Bretton Woods conference, to straighten this mess out, on the basis of prepared plans,'' which they've been afraid to expose to public view prior to that time.

But, they have to be somewhat prepared, because it has to be done quickly: to create a new monetary system, to embrace the Land-Bridge proposal for Eurasia, as the center of the building blocks of re-creating civilization on this planet; and, above all, restoring the Machine-Tool Principle, which means also the principle, a quality of education, the right of the child to that kind of education, and to restore a dignity to the individual in society, which the individual in a society does not have today.

The time has come where, if we have these ideas, and can approach the conflict of society from {above} society; don't be complainers, don't be revolting. Don't revolt from underneath, don't blame scapegoats on top. ``These guys, they're evil, let's hang them and our problems will go away.'' They won't! Because the rottenness lies in the people. You must find an operation which, at the moment, the people are willing to give up their rottenness, you must provide the ideas which they need at that moment, to make the turn, which must be made quickly, in order to take a different road. To resume the path of progress, troubled as it was, imperfect as it was, back 30 years ago. That doesn't solve the human race's problems, but it gives us the chance to begin solving them.

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