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This transcript appears in the June 10, 2011 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
LPAC-TV WEEKLY REPORT

An Economic Revival Needs
Real Science, Not Statistics

The following is an edited transcript of the LaRouchePAC Weekly Report of June 1, 2011.

[PDF version of this transcript]

John Hoefle: Welcome to the LaRouche PAC Weekly Report. With me in the studio today are two members of our Basement Team, Oyang Teng and Sky Shields; and joining us from Germany is Lyndon LaRouche. So, Lyn, what do you have for us, today?

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, we have, to begin with, an interesting topic of discussion. How long it will take in terms of our approximately hour-long event is uncertain; we still have plenty of things to discuss in addition to this.

What's been going on, is, for a long time, essentially since the end of the 19th Century, there has been the understanding, that in order to understand human life, and human relations to the universe, we had to depart from the conventional methods then considered, which took eyesight, or the five-senses version of view, and realized that the five senses are not real. This was understood by Max Planck, it was understood by Einstein. They did not at that time have an answer to the problem, but they knew the problem existed, that it had to be solved.

But, unfortunately, as World War I came on, things got worse; the science community went crazy. Bertrand Russell was coming in then as a leading figure, and there has been very little science, really, since that time. Then you had the Solvay Conferences of the 1920s, that pretty much destroyed science. It went from being science to statistics—and statistics is not science. And it just made the whole mess worse. Our dear friend Einstein, was, in a sense, pushed to one side pretty much. They couldn't get rid of him, but they pushed him to one side.

And after World War II, there was a full-scale lurch in the direction of the crazy people, who actually did not believe in science at all, but believed in statistics. Von Neumann, for example, who was actually an idiot savant: He was a human calculating machine, but he couldn't think in concepts; he could think of calculations.

It became worse in the postwar period; economics became totally incompetent—that's how I got to be the best economist around, because I was the one who didn't believe in the rest of them, and I started doing forecasting. I've pushed more and more in this direction, of the belief that sense-perception could not be accepted. I had fortunately rejected Descartes and similar people, and also the "classical" so-called geometry, as incompetent—and they were incompetent! But people were taught these things, they were taught Euclidean geometry, and Euclidean geometry is intrinsically rotten. It is a fraud. But, so, people believed these things.

So therefore, even though we had recognized, as Planck had recognized, and Einstein, notably, that our sense-perceptions, our five sense-perceptions are merely a small fraction of the kind of scientific instruments and various kinds of factors of that type, that we have to combine these other instruments with what sense-perception can do, which is very little, actually, and therefore, get a completely different view of the universe. We had to see the mind of the individual, not the sense-perception, but the mind, as the reality of the human characteristics. And that sense-perceptions are merely one of the auxiliary agencies which are used for the overall true perception of the universe.

This conception was well-known, in the time, of, actually, two people—especially Riemann. And their understanding was that the universe is not based on sense-certainty. It's sense-uncertainty, that is the truth. And you have to find many factors, as Riemann emphasized in the concluding section of his habilitation dissertation. You have to take many factors, and use them as a combined force to substitute entirely, for a naive sense of sense perception.

For example, there is no empty space known to us in the universe. It doesn't exist! But you look: Most of the calculations and formulas you're given involve space! But there is no such thing as empty space! It's jammed full of cosmic radiation—of all kinds! Some will kill you, some will feed you, some will tickle you, some will please you! All these kinds of things. And therefore, we have to explore the full spectrum of cosmic radiation, in all its aspects, in order to get more and more, multiple cofactors, which take the place of simply the five sense-perceptions. And these multiple cofactors give us more and more ways of cross-checking things, and getting a mental image of what the reality is out there, that our eyes don't see, that our ears don't hear, and so forth.

So, I've been writing about this for some time, and I did it recently, in a piece I did which featured this,[1] and then we went to a second piece,[2] which I just did, which had more on this. And in response to that, and this discussion, Sky [Shields] jumped in on the case with Chance [McGee], and they went to work on a very significant addition to the repertoire I had indicated, that of the medium that they brought in on the question of music.[3]

Sense-Certainty Is Not Truth

Now, the key thing here, is this: What we think we're seeing, is not the truth, it's not the true universe; and the fallacy, which is what Sky referred to in his remarks on the subject, on the case of Newton and the case of Laplace. These two characters are totally incompetent, but they are still treated as if they were scientists, and they are not: They're fakes! So, as Sky has made the argument quite effectively, the Laplace system, the Newton system, simply assumes that what has happened is past, and the future comes before you; but you're never able to find any free will, as Sky has laid this thing out adequately. You can never find a free will intervention into the universe which will change a simple, kinematic chain-reaction type of sense perception.

The fact of the matter is, as I have emphasized, and Sky has emphasized in a very good way, very credible way, when we act in the universe, to go from Point A to Point B, in a sequence of physical actions, we are not limited to Point B being pulled and Point A being in the past. Point A is still there. It's very much alive! And this is true in two ways. One, I use it in economics generally: that the function of what some people call infrastructure, is actually a sort of a tableau on which things move. That is, you can have the same technology of manufacturing, and if you raise the technology of the so-called infrastructure, that is, actually, this table, then you have changed all of the values, the resulting values in your system.

For example, if you introduce an oxcart system, instead of a railway, and in every other respect you have a modern economy, your modern economy will be junk. Without the high-technology basic what we call economic infrastructure, your productivity is very poor. So you have a factor, that the table—what people call "infrastructure," is a table. And as you move it up the scale, you increase the productivity of everything within it. That is, without changing the manufacturing facilities, without changing anything in production, if you increase the basic economic infrastructure, as it's called, then you raise the productivity of everything, that is, as a whole.

So, this is a function of time.

Now, if you make a forecast on one basis, and then you look at what the effect is—for example, say you're in manufacturing. You have a manufacturing skill; now, you introduce an invention—you don't change anything else in the whole manufacturing process, but you get a technology which you could introduce into this whole process. Now you introduce this technology somewhere down the line in the production assembly process; that means you change everything.

What Sky does, with his representation, does exactly the same thing. He took the case of the musical scale. When you perform Bach, Bach's system, that is obvious and you can hear it: When you add a new note in a sequence, or two or three new notes in a sequence, to the first, the first is changed in significance. The individual note does not have its individual importance, which is what Sky attacks Laplace for: that you do not leave the past and go into the present and future. What you do in the future, as a change in the technology, affects the conditions from which you started, just as Bach's method of composition, especially the counterpoint as such, means that what you do down the line, determines the value of what you did at the beginning of the process.

So, we're in a world which we know from a physical scientific standpoint, and we have people like Planck and Einstein, who pioneered in posing this question. We now realize that we have a different kind of universe than we thought we had. And that we take all the cofactors in physical space-time, so-called—when all these cofactors are added on to the repertoire of five senses, then you have a completely different kind of mind. And it's the poor jerk that believes in sense-certainty, who is left behind. And it's poor jerks who believe in sense-certainty as such, who spoil the pudding for everyone, because they insist that everything be explained to them in terms of five-sense sense-perception. And they say, "That's what I believe in! Nothing else exists! Nothing else is real!"

And when we have that, you have a society, in which you have some people who are actually scientists, qualified scientists, and you have these average blokes, who believe in sense-certainty. The result is, that politically, the mass of the population doesn't understand what you're talking about as a scientist, and therefore the whole society is crippled, by the stupidity of people who've been conditioned to believe only in sense-certainty, rather than being educated competently.

A Diversity of Instrumentation

And that's the importance of this for science. Take what is not being done, with the question of forecasting of earthquakes and tornadoes and so forth: You have to get a great retinue of different perceptors, different kinds of indicators, which are like sense indicators, and add these sense indicators to this little collateral group of merely five senses....

So, that's the vindication of what was intended back at the turn of the last century, by the work of leading people, such as Planck and Einstein. This has introduced us now, with the development of new instruments and broader experience, to an understanding that there are many things we can create, as instruments, which supplement our sense perception, and are independent of the sense perception in their function. And by accumulating these different kinds of perceptions, of synthetic perceptions, and putting them together, with the help of the "water-boy," which is our sense-perception as such, these higher-quality instruments or combinations of instruments, enable us to forecast what the President of the United States, the current President, will always refuse to understand, if he were capable of understanding it.

And so, that is the foundation of science, today. We are blocked, to the extent that we are limited by a more or less sense-perceptual view of the universe; we are blocked from making the kinds of progress which we need to deal with the problems of the present and future. Therefore, our understanding, our breaking of this whole process of sense-certainty, which is dominating the planet increasingly, or statistical method—statistics as generally used in economics are completely fraudulent, they're not worth anything! Statistics prove nothing, except the idiocy of the credulous person who believes in them.

And you need this kind of investigation, not sense-perception statistics, but this kind of observation, and we can see the future. The instruments [weather satellites and the like] that have been taken down by this President, already, would have given us the power to see the future coming at us. Every time one of those instruments that is taken down, you ask, "How many more people is this President going to murder, by taking down these instruments which will enable us to forecast in time, to take actions which keep people from being killed, or at least minimize that?"

So this idea of time, and the reversibility of time, in the sense we've described it, is an absolutely essential feature for any science of the present and future. And the old system has to go. Therefore, the more we do in this area, whether we do it in terms of entertainment, whether you do it in terms of physical science experimentation, it's all the same thing. It's all supplements, in the form of synthetic sense perceptions, of many different qualities, which enable us, by taking the convergence—just the same way that Kepler discovered gravitation, by taking two sense-perceptions,

  1. line of sight—a line-of-sight image of the organization of the Solar System; and
  2. harmonics, a completely different sense.

And by combining the paradoxical juncture of these two kinds of senses, he was able to discover the principle of universal gravitation.

And what we're doing today, with these many kinds of instruments, as sense-perception instruments, is simply following in the footsteps of the precedent of the discovery of gravitation by Kepler, a discovery which was understood by Einstein to have redefined the universe, as being finite—not of infinite size, but finite—but not bounded. In other words, there's a self-defining universe, which he adduced from the mere fact of the nature of the discovery of gravitation by Kepler. Today, we're walking the same track.

Today, however, we've got to educate people, to understand what is actually being done, by scientists and other, related people, around the world, by developing the use of more instruments, more studies of the combinations of these instruments; looking at the paradoxes we generate, and the evidence, when we combine more and more kinds of instruments. This is the wave of the future. This is the way that can see man, safely, into space.

Statistics vs. Real Forecasting

Sky Shields: It might be worth revisiting a point you've made in the past, about statistics, which I think gets right to the core of the time question in a real clear way, which is that the real crime of statistics is the assumption that, somehow, there is such a thing as a "present state of affairs," which in and of itself can give you any kind of reading of where you actually stand. The idea that somehow you've got some state of the economy, say, that you could describe, when in reality, you can't define any economic value, you can't define any serious economic measure, in the present, because it's defined by the states that you intend to reach in the future.

LaRouche: Our problem is, it's a statistical state that they're dealing with, and statistics don't tell you anything! You may attribute things to statistics, but that's an attribution made on assumptions which are outside the statistics themselves. When you use a statistical method, you are applying a method which is your choice, and the result you get from the statistics, depends upon your choice. What's an independent fact? As a purely mathematical statistical system, it's intrinsically incompetent.

Most of the great fakery, in economics, is done by people who rely on statistics to try and define what's going on in an economy. You have to know what the intention is, of the way the economy is being designed. That will tell you what's going to happen, not statistics. That's why I was always right in these things, and every one of my rivals was always wrong, back since 1954: Every forecast I made has come in exactly as I defined it. It's never been based on statistics.

LaRouche's First Forecast

For example, the first forecast I made was in 1956, actually: I forecast that as of the conclusion of February, or the beginning of March of the following year, there would be a general breakdown degree of crisis in the U.S. economy. And it came exactly as I forecast, and nobody else had. They were all using statistics.

I was using the facts I knew about the auto industry. And I knew their lending practices; I knew their credit practices. I knew the swindle which was their contract agreements with the dealerships. It was a swindle! And therefore, they used statistics, and they were always wrong. I used the other method, the physical method, the real method: What are the factors that are going into this behavior? What is controlling this behavior? What's the kind of mental behavior I can adduce, that is guiding the people who are making the policies that are leading to this result?

So it's forecasting, not statistical forecasting! Statistical forecasting is the least reliable of all kinds of forecasting, because it's based on assumptions, purely abstract, mathematical assumptions, which have no correspondence to any system!


Shields: What you're describing, real forecasting, seems to bring the discussion squarely back into the realm of the cognitive. That is, you're not describing some abstract thing called an "economy," you're describing the expression of human mind, in the physical universe, the way mind expresses itself.

LaRouche: Well, look at us, today: Look at how much the influence of human behavior, and the effects of human behavior, have shaped practically everything that is significant about this planet. So, it's our understanding of these processes, which are largely influenced, increasingly, by the role of mankind, and the role of the mind of mankind. The Earth is getting to be more and more, from its surface levels out, more and more a creation of the human mind, or the collective effects of the human mind's actions. And most of the things that happen, can be forecast on the basis of some SOB deciding to do it! Now the SOB may not know what the effect is he's creating, but he's creating the effect, and an effect which is undesirable, simply because he says that he knows, "that's the way things should work," and his method will tell you "what's going to happen." And it very rarely does! Except if you punch a guy in the nose, the nose may bleed. That is predictable, but other things are a little less reliable.

Oyang Teng: Practical cause and effect.

It's interesting, also, going back to the history, because the statistical approach that you fought, that really was the fire out of which your career as an economist came: that whole idea of systems analysis was an explicit rejection of the trend in science, before and around the time of the Solvay Conference. I mean, the divergence was so clear coming out of that conference, whereas before—you brought up Planck and Einstein; you know, Planck's collaboration at that time with Wolfgang Köhler, and people involved in the Gestalt psychology movement, is instructive, because the Gestalt psychologists were saying, you have to separate this naive sense-perception from, first of all, what your actual perceptions really are.

The fact is, you don't ever really perceive point sources. Your visual field is completely determined by context, which people probably know most popularly through visual illusion. But then, he took it further, in saying that, if you're able to establish the basis for the gestalts in perception, then you also have to recognize that the physical universe is organized that way; that gestalts are actually real, and not simply psychological, in the sense that they're in a separate category.

And I thought the video that you guys [Shields and McGee] just put out, using the pedagogy of music, takes that to a further level, of saying that if you're going to get into the domain of creativity, gestalts in creativity, then music is the most provocative area to do that in. And you have to pose the same question, which is: Here's a real phenomenon, of experience that people know, in listening to music. Now, instead of saying, "How do you fit that into your pre-existing notion of the universe?" you ask, "How do you redefine a universe in which those kinds of processes are possible?"

And so it's interesting that it's such a clear division that this was the directionality, before World War II, and out of that, everything that's come to be called science today, is almost a bizarro pseudo-science, that really never should have been. It never should have taken that course.

Lies and Statistics

Hoefle: Economic statistics—you know, you look at the way they've been used to brainwash everybody; we've had this long decline, the build-up of this financial parasite, the long decline of the physical economy, to the point where everything is now collapsed, and we're headed into a death spiral. And all along the way, we've had statistics which showed us we're getting better! Things are improving, they're recovering. The recovery is here! You know, all these uninterrupted months of economic recovery during all these years ... and then it all blows up, and they keep telling us, "But, look, the statistics show, the recovery's here. The jobs aren't quite here yet," But there is no recovery. The whole thing is a complete fraud.

Teng: Well, "Numbers don't lie," that's the rallying cry of the statistician.

LaRouche: It's an intentional lie! It's an intended lie! Like Wall Street. Look: Anybody who's a junior accountant and free to do a little bit of thinking, knows that what they did—especially in the 1970s is when it started, but then really, the 1980s were worse, and so forth. The whole system could have no result but what it had!

You are cutting production, per capita and per square kilometer, you're cutting it! You're cheapening things, you are destroying sections of the economy; you are lowering the productive powers of people, which has been going on since Kennedy was assassinated. Step by step, they've been taking things down, down, down! Mankind was being less productive, raw materials were being depleted, and the failure to develop new kinds of raw materials meant the depletion of the old raw materials was dragging you down. You were going down, down, down. The educational system, the way in which people were motivated, the long Vietnam War, all these things were factors that brought everything down, down, down!

Now, you have somebody on Wall Street who says, "Well, we have this new system, of gambling. And you can gamble, and some of you will win! If you know how to cheat." And that's what you get as forecasting. A Wall Street forecast, is, actually, in the long run, what the British Empire has made clear it means right now, what Her Majesty means. Exactly! "We are fooling people, by convincing them that they're going to get money, and they're going to get more money!"

But they can't spend it. Because they're not producing anything. They're producing less and less. So, eventually, all this money, which is added up in various ways, by gambling, upon gambling, upon gambling—obviously the people who built this system know what they did! They knew they were out to destroy society, and get the suckers to believe in the system. And the suckers who wanted to be respectable, wanted to hope they could steal a little money, too, or cheat a little bit, too, find themselves one day out of work, without a country, practically, as in the case of "governance" in Europe and so forth: It's out of business.

But they intended this! If you look at the history of the Roman Empire, since the first Roman Empire, then the second Roman Empire, Byzantium; then, the third Roman Empire, the Crusader system; the fourth Roman Empire, the British system, the British Empire, they all did the same thing! They always had a period where they would build up power, physically. Then they would say, "This is getting out of control. People are going to get intelligent, and strong, they're going to take it away from us. We've got to destroy the system again"—and that's what they do!

So, it was on the top level, with people like AIG, they knew exactly what they were doing! Take their operation in the Philippines. I know exactly what they were doing. That's AIG, the insurance racket. The legal profession was in on it. The lawyers decided that they were going to make a killing, by these medical [malpractice] lawsuits, and they ran the thing up. So the charge is now to the doctors, with all these fees, paid out to people in so-called medical malpractice cases, piled up; the whole thing goes up. Then AIG and other people come in, and they create the racket!

Automobile insurance, how was it created? The automobile insurance, compulsory automobile insurance, was a racket. They had medical health-care insurance, a racket! You don't think that they knew that this was going to happen? The people who designed this? Of course they knew it was going to happen. Did they know that they were putting out paper money, that was not even paper money, this electronic phantom image of money? And this is the debt that we're supposed bail out—a nonexistent value, we're supposed to bail it out? Flush the toilet, boy! Get rid of that stuff!

And so, the real problem with people is they think what happens to them is somehow, "Oh! Oh! The Creator did it," or something else did it. "That's our money, we should have that money! Somebody took it away from us!" It was never worth anything! But they believed it was worth something, so they would go out and borrow money against the non-money, and that would be fake; and then, they'd have to go out and borrow more non-money, to bail out the other non-money. And that becomes a threat toward hyperinflation, which is what we're on the edge of, right now.

So, people who believe in the education they got in accounting school, or Harvard University, or Columbia University, these areas, they were being duped! They were being trained, except for a few of them who were really criminals who understood and loved crime. But those who thought they were actually learning a profession, were kidding themselves: This is all fake!

And the problem you have today, when you're trying to deal with this, you're dealing with these two problems: You've got the problem of the people; the average person is not educated to have any accurate understanding of the world they live in. They believe in things which are purely myths. They count on them. They're told that their five sense-perceptions are all they have, and they believe it. And they will base an opinion firmly on five sense-perceptions, which we know is not a good indicator of reality these days! So the population becomes a bunch of suckers, and those of us who know something about what really is happening, are the tiny minority. You get a roomful of the average persons, and the roomful of the average persons will tell you they believe in what is absolute nonsense, because they were told, and trained to believe in it! And therefore, because of that, they're suckered.

Wall Street, the whole Wall Street game, the whole London game, all this stuff, is pure swindle! And people should go to jail for just doing it! Because it's a destruction of the economy, to introduce fake money as if it were value. It's not redeemable; it's not credit. It's fake money.

And this is the greatest problem: By keeping people stupid, by these various kinds of tricks, and they believe they're educated because they've learned these tricks! Like statistics. And they believe it.


Shields: You say, it's training people not to think. This makes clear, because sometimes you get this funny pessimism, that, "Oh, people are just like that! People are just controlled by their senses. People are just...." But it's not true; there's a policy to get a population that behaves in that way. Because if you have a population that identifies primarily with their sense-perceptions, you've got a population that can be controlled in this way, that will believe a statistical description of reality.

Because the whole point of statistics, as you're saying, is to disguise intent.

But then, going back to our first "time" question, it's significant to really think: What do you really mean, when you say, that there's an intent to do something? That's sort of an amazing thing, if you think about it. It's something that really throws out the idea of linear clock-time. Because the very idea of having intent means that you're acting on a future state, in such a way, that that future is acting on what you recognize to be the present.

LaRouche: Yeah. That's the time you're functioning in.

Shields: Exactly. And it's you existing in that.

The Imagination

LaRouche: The other thing is fun, which, as I pointed out, is why you and Chance are having such fun—that the real, highest level of knowledge, that man has ever achieved, is in the imagination, and imagination as expressed by Classical artistic composition. This is the area of the imagination, in which the ideas of what might be happening are found. When you are inspired by this Classical kind of artistic equivalent education, then you are able to make discoveries, guided by the inspiration of these forms of Classical artistic composition.

So you don't have science as leading in human progress. The imagination leads in human progress. Progress is going where you never went before! Progress is going to do something that you never knew before! And making it successful. And how do you do that? With the imagination. Well, how do you do that? Well, with the principle of metaphor. The role of metaphor in poetry, in drama, gives you an imagination.

Now, take that idea from the stage, from Classical artistic composition, take that idea into the laboratory, and a scientific thinker will be inspired by these models, which are often literary models or things like that, and they inspire people to say, "Wait a minute! Where'd I get that idea?" And they make a discovery.

So the leading edge of the distinction of mankind from the beast is the Classical artistic imagination, where the ideas of what has not yet been done, are forged. And it's those ideas, which then, in turn, guide and inspire, scientific and related progress. And therefore, the imagination is crucial.

Shields: You made the point, which I think is worth drawing out, in the first of the papers in this series, on "When Governments Crumble," you made the point that it's wrong to say, there's something called "mind" and "imagination" that's studying some other thing, called the "universe." That in reality, what you're doing, the real investigation, is mind investigating mind. And removing that—that's very important! Because you can't have any progress without it, but then taking it out, leads to a very serious, moral slippery slope.

Because if you believe that there's some one set of principles that apply to mind, and some other set of principles that apply to the rest of the universe, you set yourself up for the liberal fascist argument, Which says, "I know what you're saying is right in principle. I agree with you in principle, I agree that we shouldn't let people be foreclosed on; I agree that we should not be throwing families out of their houses; I agree that we shouldn't have people starving in different nations of the world. But, don't you have to pay attention to reality? Reality is, there's only so much to go around. Reality is, we're in this state, we have to be realistic."

Then you bring in the statistics, and you're getting people to look at the current state of affairs as though it were completely defined, and you're ignoring the fact that it's an intention that's driving the process.

And so, as soon as you make that separation between mind and so-called "objective reality," then you're introducing the wrong idea of time, as a corollary—you're introducing the Newtonian/Laplacian idea of time as a corollary, and you're destroying the ability to act, as actual, moral human beings, for the sake of humanity. All those go hand in hand.

LaRouche: Precisely. Precisely that. That's exactly it.

Teng: Well, I have a question on that. It seems like, as far as experimental science goes, when you begin to think about, for example, what's being raised here about time: It's clear, at least initially it seems clear, in the realm of experiments in, say, the extremes of physics, whether it's in the very small or the very large astrophysical domains, it seems easier and more controllable. You go to the next level, which Vernadsky raised, about the questions of time, and really space-time, in living processes, as subsuming those lower processes, and experimentally, it seems a little bit less clear about how to control certain things, to get clear conclusions; and then, of course, he's already laying the table for the next stage, in terms of the Noösphere, then you have a subsuming domain above that.

The question that I have for you, Lyn, is: In terms of the microphysical or the astrophysical, where do you place human economic, human social organization, in terms of actually acting as policy, on the question that you're raising? It's, to me, still a little bit unclear, how that gets take into the domain of economic forecasting and policymaking.

What Happened to Our Culture?

LaRouche: It's easier for me, because of the advantage of my age, that what happened in the post-World War II period, was a systemic destruction of the ability to think, among people in the United States, and in Europe in particular, which I know the best. Now, you had the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a factor, and similar kinds of phenomena. The spread of existentialism, which is a mental disease, same kind of problem.

So these targetted science, yes; but the primary target was in so-called Classical arts, art forms, especially in music. Now, Classical music is very significant, especially because of the factor of Bach, because this introduced an organization, a systemic organization, a musical composition, based on a multi-voiced system. That this expanded what the human mind's imagination could do. This overlapped to other areas of Classical artistic composition.

But what did you get instead? You got existentialism. And existentialism, and various kinds of approximation of it, dominated. Science education became dominated by statistical mathematics, not science. It became that sort of thing. So, we had a systemic destruction of a certain collective cultural advantage, which people in Europe, and people in the United States, generally had, at least a large part of them.

They were actually rendered relatively stupid, functionally, by these things. They learned things that didn't require insight, like a trick, they could learn the trick. Like teaching a dog to perform a trick. And that's what's killed us. It's the general cultural outlook, and the intent of culture.

In other words, culture, the cultural development of the mind, and personality, in habits of a people—that's the people! It's not money, it's the habits of the people. It's the culture of the people! And then, the creative function of culture, the imagination, the creative Classical artistic imagination, is the driver of science. If you don't have that driver, you lack what's called inspiration, and you produce gimmicks, rather than insights into new principles.

And we have, to a large degree, lost that. And here I am approaching 89 very soon, when most of the people of my generation are dead, or if they're not dead, most of them are nonfunctional, those who remain; they are no longer an influential factor in shaping the average way policy is made, policy is accepted or not accepted.

Then you have the Baby-Boomer generation, which essentially was a destroyed generation. The destruction, essentially—the killing of Kennedy was deliberate, on the part of very powerful forces, and the killing of his brother, Robert, who was a threat because he might have become the next President of the United States—they killed him, too. We went through the '68er phenomenon as a result of this, and this is what did it. June '68, the murder of Bobby Kennedy was a turning point, where everything got nasty! And the degeneration—if you didn't have gonorrhea, you weren't social.

And this whole generation became the leading generation, which was used by the oligarchy, at first, and then, it was selected, and trained to be used, and they become leading influences in politics, in universities, so forth. You know, the freak, the acid-head freak of the 1970s, became the political leader of the 1980s. This was the trend. That's what we have today.

We have a crippled population, a crippled culture. And only a great crisis can break the bonds of that culture. We're going to have that great crisis: We're having it right now. We're in an impossible situation. If Glass-Steagall is not enacted, probably before, say, the 3rd of July, the day before the Fourth of July—if it's not enacted, there may be no chance for civilization. Because only the United States, now, could launch the initiative, through Glass-Steagall, which could restore our economy, and would force a restoration of the economy of Europe, and would save China and India from going down, despite their apparent greater strength, today.

It lies with us, to give up all other concerns, those of us who care, but to say, "We're going to get Glass-Steagall through, because it's the only action that enables us to save our nation. And when we save our nation, it gives us the leverage to help other nations save theirs."

And we get rid of this "governance" nonsense, and other forms of Hitler-like obscenity, and get this President out of office! He's a mental case, he's qualified under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, to go out as a mental case. He should be carried out, to his succor and relief, to some distant place from the White House.

But if these actions are not taken, people who are still complacent, and say, "It's all going to pass away, it's all going to be all right. You'll see, it's bad times now, but good times are coming! Oh, the President's got a new idea; people in Europe got a new idea, a new kind of society! It's going to be jes' wunnerful, when it happens! We're going to Paradise, now. It's going to be a little rocky on the way to get there," but since they're going to die in the process, who's going to hold them to account for having lied?

And that's where we are now.

And the problem is, we have to recognize that there has been great intellectual, emotional damage to our population, with the passing of my generation, almost totally now, and the incapacitation of the Baby-Boomer generation, because Baby-Boomers now are beginning to get into incapacities, increasing incidents of it. And they're going to be out of business soon; by the end of this decade, they'll be out of business.

And then ... what's left? You have nothing. You haven't trained anybody in science, you haven't trained them in skills, most of our young people under 25 don't know anything! You couldn't get them to do anything, because they don't even begin to know how to do anything that's important! We've destroyed our own nation with the policies, especially in the past ten years. George W. Bush, Jr. and Obama—that has been the ruin, the final blow of ruin, of our United States, and it's this that has put this Hell upon us!

We were still alive under the former President, Clinton. But under the two successors, we've lost it! And only a very radical and sudden shift, which puts us back on "Go," will save this nation. And it's not something in the far distant future: It's a decision that's going to have to be made in the coming weeks, now! Because if we don't get Glass-Steagall through, by the beginning of July, it is doubtful, that we will ever recover.

Glass-Steagall Now!

Teng: It makes clear why incremental steps right now are absolutely useless. The kind of thing you're describing, about a generational gap that's really profound, is not something you can really build up stepwise. It seems like at this point, the only way you can get that kind of cultural upshift, is through the actual experience of a radical upshift, of actually accomplishing a mission, something akin to, in the living experience of people alive today, maybe the space program, but on a much broader level.

LaRouche: The Egypt revolution is a good example of that. It was a mass-strike effect, which brought a new government into power in Egypt. We had other symptoms of that, but they weren't powerful enough to overwhelm this international system, which is crushing those kinds of movements. But we're getting to the point that everybody else—everybody's running out of options! There's probably a handful of people, percentile-wise, in this population which is not running out of options for the future. We're draining, we're getting to the bottom of the barrel, and then, we find there's no bottom there! But that's where we are.

And therefore, we have to recognize that our people, out there, have been crippled by what's happened to the past three-generation, successive decay in the culture, in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. And that culture, that degeneration is what we're looking at now. The question is, do we have the will, like a man rising out of his coffin, before he's carried off, to get out of that coffin, and to go out there and take the action, which will put the world back into business! We can do it! I know exactly how to do it. It can be done! But the will to do it, has to be there. If we can get the will to get Glass-Steagall enacted, by early July, we can save this nation. If we can't, I don't think there's much of a hope for any of us.

Hoefle: I think that's a fair assessment, if we don't do it, we're doomed. It's already locked in, under the current policies. There is no choice. Either we pass Glass-Steagall, either we change this policy, along the lines that you've identified, or, there is no alternative: We're all going to Hell.

LaRouche: People have illusions that that can't happen, but it can happen. It's happened often in history before.

Shields: And I'll add that this goes back to the same time question again. The idea of no incremental change, really is stating that there's no extrapolation from this present state that can get you anywhere. But, if you can identify a clear future state where humanity belongs, act on that, in such a way that it draws you forward from where you are here. You've got that clear reciprocal action across time—if you can do that, you get these huge, what seem to be huge, discontinuous changes that are no way deducible from the current state; but that's the proper human experience of time. That's the only one that we can live in, that will let us survive.

Teng: This is the platform idea, of economics, that you have to—

Shields: That's it exactly.

Teng:—act on all levels, simultaneously, in that sense.

LaRouche: Yes. We have the projects. We can name the projects that'll do it. We have the NAWAPA[4] project, which is typical of that, NAWAPA project which would mean, right off the hand, 4 million jobs, right away. Not immediately realized, but 4 million jobs are on the line.

We've destroyed our railway system, we've destroyed much of our trunk system, our power systems, and other things: That will give you another couple of million jobs. So if you want to talk about getting 7 or 8 million jobs, which are really productive jobs, back into business, in this economy, you can do it! Just pass Glass-Steagall, and take these kinds of projects, plus, putting the repair process back into the states which have been ruined by this shakeout. Help the states recover; get the essential institutions in there, in each of these states.

But at the same time, drive the whole thing, by a high-technology driver program, largely with engineering, science-driven engineering programs! You can get about 7 million jobs of that type, right off the top of the list! It's possible, right now! We just have trouble finding the people who are qualified to do those jobs, but we can train them; we can bring them into training programs. We've done it before.

And we can rebuild this nation—if we want to. If we want to badly enough, to fire the President, who's a mental case, and therefore should be out of office because he's a mental case! He shows that, all the time. And Wall Street? We don't care if Wall Street goes to Hell! We don't need it! We've had too much Wall Street!

What we need is a good commercial banking system, a good, American-style, classical commercial banking system, with a decent interest rate. Not an exorbitant one, not a too cheap one, maybe 2% baseline. On that basis, with a high rate of gain of productivity, we can do what has to be done. And we have some horrible choices to make, in part, in some of the things we have to do. But we can win! And that's what's important.

Teng: Before we end, I think it's worth it to point out, that when you defined the NAWAPA project last Summer, it was a definition, not just of jobs creation, not just a reindustrialization of the country, but it was defining the relationship between the human species and what's called our "environment," from sort of a passive, to an active role. And you said that this is going to be a necessary platform from which to have a revival of the space program.

And now, if you take those two concepts—fast forward from August of last year, to the Spring and Summer of this year—you see exactly where the lack of that perspective has put us. We're being destroyed—again, something that you had forecast in pretty explicit terms, that we're facing an increase in these kinds of extreme weather events. And you can see, in kind of negative relief, the importance of not just these policies, but the kind of paradigm, that this is the way that you have to actually take an active approach, an active role in shaping, in acting on the underlying basis of the environment.

And that seems to be, how you would define physical economy: It really defines, not just our relationship to our immediate environment; it really defines our relationship to the global environment, but into the future—it's the place where you universalize an individual's experience, to all of humanity, and it has to be done from the standpoint of economic policy.

Because without that, we're just stuck here, getting slammed by a hyperinflationary crisis, and getting slammed by these weather events, and the net result of that, or maybe the best expression of that, is Obama saying, "You know, this is just the way it is. This is just the way it is, and there's nothing we can do about it."

LaRouche: When we put him into the slammer, and close the door, and lock it, someone will speak to him, through the grill in the doorway, "That's just the way it is...."

Teng: There we go!

Hoefle: All right! On that note ... that wraps it up for this week, and we'll see you next week.


[1] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "At the Brink of Confusion: When Governments Crumble," EIR, May 20, 2011.

[2] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "What Happened to Us? What Is Our Constitution?" EIR, June 3, 2011.

[3] "A Pedagogical Investigation: Is the Past Fixed?" LPACTV, May 31.

[4] National Water and Power Alliance.

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