LAROUCHE PAC WEEKLY REPORT
Long Waves of History:
We Have To Think Galactically!
[PDF version of this transcript]
Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science Team hosted this "New Paradigm for Mankind Weekly Report" on April 30. Lyndon LaRouche and Ben Deniston were her guests. The video is at http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/30655.
Megan Beets: People who have been following this website know that Mr. LaRouche has been warning for a number of years now, that if nothing were done to address the emergency conditions of collapse of the United States industrial, and infrastructure, and agricultural capability, in the face of what has been an increasing collapse condition, an increasing threat of so-called "natural disasters," the extreme weather conditions typified by the dire drought that's currently hitting the American West and Southwest, that if we did not do this, the United States and beyond would be facing conditions of food shortages in the immediate period, and starvation and mass death.
That condition is now here, and emergency measures must be taken. Now, that call is being led currently by the campaigns for Senate of Kesha Rogers in Texas and Michael Steger [who is running for Congress] in California.
But to go to a higher level, last night, Lyn, you, in a discussion with your associates, put out the challenge that if we are going to solve any crisis, like the drought today, like the threat of thermonuclear war, if we're going to be capable of making any competent strategic assessment of history, we can not go from the individual parts, up. You would be incompetent to think that you could take the so-called causes and so-called characteristics of the individual parts or sections, and somehow come to an understanding of the whole and a solution. Rather, as Johannes Kepler did, you have to have an insight into the top-down cause which is animating all of the separate parts. And last night you used the image of an ocean: that you have to have an insight into the ocean in which the different happenings are merely a piece of turbulence, or a fish, or a part contained within that ocean.
So, if we intend to save humanity today, we have to be able to have an insight to understand and act on that top-down force which is unfolding all of these separate events. So Ben, I think you're going to give us an insight into that.
Rivers in the Atmosphere
Ben Deniston: I'll just open it up by giving a updated picture on the drought conditions we're facing, as you so clearly stated them.
The headlines have been focussed on California a lot, but it's also a national crisis (Figure 1). Texas, for example, is facing very severe conditions. We've covered a lot of this, and it's a real threat to the entire country. California produces one-third of all the produce for the entire nation, so a drought and threat to agriculture in California is a threat to the American people being able to eat. It's a threat to the entire food supply of the nation; it's not limited to California.
And really, if you want to be serious about what we're looking at, it's not just limited to the United States. Figure 2 is a map from UNESCO, from the United Nations, on water stress globally. And you can see that in the western United States, as we're very familiar with, and down into Mexico, you have major water stress in the United States; but also Northern Africa, even sections of Europe; obviously the Middle East; and India and China, which each have well over a billion people they're trying to support. So water is an existential issue for the future of mankind on this planet. And we have to be serious about how to address this, and how to address this in the short term, if we're actually going to keep the world's population alive and fed at this point.
I want to start with the focus on California as a case study. In some of our work in Washington, D.C., we were told that some people's view is that the California water shortage should be solved with California water. Now, that's absurd for a couple of reasons: First of all, California water is not really California water. It's part of a global system—we'll get to that in a second. But second, the conditions in California over the past 150 years, on a longer time scale, have actually been anomalously wet and anomalously stable.
A report from a professor from Cal State East Bay/Cal State Hayward showed, through looking at tree rings and different evidence of climate variation over the past 7,000 years in California, that the past century has actually been one of the wettest centuries of this whole seven-millennia period. So the conditions that the water projects were built under, the conditions that California's water infrastructure was built under, were conditions of actually more water than they would regularly expect.
So we're going into a period where the whole system in California could naturally adjust to a much drier condition for many years—potentially decades, potentially centuries to come. That's completely consistent with the record of California.
Another professor, out at UC Berkeley, had a similar study, looking at the past 2,000 years, saying the past 150 years in the West in general has been also among the most stable and wettest periods of that whole region.
So, right away, we know that there's no reason to assume that the water we saw 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago, is going to return in any natural way. That's the first, immediate issue that needs to be put on the table, in looking at California and the West with the water. But to get more to the substance of it: The idea you can solve the "California water crisis" with "California water," means nothing. There's no such thing as "California water."
Figure 3 is an image of atmospheric water distribution; these are called "atmospheric rivers." So you can see this greenish-blue stretch across the Pacific, which is a measure of the amount of water in any vertical column in the atmosphere. The reddish-purple regions have less water; the green-blue is a higher concentration of water—and again, this is in the atmospheric structure. And they find that there are actually these periodic streams, these columns of high concentrations of water, which they call "atmospheric rivers," transporting huge volumes of water across ocean territories.
Figure 4 shows three other images of different cases when this happened. And you can see they vary in structure and length, but these are cases where large volumes of water are being transported from the Equatorial region, where we have greater amounts of evaporation and moisture content in the atmosphere, and directed up into the mid-latitudes. And a number of these come and hit the West Coast of the United States.
On the bottom, the colors indicate, in centimeters, the volume of water, the height of water contained in a height of atmosphere. So if you took one section of atmosphere straight up, and you took all the water that was in that column, how much water would there be? And as you can see, it varies from just 1-2 cm or less, up to 7 cm of water in that section of atmosphere. So you can see, these rivers are very concentrated structures up in the atmosphere, carrying large amounts of water.
Now, around the time of the California drought (Figure 5), there were some presentations by representatives of NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and NASA, looking at the relationship between these atmospheric rivers and California, in particular. You can see on the bottom, they noted that any one of these atmospheric rivers can easily have a flow 5-10 times greater than the Mississippi River.
So these are not small structures of water. It's kind of amazing to think about: If you've ever seen the Mississippi River, imagine five or ten of those flowing constantly, up over your head, carrying huge amounts of water throughout the ocean systems onto land in different places.
They found, for California in particular, and for the West Coast of the United States, that these atmospheric river structures account for 30-40% of the entire freshwater supply of the West. So you get general precipitation, general water coming from evaporation from the Pacific Ocean, bringing that water onto land, into the West. But you also have nearly half of that in the form of these very structured processes of atmospheric rivers.
They also found that, for California in particular, nine days of atmospheric rivers per year will provide nearly half of California's snowpack, which is a huge supply of water for California. And they also found that 40-50% of all California droughts are busted or stopped by the coming of these atmospheric rivers.
So the idea that California's drought, water crisis, can be solved by "California water," is a non sequitur: There's no such thing as "California water." California water is Pacific water, coming from this global system.
The point is, California's water, but any water on land, comes from, ultimately, the water being evaporated from the ocean: That's the supply of the entire global system. And to put this into scale, Figure 6 shows comparative values of the flow of water for different systems, measured in cubic km/year. So the Colorado River, under its natural conditions if we didn't draw any off at all, would have an outflow of about 20 km3 of water per year into the ocean. The full NAWAPA [North American Water and Power Alliance] system, including southern regions of the PLHINO/PLHIGON [in Mexico], including nuclear power, would be about 200 km3/year moved, as the full, expanded system. The Mississippi River itself, just one river, is about 400 km3/year, and for scale, the Amazon, which is by far the largest river in the world, multiple times any next-closest large river, has nearly 7,000 km3/year, so it dwarfs some of these other ones. But total evaporation, the total amount of water flow from the oceans into the atmosphere, being transported up into the atmosphere every year, is 413,000 km3. That's the equivalent of either 60 Amazon Rivers flowing straight up into the atmosphere, continuously; or, 1,000 Mississippi Rivers, or 20,000 Colorado Rivers, flowing continuously, straight up, and bringing this water up into the atmosphere, continuously, at all times.
So this is a huge store of water, constantly being pumped up into the atmospheric system. That's the basis for the whole global water cycle, the whole global precipitation system.
We see that in certain cases, you get these very structured processes, called "atmospheric rivers," which play a critical role in the distribution of this water to the West Coast and to California. But if we're going to have any serious attempt to address the water crisis in the United States, in the West, and we're going to need to look at this global moisture evaporation system as a whole.
Figure 7 is a schematic of the precipitation and the river flows of the North American system, and this was the basis for the design of the NAWAPA system in the 1950s: the fact that you have large amounts of precipitation up in the North, which runs off into ocean. And people came up with the correct idea that we can bring some of that water down into the West.
But now we're at a point, at which, because NAWAPA wasn't built, the crisis is much worse. The crisis is immediate: We're already losing half a million acres of the most productive farmland in California, a place that produces a third of the produce for the entire country. We don't necessarily have 25 years to build NAWAPA to address it. We can't wait that long to save the food supply, stop the drought in the United States. We're going to need NAWAPA and a NAWAPA-type system, but we can't rely on dusting off the original NAWAPA design and just trying to start to build that today, which wouldn't be online for another couple of decades, to address a crisis that's immediate.
A Super-NAWAPA System
But even beyond that, Lyn, you've stressed the idea of a Super-NAWAPA system, and I think this is where you have to go to think about it. Because if you're just relying on redistributing existing precipitation patterns, you're still making mankind subject to those precipitation patterns. NAWAPA is assuming that you're still going to have the rainfall up North and the precipitation up North which will allow us to draw it down South, but there's no reason to guarantee that's going to be sustained for any long period of time.
Again, as we referenced in the beginning, we know that the recent period in the West was somewhat of an anomaly, relative to the longer period, where the past century in California, the past century in the West, just happened to have more water regularly available than we can expect on any long-term basis. These are not permanent systems that we can just depend upon forever.
So, if we're going to have any serious attempt, any serious way of actually addressing the global water demands of mankind into the future, we have to think about the systems that subsume NAWAPA, the systems that subsume these large water projects, and really put on the table, the challenge of how can we begin to tap and potentially direct and redirect these large atmospheric flows of water systems on a global scale? How can we actually begin to look into different ways we can have some influence or control over where this moisture goes, where it falls, where it doesn't fall, so that we can ensure that a system like NAWAPA would be able to continue well into the future. We can ensure that the water is actually being distributed where it's needed, because, as we saw, there's plenty of water there: 20,000 Colorado Rivers flowing up into the atmosphere at all times! The water's there. The question is, can we have some effect and control over these large atmospheric structures and flows, to ensure that the water goes where we need it to go?
And the other aspect, another challenge, is our weakening solar processing, that's adding a whole other complicating factor. We're now at a point where the Sun has had a very, very weak solar cycle this past 11 years (Figure 8); and the expectation is that the next solar cycle is going to be even weaker, and we could be going into what the experts call a "grand minimum period," which is a period where you might have very low solar activity over successive cycles, potentially over decades, and potentially relatively no sunspot activity, no solar activity. And what we know from the records is that this has corresponded to drought in China; there was a recent study that said when the Sun gets into these very weak periods, they see corresponding droughts in Tibet, and in the Tibet plateau region, with these drought periods corresponding to these grand minimum solar weakening periods.
We know that these periods of low solar activity correspond to major cooling effects, major increased glaciation, major cooling effects in the Atlantic. The point is, we don't exactly know what we're going into in terms of an immediate period of the coming years and decades, with this solar factor added to the current crisis (Figure 9).
So the challenge, Lyn, is what you put on the table: to go to this subsuming system; not just dusting off NAWAPA as a sitting project from decades ago, but looking at that as a part of the solution, but going to the higher level of what actually determines the feasibility of NAWAPA or any of these other water projects, by this larger global moisture cycle. That's a challenge we have to put on the table right now.
The Universe Functions as a Unit
Lyndon LaRouche: The key thing here, is what I've been concerned about very much, because what happens is there's a certain state of mind, where even some of our own people get screwed up on this thing, because they think that there are certain things that are fixed. They make assumptions that "history will teach us," that "experience teaches us"; and it does not! The actual history of the Solar System has been evolutionary; it's never really fixed. Some things continue, but we're not looking in the right scale of factors to consider this.
Now, we're at a point where, because of these factors, we have to change our ways in many ways. But the worst thing, we've got to stop thinking about being practical. Because "practical" implies that you can repeat, as a matter of practice, that you can repeat some factor and that you can manipulate that factor and find yourself a satisfactory solution. This is not possible. It never was possible! It only seems to be possible when people aren't thinking. Whereas, we're looking at the Solar System, and when we look beyond the Solar System, it gets very interesting.
For example, the migration of the Solar System, moving through the galaxy—this is a very significant process. Also, the very idea that we live on Earth and that we have an Earth-based operation, is insane! We're now going through all kinds of changes in the system. We just, because we're short-sighted, don't see these things, and then one of these things hits us, and then somebody starts to complain. But this is going on all along!
For example, there are long-term trends in the Solar System; for example, the Moon was once an active part of Earth. Now, it's no longer directly part of Earth, because you have a shrinkage of the system which we call the Earth system, the Earth atmosphere system. That got changed, it shrank. The polarized area contracted, so the area of the Moon, which at one time was part of this wet part of this system, is no longer wet! Same thing, all kinds of evolutions have occurred.
But this comes from a stupidity of mankind. The intrinsic stupidity of mankind is to believe that there's some fixed system inside the Solar System, even the Solar System as such—but there is not! What we do know about the Solar System is full of all kinds of changes that occurred. They have histories.
We're looking at all these asteroids. They are going to come down on us some time! This is not going to go on indefinitely. There are lots of those asteroids, and they're whizzing by, and sometimes very closely. And some time, one of those asteroids is going to take out the whole human species.
That's where the stupidity comes in! People think in terms of what we call, essentially, mankind's culture, mankind's atmosphere, the conditions of life in which we live on Earth. Well, this is not true: The asteroid threat teaches that. What happened to the Moon teaches us. And the evolution of the Solar System, the evolution of forms of plant life on Earth, the forms of animal life on Earth, all these things have undergone changes which are catastrophic in their character.
The contrast is what? The contrast is man! Mankind is the only creature which has a voluntary capability. The voluntary capability means, the increase of the power of man per capita, to increase control not only on Earth, but within the Solar System! Like this whole asteroid problem, the asteroid threat; this is going to become worse, inevitably. It's not just something that might hit here, or might hit there. This thing is going to become more problematic. What does that mean?
Well, mankind is increasing, contrary to the Greenies. The thing you have to do, if you want to improve the planet, is to eliminate all the Greenies; just wipe them out. You would save lot of lives, by wiping out all the Greenies, because the Greenies are going to wipe the rest of you out, in any case, that's their intention. That's what the British Queen's intended to do.
So our job, is we actually have to go to higher energy-flux densities, in which mankind from Earth, and moving off Earth to control mechanisms in nearby space, can begin to control these areas. We also have to increase the control of high energy-flux density in another, broader sense. It is possible, implicitly, in the future, to actually make changes in the Solar System, willfully, by mankind. That's implicit in mankind!
But the problem is, that people today don't think that way. So they say, "Let's be practical." "This works," they say. "This always did work, this always will work"—and that is not true in the universe. I mean, we know something about the history of the universe, and it's a very complicated history. We know very little about most of it, but we understand the complexity of it. That's all we really know, is the complexity of the universe, and the universe is functioning, just like Kepler saw the Solar System! The whole universe functions as a unit! This is the lesson from Kepler!
And it was proven in many other ways. Look at all the things that we do know, which are scattered little pieces of evidence, but they all converge on this process. The problem with us, is man tends to be stupid; that is, by being stupid much less than man's capabilities are. It's becoming conventional: conventional opinion, traditions. Well, there is no such thing as tradition in the universe. There's change! There's only change.
And what we have to do is catch up with what the change is, the processes of change. We, in order to do that, have to increase our own intelligence.
Never Trust a Practical Man
Now, take the case of the United States: Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there has been no net progress in the economy of the United States. There has been no advance, but rather a retraction in the intellectual level and capabilities of members of the human species on the planet Earth, in general—especially in the trans-Atlantic region, because of the British artificial interests.
But also there's the attritional factor. We have to consider various kinds of attritional factors which are changing the universe, changing our immediate area of the universe. We've got to keep our eyes on what is happening in the galaxy, as the Sun goes through all these changes; and the Sun itself is subject to the changes induced by the movement of the Solar System within the galaxy! And we're now getting to much more highly active areas. So, we're saying the Sun is getting less active, but on the other hand, we also know that the trend is that the Solar System itself is moving into a more active area within the galaxy.
So therefore, the very idea, when people come up and say, "Practice teaches us, it will work because it worked before, or it would have worked before, it will work now." It's never true. Sometimes the changes are slower in effect. Sometimes they become more accelerated, like this change in the movement of the Solar System through the galaxy as it passes from one position to the other, the effect of the higher systems. We don't really know what that is! Because we're bridging an area, where the topside and the bottomside of this process, we don't know exactly where that goes. We don't know what the effects are.
So therefore, we have to assume a galactic standpoint, as a minimum. We have to think galactically. That means that mankind is going to function in terms of increasing higher energy-flux density. For example, what we thought was the Solar System, what we thought the [periodic] table of chemistry was, and so forth, at the close of the 19th Century, that's no longer true. It's changing. The energy-flux density, in terms of intensity, is increasing, generally, because we have to increase it. We can not survive without increasing the energy-flux density we propose. So people who are going to this green policy, are actually committing suicide! And murder at the same time. Murdering their neighbors, and suiciding themselves as a species.
The Green Policy
Deniston: That's literally the case with California with the drought. Because, what these people are saying, is that, we're going to have to adjust to this coming mega-drought period with less water. So by that, they're saying we have to just let agriculture die; we have to let the food supply die. So they're not saying something that's just going to affect them, they're calling for something that's going to kill the American people by ensuring there's not enough food to eat.
LaRouche: Because that's what the British Empire intends: That's the policy. That's what the green policy is. Every green advocate is a mass murderer, and should be treated as a mass murderer, imprisoned, and treated accordingly! Because the very policy they exert within an area as large as, for example, the United States' territory, or similar things that are happening in Europe—the green policies are systems of mass murder of the human population, and could lead to the extinction of the human species! So therefore, anybody who's a green, is a criminal, a criminal in the highest degree, a mass murderer.
So we have to take all these kinds of considerations into consideration; you can not say, "Work from local evidence. Build up a record from local evidence." What you have to do, is mankind always must extend our understanding of the universe, because the universe is changing! If mankind does not increase our ability to understand and control the universe in some increasing degree, we ain't going to make it!
So people who try to stop progress, whether they understand it or not, are willfully mass murderers, otherwise called "very, very stupid people"!
Beets: As you said, it's on the behalf of the enemy of the United States Republic, and humanity as a whole, which is this British-based oligarchical system. And people have no idea that they have adopted an ideology which was imposed upon the United States in the wake of the John F. Kennedy era. I mean, the policies that were being imposed, the ideologies being imposed, by Kissinger's policy, through NSSM-200, the idea, the lie that there are limited resources on the planet and population growth is a threat to them, and therefore, measures must be taken to decrease population—that's the policy people are implementing today, by insisting on the idea that we should shut down human civilization, shut down the noösphere, and withdraw.
And you contrast that to the view that Kepler had, which is that man's mind was at least as large as the Solar System. And he proved that! His discovery made man's mind encompass the entire Solar System, and we still have yet to realize and manifest that in practice, which is exactly what you're calling for today.
Long Waves of History Shape Events
LaRouche: I would also take another thing, related to the same thing, which is what I said in my remarks last evening. It's how we think about society. And practically every person who's talking about society is an idiot! Not because they intend to be idiots, but because they intend to be acceptable, and that's the same thing as deciding to become an idiot. It's a voluntary consent to be an idiot, to be a conventional person.
Because the point is, that even the simplest things, like social processes on this planet, are understandable generally in the range of a period of about a thousand years. This has been rather characteristic. Beyond the relatively major things, just the normal process of evolution, of man and man's condition on Earth, will go generally in the order of magnitude of a thousand years. So if you don't know what a thousand years are, and how the current thousand years is going, or its equivalent is going—.
For example, take the Renaissance. How did the Renaissance come into being? What were the conditions? There was a breakdown in the previously existing system, of a previous century. In this process, convulsive changes occurred. Jeanne d'Arc, for example, was part of the whole thing, and she was murdered—cooked alive, actually—by the enemies, but the Renaissance came out of this process, and this dominated things for the better part of a hundred years. This one thing.
And then you came into another period, and a whole century was involved. And that century has its characteristics, so you have a period where this is being experienced; then you have another period of hundred years. But this series, from the Renaissance on, into the present time, is a complete cycle. So if you're starting from the beginning of the period of the Renaissance to the present time, this is an incompleted cycle.
So when people say, events are shaping history, no! History is shaping events! And that's the essential idiocy which dominates people in this world today. They keep thinking that they are making events, they're making history. They're not making history. History is being made by thousands of years of cycles. And these are divided into cycles, but they're not simply independent cycles; they have successions, in centuries and so forth. We've gone through this kind of process.
Now, we went into the 20th Century; it was a downward cycle, but it was not the beginning of the downward cycle, but was a reflection of it, as of what happened with Bismarck's being suppressed, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And Abraham Lincoln defined a deliberate intervention into the course of history by the British Empire, because it was the British Empire that assassinated him! Similarly, again and again!
So when you want to understand history, in terms of physical history, political history, or you want to understand social processes, you've got to think in terms of very long cycles and subcycles. And you have to say, what is the cycle? Is it a major cycle? Is it a characteristic one?
For example, the Zeusian period, the period of the Zeusian cultures, was a period of great evil. And it was a very specific kind of evil, but there were other kinds of evil that developed from earlier ancient societies. But the Zeusian period was the most characteristic and the most evil, and the Zeusian period was the period which led into, by various other steps in between, the Roman Empire. And from the Roman Empire it was continued in the form of the British Empire.
The Roman Empire was the antecedent of the British Empire. We are still under the domination of the British Empire, as a global empire. And if you want to understand anything, even political social processes, you have to think in these terms. But people say, "Let's be practical, let's get some evidence, let's take some figures, let's take some calculations, put them together." That will never determine history.
That's what the whole meaning of real strategy is. The idea of the strategic concept, is that there are long processes in history, and if you understand these long processes, whether they're minor parts of the processes or greater ones, they all have a dynamic in them, and you have to understand that dynamic. And you may be able to influence that dynamic, but you can only influence the dynamic by understanding the dynamical processes of large-scale evolution. In other words, you never start from the detail.
The existence of mankind, for example: Mankind, how did mankind develop? Well, we developed largely because we increased our energy-flux density, voluntarily, the only species that does. And the way in which we did that, how we did it, is important; our effect on the climate. Mankind is very significant in effects on the climate, and the climate conditions and mankind are interrelated in that respect.
So the problem is that people tend to be detailed; they want to be practical. And I say, practical people should be put in cages, where they can't hurt themselves, and be fed by somebody who's kind!
Deniston: You've repeatedly pointed to a shorter-term cycle starting right after World War II, when mankind has reached a point where the energy-flux density, the technological capabilities, progressed to the point where warfare as a mode of interaction of nations, as it had existed for centuries, if that were to continue in this new technological age, you'd see the elimination of mankind.
LaRouche: That's right! That's what was intended.
Deniston: And so, that's defined the whole dynamic after World War II. I think what you're saying is very provocative, about history shaping events. You've demonstrated this repeatedly, in your own work and your own forecasting, and your own flanking: You never respond to people and to events. You respond to the things that those people are going to have to respond to.
LaRouche: Exactly.
Deniston: You respond to the process that you know those people are going to have to intersect and respond to, even at a future date.
LaRouche: I consider practical people as idiots, and I'm not exaggerating when I do so. Because the processes in history—take the case of mind. Compare the human mind with the animal mind. Now, animals, if they're conditioned, like my little dog; my little dog responds to the environment that we provide that little dog. Her characteristics are imposed by what we impose in her environment. We condition her from the time she's a little puppy, she evolves, and the result we get is the result we deliver. Whole societies are of that characteristic! And so people are not independent minds.
What we try to do, is develop those qualities in human beings, which will enable them to act, what? Noetically, creatively.
When Education Makes You Stupid
We don't like the education system today! We want to shut down the education system, in order to start with a new one! How do you think the present generation got so stupid? They didn't choose to become stupid, they were made stupid, by the conditions of life imposed upon them. It was part of the cultural process.
So that there are great waves of cultural processes in human society, as well as other kinds of processes, which are a larger indication. And all of these nests of cultural effects are interactive, these long cycles. And it's only when you understand how the cycle process works, and how you can break it down, and understand it, and trace it, "Yes, this is what's happening"—only then do you understand what you're doing.
So most people don't know what they're doing. They don't know! And, they don't want to know. They want to be affirmed in the assumption that they already know what's going to happen.
If you're going into space, the first thing you think about when you think about going outside the Earth's protective area: There are going to be some changes hitting you! You don't have control over your destiny, by will. You have to control your will, by developing your will to enable you to adapt to what you're going to face.
That's what the education process is. The basic thing: We have the correlation between energy-flux density, in terms of the development of the human species to higher orders of energy-flux density, that's one cycle. But we have to understand that these cycles that we have, that we have even experienced in our own development, are subordinate to a larger cycle! We can only affect a larger cycle by intervening in it. In other words, you change the cycle—that's what we do with culture and civilization: We change the cycle. we change its characteristics. We don't change the cycle as such that easily. But the problem is, we don't educate our people to know anything, that's why they become stupid. Most people in the United States today are functionally stupid. Why are they functionally stupid? Well, mainly because they don't have any incentive for actual noetic processes of discovery. They're all practical people.
Practical people are intrinsically stupid people, clinically stupid people. Because, if you're not growing, you're not a human. If you're not developing, you're not human. You're something in the process of dying, or dying out. And the problem I face is, this is the problem of humanity! Humanity does not know its own nature. Humanity does not know its own mind. It could! I do that, all the time! I forecast all the time. I'm not forecasting every moment around the clock, but I have these conceptions, I think that way. That's why I know what I'm doing.
But most people out there, including Presidents, and the whole kit and caboodle, they don't know what the hell they're doing! They're totally incompetent. You've got a few people who get a sort of instinctive insight into a sense of patterns of social evolution, cultural evolution.
Preconditions for Development
We're going into one now; for example, the trans-Atlantic region is in a process of terminal decay. That's where we are now. Western Europe, for the greatest part, is in terminal decay. Africa has continued in terminal decay. The entire Islamic world is in terminal decay, as a social-cultural phenomenon. China is now coming out; India, if it can overcome some problems, can come out. So you have a Eurasian perspective which is what these idiots don't get!
Why is Russia successful? Well, because Putin is a lot smarter than they are. He actually is. Because he's not stupid; it's not because he's brilliant, it's because he's not stupid. They're stupid! Obama is stupid! He's brutish, yes, but that does not mean he's intelligent. He's stupid.
And so therefore, the main thing we have to concentrate on is the mental development of the minds of our people. Don't try to interpret from practical experience and say, "This is what determines human behavior." Because your practical experience is something that is being imposed upon you by somebody else! And you call it being practical. What you're really being, is being stupid. How do you become successful? By becoming stupefied, so you don't do any of the things that get you into trouble.
People who think—actually think—are people who look at things in the long term, and look at these processes, and criticize the processes which are determining the way our people think. And what we have to do is get control of those processes which control the way we think! And that's what the meaning of knowing the future is. It's a very simple thing: Discover how you think. Discover what's wrong with the way you think. Don't try to impress your opinion upon society. First of all, let the truth impress its opinion on you, as a cultural truth, as a process of development.
What do you have to do? What does an Eskimo do? He gets an igloo. That's the first thing he has to know. The conditions that you live under are not the conditions that must guide you; it's what you must do to guide yourself to cope with those conditions, and you must have a sense of foresight, of the evolution of long cycles, the evolution of development. The easiest one, of course, is energy-flux density, as a characteristic of mankind, the increase of energy-flux density. That is the most reliable thing. And you get the biological correlatives of it: What do we do in creating an environment, an animal environment, other kinds of environment, plant environment, which increase the possibility of mankind in dealing with these problems.
But the problem is we are in a society which is culturally stupid. This condition is imposed upon us by social pressures, by social processes. And only if you can recognize what those social processes are, and disrupt them, can you do something! And what's happening now, is that the stupidity of the United States government, the stupidity of the British Empire, is condemning it to death, as a system. It's run out of the right to exist. It's like a species ripe to die.
And whole cultures have gone that way. They disappeared like species that are no longer fit to live. But with mankind, whether you are fit to live or not, is a matter of choice; you have a choice. Mankind has a willful choice, or an available one. Other species do not have a willful choice; they have the ability to adapt, but not to create.
Vernadsky's Idea of Man in the Biosphere
Beets: Somebody who recognized, in his own way, what you're saying, was V.I. Vernadsky, who recognized that, just as any individual organism within the biosphere might believe that it's determining its own fate, following its own instincts, and pursuing its own independent species characteristic, what we know from the biological record, is that if you take the biosphere as a whole, not only in any one moment, but also across time, you see that there's a top-down process of biosphere, which is determining all of the activity, and then the changes, and evolutionary process within that.
Vernadsky recognized that with the human species uniquely, you have something which is Number 1, qualitatively different than the biosphere; but also, that any human individual activity is governed by a natural process of noësis. And what he recognized is that things which had been subsumed within conventions, such as religious beliefs, nationalistic beliefs, and things like that, that humanity had come to a point, at the end of World War II, where those things could actually be subsumed with a conscious process of man acting on the basis of creating a noösphere. And he recognized that, for the first time, at the end of World War I and World War II, man had reached the point where he could act as a global species. And I think that poses the same type of point, in its own way, that you're posing today.
Long Wave Since the Renaissance
LaRouche: That was what happened with the Renaissance. The Renaissance actually introduced, after a long history of failures of human cultures, a factor which could mean a permanent human society. All the elements were there. But then, you had a great counter-revolution, which built up toward the end of that century, and with [Nicholas of] Cusa's death and so forth, it corresponded to that. Then you have a period of successive de-generations.
But then what happened is that from the Renaissance process, is that something else developed, and it developed through the process of colonization in North America in particular; other parts of the Americas, too. Because this resisted the cultural trends of the Eurasian region. And so therefore, we engendered a whole new wave of civilization, beginning with the Renaissance, or with the turbulence which caused the emergence of the Renaissance. There were efforts earlier, but they were crushed by the great epidemics. But nonetheless, in the process of that century, the Renaissance was the driving force for the creation of human civilization.
Now, that was crushed, by warfare, persecutions, horrible situations! But then, the development of the Americas, the kernel of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and what that engendered, created a new impetus inside the United States. So naturally, Hell himself, in the form of various people, came into the picture and said, "We're going to crush the United States." So what they did is they introduced a very simple factor: states' rights!
States' rights destroyed the United States. And now the carnivore, the British Empire and its like, have come to eat us, chew us up! Because we're stupid enough to sit there and take it!
And that was the long cycle: The cycle was from the Renaissance up to the point, the downturn, especially since the beginning of the 20th Century. We're now in a downturn toward toward Hell, global Hell!.
And the only place we can really have a basis for [avoiding] that is in Asia, parts of Asia. And Russia is in the center of it; Russia and China are the center of the future of mankind at this moment. There are other elements on the planet which could be brought together, but the planet as a whole, as a cultural phenomenon, requires a unitary capacity. There has to be something in the unitary capacity of the planet as a whole, which drives the planet as a whole in the direction which it needs, for all the cultures of the planet.
Kill the British Empire!
We had the Devil himself, who was, of course, the British Empire. It still is the British Empire. So we have to kill the Devil, the British Empire! When we have killed the Devil, and laid his ghost, we can start with another cultural development, which can lead civilization.
For example, we're at the end of warfare. Warfare on this planet can never occur again. We're now at the point that any attempt to have an effective full-scale warfare, would be the extinction of the human species. So therefore, we can't have that.
In this period, now, we have a new development, and the United States is essential, in one respect, if it can change its ways. Because we still represent this element of the Renaissance, the spirit of the Renaissance—if we come back with the American Idea, which is the Renaissance conception, actually, the original American Idea. Then, together with other nations which are coming up, like China; Russia will come up again now, under these conditions, it would tend to, very much—if we can avoid a general war, then we can topple all the dirty things that should have been thrown into the garbage bin! All the cultures that should have gone to the garbage bin, will be thrown into the garbage bin, and the planet will be dominated by a new trend, a new long, great cycle of mankind. And that cycle will not be ended until we have moved into nearby space.
And that's where we are. We have to! We've got all these blasted things that are about to plop down on us! Asteroids are about to kill the hell out of us! We've got do something to make sure we are asteroid-proof, the human species, otherwise there's not going to be much of it left. You know, one good asteroid hitting the Earth, and the whole species is out of business! So that's one of our goals, and we have to think in terms of great cycles, long cycles, think in terms of the history of mankind, the emergence of mankind as a species. The characteristics of mankind which no other species ever had. The evolution of mankind, the development of the culture of mankind to increasing energy-flux density as a command per capita. All these things are a process. They're all cycles; they're not cycles inherently, but they become cycles, because they are different phases; it's like the evolution of earlier forms of life, they went through whole characteristic groups of phases. And therefore, life progressed. And the old things died out and the new things came in.
Now mankind is a permanent species, because we're the first species that has a voluntary power to determine the consequence of our existence, and that's what we've got to do: Become mankind, no more war. We don't need war, it doesn't do any good for us. We've got missions to perform, these involve long, cyclical kinds of discoveries and developments. We're going to reorganize this planet in terms of the human population, and get us going back to work in the right way. And that's the way we have to think!
But thinking in terms of so-called practical ways, practical people—I despise. And that's the kindest thing I can think about them.
Beets: Okay, that's a good place to leave it for this week. So thank you for joining us. Stay tuned to www.larouchepac.com.
