This Week You Need To Know
LaRouche in Paris
Classical Culture: The Case for National Sovereignty
Here are the keynote remarks by Lyndon LaRouche to the annual General Assembly of the Solidarité et Progrès party on Dec. 6 in Paris.
What we shall do here, is consider from approximately a scientific standpoint, the case for national sovereignty, still today, as opposed to some kind of approximation of world government.
Now, what the functional importance is of national sovereignty, for the success of the recovery of this planet from the disasters that are now consuming it: The first thing, let's consider the role of Classical culture. That, if we try to communicate in terms of a language, and we assume that a language is something which can be explained by looking up words in a dictionary, then, we are idiots. As a matter of fact, we are bordering on a state of clinical schizophrenia: because, never does a language, as such, in a literal sense, communicate ideas. A language always occurs against two backgrounds: Speech, writing, refers to something which exists, refers to a situation. It also refers to the culture of the peopleas the culture of the people affects the way in which the situation to which the language refers. And therefore, there are always these two, minimally, two different kinds of ironies going on in any intelligent, non-schizophrenic speech. First, the reference of the speech. And second, the cultural view of what the reference means. And this is always ironical. Because, whatever you say, never tells what you mean! What you say, always has a reference, a reference in society, a reference in experience. It refers to that.
And the minute you refer, as a human being, in that culture, to that particular experience, this invokes reference to how the culture looks at this kind of experience. And also, at the same time, how the culture looks at this use of these words. This is always called, in Classical understanding of speech, irony.
So therefore, when a people try to communicate ideasand I shall explain what the problem isthey always, if they're intelligent, if they're sane, they always are referencing these two things: the actual experience, and the way the culture looks at that kind of experience.
Now, ideas have to be defined, and we usually define them in today's brilliant youth movement here, and in other places, in terms of the model of Gauss's 1799his first published major paper, 1799on the subject of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, which was an attack on, as some of you know very well by now, an attack on Euler and Lagrange, as well as d'Alembert and so forth.
And what it also did, which is very significant, not only did it attack the incompetence, or the fraud, of Euler's approach to physics, and Lagrange's approach to physics; but in addition to that, it referenced a pre-Euclidean, Classical Greek geometry. A Classical Greek geometry which was developed in ancient Greeceor the Greece of Thales, the Greece of Solon, the Greece of Pythagoras; referenced the accomplishments in geometry and astronomy in ancient Egypt, going back to the time before the Great Pyramids, the period of the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, which are astronomical instruments.
And so, therefore, what Gauss did, was show a continuity between pre-Euclidean, that is, Pythagorean, Platonic conceptions of physics, physical space, and communication, and modern mathematical physics. By modern, I mean the mathematical physics which was developed essentially since the work of Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th Century, in the launching of the modern Renaissance. Modern mathematical physics, as typified first by the accomplishments of Kepler, in discovering the fundamental principles of gravitation.
Defying Sense-Certainty
Now, in this case, what is demonstrated, demonstrated by a concept which is defended by Plato, and it's attacked by Aristotle; and it's attacked by the modern empiricists, such as the followers of Paolo Sarpi, Descartes, and so forth. The issue is this: In discovering a universal physical principle, we are always defying sense-certainty. That is, in discovering a physical principle, we're looking at something experimentally, which is observed in the senses. But, we're looking at a very specific aspect of that. We're looking at something which makes no sense, from the standpoint of the assumption that what you see with the senses is reality. In other words, you're starting from the standpoint which Plato defined as the problem of the paradox of the cave: that what we see with our senses is not reality. What we see is a shadow of reality, as reality affects our senses.
That is, as I've said before, on many occasions, but I'll repeat it again: Our sense-perceptions are based on organs of our physiology; they're part of our living organism. And therefore, they do not directly reflect the outside world, "outside our skin," so to speak. They reflect the effect of the outside world on our sense-perceptions. Our sense-perceptions are then interpreted by the mind, to give us an image of what we think the outside world is. But, then, we find that the outside does not behave the way our interpretation of our senses instructs us that it should behave. This creates paradoxes in experience.
Now the simplest paradox in experiencefor example, take the case of Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation. Now, the Mars orbit is not only elliptical in shape, which was what Kepler was the first to define, but apparently, from the standpoint of normalized observations, from Earth, it looks like it makes a little loop, once in a while. About once a year, a funny little loop. It seems to go backward, retrograde, and forward, all in a little loop. Now, there is no way, in Aristotelean geometry or physics for this to happen. This means that something is operating, which is not explainable in terms of the senses; and this something, as Kepler showed, is universal gravitation.
The way this developed, this concept developed, in ancient Egypt: The ancient Egyptians were looking at the stellar universe, and they were looking at it from the standpoint of things like deep holes in the ground, or the pyramids, which have these deep holes cut into them. So, one would show when Sirius appeared in a certain position. Another would show when Polaris, the other star, would appear in a certain position.
So, what the Egyptians understood, with their astronomy, as reflected in the Pyramids of Giza, was that the universe is out there, and the way we experience it, is, we don't know how far the star is away from us at that point. We simply see the star on the horizon. Where is it? We don't know. How do we judge it? We judge the angular differences, in motion and position, of one star in respect to another, or the Moon, or the planets, or the Sun, in respect to these motions.
So, we know the angular differences. The angular differences in what? We imagine that the universe is spherical: We're inside a great sphere. We don't know how big the sphere is. And when we're looking at it, and when we're looking at it from ancient society, we don't know how far away these stars or planets are. Even though some people began to be clever, such as Thales, and later on Eratosthenes. And by taking the image of looking at the eclipsesfirst of all the eclipse of the Moon, and the eclipse of the Sun; and with these two eclipses, you begin to get an approximation of some of the distances of the Moon and the Sun from each other as their relative size, which were calculations made by people like Thales, for example.
So therefore, they saw the universe as spherical. A sphere of unknown dimension, unknown depth, but spherical. So, their mathematics was not Cartesian. Cartesian mathematics, or Cartesian space-time is a pathological state of mind, which was introduced by Aristotle and others at a later point! The natural, simple, easy state of mind, when we're looking at the universe, is, the thing is spherics: We're looking up. We're normalizing observationsthat is, compensating for the motions of the planetand we're seeing a spherical universe. We see stars and planets on the horizon. We don't know, at first, how far away they are, in primary observations. We just measure the anglesthe angles of what? The spherical angles. And that's what we measure.
So therefore, the deviation of simple action within the spherical ordering, leads to the understanding of the existence of paradoxes: things that can not be explained from the standpoint of sense-perception. If you can discover what the principle is, which causes this to occur, then you have discovered something which can not be seen with the senses! But something which exists. Something you can know with certainty, through experimental methods. And now, the mind begins to see new geometries, which are invisible to the sense!
This was already understood from ancient Egypt, by the ancient Greeks, for example the Pythagoreans, with whom Plato dealt directly, through Archytas and others, at that point. And Plato provides a conception of physical science, which is based on this understanding of this principle.
Now, those things, which I'll refer to a couple of times, later here todaythose things which correspond to principles we discover, about the universeand in the beginning, this was always the stellar universe; the universe out there of stars; the universe of planets, and the Sun, the Moonthis was our conception of the universe. Now, anything that was known to be a principle, a provable principle, in terms of that universe, we call "a universal principle."
What I'm dealing with, here today, is the subject of universal principles of two kinds: using, first, the principles we call "physical principles"; that is, where the individual mind can simply experience nature, and by observing, as an individual, can discover universal principles. Maybe not as original discoveries, but at least as a repetition of discoveries made by othersgoing through the process of re-enacting the act of discovery. That's one kind of universal principle.
A Social Process
There's another kind of universal principle, which depends upon the relations among people in applying universal principles, as a social process. In other words, if the discovery of a universal principle must always occur within the individual mind, it is not a collective action. The discovery of a universal principle is never done as a collective action. It is always done, internally, inside the mind of the individual; in mental processes, which are not directly visible to the senses of any other individual. You can not actually "see" people thinking creatively. You can not "see" the processes in their mind, by which they make discoveries. However, you can replicate the same experience, in your own mind. But, you can't see the experience occurring in the inside of the other mind.
Now, this relationship between two minds, who have both had the same experience, leads to a very interesting result. First of all, how do you know that the other person thinks the same thing you think, when they think about this discovery? First of all, you have to define the problem: What is the paradox, which they can recognize with their senses? Now, each of them has a knowledge of what they went through, when they made the discovery. The result they obtain, out of the tentative discovery, is demonstrated by an experiment: Can you apply this discovery to nature, to control something in nature?
Now you can test that by experiment. The experiment you are capable of seeing, knowing, with the senses. By seeing the connection between the two, you're able to recognize that you both are talking about the same thing, when you talk about the act of discovery you've gone through.
In other words, for example, when you go to a university or a school, and you learn from a textbook, you are an idiot! You don't know anything. You pretend to know something. And you are approved for reciting these words, but you really don't know what you're talking about. You pretend to know what you're talking about. If you pass a multiple-choice questionnaire, you are a certified idiot! Because you believe in the questionnaire, you believe in that method.
You know something only when, concerning principle, you know it as a human being, only when you experience the process of discovery. And, when you're able to make a social replication of that, with other people, so that you both know, you're talking about the same thing. That is, you're talking about the same kind of experience of discovery.
So now, this process of creativity now becomes the basis for mankind to change his behavior, and stop acting like a monkey! Because a monkey has sense-perceptions. They're not necessarily as intelligent as a dog'schimpanzees, the Russians used to saythe Soviets made experiments on this. Remember, when we tried to send a chimpanzee into orbit, they sent a dog into orbit! And, the Russians said they sent a dog into orbit, because, contrary to human prejudices, dogs are more intelligent than monkeys and chimpanzees. Since the local man who was just elected looks like a chimpanzee, you think, somehow, he's an authority, therefore the chimpanzee is superior. But actually, the dog knows more than this local politician. So, "going to the dogs," is not always a bad thing.
In any case, this processthe human process, does not exist in the human form as such, in the sense-perceptual form. The human form is the form which distinguishes man from the ape. And that form is the ability to make these kinds of discoveries, such as discoveries of universal physical principle. As I said, the first time a physical principle was discovered, the easiest ones, are where one mind discovers a universal physical principle; it is able to verify that, by inducing some other minds, to conduct the same process of experiment and discovery; and then, by sharing the proof of the discovery together, to recognize that both went through the same kind of mental processes, when making the discovery. And that is what it is to be human.
Cooperation: Discoveries of Principle
Now then, a very interesting problem comes up: The problem comes, is how do people increase man's power to exist, through use of these discoveries? This involves cooperation. Now, the first form of cooperation, of course, is cooperation in making discoveries of principle, for example, in educating children. You want to have an idiot? Train your child to pass a multiple-choice questionnaire. You'll produce a certifiable idiotprobably becomes a bureaucrat someplace. And you know that, when you see them, when you are the victim of bureaucracy. You recognize what has happened. Hmm?
But, actually, this process of discovery is important. And, sometimes, when you pose a problem with a child, or a situation with a young child, and you see the child make the discovery, the child becomes actually illuminated. We often speak of "illumination," sometimes in a bad way, but often in a meaningful way. When a child makes an original discovery, even a simple, childish discovery of principle, the child seems to become illuminated, and keeps trying to repeat this experience, because the child is so fascinated by the experience of discovery, they repeat it, again, and again, and again! Ahhh! It's fun! It's play!
So, a child, with this kind of play, actually is showing human development, human play, by repeating experiments which show the child a discovery of something that the child itself can do! Like putting something together, playing with blocks, for example. Watch a child playing blocks, at a very early age. The ability to put one block on top of the other, for a child, is a big thing! And, the day the child discovers they can do that, they're ecstatic. They keep repeating it. They want to show it to everyonethey point to it. They can't even talk yet, they'll point to this discovery, and you know they're ecstatic. And parents will sometimes have tears of joy, when seeing this particular experience going on in one of their children, or somebody else's children. They just enjoy it, because it's human.
So this kind of thing, is the birth of social relations. And it's the way that people are capable of organizing society, to cooperate in doing something besides repetitive action from generation to generation. Monkeys keep doing the same thing, generation after generationand some politicians, too! They monkey around with our society, so to speak.
But in a progressive human society, in which people are increasing man's mastery of the conditions of society, there's always this creative process going on: The sharing of discoveries, innovation, change, improvement. Creative, productive people are people who are never satisfied with doing the same thing over and over again. They want a change. They want to find a better way to do it. Good workmen, always are trying to improve the work they're doing. They're happy people, working in a factory, with some kind of skilled job; they're always trying to find a way, by improving the work they're doing; or discover a better way to make a product, or something of that sort.
It's this process of cooperation, in the promotion of discoveries, and cooperation in the use and sharing of those discoveries, for society, which is the most essential second area of knowledge of universal physical principles. How can we order society, cooperation in society, in such a way, that society is able to effectively use its mastery of physical principles, to improve society's ability to exist, and to solve its problems? Hmm? How do we induce other people to accept acting in a certain way, for the benefit of society as a whole?
This, of course, on one level, is called "statecraft." In the form of play, it is called "art."
And there are two kinds of art: plastic and non-plastic. Plastic art is the art we create, which we can see with the senses. We don't always "see" with the senses what we think we see. It's the difference between Archaic art, sculpture for example, and Classical Greek sculpture. Or, the difference between the Romans' attempts to imitate Classical Greek sculpture, which is always ugly. And the fact that a Leonardo da Vinci or someone else, with improvements in this, was able to show, in painting, on a flat surface, how to produce the same kind of effect as was achieved in Classical Greek sculpture. You see, in Classical Greek sculpture, as opposed to the Archaic: The Archaicit's tombstone art. It's stabilized like a tripod. Everything is stable. It will not fall over. You are satisfied it won't fall over. It's an image, as of a corpse laid out in a coffin. Tombstone art. You see this in all the ancient Archaic art.
But, in Greek Classical art, something else is done: because the Greek Classical art recognizes motion. And what the great Greek sculptors do, is they embody motion in a fixed object. So, the sense of viewing a Classical Greek sculpture, is to recognize, to you it seems as though it's alive! A sense of being a living thing. So, the great sculptor has put the sense of life, into the experience of a Classical piece of sculpture.
Or, as Leonardo da Vinci, with his change in the discovery of perspective, from the linear perspective, to actually spherical perspective, was able to show, how, on the canvas, how on a painting, to produce effects like those the Greek Classical sculptors achieved, the result in sculpture.
So, this is typical of artin all kinds of plastic art. I mean, we actually, when we build buildings, we build buildings in a very ugly way, today. People call it "modern architecture." It stinks. I hate it. It shows that people don't know how to organize society. Because architecture, and the organization of cities, should be beautiful. Beautiful, not in the sense of decoration, but beautiful in a functional sense: The proportions, the way that things are done, conforms to human beings cooperating in doing things. The functional relationships in architecture, that is, in the house: the way the house is constructed; the way a building is constructed, an office building; or the construction of a park; the construction of a transportation system, should be, in a sense, aesthetical, but in a functional way.
Classical Tragedy
Then we come to the other side, is non-plastic art. Non-plastic art is the most important part of art. And the highest form of this, is Classical tragedy, or Classical drama. Because Classical drama, properly performed before an audience, is the way in which human beings can actually achieve the quality of becoming citizens; as opposed to subjects of government.
See, the average person is an average person. They have no great power. They're not the president of a country. They're not the commander of division, a military division. They're not a captain of industry. They're an ordinary person. They're a person in a household, a member of a household. They do a job. They have a routine, a life; they may change the routine slightly, but they're routine. They're small people, in a sense.
Now, how do you get small people to stop being small, in the way they think about themselves? How do you get people to stop saying, "I'm a little guy. I mean, don't tell me these complicated things. I'm an ordinary guy. Come down to Earth, and talk about ordinary things. Don't ask me to understand politics. Don't ask me to understand warfare. I'm a little guy!
"Put bread on my table! Put meat on my table! Reduce my taxes! Kill my neighbor. Execute him on some pretextI don't like him."
Little, small-mindedness, in which people, because they're small-mindedthe ones who say, "be practical"small-minded, they're behaving like human cattle, not like human beings.
Therefore, the function of Classical drama, is to take an audience of so-called ordinary people, and transform them into human beings, by aid of great drama. How is that done? Well, first of all, you create a theater. You create a stage. And the Classical stage has many experimental forms: You have the Classical Greek stage, for Greek tragedy. You have a more decadent form of the Classical Greek stage, imitated by the Romans, in which they were coming up through holes, and so forth, crazy things like that. But, the Classical Greek stage was simply a stage, in which one or two actors, wearing masks (and the masks didn't change, too much), would come on stage in succession, and play the part of a dozen or hundreds of people: two or three actors. The audience would sit enraptured with the drama, which usually referred to something that was a part of Greek cultureGreek history or Greek mythology. They put it on the stage. The audience would imagine, that behind the mask was each of the characters which were being created by the drama. But, it's probably the same actor, playing different parts, at different times. So, the audience was not simply looking at the actor on the stage. The audience was looking at a different set of actors, imagined actors, on the stage of the imagination, not the stage of vision.
In a tragedyand there's another form of tragedy, called the sublime, which is not really tragedybut, in tragedy, in the general sense, what is going on, is you're portraying the events of the society. You're putting on stage, largely, leading figures of that society. You're presenting the conflict of the society, and in the case of a tragedy, you're showing the society destroying itself, as European civilization of the past 50 years has been destroying itself.
It is now being destroyedby itself. Hmm? By the changes, especially in the past 40 years: We have changed from, concretely, a productive form of society, in Europe and the United States, into a decadent form of society. We did what the Romans did, or the Italians did, after the close of the Second Punic War, when they overran southern Magna Graecia; they overran Greece, and began conquering all parts of the world, and looting them! So, the Romans came back, and made social changes in the institutions of Italy, and reduced the Roman people, largely, to human cattle: either to slaves, or to people, like today's population, who live on "bread and circuses."
Today's mass entertainment, is circuses, just like the Roman circuses. And just as deadly. Mass gambling, for example. You shut down industries. You impoverish the city. Somebody calls, "Bring in the gambling casino! We need a gambling casino. To fuel the economy." For what? So the people who run the croupiers can rob the population of the few pennies left? Which is what happens.
So, we have become a decadent society. This culture, European civilization, is about to die! And, if it diesand it can die very soonit will take the rest of the planet down with it! Because China is not capable of surviving with its present population without European civilization! If the United States dies, then Europe will die! Then the planet will die! We're at that point! And, all the great tragedies refer to precisely that, that kind of event in real history, or in a legendary history.
History and Legend
For example, all the plays, the Homeric legends, are a mixture of history and legend, and they have a certain validity. They're an organic part of the ancient Greek population, their knowledge, their behavior. And that includes a lot of tragedies, a lot of destructions of kingdoms, of monarchies, of whole small nations, of civilizations. And, as the Homeric legends give you a picture in the Iliad and the Odyssey , of the tragedy on a mass, vast scale, relative to that society. That's the image of Classical tragedy.
So, now the person is brought into the theaterwhether the Greek theater, or the Shakespeare theater, the proscenium theater or the box theater we used to have, the Classical box theater. And, the person who's there is an ordinary person from the street; ordinary by a different standard, but some individualbusinessman, something, or just ordinary people. They come into the theater. And they watch the drama, in which the subject is a nation, and especially the leaders of the nation; and some people who are actually small figures in that nation, but who are interacting with the leaders of the nation. And, in the end, the nation destroys itself, or virtually destroys itself, because the leaders fail, or just fail to change the habits by which they are destroying themselves.
So, now, the little person, sitting in the theater, seeing a few actors onstagelike the Greek actors behind the mask; or the Shakespearean stage actors; or the modern actorsseeing these things, does not just see the figures on stage, as Shakespeare cites this, for example, in the famous Prologue to Henry V . Don't lookthere are no horses on that stagethe play refers to horses, great cavalry charges. But there are no horses on the stage. It's in the imagination, as Shakespeare emphasizes to the audience, through Chorus, at that point; through the imagination, that the audience sees exactly what the play is pointing toon the stage of the imagination, not on the stage of vision. And the stage of vision, and hearing, is simply a device to prompt the mind's imagination to see the actual society in this crisis, which is being portrayed on the stage.
So therefore, all of great tragedies do not refer to little personal problems. They don't refer to quarrels on the family level. They don't refer to somebody's sex-life problems, or something like that. They refer to the way in which great nations, and the leaders of great nations, tend to bring about the destruction of those cultures. Or, a great crisis comparable to destruction.
Now, the person watching the drama, then, sees, not only the drama, but he begins to see himself. He no longer thinks of himself as a little person: He thinks of himself as a person thinking about how to avoid the catastrophe which that society, with its kings and other leaders, has brought upon itself. How the people of that society, and their leaders, have brought about a great destruction of that society. And if a drama's effective, it shows him, essentially, the fact which he needs to know, to understand how that society destroyed itself.
He says, "No! I'm not just a little citizen. I'm capable of judging what's wrong with this society! I can apply that knowledge, which I get from great drama, to real life. In real life, I'm no longer just a little guy. I am now a citizen. I am now a person, who has part of the responsibility for what my nation does. I have to use my influence, and I have to guide my behavior, in a way which my nation will need, to save itself from this kind of tragedy."
Now therefore, the function of tragedy has been, great Classical art. I've just gone through great Classical drama. What's its function? All great Classical drama is based either on real history, carefully researched; or, on addressing legends, which in the mind of the population, correspond in effect to real history. Such as the Homeric legends, which are mixtures of real history and some other things. But, as Schliemann noted, and demonstrated experimentally, there was a lot of very precise truth in the Iliad . So, this kind of thing.
Thus, what the job is, the first job in politics, which I emphasize constantly, is to use real history, to enable the people to understand what our problems are today.
The 15th-Century Renaissance
For example, we took the case of the Renaissance, the 15th-Century Renaissance: At the end of that century, the Venetians, who were then the dominant maritime power of the region, dominant, also, with the Norman systemthat is, the Norman chivalry and the Venetians ran an empire, which is called feudalism, from about 900 A.D., up until the Renaissance and beyond.
After the Renaissance had established the first modern nation-state, in the case of Louis XIthat represented the first modern nation-state; that's the first state which was actually dedicated to the proposition, that the king, or the government, was responsible for the general welfare of all of the people, and for their posterity. And therefore, the king must not do anything, which is not dedicated efficiently to promote the general welfare of the entire population, and its posterity. This is the republic, the republic as defined in principle by Plato, for example, in his dramas. But, that's what a republic means. On the basis of the model of Louis XI. He was an expert in warfare, without actually fighting it. He fought a few wars, but he was smart enough to make the other people do the fighting. And he would buy them off, and he'd make money on the prospect.
But then, you had Henry VII in England, who ended the domination of England by the Norman knights, by the House of Anjou, Plantagenets, and so forth. He set up a consequent to the France of Louis XI, which was set up in England. This was later corrupted and destroyed. But nonetheless, it was done.
And these models, this model of what was sometimes called the commonwealth, or what we would call today, the republic or the republican form, this model was the model for the later upturns in European civilization.
But then, European civilization, based on the Spanish Inquisitional model, was used to try to destroy Europe with religious wars. It was the role of the Inquisition in Spain, it was the introduction of the concept of the "beast-man," typified historically by Torquemada, who committed monstrous tortures against populations. For example, the expulsion of the entire Jewish population of Spain, in 1492, by Isabella, under the influence of the Inquisition, was one of the great crimes which helped to destroy modern European civilization, after it had had a start in the 15th Century. It was the Spanish and their Hapsburg friends who played a key role, for Venice, in trying to destroy European civilization between 1511 and 1648, with religious and related kinds of warfare.
So, the idea of the citizen, the idea of the republic, was destroyed. It was destroyed by the appearance of "beast-men"! That is, people would commit crimes, like the Inquisition, beyond anybody else's imagination! "I'm going to commit a crime so horrible, that you will fear me, and you will love me, because you fear me. Because I might do it to you, too." Like a Nero. Like a Caligula. Like a Tiberius. The "beast-man" who rules, by reducing people to animals, to kill each other.
So that was the problem.
Then, you had Mazarin's role, in leading the way out of the Thirty Years War, on the basis of bringing back the concept of the sovereign nation-state and republic, again. Why? By showing this concept of the "advantage of the other." That we are separate peoples. We are not the same nation. But, how do we relate to each other? We have to concentrate on giving each the advantage of the negotiation. Don't try to get the better of the other fellow. Try to give him the better. And, ask him to do the same for you, and the same for others.
So, this was the concept of the republic, reborn, under the influence of the Treaty of Westphalia. In which you rise above Hobbesian, or similar kinds of competition among nations, to say, "We are separate nations, because we have"it's something I'd like to emphasize here"We have different cultures. But we also have a common purpose, which is a common human purpose. And the common human purpose is the progress of humanity. And for that purpose, we try to help the other achieve what they should achieve, rather than trying to take from them. But, to give to them. And, that's the way we progress."
Now, this went into a crisis. It went into a crisis, with the wars of Louis XIV, in that period. Again, Venetian games. And the people who dominated the 18th Century were called the "Venetian Party." The British party was known as the "Venetian Party." The British East India Company was known as the "Venetian Party." The Venetian Party was determined that the United States should not come into existence, from 1763 on. The Venetian Party was determined that France would be destroyed. The Venetian Party was determined, that no power would rise in Europe ever, to challenge the new power of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal power.
The Anglo-Dutch Liberal power was determined, after 1763, that this power would rule the world forever, as an empire! That's why Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , under the instruction of Lord Shelburne, the leader of the British East India Company, and the actual political ruler of England during the latter part of the 18th Century.
It was Shelburne, who organized the French Revolution! He was Shelburnehe owned Philippe Égalité. He owned Necker, from Switzerland. Marat and Danton were both his personal agents: deployed from England, trained in England, deployed from England; and read their speeches, drafted for them by the chief agent of Shelburne, Jeremy Bentham. In other words, the famous speeches of Danton, were written in London, under the direction of Bentham, and read by Danton, and Marat, in France. These were revolutionaries.
The Jacobins were the same thing.
Then, you had another crew, that's involved in all of this: the Council of Ten. The Council of Ten was a freemasonic association. It was created by the British. It was centered in Lyons. And it included Cagliostro, Casanova, Mesmer, and so forth. This Council of Ten were the people who ran the French Revolutionunder British direction.
What was the purpose? It was to induce France to be destroyed, and to destroy itself; and to induce Europe to destroy itself, by various machinations, like the Napoleonic Wars. Or the system that was set up after the wars. The British policy of the British East India Company, the Venetian Party, was always to get Europe to destroy itself, continental Europe! And everybody else! In order to perpetuate the imperial power of the British East India Company, and its successors.
Now therefore, what has happened up to this time, including the emergence of Hitler, including the Second World War, including the crisis we're going through now, is what? It's a process which can be traced, proximately, from the New Dark Age of the 14th Century, the rise of the Renaissance in the 15th Century; from the period of religious wars, orchestrated by the Venetians, Venetian Party, with the aid of the Hapsburgs, on the model of the bestiality of Spanish Hapsburgs and the Inquisition. Our coming out of that, with the Treaty of Westphalia; the role of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal parliamentary faction, in bringing Hell upon Europe in the 18th Century, the Hell of the 19th Century, the Hell of the 20th Century. So, that for a person today, to understand what is happening to us todayin Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world, todaywe have to know this history!
It is not someone having a reaction, to a recent event. It is not a matter of simple sociology, or the sociology of contemporary politics. There are political forces, cultural forces, deeply embedded in the culture of the living, transmitted from those generations which are now dead, which are now operating in our institutions, in our culture, to govern the way we behave. And the way we are behaving, as nations, today, is a course of self-destruction!
And therefore, how do we free people from this impulse, to destroy themselves? They don't see it as an impulse to destroy themselves; they see it as their "culture," their impulses"well, this is the way I think." But, the way they "think," ensures their destruction.
Why, for example, would a nation as powerful as the United States, offer the American people, in the year 2000, two rival sets of candidacies for the Presidencyin both cases, the Presidential preference was an idiot? George W. Bush, Jr. The man is a certified idiot. He's had a cocaine burn-out! And other kinds of problems. He has neurological problems of the type, which he can't function. He's also not a nice neurological wreck, he's a mean-spirited neurological wreck! But, he doesn't know what planet he's really living on! He flunked geography, at an early age, and he's not improved since. All right.
Now, he had as a Vice President, a beast-man: Dick Cheney as his Vice President. Okay, that was one choice. The other choice, Al Gore, was also an idiot, of a different type. He had, as his Vice President, a fascist beast-man, comparable to Cheney: Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman was created by the right-wing Cubans. And Buckley. Both fascists. So, this Democratic Vice Presidential candidate was a fascist, who was prepared, as was Cheney, to carry the United States toward world nuclear warspreventive nuclear warof the type we're now in, as a result of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001; which was used as an instant stage to provoke the world, on the pathway, toward generalized, preventive nuclear warfare, which we're now in. It's what's happening in Iraq, right now. Hmm?
Bread and Circuses
So, this is the way history goes. The American people have become so corrupt, so corrupted by 40 years of counterculture, 40 years' decadence from going from the most productive nation on the planet, to a parasitical, and stupefied nation; with the kind of corruption, which we know from the history books, as Rome, the Rome of "bread and circuses." An America of "bread and circuses," which wants to have its pleasure, at the expense of the dead bodies of the slaves who produce for it, from around the world.
So, the American people lost their culture. The lower 80% of the family-income brackets, in the U.S. population, has become disengaged from the political process. They go into politics, the way they go into a Wal-Mart: to buy worthless products, produced by slave-labor from abroad. At high prices. Prices they can't afford, because they don't have enough money to buy them.
So therefore, the United States has gone through a process of 40 years, of acute cultural decadence, from what it was 40 years ago, when Kennedy was President. And a lot of things happened. Therefore, for people to understand the United States, in the world today, you have to relive it.
How do I approach that? I approach that by treating the history, of modern and ancient civilization, as a single great, Classical drama. And packaging the experience of humanity, particularly European civilization, since the time of Thales, the time of Pythagoras, the time of Solon, and package that into a picture of the emergence of what is called "European civilization." So that we, in European civilization, can understand ourselves. But to understand ourselves, we have to absorb this history; we have to absorb about 3,000 years of history of European civilization, or we don't understand why we do, what we're doing today.
And how do you get that across? You teach history! How do you teach history? As a story-book? No. You teach it, by getting them to re-live that history. Layer by layer, like acts of a play, an integrated drama. And to re-live, in their own mind, the evolution of culture. Now, they understand themselves, or begin to. You put them on the stage. You put them, then, at the same time, in the seats on the balcony of the theaterto re-live the action on the stage. Imagining themselves on the stage, but also imagining themselves as seated in the balcony in the theater.
Then people can begin to understand what is happening to us. And get out of the fishbowl, or habits of behavior, and get into making the decisions which will enable us to survive. And the key thing here, is to get the individual citizen, not just the leader, but to get a significant number of individual citizens, to understand this, in that way. Then, we have a population of citizens, who can do that.
What I am trying to do, as you know, is to build a youth movement, based on that principle. And, to teach two things: The history of science, or man's relationship, physical relationship to the universe, how we can master it; to understand what a physical principle is; to understand what the word "universal" means; to understand universal values. And, then also, to understand cultural values, which also have the character of universal principles; the relations among people; how ideas are spread among people; how history is shaped by this process.
So therefore, what happens then, now, having said that: Now, go back to the question of how do you interpret a sentence? How do you interpret a paragraph? The paragraph is a bunch of words. What brings the words alive? Well, the first thing is, try to have some prosody. Have some musicality in the language, and don't speak like the way people speak these days. People don't know how to speak! They've lost the ability to speak! They croak, like ducks. And, you look it up in the dictionary: What's this duck's doing? What's this word, the duck's saying? I can't be sure, what he's saying. It's a duck sound. It's not human musicality. People don't know how to sing any more; therefore, they don't know how to speak. Singing, Classical music, comes from a natural characteristic of the human singing voice, speaking voice. Poetry was sung, it developed out of singing, out of the natural singing of people, like the great Vedic hymns, for example, which contain astronomic information we can verify; astronomical information dated to about 6,000 years ago! In Central Asia. Or maybe, 8,000 years ago. And they portray an astronomical system, which was accurate for that time. This was transmitted by an oral tradition, and most of these chanters, even the Hindu chanters today, Brahmin chanters, don't know what they're saying! They're just repeating these things, like music, whose words they don't understand. But, because of the musicality, the principle of musicality, and by sticking to these rules of this musicality, the chanters are able, with great fidelity to replicate the original singing, by word of mouth (for most of the time)by word of mouth, from 6,000-8,000 years.
This is the power of poetry! The power of poetry, lies in musicality. And great speakers, are people who have a sensitivity for musicality and poetry. And this musicality in poetry, is the musicality of Classical composition; is the musicality of Leonardo da Vinci, from the 15th Century and early 16th. It is the musicality of Bach. The principle of polyphony, is the principle of speech and poetryfour-part solfege is an integral part of learning to communicate ideas! It's not a way of learning to sing, in a certain way. If you don't sing in that way, you're making a nuisance of yourself. But, if you understand this, then you understand that, even the way our physical speaking/singing apparatus is biologically determined, we use that as a weapon in the ability to communicate ideas.
But, once these ideas are communicated, it works. Then, the question, what comes in? What comes in, is what I referred to: The general background of European speech, and communication, is the history of Europe, since at least the time of Thales, Solon, and Pythagoras. And the evolution of that history, those changes, those things that have happened, in European experience; and then, the divergence of that, in various national cultures. But all coming from this same flow.
So, when somebody says something, and refers to an object, an event, an experience, that is invoked. So, you can not look that up in the dictionary. You have to know the culture. And the way great poets work, like Goethe was a genius, in a sense, but he wasn't the bestthe way great poets work, is they invoke that. They have a sense, of the history of the culture. And what they do, with great poetry, or with other writing, or great speech, or great drama, is, to bring that to the fore; to help make people conscious of the irony of the relationship between literal speech as such, as such, and what it refers to. And, then also, to the immediate experience, to which these words are related.
So therefore, each people's culture, the history of the culture, these things transmitted in the culture, in the case of European cultural relations, the specific national culture within European culture as a whole. The ironies among European cultures: For example, we have these jokes about Spanish, in the Americas. Words you sometimes use in one country that are polite, are an insult in another language, hmm? But, it's all Spanish! So, the national culture comes into play, in what the meaning of the word is, as to whether the wordwhich means the same thing in both languages, literallyis an insult, or a term of praise. So, these things all come into play.
So thus, when we're trying to educate people in history, or science, we are required to take that into account. We are going to a people who are generally fairly ignorant. And children start out fairly ignorant. We're trying to get those people to understand, what their role should be, as citizens, in shaping the course of society. And thus, we want them to go through the experience, the cognitive experience, which enables the citizen, not to merely repeat the words, as if answering a multiple-choice questionnaire, but the citizen to understand what this is! The citizen's ability to make an intelligent decision about what he or she should do, in that society.
Bringing Nations Together
Now therefore, if we want to bring the nations together, for cooperation, let's start with European civilization alone. We then take all the European nations. We say, do we want to make them one government, under one nation? No, we don't. Why not? Because, if you homogenize this, or attempt to homogenize these national political cultures, you're going to destroy the ability of the people in them, to actually understand what you're talking about: Therefore, they must go through the experience, of their national culture, as a way of digesting the proposition, in which the decision has to be made. In the end, however, the decision they make, will correspond to some universal principle. Therefore, in the end, we have to bring the nations together, to make decisions, which are in the common interest. But, the route by which the people in one nation come to the same conclusion as the people in another nation, is a different process. It involves a different culture.
Therefore, what we should desire, is that a principle of Classical culture, be adopted and promoted in all nations. And we take the case of European nations. Classical culture is essential, in order for these people to understand themselvesagain, sticking to European culture, for the momentto understand themselves, in the past approximately 4,000-5,000 years of history, of European civilization. They must understand that history. And, must locate that in them. They must use their national culture, as a vehicle, like a musical instrument, in which to absorb and understand this culture, and develop these ideas.
At the end, the different national cultures, must come to common decisions. But they must be voluntary decisions. Not decisions where people obey orders. But, in which the people themselves are participating in shaping the policies of their nation. Then, we have a good system.
If we try to homogenize this, and go to a world culture, a world government, then, we are going to produce world slavery, because the people are no longer able to comprehend the processes, the controlling processes, by which they are governed. And that will lead to slavery, by people who like to make people slaves.
So, this concept of irony is essential. The way to start, is the way we started with the youth movement. You start, to get the idea of what does irony mean? What does metaphor mean? You start with Gauss. You take the problem the way Gauss does in 1799. You compare the lessons of modern mathematical physics, as Gauss addresses that, largely on the basis on the work of Kepler and Leibniz; and you compare that with a pre-Euclidean geometry, in which the idea of universality was already present. The same Classical Greek culture, which was used to give birth to the 15th-Century Renaissance, which is the beginning of modern European civilization.
Then, on that basis, now you've got a conception of what irony is: That man is not a beast. Man is above the beasts. Man is capable of discovering universal physical principles. And by that means to increase man's power to exist, to improve man's role in nature. That's man.
Now we have to take the same principle, as a physical principlethe principle of irony, the principle of metaphor, the principle of paradox, the principle of hypothesis: We have to apply that also to social processes. To discover the principles, by means of which human beings can cooperate, and come to an agreement for cooperation on joint purposes. And thus, bring the nations together, on the basis of agreement on a common notion of a joint purpose, but brought about through the internal processes of separate national cultures, and separate national languages. That's the process.
And thus, those who are experimenting with, on the one hand, with the idea of supra-government, world government, a magical world system, and so forthshun them, and put them into retirement. At the same time, we have to define what the purposes of humanity are. Which I try to do in my campaign, for example.
There are certain purposes. People say, "Why do you bring in the space program?" Well, first of all, the exploration of space involves everything that we want to know about the physical universe. And it also applies to everything we want to do on Earth. If you go into a space program, and you take a simple thing, like putting a scientific experimental colony on Mars. And you look into all the problems that are involved, in getting there, and what you do when you get there: You're going to deal with every possible physical, scientific, and related problem, that mankind has on Earth. If you concentrate on a space program, you're going to discover the things that will transform the Earth! Not from space, but simply by calculating how to get there!
So, these kinds of projects, giving man a sense of purpose, a sense of the future, a sense of where humanity is goingnot how do we get out of our troubles, but to the sublime: How do we rise above the issues as they're defined for us today? How do we get to a higher level, and choose for man, not what man thinks will solve the problems he perceives now, but lift him to a higher level? To get him to see, where mankind must go; to what future achievement mankind must go. Look ahead a century. Look ahead two centuries. Where must we go? What are we going to do, when the population reaches 10 billion, or 15 billion, on this planet? How are we going to manage abiotic raw materials, for example? How are we going to organize the planet?
We have crises coming up: The Sun, one day, is going to blow up on us, the way it goes now. Are we going to sit around and wait for that to happen? This may be a few billion years from now, or less. Or we may have some catastrophe a hundred million years from now, but so what? We've got to think about these things now. We've got to have a sense of man's future, because we don't know how long man has been on this planetmaybe 2 million years, as man. We don't know everything about where he's going in millions of years from now, and that's a plausible proposition.
The Sense of Immortality
And, let's get to one final point on this: the sense of immortality. The ability to deal with a crisis like that of today, which most politicians do not have. Most political leaders, or suspected, possible political leaders, on this planet, are incompetent to govern their own nations today. Why? Because they have no sense of immortality. They may hope, that somehow, they can get a rain-check on reincarnation, like this"I'm going to be reincarnated without delay," as one guy says. But, they have no sense of immortality.
We all are going to die. That is certain. But, what does life mean, then, if we're going to die? What is our self-interest, if we're going to die? Our self-interest is what is involved in our having lived. What have we done, which is of permanent value, for humanity? What have we done, to give justice to the aspirations of our predecessors? Give them justice. They had the right idea. We didn't do it, listen to it. There are problems before us, which have to be dealt with: Let's do them.
So therefore, in our "mortal coil"as Shakespeare puts it for Hamletin our mortal coil, we must absorb the past of humanity in our souls, as I indicated: history, as the dramatic stage should convey history. We must also incorporate the future. We can't see the future perfectly. But we can see certain tasks. We have a partial view of what these tasks are. And by dedicating ourselves to make possible the solution for these taskseither in our lifetime, or by our successors; or by creating institutions, which undertake those taskswe have actually become essential to the future and past of humanity by our existence.
Take the case of Jeanne d'Arc. Because the Jeanne d'Arc, essentially, with a few dramatic alternations, the Jeanne d'Arc of Schiller's drama, is the real-life Jeanne d'Arc. And she was faced with the idea of a mission: A mission to make France a nation, to change the condition of humanity. And she was faced with a point, where she could have made a compromise, or was offered a compromise, to survive biologically, knowing that if she refused, she would be burned alive. And, she made the choice not to compromise. As a result of that choice, France came into existence as a nation, which was her immediate mission. As a result of the impact of her making the choice, the Catholic Church, which was in the process of destroying itself, through the Councils, was inspired in part, by her, by her example, to clean up its act, and to reconstitute the Papacy, and reconstitute what became modern European civilization.
So, this example, and other examples of the Sublime, the individual who rises above their individuality in a mortal sense, to see a purpose in their life, to see something they must do, for the past and future of humanity: They treat their life as a penny, and say, "I'm going to lose it anyway. Where do I spend it, and for what?"
And that sense of mission must also be added. And that sense of mission, that sense of immortality, is the greatest of all ironies: The one which should color the reading of every statement, on a subject of importance.
Thank you very much.
|