Editor’s Note: EIR first published this article in Vol. 38, No. 11, March 18, 2011, pp. 4-46.
Lyndon LaRouche originally delivered this webcast address to an audience in Northern Virginia, on March 10, 2011. The full transcript with a longer introduction and 27 pages of dialogue is archived here.
Shelley and the Mass-Strike Process
Lyndon LaRouche: How do you do? Thank you.
I shall have some delicious things to say, and some bittersweet things to say, all of which are quite relevant. The subject is, today, essentially—which I’ll get to in due course, after setting the stage for it—is that there is a principle afoot, in the trans-Atlantic part of the world, generally, which is not understood by virtually anybody on this planet today, at least certainly not by the press, and certainly not by leading figures on the level of national governments, and on the level of governments of states. They don’t understand what is happening. They understand some things, but they don’t understand the real, underlying principle which is at work here.
You have, on the one hand, in the United States, you have the most terrible government we’ve had in more than decades, and the past decade was a horrible one. But that is not the whole story. What you have is a revolt throughout much of the world, spreading in the form of what’s called a “mass-strike ferment,” a mass-strike movement, as described in 1815 by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in terms of the concluding paragraph, especially, of his A Defence of Poetry, where he describes a process by which people of many parts of society are swept and gripped, by something they themselves do not understand, but leads them, often, against their own, previous will, to an end, which this principle, which controls society in that moment, compels them to do.
We have come now to such a point in this history, in the aftermath of this fake election, on Nov. 2 of this past year, in the aftermath of the installation of the worst collection of Republicans on human record, or on animal record, or whatever, as in the case of New Jersey and Wisconsin. You have nations of the world, leading governments of the world, not all the political figures in the world, because we know some in Germany, and some elsewhere, who are actually leading political figures, who are moving in a different direction, but even they don’t grasp what’s going on, what’s going on globally, in the trans-Atlantic region of the world.
We have, on the one hand, the worst government you ever saw, and that’s one of our most recent achievements: If you can’t produce a good government, at least produce the worst you can, that way you can achieve some goal, some end, some extremity, shall we say.
But there is no understanding of what the process is, which is actually governing this popular reaction, which first erupted in Tunis; it spread to Egypt; it hit Bahrain; it causes disturbances throughout that region. It spread, not only in the results in Ireland, recently—which I’ll have something more to say about—but it spread into the United States, where in defiance, of the worst collection of Republicans ever conceived, voted into office, we have a mass-strike movement, which these damned fools don’t understand, a mass-strike movement that is about to bring them down.
Now, to understand this process, as a process, not as a gossip, not as a newspaper headline, not as someone’s chit-chat on a television program, or some other piece of tomfoolery, but as a lawful process, we have to understand the meaning of history, in a way that even intelligent, and capable young people, young adults today, do not understand. The good people, among young adults today, believe that in their lifetime, they must do good. That’s the good people. There’s another crowd, too, not so good, especially under 25, as we saw in Tucson—that’s there. But, they believe that they have to respect the opinions of people of a contrary view, even of a hostilely contrary view. And they believe that their influence in society, therefore ends with their demise, with their death! They do not believe that a right idea, a correct idea, which may be held for a time only by a minority, that that idea must prevail over successive generations, because these ideas, which are precious to humanity, as well as some of the evil ones, are not born with these generations. The people who were born as young Americans, today, they were pre-shaped, in part, by what my generation was doing, and what generations before me were doing.
History Is Not a Timeline
There’s a course in history, contrary to all this stuff about—you know, talking about calendar dates, or timelines—timelines! The concept of timelines is for fools, not for intelligent people! History is not a timeline! History is those ideas, which are developed in a process in society, over many successive generations, which are preserved into coming generations, in which they affect the minds of people.
Take, for example, the case of our United States. Let’s look at the history of the United States, the ideas that shaped the United States, the ideas that are important for the United States and Ireland, today. And how these ideas have a very special, peculiar relationship, to the affinity of the struggles of Ireland against the British, and the struggles of the United States against the British Empire: It’s the same struggle, that started in the same time, but its roots came much earlier, in ideas which are earlier! When did it start? It started in 1688. It started with what? With the end of James II, who had made himself, as the author McCauley described it, the most unpopular man in British history, with this Bloody Assizes, and similar kinds of atrocities, and his slaughter of the Irish.
But things got no better. They got a worse tyrant, one who was more efficiently evil, who was imported from the Netherlands, and it gives the term “Netherlands” a new meaning: “Nether, nether, nether-land!” And this William of Orange, who was a representative of, actually, the Venetian school, the New Venetian Party, which was based in the Netherlands, which was based on a bunch of loan sharks—that’s all they were, Venetian loan sharks of the new type. And they had branched out, to the Netherlands. Why? Because Venice was a swamp, to which the ancient Roman notables had gone, to hide, from the horrors that they created. So they decided that they would take their wealth, and themselves, out to a swamp in the northern Adriatic. And they thought, there, large armies could not attack a swamp! So they thought they could be relatively secure, as a limited number of people, in this swamp area.
And, at a later time, they won their position there. The Byzantine Empire, which was the second Roman Empire, was in decline, and Venice, as the loan shark of the world, took over. And Venice became an empire, which was known for the Crusades, which was: Kill as many Christians as possible, and that’s what they did: They sent whole sections of the leading families of Europe out to die and be slaughtered in a pilgrimage, which was evil. And it fell down, into a New Dark Age, in the latter part of the 14th Century.
Now, in the 14th Century, something important happened: There was a great figure, Dante Alighieri, whose ideas were transmitted across the course of that dark century, the 14th Century, into the 15th, and several developments happened. Among the crucial developments, was Jeanne d’Arc. Jeanne d’Arc, who was actually tortured by the British, the English, the Normans. She was baked alive in an oven, the fire, and once they opened the oven to see if she was dead; once she was dead, they reset the fire, and burned her ashes.
Now, the word of this reached an influential circle around what was then the equivalent of the Papacy in that century, and the case of the criminality of [the murder of] Jeanne d’Arc, reached the council. And the council took the measures, which led to the beatification, later, of Jeanne d’Arc. But the action by Jeanne d’Arc prompted other things to be set into motion. The main figure in this process was Nicholas of Cusa, later a cardinal. Nicholas of Cusa was the one who took the idea of Dante Alighieri, of the modern European nation-state, and in his Concordantia Catholica, set forth the principles for going to a system of sovereign nation-states, the Concordantia Catholica.
The next phase, again, Cusa played a key role in this, among many others, but he was key. You had [Filippo] Brunelleschi, who had actually launched the foundations of modern physical science; and the crucial thing he did, was in the building of a cupola for the Cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore. And this process led to the birth of science, which, in a germ form, was introduced by Brunelleschi, with the idea of his cupola, the catenary principle: the physical principle of the catenary, not an artistic principle, not a drawing principle, but a physical principle, which eliminated Euclidean geometry, by any sane person. No person, after what he did, could honestly believe in Euclidean geometry. That was the death of it.
Cusa: ‘Go Across the Oceans’
But then, this didn’t just happen, in terms of scientific writings, and books, and so forth. It happened in the form of revolution, which again, was launched by Nicholas of Cusa! Nicholas of Cusa, before his death, assessed the situation in Europe, that the European situation had become desperate, despite the achievements of the Council of Florence; that the opposing forces, which were centered in Venice, which was the evil cesspit of the world at that time, that this evil thing would prevent, by its manipulation of nations through monetary principles, would be able to manipulate the people of Europe, such that outside help would be needed to save Europe from the disease which had occupied it.
And he said, therefore, go across the oceans, the great oceans, to other areas of the world, to other continents, and build up there the place for these ideas which we have struggled for, he and his associates; build it up there, and then bring it back to Europe.
Well, Cusa died. His friends did not die. And the trustee of Cusa’s estate, who was then the minister of the Church to Portugal, had these correspondences from Cusa. And this correspondence was then passed on, to a fellow called Christopher Columbus. And Christopher Columbus, in 1480, had absorbed and understood, with the help of the friends of Cusa, the scientifically trained friends of Cusa, how the size of the Earth, which had been determined by Eratosthenes, in an experiment by Eratosthenes, much earlier—we knew the size of the Earth, by Eratosthenes’ experiment.
Therefore, the conclusion was, knowing the size of the Earth, and knowing the general shape of the Earth, which was known since Eratosthenes, therefore, we knew where the other side may be.
But, unfortunately, they had some misinformation in there. Because the Venetians—again, Marco Polo and company, and his family, were a bunch of stinking liars: They didn’t want Europeans to know where China was. So they said it was a “terribly, terribly great distance,” and they placed the distance as being, in terms of travel time, what would be the East Coast of North America! So, Columbus, with this information, including this misinformation, or disinformation, by Marco Polo and company, of the location of the continent on the other side, and China—so they thought they were going to China, because Marco Polo had lied, and his family had lied.
But, nonetheless, Christopher Columbus set out on the route which was scientifically designed, to cross the Atlantic, in about the same time an ancient Greek mariner would have done, going down the route of wind and currents, with the help of a few oars, now and then, to get into the area which we call the Caribbean. And he arrived there in about the time he expected to arrive there, which showed he was a very good mariner, and he knew something about geography at that time.
So therefore, in that way, and with the same influence spread among other mariners, of the mariner profession, you had the discovery of the Americas, in this period.
Now, this was an attempt, then, of course, for the followers of Cusa, to attempt to deal with this process of civilization, what was going to happen to European civilization and its culture. So, what happened, eventually, is that the Spanish colonization, the Portuguese colonization, did not succeed—not because many of the colonists were not successful in what they intended to do, but because the Habsburg family, which dominated both the Portuguese and Spanish houses, was evil and corrupt! And therefore, the repression that they imposed on the colonized area, the European-colonized areas of Central and South America, were historic failures. They were not biological failures, because the people on the other side of the Atlantic had descendants, and these descendants and other people, came on to build up the nations of Central and South America, later.
But then, because of this anomaly, and because of the nature of the religious warfare, which had been launched by the Venetians in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, this was the first step, toward the New Dark Age: 1492, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The crime, which was only exceeded by, guess who? Henry VIII of England, whose crime was greater, than that of the Habsburgs in this period, who was responsible for the continuation of the religious warfare in Europe, from that time, up until 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia.
So therefore, in this period, actually in the beginning, the end of the life of some of the friends of Shakespeare, and the end of the life of Shakespeare, you had a movement, a new surge, of evil, a new dark age, organized by Paolo Sarpi, the inventor of modern European Liberalism, which is the form of evil, which is the root of what’s wrong with the world at large today: Liberalism is the name of evil. It continues.
The Colonization of North America
But in this process, we had two colonizations of North America, which were actually crucial, up until a later time, in the 17th Century, and that was, first, the Plymouth Brethren’s landing. And the Plymouth Brethren’s ship, the Mayflower, went to Provincetown, where there was a Portuguese settlement, a fishermen’s settlement, because the Portuguese had—as a matter of fact, many of the so-called Indian tribes, were prospects of intermarriage among Portuguese sailors, who married Indian women. And so you had these quasi-tribes, which were quasi-Indian tribes, which spoke a kind of Portuguese. So that when the Mayflower passengers and crew went to Provincetown, which was a town established at that point, in the tip of Massachusetts, they had an easy time in getting in a discussion with the people there, as to what the directions were to the mainland, beyond the Cape. And so, that became the Pilgrims’ landing.
And that was the first one.
But this was not an isolated event, because the same thing was going on in England at the same time. And the same process, was the process of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, under some very brilliant people, who were scientifically trained, and who led their party well.
But then, we come to the Irish question. You come to 1688, and where this bastard James II, who was so disgusting that nobody could like him, who committed a certain amount of slaughter on the people of Ireland. Then, he was replaced by an even more capable, but even more evil, successor: the House of Orange, William of Orange. And there was never a man, in that time, so evil as was William of Orange, who was the actual author, of what became the British Empire, which, since its ascendancy, in 1763, when it had won the war that it had organized, the so-called “Seven Years War,” became, by getting other European nations to fight each other, and kill each other, in the same spirit, that we had seen in the great religious warfare of 1492-1648, was able to weaken Europe, to establish the Venetian Party, which William of Orange represented, with the flag of the New Venetian Party, using England as a way of building the empire.
But that began in 1688, at the same time of the downfall of James II, who had been slaughtering the Irish. And what did they do? What did this crowd do, William of Orange? He went out to slaughter the Irish, in the name of the House of Orange.
And thus, we had, in 1688, the successive attempts at destruction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first by James II, and, more influentially, by William of Orange. And since that time, since the time that Europe became, or was in the process of becoming, nothing but a colony of the British Empire, of the New Venetian empire, at that time, Ireland was struck down. And what was going to be the Massachusetts Bay Colony was struck down, by the British Empire of William of Orange!
And that is the history, that is the fact, of what’s happening, today, in the United States and in Europe: The same evil, which I’ve just described, against the same background and history, contains the ideas, which move, in their process of evolution, from generation to generation, from location to location, and shape the way human beings behave in societies!
It is not, as many of our young people have been told, that they have a right to their ideas, and as long as they’re alive, their right to those ideas, is hereditary. And then, of course, the grave robbers come in, immediately afterward. That’s the idea.
But they’re wrong! My young friends are wrong! They’re often wrong on this one, because they believe that the right to belief is something which exists only within you as a person. And that when you’re dead, your rights cease, because your heritage is lost, the heritage called “life” is lost. And therefore, the other guys have their right to their opinion, too, even Adolf Hitler, and people like him, such as our President, or such as the ruling family of the house of England, which is really the descendant—and I do mean, descending—the House of Hanover, the house of the present British monarchy.
It’s nothing but a loan shark, a thief, a piece of evil, called the British Empire, which right now, today, rules continental Europe, through the euro system and its appendages. Which is destroying the nations of Europe, with its usury, its larceny, its filth. Which is seeking to destroy, to exterminate, our United States! These are not events, where the “ideas” of some individuals in their lifetime have gotten “the wrong idea,” and happen to be lucky, and get in power, or unlucky enough to enjoy the power they get. This is a process of history. The immortality of the nature of man.
Immortality: Participation in the Future
Mankind is based on what? Not on opinions! Mankind is based on ideas concerning principle. These ideas evolve, but those who have gone before, participate in the evolution of the ideas, which are required for today. The human being is, indeed, potentially immortal. Not in the flesh, but in their role, in mental life, in the mental life of society, their role in shaping the future of mankind. They don’t have a monopoly on the future, but they have a participation in the future! And above all, if they’re really smart, they believe that what they’re contributing, while subject to correction, is nonetheless, an integral and necessary part of getting to where they’re supposed to get to, even if they don’t know where that place is.
So, it’s only when you understand the immortality of man, the immortality of the nature of man, as a creature of ideas that change the universe: There is no other species in this universe that we know, who has been able to do the kind of things that man does. Only the human mind is immortal. The animal is not immortal. The human mind is immortal, to the extent that they embody those valid attempts at ideas, which generate the birth of the future. Their place in the future is eternal. They belong to the future of mankind, even though they’re dead. They participate in the future of mankind, even though they’re dead.
And therefore, it is those ideas, which pass the standard of truth, as borne by people over successive generations, as they evolve and are corrected or improved, or sometimes not improved, by the changes that are induced in society. And therefore, this is the nature of man.
And thus, when all of Europe, since 1688, has been under the control, either directly or indirectly, by an empire, a Venetian empire, centered in Europe, a Venetian empire brought into Europe by the campaign of William of Orange, it means that Ireland and the North American colony have a common interest, and have a common struggle, and have had it for all these years, against the evil that was done, not only to them, not only to us, but to all of Europe, and beyond, and the effects of Europe on the world as a whole, since the ominous date of 1688.
And to understand history today, to understand us today, you have to understand what I have just summarized. You have to understand history as belonging to an immortal species: mankind. And when you look at some of the species that have been wiped out, in the past history of life on this planet, you realize what the immorality of man as a species represents. And what we’re doing in the Basement, for example, to that effect, to understand these principles.
So, we are dealing with the immortal destiny, of mankind, as a species. And the immortal destiny of those who participate for the good in mankind and mankind’s future.
We are now at a point where the whole planet, especially the trans-Atlantic region, is under the degradation of what is typified by that mass of culprits, which was just elected Nov. 2 to the Federal Congress, that pack of scoundrels, like the Governor of Wisconsin, a real degenerate, who has made himself more and more hated; and instead of being the most popular man in Wisconsin, he is actually the most hated. And the fire of hatred is spreading rapidly throughout that region, and the fire is becoming more intense.
All right. Now, what do we have? We have a process, which is erupting. Here you have, everything recently has been bad. Everything has gone bad for ten years; nothing good has happened in the United States government! Some people have made some attempts at some good things, but they were overwhelmed by the evil things, like two evil Presidents: George W. Bush, the grandson of the man who helped put Hitler into power in Germany! That’s not good! And whose son was George H.W. Bush, the man who jumped from a plane, and left his comrades behind to die. Great hero. Great war hero! And then the son: Well, the man, the Cocaine King, whose mind didn’t function too well; still doesn’t. About all he knows how to do is, be mean. Mean and stupid, and preferably drunk.
And we have this specimen: We don’t know what it is! It’s called a President. I think it’s a balloon floating up there, kept on the ground by some lead weights called “shoes,” with some draperies in between. It acts like the Emperor Nero, in terms of its behavior toward the American people, that kind of thing. So this is evil.
We see the parties, we see large trade unions, and so forth, have bowed to this corruption! It seems like the corruption has taken over, especially since Nov. 2 of this past year. Like everything is over! “Hey! They’ve won!”
They’ve won nothing! And you’ve got an interesting little fact out there: Here you have this mass-strike movement—inexorably moving forward, step by step, nation by nation, place by place, across continents, across oceans, out to destroy these very things. It’s the mass strike.
Now, one of our advantages is, and one of my disadvantages is, simultaneously, the same thing: Most people, even those who are part of the mass strike, have absolutely no conception, of what the principle is that determines and shapes this behavior we can recognize as a phenomenon, as a mass strike. You have the same movement, which erupted in one town, in Tunis. And spread to Egypt. Which took over Bahrain. Which spread into Libya. Which leaped across the waters, to other places, especially in the United States. It leaped in the form of a mass movement, which said, “This is too much!”—when they looked at the results in January, of the election of Nov. 2 last year.
This is a transcontinental surge, prevalent throughout the trans-Atlantic region, coming on at the same time, that this grand and glorious success, which these “pubicans,” or [Re]publicans, or whatever they are, think is their victory, which is—it’s like Louis XVI saying he won the Siege of the Bastille. He won his death; he won his death by his victory, his victory over Lafayette, in taming Lafayette, his foolishness. And he says, “I’m the King. I have the support of my brother-in-law, the Emperor. The Emperor is going to protect me. And between the Emperor and me, we’re going to control this situation. And we’re going to punish these people for what the British did,” which is called the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace, which was used to incite the French Revolution. Mass strike, mass strike.
A Principle in Mankind
There are processes in mankind, in which there is a principle embedded in mankind, which, time and time again, not always, but time and time again, has surged forward to rescue mankind, or some part of it, from what seems an overwhelming victory, of the forces of pure evil. What is that force?
Well, I come back to this question, and the other questions I posed earlier, after stating, “What is this principle?” Because it’s something that probably none of you really understands. But some people have understood. This was understood by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a work, which he left uncompleted, in 1815, his A Defence of Poetry. He went through the first part of this thing, and then he came into one, long paragraph, which concluded as much as he ever wrote, to complete that work, which was then finally published some years later. It was first circulated in 1820, and then his widow, later, caused the thing to be published more widely. But this laid out a principle.
Then, you come into the 20th Century, the beginning of the 20th Century: You have a woman [Rosa Luxemburg], who was educated in France, who is a representative, a leading figure in terms of family circles, of a movement called the Bund, whose fraction inside the United States became known as the Workmen’s Circle. Now, this Bund was an elevated group, based largely in Lithuania and similar areas in Poland. Her father was a leading figure. He was a businessman, a manufacturer, and a leading figure of the Bund. And these refugees from this movement, came into the United States as representatives of the Workmen’s Circle; and if you want to find what a good Hollywood actor used to be: They were somebody who got a job because they were qualified for drama, in the training they got in the Workmen’s Circle in New York City. So that’s the way it sometimes happens; principles happen.
So, she [Luxemburg] also presented this in 1905, and in other writings, as a principle of the mass strike, and said, as what had been said earlier, in that one concluding sentence of the uncompleted work of my dear friend Shelley: There is a force, of ideas, in mankind, which is not understood in terms of sense-perception, but which moves populations, under certain circumstances, to accomplishments beyond their own preconception. They just are moved by something within them which they do not fully understand, exactly as Shelley describes this in that concluding paragraph of his Defence of Poetry. The same thing that is said, to similar effect, by Rosa Luxemburg. And there are other instances of this kind of insight, throughout history. But these are the most notable for us today.
What you are seeing today, coming out of a small town in Tunis, spreading, into Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, leaping over into Wisconsin, going into northern Ohio, going into the state of Michigan, and so forth and so on, is a mass movement, which is actuated by a principle, which almost no one, even the participants in this movement, yet understand. It is a principle and a phenomenon which is shaking the world; it’s shaking the governments of Europe; the governments of Northern Africa, the governments of the Middle East; the government in North America; it’s shaping these forces, and the people who are participating in this are participating with great enthusiasm, but no understanding of exactly what this thing is, that causes them to be so moved!
Now, this is the sticky subject which I said I was going to present today: I know what this subject is, and I’m going to describe it to you in outline, because it is a scientific subject, and you’re not going to get it, in a few words, or a few paragraphs’ equivalent, in a lesson today. But I will set it forth before you, to show you that this is a cognizable conception: That the idea that mankind, in mass behavior, could be coincidentally moved by a principle, for which they have no sensory explanation—that this is the way, in which some of the most important phenomena in history have occurred.
This also occurs in the form of mass movements, of revolutionary movements, such as the Irish revolutionary movement, where the movement is empowered by a sense of a mission, that even defeat, after defeat, after defeat, will not uproot that sense of mission. And you see it in the case of our dear friend from Ireland, of Sinn Féin: Gerry Adams. He spoke of his history, and he said: You know, we of Sinn Féin, we often are down to 1% of the vote in Ireland as a whole. But we come back, under certain conditions. And we have recently seen a demonstration of exactly that fact! Gerry Adams is back in the picture; he’s no longer down to 1.1% in Ireland. He just, in a sense, won, in a very significant degree of winning, an election in Ireland. And he’s now in a position to shape the history of Ireland! Who knows to what effect? But it’s the same principle!
And we, in the United States, who are sentient to this thing, like those in Ireland, who share the same thing, we understand this! We can not always explain it. But we know there is a sense of mission, a human mission, which we can attribute to the history of our countries, and the history of the trans-Atlantic region, since 1688, since the struggle against James II and his tyranny, his butchery, and that of William of Orange.
And you find that the entirety of Europe, otherwise, is more or less gobbled up, by the British imperialism, which established its position between 1688 and the 1763 establishment of the British Empire as such, or the British East India Company. That the Irish cause and the American cause have been joined by shared representatives, over this entire period, because we are not British subjects; we do not want to be British subjects. We, therefore, in our own minds, are not British subjects. We have people in the United States, who think they’re British subjects, or wish they were. They should go there! Benjamin Franklin had suggested that: Put ’em on a boat and ship ’em over there, where they want to go!
Let them be, what they wish to become! We want, of them, none! So, that’s the point.
Now, what is this principle? The principle shows you exactly how mankind is managed, and how this attempted management of society fails. And how we can use that failure, that occasional failure of tyranny, to be able to control the behavior of mankind. As the tyranny—you know, no European nation, publicly, has dared to mention, what caused this mass-strike phenomenon! Because some of them, who are sophisticated, remember Rosa Luxemburg, even more proximately than they remember Shelley and his Defence of Poetry. Some of them are not entirely stupid. They’re cruel and evil, but not stupid. Some people are cruel and stupid, but these are not exactly stupid. That’s unfortunate; they should be stupid. The world would be much better off if they were.
So, there is a characteristic of mankind, which is not that of the propensity of becoming a slave.
Music, Poetry, and the Minds of Children
Now, the way we are degraded into slaves: How was slavery done to the world, after World War II? After we won this battle against Hitler and all these things, why did we go back to what we went back to? It’s called Truman. True? No! There’s no truth in him! No true humanity in him! He was a Wall Street agent, and a British agent, at that. Why do we go back to such things? Because we become practical. We are concerned with our gratification, our sensual gratification, in particular, that we think of ourselves as what we enjoy in the sensuous part of life.
We have lost touch with our ancestry, not our ancestry as simply a biological ancestry, but the generations before us, who embodied an idea. Or a set of ideas. These ideas were not perfect, but they were our ideas. And we corrected our ideas, preferably through experience. And the main things we used in correcting our ideas, that people do, is poetry and music! Poetry and music, Classical poetry and music, is the mother of science. It’s the poetic imagination, the Classical poetic imagination, and the problem of making a poem come out like a poem, which itself, for many people, is quite a challenge.
That, in this capacity, which we put too little value on, there lies a capacity of the human mind, which transcends anything beyond mere sense-perception. And when people give their lives, which is the thing they think they have, the thing they’re told they have!: You’ve got your life, haven’t you? We allow you to walk the streets, don’t we? We allow you to be fed, once in a while, don’t we? We don’t kill you every day, right? What’re you complaining about?
Well, then why are some people willing to go out and die for a cause? A cause of humanity? Because there’s something more to them than being Gadarene sheep! Or, pigs, or whatever. And most people are content to behave like Gadarene pigs. “I’m evil, yes, but I’m a pig—and I’m proud of it!”
No, the idea that ideas, which are absorbed, refined, and projected by mankind: ideas, which signal expression, as Shelley said, poetry and the Classical composition of music, rooted in the conception of poetry. It’s in this aspect of the human character, that you find the spirit, and one little clue here, very important: Go to Wisconsin; go to Saxony, Upper Saxony in Germany; go to what we’ve seen in New York City and other places. What are we seeing? Who is leading the mass strike? What part, of the United States and Europe, is leading the mass strike? Teachers. Teachers.
Now, what are good teachers? Obviously, poor Obama never had one. I mean, if he had a real head, and something besides leaden shoes to keep his head from floating away, he might have had better luck in life. But what’s the issue? What’s the thing that moves us? It’s a sense of mission, it’s a sense of ideas. It’s a sense of man, as man’s creative power. It’s the creative power which a child will struggle with, in trying to compose a poem; in which a musician tries to compose a Classical work, or to perform it: Because these are the rehearsal halls in which the spirit of mankind is located. In the literature and poetry and music of a people, is the part of them, which has the greatest intellectual power, the power of the artistic imagination, of the Classical artistic imagination.
What is a teacher concerned with? Now, these teachers are mostly on the middle-age side, from twenties into their forties, usually. What is their mission in life? Their mission in life is the minds of children. Now, what do we mean, by “the minds of children”? We mean music, we mean poetry, among other things. We mean all the things which compel a student, pupil, to try to sort out something, to have it make sense, according to some aesthetical principle, an aesthetical principle, which is actually identical with the actually creative potential expressed in a valid scientific discovery.
So, how do teachers train children? Well, they start with music and poetry. You capture the child’s mind, the organized powers of that child’s mind. And what is the teacher concerned about? The teacher is concerned about the soul of the student. The teacher is concerned about the future of the student, the soul of the student, knowing that that soul, that power of creativity which lies in this sort of thing, trying to figure out how the universe works, by the aid of the rules of poetry and music.
So there are two characteristics, and we know this in physical science as well; it’s not what’s taught often, in physical science, or is only referred to indirectly in physical science: is the difference between sense-perception and mind.
Liberalism: The Pleasure/Pain Principle
Now, if you want to understand what sense-perception means, talk about an evil man: Paolo Sarpi, who is the author of the British Empire, actually, the intellectual author of the British Empire, today. Paolo Sarpi, like Adam Smith, otherwise known as the “Old Adam,” this Adam Smith, laid down a rule based on Sarpi, and the rule is: You don’t know anything, buddy! You don’t actually know anything! All you have, is your sense of pleasure and pain! And we give you pleasure, and we give you pain, and by these ’twain, we control you! Because that’s the thing you think is important, your pleasure and your pain! And you are taught that there’s nothing else! That’s called, the “Old Adam” Smith. That’s Sarpi! That’s the doctrine of Sarpi. That is British Liberalism. That is the principle that sustains usury, as practiced in New York City, for example, in Manhattan and throughout Europe today. That is this thing that authorizes usury, which is really evil gambling, which belongs in houses of prostitution in El Paso, and various places like that.
You sell your soul for pleasure! And to avoid pain. And your master controls you, by supplying you pain, and the pleasures of whatever the house of prostitution, of whatever else will please you, and keep you under his control.
So therefore, the part of us, which is human, the part which is creative, the part which is Classical artistic composition, is pushed away. What did they do in Europe in 1950? The Congress for Cultural Freedom! Freedom for what? Freedom to rot—and Europe rotted! Continental Europe rotted! Look at what you’ve got in Germany today.
You had, this past week, another mass-strike business, which had to do with automobiles. Now, Germans like automobiles: They like to possess them, they have a kind of sexual attraction for them. Don’t scratch a gentleman’s automobile! One scratch! It’s a cause for assassination, or whatever. So, what did they do? The German government passed a law: It was obliged, under this law, to take foodstuffs, and take it away from people, and turn it into automobile fuel! And that’s a German law: that a percentage of the food production of Germany must be turned to gasoline, or a kerosene, or something of that nature.
Well, this stuff was not so well designed: Because one large tanker of it, coming down a German highway, had a little accident. And this stuff spilled onto the streets. What happened? The street dissolved! In order to repair the street, they had to take this whole portion, dig it up, cart it away, as far away as wherever they could, to get rid of this stuff, and build a new street from the bottom up!
Now, if you know how Germans love their cars, you can imagine what happened: That in itself would provoke a mass-strike movement in Germany! It’s about as popular in Germany as a traffic jam! Which Germans hate, but they always go to them! That’s how they make traffic jams. And they also celebrate that, by killing mass transportation, so they can have bigger traffic jams, or keep up the level of traffic jams, despite the fact that more people are unemployed and can’t afford to drive cars. So all this stuff is going on.
The problem here is, we are so corrupted, by the international spread, especially in European civilization, trans-Atlantic, of this pleasure/pain principle, this so-called Liberalism, this amoral thing called Liberalism, that we don’t know what’s true. We don’t care about what’s true. We don’t think that Beauty, as we understand Classical artistic Beauty, is an essential part of the mind of man.
Now, let’s see what we’re talking about: What is the idea of Beauty, really? Minus all these crap artists. Well, we have, so-called, five sense-perceptions; this is the standard doctrine. Well, it doesn’t happen to be true. Because, what we’ve done, in terms of sense-perception, we’ve been inventing new kinds of sense-perceptions. We develop new instruments, which give us new kinds of sense-perceptions, not directly, but they’re sense-perceptions. So, we don’t have five, we have a multiplying multitude of all these different kinds of sense-perceptions, some which come in the box when we’re born, and some which come later, through education, or through association with society.
So, this being the case, well, what is sense-perception? Everybody says, “I believe in sense-perception. I believe what I can see, and touch,” and so forth, as sense-perception. “I believe what’s reported to me by mathematics as being the mathematics of sense-perceptions.”
But, is sense-perception real? Or is sense-perception a shadow of something, that is real?
Now, it was laid down as a principle, by one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of modern times, Bernhard Riemann, in concert with his onetime teacher and associate, that, when you want to get into physical science, you leave the department of mathematics. Because the calculation of things as defined by sense-perception, is not the real universe. These things are real, in the sense that they are shadows, cast by reality. But sense-perception is not reality. None of the valuable ideas, which distinguish man from a beast, are located in sense-perception! They’re located in something in mankind, which does not exist in the animals! Which is sometimes called spiritual.
But what is this thing called “spiritual,” which is the thing Shelley refers to in the famous concluding paragraph of his Defence of Poetry? Or which is also stated in modern times, in modern conceptions of that. What is that? Well, it’s called “mind”: The creative powers of man, to create something, which is not known to exist as a sensual object, but you’re able to prove, by inference, that it is, is the demonstration of the mind of man.
Development of the Creative Imagination
What happens in our educational process today? What happens to the training of students? What used to be the development of the mind, of the creative imagination—and this of course, has a great deal to do with limitation on class size, for education of children, and of older people too! How much attention can you give to the development of the creative potential of the individual person in the classroom? If you have too many, you’re not going to do the job. It has to be an almost family-like relationship of the teacher to a group of pupils, who are of number which a teacher can deal with. It’s the teacher’s ability to intervene in the process of the creative imagination; it’s the importance of music in the classroom, of Classical musical training, of training of the singing voice in the classroom. And the singing voice is key to understanding Classical poetry: You can’t compose poetry without music! If you don’t have a sense of Classical musical composition, you have no poetry.
We know, also, even from physical standards, that the principles of composition, of music, have been established, as physical scientific principles. I had a good deal to do with that sort of issue, some decades ago, when we assembled most of the leading singers, of the trans-Atlantic community, around the defense of the tuning, based on C = 256 hertz, which was the standard tuning, based on the register shifts, the natural register shifts in the human singing voice.
And therefore, the child has to be able to understand these principles, experience them, develop the singing voice which accords with these principles, and let these principles, as understood, resonate, in the way they think about poetry. And that builds up the child’s imagination. Now, once the child has an active sense of imagination, as a social phenomenon within the classroom setting, you have the potential for the development of the mind of the child.
So therefore, we have to have the difference. We have a necessary function, so you don’t fall into holes, of sense-perception. If there’s a hole in the street, you want to have the sense to decide that the hole is there, even though that’s only a sense-perception. But, what’s more important, as we have cases of people who have lost sense-perceptions, through damage to their physical organs, that they do have the ability, to rebuild the equivalent of sense-perception, sometimes with assistance, but they do it in terms of their own mind, and rebuild that. And thus, it’s this rebuilding, of this character of the individual, which is not their sense-perception. Sense-perceptions are merely the shadows of reality.
What is the reality? Reality is the power of creative insight of the individual human mind. That’s exactly what Shelley says! That’s exactly what Rosa Luxemburg said, about the same kind of phenomenon. And it’s no accident, therefore, that it’s among young teachers, or middle-age, young teachers, 25 to 45, and so forth; it’s among these teachers, who have a passionate commitment to teaching, which means a passionate commitment to the benefits for the mind of the pupils, for the mind of the people of the next generation. And it’s therefore, by poetry and song, that a people holds itself together, with its development of poetry and song, which gives us access to other people’s conceptions of poetry and song, as in language. And that’s what binds us together.
But when we are told that we are living in a Liberal society, a society infested with that disease called Liberalism—it’s sort of the intellectual equivalent of syphilis, that disease—that we lose the ability to locate our own identity. We become obsessed with sense-perception, to the degree that we do not see the human mind! We do not see the human being as anything but an animal, another pork chop to be eaten! And that’s what the crisis is.
So, we have two things going for us: We have a manifestation, at a time when evil seems to have triumphed over the planet—again!—in which there is a revolt, spreading, now, at an accelerating rate, throughout the trans-Atlantic region, and that’s what we’re engaged in. And that revolt, which you see in the teachers, and their students in Wisconsin; and you see in other young people, people of middle age, and young middle age, in Egypt; young, poor, middle-aged, in Tunis; people in Libya, Bahrain, and so forth; and now in the United States. And it’s erupting in Germany, in Dresden, which was the fatherhood of the great revolution against the D.D.R. [East Germany], occurred in Dresden. The demonstrations in Dresden, in particular, day, after day, after day, brought down the D.D.R. regime, with the help of what happened in other places.
Germany was freed. But it walked from freedom, from the D.D.R., into the hell, which was the British control, the British and French control, with the help of George H.W. Bush, over Europe. And George H.W. Bush and Thatcher, and that British agent Mitterrand—and I know he was a British agent! He was not a true Frenchman, he was a British agent, and the British used to laugh about it—he was their agent! He’s a secondhand Napoleon III, or Napoleon the Turd, if you prefer.
So, Europe was crushed, by the consent, of the combination of Mitterrand, of George H.W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher. And out of this, came the thing called the euro system—you know, it was the kind of thing you take to the toilet, the euro. And now Europe is in an explosive mood, on the continent, against the euro system. It’s wondering if it has the guts to fight and resist it. But that’s what’s going on there.
Again, so you see the ingredients of the mass-strike expression, which you can see in Germany, in the German who’s worried about their streets going to be eaten up by this fake fuel—you know, “I had a highway out there, and this fake fuel fell on it, and the highway disappeared. Now, where’s my car gonna go?” And in Dresden, where the teachers, predominantly, among many trade unionists and others, have led a demonstration, which reminds us of the Dresden demonstrations which brought down the D.D.R. regime!
So now we see, on the one hand, we find that there’s a spiritual quality, so-called, which is really the mind, as opposed to mere sense-perception: You buy them off with sense-perception, but the mind is still there. And if you don’t kill the mind, sense-perception is not going to prevail under these conditions. And that’s what’s happening.
A Great, Profound Movement
So there’s a different agency—the phenomenon is well known; it’s all over the world, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. And yet, there’s not a single press I’ve seen, of the so-called usual press, which has made any reference in any of these cases, to the mass-strike movement which was spreading, first across the Arab sector, and came into the United States, is ready to explode in other parts of Africa, and so forth. Which will tend to explode in the entire region.
And thus, the peculiar thing about us—both the Irish and the Americans, who belong to my tradition, so to speak—is that our recognition, among us, of the existence of mind, as opposed to mere sense-perception, because we have not been dosed so heavily as the Europeans have, the continental Europeans, under the British Empire! Which has desensitized them! They’ve lost their moral sense! Especially with the introduction of the European Congress for Cultural Freedom—which was a big mass of degeneracy, of moral degeneracy!
And so, in the United States, and in Ireland, with all our shortcomings in the respective places, we have managed, because of our isolation from Europe, or relative hostility, expressed toward us from Europe, we have been able to maintain, among us, a core of that spirit, as in the United States: The virtue to which I refer, is merely among a core of our citizens. But I find it is also, successfully, infectious, especially when people are disgusted with the alternative. And that’s where we are. That’s what’s happening today.
There’s a great, profound movement, throughout the planet, at a time, when the entire planetary system, economic system and social system, is about to disintegrate. And in this moment, out of the trough of despair, we find a force, arising from within the people, in certain parts of these nations—as in Dresden, recently, or as in Wisconsin—you find an eruption, of protest, and, not accidentally, often, among teachers, the teachers who are concerned about the minds of children, whose focus is the minds of children. Whose focus is therefore spiritual, in the sense that it’s focused on the future, what comes after them. What came before them, what comes after them, and how do you explain to a child, what came before them, and what should come after them? And that’s the secret, which has other implications, more profound implications, from a technical standpoint, of this process, of the spread of a mass-strike process, across the oceans, across the Atlantic Ocean, among different parts, of that region of the world.
And the alternative is, if we do not succeed in this enterprise, which I’ve now promoted here, if we don’t succeed, the Earth is going into a long dark age, probably of several generations. And it’s on the fragile element, which the mass strike represents, as a powerful element, though fragile, that the hope, for the future of mankind, for the foreseeable future, depends.
And thus, this peculiar thing, of the fact, that the Irish—and I’ve got a couple of ancestors—that I pride myself: We always tended to do that: that we are responsible, for embodying what we see from this standpoint, as we look at Europe and beyond—a conception of man which is not that of a creature of pleasure and pain, but man as a creature of principle, of the higher principles of discovery, which connect us to mankind long before us, in those ideas, which man developed, over many thousands of generations of mankind, up to this point. And we, today, represent a legacy, the legacy of as much as we have been able to retain, from that legacy of previous generations of mankind, an intrinsically immortal legacy, which, if we turn to it for our succor, now, in these circumstances, is the only standard, to defeat the heirs of William of Orange today.
Thank you.
Cusa, the Common Good, and the Equality of Man
These words of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) were quoted by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a speech on May 6, 2001, at a Schiller Institute conference in Germany. The full speech is in EIR, July 6, 2001.
Human beings have built cities and adopted laws to preserve unity and harmony, and they established guardians of all of these laws, with the power necessary to provide for the public good…. All legitimate power arises from elective concordance and free submission. There is in the people a divine seed, by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men, so that the authority—which comes from God, as does man himself—is recognized as divine, when it arises from the common consent of the subjects. One, who is established in authority as representative of the will of all, may be called a public or common person, the father of all, ruling without haughtiness, or pride, in a lawful and legitimately established government.
While recognizing himself as a creature, as it were, of all of his subjects as a collectivity, let him act as their father, as individuals. That is the divinely ordained marital state of spiritual union based on a lasting harmony by which a commonwealth is best guided, in the fullness of peace toward the good of eternal bliss.
So therefore, Nicholas of Cusa founded science, he founded modern European science, the only competent science we’ve ever had. Which went from him to his followers, including Leonardo da Vinci, including people like Kepler, including people like Leibniz and the followers of Leibniz, especially, in the last years of Leibniz, and came to life again, in full-blown form, secretly, in a sense, by Carl Friedrich Gauss; but in a much more impassioned and broader form, by the discoveries of Dirichlet, Lejeune Dirichlet, and his associate Bernhard Riemann. And Bernhard Riemann then brings us, of course, to what Einstein and others came to represent in the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th. And it’s the things built on those ideas in science, which is the only hope, for the future of mankind, today.
And the concept of the nation-state, the same way.
