The Lead

When Institutions Fail: Think Like LaRouche

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Jul. 04, 2024

It is a clinically proven fact that, when the behavior of a severely neurotic or psychotic individual produces real-world consequences that are contrary to his belief structure, he views those results through the prism of the same psychosis—and concludes that his views have been vindicated, once again.

The “analysis” provided by Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe, a leading Establishment luminary, that the game-changing political implosions surrounding the cases of Biden, Macron, and Sunak are happening because “they brought it on themselves,” is of exactly that character. Nowhere does Kempe display the least recognition that these tectonic political shifts are merely the surface expressions of a systemic breakdown of the entire current London-centered imperial financial, economic, political, cultural, moral, and philosophical system.

Lyndon LaRouche forecast that breakdown crisis with precision over 50 years ago.

How is that Kempe et al. still don’t have a clue, and are willy-nilly driving the world to deadly economic meltdown and towards an increasingly-probable nuclear war—whereas LaRouche foresaw current developments a half-century before they “happened,” and provided a solution to the problem?

Go back to 1976, and a Strategic Studies memorandum written by Lyndon LaRouche on April 3 of that year, under the title “Heuristic Applications of the Higher Theory of Manifolds to the Current Strategical and Subsumed Tactical Situation.” Study the following excerpt from that document, keeping in mind that LaRouche had in June 1975 first presented his International Development Bank (IDB) proposal as an alternative to the current collapsing system:

“In any relatively short interval of development of a phase of society of a definite kind, the characteristic specific feature of that society adducible from its mode of development defines the approximate equivalent of a set of universal laws specific to that phase of that society. Consequently, in the experience of persons within that society, certain forms of activity as characterized by such rules represent the effective measure of reality within that context. Consequently, certain features of life so determined have the significance of `fact’ under such conditions. As facts they represent not only generally acceptable interpretations of events, but that interpretation is inseparable from an associated implicit notion of what practical action ought to be taken in response to the event. We might therefore properly term such `facts’ to be `practical facts,’ since their conditional validity is inseparable from the effectiveness of the kinds of actions they imply; they are called `facts’ essentially because the reactions they imply `seem to work’ within the framework of that phase of that particular society’s development.

“Then, however, bring that society to a point of discontinuity, such as the present phase of capitalist breakdown crisis. The society has reached the point at which it can no longer exist on the basis of the previously dominant sets of institutions. As a result, what worked as reactions to events in the past no longer works. In a very meaningful sense, the laws of the universe have suddenly broken down insofar as relations within that society approximate a set of implied universal laws of social practice. Consequently, what was effectively a `fact’ in 1971 is no longer a fact today.

“The situation is more complicated, as we have already indicated.

“There are two basic deliberate alternatives available to the capitalist sector today. One is the degenerated universe of Schachtian austerity and police-state rule on a virtually global scale. In this universe, an entirely new definition of facts prevails. The other is typified by the International Development Bank proposal, in which basic facts of experience are defined differently than either the world of 1971 or the Schachtian world. Finally, if neither of the two feasible universes is chosen, we have the special universe of absolute chaos.

“None of the four alternative universes yet fully determines what is a fact. The old universe is dying, but it still tends to contribute to determining what a fact is. The Schachtian universe is on the verge of becoming the total replacement for the world we knew in 1971, and that emergence is already influencing the definition of fact. The International Development Bank proposal is also influencing the course of events in some nations and in the global situation as a whole. The lDB also determines therefore the significance of facts. There is also a threat of growing chaos, which also determines facts.

“That is merely the overall situation. The process of moving from the existing, collapsing universe of 1971 into one of the three alternative new universes cannot occur as a simple direct leap from one into the other. The institutions needed to establish one of the new alternative universes are not in place; they will come into place as the outcome of successively intervening intermediate, short-lived sub-universes, each of which immediately contribute to determining what constitutes a fact for that moment.”

As you reflect on these deeper matters this July Fourth weekend, and on the urgent danger of nuclear war facing our species, this would be a good time to recommit to “Think like LaRouche,” since anything short of that will not provide a pathway out of today’s existential crisis. In addition to the above-cited document by LaRouche, a good place to start would be the recently-published Vol. II of the Collected Works of Lyndon LaRouche—which includes works centered largely on art, music, drama, poetry, and the principle of human creative action which underlies them—and which is available from the LaRouche Legacy Foundation.

And make sure you support and widely circulate the International Peace Coalition’s just-released “Declaration of Independence from Imminent Nuclear War: Begin Negotiations for Peace Now.”