The economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche urged many times, to friends, colleagues, and world leaders alike, that despite appearances, it is the future—not the past—that determines the present.
We see the truth of this clearly in the effect of the Nov. 14 inauguration of the Chancay Port in Peru—South America’s first deepwater port capable of handling the world’s largest container and cargo ships, built with the cooperation of China, which has made Peru the gateway to Asia for all of South America and has the potential to link up to the proposed Bioceanic Railway, connecting Pacific to Atlantic. A wave of optimism has been unleashed in Peru—not over what has happened, but what can now happen. New ideas for economic development and cooperation, which couldn’t be thought before, are now being thought of. The future is the present.
However, in periods of dramatic transition such as this one—between an old paradigm of inhuman colonialism and a new post-colonial era of cooperation among sovereign nation-states as equals—the future seems to be very much undetermined, and the turbulence of that fact is felt by all.
Tensions continue to arise in meetings of world leaders, as seen in the ongoing COP29 meeting; in the machinations to “Trump-proof” NATO’s war in Ukraine against Russia and U.S. military policy more generally; in uncertainties on all sides over the transition to a new presidential administration in the U.S. Responding to a question on Trump’s appointees during the 76th consecutive meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Nov. 15, Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented, “I could comment on a lot of the appointees, their profile from the past; but I don’t think that’s a useful approach, because if you take that attitude you come to the conclusion that there’s nothing you can do about it; there are historical material processes which happen no matter what…. If you look at it as projections of past experience projected into the future, you end up with something which is not corresponding to the absolute revolutionary transformation going on right now.”
That transformation is not, however, guaranteed nor automatic. True leadership comes from those with an intimation of the existence of the future, and the passion to pull that future into the present, even against the skepticism and cynicism and wails of “it’s never going to happen” from those of your peers still stuck in the present.
The 22 BRICS nations represent 4.7 billion people—57% of humanity—and as seen in the contrast between what the U.S. had to offer the APEC summit in Peru (nothing), and what China had to offer (the Chancay Port and entrance to the Maritime Silk Road), the future lies in the kind of transformation which will come in developing full-set economies and ending poverty in all corners of the globe—not in blowing it up in a nuclear war to maintain the “rules-based order.”
If we succeed now, in this ambiguous moment of transformation, in avoiding that nuclear annihilation and instead bringing the U.S. into cooperation with that Global Majority, we will be seen with gratitude by the vast and nearly infinite majority of humanity-yet-to-come, as the passionate individuals who acted on the future in order to change the present.
Friedrich Schiller, the Poet of Freedom, wrote, “Give to the world on which you act, the direction toward the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring about its development. You have given the world this direction, if by your teaching you elevate the thoughts of the age to the necessary and eternal, if by your actions or creations you transform the necessary and eternal into an object for their drives. The structure of illusion and lawlessness will fall, it must fall, it has already fallen as soon as you are certain that it is tilting, but it must tilt in the inner, not only in the outer man.”
This is the object of the upcoming Schiller Institute conference on December 7-8: “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men Become Brethren!”
