We should clarify a crucial epistemological point from the outset. Lyndon LaRouche, in a Sept. 2007 article “When Fate Hangs on a Forecast,” stated unequivocally: “The actual, strategic purpose and function of competent economic forecasting, is not to attempt to predict what will happen, but to cause it to happen.” In other words, LaRouche places Man’s free will and creativity—two thoroughly “subjective” matters—at the very center of the science of physical economy. That elementary consideration will prove decisive to understanding the scientific rigor of his forecasts, and why they are correct, and uniquely so among modern economists.
More than a half century ago, in August 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced the end of the international fixed-rate financial system, Lyndon LaRouche warned that, if the policies of free trade and speculation continued, the world would enter a breakdown crisis characterized by financial collapse, wars, mass starvation, and dictatorships. LaRouche was correct, and the world today is paying the price of not adopting the alternative policies he repeatedly proposed.
Over two decades later, in June 1994, LaRouche warned that “the presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term … That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but … putting the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.” LaRouche was right again. The Mexican debt bubble exploded in early 1995 and almost brought down the entire system. In January 1996, LaRouche published his famous “Triple Curve” pedagogical graph [Fig. 1], to indicate the irreversible crisis affecting both the U.S. and the world.
Twelve years after that, on July 25, 2007, LaRouche delivered a shocking international webcast pronouncing that “the world monetary financial system is actually now currently in the process of disintegrating… There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none!... Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse.”
LaRouche was again right. First Bear-Stearns went down, and then on Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed. Only massive bailouts from the world’s central banks, which continue to this day in the form of Quantitative Easing and now cryptocurrrency, stopped the entire system from going under.
LaRouche also made non-economic forecasts that made him world famous. For example, on Oct. 12, 1988, in a press conference at the Kempinski Hotel here in Berlin, LaRouche announced the impending collapse of the Soviet system, which would lead to the restoration of Berlin as the capital of Germany. At the time, his forecast was considered outlandish by most, and dangerous by powerful forces: he was falsely convicted of crimes he never committed, and spent five years in jail from 1989 to 1994. But LaRouche was right—and the world paid the price of not listening to his wise words. And it is still paying the price today for that colossal folly, a folly we intend to remedy.
How? First: The exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche remains a topmost strategic priority of this movement. And second: the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, a public charity established right after his death in 2019, has started publishing the Collected Works of Lyndon LaRouche, and digitizing, archiving and making available to the public free of charge the entirety of LaRouche’s works on the LaRouche Library website: over 2,500 articles; 1,500 videos; and on and on.
So, what is physical economics anyway? LaRouche’s definition is:
“The manner in which the human species utilizes its unique characteristic of creativity, to achieve the continuous successful reproduction of that characteristic in the physical universe.”
For LaRouche, the key to economic success—and to proper forecasting—is willful human action to increase Man’s powers over the physical universe, by using his creativity to improve that universe, including his own powers over it. LaRouche’s fundamental discovery is the causal relationship between such subjective improvements and objective results expressed in metrics such as Potential Relative Population Density.
This is totally revolutionary; as revolutionary as Nicholas of Cusa’s proof that all science is essentially subjective, not in the sense that everyone’s personal opinion is equally valid, but rather that what one actually knows about the physical universe—the only thing we know—is Man’s Mind’s interaction with that universe in the process of changing it.
In his 1450 dialogue, “The Layman: About Mind,” Cusa destroys the Aristotelian view that sense perception is knowledge.
“Aristotelians say that to understand is an accident… [But] Mind is a living substance…. Its function in this body is to give it life, and because of this it is called soul.... Mind is a living description of the eternal and infinite wisdom…. So Mind is not of the nature of changeable things which it grasps by sense perception, but of unchangeable things which it discovers in itself.”
Cusa explains that knowledge is actually a form of “measurement,” and that the relatively more infinite is the metric of the relatively more finite.
“Mind is that from which comes the limit and measure of all things. In fact, I propose that ‘mind’ (mens) is so called from ‘measuring’ (mensurare)… The power I call ‘mind’ [is] the power in us which embraces conceptually the exemplars of all things.”
By “exemplars,” Cusa means something akin to Plato’s “forms,” which are the original universal existences or concepts from which all specific reflections or “images” of it derive—a little like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave in the Republic dialogue. Mind uses the relatively infinite Exemplar to measure, or know, its relatively finite Images. We recognize a specific Just act because our Mind has previously generated the concept of Justice per se.
Here is a quick diagrammatic version of Cusa’s argument [Fig. 2], which will hopefully entice you to read the full dialogue:
The Mind of God, the original or exemplar, measures and knows His creation or image, the Mind of Man. #1 measures #2.
