In the midst of the apparent chaos careening through the minds, and therefore through the conference rooms, board rooms, war rooms, and banquet halls occupied by the lackeys of a dying trans-Atlantic “world order,” the International Schiller Institute has convened a conference in Paris, together with the Solidarité et Progrès organization of France. With its special emphasis on the sudden emergence of a new generation of continental leadership in Africa, several of whom spoke on Nov. 8 on a panel titled, “Emancipation of Africa and the World Majority, A Challenge for Europe,” the Schiller Institute is re-dedicating the trans-Atlantic world to the mission that the great Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1463) personified.
Pope Leo XIV referred to Cusa, and his “theology of hope” at the Jubilee Audience on Oct. 25 before tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who, since the 1970s, has been the leading world figure to call mass attention to Cusa’s method of thought and diplomatic action, spoke about Cusa’s method on two panels of the conference on Nov. 8.
The depopulating, yet increasingly “anti-immigrant” Anglo-American world, with its aspiring trillionaires and “live forever” cyber-eugenicists of Silicon Valley, no longer “wears the mantle of heaven” when it comes to the developing sector, and its alliances, such as the BRICS-Plus nations. Only “Western” visionaries like Martin Luther King, or economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, “prophets without honor in their own home,” will soon have any credibility with the Global Majority. In Martin Luther King’s theology of hope, he proclaimed that “The prophet must remind America of the urgency of now. The oft-repeated clichés that the time is not ripe, (that) Negroes are not culturally ready, are a stench in the nostrils of God. The time is always right to do what is right…. Now is the time to transform the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into a glowing daybreak of freedom and justice.”
What appears below are a series of presentations from the panels of the Schiller Institute conference. They represent “the epistemology of hope,” the method by which all people, no matter their religion or nation, can collaborate to bring about a new security and development architecture that responds to the urgency of now. A method of hope must rapidly be introduced, as Pope Leo is attempting to now do with millions, as a counterpoint to the philosophical despair popularized over the past century. It must be done now, before all is lost in a thermonuclear nightmare from which we may be only one Palantir-generated algorithm removed.
The level, caliber and precision of the conference presentations so far, while unique, can and must be replicated by a young, self-organized volunteer force. These ideas must be reproduced in hundreds of smaller such conferences as the present one in Paris, as rapidly as possible, if the world is to survive, even through the next 12 months. A brief reference to the tragic drama of current history shows why.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban and America’s Donald Trump have announced, as of Friday, Nov. 7, that a summit with Russia “might take place very soon”—though it is unclear whether Vladimir Putin or anyone else in Russia knows anything about it. Russia, along with everyone else, is still trying to assess whether Trump is going to authorize a United States resumption of nuclear weapons testing—one giant step on a highway to Hell which may have no road back.
One possible reason for a renewed summit possibility is that Russia’s manifest victory all along the battle lines with Ukraine has become harder to hide. “Russian Forces In Ukraine Near First Major Conquest in More Than Two Years,” screams the Wall Street Journal. “Ukraine Digs In To Try To Halt Biggest Russian Win in Two Years,” yells Bloomberg. “Ukraine Insiders Fear Major Defeat against Putin,” whispers Germany’s Bild Zeitung.
Anglo-American military adventures, however, whether luridly paraded in Venezuela, the Pacific and Ukraine, or carried out clandestinely in Syria, Sudan, and a dozen other unacknowledged theaters, are seeing opposition even from the bought-and-paid-for United States Congress. As former U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare discussed on Nov. 8 in the first Paris conference panel, the Nov. 4 New York City mayoral election was, in part, a refutation of the U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. More than 30% of the city’s Jewish vote was cast for Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 34-year-old Muslim “socialist” son of African immigrants, who has denounced the State Department’s Gaza policy in the past, and is now Mayor-elect. He is the youngest mayor in New York City since 1892, in 133 years.
This suggests that, just as empty IMF and World Bank promises and lies can no longer re-route the aspirations for progress of Africa, so the objections of Americans—Republican, Democrat and Independent—who reject both Ukraine and Gaza as war crimes that must no longer be carried out in their name, will no longer go unheard. If candidates like Sare, and Congressional candidates like the Bronx’s Jose Vega, who also spoke at the Paris conference, can emerge in the wake of the “political shockwave in New York City,” a change which is actually happening everywhere, then certain tragedy can be transformed to certain hope.
“If we reflect over the span of known history to date, it is sometimes permissible, even required, that one speak apocalyptically, but without either intending, or being construed as intending to prophesy an Apocalypse.” Lyndon LaRouche began his 1994 essay, “The Truth About Temporal Eternity” with that statement. He says, further on: “Indeed, the practical difference between that Renaissance and earlier forms of Christian civilization, is epitomized by that founding of modern science. The key conceptions on which this development was premised are included topics of Nicolaus of Cusa’s On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia).”
What is temporal eternity? An example: If King is correct that “the time is always right to do what is right,” that means that the act of doing the right thing exists in temporal eternity. That is, there must be an action, and action now, but that action must be of a character that, done now, it would be always right at any time in the past or future. This strongly implies that such action must be non-violent. It must certainly be creative, and it must be direct and public, not hidden, like the actions of Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Mexico’s José López Portillo, Lyndon LaRouche, and many others.
Just as all parts of a sphere are curved, no matter how “infinitesimally” small, all actions for the Good, no matter how small, are part of that arc of the moral universe that bends toward Justice. Self-government is the result of each individual doing infinitesimal acts of good, whose individual power is often unknowable. But there can be no durable self-government without technological and scientific progress that is socially organized, so that all people are guaranteed access to the means, through the productive process, to make breakthrough discoveries on the infinitesimal level—the human mind—which have a potentially infinite effect on all of humanity. From the LaRouche Oasis Plan to the Zepp-LaRouche Ten Principles for a New International Strategic and Development Architecture, the tools exist for an immediate transformation of the planet away from its present course. The place is now, and the time is now, to do infinite good.
