The Lead
The Apple Orchard and The Physics of Civilization
by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Apr. 24, 2026
When you stop burning the apple orchard, you do not get your apples back. The fire’s cessation is not the fruit’s return. Somewhere between those two events lies the patient, continuous, generation-long work of planting, cultivating, pruning, waiting—without which there is no orchard at all, only ashes and the memory of what once was.
This is the reality the Anglo-American elite is refusing to understand as it surveys the damage its war on Iran has done to the fabric of the world. The fertilizer not applied this spring cannot be retroactively applied; the crops not planted this season cannot be retroactively harvested; Iran’s loss of eighteen months of human development progress in eight weeks of war is not an event that has ended but a deficit that continues to compound. The 32 million people newly impoverished by the Iran war, a reported Pentagon estimate that Hormuz mines could take six months to clear after the fighting stops—all of this describes damage that is still unfolding from causes already set in motion.
Nearly 350 years ago, aboard a ship in the Thames estuary awaiting passage to Holland, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took up this problem in its deepest form. His dialogue Pacidius to Philalethes—a work ostensibly on the nature of motion—arrived at an astonishing conclusion: that a body in motion does not sustain itself by its own momentum but must be, at every instant, sustained in existence by a creative cause that is itself never at rest. Leibniz called this “transcreation.” What looks like a continuous motion is in fact a continuous re-making; what looks like persistence is in fact the product of an ongoing act of creation. A universe abandoned to its own devices would not coast; it would fail to be. Existence is not inertial.
Translate this from metaphysics to economy and one arrives at a principle Lyndon LaRouche developed across his lifetime: Human civilization is not a thing that persists on its own. It is the product of a continuous creative contribution—scientific discovery, infrastructure, the raising and education of new generations, the cultivation of the productive powers of labor—without which it decays. What seems “stable” is in fact being built, at every moment, by someone. When the creative work stops, civilization slides back. And when destructive work is added to the cessation of creative work, the decline is not linear but compound. The damage now entered in the ledger does not freeze in place when the war ends; it continues to unfold from causes already in motion, and compounds with every moment of continued creative neglect.
Against this, consider what continuous creative work actually looks like. Yesterday we reported on personalized mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer and India’s 500-megawatt fast breeder reactor, both the product of decades of engineering and gateways to benefits to last centuries. China opened its 11th Space Day on Friday, April 24, with the identification of two new lunar minerals and the confirmation of a 2028 launch and 2031 return for the Tianwen-3 Mars sample-return mission. In Algiers, the Presidents of Algeria and Chad signed 30 agreements to extend the Trans-Saharan Highway, the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, cross-border power generation, the physical infrastructure of an Africa no longer organized around imperial extraction. None of these are accidents or gestures. They are examples of what human existence actually requires in order to keep being.
And then there is what the Anglo-American elite is contributing. A Pentagon circulating options to punish NATO allies who refused to join the Iran war—including suspending Spain from the alliance and reopening the Falklands/Malvinas question—in retaliation against the very allies who, at Northwood this week, are attempting to draft a post-war Hormuz security architecture without the United States in the room. A secretary of war who speaks the language of destruction fluently and the language of creation not at all. Against this tone, Pope Leo XIV has called for “a culture of peace.” Even Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential voices behind Trump’s 2024 victory, has publicly renounced his advocacy and apologized for “misleading people.”
At the International Peace Coalition, the need and demand for international action to be brought to bear to change the U.S. came through loud and clear. Dennis Fritz, former USAF Command Chief Master Sergeant, spoke bluntly as a military man who had seen the inner workings of the Pentagon: “We are the cause of the majority of the problems around the world.” Former Mexican Congresswoman María de los Ángeles Huerta called for a “South-South” alliance for “cognitive sovereignty and digital justice” against the hybrid warfare being tested across Latin America by think-tanks and Silicon Valley tech giants. Independent presidential candidate Diane Sare called on Congress to reclaim its constitutional war-declaration authority and for participants in the meeting to help by contacting the U.S. Congress directly. Reports came in from several activists on their activity to organize for the Congress to end the war. The meeting heard from veterans, farmers, and international correspondents, including a 90-year-old nun in Barcelona, who wrote that “it’s a question of world heritage that the founding principles of the United States must be revived.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche closed out the meeting by stressing the urgent need to unite the international peace movement.
The choice is not between war and peace in some abstract sense. It is between two different physics of civilization. One recognizes that what we have is built at every moment by creative contribution and will decay without it; the other treats the inheritance of centuries as a fund that can be drawn down indefinitely, as if the work of sustaining it had ended long ago. The first physics is the one Leibniz described and LaRouche advanced for economics. The second is the physics of every imperial decline.
Once we put out the fires, what shall we cultivate?
Contents
Strategic War Danger
- Israeli Military Admits Hezbollah Was Not Defeated; IDF Chief Warns of 'Collapse' (↓)
- Trump Announces Extension of Lebanon Ceasefire (↓)
- Britain and France Make Plans for Hormuz Security Without the U.S. (↓)
- Iran's Foreign Minister to Visit Pakistan, Oman, and Russia (↓)
- Dmitriev Calls Out British Promotion of Germany's Remilitarization (↓)
- Democratic Plan To Push Ending War Around WPA's April 29 Deadline (↓)
Science and Technology
New World Paradigm
- Leo on Regime Change and International Right (↓)
- Leo: If You Worry About Immigration, Develop the Global South! (↓)
- Presidents of Algeria and Chad Meet To Further Algerian-Sahel Economic Cooperation (↓)
- Arlacchi Runs for UN Secretary General (↓)
- Leo Makes Clarity on Sex and Morality (↓)
U.S. and Canada
LaRouche movement
Collapsing Imperial System
- Chief Economic Advisor Backs Merz on Pensions (↓)
- Synarchy, Anyone? RUSI Urges Today's Cartels To Become New East India Companies (↓)
