Question: I study Russian at the University of Stockholm. Some of the education--it's purely propaganda, and some is not. But, I was wondering: I now take lectures in this course, "all you want to know about economy." And, I have found pure, simple things--how to measure the state of an individual's economy, and how the society really is. For instance, the pensions, in the future, they will get worse; and for instance, what people buy, what kind of food people buy. Can we tell some more about these pure, simple things? How to really measure how it's the economy? And I have also told people, that these two things, about the pensions and about the what people buy--what kind of food, yeah?--and, I have seen a big relief in people's faces, because they suspect something's wrong.

For instance, you really say these two simple things, and they realize that all what the leading economists say, and all the politicians, it's just a lie. So, can you tell us some more about how to measure one individual's economy?

LaRouche: I've approached this from many aspects, and many fora, at different occasions in the past, and I've recognized that people will look at you, when you tell them something; and, they may grasp some of the things you say--what I say, for example--but, then they miss it; they miss the essential point. They come up to the edge, and they slip away.

The problem is this, and that's why I--with the youth movement--emphasize so many years ago, and they asked me: "What do we do, for our education?" And so, I said, "We should start with Gauss's 1799 statement of the fundamental theorem of algebra." Now, the reason for that, which should be obvious from things that I've written, particularly recently on this question of the "Historical Individual" and "The Next Generations," which are now in publication: Is that, the basic problem, in modern civilization, is the problem of Aristotelianism, and its derivatives, such as its copies, such as empiricism, Cartesianism, and so forth. That, just as Gauss attack d'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, for committing fraud on the issue of the complex domain, that this goes to the very heart, of the essential cultural incompetence prevailing in modern European civilization.

What was already demonstrated by Archytas and Plato, and their followers, in Classical Greek work, is that the doubling of a line, the doubling of a square, or the doubling of a cube, are not operations, which can be explained arithmetically, or by simple geometry. And the minute, somebody says, "No, no, no! I can show you how to double a line," you recognize immediately, that they don't understand the problem. And, when you see  them failing, again and again, as Plato deals with this in the Meno and Theaetetus dialogues, for example--you see this repeated. And, you see that the [crass?] school of modern mathematics is derived, largely, from the authority of Lagrange's affirmation, of this mechanical system of mathematics, as opposed to physics.

You recognize, the key problem is cultural, in that sense. People do not understand what an idea is. This is the problem of Immanuel Kant. This is the problem of the empiricists, the positivists, the existentialists, the Cartesians, and so forth. They all introduce purely arbitrary axioms, or axiomatic assumptions, which are pure arbitrary, ivory-tower fantasies, and try to explain the important things by use of these fantasies, as axioms of a system. For example, doubling a line: Look at Gauss's demonstration of the fallacy of this thin--the doubling of a line. Or, you can see the entirety of Gauss's Disquisitiones, as his doctoral dissertation, in which his number theoretical questions are laid out. And you see that numbers are not simply counting numbers. That the number system has characteristics, which include the complex domain, as in the case of biquadratic residues, as Gauss's second paper on that shows.

That there are concepts here, which lie beyond, the accepted standards of teaching, of modern textbooks in universities. And, when I explain to people, how my understanding of economy works, I will get blank faces, at the time their mind comes up against these kinds of assumptions in the existing curriculum. So, to me, it was totally clear what the problem was! All my life's work has been based on understanding the fallacy of that kind of thinking.

But, nonetheless, most people have it. They say, "Well, I learned this in school. I learned this in university." "I got my degrees in this," and so forth. "Whaddya mean? You telling me my university didn't know what they were doing? Telling me I was a victim of false education?!" "Yep!" And, they just look at me (sometimes angrily), and that's the way it goes.

But, that's why I emphasize this, because what Gauss does, is to restate, essentially, what was argued by the Platonic mathematicians, from Archytas and Plato, through Eratosthenes and Archimedes, in the Classical Greek, pre-Roman civilization, pre-Roman culture; anti-Aristotelian culture. And, most of the corruption of modern society comes either from the acceptance of Aristotle, or the empiricists.

So, that's where the problem lies. The key thing here, is to understand what an idea is. Then, you have a second problem, which comes out of the root. As I pointed out--or discovered, in a sense, in 1952-53: It is impossible, having discovered how the economy works, and having proven, in a sense, how it works in terms of action, the question is, how do you represent an economy as a whole. At that point, I took a second reading, more seriously, at Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, in which I understood what he meant, by a generalized, anti-Euclidean--not non-Euclidean, but anti-Euclidean--physical geometry. And, I recognized immediately, that that is the only way you can describe the way in which a physical economy works. You can say things about physical economy, which are true, as I had done before; you can make discoveries about this, which are true, as before. But, you can not say, what is a physical economy, in the large, as an historical process, without using Riemann's work, and what goes into it. Which means also, starting from things like Gauss's fundamental theorem of algebra on the complex domain.

So, that's where I put the emphasis, and that's where the difficulty lies.

The other way I put it is this: I've used Vernadsky, and my other work did not come out of Vernadsky; but, I found it very useful, despite the fact there are certain differences of my view and those of Vernadsky (but, they're not really significant, with respect to Vernadsky's competence). Vernadsky lays out what is actually a Riemannian phase-space system, of three phase-spaces: abiotic systems, as defined experimentally; living systems, as distinct from abiotic systems, also defined as a principle of life experimentally; thirdly, the Noosphere, as the transformation of the Biosphere, introduced externally by a phase-space of cognition: that is, human intervention to transform the physical effects, performed upon the Biosphere.

Therefore, what we're doing, as man, can be situated in a Riemannian recapitulation of Vernadsky's conception of the Noosphere: That we, as man, by making individual discoveries of principle--like those made by Archytas, for example, on the question of the doubling of the cube--that, by these kinds of discoveries of universal principles, by the human mind, we change the universe, by giving ourselves the power to intervene in the universe, by newly discovered universal laws.

The purpose of economy is actually based on that. So therefore, that which is essential in the nourishment and the development of the individual, and the population, and the nation, to maintain that process of growth, through technological and scientific progress, that is where growth generates. Growth is not an expression, can not be measured in terms of energy, even though growth is reflected by increases of the energy flux-density of processes. But, that's only a descriptive view of the microcosm. In fact, growth comes only from an increase of power: power which means the same thing it meant to Plato, in discussing the doubling of the line, the square, and the cube, or power as expressed by his discussion and that of others, of the five Platonic solids; power as described by Leibniz, in his definition as Kraft; and economy.

So, the point is, yes, you can find  many examples of the type you refer to in this kind of problem, which illustrate, in a fairly simple way things which are useful, as opposed to those which are not. But, to generalize that, one has to have this conception I've used, of a Riemannian type of manifold of economy, which is approximated simply by looking at the work of Vernadsky on the Noosphere, from the standpoint of Riemann's actual conception, which--again, Riemann's conception is one which is derived, most immediately, from the work of Gauss, as typified by this one 1799 attack on by Gauss, on Legendre [sic], Euler, and d'Alembert.

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