Question: Hello! Good morning, Lyn. Greetings to you in the United States! My question is something that you have touched on before during this conversation, that throughout history, there is progress, and then civilization backtracks. What do you think is the difference we make now, to ensure that the constant fight between empiricism and the search for truth is won for truth, particularly now that there are so much more advanced elements of manipulation, such as television and the mass media, and which have such a massive effect on public opinion. So how can we ensure that we do not return to this process of one step forward, one step back?

One further question, the issue of self-consciousness. This ability that you have had, to always say the truth, regardless of public opinion, do you think you got that from self-conscious love, which is received from parents, or is this something can be generated internally by someone, regardless of the lack of self-consciousness in the maternal or parental relationship? Thank you.

LaRouche: Oh, I am sure that-- I didn't get much benefit-- I didn't have the worst family conditions imaginable, but my greatest advantage was that I recognized that my parents--like most people--lied all the time. There was some good in them, of course. I am not mocking them in that sense. But the idea that somehow they transmitted to me some great tradition--not really. What they transmitted to me was recognition of the corruption of what their culture represented. I mean, their religious beliefs were horrifying to me--increasingly so. I was a child, I didn't know how to deal with it, but it horrified me: It made no sense. So, it was not that. No, it doesn't come by any spontaneous rule.

You see, we are individuals. And what we accomplish, we accomplish as individuals. To be an individual, creative personality is a very lonely thing. And one of the problems people have in becoming creative is to deal with that loneliness. Because the nature of creativity is that you are right, when society and opinion around you are wrong. Now, you have to know the difference. You have to have a standard. You cannot go around assuming that you are right, just because you wish to assume that. You have to actually be right. And you have to take the personal responsibility for making that difference.

I know people around me would tend in that direction--a lot of young people I know. They would tend toward that. Then they would back off. They become frightened. They say, look, you know, you are a smart guy, and so forth, but look, you are not going to succeed. You can't win by going against popular opinion. You got to learn to live with popular opinion. You got to learn to swing with the punches. And I didn't. And my advantage was entirely that. My advantage was not what I got from my culture. My advantage was what I rejected from my culture. I recognized the flaws.

It's the same in science. That's what the nature of science is. Scientific discovery is not learning to repeat something you learned in school! That's not science. Science is taking the bit, like a horse. You recognize that what you've been taught is wrong. So now you set out to prove it is wrong. Not only to prove it's wrong, but to find out what's right! All knowledge is based on that. That's what I've always done. And it is because of that, that I have succeeded.

Now, as to the future, why I fight so hard for this youth movement, is because I recognized what was wrong in the education that the older generation got, and my generation before them. And I was determined, where people were open-- you know, you've got people out there, most people you know, really, know that what their parents gave them, was no future, was a "no future" society. Most young people today know that, in one way or another--that their parents were failures. Terrible failures, who gave their children a "no future" society. Any young person who thinks, frankly, knows that. So therefore, what you have to address today, is the failure of the generation that produced these fellows of, say, today's college age. That is the first thing that you have to recognize. If you don't recognize that, you get nowhere.

Now then, why do you want to do that? You have two objectives. First of all, you want to overcome that problem: You want to have a future. You want to change society to bring about a future, but that's not enough. If you are going to succeed, you have got to think about-- since your parents failed you, morally, in this way, what are you going to do for the generation that follows you? Are you going to be a failure like your parents were? A moral failure in this way? Or are you going to take steps to make sure that what was done to you, is not done to your children and your grandchildren?

Therefore you have to think about the transmission of knowledge, and that's what we're doing that's different. What we're doing is, we are emphasizing a method of education based on the critical significance of Gauss's attack on the work and opinions and methods of Euler, Lagrange, and so forth, the methods that are commonly taught in universities today--the empiricist method. We are building an education system with these young people, based on the best knowledge from the past, but with the intention that we will create an educational system that is a cultural system, not a formal educational system, but a cultural system. A cultural outlook: habits of thinking about ideas, discussing ideas, debating ideas. This kind of thing. To create that kind of society that will not make the kinds of mistakes that the recent generations have made, will not try to get along with popular opinion, will have the courage to challenge popular opinion. You say, "You say it's true? Prove it!" And that's the difference. Yes, otherwise we get into a cyclic business of saying, let's hope it works out.

But the other thing here is also crucial, which is implicit in what you are saying. The other problem is this: People say, "you've got to trust popular opinion"--vox populi. The quality of a leader is a person who is not awed by vox populi. Someone says, "well, if all my friends will disagree with you..." Hmm? You say, "well, you should get better friends, or re-educate them--one of the two." If you don't have that attitude, if you have the sense that you somehow have to apologize for disagreeing with your friends, that is the beginning of corruption. That's where you lose it. And that's where I get tough. No. You have no right to raise the argument, that since "all of my friends will disagree with you," that I am wrong? Naaah, I'm not wrong! I've been there too many times! I've been consistently right, when all the so-called "your friends" crowd were wrong. So I have enough confidence to know, that I can know the truth.

Once you get that sense of reliance upon knowing the truth, not looking over your shoulder to see what your friends are saying (are they going along with you?),... You see, the fear of rejection by your friends, your peers, is the biggest source of corruption. You had this in the case of St. Augustine. He reports about a good friend of his, who went with popular opinion. He went to the games, the Roman games. The gladiator struggles. He came back having been converted to admiring those games, and he never recovered his morality after that. It is popular opinion that is corrupting, and it is fear of popular opinion, it is asking for assurance from popular opinion, that what you are saying is acceptable-- that is the essence of corruption.

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