Question: Good morning, I am from Monterrey. I was recently reading the Wallenstein [trilogy by Friederich Schiller]. What could Wallenstein have done to change his history, or to end the war when he wished to? Second question: I was reading the article on the historic individual, and I have an issue. Where does imagination reside?

LaRouche: In the case of Wallenstein. The real history, which is reflected in Schiller's account, is that Wallenstein never really intended to solve the problem, but he had an insight into the nature of the situation, and he was killed because he was suspected of having insight into the situation. Schiller uses these other characters to present the reader, or the spectator of his play, with an image of what the solution was.

Very simply, what is the truth of the matter? If Wallenstein had said to Gustavus Adolphus, successfully, let's you and I end this damn war by neutralizing the whole issue, then, in that case, the war would have ended. But what would have happened? Well, this would have been considered, as is shown in the play, by those who would say that Wallenstein, if he'd done that, would have betrayed his oath, and he was thinking of betraying his oath. And that, therefore, is the moral issue of the play.

That's the stupid version of the issue. The fact is, he was showing essentially the tragedy of what happened to a whole culture-that is, the continuation of the slaughter which happened as a result of people lacking in the situation who would have acted to end the religious war, as, about 16 years later, it was ended by Cardinal Mazarin's intervention into the affair, to bring about what became the Treaty of Westphalia.

And that possibility of the Treaty of Westphalia was an alternative existed even then. The greatest destruction occurred after Wallenstein's death, after his assassination. That's the lesson of the play.

On the lessons of this process. One has to be so deeply imbued with an understanding of the principles of creativity, as exemplified again by Gauss' attack on the fallacies of Euler, LaGrange and so forth, one has to be so deeply imbued with that understanding that one understands how it works. The problem is most people lose their nerve when challenging authority, to the degree that making a great discovery is a challenge to authority, when one is implicitly offending and challenging popular opinion. That's the great problem. I think the answer lies there, it's that simple. We've had a number of questions to this same effect earlier in the discussion. The same thing.

The key thing is, get away from this idea that you have to win over popular opinion, or the approval of certain authorities or some other kind of external authority to endorse your opinion, in order to defend your own opinion. Whereas, in fact, to be a leader is to develop your certainty of your knowledge, to the point that you don't depend upon any external authority, that is, opinion authority, for your own views, but depend upon your own powers of reason to know when you are saying something that is truthfully correct or not. You have to have that sense of inner authority.

It's like the scientist who will spend 20 or 30 years to overturn a prevailing scientific view of a universal principle. Take the case of Kepler. Look at Kepler's work, leading into the 1609 publication of his The New Astronomy. This was a revolution which for the first time defined the essential principle of all modern mathematical physics, experimental mathematical physics. Look at the amount of work he went through to do that, and now look at it from the beginning of his writings on the subject, and trace the work through the Harmonics book later. Trace that work. How many decades of life did Kepler commit to making these discoveries, and with the confidence to do it, as a conscious follower of Nicholas of Cusa, and Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli, for example, and a collaborator implicitly of Gilbert? Where did he get the courage to do that? He had to have a sense of inner authority on the method of reason.

The most important question is of leadership. You must aim to find a platform for internal authority, the kind of authority that was raised in the first question asked, on leadership in the Catholic Church. There are very few people in the Catholic Church who are capable of leading it. The worry is that if this Pope were to die, is there another priest in the Church who is qualified to be a Pope, as my friend, the deceased Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan, was a candidate for this kind of consideration? So you have to look at what is the kind of internal compelling authority of method, which enables you to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and to know the difference between what you must do on the basis of that conviction, and what you must be uncertain about. That's the big question.

And what I'm trying to do with the youth movement, in the context of a collegial movement-that is, where people are working together in groups of 15-25 for these kinds of discussions, where you have enough interchange on scientific questions to have a lot of interchange, fruitful but not so much that the individual gets buried in the pure size of the number of people present--but to build a movement in which people have a sense of how to acquire this internal authority which we associate, for example, the way I've described spiritual exercises. To go through the spiritual exercises, and to share that experience with others in sufficient degree, such that you can say "I know," and when challenged, to be able to think, find resources, to make your argument. And you have to have a sense of confidence in yourself and what you stand for. You have to develop that, and my view is that a youth movement can provide that, not only for this generation, but if we build a youth movement of the proper quality, I'm convinced that humanity will have turned a corner, and from henceforth, humanity will have a pathway to assure itself that it can continue to go upward, rather than going into another relative Dark Age, as we have recently.

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