Question: Hello Lyn, and thank you. I'm from L.A. I've been with the organization for about two years. I haven't been full-time, so I have a pretty personal question, regarding my own psychological impotence. [general laughter]

LaRouche: Oh, my God!

Q: Well, I kind of see myself as a type of Iranian Hamlet, without the nobility--[more laughter]. People here might call me a "Persian prince," because of how I act, but that doesn't really count. I can see how people, a thousand years from now, depend on us and your youth movement today, to get your ideas passed into U.S. policy, as official U.S. policy. But, I fear death, because I haven't acted selflessly in the sublime, by examples set forth by yourself, Amelia, Joan of Arc, and so forth. So, more often than not, I've chosen to put on my own shackles, you know, as a slave, and they consist largely of escaping reality, pessimism, and, to be honest, mother-dominance in my own head. [Lyn chuckles] I usually don't have a problem, helping out, writing a check, organizing here and there. But, when it comes to my own personal "me time," when after work I can be myself--and I've even read Freud or Jung!--I might have said, escape to a virtual computer world, or go hang out with a degenerate friend.

Now, these things are honestly making me crazy! What advice can you give to me, and other people like myself? And please don't pull any punches. Thank you.

LaRouche: Well, I don't have to do much punching: You've done a good job, yourself! But, the thing is, there's a sensuous crossover, from a sense of impotence to a sense of potency. And, people have to make that decision themselves. They can be helped by example; they can be helped by discussing it; they can be helped by situation.

You know, you go through an experience, where you make a real commitment, a commitment which involves your sense of identity, and you say, "I am going to accomplish this." It doesn't have to be a big thing. It just has to be a crossover, from the sense of--do you ever find yourself feeling like you're walking through a shadow world? Where you are walking in a shadow, on the one side, and sometimes you walk into reality? Then, you walk back into the shadows? And, you wonder whether you're living in the shadows, or the reality? You wonder where the real you is living: into a kind of fantasy or a life which is organized by fantasy, and life which is real.

For example: Concern for saving a life of someone in danger. Concern for helping someone, who's in jeopardy. Putting yourself at risk for doing something you know you should do. These kinds of things give you a commitment to yourself, as an important person. Not important, because you've got the press following you around, praising you. But important, because you know that you are a needed person in society. That you do the kinds of things, and are the kind of person, who will do the kinds of things that will meet needs. That you have a sense of what is important in society; that is, what is an important need, as opposed to something which is marginal. And you're committed primarily to trying to fulfill an important need, of some kind.

When you make that attachment, which is sometimes called in psychology, "cathexis," that attachment to a sense that you are an important person, because you  have a commitment to some sense of mission, as opposed to being a person wandering in the shadows, and looking at missions, as if as a spectator from the land of shadows.

This problem is aggravated today, by television. Because people find themselves living in a television world, as a spectator of a television screen. Or, with a computer, playing games with a computer--a spectator of that. Your identity is not there. You have an identity, but you have, at the same time, this sense of lack--and this is the Hamlet sense. Hamlet, of course, flees into action--that is the other way of doing it. By killing people: That's his recreation. He enjoys doing that--he hates it, but he enjoys it. It's like an alcoholic: He finds that compulsion to take that next drink of blood. But, he has no sense of immortality, so he goes out and gets drunk, on blood. That's another kind.

But, there's also the kind, of the passive, the spectator sense. You sense yourself as a spectator of reality, and you sometimes intervene in reality. But then you leave, and you feel that, [voice dropping to whisper] "Basically, I'm a spectator!"

That's just something you have to work out with yourself. The only thing that I can do, or anybody else can do, is to help you see that, and see your way to, what is called in psycho-medical literature, cathexis.

-30-