Question: Hi. I am from Baltimore. I been doing my own little study. It was on you. I believe in some things, like the Eurasian Landbridge and all that you were talking about. But some things, I ain't really got the experience for it, but what I wanted to know is what you thought "respect" is? That's my main thing. What leadership is? They put me on the field. You see, I'm a new cadre and stuff, so I wanted to see what you thought about that.

LaRouche: My job, our job, is to address those kinds of problems, not with magic solutions, but simply with understanding. The natural thing about life is that you're born as a baby. You've already had a little experience. You've heard the quarrels between your parents while you were inside the womb. The banging of the neighbors on the wall when you were crying afterwards. So you start out as a child. The name of the game is development. And if you understand life, your life from beginning to end is a process of development. One need not be ashamed, ever, of feeling a need to develop more. And if you're wise, the function you demand of social relations is that they be a context for your continued development. And those things of which you are uncertain, can be made clearer by your development, and your selection of people who are useful to you, in a real sense, are people who help you develop. If you have fears, if you have problems, if you have doubts, others have been through a similar experience and can share their experience with you. You can relive it, reenact it, and find strengths you didn't have, just as a child develops strengths in growing into adolescence, and beyond, into adulthood.

So, the function of an association like this, is precisely to provide inherently the kind of environment in which those kinds of questions are dealt with in the normal course of experience. Simply by treating life as a drama, seeing what's going on around you, seeing what leadership is, seeing what fears are, seeing what problems are, seeing them reflected in other people. Judging what it means for you, what you're seeing in other people. And you develop strengths. Life is a great education, and I would hope that our association could perform that function, as it can and will, of providing people through themselves, through their association, provide to one another a shared experience which is a source of strength and knowledge to all.

It's like a university on wheels, is how I've described the Youth Movement, which it should be. Here we have a situation. The universities are not worth poop. Here they are, running around, charging all these fees, and they're not really providing much of anything, except student loan debts to their victims. So therefore, I said, okay, we'll create our own universities on wheels, and we'll take as a reference point Gauss' 1799 lecture on the subject of the complex domain, which is a point where the principle of truth is demonstrated. Gauss demonstrates the principle of truth. The reason I emphasize that is two reasons: first of all, Gauss does demonstrate the issue of truth, and secondly, he demonstrates it by referring to a precedent from the Pythagorean work in constructive geometry, pre-Euclidian geometry, which is also, from the standpoint of geometry, a demonstration of a principle of verifiable truth, which Gauss recapitulates in modern mathematical physics context as a principle of truth.

Therefore, our job is first of all to concentrate on saying, what should be our final decision on anything, and the decision should always be from the standpoint, what do we know is true? And if we don't know, how do we find out what is true? So, the first thing to develop is a yardstick for our use of the term "truth," which Gauss provides as a sample yardstick for the word "truth." Therefore, with one another, we try to find the truth of matters which bear upon experience of society as we see it, and have seen it in the past, on the present situation, and on what we're going to do, about the present situation, with a view to the future. All of which is a search for truth. A good university is not a program. A good university is an engagement of people for a period of four to seven to eight years in the process of perfecting a discussion of important matters pertaining to the idea of truth. Which means it should include the two areas of human experience, those we call mathematical physics and related science, and those things which refer to classical art, principles of social relations. These are the two areas of general concern. Therefore you should not come out of the university without a good sense, a scientific sense of the universe, how we got here, how we got what we know about scientific matters, what we know about the universe. And also, what do we know about man's experience in the light of classical artistic composition which tells us what man is like and how man and society have developed. All of this, a university, is a leap. It's a leap upward. A period of life where you make a leap, to go forth into society as a person who's now prepared to engage society, engage its problems from the standpoint of a sense, of what truth is, and what is the scope of what humanity has given to us, to work with as a starting point. That's all that a university is.

And my view is that associations such as this, should be a university on wheels which is engaging society, with all its problems, its lunacies, and whatnot.  But at the same time, using the experience of engaging society, to devise a better understanding of how to put it together, your purpose should be, to become the leaders of the next generation in the United States. That's your purpose: To qualify to become the leaders of the next generation, which means you go through a process, in which one is like a university process of developing yourself; and then going forth and getting sort of the second generation of your life, the second 25 years. And go forth, to become leaders of society, but using what you've learned in the first 25 years, to launch you as a person, who is going to assume increasing responsibility for leadership in the coming generation. Hmm?

And, that's the only way to look at it. And, relax and enjoy it. It's fun.

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