Question: I appreciate all this discussion about the passion, number one, I mean, as you know, I've been asking you questions about this and, you know, been trying to develop ideas on this, the whole youth movement has been. But, a couple of weeks ago, I sort of dug into this. And I'm looking at something else, which is very related with this passion, which is compassion. My idea of compassion is pretty much a certain understanding that one has towards an individual group of people to sort of address the issue because we've been looking at a lot of Poe, and it is very interesting to look at how Poe deals with the situation in "The Purloined Letter," where you have two people trying to solve a mystery, and on the one hand you have the prefect. And he is like you discussed with us--logical, deductive objectivity--who sort of imposes his view upon the situation, rather than looking at Dupin, which actually says, well, you have to understand the individual to understand how he would go about hiding the letter and so forth.

I looked at that and I said, "Well, how do we organize to that effect?" Do we organize in terms of proving people wrong, if we know a certain amount of knowledge? Or, I mean, it is a question of compassion, if you have an understanding of what this person is actually going through, like you discussed last night, when you said, these are our people. Have a sense of what these people, what we are actually doing, what it means to actually organize a population in the way that we are doing. Because, you said, a couple of conferences ago, that we're actually giving the lives back to our generation. So, this is something that you don't want to play with in terms of academia, or, you know, just sort of organizing to get a set effect, you know. So, can you please touch on this question of compassion and touch on how we can access this better.

LaRouche: I would take the case of Poe, just because you used it in the context of Poe, and the answer can be best phrased in those terms. Poe was the grandson of the Quartermaster General of this region, for the American Revolution. And because of that, and because his parents had died, Poe was, in his youth, a member of the Society of the Cincinnatus, which is a hereditary society of officers of the American Revolution. Poe, at the age of 19, rose to the rank of what we call sergeant major or master sergeant in the U.S. Army. He was then sent to West Point on recommendation of, I think it was, of Madison or Monroe, because of the Cincinnatus Society. He left West Point in the first term because he had epilepsy, and therefore was not able to serve adequately as a military officer, those duties, because he was epileptic.

He then became a skilled intelligence officer, a counter-intelligence officer, in U.S. affairs. At a certain point, he was sent to Paris under James Fenimore Cooper, who was also a famous intelligence officer of the United States, and a famous writer. And, in Paris, he made the acquaintance of the actual living Dupin, who was a part of the French Ecole Politechnique. And he used this figure of Dupin, the name of Dupin, to deal with certain philosophical questions. He was also famous because he, as a young reporter, working as a reporter in New York, he actually, from the facts of the case, solved a murder mystery, as a reporter; just a literary exercise. He solved it. They went and made the investigation; they found the proof. So, he was an expert intelligence officer with very special kinds of insight.

So, the usual idea of the reputation of Poe, forget it! It's not true. And most of this reputation was supplied by a British intelligence agent who moved in on him at the point of his death. He was probably murdered; the evidence is, he was beaten savagely, in some way, and died of his injuries in a Baltimore hospital.

So, on this Dupin case; what the issue has been in modern society is that you had a pig, a British pig, called Arthur Conan Doyle, sometimes called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--first time a greased pig was ever called Sir, I guess. But, anyway, he wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, in which it was stated to eliminate the influence of Poe's Dupin. So, all bad investigations--the FBI was practically invented by Sherlock Holmes--all incompetent investigations come from this thing. So, that Poe's conception was a philosophical one, that is, he had a deep philosophical insight, and his stories reflect that. For example, "The Goldbug," all of these things, these show real philosophical insight. And so the significance of that, is that.

Now, philosophical insight always involves compassion. Because, for example, when you are looking at aberrant behavior in a person, you should be looking at it the same way you look at the question of universal physical principles. You find a paradox, something that makes no sense. So, you have to find, what is the principle that causes this apparently irrational behavior? So, therefore, the first thing you have to do, you have to have a compassionate insight into the subject person, whose eccentric behavior you're studying. And, if you want to find out why he does what he does, and what he's likely to do, you have to have insight of the same type that Kepler showed in discovering gravitation. You look into the subject matter with insight; identify in a refined way what the paradox is, what the contradiction is; solve it, in the same manner you would solve a universal physical principle, discovery of universal physical principle; then, on the basis of that knowledge, proceed in two directions. First of all, number one, what is this person likely to do? Or, what's this planet likely to do? Or, this asteroid is likely to do? Secondly, how do you change that person's behavior? How do you use the knowledge of their behavior to induce them to change the way they behave. And Poe had that kind of mind. And what you're asking, I think, is essentially that.

You have to end this fragmentation of the relationship between physical science and human behavior. You have to say that they are different in the sense that physical science pertains to our insight as individual minds into the universe around us; that social matters, human relations, pertain to the way such minds, which are capable of discovering universal principles, are dealing with the way people interact in order to accomplish, or not accomplish common ends. So, therefore if you've got a principle, you want to implement it--physical principle--you've discovered it, now you want society to cooperate in applying that principle, for some benefit for society.

Therefore, the same powers of insight that you use for discovering the principle must now be applied to a different subject matter. It's how do you implement the principle as a form of social cooperation? So that it has to be, first of all, task-oriented, always task-oriented. Secondly, insightful, into the way the mind of the person you are addressing is working, or the minds, the interaction of minds. And then, two things: See where things are likely to go, as I do with the economic forecasting; and then see what the solution is, the alternative to a catastrophe.

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