Answers From LaRouche

Q: How do you compose your writings?
                                   - from January 24, 2023 West Coast Cadre School

Question: My question was, as I read your papers, it seems I always get a new idea every time I read it. And lately I've been completely amazed on the way that you actually compose your paper.

LaRouche: Which one is that? Which paper?

Question: I read the "Tariffs" paper, and you had it incomplete. So, the question that was running through my mind—.

LaRouche: Oh, you mean, the one that's not completed yet.

Question: Exactly, and that's what actually sprung the question: How do you actually compose these? I begin to wonder, okay, what principle do you use? How do you actually go about composing it? Were you inspired by Classical music to do it? What specific pieces? Obviously, the late string quartets [of Beethoven], because you always bring it up, right? Maybe I'm wrong.

But I'd like you to discuss it.

LaRouche: It's sometimes called the historical method. You have to live in history. You have to have a sense of immortality. You live in history. I live in a lot of history. I live in pre-historical history; I live in ancient times. I live in the sense of the historical specificity, of various places and times in history. I look at the reflection of ancient historical developments in us today.

I've often referred, for educational purposes, to the fact that I had a great-great-grandfather, Daniel Wood, who was born about the beginning of the 19th Century, about the same age as Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in the Carolinas in struggling against slavery. He was a Quaker minister of some sort, and he was involved in this effort. And he had to scamper out of the Carolinas, because they were about to kill him. South Carolina was not a pleasant place.

So, he went up to Ohio, and he became one of the founders of the Underground Railroad movement in the United States. So, he was the oldest figure who had appeared at the family dinner table, in my family. And therefore, since he was a celebrated figure, I knew the place he'd lived, I'd been there, at his farm which had been one of the Underground Railroad stations north of Columbus, and in fact, the whole family, extended family, was living there. People around there all knew of him, knew him personally, and he figured at the family dinner table, as a constant topic of what he said, what this happened, how he did this, how he did that. So he was sort of the earliest figure who came to life at the dinner table.

Then I had other members of the family, of different backgrounds, and so forth, and so I got a sense, from childhood, from this kind of family relations, of how culture is transmitted from one generation to another. And how we find inside ourselves, the residues of cultural changes, which had come earlier in society. And I realized that there is no such thing as a flat land on which ideas are spontaneously developed in our contemporary society. Rather, we are the embodiment of an accumulation of discoveries and experiences which are transmitted and incorporated in us.

I always think that way: When I try to teach, I try to get people to locate themselves, historically. Because that's the way you have a sense of immortality. You locate yourself historically. People came before you. You are an expression, an outcome, of their having lived. You are a living continuation of what they produced, that's embodied in you, or embodied in your circumstances. You think about the future society, and what you're going to embody in the future of humanity. Which is to me, the way to educate. That all good education, is essentially an extended form of the practice and teaching of history. And that's the way I write. Always try to situate people; try to make a connection to ancient people; get these connections made in people's minds, so they're not just floating around in empty space, but have a sense of where they are in the universe.

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