LaRouche And Polish Science Educators: Discussion

Here are excerpts from the discussion that followed:

Q. Mr. LaRouche, do you know any state or society which is following this educational program that you described? And the second question: What age should you start fighting for an individual consumer?

LaRouche: First of all, in the American tradition, which is called the American intellectual tradition, which was actually a creation of Europe--in the period of the American Revolution, it was impossible to develop healthy states in Europe, so you had people throughout Europe, chiefly the followers of Leibniz, because the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution were based on the ideas of Leibniz. As also from Poland, there were people who came to North America to establish a republic in North America, with the expectation--as in the case of the Polish patriots, who came to the United States--of coming back to their own country, hoping that the American success would lead to the repeated success in their own country.

The fundamental struggle is very simple, and it's a struggle inside the U.S., as well as outside. We had Presidents, many Presidents, who I would consider pigs, not human beings. I won't take the time to give you the list. We also had good ones, typified by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt, with his imperfection, was also in the right tradition; John Kennedy was trying to be in the right tradition, before they killed him. So we have in the United States, which I represent in a sense, the "American intellectual tradition,'' as it's called, which is essentially the tradition of Leibniz and his influence. And this was our policy.

However, in the world there is another policy. it's called the "oligarchical policy,'' the oligarchical model, in which a small oligarchy aided by its lackeys, keeps the majority of the population mentally and otherwise in the condition of human cattle. The method in European civilization by which this degeneration occurs, is the Roman pagan method. In ancient Rome, it was called vox populi. I call it vox pox. Some people call it public opinion. Public opinion is a manufactured system of fables and lies used to manipulate a population to such an extent, just the way the Romans would take the Roman citizens into the Colosseum, to cheer for the execution of the Christians for the amusement of Nero.

In the case of European history, you have educational policies, of the type which I have been indicating in my speech, which I am in a sense an heir of. You have the Augustinian teaching orders, which introduced Classical humanist methods of education for young people to Europe. You had the Brotherhood of Common Life, from which many great figures of the Renaissance came. You have the constant recurrence of the attempt to establish what I described as "Classical humanist education.'' The best educational institutions of the Catholic Church always emphasized that; and the case of the Humboldt educational system in Germany.

The point that I have been insisting on, is that we go beyond that, to generalize that the political administration of society must come from an educational process which defines the way in which politics is defined by political parties and by the population generally. The truth, the principle of truth, as opposed to fables, mythologies, and lies.

We have enough knowledge of this, to know what we should do. The question is, to find the opportunity to do it, and have the will to seize the opportunity.

- 'Stubborn Optimism' -

Q: I just was here, involved in techniques of creative thinking, in this university. But, the more I think about this, I can not see anything other than more obstacles to implementing this here. Firstly because our professors lose their motivation after their habilitation thesis work. Teachers often like training children, because they get stimulated by their feedback. But the students, when you tell them about basic laws, usually answer you, that it is enough to click the mouse, and everything is to be found in a computer, so this technical progress has softened them intellectually.

I would like, therefore, to hear and to focus more on this "problem of the will'': how to make people be more willing, to be closer to God. How can you inspire them? Because, this usually requires a very early stage of development, while the politicians now in power, will do everything to stop them. And they will tell you, that Plato's idea to create an ideal state has failed, and they will tell you that it will always fail; because, in this period, it's easier to inspire people to become better consumers, rather than to just take a bigger effort.

LaRouche: The problem is largely linked to a very evil fellow from Venice, with the name of Paolo Sarpi. He became the Lord of Venice, so to speak, in 1582, and he lived into the early part of the 17th Century. He was the founder of empiricism. He controlled a certain force in England around King James I. He was the creator of Francis Bacon; he was the creator of Thomas Hobbes, who was educated by the lackey of Sarpi, who was Galileo. He was the personal house lackey of Paolo Sarpi. And thus, you had the rise of British empiricism, and French cartesianism.

Now, the most interesting part of empiricism, the part that makes it the root of all modern evil: Sarpi looking deep into his own soul, said that man is inherently evil. And, I often suspected that Satan shudders when you mention the name of Sarpi. ...

What is the God of Sarpi? It's not God the Creator. Have you ever heard of a religious belief, called the bogomils? Well, you have a lot of religious belief in Europe, which is based on the bogomil model. It's from this, that the idea of free trade came. The idea was, there is no truth; man is inherently evil, greedy, and bestial. Therefore, you have to let everything happen, because under the floorboards, there are little green men who are adjusting statistics.

It's an Invisible Hand. But it works with certain people. It's mysterious. But, obviously it's the intention, that they are considered superior. They also should become rich. And, if you worship the god of evil, maybe he will make you rich.

So, this was the rationalization used by the British monarchy, as the follower of the English empericists.

This first came as an issue into Europe, around the figure of Kepler.

Kepler, in proving that Copernicus was wrong in his mathematics--as well as Tycho Brahe--pointed out that, if you made close measurements of the observations that he and Tycho Brahe had made, that the planetary orbit was of non-uniform curvature, and, therefore, you could not, by simple statistical methods, predict both the velocity and the position of the planet at any future time.

In first approximation, Kepler showed that the position and velocity were determined by equal areas, equal time. But from the standpoint of Copernicus' representation, you had to say, what controlled the planetary orbit was an "intention,'' not some mathematical formula.

So, Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation, as elaborated and confirmed by the work of Gauss, became a generalization for the words "scientific principle,'' "universal physical principle.'' In other words, the universe is governed by what we call "universal physical principles,'' which we discover by the method of paradox and contradiction and cognition.

Now what happens then? The empricists say "No.'' That we can do this by a fixed statistical system, such as the proposal of Bertrand Russell, of John von Neumann, of Norbert Wiener, and so forth. And, this was the big attack of Mach, for example--who was an ultra-empiricist--the attack on Max Planck, on the question of the characteristic of action.

So, the point is, that in science--and you can prove it to your students as a teacher--in science, the principle is: universal principles, which are discovered, by solving paradoxes and proving them experimentally. And, by looking back to the Kepler work, you have the concept of intention, as Kepler defined intention. Like Fermat's discovery of refraction. You discover the behavior in the universe which does not correspond to your statistics, but there is an intention, which we call universal physical principles. So, the universe is not organized the way that Paolo Sarpi and his friends argued: The universe is organized by intention.

Now you come up with a very interesting theological problem.

If man is created, if man can discover intention and use intention, what is the intention of man's existence? The intention of man's existence is an expression of God the Creator. Ah, if you accept the idea that the intention of man is dictated by the intention of God the Creator, what does that say? It says that there is an underlying natural law in the universe, which governs, among other things, the way man treats man.

What you are describing, in the student situation, is: The student says, "No. There is no natural law.'' What you get is cultural pessimism, in the form of pessimism about the very nature of God, man, and the universe. You get an image of a society, like the street urchins of Rio de Janiero. Imagine children, 8 to 12 years of age, with no homes; they have no parents, no homes, they live by stealing. What you are describing--it's happening in Poland, as in other parts of the world--is, the cultural pessimism has brought on this condition of the mind, which is approximated by the street urchins of Brazil. They have lost the conception of the dignity of man, of what creativity is, how the universe is organized. You have to give back to these children a sense of something which is true and they can believe.

The individual who tries to do that--it's a very difficult work to do it alone, but, then you organize people around you to do it collectively, and one day, as is going to happen right now, the whole system collapses. At that point, you have the opportunity to get their attention and say, "It didn't work, did it? Would you like to find a better way, and try it?'' You have to have a certain type of stubborn optimism, and then you can deal with those problems. And since your optimism is not always immediately rewarded, it has to be stubborn.

- The Sublime in Teaching -

Q: My question would be similar.... We have to go back to best examples, such as the Humboldt reforms. Those who promote infantilization, like [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, and which are followed by the present leaders of the so-called educational reforms.... The greatest resistance to this infantilization process and dehumanization--algorithmization of the society--is to be seen in small countries like Norway. The ratio of teachers to pupils is the highest in Europe, and it's not diminishing, like in Britain. I was greatly impressed by the fact that, in the last years, the best results in the international mathematical Olympic Games were taken from Iran, who were better than the Russians and Americans. ...

LaRouche: In the education as such, this idea of a class size of 16 to 18 in a class, is extremely important. Because the point is, that in a class the teacher-pupil relationship has to be such that the teacher is attentive. A good teacher, as you know, has to have the mind of the student in the class in his mind. Because every student is different, and when you are teaching a class, you have to think about every student with their individual peculiarities, in that class. And that basis is the way you are conducting cognitive interaction among the pupils.

What happens, then, if you don't do that, even in a small class? Then the teacher is teaching at the pupils; he is not involved in the pupils. He would never know whether the pupils will go asleep, he is just so busy. Now, if you have a very large class--and you know this from teaching--it's extremely difficult to maintain this proper discipline among the teacher-pupil relationship. The worst is the giant university classroom, where you have some poor idiot, a professor, or a teacher waving his arms pointing to diagrams, and what is going through the minds of the students, is not in his comprehension. He tells a few jokes, and they laugh, and he thinks that it's a good class.

And, I would emphasize that the educational relationship, like the parent-child relationship, is the most intimate relationship one can imagine, because you are not conducting a conversation. What you are trying to do is to engage the cognitive processes inside the mind of the individual. You are trying to get a reaction from that pupil or among those pupils, which then shows the pupil has responded to what you said. Then you use the fact that one or two of the students responds, and you say, "Hey Johnny, what do think about what he just said?'' Now, why do you pick on Johnny? Because you know Johnny, and you know that what you will get from Johnny, and from what this other student said, you are going to get the kind of reaction which will make something happen inside the class. You get something like a Platonic dialogue.

I think the best best way to train teachers is to have them work through competently, not in just reading, but as a study group reenacting the Platonic dialogues, which some Catholic theologians will call "spiritual exercises,'' because you train the mind to try to engage the inside, the cognitive powers of the minds of other people.

Now, as result of this kind of education, you get a moral effect. The teacher accepts a moral responsibility for truthfulness to the student. The first moral thing is, never tell a student they are right, when you don't know what they meant. The student will originally resist that--"You are trying to peek inside my mind. I am not going to a psychiatrist there.''

So, you get that kind of reaction, but what happens is, that you establish a moral relationship between the students and the teacher, and among the students. This moral conception of discovering truth as an interaction among people, it's the most essential thing, as you know in education. You all know what a good class is. You know the class you love to teach, and the class you think is a terrible thing.

So, I think that's the best answer--we have to establish a clear conception of that.

I just want to add one thing to it. You had an evolution in the development of dialogue method in the Classical Greek, and also later, in Europe. Those of you who are familiar with the Classical Greek tragedy, also probably know Plato's attack on the Classical Greek tragedians. He attacked it in a way which is exhibited by the character of Socrates in his dialogues. In German, it is the Erhabene or the "Sublime.'' For example, take the case of Jeanne d'Arc: Friedrich Schiller wrote a play Jeanne d'Arc [The Maid of Orleans]. I have gone through this, and what Schiller does, with one exception, which is dramatically legitimate in the play, is, he actually replicates the actual case of Jeanne d'Arc, the historical case. This is recognized as the Sublime by the Church, in the canonization of Jeanne d'Arc.

From the accession of Henry II in England through Richard III, Europe was besieged by an alliance between Venice and the evil Plantagenets, especially the House of Anjou. In this period, from a region called France, this young shepherd girl developed a mission to force the King to become King, as a mission from God. She didn't say, "You should be King;'' she said, "God wants me to tell you to become King, and ordered you to become King.''

So, she died for that reason, and she was canonized, because what she did, led to the defeat of the Plantagenets in France, led indirectly to the overthrow of Richard III, which introduced modern society into England; inspired two Popes; inspired forces inside the Council of Florence to give birth to the great Renaissance.

Now, this is the Sublime. In tragedy, you say the figure dies, because of a flaw in society, or in the leading figure. In the sublime drama, as in Jeanne d'Arc, she does not die uselessly, as an error. She puts her life at risk for a mission. The success of her mission, results in a change in the course of history. Her sacrifice is an inspiration.

Look, for example, you have Poland: Poland is a nation which has many heroes, many dead ones, many heroes. It's a nation of a resistance movement, a popular resistance movement. Many people died to make the nation possible, in many struggles against many occupations. So, in Poland, you had a moral effect of this, the sense of the Sublime. We did not die for no reason.

In education, it's the same: Education is a struggle with the mind of the student and the teacher. The great teacher accepts the object as a mission. The teacher thus acquires the authority of being a representative of the Sublime, which inspires the student morally. These are the great teachers, the great researchers, who created the great movements of discovery.

So, I would say there are many models, but no model is any better than the intention within it. The person who has the intention, and knows how to make the intention work, will succeed.

- Poland's Moral Mission -

Q: I would like to thank you, Mr. LaRouche and your coordinators, for the mission you bring to Poland. I will tell you why: I personally had close contact with Cardinal Wyszinski, the former Polish Primate. He was not only the conscience of the previous system, but he was very critical of, generally speaking, Western patterns, Western ideas. As far as I know, the Schiller Institute is the only intellectual environment, moral environment, which is critical, also, about the Western societies and the Western ideologies. What is very essential here, even today's lecture tells us, is this synthetic idea of both philosophical ideas and moral ideas, and how to apply them to a very specific decision in social life, economy, and politics, which is very important today. I have, however, some problems.

The first is the problem of efficiency, generally speaking. Because the question is, whether there is not a surplus of philosophy and high thinking in this message, which brings it to a lower efficiency? And, the second question is, how to translate this very principled, highly philosophical attitude into efficient action programs?

This leads us to the next problem. When we are monitoring the present situation, we see that the oligarchical ideas are more popular, and they are dominating. The critical movements against that oligarchical current are marginalized.|... Could you formulate, how you see the mission of Poland in this big, global world?

LaRouche: I do see a definite mission for Poland, which I referred to, in part, in referring to the case of Vernadsky, because Vernadsky typifies a sense of mission. He served a state with which he was not in political or philosophical agreement, but he made a great contribution to that state, which admired him, despite the fact of his disagreement, because he made such a great contribution. ...

I also have a very specific conception of this, which I have written about and which I work on, which I do things about. Despite my years, I am still functioning, and I am still running for President of the United States. And, at this time, I intend to win, not because I am ambitious--I have got everything I want--but they need me in that position. Nobody else around is qualified at this time.

How do you have to look at the Poland situation from my standpoint? As I have said repeatedly, there are only three cultures on this planet which are capable of thinking efficiently globally: One is the British monarchy, which thinks only evil, but it does think globally. It's a culture that assumes unto itself, the responsibility for deciding how the world should be run. You have the great Russian culture, still thinks of itself as a great power culture. The United States thinks as a nation never defeated, and thinks globally. The nations of continental Europe do not. They have been conquered too many times, and there are too many great powers that are more powerful than they are. China, as the most populous nation of the world, can not think globally. There may be people in China, who think globally, but the Chinese culture does not think globally. Thinking of China and the outside world, they don't think globally.

So, therefore, the solution to the crisis is, how do you create a combination of sovereign nation-state powers to address the problem of today?

The problem is, the United States is obviously the nation which, you would think, should take that responsibility of creating that partnership. The partnership should be centered, however, in Eurasia. But, not only is Asia the great population center of the planet, the great geographical center of the planet, but between Central and Northern Asia, you have largely a wasteland. On the other side, you have East Asia and South Asia. Now, on the one side, you have Western continental Europe, you have the legacy of Classical Greek, which is called European, civilization. You have the impact of Christianity in shaping European civilization. In the culture of Asia, you have a different culture, even though there are elements, like Confucianism in China, and so forth, which are agreeable; nonetheless, these are different elements, different cultures, different conceptions of man, God, and the universe.

So, all of us who think clearly and globally, come to one conclusion. I come to that conclusion, Pope John Paul II comes to the same conclusion.... We must have an ecumenical approach to the reconciliation of Asia, Eurasia as a whole. The relationship between Europe, and South and East Asia across Eurasia, is the determining factor in the future civilized history of mankind.

So, therefore, the issue is, at a time that the United States government and policies are about to collapse, the present government under George Bush is evil and doomed. It's incompetent and doomed. ...

As was referred to earlier here: You have a change in the mood of people in Poland, politically. Poland had, first of all, the domination for a long time of Russia. They thought that the Americans would come, and things would become better. Poland would almost do anything the Anglo-Americans demanded. Now, people are saying: Economically, conditions in Poland are worse than they were under the Soviet domination. And the problem is, people hover between these two choices, which leave them in a state of pessimism.

We need a new conception of man, going back to the sovereign nation-state, and a partnership which will empower countries, such as Poland, to begin to act as Poland for themselves within a partnership, not as satrapies of a conquering world empire.

Therefore, my opportunity to cause a revolt against what Bush represents, and what Nixon represented, and what Carter represented in the United States, now, which is what I am working on; we are having some significant success on this. ...

- A Closer Look at the 'New Economy' -

Q: I have two questions: Countries like Poland will face shrinking funds for fundamental scientific research. How would you see that situation? Because, what we can see is, there is an economic argumentation behind this. Why spend huge sums of money on research in a country like Poland, if the other countries can do it better or cheaper?

Second question: I would like to refer to the globalization problems and the development of new information technologies. They are not essentially changing the questions and problems that we are facing, but they basically change the fighting environment.

LaRouche: First of all on research. The first function of research, is not necessarily to produce a result. The point is, if you do the research in your own country, if it's research into either fundamental principles or technologies, then the research gives you a technology, a science which is yours. Intellectually yours, part of your country. Otherwise, you are begging at the backdoor of somebody who has it. You are crippling your population, by denying them the right to access to actual knowledge of what is important for the world as a whole.

Now, globalization doesn't work, it can not work. The model of globalization as proposed today, is the Roman Empire. The model today, is the collapse of the Roman Empire on an accelerated rate. You can not have a globalized system which will exist. Globalization is already destroying the globe and the nations in it.

Now, the information society is highly exaggerated. It was invented by an idiot by the name of Norbert Wiener, who worked together with von Neumann; both of them were fools who were kicked out of Gouttingen for incompetence, and justly so. They were followers and virtual satanic acolytes of Bertrand Russell, who probably was the most evil man of the 20th Century. They denied the existence of fundamental physical principle, as Russell said explicitly at the 1929 Solvay Conference.

The systems analysis is a complete fraud, except for communication as such; information theory is a fraud. A system of communication, fine; it means something. But, as a system of thinking, it means nothing. Any system which is based on a linear system, can not possibly replicate the act of cognition in the human mind.

So, you get, by its own definition, an entropic society.

Now the other part of this: This present wave of so-called information revolution, was started under President Carter. It was called the Third Wave. Three political figures were most significant in starting it: One was Newt Gingrich, the later fascist, who put in the Gingrich reforms. The second one was Alvin Toffler, a very strange person. And the third one, was Al Gore. This was sponsored by a section in the military, to develop certain kinds of weapons systems, which would function on the basis of automatic fire control. You saw this in Desert Storm--these little machines which they were using, like children playing with toy games; they were controlling military systems with that.

The other part, today, about the Information Society: The New Economy was started in the United States in 1995, because they knew, at that point, the entire U.S. economy was about to collapse. What they did, was they raised the fear that the computer systems of the world would go bankrupt, when the year 2000 hit--Jan. 1, 2000. So, what they did, was they poured a vast amount of money, under the pretext of curing what they called the "Y2K problem.''

So, they poured a tremendous amount of money into this, which created a great financial boom in the production of this equipment. The institution never made any money. It made money strictly on financial speculation. It never made an earning. That is, its earnings were always less than its costs.

In the year 2000, this reached the point that it was about to collapse. They kept it going until Nov. 7, 2000, the date of the U.S. Presidential elections. With hundreds of billions of dollars poured in to create a totally artificial appearance of a great, new market. It has now collapsed. In the United States alone, during the period since the beginning of the collapse of the New Economy bubble, the United States alone, in terms of market values, has lost over $10 trillion, which compares with an estimated GDP of the United States of $11 trillion. These firms are collapsing one after the other. Bankruptcy and mass unemployment in this sector are now spreading throughout the United States, internationally.

The whole telecom industry of Europe is collapsing, bankrupt: British Telecom, German Telekom, Italian Telecom, French Telecom--they are all collapsing. So, it's coming to an end. We are coming back to basics. We are coming back to reality, to realize that electronic communications, in better systems of communications, are useful. They save labor, but they do not create ideas.

Only human beings can create ideas.

So, this is one of the great problems we have to deal with. This is the leftovers of a delusion, that we can substitute computers for the human brain. We can't. And, there is no computer you could possibly design now, which could replicate a true, non-linear system. We have some complicated systems, which are called non-linear, but they are not truly non-linear.

So, there is nothing to be afraid of in this area. We are back to basics. Back to mathematics and physics.

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