On The Subject Of Integration Be sure to read the introduction to this event |
This is Lyndon LaRouche's presentation to the fifth “Argentina-Brazil, The Moment of Truth” meeting, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil on June 14. Subheads have been added. On the subject of integration: The bringing together of people of different cultures and nations for a common enterprise, a strategic enterprise, is the most important and most challenging enterprise in all statecraft. You can not use ordinary politics under such circumstances because--as in the Second World War, the United States was allied with Britain. Culturally, the British monarchy and the United States are historical and continuing enemies. But nonetheless, we were obliged to act as allies with our enemy Britain. And General Eisenhower, later President, referred to this cooperation as “a most difficult alliance.” But the difficulty is, as in that case or in the present case, that you can not speak in the language of the press; you can not speak in the language of the formalists; because you must actually communicate ideas. Integration Is an Idea Ideas can not be communicated by simple deductive methods of speech. Actual ideas of human beings, as distinct from animals, can only be communicated by what is called irony, which is the distinction of great poetry, great classical poetry, for example. The problem is that our senses are not reliable. Ideas can not be communicated in general by sense experience. The human mind doesn't work that way. Let me just--as a matter of introduction to the way in which to approach this question of integration--just qualify that particular problem. We know in physical science, in particular, that what the senses show us is not reality. What the senses show us is a response of the mind to what is perceived. Plato used a representation of this, particularly and famously in his Republic. The senses respond, if we learn to use them properly, more or less faithfully to the stimulation they have experienced. But then we discover--the mind discovers--that what we experience is not the substance of what is causing the experience. Plato said that we see as if shadows, on the wall of a dimly-lit cave. The function of science and great poetry is to enable us to discover the reality which causes the shadows. In physical science, we call this universal physical principles which can be experimentally demonstrated. In Classical poetry, we call this ideas. The way we discover a scientific principle is, we discover a contradiction. Let me just identify one--or two famous ones. How did Johannes Kepler discover, according to his own report in 1609, The New Astronomy, how did he discover a universal principle of gravitation? If someone says they can see gravitation, or smell it, or touch it, we send them to a mental clinic. So what you see in the orbiting of the Solar System, you see a shadow. When you try to interpret the motion of these planets and so forth, in terms of the shadows, it doesn't work. So Kepler ran into a wonderful contradiction, which enabled him to define gravitation. Kepler made some more precise measurements than had been made before, in the work of Tycho Brahe, and demonstrated two things by observation. The shadows told him something. Not the reality, the shadows. The precise measurement of the shadows showed him that the orbit of Mars was not circular, but elliptical. He didn't know how to make an ellipse then, except he understood what it was. But he discovered that the Sun occupied the position of one of the foci of that elliptical orbit. He also observed that there was a principle involved in the way the Earth and Mars orbited the Sun; that the area swept by the orbit was equal--equal areas, equal times. He also discovered something else. He compared the two extremes of the orbit, and determined that there is an harmonic relationship between the two. He also determined that all of the planets each had a characteristic harmonic orbit, and that these orbits were ordered in terms of approximately the musical scale. So from this, he said, there is an intention embedded in the universe which causes this to proceed in this way, which he then referred to as God's intention, which is not seen, is not smelled, is not touched, but which is visible to only one creature: the cognitive powers of the human mind. How Do Societies Progress? And thus we know, as Kepler concluded, that man is made in the image, the living image of the Creator, to discover and use these universal principles, and to change the universe by using them. And we are responsible for changing the universe. We are the gardener. We are the farmer that makes the land fertile. We have a mission. And the important thing about this is not merely that we are individually able to discover these things, but how does culture progress? How do societies progress? For example, you look at man, and you look at the universe. You look at Earth. Now we have a fair knowledge of the conditions of the Earth, changing conditions, over the past two million years. This is a period which corresponds to the point that the various continents had their present positions, approximately, and which a pattern of ice ages, recurring ice ages, has defined, for this planet over the entire period. Now during this period, therefore, knowing the conditions on this planet over two million years, if man as you see him would be classed as an ape, the possible human population of this planet at any time, would never have exceeded several million individuals to the present day. Every animal species has a more or less fixed potential relative population density. Then how does man reach a level of several billions of population on this planet? By changing his own behavior. Other species can only do this through a kind of evolutionary development of their genetic material. Man can do it as an act of will, as in the image of God. How does this result in human progress? By transmission of these discoveries from one generation to another, typified by what an education should be. But only one kind of education: a Classical humanist education, of which there is very little going on in the world today. So we are educating people to be animals. We train people in school the way we train circus animals, and we wonder why the children sometimes behave in a bestial manner. This is crucial; this is crucial for this question of integration, the strategic problem of bringing people with different cultures and different languages in different nations together to a common purpose, to the same effect as an integrated national military force. How do you exert command over such a multifarious resource? By interpreting words? No. You have to reach inside the mind of the other people. How do you do that? Not by grammar, not with dictionaries. Not at the blackboard. You have to reach the soul. You have to resort to poetry, Classical poetry; to classical science, as typified by the case of Kepler's discovery. Empiricism and Idiocy Or, for example, take another case of this, which is very important to mention, because it goes to another kind of problem. The failures of the astronomers of the 16th Century, such as the followers of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, the common error: They all were students of Aristotle, even though each had a completely different scheme for the Solar System. Actually, an accurate understanding of the Solar System existed prior to the Roman period. The Classical Greeks associated with Plato had an understanding of this--long before the Romans--as the case of Aristarchus, for example. But the issue here was, that while Kepler exposed the fraud of the Aristotelean method, and he did that in great detail in, for example, his New Astronomy, one of his major works; you had a very strange gentleman from Venice by the name of Paolo Sarpi, who introduced a kind of castrated Aristotle as philosophy, by removing some of his predicates. So this became known as empiricism or liberalism. It denied the existence of any principle of the universe. It was based on sensationalism, the interpretation of sensations. And this dominated much of European quasi-scientific thought. For example, economics as taught in universities is a form of idiocy. Because, what do the university economists tell you? The university economist, in the name of statistics, plays a game called “connect the dots.” He takes a group of points on his statistical scale of numbers of various kinds, especially financial numbers. And he draws a line between the dots. And he says, “Now this shows you what causes what in economics.” And he never understands why a crash comes. It's the same problem, because in economics, what actually causes growth is the action of the mind, in the form of physical actions directed by physical principles, discovered by people, which change the universe. The Case of Brazil Typical is technology. Or take the case of Brazil. Brazil is a very large country, with vast resources, mostly almost untouched. The fact that this city is the third-largest city in the world: We compare the population of Sao Paulo to the population of Brazil as a whole; compare the area of Sao Paulo to the area of Mexico as a whole. What a difference! What un-development! So, how is the potential of Brazil to be achieved? There must be sources of power in various parts of the country; there must be efficient communications and transportation. So the profitability of the firm, the productivity of the firm, in some part of Brazil, is not typically based on the productivity, internally or financially, of that firm. But it is the “artificial environment,” which the nation creates in the form of infrastructure, which the nation creates in the form of educational programs, which the nation creates in other ways, which then enables the people of Brazil to develop the various parts of the continent--to create new cities, to create new industries, to transform the Amazon region, to conquer the high plateau with its great potential: To change nature by the human will, by discovery. The typical economist does not know that exists. And they will produce long reports to prove that's not true. The problem of empiricism, liberalism, and so forth, in this form, was the denial of the kind of universe which is identified by Kepler, in which there are underlying intentions--which have the form of physical intentions--they control the physical domain, which determines the way things work. The way you understand an economy, or any other process, you have to understand it from the standpoint of the intentions of the Creator, as expressed in the discovery of universal physical principles, to transform one's environment. You transform the environment, you create the opportunity for people to apply other principles to the transformed environment. Say the farmer in Brazil grows a vegetable. (Not one to be elected to high political office, but to be eaten.) So, what does the farmer do? We have a few experts in the audience, on that subject. You must first prepare the area. You must provide the conditions under which you can have fertile and fruitful growth. Then for each plot of land, you must prepare that area. You prepare it with fertilizers, irrigation, and in other ways. Now, you can plant the vegetable, and get it. This may take years of preparation, to bring that land to the condition under which it can fertilely produce a particular type of vegetable. To develop a herd of cows may take a dozen years to a quarter century, depending on the type of herd you're trying to develop. So, there are long cycles in this process. We call them “capital cycles” in economics. The building of a great hydroelectric system, for example, which is a very expensive project: you can only do it, as a nation, if you allow yourself to pay off the project over a period of decades. But that can enrich the country. Regulating the National Economy So, these kinds of willful changes that we make in the environment, which involve long-term and medium-term cycles, are the foundation of economics. But your typical economist does not admit it: he's into neo-liberalism or liberalism. They ignore the reality. You see, economics is a physical science, it is not statistics. We create financial systems, which have no lawfulness in them. They're crazy. It's like having a crazy wild animal in a cage. Don't let it out of the cage. What you do, is you regulate an economy, you regulate a financial system, to prevent it doing the criminal things it will tend to do, if you don't watch it closely. For example: in order to have successful entrepreneurs, such as individual farmers; the individual farmer has an intellectual role in farming. The entrepreneur, as an individual, has an essential function in the economy, in managing that business. The individual farmer cannot control the national territory. The individual entrepreneur cannot control the economy in which he is working. Therefore, intelligent governments set up rules and mechanisms, to ensure that the individual farmer and the individual entrepreneur is protected in performing his useful function for society. We must provide the credit for the individual farmer. We must provide the infrastructure. We must do the same for the entrepreneur. We must enable him to perform his essential function for society. But all of this involves physical principles. What happened was that we had a development called empiricism, or liberalism, over the course of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Europe, in which the attempt was to crush science, as the case of Kepler typified science. Then in 1799, a young, brilliant mathematician, Carl Gauss, produced a paper, called “The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra,” which discredited all of the fundamental assumptions of empiricism or liberalism. What he did, was he took the case of numbers, and proved that numbers are not based on the “counting numbers” system; that the number-field has certain modular characteristics, and these characteristics reveal geometric principles. So, the first thing he proved by that method--as in the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae--was that there is no arithmetic; there is only a mathematics which includes arithmetic and geometry. Ah, but he didn't stop there. He defined what is called the complex domain. He demonstrated that the powers which underlie mathematics are universal physical principles, in the same sense as Kepler's discovery of gravitation. Alright. So therefore, at-the-blackboard mathematical proofs are worthless. What counts is knowing the physical principles involved. So therefore, the method by which we communicate the ideas of physical principles, by which we discover, generate, and prove physical principles, is the ultimate method of communication to reach the soul. Now this involves my personal contribution to science. What is proven by Gauss, and by people like Riemann and others after him, for mathematical physics, is not only, I propose, in the domain of physics, but pertains to the realm of ideas, in the sense of Classical artistic composition; the way Classical poetry teaches us how to communicate with each other. How to Build Integration Now just let me summarize the point that I wanted to come to on this thing, on integration. All of us who have been inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach's setting of the New Testament account of the passion and crucifixion of Christ, have a sense of spirituality, not as ghosts above the ceiling, but in the universe. We think of these things, often, in terms of family. We think of these things in terms of mortality. It's a very important subject for military science: mortality and immortality. For what would you sacrifice your life? Does that fulfill the purpose of your life, or does it, in some way, deny the purpose of your life? But, you're going to die anyway. So, therefore, what does all this life and death mean? Christianity is simply that. A Christian is a person who lives with the idea--as Bach presents this in the Passions, the musical Passions--the idea of the passion and crucifixion of Christ. For what would Christ lay down his life? To achieve the meaning of it; to achieve its mission. This is what inspires a Christian. This sense that there is a meaning, continuity, purpose in our mortal life, which transcends that mortal life. This is why education is so important to us. How do we transmit the ideas we have received from those before us, to those who come after us? How do we transmit the development of ideas on which the culture depends, from one generation to the next? How do we honor what we have received from those who went before us? How do we fulfill our obligations to those who come after us? This is realistic to us only in one way. Only by those kinds of communication which pertain to the form of discoveries of universal physical principle. A monkey can learn. Many of them are qualified as politicians. They perform tricks. But only a human being can transmit ideas. And ideas are not sense-objects; they are not shadows. They are principles. Which is why art is so important to us, Classical art. Because we are exchanging--instead of simple talk, and silly talk, and simple words, baby talk--we are now communicating ideas from one to the other. And the artist who can do that for us, the performing artist, the composing artist, is the one who is precious to us. For example, an adequate performance of the Bach Passion of St. Matthew, or Passion of St. John. So, that's the key here. That we must speak to one another within the frame of reference I've just described today, here. We must see the nature of our identity. We must understand mortality and immortality in these terms. We must rejoice in what we are bringing into being, at a time beyond our life. We must be happy in that fulfillment of our existence. We must see one another in those terms. Nations must see one another in those terms. We must look upon the bestiality to which man has been condemned so often; we must say, we must bring to an end the time when only a few leaders were qualified to guide an entire nation out of its self-destruction. We must develop our nation and its people, so that we have a nation, not of leaders and followers, but a nation composed entirely of present and future leaders. That is the way we must think of integration. We must also reach out. On one level, it's easy to reach out to Judaism, actual Judaism, and Islam, to actual Islam, because they all go by the same book. They all accept the concept that man was made in the image of the Creator. Now we're engaged in a great potential war which involves Asia. In general, the populations of Asia do not accept the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic conception of man. This is the most populous part of the planet. How, then, do we, seeking on the one side to engage nations which call themselves Christian, with a great effort at integration, how do we reach out to the rest of the world? I propose we can do it. Not as doctrinaires. Not inducing them to accept the Catechism. But assuming them to accept the experience of their own nature, to recognize what that nature is. And to agree, strategically, to create a community of nations on this planet, which is fit for human beings to live in. I thank you for accepting the difficulties of doing this dialogue in this manner. Click Here to read a transcript of the discussion period.
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