The Issue of Leadership:
Discussion With LaRouche In Mexico City
December 15, 2023

Q: Mr. LaRouche, first of all, God bless you for this fight. Here's my question. I think that Judeo-Christian civilization has given us a great contribution to this victory. As you say, you can smell victory. This is very important. However, we have also seen a pessimist society: this process which has led to a post-industrial age. My question, what I wonder, is what have really been, let us say, the failures of our Judeo-Christian culture, its axiomatic or ontological shortcomings which allowed for this process to take place, which should never have occurred? If these can be identified, although of course we know perhaps that they have been undermining this principles. On the other hand, I also wonder whether we might not be now at the threshold of arriving at a deeper cultural concept, a higher conception of culture which would give rise to a better civilization, which as the Pope has said, would be a civilization of love. This is a concept which I wonder about, and I would like to know if you have any thoughts on this?

LaRouche: Yes, I have a very definite and specific response to this question. You mentioned the Pope. Now, he's one of my friends, one of my boys. He's a little older than I am. Not much, and he's fighting, and his health has improved lately, which pleases me greatly. We just lost a great friend who died recently of cancer, Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan. He was head of Justitia et Pax. Some people consider him as having been a person who was a candidate for the succession to the papacy.

He was a dear friend and he and I had a special relationship. We knew each other--Helga and I knew him back in the 1980s, when he was still a younger bishop in Justitia et Pax, and despite Monsignor Martin, we had a pretty good relationship. But then, I met him again and he had written a book called On Spiritual Exercises, which I've referred to. This book was the result of the Pope having invited him to present this lecture on spiritual exercises to a convention of bishops in the Vatican, and the Pope had concealed himself during the presentation in the adjoining room with an open door, where the bishops in the audience could not see the Pope. And then the Pope appeared after the lectures to embrace the presentation. Then the book was published.

Now, this book, while the subjects are simple theological, biblical themes, represents my method, my Platonic method. What are called spiritual exercises, in true terms, that is, exercises which actually evoke the sense of the spiritual quality that distinguishes man from the beast, these exercises are purely Platonic. There is no Aristotle in any of them. They are purely Platonic, as all Christianity is purely Platonic, because the spiritual aspect, as identified with Vernadsky, as an example: we have three categories of efficient universal principles in the known universe. The first we call abiotic, non-living processes, as Vernadsky defined that from the standpoint of physical chemistry. You have a second group which are physical effects which are generated only as effects of action by living processes, not non-living ones. They are never generated by non-living processes, only by living processes. This defined what Vernadsky defined as the biosphere, that is, an area which includes non-living processes and living processes, in which the living processes, in the long term, are transforming the non-living universe into a fossil of a living universe.

Then you have a third category, of physical effects which are introduced to the universe only by the mental actions of man, which cannot be copied by any beast. This third category, we call spiritual, or the domain of reason. Thus, we have three categories of universal physical principles. One, the so-called abiotic, the non-living principles. Secondly, the principle of life, which exists among the animals, for example. Thirdly, we have the spiritual concept, which is reason. The spiritual quality of man can be explicitly addressed only by spiritual exercises of the type that conform to Plato's Socratic dialogues. The only method.

Now, when you look at matters in that way, and you look at the  condition of the Catholic Church and the decadence in the Catholic Church, as I do, you find that there are a few priests and missionaries, especially missionaries, or people of missionary disposition, who care about the inside of the minds of the people with whom they are working, to whom their mission assigns them. As opposed to someone who is merely doctrinaire, laying down the line, you know, the party line for the Church. And the party liners tend to be corrupted all too easily, especially with lack of inspiration. So therefore, you have a Church, which as we know in the case of the U.S. Church, is predominantly corrupted. Those priests in the U.S. Catholic Church who are not corrupted--priests and nuns--are a minority. And once you take the slide toward corruption, you tend to go all the way, which is some of the problems we have there.

You have a similar sort of thing in Germany, where you have outright fascism, Satanic fascism, as expressed by leading circles of the Church there. You have the French problem, where there's some question as to whether Napoleon is God or not. Then you have the problems in Italy. In the Italian Church in general, you have a lot of good people in the priesthood and in the congregations. In the Curia, you have some problems, internationally influenced problems.

So, what has happened in the collapse of society, is that the Church has not measured up to its mission. We've had some great Popes from Leo XIII, Benedict, Pius I, Pius II, and of course our friends, including Paul, including John Paul, but the Church as a whole has not been living up to its mission. And if you live inside the United States in particular, you know it very well. You find all these fellows who are Adam Smith followers. Well, Adam Smith theologically is a Bogomil cult, a Cathar cult. Calvin himself was a Bogomil in terms of his theology. And you have priests who are teaching that sort of thing. The problem is that many of these bishops and priests depend upon money. Where does the money come from? It comes from wealthy families, financier families? And the priests and bishops are tuned to this money, which comes from wealthy families, and they are careful to shape their conduct in ways which will not offend these sources of wealth.

We had a friend of ours, Stefan Kozak, who is a U.S. professional diplomat, who died a few years ago. Now, Kozak did an investigation for the Vatican of the problems inside the clergy, and the large-scale homosexuality which was prevalent, was documented. The role of the bishops' negligence in sending priests to universities where they studied William James' varieties of religious experience, or you had this pseudo-Catholic faction at Chicago University around people like Leo Strauss and so forth. The corruption is immense. It's this type of corruption. So you have corruption in the Church, and it's been there for a long time, and you have those who fight against it, like the Pope and like our dear, departed friend, the Cardinal. But the problem is, the quality of leadership has been largely lacking.

Now, this is unfortunately the usual case of mankind. Until mankind rises out of what we see today, the level of popular opinion, mankind will always tend to slide into decadence. And it's only in times of crisis, where fortunately some leadership appears of quality, that mankind is able to crawl out of this kind of decadence and survive. In the long run, I'm optimistic that, as mankind, we shall succeed in curing this problem of epidemic, or endemic decadence, which causes these cyclical behaviors in cultures.

But the problem today, you cannot say that the Church as an average institution is an efficient institution for combatting these kinds of problems. The Church by and large has become increasingly corrupted by precisely these kinds of problems, and it's corrupted largely by one thing: the lack of priests and other leaders who actually embody the method of spiritual exercises that is the Platonic method, the method of Plato's Socratic dialogues, which is epitomized in terms of Biblical New Testament issues by Cardinal Van Thuan. It's the lack of a sufficient number of such priests and others, with that specific quality of commitment to spirituality, and the prevalence of priests who have an inferior understanding of spirituality which melts too easily under the corrupting pressures of the surrounding society, that's the problem.

 So, I'm confident. I have confidence in myself on this question. I embody the principle of spiritual exercises. That's my method, it's what I've always relied upon, at least in all my adolescent to adult life. That method. I know some people in the Church, like the deceased Cardinal, I see the same reflection in the Pope. I see it in some other leading figures in the Church, who represent that same method. So we have a certain kinship, based on having the same method. But I can tell you, when you get outside that, you get some honest good priests who will respond to that, but you also get a lot of members of the clergy who are totally corrupted by the present society, the present culture.

And then you go over to the other side, you look at the Protestant side, and you have a much more serious problem, in general. You have the prevalence of this Moonie cult, which actually had a big control over the Christendom College crowd, among other things. The so-called Christian Coalition was totally corrupted by this stuff. We had a fight against that. So, we have the problem, and the answer to such questions, the question you posed, is extremely important, but you've got to know where the answer lies. The answer lies in those of us who have a devotion to the concept of spiritual exercises which I've identified, and it's upon us--whether we're in the clergy or not--on whom the rescue of civilization depends for our role as leaders.

Q: I am from Monterrey. My doubt is in regard to my education. I received an education on the knowledge of man. Everything was cumulative, and the education that we receive today, everything that is taught today, they say we are better in this period than in the past, precisely because of the question of so-called technology, that we are better off now than in the 1960s or the 1430s, because of the scientific principles that have been discovered. What draws my attention is that this isn't the case. Which process is determining, because I see that there has been an advancement in technology, but if we don't have the cultural conditions that transmit those discoveries between us, what would happen to that knowledge if we don't have a transmission into the relationships of human beings?

LaRouche: You have to have clarity about this transmission of knowledge. The first thing you have to understand about European civilization, of which we're all a part who are speaking together today. European civilzation is a little over 2,700 years or so old. It has two leading currents in it. One is the classical current, as typified by Plato and Pythagoras before him. The other is the reductionist tendency, which is typified by the Empiricists, the Aristotleans and so forth and so on. Those are the two currents.

In the whole span of this, there is the rise in Greece to the point of the stupidity of the Peloponnesian Wars which destroyed Athens, and much of Greece besides. But from the destruction of Greece in these wars, a group of the followers of Socrates such as Plato, developed a program for the revival of the kind of knowledge and development which had been placed in jeopardy by such events as the Peloponnesian War. So, from this we have, in the last period from about the time of the death of Socrates until about 200 BC, the death of Eratosthenes in Egypt, and Archimedes' murder by the Romans, you have a period which is dominated largely by classical culture. A classical culture which in turn is dominated by the Pythagorean tradition and, specifically, by Plato. All the great accomplishments in science and knowledge of ancient Greece, are consistent with the teachings of Plato, not with Aristotle.

Then, you have the rise of Rome from about 200 BC, toward the end of the second Punic War, the conquest of southern Italy, the invasion and conquest of Greece and so on, these developments characterize the rise of Rome. Now, Roman culture was a degenerate culture despite a few figures like Cicero and so forth, but was a degenerate culture as Augustine describes it. And the prevalence of the Roman Empire imposed a long wave of degeneracy, which dominated all European and Mediterranean civilization from about 200 BC until the 15th century Renaissance in Europe. The 15th century Renaissance was the revival of classical knowledge.

There had been revivals before. The important role of the Arab and Jewish renaissance in Spain, as typified by the case of Alfonso the Wise, or similar things with Frederic II in Italy, before he was killed. And a similar thing around Charlemagne, with the Abassid dynasty in that time. So, there were many renaissances. Augustinism was generally crushed in Italy, moved to Isadore of Seville, was crushed to a large degree there, and moved north to the Irish, and it was the Irish monks who civilized the Saxons, who civilized some of the Franks and created France. But then the Normans were sent in to destroy Christianity by conquering the Saxons. And so forth and so on. And Europe was dominated by this long wave which was predominantly evil, even though there was some persistence of progress, as in the cathedral-building of Chartres and so forth, in the meantime.

So, it's only with the 15th century, in the wake of the new Dark Age of the 14th century, that there was a revival of classical Greek method, i.e. the method of Plato, in Europe. The Venetians, who were the imperial maritime power, a financier oligarchy, which dominated Europe from about the time of Otto the Third as emperor of Europe until the end of the 17th century, the Venetians staged a counteroffensive against the Renaissance, and the rise of the Hapsburgs, as in the case of Charles I of Spain is an example of this. But from about 1511 to 1647, all of Europe was destroyed by religious wars which were orchestrated entirely by the Venetians. They created the Protestant sects and they created the other groups, and they set each against each other's throats in bloody warfare, to attempt to destroy civilization.

The Venetians introduced a reductionist philosophy. You had two versions: one was a new Aristotelianism, which was introduced by Venice at the beginning of the 16th century. Then, near the end of the 16th century, Paolo Sarpi introduced Empiricism. And Empiricism and Cartesianism became, together with Existentialism and later Positivism, became the reductionist currents that dominated all aspects of European thought, in conflict with the Platonic current flowing through Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss and Riemann.

So, most culture--or what is taught as culture in education today--over most of this period, with rare exceptions of classical renaissances, has been corrupt. So, what has been transmitted as knowledge, including so-called physical scientific knowledge, has been largely corrupt. For example, in this youth program, I've emphasized early on, the key thing in starting a university-level education among young people today, you start with Gauss' 1799 attack on the Empiricists, the neo-Cartesians in some part, D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange.

Because what's the issue? It's the Platonic issue. In this paper of Gauss', he defines what he calls a fundamental theorem of algebra, which is actually the definition of what we call mathematics of the complex domain. Now, that definition, which is not entirely original to Gauss but is simply a new way of putting the point, is already presented by the Pythagoreans and Plato in such forms as the question of the doubling of the cube by construction. These conceptions involve spiritual exercises, and creativity is a spiritual exercise. What you've had in education is corrupt education, largely based on Aristotelian and other reductionist programs, in which the students learn doctrine, they do not experience the spiritual exercise of the actual discovery of a principle. And society functions on that basis. You're told, learn, learn. When you're old enough and have degrees, then you can make up your own mind about these things. But by the time you get to that point, by the time you reach the age of 25-27, if you don't already know this in a Platonic way, you probably never will, because your mind is already too much destroyed.

So the problem is, we've had corrupt cultures and people have sat back and said, well, for a time, we've gotten by nicely on the inertia of what we've accomplished, but then the culture becomes totally decadent. But the decadence was already embedded in our failure to develop adequately earlier. What we're trying to do now is change that, and the way I've defined the youth movement as a political youth movement, is actually new in modern history. This youth movement is like no other, which can be adduced from shall we say the twentieth century. There's no comparison. This is a youth movement based on knowledge, based on the process of discovery of knowledge, which is what people ought to be doing in their university years, and even before then. So, the difference is, we represent potentially the difference, the margin of difference to begin to reverse this long crisis in history of advancing and collapsing, advancing and collapsing. At last, we're challenged. We've got to change the way things work. We have to have a new conception of culture, and this youth movement which has emerged in the past three years, has demonstrated that we're on the right track.

Q: Hello. I'm here working full time, deploying full time in Mexico City. We had a class yesterday which was very interesting, I thought. Except one idea was not very clear to me, and I'd like to see if maybe you can help me out. Between the classes yesterday at the cadre school, and Marivilia gave a class on the sublime from the standpoint of Schiller, and yes, LaRouche, they were quoting some parts of Schiller where he speaks of when, technically speaking, in a crisis, there was something that lifted people from that crisis, so that they could overcome and achieve something greater. And it could be explained or defined as the sublime. I had a doubt there and we discussed this for a while. I tried to compare it with what Roosevelt did with the economy in the 30s, which was he took it to the limits of the overall, off-the-shelf industrial capabilities, and what happened was that a breakthrough was made. These limits were overcome and things went further, quite opposite to the idea that when pushing to the limits, things could break and collapse. So, I'm not sure if this is exactly the principle that is referred to, whether this is a correct comparison, but if so, my question would be: this issue of facing up to the crisis at this time, where it's fairly apparent among youth and society at large, but mostly youth, you must face up to the crisis in order to make that breakthrough. But since it is more than apparent, what would it be, a matter of bringing it to self-consciousness so that they face the crisis and then we help them to break through, or how would it work? What do you think about this?

LaRouche: It's fairly simple. You see, I have the advantage of having lived through the entire period you've referred to, the 1930s, the 1940s, the post-war period, and I saw exactly how the degeneration occurred. This is now a lawful process, in the sense that it had to happen that way. Roosevelt died and the enemies who he had fought all his life were able to move in and take over. Now, there were reasons for it. Part of the reasons were that this is not a great society. Most of the people of my generation were extremely backward, morally. The 1930s was not exactly a good time to live. It was a decadent culture. Remember, the United States had been in a decadent culture since the successful assassination of William McKinley. McKinley was not the strongest person in American history, even though he had essentially a good commitment, but there were terrible weaknesses in that time, in that administration. So, it's not quite that simple.

The good comes not by trying to find a magic formula, for how to you orchestrate success? The problem is people look for magic formulas because they want to say, how can we be sure we're going to succeed? How do we know that our effort on this is going to be worthwhile? How do we know we're not going to fail, like so many have before us? Well, the answer is largely two things. First of all, you have to be determined not to fail. You have to have this sense of immortality, which I described. And without that sense, you're not going to succeed. I had people all around me. I'm a success, but all the people around me from that period turned out to be more or less failures, and what you're experiencing in society is just the result of the fact that most of them were failures. Most of the people with whom I was in military service were failures, they proved failures in the post-war period.

So you depend on people like me who are not failures, to get you through this period. Take the case of Germany, before Hitler. Now Germany was at a very high level of culture, but unfortunately had never overcome the fact of having a Kaiser, which is a very backward kind of institution, to have that kind of imperial conception. And the Germans wreaked its own death, by refusing to coup, when they should have couped. Not waiting until 1944 to try to do it, until the British would betray them. And they brought upon themselves their own destruction in that way.

So, the secret is one of leadership. It's called quality of leadership. Roosevelt was an exceptional quality of leadership. If Roosevelt had not succeeded, the United States would have become a fascist state, as Germany did. It was Roosevelt's ability, his development of the qualifications to make that revolution, which caused it to occur. And once they got rid of Roosevelt, the revolution collapsed. Not entirely, because the effects were not completely wiped out immediately, but it collapsed, and I saw it. It was my generation that was rotten, and today, my unique position is being a survivor of that generation who did not betray that legacy.

Therefore, through my commitment to that at any price--I've always refused to compromise on this issue. And the fact that I've refused to compromise has given me the strength to deal with this kind of problem. Normally a society would say, no, it never works. And all the successes of society were successes of what might have seemed impossible to people at that time. Just like Roosevelt's success. It seemed impossible to people at that time, but he succeeded. It was not an ordinary success, it was not some kind of thing, some kind of recipe. It was a personal impulse, a personal commitment, a drive to succeed, and the knowledge to match it.

People underestimate Roosevelt. They underestimate his knowledge. He understood the American System, which is the finest, highest level of development of economic thinking in the world today. There's no society on this planet that has matched the American System in terms of economic thinking. That is, the American System of Political Economy. Nothing. The American System of Political Economy was the basis for most of the great successes in the Americas and other states, especially after the success of Lincoln to develop in that direction. And the idea of the United States' method of economy, the heritage of Lincoln for example, was one of the great inspirations for the development of the nations of the Americas.

So, the thing to look at is not some system, it's not some systematic thing. It is systematic in the sense that I've said, but what determines the success or failure of society in any time of crisis up to the present, is the presence or absence of exceptional individuals who represent the quality of leadership which, in a simple way, Joan of Arc represented in the history of Europe. Without such leaders on the scene, society will go to hell. It may come out of it later, because human beings naturally have this gift which enables them to recover, but the general tendency of society will be to go to hell, every time, without the exceptional leaders. The only thing that saves us is that society does tend to produce, in a most remarkable way, some exceptional leaders, and because of that, society has survived.

But many societies have not survived. Many cultures have not survived. They were decadent. They were not capable of generating survival. What worries me today is that it's possible that this European civilization might not survive. It might not make it through this period of crisis. That's a possibility. A very real possibility. I think that we can save it. I know that potentiality for saving it exists. I know that I have the ability to lead that kind of process. I understand it. Therefore, I have confidence. If you don't have the adequate basis for confidence in that kind of process, you can't succeed. You need that. Fortunately, I have that, and I have it for only one reason: because I've stuck to this devotion over so many decades. People said I was wrong, but now it all becomes clear. I was right all along, and therefore, I think that I'm qualified to say, we are going to succeed.

Q: Hello! Good morning, Lyn. Greetings to you in the United States! My question is something that you have touched on before during this conversation, that throughout history, there is progress, and then civilization backtracks. What do you think is the difference we make now, to ensure that the constant fight between empiricism and the search for truth is won for truth, particularly now that there are so much more advanced elements of manipulation, such as television and the mass media, and which have such a massive effect on public opinion. So how can we ensure that we do not return to this process of one step forward, one step back?

One further question, the issue of self-consciousness. This ability that you have had, to always say the truth, regardless of public opinion, do you think you got that from self-conscious love, which is received from parents, or is this something can be generated internally by someone, regardless of the lack of self-consciousness in the maternal or parental relationship? Thank you.

LaRouche: Oh, I am sure that-- I didn't get much benefit-- I didn't have the worst family conditions imaginable, but my greatest advantage was that I recognized that my parents--like most people--lied all the time. There was some good in them, of course. I am not mocking them in that sense. But the idea that somehow they transmitted to me some great tradition--not really. What they transmitted to me was recognition of the corruption of what their culture represented. I mean, their religious beliefs were horrifying to me--increasingly so. I was a child, I didn't know how to deal with it, but it horrified me: It made no sense. So, it was not that. No, it doesn't come by any spontaneous rule.

You see, we are individuals. And what we accomplish, we accomplish as individuals. To be an individual, creative personality is a very lonely thing. And one of the problems people have in becoming creative is to deal with that loneliness. Because the nature of creativity is that you are right, when society and opinion around you are wrong. Now, you have to know the difference. You have to have a standard. You cannot go around assuming that you are right, just because you wish to assume that. You have to actually be right. And you have to take the personal responsibility for making that difference.

I know people around me would tend in that direction--a lot of young people I know. They would tend toward that. Then they would back off. They become frightened. They say, look, you know, you are a smart guy, and so forth, but look, you are not going to succeed. You can't win by going against popular opinion. You got to learn to live with popular opinion. You got to learn to swing with the punches. And I didn't. And my advantage was entirely that. My advantage was not what I got from my culture. My advantage was what I rejected from my culture. I recognized the flaws.

It's the same in science. That's what the nature of science is. Scientific discovery is not learning to repeat something you learned in school! That's not science. Science is taking the bit, like a horse. You recognize that what you've been taught is wrong. So now you set out to prove it is wrong. Not only to prove it's wrong, but to find out what's right! All knowledge is based on that. That's what I've always done. And it is because of that, that I have succeeded.

Now, as to the future, why I fight so hard for this youth movement, is because I recognized what was wrong in the education that the older generation got, and my generation before them. And I was determined, where people were open-- you know, you've got people out there, most people you know, really, know that what their parents gave them, was no future, was a "no future" society. Most young people today know that, in one way or another--that their parents were failures. Terrible failures, who gave their children a "no future" society. Any young person who thinks, frankly, knows that. So therefore, what you have to address today, is the failure of the generation that produced these fellows of, say, today's college age. That is the first thing that you have to recognize. If you don't recognize that, you get nowhere.

Now then, why do you want to do that? You have two objectives. First of all, you want to overcome that problem: You want to have a future. You want to change society to bring about a future, but that's not enough. If you are going to succeed, you have got to think about-- since your parents failed you, morally, in this way, what are you going to do for the generation that follows you? Are you going to be a failure like your parents were? A moral failure in this way? Or are you going to take steps to make sure that what was done to you, is not done to your children and your grandchildren?

Therefore you have to think about the transmission of knowledge, and that's what we're doing that's different. What we're doing is, we are emphasizing a method of education based on the critical significance of Gauss's attack on the work and opinions and methods of Euler, Lagrange, and so forth, the methods that are commonly taught in universities today--the empiricist method. We are building an education system with these young people, based on the best knowledge from the past, but with the intention that we will create an educational system that is a cultural system, not a formal educational system, but a cultural system. A cultural outlook: habits of thinking about ideas, discussing ideas, debating ideas. This kind of thing. To create that kind of society that will not make the kinds of mistakes that the recent generations have made, will not try to get along with popular opinion, will have the courage to challenge popular opinion. You say, "You say it's true? Prove it!" And that's the difference. Yes, otherwise we get into a cyclic business of saying, let's hope it works out.

But the other thing here is also crucial, which is implicit in what you are saying. The other problem is this: People say, "you've got to trust popular opinion"--vox populi. The quality of a leader is a person who is not awed by vox populi. Someone says, "well, if all my friends will disagree with you..." Hmm? You say, "well, you should get better friends, or re-educate them--one of the two." If you don't have that attitude, if you have the sense that you somehow have to apologize for disagreeing with your friends, that is the beginning of corruption. That's where you lose it. And that's where I get tough. No. You have no right to raise the argument, that since "all of my friends will disagree with you," that I am wrong? Naaah, I'm not wrong! I've been there too many times! I've been consistently right, when all the so-called "your friends" crowd were wrong. So I have enough confidence to know, that I can know the truth.

Once you get that sense of reliance upon knowing the truth, not looking over your shoulder to see what your friends are saying (are they going along with you?),... You see, the fear of rejection by your friends, your peers, is the biggest source of corruption. You had this in the case of St. Augustine. He reports about a good friend of his, who went with popular opinion. He went to the games, the Roman games. The gladiator struggles. He came back having been converted to admiring those games, and he never recovered his morality after that. It is popular opinion that is corrupting, and it is fear of popular opinion, it is asking for assurance from popular opinion, that what you are saying is acceptable-- that is the essence of corruption.

Q: Hello Lyn. I'm deploying in Mexico City now. I'd like to know how much influence there was with the principles that established the United States. That is, what was the influence of that on the creation of the Mexican Republic? How much did that feed into it? Thank you.

LaRouche: Well, first of all, the remarkable thing about the United States is, you've got to look at the case of Benjamin Franklin, and look at the genius shown by some people, while Franklin was still alive, in crafting the leadership of the American Revolution, and that was over a long period of time. And look at how they collapsed, once the Siege of the Bastille occurred, with the degeneration of the struggle in France! Of course, take into account the number of people who think that the Siege of the Bastille was the beginning of some great movement for freedom. They celebrate it as a great event.

So, if you know Franklin as I know him, you'd know that it was this one individual who was most crucial-there are many people who played a very important role-but continuously, Franklin's influence was crucial in making the American Revolution. Once the United States was hit by the terrible effects of what happened in France and elsewhere, the degeneration of people like Jefferson, Madison, John Adams to a lesser degree but to a specific degree, these people had been leaders of a great revolution, and suddenly they degenerated. Franklin wasn't there. They degenerated because Franklin wasn't there. This is often the case in history, that we depend greatly upon individual leaders for all the great movements. And the principle of assassination is, that the people who understand these things will commit assassinations, knowing that if they eliminate an indispensable leader, they will beat the entire movement that leader represents, or conquer the nation that leader represents. That's the big problem.

Now, my concern is to try to develop a depth of leadership for the future, so that does not happen after the effort we are making now may have succeeded. But the problem is a shortage of leadership, and in these days, it's not considered popular to say that. You're supposed to be so-called democratic. I'm telling you that the great revolutions are made not by democratic movements but by great leaders, and we have a shortage of them. My concern is to develop more leaders. My concern in developing a youth movement is to produce, from a youth movement, a quality of leadership which will not fail, as many Americans failed who had been leaders under a crisis, where they were hit without Benjamin Franklin as their leader to guide them.

By the way, that puts a big responsibility on you, Lisa. (laughs)

Did I scare you?

Q: No, no one here is scared.

LaRouche: Good. I didn't think so. I just thought I'd provoke you a bit, in order to come up to the level of what you really represent. You must sense what greatness is, to achieve it in yourself.

Q: My specific question is what can be salvaged from traditional popular cultures that might be of use in rectifying certain situations that we're going through in our culture's present crisis, our present culture? What needs to be corrected, or improved, so as to develop an even more perfect culture for future generations?

LaRouche: My dear friend Lopez Portillo, the former president of Mexico, who has had some problems with his health, nonetheless represents a person who struggled for his nation in a noble way. For example, his address to the United Nations at a point where Mexico was being crushed, typifies great leadership. Now, we got a source of inspiration and strength, as the case of Jeanne d'Arc typifies this, from those whose courage and competence has led great struggles.

Now. Jeanne d'Arc did not bring about directly, she did not see, experience the birth of modern France, but without her actions, it would not have been possible. Lopez Portillo in his time did not succeed in conquering the problem which Mexico faced at that point, but he set a standard of courage in leadership which, for future generations, is crucial. If there are people in Mexico in the future who show the same kind of qualities he showed, or the kind of qualities he hoped to evoke by his courage, then it will be partly because someone looked at and remembered what he did.

The same thing is true when we look at the work of great leaders in history: great artists, great scientists. Whatever we get from them by studying their work, one of the most important things we learn is that it happened. We develop optimism, because we realize how the human mind not only produces great things, but that sometimes causes which seemed to have been defeated, succeed, even long after the time that the effort was made. This was true of most human history.

Let's take the case of the progress of science. Since Ancient Greece, the progress of science was virtually destroyed with the rise of Roman culture. Roman culture is a disaster, compared to preceding Greek science. But do we therefore say the preceding Greek science failed? No, it didn't! What happened is that people who studied it later, made the greatest revolution in the political life of humanity to date: the birth of the modern nation-state. So therefore, we study what they did. We're not merely looking at whether they were a success or failure, and trying to imitate it. We are realizing and recognizing, being inspired by, the fact that people who lived so made possible the great things that happened later. And what we take from them is not so much what they did. What we take from them, above all else, is what they represent-that they made a better future possible by the example of the way in which they worked. And when we study the example of their accomplishments. The particular thing they contributed to us is important, but even more important is the fact of their devotion to producing that result, a result which we may realize as a continuity of modern science thousands of years after. And that's the thing we should concentrate on.

Q: Hi Lyn. Last weekend, the Mexican Senate here yielded to pressure from the US Embassy and from certain Fox cabinet members to prevent a moratorium on the Free Trade Agreements. Yesterday, in Helga's presentation, she went through the Lautenbach Plan and outlined the urgency of the scientific starting points for the economy, which, you have laid out, needs to inform and serve as the basis to develop this, to be able to offer an alternative to free trade and slave work here in Mexico. One of the problems we have is that the industrial leadership, and also the agricultural sector here in Mexico, are completely duped by the story that economic wealth is based on trade. I'd like to ask you for your opinion or recommendations on how to deal with these guys, to drive home an argument such as you make, because we are constantly running into a huge impasse on this, in spite of the fact that there are those who understand the destruction underway, but do not, however, understand the solution. Thanks.

LaRouche: Well, what you do is you have to be ruthless-gentle, kindly, but ruthless. And you have to know how to be kindly but ruthless. If you evoke rage sometimes, you probably have succeeded, because you may have evoked rage not because you've said something cruel, nasty or unfair, or sought to abuse somebody, but because you've confronted them with a fact that they are determined not to have to face.

Now, the essential thing that the people who supported this motion will have to face, is that it will never work. It will be a disaster. And we hope that the nation will outlive that disaster. That's the issue.

You see, they know, in a sense, that they're committing a fraud. But they say, ‘We need public opinion. We do not wish to be deserted by our friends and neighbors and fellows in business. We don't want to be rejected. We want to be loved.' And so they have problems. They do not wish to face the truth. They're not convinced that they know what they're doing. They're convinced that they should try to convince themselves that what they've done is true. They've submitted to pressure. A typical macho-you may know a macho or two, someplace-faced with that kind of problem, where he's asked to cringe and crawl before a force he does not know how to resist, will compensate and say, "Well, yes, I did what they wanted me to, but I think they were right!" Does he think they were right? What he thinks is, if he can cause himself to believe that he acted because he honestly believed they might be right, rather than recognizing the fact that he crawled before a fear of their power, or of the opinion they represent, that's the problem.

So, when someone says ‘I don't agree with' you in a case like that, don't assume that they're sincere. You will find that if you press them on a thing like that, the reaction will be that they suddenly become very angry. If you make an argument that shows them they were wrong, which proves that the argument they accepted was wrong, they're going to become angry with you, because you have attacked their dignity. They were trying to save their dignity by pretending that they had not been cowards. You're telling them that what they did made no sense, that there was no excuse for what they did, means that they capitulated ignorantly. For that, they will probably hate you. But don't worry about it, just duck. Because that's the way you'll win.

And the way most people fail is, when faced with that kind of proposition, that kind of problem, out of fear of offending the people they're addressing, they will crawl. And once they crawl, how do we tell them that what they did is wrong? They know it's wrong. That's why there was resistance in the first place. They knew it was wrong. But they also knew that they thought it was prudent in the short term to capitulate to that pressure, rather than to have terrible penalties imposed on them by an angry United States. And they said, "Well, it's for our own good. You're wrong. This will be good. Trade is good. We don't want to be embargoed by the United States."

So, it's a typical act of cowardice. But you simply tell the truth, and you're going to face some anger from them for telling the truth. But don't be upset by that. In the end, they'll respect you for that. The authority you will get will come because you did tell the truth. So, just tell the truth. And tell them you're telling the truth. I do it all the time. It gets me in a lot of trouble. I feel good about it.

Q: Good morning, I am from Monterrey. I was recently reading the Wallenstein [trilogy by Friederich Schiller]. What could Wallenstein have done to change his history, or to end the war when he wished to? Second question: I was reading the article on the historic individual, and I have an issue. Where does imagination reside?

LaRouche: In the case of Wallenstein. The real history, which is reflected in Schiller's account, is that Wallenstein never really intended to solve the problem, but he had an insight into the nature of the situation, and he was killed because he was suspected of having insight into the situation. Schiller uses these other characters to present the reader, or the spectator of his play, with an image of what the solution was.

Very simply, what is the truth of the matter? If Wallenstein had said to Gustavus Adolphus, successfully, let's you and I end this damn war by neutralizing the whole issue, then, in that case, the war would have ended. But what would have happened? Well, this would have been considered, as is shown in the play, by those who would say that Wallenstein, if he'd done that, would have betrayed his oath, and he was thinking of betraying his oath. And that, therefore, is the moral issue of the play.

That's the stupid version of the issue. The fact is, he was showing essentially the tragedy of what happened to a whole culture-that is, the continuation of the slaughter which happened as a result of people lacking in the situation who would have acted to end the religious war, as, about 16 years later, it was ended by Cardinal Mazarin's intervention into the affair, to bring about what became the Treaty of Westphalia.

And that possibility of the Treaty of Westphalia was an alternative existed even then. The greatest destruction occurred after Wallenstein's death, after his assassination. That's the lesson of the play.

On the lessons of this process. One has to be so deeply imbued with an understanding of the principles of creativity, as exemplified again by Gauss' attack on the fallacies of Euler, LaGrange and so forth, one has to be so deeply imbued with that understanding that one understands how it works. The problem is most people lose their nerve when challenging authority, to the degree that making a great discovery is a challenge to authority, when one is implicitly offending and challenging popular opinion. That's the great problem. I think the answer lies there, it's that simple. We've had a number of questions to this same effect earlier in the discussion. The same thing.

The key thing is, get away from this idea that you have to win over popular opinion, or the approval of certain authorities or some other kind of external authority to endorse your opinion, in order to defend your own opinion. Whereas, in fact, to be a leader is to develop your certainty of your knowledge, to the point that you don't depend upon any external authority, that is, opinion authority, for your own views, but depend upon your own powers of reason to know when you are saying something that is truthfully correct or not. You have to have that sense of inner authority.

It's like the scientist who will spend 20 or 30 years to overturn a prevailing scientific view of a universal principle. Take the case of Kepler. Look at Kepler's work, leading into the 1609 publication of his The New Astronomy. This was a revolution which for the first time defined the essential principle of all modern mathematical physics, experimental mathematical physics. Look at the amount of work he went through to do that, and now look at it from the beginning of his writings on the subject, and trace the work through the Harmonics book later. Trace that work. How many decades of life did Kepler commit to making these discoveries, and with the confidence to do it, as a conscious follower of Nicholas of Cusa, and Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli, for example, and a collaborator implicitly of Gilbert? Where did he get the courage to do that? He had to have a sense of inner authority on the method of reason.

The most important question is of leadership. You must aim to find a platform for internal authority, the kind of authority that was raised in the first question asked, on leadership in the Catholic Church. There are very few people in the Catholic Church who are capable of leading it. The worry is that if this Pope were to die, is there another priest in the Church who is qualified to be a Pope, as my friend, the deceased Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan, was a candidate for this kind of consideration? So you have to look at what is the kind of internal compelling authority of method, which enables you to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and to know the difference between what you must do on the basis of that conviction, and what you must be uncertain about. That's the big question.

And what I'm trying to do with the youth movement, in the context of a collegial movement-that is, where people are working together in groups of 15-25 for these kinds of discussions, where you have enough interchange on scientific questions to have a lot of interchange, fruitful but not so much that the individual gets buried in the pure size of the number of people present--but to build a movement in which people have a sense of how to acquire this internal authority which we associate, for example, the way I've described spiritual exercises. To go through the spiritual exercises, and to share that experience with others in sufficient degree, such that you can say "I know," and when challenged, to be able to think, find resources, to make your argument. And you have to have a sense of confidence in yourself and what you stand for. You have to develop that, and my view is that a youth movement can provide that, not only for this generation, but if we build a youth movement of the proper quality, I'm convinced that humanity will have turned a corner, and from henceforth, humanity will have a pathway to assure itself that it can continue to go upward, rather than going into another relative Dark Age, as we have recently.

Q:  Morning, Lyn. I am from Queretaro. It's quite an honor for me, and I'm truly excited at the opportunity to talk to you. I'd like to ask you the following. Some time ago, Bush made a statement that can be taken as a threat to the entire world, to the effect that any country that dares--this was ostensibly aimed at Iraq, but -- any country that attacks the United States, he would be willing to respond with a nuclear attack. This is a worrisome attitude for most of us. Another concern I have is that society does not make much of this. They're more interested in discussing TV programs, soap operas and other useless trash, rather than this situation which is of such great concern and which can be seen as a threat against the entire world. What do you think about this?

LaRouche: Well, first of all, Bush is not much of a president, to put it lightly. But we have to deal with this situation. You know, I can't say, well, I can't do anything until we get another president. I had a moral responsibility to do something, and I did it. What we did was to go to other institutions in the government, or influencing the government, and we tried to build an assortment of forces that could influence the decision-making process around the president. And we succeeded. Despite the ugly things he said, the president for the time being has acceded to things which are, shall we say, promising. Not reassuring entirely, but promising. And we're going to have to work from there, to deal with the next stage of the crisis, because there will be a next stage. This president may have probably learned something from this experience, or he may not have. I don't know, but that's where we stand.

So, this is typical of society. Of course it's awful. But also, you said something else, really. Think about it. What you are really talking about is the influence of the present older generation, that is, those who are in their 50s and 60s. They and the people they influence, are reacting with indifference to the reality of the present situation. That's why the youth movement is so important. As a youth movement, the conscience of the nation, you have to be in a sense like Cervantes was in the case of depicting the self-destruction of Spain by a crazy monarch typified by Phillip II, and the crazy Spanish peasant, typified by Sancho Panza. You have to have a certain sense of humor of a higher kind, about the reality of the situation. We have a stinking society. We poor fellows have to solve the problem. And the youth generation actually has the power to reach the older generation. That's how youth movements work.

But sometimes the youth movement is not adequately developed, and it only works badly or doesn't work at all. My insistence is that the youth generation must not only be dedicated to arousing the conscience of the older generation, of their parents' generation in particular, but the youth movement must develop in itself the competence of knowledge to become policy-makers of society. And that's the difference I'm trying to make with this kind of youth movement, which is to create a youth movement not only capable of provoking the adult population into sensible responses, to stop their silly indifference to reality of the type you describe, and others, but to actually be qualified to assume the responsibility of government.

If you don't like government, make yourself qualified to assume the responsibilities of government. Not like poor Sancho Panza, who couldn't resist his belly's demands long enough to govern an island. So, in order to be effective, don't be like Sancho Panza. Be able to govern, get the qualification to govern. And I think that's what we're doing. So let's have confidence in ourselves. I think that we can do the job, and have fun. I keep telling people all the time, have fun. Cognition is fun. Spiritual exercises are fun, they're the highest form of pleasure. Have fun. I think we can do the job.

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