May 15, 2015 – LaRouchePAC Friday Webcast

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening; it’s May 15, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I’d like to welcome you to our regular Friday evening webcast from larouchepac.com. I’m joined in the studio tonight by both Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review, and Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC Science Team. Both of whom will be participating as featured speakers in an event up in New York City tomorrow, which is titled “Prometheus Unbound: Defeating the Gods of Olympus”. And this is precisely the subject which Mr. LaRouche wished tonight’s webcast to be concentrated upon as well. Specifically as Mr. LaRouche identified during a preliminary, preparatory discussion that we had with him, what is the true meaning of the human species; and how can we regain a moral and intellectual connection and commitment to that, despite the efforts of individuals such as Bertrand Russell and other modern day Zeussians over the course of the 20th Century to degrade the human species to nothing more than mere beasts. Or, said otherwise, how can we give mankind his true sense of identity back? So, we thought we’d elaborate on some of these topics here tonight as a sort of preview of what you can expect to occur tomorrow up in New York City.

So, first we’re going to hear briefly from Jeffrey Steinberg; who will be followed by a somewhat longer presentation by Jason Ross, who will elaborate on what has been the cause of the moral and intellectual decline that has characterized the United States and Europe over the course of most the 20th Century, and what must be done to reverse that. And let me just say that Mr. LaRouche emphasized that far from being an abstract point of discussion, this question is a factor of crucial importance in the context of the present period; especially in the trans-Atlantic region, where in the 20th Century we’ve seen the net decline in the moral, intellectual, and really spiritual commitment to what it means to be human at the point now where we are faced with the danger of general thermonuclear war and the threat to mankind’s very existence. It’s at times like these that we must penetrate below and beyond the conventional banality of practical political issues, so-called; and proceed to the axiomatics which determine whether or not great civilizations rise or fall. We must address questions such as what is the true destiny of the human species? And for those of you who have been watching these broadcasts over the course of the last several weeks, you’ll know that we’ve been doing just that with the work that Benjamin Deniston has been presenting on this forum and elsewhere, along with others. And as we begin to confront this in various ways, these questions, our true identity as an actually galactic species, we are forced to ask and answer completely new questions that our species must fulfill. These are moral and even spiritual questions, which go far beyond what we tend to call science today in conventional terms, precisely because persons such as Bertrand Russell and others, bastardized the name of science over the course of the 20th Century in opposition to a small handful of true scientists in fact, such as Albert Einstein, who we’ll be discussing more later this evening.

So, before we get to that, I’m going to ask Jeffrey Steinberg to address briefly some of the more proximate immediate developments which pertain to our discussion here tonight. And I think a good way of introducing what Jeff has to say, is to read the institutional question which we received for tonight’s broadcast, which was presented to Mr. LaRouche during our preparatory discussions with him. It reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, the United States House of Representatives has voted to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The vote was 338 to 88; henceforth the NSA will have to go to court for case-by-case approval. Bulk collection was revealed in 2013 by ex-security contractor Edward Snowden. The bill passed by the House, ‘The United States Freedom Act’, is supported by privacy and civil rights advocates, who say it protects privacy while preserving national security. The bill amends select of the US Patriot Act, which expires June 1. Earlier this month, the US Appeals Court also ruled that bulk collection of phone records by the NSA was illegal. What are your views about the US House of Representatives vote, and the NSA collections?” So, let me just ask Jeff to come to the podium to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response to that question.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thank you, Matt. Well, first of all, on the immediate issue of the Congressional action and also the ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals last week, I think that part of it is pretty obvious. We’ve been living under a tyranny since the original September 11, 2001 attacks. For many young people — virtually anyone under the age of 21 — who spent their entire conscious adolescent and adult life living under the Bush/Cheney Presidency followed by the Obama Presidency, there’s virtually no real sense of any actual connection to our Constitutional republic and what it means to live under a viable Presidency that’s operating under those Constitutional principles. So quite clearly, this action is important and is positive. But it must be understood in a larger context that we’ve been discussing on this show for the past several months. Namely the fact that as a result of the policies, first of the Bush/Cheney administration, reinforced and further advanced by the policies of the last six years plus of the Obama administration, we reached a point where many leading political and national security circles in the United States — at least sane elements — as well as similar elements in Russia, in China, in India, and in many parts of western Europe, concluded that we are on the verge of a war that could very rapidly become a war of thermonuclear extinction. The entirety of Obama Presidency, up until very recently, has been singularly directed at forcing a confrontation with Russia and China. And in that sense, every aspect of the Obama Presidency has been a thorough continuity from the Bush/Cheney administration and for the drive for tyranny and dictatorship that came as the result of the Anglo-Saudi operation known as the 9/11 attacks. So, yes the action by Congress — a bipartisan overwhelming vote — was significant; but it must be understood that this was one of a number of actions that have been clearly taken by certain leading institutional circles here in the United States, who are motivated by the fact that we are on the very edge of thermonuclear war. A war that would be a war of absolute annihilation of humanity; and therefore, this is the height of insanity.

Now, as Mr. LaRouche has been arguing, really persistently since April of 2009, President Obama should be removed from office. He should have been impeached long ago; he could have been removed from office by elements within the Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment. That clearly has not happened; in the same way that Bush and Cheney were not impeached for cause back when they were in power. So, what we’re dealing with now, is a situation which one could describe as the bringing down of the Obama Presidency by 1000 political cuts. So you had the House vote earlier this week; the overwhelming repudiation of one element of the police state structure. But you’ve had quite a number of other developments indicate that there is a substantial institutional break with President Obama; and that we can expect a lot more of this to happen. And that cumulatively, it must very rapidly lead to the end of this Presidency by Constitutional means.

So, what are some of the other developments that we’ve seen just in the last several weeks? Well, for one thing, you had the vote in the US Senate, earlier this week in which every Senate Democrat with only one exception voted against the President on the fast track for passage of the two big trade agreements — the Asia-Pacific free trade agreement, and the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement. Ultimately, there was enormous arm twisting and pressure by the White House; and so there was a reversal of that vote in the Senate. But it put President Obama clearly on the spot; and represents the clearest indication of a decisive break. We’ll see many more manifestations of it coming from elements within the Democrat Party.

We’ve had the revelations published last week in the London Review of Books by American write Seymour Hersh, that basically exposed the fact that, in collusion with the Saudis, President Obama lied to the American people repeatedly about the circumstances around the killing of Osama bin Laden. And as the Hersh article — 10,000 word article — revealed, although the killing was carried out by American special forces teams, virtually every other detailing of the killing was completely fabricated. Was a series of lies and cover stories that persist to this day, including the fact that the Obama White House tried to dismiss the Hersh article, and claimed that it was based on one single, unreliable source; which was absolutely untrue. So, this was not a commando raid against some al-Qaeda stronghold that was unbeknownst to the Pakistani government. Every aspect of the description that came out from President Obama’s own lips just hours after the killing of bin Laden, is now exposed as an absolute lie, fabrication, and fraud. So, in effect, the one “great foreign policy accomplishment” of the Obama Presidency, namely the killing of Osama bin Laden, was completely misreported and lied about; including allegations that some of the evidence leading to the assault on the bin Laden compound came as the result of waterboarding and other torture methods. That was all fabricated after the fact; and now many people around the world are fully aware of that as the result of both Hersh’s article and the clumsy efforts by the White House to cover it up.

Now, we’ve had other developments as well. We’ve had the fact that Secretary of State John Kerry, in complete contrast to every aspect of President Obama’s poisonous policy towards Russia and China, was able to visit with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Russian President Putin earlier this week for eight hours. And the net effect of that visit was: 1) a serious effort to de-escalate the war danger. A danger which I said earlier, and that Mr. LaRouche has emphasized for months, is really a danger of thermonuclear annihilation of mankind. Secondly, what Kerry did in the context of eight hours of discussions in Sochi with Lavrov and Putin, was to — in effect — stab President Obama in the back by moving in an opposite direction from the confrontation that has been characteristic of President Obama’s policy toward Russia and President Putin since the day Obama came into office. Evidence number one is the continuing role of Victoria Nuland; who openly engineered and supported the neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine, which really started a certain escalating phase of this drive towards confrontation with Russia and the prospective danger of thermonuclear war. Secretary Kerry, over this weekend, will be traveling to China; and I suspect that his efforts there will similarly go against the directionality of the Obama policy towards China, and reflects a certain move by senior figures within the governing institutions in the United States, who have recognized that the continuation of the Obama Presidency unchecked, will be a recipe for potential nuclear war and thermonuclear extinction. So, you have institutional elements that are moving in those directions.

And of course, as you step back and look at the global scale of events, we’ve had extraordinary developments this past week; further movement towards the emergence of a new paradigm which is much more in line with the real nature of mankind’s mission toward the future within this galaxy and Solar System. Namely, the further advances of the BRICS towards cooperation among a large array of sovereign nation-states; principally in the Asia-Pacific region, extending into parts of Europe, with cooperation in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere as well. You have Prime Minister Modi of India, on day two right now of his three-day historic visit to China; hosted by President Xi Jinping. You’ve had cooperation announced during last Saturday’s victory celebration on the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Hitler, that there will be convergence of the Eurasian Economic Union’s efforts with those of China’s initiatives around the New Silk Road policy. So, much of mankind is moving in a direction that reflects the actual nature of man and his potential as a truly, uniquely creative species.

Now, these actions that have been taken by certain leading institutional circles in the United States and elsewhere are being undertaken precisely because the situation is so dangerous and so grave. And on a certain level, at least some of the people that we’re referring to here are aware of the fact that the general level of moral, of culture, and of comprehension among the vast majority of Americans, and really citizens of the entire trans-Atlantic region, is something that falls way beyond the standard of human behavior. And in our lengthy discussion yesterday afternoon with Mr. LaRouche, among the points which he reiterated, and which Jason will take up in much more detail in just a few moments is the fact that since the very onset of the 20th Century, the entire trans-Atlantic region has gone through an extraordinary degeneration. The educational system has been destroyed in large measure; the scientific accomplishments that were reaching breakthrough levels in the latter part of the 19th Century, were completely suppressed by a tyranny of mathematics over physical science. And as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in numerous writings, one of the key figures in that assault, was the late Lord Bertrand Russell; whom Mr. LaRouche has described on many occasions as the most evil man of the 20th Century. Now, think for yourselves about the image that many of you have of Bertrand Russell — the wizened haired old anti-nuclear war activist. The fraud that has been perpetrated around the actual nature of Bertrand Russell, and Russell’s role in the moral and cultural destruction of the populations of the trans-Atlantic region, is one of the greatest frauds of the entire 20th Century. As devastating as the fraudulent idea that mathematics is superior to physical science.

Now, I just want to read a few quotes from Bertrand Russell, from published material that he had written over the span of a 20-year period during the peak of his economic and political and scientific life. I want to first read, and I want you think about these words, and judge for yourself both Russell’s intention on behalf of an evil, Satanic British Empire; and I want you to also weigh those intentions against where things now stand, here in the United States and across the Atlantic, in much of Western Europe, ask yourself: “Has Russell’s vision been accomplished? How far along the downward slope have we actually reached already?”

First of all, I want to read you a segment from a 1951 book by Bertrand Russell, called The Impact of Science on Society, and then I’ll read you a quote, similarly oriented from an earlier work by Russell. Here’s what Russell had to say: [as written]

“Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

“The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship…. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray. …

“Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

So that was 1951. These were not new ideas, because in in 1931, Russell wrote another book in which he again betrayed his abusive notion of the term “science.” This book was called The Scientific Outlook, and in a chapter called “Education in a Scientific Society,” he wrote:

“[t]he scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called ‘co-operative,’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.

“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements….

“On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.”

OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. And I think it was a very appropriate way to end your opening remarks here, by citing those thoroughly evil quotations by Bertrand Russell.

And as I stated at the introduction of this webcast, our mission here tonight is to address the fact that throughout the trans-Atlantic region, largely because of the influence of Bertrand Russell, we have lost touch with what it means to be human. And as Mr. LaRouche specified in our discussions with him, one of the most efficient ways to do that, is by means of the personality of Albert Einstein.

As Mr. LaRouche has been elaborating over the course of this week, in discussions, Einstein uniquely possessed the moral and the intellectual commitment to the true meaning of human life, a commitment which he defended and sustained while practically no other scientist, or no other associate of his in the 20th century, possessed the strength and the courage to do so. It was Albert Einstein’s devotion to what he understood to be the true identity of the human being, which was the source not only of his moral strength, but also of his intellectual genius which distinguished him from the vast majority of other so-called scientists, both among his contemporaries and since.

And in that context, I would just like to quickly call our viewers’ attention, to two articles that were featured in this week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review magazine: One by Tony Papert, titled “Albert Einstein’s God” and the second, “The First Solvay, 350 B.C.: Aristotle’s Assault on Plato”, by Susan Kokinda, both of which tell the story that we’re addressing here tonight, how the 20th century became a century of moral, intellectual, and spiritual degeneration, and how this narrow thread of true science has been defended, only by those precious few, who had the integrity to reject this bestialization of man.

Now also featured in this week’s EIR is a very short article which was written by Albert Einstein himself. He wrote this article about another scientists who was very similar to himself in his lonely, but unshakable devotion, to the true identity of the human species: This man was Johannes Kepler. And this was an article which Einstein published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Nov. 9th, 1930, marking the 300th anniversary of the death of Johannes Kepler. And I just want to read two short excerpts from this, because I think they’re highly apropos too what we’re discussing here tonight, and I think will set up quite well, what Jason is going to present.

So, Einstein begins this article as follows:

” Precisely in such a troubled and turbulent time as ours, when it is hard to summon up joy about mankind and the progress of human affairs, it is especially comforting to think of such a great and serene person as Kepler.

“He lived at a time when the very conception of universal lawfulness of nature was not at all established. How great must have been his faith in such lawfulness, to have the strength to endure decades of patient, difficult work—supported by no one and understood by few….”

And then, after Einstein elaborates Kepler’s absolutely unique method by which he made his discoveries concerning the planets, he concludes this article with an almost religious statement of what he calls a “feeling of … veneration … for the mysterious harmony of nature into which we were born”; also a reference back to the “faith” that guided Kepler, and something that he calls elsewhere, a “cosmic religious feeling,” which you can find in other writings by Einstein.

So after this, he then concludes his article with a strong denunciation of empiricism, asserting that the work of Kepler proves that imagination must precede sense experience in any competent scientific work. So this is what Einstein says in conclusion:

“Our admiration for this wonderful man is joined with another feeling of admiration and veneration, not for any person, but for the mysterious harmony of Nature into which we were born. In ancient times, men already thought about lines of the simplest conceivable regularity. Among these, the foremost, next to the straight line and the circle, was the ellipse…. We see these latter forms realized, at least in close approximation, in the orbits of the heavenly bodies.

“It seems that human reason first has to independently construct the forms, before we can detect them in things. Kepler’s marvelous life’s work shows us especially beautifully, that cognition cannot blossom from sheer empirics, but from the comparison of what is imagined, with what is observed.”

So with that, I’d like to invite Jason to come to the podium.

JASON ROSS: All right, thank you, both. That’s quite a set-up. Keep in mind, those were only Bertrand Russell’s public commentary. It makes you wonder what — it’s actually hard to imagine what he could say that would even be any worse than that in his private dealings.

So, let’s take a look at this. It might seem surprising to hear the notion that the 20th century was one of degeneration — of moral and cultural degeneration, and of intellectual degeneration. You might say, yeah, music was more refined, perhaps, or social interactions used to be more polite — but didn’t we make a lot of breakthroughs in science in the 20th century? Don’t we have a huge technological advancement over 100 years ago? The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Keep in mind the origin of science, the origin of technological advancements and what it is at its heart. To get at this, we’ve got to track how this fight has played out, from look at Prometheus, Plato and Aristotle, into the Renaissance, and then make the point about Einstein. So, if we go back to the story of Prometheus, the giver of fire, to mankind, fire, but also music, astronomy, homebuilding, the use of beasts of burden, sailing ships, agriculture, poetry, calendars; among all of these gifts, Prometheus gave humanity. This is the origin of having a human society, because beyond the specific breakthroughs that are made, you can ask yourself, what is the origin of them, what’s the nature of the mind that creates these kinds of things?

And the greatest and most threatening thing Prometheus had given was the culture, or the identity of human beings, as being creatures that were able to create and discover more such principles and increase their power. That was what Zeus found most revolting about Prometheus, most dangerous about Prometheus, and the reason, in addition to the others, that he had him chained to the rock, tortured and so on.

So think about what this difference is, our ability to make discoveries. You know, LaRouche often references that people don’t have an understanding of what makes human beings different from animals. I think today, many people don’t know what makes people different from computers, and as seen in the concern that some people have, like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking about “artificial intelligence taking over the world,” being the worst possible threat to mankind. It’s just not true.

Artificial intelligence will never supplant human creativity. Having a self-driving car, or a robotic auto line-worker is a little bit different than saying, “could we have an automatic laboratory?” or an automated set of robot musicians, or robot composers, computers creating music that’s new and worth hearing. Or are computers going to create new discoveries that overturn all of the thoughts that came before? They won’t and they can’t.

We’ll get at this from the Plato/Aristotle fight, and then in the 1900s with Hilbert and Einstein.

So, going back to Plato and Aristotle. Many people heart that, or many people say that Plato and Aristotle were the two founders of the “Western canon” or “Greek thought” or “Western civilization” — it’s just not true. They don’t have really anything in common in their outlook. Were they contemporaries? Did they know each other? Yes. Was Aristotle in some respects a student of Plato?—you could say that, but they didn’t see things the same way at all. Three examples:

One, an approach to looking at human beings and their social status. Plato has a dialogue in which Socrates discusses with Meno a number of topics. Eventually, the topic of education comes up, and Socrates performs a demonstration with one of Meno’s slaves, in which Socrates reveals that this slave-boy, who’s had no education, who Meno would think is inferior to his own sons, nonetheless, this slave-boy is able to discover and own knowledge of a non-insignificant geometrical demonstration. That’s in Plato’s dialogue of Meno.

What does Aristotle have to say about slavery? Well, he says in his Politics, you’ll note that it’s easier to quote Aristotle than Plato, because Plato has discussions and Aristotle just tells you things. So Aristotle says [as read]: “The slave is a living possession and property, an instrument. The master is only the master of the slave, he does not belong to him. Whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him! For that some should rule and others be ruled, is a thing not only necessary but expedient. From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjugation, others for rule.” That’s Aristotle.

Compare that to Plato’s Socrates, showing that the potential for discovery and knowledge exists in a slave.

How about one where discoveries come from? Let’s start with Aristotle, first on this time. Aristotle, on the origin of thoughts, he says, [as read] “Since, according to common agreement” — that’s a great way to start, right? — “since everybody says that there’s nothing outside and separate in existence, from sensible spatial magnitudes, then the objects of thought are all in sensible forms, both abstract objects and the states of affections of sensible things. Hence no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of senses. And when the mind is actively aware of anything, it is necessarily aware of it along with an image, for images are like sensuous contents.”

So what makes people different? Don’t animals have sense-perceptions, too? Don’t worry, Aristotle thought of this. He said, “While in respect of all the other senses we fall below many species of animals, in respect to touch, we far excel all other species in exactness of discrimination. That is why man is the most intelligent of all animals.”

That really should be enough to not bother with Aristotle any more and in fact, I’m going to leave out the third quote I was going to read about this.

If we contrast that with the Plato’s discussion; this is an actual quote from Plato, which is difficult. He’s not quite so quotable. But he says that “t is necessary to learn at the same time both what is false and what is true of the whole of Existence, and that through the most diligent and prolonged investigation…; and it is by means of the examination of each of these objects, comparing one with another — names and definitions, visions and sense-perceptions, — proving them by kindly proofs and employing questionings and answerings that are void of envy — it is by such means, and hardly so, that there bursts out the light of intelligence and reason [noös] regarding each object in the mind of him who uses every effort of which mankind is capable.” Discovery is required; study is required; questions and answers, and contradictions.

I’ll leave it with that for those two. If you just open up a book of Aristotle and start reading I think you’ll convince yourself about him.

So what do these guys do politically? You’ve also possibly heard that Aristotle is a tutor of Alexander the Great, which isn’t true. In fact, his nephew tried to poison Alexander and was executed by him. And then, a colleague of Aristotle’s son did poison Alexander the Great. Actually, it was the Platonic tradition that educated and was the faction behind the Alexander the Great.

After his murder, the need existed to eliminate the possibility of further uprisings of thought and further creations of new concepts, and so a program was put into place, very much along the lines of what Jeff had read from Bertrand Russell about how can people’s minds be controlled in the kinds of thoughts that they consider possible or acceptable to have. That operation was known as Euclid.

Now, you might not remember from school, but I guarantee everybody’s heard of Euclid; Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, Euclid the creator of logic, Euclid the thinker who made reasoning concrete.

What Euclid did was, pull together discoveries that people had made about geometry, by some means that actually allowed them to make those discoveries in the first place, beat the discoveries out of them, and then presented them as deriving from a small number of basic assumptions. When you go to read those assumptions, they sound pretty awkward — many f them do — but the important aspect of it, is that if Euclid is held up as the standard of thought, all future knowledge already exists in the past, by just pasting it together and combining it, and drawing new conclusions from old material.

Nowhere does Euclid discuss the creation of new axioms, the discovery of new, fundamental principles. That doesn’t happen.

So, if that’s the standard, as it was, through the Dark Ages, if that’s the standard of education in large part, if that’s the standard of what thinking is, of what rigor is, no one’s ever going to discover anything new. And indeed, people who support that outlook don’t — can’t.

When the Renaissance began launched by Nicholas of Cusa, who was opposed to and attacked Aristotle as having eliminated the only possibility for breakthrough, Cusa said that opposites can coincide. That when we ask questions, or think in ways that result in contradictory answers that both seem right in some way, that’s our clue to then make some new hypothesis, a thought in the mind which can be in resonance with how the universe unfolds as a new principle. That’s what Kepler did: Kepler, the first modern scientist, the astronomer, who in 1609 in his work The New Astronomy, applied Cusa’s method, asked a question about Mars in particular, but about planets, got two contradictory answers, and said, aha! Dear reader, this is proof, this is a demonstration to you, that the mode of questioning is wrong. That trying to fit geometry to the planets will never succeed.

Then he says, come with me into the domain of physics, which mathematics can’t touch. Let’s go into the domain of physics, and we’ll figure out how the planets actually move. And he did. He wasn’t led by mathematics, he was led by a physical hypothesis that came from his mind, that was new, that didn’t come from the past, that wasn’t deductive, that Euclid of Aristotle never could have arrived at and that Aristotle opposed; to make a breakthrough in our understanding of what science itself is, in addition to making a discovery in astrophysics.

So: Let’s get into this 1900, Hilbert, Russell, Einstein period, by leading into it from Dmitri Mendeleyev. So in the latter 1800s, Dmitri Mendeleyev, who developed a periodic table, he advanced the science by rejecting the concept that our notions should be related to sense-perceptions. Let me say what I mean by that: Mendeleyev made it clear that the actual elements of chemistry — what they were was a potential for activity, but those elements themselves had no physical, sensual, sense-perceptible characteristics. For example, Mendeleyev would point to carbon. Now, carbon could be a diamond; carbon could be graphite in a pencil; carbon could be coal. These different substances are different! Obviously, if you look at a diamond and coal, they don’t really look alike at all, except neither of them is a liquid or gas; but beyond that, they’re completely different. So Mendeleyev said, yeah, carbon doesn’t have any characteristics. The potential for it to do things, the potential for it to form compounds, what it’s able to do: that’s its existence, not how it appears or any of those measurable characteristics.

So he developed a new foundation for considering chemistry overall. Through his periodic table, periodic system, he developed a hypothesis about a unity behind all of chemistry, behind all of material, behind all of matter, there is something that it all has in common. They weren’t all completely different. Something unified them.

So now let’s come to 1900. Let’s start by looking at Max Planck. Now, Planck, when he went into physics, was urged not to. one of his mentors, who fortunately he didn’t listen to, said: Look Planck, in this field, the physics, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes. This is in the 1870s, I believe. That’s not what really happened.

So, the year 1900: At the end of the year 1900, Planck didn’t fill a few holes, he showed that the foundation of a major part of all of physics had to be overturned and was wrong. His hypothesis of the quantum made over October through December 1900, this was not derived from the past, as Aristotle said knowledge was; it didn’t come from previous axioms, as everything in geometry does according to Euclid. It was a new hypothesis, that contradicted what already existed, which couldn’t be stated in the already-existing physical language. Which gave results that said that everything about physics that we thought, was actually at least a little bit wrong. Nothing was unchanged by what Planck had done.

In that same year of 1900, in Paris in the summertime, the mathematician David Hilbert spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians. You might ask: How could that possibly be important for world history? Who would attend an International Congress of Mathematicians — I can’t imagine any bothering to read the news reports about it, who could possible care about this? What if he spoke at the Thimble Collectors’ Society, what difference would it make?

Well, this was actually of crucial importance because what Hilbert said at that conference, was that he wanted to bring “rigor” to mathematics, and he says, “what does it mean to know something?” Here’s Hilbert’s view of that — here’s his answer:

“It shall be possible to establish the correctness of the solution by means of a finite number of steps based upon a finite number of hypotheses which are implied in the statement of the problem and which must always be exactly formulated. This requirement of logical deduction by means of a finite number of processes is simply the requirement of rigor in reasoning. Indeed the requirement of rigor, which has become proverbial in mathematics, corresponds to a universal philosophical necessity of our understanding….” [emphasis added] He’s saying that logical deduction, which he calls “rigor,” is “a universal philosophical necessity of our understanding,” that the only way we know anything is by deduction, by the method of Euclid.

Kind of bad timing on his part, that only a few months later, Planck had developed something which overthrew all of the axioms of physics, and it was not derived from them! But that didn’t stop Hilbert, and it certainly didn’t stop Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell, in 1903, published a book called the Principles of Mathematics, in which he tried to do what Hilbert had set out. He tried to show that all of mathematics could be demonstrated logically. So that’s what he was up to. Two years later, Albert Einstein, instead of showing that things are logical and everything derives from what we already know, shows that our thoughts about space and time and energy and matter are all wrong, when he discovers relativity. When he works on the photoelectric effect and starts creating quantum physics based on Planck’s discovery.

So while Russell and Hilbert are trying to say that rigor is the basis — essential, necessary basis of knowledge, and that all future thoughts will only be new derivations from what we already know, at almost the exact same time period, Planck and Einstein have overthrown our understanding, in a way that contradicts what came before.

The results of this, who would you look to as a basis for understanding what science ought to be? Somebody who wrote a math book that Kurt Gödel proved was pointless in 1931? On the guys who made the last, real fundamental breakthroughs that have been made in physics? These are a hundred years old! And although we’ve seen a number of new technologies, have we discovered any new principles, that overthrow the basic concepts? Ask yourself that.

So, let’s come to Einstein. Einstein was attacked in 1927, at the Solvay Conference, where groupings came together to discuss quantum physics, etc. What occurred there was that Niels Bohr was trying to force what’s known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” on the world. What Bohr had said was that, due to some of the unusual paradoxes that follow from quantum physics, that the old idea that we could actually know what made the world work, was an idea that was now passé. Bohr famously said, “We can’t know what the quantum world is. All science includes now is, what can we say about that world?” Bohr said, we have our sense-perception, we have our observations, we can come up with formulas and concepts that explain those sense-perceptions, but the claim to truth that any of our thoughts have is, do they match the perceptions, not do they correspond to a human principle, a human hypothesis?

Now, almost everybody gave in on this. But Einstein didn’t, leading him to be increasingly ostracized. Amazingly, the man who had created and developed quantum physics was considered an old dodderer. He wasn’t keeping up with the times: He still held onto the idea that eventually we could discover things that would feel like causes in the human sense. How passé of him!

As a matter of fact, Bertrand Russell, who wrote — he certainly kept himself busy, I’ll give him that — he wrote a book called The ABCs of Relativity, in which he offers some remarks on Einstein’s relativity, and he talks about how a single concept of time no longer exists in Einstein’s world, which is true; two events in different places, which one occurred first and which one occurred second, or were they simultaneous, could depend on who was watching. So, that does come in relativity theory.

Here’s what Russell says about it: “[t]he question of whether, on the whole, there is progress in the universe, may depend upon our choice of a measure of time. If we choose one of a number of equally good clocks, we may find that the universe is progressing as fast as the most optimistic American thinks it is; if we choose another equally good clock, we may find that the universe is going from bad to worse as fast as the most melancholy Slav could imagine. This optimism and pessimism are neither true nor false, but depend upon the choice of clocks.”

I want to leave off on some reflections of Vernadsky and Lyndon LaRouche. Vernadsky in a soon-to-be-published in English translation of a paper on The Study of Life in the New Physics, points out that the very concepts that we use to describe the world around us, space, time, energy, matter, they’ve all undergone dramatic transformations in the first few decades of the 20th century, and he asks, how will the study of life and humanity advance upon this? And this silly notion of relativity that we see in Russell’s attack on Einstein’s relativity, — that everything’s relative, there is no truth — in part depends upon assuming a world in which creativity can’t exist.

I mean, whether this lightning strike occurred before or after another one, depending on how you’re moving in the universe when you watch them, that doesn’t prove that there’s no causality in the universe. Since you can’t say which came before the other, you don’t know which one caused which, etc., etc., etc. that’s all really irrelevant, when you try to look at the unique type of causality that exists in the human mind. And the ability of people like Kepler, like Planck, like Einstein, like Mendeleyev to develop new concepts, that we then use to transform our relationship and our power over nature, what kind of time does that cause exist in? Is the before and after of a discover just the ticking of a clock? Or is there something else? Is it a different kind of time, altogether, after a discovery is made, than before it was?

Lyndon LaRouche, in his economics discoveries worked out in a very similar time period to the work of Vernadsky, draw upon this ability of human beings to transform our power, as a force of nature, to consider that as the foundation of economic value, the creation of economic wealth, the characteristic of our species, and the basis of what has to be promoted, to create a future, to create a better future in the economic and in other senses.

So, although it might seem distant, and this was not a comprehensive coverage here, — we will be having more, what Hilbert did in 1900, what Russell did in collaboration with him, was the same thing that Aristotle’s groupings did with Euclid, to say, we will define what it means “to know something,” and if you try to know something by other means, it’ll have to be considered a “morbid taste for eccentricity” in the words of Russell.

So there is an importance in understanding where our concept of what science is comes from, if we’re going to be free from its effects, unconscious usually, upon our thinking. And that’s an essential and powerful aspect of the transformations that we need to create, politically and economically, in the world today.

OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jason. And let me just say before we conclude: The event from New York City tomorrow will be streamed live on the LaRouche PAC website. It’ll be 2 o’clock Eastern Time, so we ask you to join us again, tomorrow afternoon: Both Jason and Jeff will be featured speakers at that event.

So thank you for participating in our webcast tonight, and please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.