Friday Webcast · June 26, 2015

TRANSCRIPT

MATTHEW OGDEN:  Good evening; it’s June 26, 2015.  My name is Matthew Ogden, and you’re joining us for our weekly broadcast on larouchepac.com of our Friday night international webcast. I’m joined in the studio tonight by Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review, and by Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science Team.  Megan Beets will be presenting the bulk of our presentation here tonight, on the central theme of what is the true nature of mankind.  Megan will be addressing this from the standpoint of the great figure Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, as well as the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky.  But before we get to Megan’s presentation, I think that you’ll understand that much of what we present about the current existential battle for the future destiny of the human species and the survival of civilization itself hinges very much on what Megan will present here tonight.  Now, many of you probably had a chance — hopefully — to have listened to the discussion that Mr. LaRouche engaged in last night with a broad cross-section of the American people in the 6th of what is an ongoing series of so-called “Fireside Chats”.  This is the 6th consecutive week that Mr. LaRouche has engaged in this discussion, and it continues to engage an ever-broadening section of a very serious core of the American population which is being brought together around Mr. LaRouche’s leadership.

Now very significantly, tomorrow — Saturday — in Manhattan, Mr. LaRouche will engage in a special discussion directly with the people of Manhattan; during an event which will be held there.  Mr. LaRouche will be joining this discussion over video conference; and it will be an opportunity for the people of Manhattan who have been directly engaged in our so-called “Manhattan Project” to engage with a direct dialogue with Mr. LaRouche.  And if you are in that area, I implore you to immediately contact our office in the New York area to make sure you can attend this historic event in person.

So, we are currently in the thick of the showdown over the Greek situation in Europe.  And Mr. LaRouche put a premium on this, as you heard in the beginning of the discussion last night on the national Fireside Chat, and it continues something which he is putting a central feature on; in terms of what is the responsibility that we here in the United States have in that regard.  And I’m going to read a statement that was released by Mr. LaRouche last night, which he put together in a very precise way, which is intended to address directly the ongoing situation which is occurring in Europe over the Greek situation.  So, this is what Mr. LaRouche had to say, and I’m going to read it in full.  Mr. LaRouche said the following:

“LaRouche on the Greek Crisis: The Only Way Out of This Mess”

The European Union is just stalling, economist Lyndon LaRouche said today. That should be said. They’re just stalling. They know what the issues are, and the Greeks have made it clear that the issues are limited, so cut that crap out. Because otherwise, if they’re not going to do that, then just call it off and move the Greeks off into a different department, and they’ll leave Europe. That’s the only way to put it. Say, either you guys get reasonable, and stop trying to stretch out all these things,— the only thing to do is to make a statement.

Say, the problem here, in this discussion, is that some parts of Europe are refusing to admit the fact that their governments, or their representatives, have committed a fraud against the Greek people. And those elements are demanding that they get consideration: that the Greeks have to pay the debt, which a fraud has created. Just simply say that the fraud will not be honored.

You stole the money, for pure speculation, and you’re now demanding to get it all over again. And we’re saying, “No. You’ve stolen more than enough from us already.” That should be the slogan.

The fly in the ointment is, that an honest treatment of the debts which are attributed to the Greeks, would mean that we would be bankrupting major speculative interests in Europe and the United States in particular. Therefore the only way to settle this thing, is not to worry about what the Greeks are doing. The problem that Europe has to worry about, is the fact that the European debts, which are these gambling debts, are not fungible. Therefore, this would mean, for example, cancelling Wall Street, and going back to Glass-Steagall.

We should be saying, “You guys miss the point. Because, what you’re defending, are worthless assets. You’re trying to recommit a fraud, which you had already committed previously. Now, cut it out: what you have to do, is go to a global Glass-Steagall policy. Come along with the United States, and we’ll restore the Glass-Steagall policy in the United States. And we’ll cancel the worthless debts. And you, in Europe, you will cancel your worthless debts, of the same nature. Especially the British.” And that’s the only way to handle this.

The fact is that the only way that this is going to work: the Europeans must eat, what they should eat. Because we know that much of their banking sector is purely speculation. And what they’re demanding, is the protection of their thievery, in effect. The solution is the re-establishment of the Glass-Steagall policy for the relevant regions of the planet, including the U.S.A., and so forth and so on. We’ll all go back to a Glass-Steagall policy.

That’s the only way to get out of this mess, because if you close down the banks in the U.S. which are speculative banks, you do it under U.S. law. And therefore, you have now changed the character of the money system in the United States, in particular, to eliminate this swindle system. You return to Glass-Steagall. Now you use the fact that you went back to Glass-Steagall, to use that as a source of credit. You put that source of credit into the hands of the U.S. government, so it’s now the U.S. government, which is the agency which represents the people of the United States. We recommend that a similar approach be applied to Germany, to France and so forth. In that way, yes, the swindlers lose the money. But the swindlers are swindlers. So what we do, is we take the swindlers’ money away from them, and give it back, respectively, to national banks, that is to governmental banking systems. And we create a new Glass-Steagall policy of international development in a significant part of the trans-Atlantic region. That’s the one thing we must throw on the table.

Now, you just imagine German Finance Minister Schäuble and so forth, all these creeps, pirates and burglars, are out squawking to protect the so-called interest of the pirates and swindlers. Let’s go back to Franklin Roosevelt methods; and Franklin Roosevelt’s method is the model. France needs it. Trying to swindle Greece is not going to help France one bit. What you want to do is have a cleanup of the situation; to clean up the monetarist system. That will not solve all problems, but it will give us a foundation from which to build up solutions. Get some production going. And we shut down this euro speculation system; these guys are all thieves. And the British most of all. So, we don’t need to worry about their benefits; they don’t have any benefits coming to them.

What we need is an economic system, a federal banking system, a national banking system. You need to clean the whole thing up and go back to the U.S. concept of Franklin Roosevelt, of Glass-Steagall. The point is, that it’s the swindler class which is making these demands of Greece. Don’t listen to the swindlers; go back to national economy, and we won’t have such swindlers.

So that was Mr. LaRouche’s statement which was issued and published on the LaRouche PAC website last night.  It’s available to you; and it’s very necessary to circulate this and to follow these marching orders.

Now, I know that Jeff is going to address the current raging battle that is now breaking out inside the United States, around the alliance that John Boehner and Barack Obama have now made over their trade policy from Hell.  Obama is now officially a Republican, and Boehner is officially an Obama-crat.  So Jeff, why don’t you come to the podium and elaborate on this situation a little bit.

JEFFREY STEINBERG:  Thanks, Matt.  I think in plowing a little bit ahead on what happened in Washington over the past week, it’ll become clear why Mr. LaRouche’s call for an international Glass-Steagall, beginning with the re-instatement here in the United States is so critically relevant right now at this very moment.  Look, you had a defeat; we talked about this a week ago, when the overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives defeated President Obama on the issue of the fast track authority.  They did it by voting against the Trade Assistance Authorization, which is a program that normally the Democrats would support all-out, because it provides certain retraining for workers who are going to lose their jobs in a massive way if these free trade deals go through.  But it was a decisive defeat for President Obama and for Boehner.  And what they did was, they came back and they decided to take literally a second bite of the apple.  And so what happened is that President Obama thoroughly abandoned the Democratic Party; simply wrote them off, and cut a rotten deal with Boehner and with Mitch McConnell in the Senate, to essentially re-do the votes.  Now the net effect of this has been that President Obama is now persona non grata; is actually an object of hate and derision by an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House and the Senate. And that goes even more to the case with the overwhelming majority of the American population.  You’ve got on the other side, Boehner carrying out a vindictive and illegal purge of those Republicans who stood with the country, stood with the interests of the United States, stood with the Constitution, and opposed Boehner and Obama in their rotten deal.  And so, you’ve had reports in a number of Washington Capitol Hill publications, that many members of the Republican caucus have been purged from leadership positions; have had committee and subcommittee chairmanships taken away.

We know from our own direct presence on Capitol Hill earlier this week, Wednesday and Thursday, that there were meeting going on between blocs of Republicans, blocs of Democrats, figuring out what to do against what was, in fact, a completely unconstitutional move by Obama and Boehner.  So, in effect, by Obama going clearly over to the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party, really whole hog, he’s created a major eruption of anti-Obama sentiment inside the Democratic Party; and you’ve got a parallel phenomenon inside the Republican Party, which is a revolt against a wholesale tyrannical purge on the part of Boehner.  For some people who we spoke with over the last few days, this is a fundamental violation of our Constitutional system.  What you’re dealing with here now, is a British parliamentary model of party dictatorship, and in this case, a coalition of the most rotten elements of the Democratic Party personified by President Obama, and the most rotten elements of the Republican Party personified by Boehner and McConnell, the House and Senate leaders.

So, what do you do about this?  The free trade bill, if it moves forward now that the President has fast-track authority, is going to be subject to significant scrutiny down the line, if it ever even reaches the point of an agreement being reached.  This week, Doctors Without Borders, a highly respected organization came out with a scathing attack against the treaty; at least insofar as people know something about the draft of the treaty, which is largely from leaks.  And what they concluded is that some of provisions around protection of pharmaceutical companies’ patents, will mean that as many as a half a billion people will be deprived of access to vital medicines, because they will no longer be able to afford them.  So, in effect, the deal itself has a very large element of genocide; the same kind of genocidal policies that we see with the British Monarchy with respect to the whole global warming hoax.  And through people like Schellnhuber, who is a straight-out British agent; that hoax has been inserted in a dominant way inside the latest encyclical by Pope Francis.  It’s an absolute travesty; it’s a call for genocide, and Megan will be addressing that issue later.

But so the question is, what is the appropriate response for members of Congress who are absolutely furious with Obama, and furious with Boehner?  There’s many impotent things that they could come up with; and I can assure you, there are all kinds of recommendations being made for all sorts of impotent and pointless gestures. But there are two things that could be done that would actually address what’s just happened, and begin the process of reversing it.  Number one:  Congress should immediately move for passage of Glass-Steagall.  This will require a revolt against Obama, against the Republican leadership in Congress, and most of all, against Wall Street and the City of London; because that’s where the repeal of Glass-Steagall came from in the first place.  Mr. LaRouche referred to the burglars, the swindlers, the gamblers, who have been dominant over international finance in the trans-Atlantic region; and all of that goes back to the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  So, if Congress is to act effectively, if the new emerging bloc of Democrats and Republicans who repudiate Obama, and repudiate Boehner, were to want to do something effective and potent; then the first step is re-instate Glass-Steagall.  Take the problem on at the appropriate level; not at the level of Obama, not at the level of Boehner, but at the level of London and Wall Street.  Bankrupt them, and tools of London like Obama, like Boehner go down along with it.  But you do something that fundamentally changes the situation and addresses Mr. LaRouche’s call for an international Glass-Steagall starting in the United States.  And if Obama and Boehner try to stand in the way of that, we’ve been saying for a very long time that President Obama should be impeached.  We have the war danger, and now we’ve got the treason that he did in league with Boehner.  He should be removed, and Boehner should go along with him.  But the first immediate step, and Congress should take this up even before the Fourth of July recess, is to immediately re-instate Glass-Steagall.  There is a bill that’s live in the House of Representatives; there was a bill that was live in the Senate during the last Congressional session — it should be re-introduced — and both the House and Senate should pass an identical Glass-Steagall bill and shove it onto President Obama’s desk.

OGDEN:  Now those of you who listened to the discussion last night with Mr. LaRouche, the Fireside Chat, will know that Mr. LaRouche put a major emphasis on the imminent threat of World War III; which is coming from President Obama’s remaining in the office of the President of the United States and the continuation of that policy.  Mr. LaRouche did put a premium on the exchange that occurred last night between himself and one of the interlocutors who is Professor Francis Boyle, who is a professor at the University of Illinois Law School.  So, that’s available for people to go back and review, and review what Mr. LaRouche’s comments were in that regard on that discussion last night.

Along those lines, the institutional question for this week, is as follows; and this was presented to Mr. LaRouche earlier today when we met with him.  And Mr. LaRouche had a somewhat elaborated response to this, which I’m going to invite Jeff to deliver once I read this.  So, the question reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, diplomats from the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, have been in intense discussions with Iranian officials in Vienna, as the end of the month deadline looms.  Critics of the negotiations accuse the administration of giving too much to the Iranians, and adapting an ‘all is fair in love and war’ approach to achieving a deal which will not stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Our question for you is, Mr. LaRouche, do you support the P5+1 negotiations, and what is a fair agreement in your opinion?”  So, Jeff?

STEINBERG:  The simple answer is yes, of course.  Mr. LaRouche supports a legitimate and fair outcome of the P5+1 talks, and I think if you go back to the framework agreement that was reached and signed by all parties and was presented publicly back in April of this year, you’ll see that that framework remains intact, and more technical details are put in place for full implementation and verification, that you can get a very viable and satisfactory agreement, which will be a major step toward de-escalating the horrible conditions that exist throughout the Middle East.  The threat of war in the Middle East is one of several triggers that could bring about the kind of thermonuclear war of extinction that Mr. LaRouche has been warning about for quite some time.

But I think that — you know, we had a more in-depth discussion with Mr. LaRouche that makes it necessary to go back to some of the background.  First of all, Iran as a country, Iran as a people, Iran as a country with a Constitution that is intact and operational, is by and large an obviously somewhat flawed but generally honest factor within the whole politics of the region, and therefore should be treated as such.  Now, if you go back to a bit of the history and what’s brought us to this moment, and of course especially consider the fact that as I say, Iran is a country with a history, with institutions, with an actual Constitution, and hold that up against the model of Saudi Arabia, you get a kind of an appreciation for why Iran should be treated as a legitimate factor in the region.

But go back a ways.  There were a number of factors that have led to the current situation.  You had, of course, back in 1953 a British-led coup d’état; largely it’s attributed to the CIA, but in reality the CIA were secondary players to the British, and in fact the British were blackmailing President Eisenhower; but so you had a coup that was organized from British Intelligence with U.S. Intelligence involvement, the Dulles brothers in particular, to overthrow a legitimately-elected Mosaddegh government in Iran.  The Shah of Iran was installed back in power after the overthrow of Mosaddegh, but the consequences, and the legacy of that coup d’état against Mosaddegh has carried forward right through to the present day. You had some elements of the Iran under the Shah that were progressive and it was the beginning of the period in which Iran began its commitment to pursue the benefits of commercial civilian nuclear power — that commitment still remains intact to this day — and a viable P5+1 deal will allow Iran to go forward with legitimate nuclear energy, while assuring to the satisfaction of all of the parties involved, that there’s not going to be a weapons program.

But so what did you have?  You had the Shah becoming increasingly more and more of a dictatorial, oppressive force. He was basically identified by the British and the U.S. as the policeman of the region.  And so you had a revolt against the Shah.  It was very messy, it was very complicated.  In the initial phases, there were some very dangerous and radical elements that were involved in it.  But as time passed, you had a more moderate element that came in to be the dominant force in Iran.  You had a Constitution and then a second Iranian Constitution.  An updated, more modern Constitution establishing a Presidential system was established in 1989.  But the British were committed to an all-out intervention, to turn the entire Persian Gulf and Middle East region, into a permanent war-zone for purposes of control and manipulation over, among other things, the international flow of oil.

Now, you had three events that occurred in very rapid succession in the late 1970s, that all represented a direct British intervention into the situation in the region, that set off this process of warfare.  As I said, you had an Iranian revolution in February of 1979.  There were many radical elements that were involved in the initial phases, but nevertheless, that was a major development.  The same year, 1979, you had an internal coup d’état within the Ba’athist Party apparatus in Iraq, which resulted in Saddam Hussein coming into power.  Now prior to that Saddam Hussein coup, the leadership of the Iraq Ba’athist Party had been very progressive, and were part of a concert of countries in the region that included Iraq, it included Syria, it included Israel, who were looking toward the prospects of an economic framework and foundation for bringing long-term peace and prosperity to that region.

Mr. LaRouche was an invited guest of the Iraqi government in 1975.  He spent a period of time in Baghdad during celebrations, and had many discussions and meetings about this perspective. Mr. LaRouche proposed a Middle East Peace and Development bill to be introduced into the U.S. Congress, that would have called for the creation of an International Development Bank using some of the petrodollar revenues, and tapping into the resources of the region, including the highly-skilled labor force of Israel, the skilled and semi-skilled labor force of Egypt, and you would have had an economic foundation — very much like some of the core principles we’re seeing today, in the role of the Middle East, the greater Persian Gulf-Middle East-Eastern Mediterranean region in the Chinese-initiated “One Belt, One Road” land-bridge policy.

But, so you had, 1979 Iran revolution; 1979 coup d’état in Iraq, establishing the Saddam Hussein control over the country. Within a year and a half you had a war under way between Iraq and Iran — a British-induced and -manipulated war, that went for eight years, resulted in millions of lives being lost, and created the preconditions for the kind of frictions, Sunni vs. Shi’ite and other things, that we see now dominating the Middle East.

In 1978 a British coup took place in Israel with the election of the Jabotinskyite Likud bloc into power for the first time.  And what this represented was a sweeping-aside of the initial generation of Israeli leaders, many of whom were fleeing the consequences of the Hitler genocide in Europe.  Mr. LaRouche up in Boston in the late 1940s, coming back from World War II worked very closely with some of these pioneers of the original establishment of the State of Israel.

And it was those people who were basically swept aside absolutely in the aftermath of that 1978 Likud election victory, which has fundamentally changed the character of Israel.  Any time there’s been any effort to re-establish that kind of original core-concept of Israel as a nation, as a kind of a healing-ground for the horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust, there have been forces inside Israel, always British-controlled forces, who’ve resorted to the same methods of assassination that the British have used historically, ever since the assassination of Alexander Hamilton, to disrupt the United States every time there was a viable Presidency.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995 was a game-changer for Israel, because it represented a complete, dominant takeover of that country by the same British who’ve been involved in manipulating the Iran-Iraq Wars, and who clearly are the dominant factor.  The alliance between the British Monarchy and the Saudi Monarchy typified by the Al Yamamah deal, has created the conditions where the entire region is a perpetual-war battleground.  And we’re on the cusp of what could become a new Hundred Years War in the Middle East, and within the entire Islamic world.

So, again, yes. A viable P5+1 deal is essential to beginning the process of de-escalating, and going back to some of the core principles that Mr. LaRouche put on the table, back in the mid-1970s, going with a major expansion of peaceful nuclear power in the Middle East region is one critical step.  It’s vital, for example, for solving the water problem which is one of the greatest and most intractable problems for that region.

And so, there are creative solutions that begin with nuclear power, and so this P5+1 deal has to potential to not only bring Iran back into the community of nations fully, but has the potential to be model for how to actually move forward, with the kinds of programs, that are vital to building up the interests of the peoples of all the nations of that region and even beyond.

OGDEN:  Thank you very much, Jeff.

Now, those of you who watched this broadcast last week, all know that Jason Ross, in a fairly elaborated form, demonstrated and exposed the literally Satanic role that Sir Hans Joachim “John” Schellnhuber, Commander of the British Empire, has played in writing large portions of the newest Encyclical on so-called climate change.  The population reduction policy, which Schellnhuber has championed, for years, claiming on the record that the carrying capacity of the planet should be no more than 1 billion people, as Jason documented, this comes directly from Sir Schellnhuber’s masters, the Queen of England and her Royal Consort, Prince “Deadly Virus” Philip of England.  We think that that magnitude of population reduction, which obviously would be a genocide of unfathomable proportions, perhaps earns Schellnhuber the apt nickname of “Sir Schellnhuber Alles.”

However, this principle that is at issue here, runs very deep, going to the very root of, as I mentioned at the very beginning of this broadcast, what is the nature of man?  What is the true identity and role that man, the human species, has been selected to play within creation, within the universe?  And this question lies literally at the root of everything.  It’s a political principle, which has been embodied for millennia, in the age-old struggle between Prometheus and Zeus, and it’s a theological question, of what is the nature of man, what is the identity of the human species, and what makes us different from the beasts?

So I don’t want to say more on this:  I’m going to invite Megan Beets to come to the podium and address this in full.

MEGAN BEETS:  Thank you, Matthew.  Let me start by citing a couple of passages of this Encyclical [Laudato Si’], to give people a sense of the evil that we’re up against.  So, it begins:

“1. …`Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.’

“2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as [having dominion over her], entitled to plunder her at will. … This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail.'”

Later, “we,”  in other words, “we humans” — “We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty [of nature] with something which we have created ourselves.”

And then perhaps even more explicit, and maybe that’s why it’s buried much later in the Encyclical:

“116. Modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism which today, under another guise, continues to stand in the way of shared understanding and of any effort to strengthen social bonds. The time has come to pay renewed attention to reality and the limits it imposes; this in turn is the condition for a more sound and fruitful development of individuals and society. An inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology gave rise to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world. Often, what was handed on was a Promethean vision of mastery over the world, which gave the impression that the protection of nature was something that only the faint-hearted cared about. Instead, our ‘dominion’ over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship.”

Now, I think there’s no ambiguity about what’s being said here, that this is not an idea which stems from the Christian religion, this is an idea which stems from the Satanic notions of Zeus which is embodied today in exactly what Matthew said:  In the British Empire and their tool, Schellnhuber.

But this gets at a much deeper issue in society itself, especially in the trans-Atlantic society which really underlies and is the biggest challenge that we face today. And that is the complete lack of understand within the population at large, of what it means to be human? What is the nature of man?  What is the mission of man, on the planet, within the Solar System, within the universe?  Should we even think about this?  most people go through life nowadays, never even contemplating this, and instead operating on, whether they’re aware of it or not, operating on a fundamentally wrong notion, both about the nature of man, and ironically, about the nature of nature, of the so-called animal kingdom itself.

So, in contrast to that wrong and in the case of what was expressed by Schellnhuber in this encyclical, Satanic idea of human life, I’d like to begin by citing the work of somebody who was an expert, and remains today an expert, on the nature of animal life:  And that is the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who lived from the end of the 19th century and died in 1945.

Now, Vernadsky studied life, but he didn’t study it as a biologist studies life, in its morphological characteristics, the shape, the size, how many legs is has, what the shape of its nose is, the colors, what are its mating patterns — that’s not how Vernadsky studied life.  He studied life from a much more interesting, and much more important viewpoint.  He studied, not a living thing, but he studied the totality of living matter over the geological history of Earth.  And he studied life and living matter in its biogeochemical effect on the planet.

Now what does that mean, “its biogeochemical effect”? Vernadsky studied life form the standpoint of — take a living species, dogs, cats, earthworms; in that species, what is the mean chemical composition of that species, and he noted that the chemical composition of different individuals of the same species across different parts of the world will be more similar than two minerals that you would find in the Earth.

So he studied what’s a species’ mean chemical composition? What is its mean mass?  What is its rate of propagation or its rate of reproduction?  And what is its mean geochemical energy? Now, by geochemical energy, we could think of that as the facility with which an organism can displace the elements in the biosphere surrounding it, through the processes of its metabolism and its reproduction; through the elements that it takes in and ingests into its body through respiration, through eating, how it transforms those elements in its body into unique chemicals which don’t exist in the nonliving world aside from the action of life, and it leaves behind the transformed deposits of these elements.

So he studied the rate of, essentially if you put it all together, what is the rate at which any particular species in the biosphere, changes and transforms the biosphere?

Now, this goes completely against the fantasy which is promoted by people like Prince Philip of the Royal Family of “pristine nature,” which is in a delicate balance and harmony that only humans seem to interrupt. The idea that nature is this unchanging, delicately balanced system — well this is completely untrue. The action of life over the past three or more billion years, proves quite the contrary.  Life has had a powerful transformational effect on the chemistry of the Earth’s crust.

Two important things that Vernadsky concluded about that process of transformation due to life:  Number one, over time, the rate at which living matter as a whole performs this transformation, the rate at which life transforms the chemical world around it, over time, has increased.  So the living system today is having a much more powerful effect in changing nature, at a much higher rate than did the systems of living matter a billion years ago.

Now, the second, related thing that he concluded is about the process of evolution.  He concluded that the process of the evolution of species over time, is governed by the law, that only species which fit into and contribute to increasing the rate of transformation of the Earth’s chemistry, only those species survive and can make it in this transforming system of the biosphere.  Those organisms which do not contribute to increasing the throughput of material and transformation of the Earth, go extinct.

So what does this mean? This means that the biosphere is not a collection of indifferent, interesting animals; it’s not just a collection of curiosities of creatures with randomized characteristics, but the biosphere over time has been going in a definite direction.

Now, what about man?  With the appearance of man and the effect of man on the geochemistry of the planet and on the transformation of the planet, Vernadsky noted that we now have a much more powerful force than anything before that had appeared in the biosphere.  Nothing in the biosphere has had the kind of powerful geological effect that man has.  But, this is not due to anything biological about mankind.

So to put it differently, man as a species has moved more material, created more new minerals and types of materials that didn’t exist before, than any collection of species before, at a much faster rate, and this wasn’t because of his metabolism and reproduction.  This was due to something which man uniquely contributes to the biosphere in any significant way, which is what Vernadsky called “the action of technology.”  The transformational effect on the crust of the Earth, through man’s technology, through his building of structures, through his creation of new materials — you could think of new steel alloys, which never would have existed without the action of man; native iron, native aluminum, these did not exist on the planet before mankind.  So Vernadsky concluded that the natural progression of the biosphere led to a species, mankind, which is a unique and mighty geological force.

Now, how does man do this?  As I said, not through his biology.  Man does not have a remarkable animal — we’re not remarkable as an animal per se.  We do this through the action of mental, creative discovery.  Man discovers new principles through his scientific thought, and it’s the incorporation of the knowledge of new principles of fundamental scientific discoveries, into the behavior of society, the incorporation of new principles in machine-tool design, in economy, in in transportation, in our ability to manipulate the nucleus of the atom, this change in the behavior of man as a species,, by the addition of new, transformational physical principles, this shapes nature in a way which would not have happened without this mental, creative action of mankind.  And by doing this, man is given greater power in and over nature, greater power to exist, with longer  life spans, to support more human beings, each of which is more powerful in his or her effect of transforming the planet and Vernadsky notes this, not only the planet, the Solar System, and eventually the galaxy.

Now, in humans where does this come from?  There’s something unique about the way in which this happens in human beings as opposed to the way that other animal species transform the planet, and that is, that in the human species, uniquely, the action of the individual is very significant.  So I’ll cite a short passage from a paper by Vernadsky, called Problems of Biogeochemistry II:

“From the standpoint of the biosphere, the individual living organism is usually lost from view; in first place comes the aggregate of organisms—living matter. In biogeochemistry, however—in some strictly defined cases—at times it is necessary to pay attention to the discrete organism, to its individuality. It is indispensable to do this in those cases, where the activity of Man appears as a geological factor, as we see happening now, and the individual personality sometimes becomes vividly apparent and is reflected in large-scale phenomena of a planetary character. The human personality changes, accelerates, and causes geological processes of enormous significance, through its presence in the biosphere.”

Now, this is a critical point:  The role of the individual. Now, this point is not just one which was reached as a conclusion in the scientific laboratory by Vernadsky as it was.  This is a crucial point which goes back a couple of centuries to the world of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.  Cusa was born in 1401 and he died in 1464, and he was the father of the Italian Renaissance and the father of the modern form of nation-state.  And Cusa bravely and rigorously developed a concept of human, as opposed to animal life. Cusa asserted a new principle of mankind, which overthrew the thinking of the dark age.

Now, to summarize, and it’s difficult to “summarize” Cusa’s thought, so this is in no way adequate or complete, but to give a sense of it, for our causes, in summary, Cusa said, as humans, we’re not God.  We’re not the creators of the universe, so, we’re not God.  He also said that we can never know God’s, the Creation, in its entirety; we’ll never have a full, final, complete notion and knowledge of the Creation.  But, human beings can contemplate the specific ways in which our knowledge cannot comprehend that infinite Creation.  So human beings can have a notion of the specificity of how our knowledge falls short of the infinite, of the infinite powers of the Creator with respect to specific areas of study, and through that discrepancy, we can gain a notion of the shadow of the Creator.

Only humans do this.  Animals can’t sense what they lack with respect to the Creation; they can’t know what’s the fundamental principle which is not there.  But man doesn’t live an animal life, and that was Cusa’s great idea that he championed against the Aristotelians within society, and specifically within the Catholic Church.  Man doesn’t live an animal life.

Now, animals, and Aristotle, live a life according to the senses.  Aristotle asserted that all knowledge comes via sense-experience, and that, critical as part of that doctrine, is that there can be no contradictories in the objects of sense-perception, from which he says man draws logical conclusions and forms a system of knowledge about the world around him.  So, within that Aristotle said that it is absolutely unallowable for something to be both “A” and “not-A” at the same time.

Now Cusa demonstrated that this is absolutely not true. Knowledge cannot come from the senses.  And he demonstrated that, rather, man is not limited to the domain of sense-experience; man’s mind has the capability of transcending the level of simple reason, simple drawing of relationships between experiences and objects of sense-perception, and man can transcend those contradictories to the level of principle, where the contradictories are no longer contradictory, where they coincide.

Now, that’s not a simple idea and he does that through many different devices.  One device he uses frequently are geometric examples. So, to give one example quickly, he uses the example of a circle and its center.  So a circle is that curve which is everywhere equidistant from a common center.  Therefore, every point of the circumference is opposite the point at the center. Now this is true of every circle, no matter what the size, no matter how small, or large you make the circle, this quality is true:  The center and circumference are opposites and never coincide.  Now, Cusa  asks you to consider what happens when the circle becomes infinitely large?  If it’s infinitely large, and if the radius of the circle, that distance, is infinitely large, where is the center? Where is the circumference?  Both are everywhere, and nowhere, and therefore at the infinite, the center and the circumference must coincide.

Now that concept, and it’s just a little taste; he also gives many examples with angles, with acute and obtuse angles coinciding at the infinite. But that notion of what is the nature of an infinite circle?  What is the characteristic of an infinite circle?  Your mind can have a definite notion of the concept of the infinite, even though, it cannot be represented in any way in sense-perception, in any kind of geometrical diagram.

But the mind did not arrive  at that definite notion by a step-wise progression.  There’s no way to, step-wise, increase the size of the circle until you’re suddenly at the infinite: There’s a leap.  There’s a leap of the mind which must occur.

So that power of man, not of his biology, but of his mind to leap to a higher level of thinking on which principles of organization of the universe  exist, that power of thinking on the higher level is what distinguishes human beings from the Aristotelians and the animals.  And it lays out a very specific and loving relationship of man to the Creator.

Now, this relationship of the world, or of the Creation to God, led Cusa to draw very important conclusions about the physical world, about nature around him, and these conclusions flew in the face of the most basic assumptions then in use in science during that day, particularly in the science of astronomy.  So, for example, Cusa concluded that in the natural world there is no such thing as a “perfect circle.”  There’s no such thing as a circle where every distance from the center is so equal, that it couldn’t be more equal and more perfect.  He drew similar conclusions about the impossibility of uniform motion, perfectly uniform motion.

Now, these ideas which were asserted by Cusa as hypotheses, were proven to be true more than 100 years later by Johannes Kepler, who discovered that the planets did not travel in perfect circles and did not travel with uniform motion.

So these conceptions of Cusa about the power of the mind, about the creative, generating capacity of the mind, where man’s mind can come to know and have ideas of a principle which corresponds so closely with the natural world that man can then exert a new power in that natural world, this is not a religious idea; it’s not just an idea relegated to discussions of man and God. This is an idea fundamentally at the basis of all religion and all science.

And it’s a demonstration that man is not subject to the biological limitations that were cited in the Papal Encyclical, to the limits of nature; man can not only remake himself as a new species, in effect, but man can remake the world around him to cohere with higher principles which would not have existed, but for the creative action of mankind.  And therefore, man is a co-creator, with the Creator, and man is a necessary driver of the development of the planet, of the Solar System, and of the galaxy.  And we are the only species which performs that role.

Now, the fact that a human individual can contribute a true notion, a true insight into the power of mankind, which transforms all of mankind as a species, that’s a true notion of human immortality.  That’s the true basis for discussion and consideration of immortal contributions of mankind.  And that’s inseparable from science.

And I think to conclude, I think that both Vernadsky and Cusa would agree.

OGDEN:  Thank you very much.  Now, just in conclusion I want to remind you, if you haven’t had a chance to listen to the discussion which occurred last night with Mr. LaRouche, by all means do so and circulate it as widely as you can.  If you are in the New York City area, please make sure that you contact our office up there, so that you can be a live participant in this historic dialogue between Mr. LaRouche and the people of Manhattan.  And, mark your calendars for next Thursday, when we are scheduled to have another Fireside Chat, July 2nd, and please recruit others to participate in this dialogue as well.

So with that, I’m going to bring a conclusion to our webcast here this evening.  Thank you very much for joining us.  I want to thank both Jeff Steinberg and Megan Beets, and please stay tuned to www.larouchepac.com.