Science, Happiness, and the End of Geopolitics

“The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.”

So wrote Lyndon LaRouche on March 30, 1984, in a document entitled “The LaRouche Doctrine: Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.,” which can be read in full in the current issue of EIR. This policy statement of LaRouche’s remains as valid, and urgently required, today as it was when he issued it, nearly 38 years ago. Since then, the governments arrayed around the Belt and Road Initiative—China and Russia, in particular—have been listening to “the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche” and have learned that lesson, if not fully, at least significantly so. It is now urgently required that the United States do the same and finally break free of British geopolitics, as has been President Trump’s instinct all along.

LaRouche continued in that 1984 policy document:

“The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as `developing nations.’ Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modern colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.

“Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers.

“The term, technology, is to be understood in the terms of its original meaning, as supplied by Gottfried Leibniz.”

LaRouche later specified the central role of science and technology in human development:

“Therefore, the general advancement of the productive powers of labor in all sovereign states, most emphatically so-called developing nations, requires global emphasis on: a) increasing globally the percentiles of the labor force employed in scientific research and related functions of research and development: a goal of 5% of the world’s labor force so employed is recommended as a near- to medium-term goal; b) increasing the absolute and relative scales of capital-goods production and also the rate of turnover in capital-goods production; and c) combining these two factors to accelerate technological progress in capital-goods outputs….

“To lend force to this policy, the powers agree to establish new institutions of cooperation between themselves and other nations in development of these new areas of scientific breakthrough for application to exploration of space.”

Today, two options are before Mankind. Over the last 72 hours, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced that the government’s investment in R&D in basic sciences had doubled over the last five years, in accordance with the policy established by the State Council of “strengthening research in basic science to lay out basic principles and major arrangements.” And Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a Feb. 8 meeting of Russia’s Council for Science and Education held in Novosibirsk, stressed the importance of mega-science projects, since “This sort of infrastructure should become the basis for large-scale research programs, and the center of scientific cooperation for the entire Eurasian space.”

Over those same 72 hours, however, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence did everything he could to derail the incipient opening and dialogue between high-level representatives of North and South Korea at the Winter Olympics—but fortunately failed. But if geopolitics does prevail in the West, then Mankind will be on a trajectory towards nuclear self-annihilation.

The central strategic issue is as stated by Helga Zepp- LaRouche at the outset of her Feb. 10 inaugural presentation for the new class series, “What Is the New Paradigm?”

“If you look at the condition of especially the Western world today—the United States itself; the condition of Europe; the German government, which is self-destructing as they are trying to build a new government—you have a situation where very clearly the world is in great disorder. I have made the point that we need a New Paradigm, which must be as different from the present set of assumptions and axioms, as the Middle Ages were different from the modern times, where basically all the assumptions of scholasticism, Aristotelianism, superstition, and similar disorders were replaced with a completely different image of man and a different conception of society.

“This is necessary to guarantee the long-term survivability of the human species. And the question is: Can we give ourselves a system of self-governance which guarantees that the human species will exist for centuries and even millennia to come? This question obviously was one which my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, devoted his entire life’s work to: in other words to detect those aspects of the present system which were erroneous, and how to replace it with a better, more complete system.”

Gottfried Leibniz, whose elaboration of the concept of technology Lyndon LaRouche identified as central to bringing about a durable peace, spoke to the nature of this better system in his brief essay “On Wisdom” (~1700):

“Wisdom is merely the science of happiness, or that science which teaches us to achieve happiness. Happiness is a state of permanent joy…. Nothing serves our happiness better than the illumination of our understanding and the exercise of our will to act always according to our understanding…. Helping each other in the search for truth, the knowledge of nature, the multiplication of human powers, and the advancement of the common good…. For only so much of our life is to be valued as truly living as the good we do in it.”