So the problem has been to get away from what has happened essentially since the year 1900, the beginning of the century. This was a return to primitivism! It was actually a force of evil! And don’t kid yourself about this thing: These guys were all evil. Their motives were evil. David Hilbert was not a simple-minded character in Paris in 1900: This guy was an evil guy! He was motivated by evil! He produced garbage, which is what evil generally does.
Ross: It’s sort of unavoidable.
LaRouche: Yes, it is. But the point is, we’re still stuck with people who think in terms of a Euclidean system, and Euclideans are stupid, they’re inherently stupid. They’re chronically stupid.

Gauss and Riemann

Ross: Right. You know, the fight in science, in reality it’s a fight against this oligarchical concept; it’s a fight against the axioms that are wrong, that prevent you from seeing things that are true. But there are contemporary people who try to say that they are scientists and talk about what science is: They present it as though the only polemic they have to make is against some fundamentalist evangelical, who believes that the Bible is a textbook,—so they say: “Well, science is about the fact that we use experiments to know what’s true, and not just assumptions.”
Well, that’s kind of obvious, but where do you develop the new ideas? How do you break through axioms that blind you to things? And that is the real key to science. But if you look at what happened in 1900, with Hilbert’s proposal and then Russell taking it up with relish, and saying that we are going to systematize thinking,—creativity became not breaking apart the underlying axioms; it became finding an unexpected, but deducible theorem. Creativity became finding a new formula to them. That’s what they turned science into: “Follow the facts, what’s the formula?”
LaRouche: Well, you have two things, you have first of all,—it was Cusa who actually gave us Leibniz. And it was through that process that this happened. So you had a definition of science with the work of Cusa, and then what Kepler proved, with the nature of physical space and time, eliminated all linear conceptions of the organization of space and time. Now, Leibniz thus represented the most typical of this kind of questioning insight, based on this understanding, exploration of this understanding, which became modern science.
But then we went to another phase, and the new phase actually came at the beginning of the next century, essentially. And then you had this evolution in process, a great tumultuous evolution, which came especially with Gauss. And then Gauss gives you, as a result, directly: the real heir of Gauss is Riemann.
I mean, the visual connection of these two is wonderful: Here’s Riemann, who’s a real student of the work of Gauss, actually. And Gauss is sitting, aged, in his last years of life, and he’s sitting there, without reported facial expression, but sitting there, and here is his student saying everything, telling all the secrets of Gauss in his great Habilitation Dissertation,—especially the initial critique which defines that, rips everything apart! He rips them all apart, just simply, in about three paragraphs; he tears everything apart—with one statement.
You can imagine what Gauss’s reaction is.
Then you get this final paragraph, which horrifies all these people: “And now, we must leave the department of mathematics, for physics. . .” [laughs] And that! That’s the declaration which is Gauss’s secret all this time! Not to explain to people how he had done things, but give them a finished example of how it works. All his work, like on the question of the organization of physical space, and so forth—he’s hiding things! All the time, he’s ducking. He says, well, I will give you an explanation of how this worked.

The Reversal in 1900

Ross: He’s hiding his mind. And that’s—like Riemann. One way you could look at it, is he’s saying, the mind is real, the mind exists.
LaRouche: Well, then you could go through a whole group of people, from the end of that century into the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and you find a real florescence of creativity, coming in various parts of Europe and elsewhere, and also in the United States to some degree. An idea of space and time, and man’s relationship in space and time,—what you get especially with Hamilton.
And most people today are incapable of understanding Hamilton. Which, of course, I’m making a big issue of. If you don’t understand Hamilton’s work, you’re an idiot. If you think you know what the Constitution of the United States is, you’re an idiot, and you don’t know what it’s all about anyway. Franklin understood it; he understood it in his way.
So this is the issue. So, we’re stuck with people whose work is to make them stupid, which is what our school systems do. They make people stupid: By teaching Euclid. If you teach Euclid as a basis of education, going from primary into secondary school education, you are going to destroy the intellectual capabilities of nearly all of those students. I know: I went through it.
The Greek mathematician Euclid, who worked in the Egyptian Emperor Ptolemy’s Alexandria court circa 300 B.C.
I didn’t even know what Euclid was at that point, but I knew it was wrong. So I just said what it was. And you should have seen the howling and screaming that went on from that point, for three years! About me, about this issue and similar issues. The point is, they were all brainwashed. The whole school—it was considered a very good school, just north of Boston. You had two secondary schools which were notable at that point. One was the so-called classical school, and the other was the engineering school and so forth. And you had people in there who really had some ability to think. But they were polluted on this question of geometry.
Ross: It was like a monopoly: It’s hard to think about physical geometry without thinking of—“Oh, you mean, Euclid?” “No—constructive geometry doesn’t equal Euclid.”
LaRouche: Well, that’s the whole point. And so the point is, we still have the problem that most people today, most university professors for example, in sciences, are crippled. I had the biggest problem with the Fusion Energy Foundation. We had one real genius in there, who was the leader of the whole operation; a real genius.
Ross: Yes, Robert Moon.
LaRouche: Yes. But the others were secondary: They all had talents, developed talents, which they had acquired in the university, but unfortunately they had also been through a secondary school education, and the secondary school education had destroyed their ability to go higher. They would be able, by working with experimental approaches, to conduct specific kinds of experiments which would work, and they would make new discoveries of specific kinds of experiments which could work.
But their idea of the progress of science was entirely based on mathematics. And you saw this particularly in my age, you can imagine what has happened from 1900, from the beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Twentieth Century was the degeneration. Everything from Cusa and so forth up, was in a direction of progress. It was a fight for progress. And the fight for progress continued.
But with the 1900, with this change, and especially what happened after the end of World War I, where the German community was destroyed, and where this was done explicitly. Since that time there has been a degeneration in the educational system of universities and schools. And that’s the big problem I have politically: I have people, very bright people out there, some of them. But! they all are soft on Bertrand Russell. And Bertrand Russell is the equivalent of the incarnate virtue of Satan.
Beets: Well, you’ve pointed out many times in your fights within the Fusion Energy Foundation, that it always came up around the issue of Kepler versus Newton, and that you got these very insightful scientists who would go into fits of insanity over the idea that Newton was the real scientist, whereas Kepler did something or other, and now we have these formulas called Kepler’s laws.
But in effect, what Kepler did was revolutionize science, the same way you’re referring to Riemann. Where Riemann said, “Now we leave the domain of mathematics for physics,” Kepler had done that: Kepler had taken the discoveries on the basis that was put down by especially Cusa, and he had put that into practice and proven that there is no such thing as a validity of a mathematical or a geometrical language. It’s physical: And what has access to the physical is the human mind.

Our Incompetent Scientists

LaRouche: The most important figure after that, is actually Leibniz. Leibniz was the one who made the real breakthrough in defining what the bullshit was. And therefore, the attack on Leibniz—you know, you have also this spectacle: Leibniz is not yet dead, and they’re waiting for his death before they dare go ahead into the next step—and that’s what happened. That’s what happened to science! They’re waiting for Leibniz to die, because he was the genius who had made what Kepler had done understandable. And made it a principle.
And therefore, the educational system from that point on, from the Eighteenth Century on, the educational system was degenerating. And the minds of people were degenerating. They could make progress in specific qualified areas, but they were still using mathematics! And the one thing that you would learn from the Renaissance, was that mathematics is not the principle on which physics is based!


Isaac Newton (1643-1727) shown in a panic, as his writings on alchemy are burning in 1693. Legend has it “the dog did it.”
Ross: Ironically, a lot of people will say that Newton is the beginning of physics.
LaRouche: He was the death of it!
Ross: Right, yeah.
Beets: And Leibniz showed very efficiently in his correspondence with Newton’s proxy, Dr. Samuel Clarke, that the belief in fixed mathematics and the belief that space and time are linear and empty,—which is the mathematical description,—he ends up showing that that’s Satanic. That the root of that is actually Satanism, which is exactly what is reincarnated in Bertrand Russell.
LaRouche: Exactly. And Bertrand Russell was very aware of that. That that’s what it is, and that’s what we’re dealing with today. That’s what our whole organization is dealing with, essentially, to the extent it functions at all: You’re fighting against these fixed standards, where people who came out of colleges and so forth,—they may have been bright, and so forth, but they still had this attachment to what they had been trained to believe, and tried to explain everything in terms of what they had been trained to believe. And the minute they would click on that, “Well, this is what we had been trained to believe,” this becomes the affirmation for them of what is truthfulness!
And that’s one of our biggest problems we have with our best, leading people, politically. They’re not competent! Because they have, underneath them, they have assumptions, presumptions which are false. And it’s like belief in Satan; you know, no matter how smart you are, you still believe in Satan, and therefore, there’s something wrong with you.
Ross: Yes. I feel as if I know what you’re getting at. For me, it’s really resonating with the concept of the ontological versus the methodological transfinite in your economics book, So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics? Because there, you had contrasted those who would still accept that there is something transfinite, or transcendental about the mind, as a method, that there are people who might say, “Yes, the mind does something that’s inexplicable. But the things that it discovers should be deducible from the axioms.” Versus, the true—what you called in that book the ontological transfinite,—where the way the mind works is itself reflecting something about how the universe works: that there is a coherence between them; that the mind itself is a part of nature.
And there’s this bizarre idea that it shouldn’t be. You know, that’s what Gauss had to do. He had the way he thought, he had his mind, he had the way his creativity worked. But then he presented things as though he hadn’t found them that way. So it can be kind of irritating to read his work, because you know he’s not telling you how he came up with something!
LaRouche: If you look at his earlier mathematical works, you see it.
Ross: Yeah! In his proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, then he has a lot of raucous fun; he’s polemical, he’s attacking people, he does it very explicitly—well, almost explicitly,—tell you how he’s thinking.
LaRouche: Until he gets to a certain point, and then he’s told, “Take it easy, buddy.” And thereafter, he would not explain his experimental discoveries. He would describe them. And then Riemann changed that! Riemann, with the Habilitation Dissertation, just destroyed this whole thing! It’s there. You can go through it, read that; it’s the most up-to-date thing you can imagine today when you’re getting into a classroom. You bring Riemann into a classroom, a mathematics, physics classroom, academic level, even postgraduate level—you get a real freakout!
Ross: They say, “Go to the physics department, get outta here. You’re spoiling our fun.” [laughter] LaRouche: Well, the point is, “We don’t believe in shitting on our food.”

Russell’s Evil Doctrine

Ross: Their idea of fun is maybe not the best.
LaRouche: It’s essentially that!
Beets: What you’re bringing up,—this is the crucial issue we face today, because this is an oligarchical prison cell that people are willfully putting themselves in. And by clinging to the idea that the human mind does not actually have a consequence in the physical universe, that all we know and all we do is a derivative of mathematics and deduction and experience, we’re submitting to what is an oligarchical system, an extinction system. Because if we don’t break out of that, and if we don’t return to a truly human policy structure, which is these breakthroughs in principle of human mind, implemented in a physical economic system which has been best embodied by the American System of economics,—we are facing extinction.
LaRouche: And the phenomenon is, we’re dealing with a population whose standard of veracity is clinically insane. Because they believe in things that are not true. They’re living in a fantasy world, where there’s no understanding whatsoever of the truth of things—because they don’t want to be ostracized! And the principle of ostracism is the key instrument of making people stupid. Tell them, “Don’t do that, you’ll be ostracized! Nobody will talk to you; if you start talking like that, people are going to wonder if something is wrong with you.”
You say, “No, there’s nothing wrong with me,—there’s a lot wrong with you. But maybe your case is hopeless. Is that possible?” It’s the only way you can respond to them. “I mean, you may believe that, but maybe it’s just because you’re insane. Or, maybe just stupid.”
They don’t like that—I don’t know why. Giving them valid information on which their future existence may depend! But they don’t like it. . . too bad!
So what you do, is you work in the process of history which creates points of contradiction. And you exploit the contradictory evidence to shatter the evil presumptions. You’re seeing that now. You’re on the edge of exactly that: that what’s happening from Asia, which relative to the trans-Atlantic region, is predominantly sane. It may be imperfect, highly imperfect, but it’s different!
Asia is progressing, and in the trans-Atlantic region, you have a disease called the green disease. And the green disease is pure evil! And people who believe in it will behave like evil people: They will attack viciously those who do not accept the green philosophy. But every green person is an idiot! Every person who’s green should be thrown out of any department of science, in secondary schools and also higher. . . they’re intrinsically incompetent, they are fraudulent. Their premises are wrong, have no correspondence to reality. They believe in mathematics, and mathematics has inherently no truth to it.
They believe in language in the ordinary sense, and there’s no truth in language in an ordinary sense, just as Riemann says in his final paragraph of his Habilitation Dissertation: We must now leave the department of mathematics, for physics.
And that’s exactly what the reaction, was against in the famous events in Paris in 1900. That’s exactly what Hilbert was doing: he was setting up a counterposition to science—in mathematics! And then you had this evil Russell, who went out as a real fanatic, to spread this doctrine of evil. It was based on the British Empire, the power of the British Empire to enforce it. And World War II and the things that led into it were actually this process of destruction of the human mind.
And the transition from the process of—well, it actually comes from Bismarck, Bismarck’s [1890] ouster was the turning point. And you have this whole series of wars and so forth which were breaking out at that point, because they recognized that the victory of Abraham Lincoln, who they assassinated as a result, had been an affirmation of the American Revolution. So he was assassinated! Just the same way that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, that his brother was assassinated. The assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan was part of the same series as the assassination of Kennedy and his brother.

Coming Breakthroughs in Science

And Reagan was a little bit tough physically; because of his whole background, he was a very physical guy. So he survived the assassination attack against him. But he was crippled and pretty much put out of action for a while in recovering from that assassination attack, and the Bushes moved in.
So what happens is, that Reagan actually comes in as the escape from the Democratic Party’s stupidity of the whole thing,—the stupidity that occurred in the entirety of the 1970s. It was an era of stupidity.
And the attempted assassination of him, which didn’t work out as an assassination, but it was surely an assassination attack,—was to bring in the Bushes! If he had died, there would have been a Bush Administration all the way through! And we would have had the Bush problem then, already. Which we have now with what was done against Bill Clinton. And Bill was not prepared to deal with the shock that they were throwing at him. That was his weakness. He had also a Vice President who was better at vice than anything else. And that was not helpful.
So that’s where we are! We’re in a point where there are certain standards which we can know, and which you can find by tracing the history of science and history of culture the same way. You can find a track which is consistent. And you find out early, with what happened with Vernadsky’s work,—how Vernadsky has made another breakthrough—he’s dead now, but he’s made a breakthrough which is a new conception of mankind in the universe.
Because for the first time, human life—not life as such, but human life, becomes a standard of understanding of the whole Solar System and beyond. Because it’s man in the Solar System, which is now the standard of truth, of relative truth. It’s the best we can do right now, so far. And that’s why the space issue is so urgently important. We have to get beyond what Vernadsky actually achieved in the transition to the concept of life as primary, human life as primary. And that’s what was happening at the turn of the Twentieth Century! And that’s what they tried to head off!
And that’s what the fight is now. That’s what our fight is. We have now entered into a new space of history. We’re now going into space; that is, we have to go into space, we have no way of escaping that responsibility. Which means we have to redefine everything we think in terms of just everything that’s happening on Earth. It’s not just happening on Earth! The threats to mankind’s existence immediately beyond Earth, or affecting Earth from beyond, are the real issues. And the point is to understand mankind and understand what the human mind actually represents, from the standpoint of looking into the future, looking into—the idea, are we going to Mars? We’re stupid!

Man in the Solar System: A hazard avoidance camera on the rover Curiosity in one of its maneuvers over Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltec

Obviously, you can’t live on Mars! No one yet has the capability to actually live on Mars. Or to live on asteroids. Human beings don’t have that capability. A very short time, with highly specialized preconditions and followup, and then their life is at risk also, because of the effects of the little bit of strain they have. But we can put machines out there. We can put processes in action out there; we can control them from Earth; we can set up institutions that function, controlled from Earth, in nearby space, on the Moon, and beyond.
Mankind then begins to control nearby space. And that’s what we must, among other things, do! Because we’re going to have to change the condition of Earth; we’re going to see what we can do about influencing the Sun. These are the kinds of things which are the future.
And you have minds like those of the Renaissance, those minds, and the Renaissance tradition that came out of that, until it was crushed! That’s the reality. It’s the only thing worth studying.
Beets: And it’s the fulfillment of what Kepler did. Kepler subsumed the observed bodies of the planets out there into a single Solar System, under the principle of mind. And we have to fulfill that by subsuming the Solar System by the principle of the human mind.
LaRouche: Exactly! Precisely! This is precisely it! And people have got to get out of their smallness. And these cases,—like these cases of the Renaissance,—are a crucial point in the history of mankind. And it remains still the crucial issue for mankind, to understand what that principle is. It’s the most important thing we can do.
Because this system is not going to work! It can not work. It is inherently a failure; there’s no way you can civilize it; you have to change it for something better.

Ross: Into a different, totally new idea of the future. The Renaissance proved for sure that we can go way beyond what we had done in the past. That venerating antiquity was not the way to go. The future could go far beyond that, and the same thing today. You have to have a vision of the future that goes far beyond where we are today.
LaRouche: And not to recognize the fallacies of sense-perception, and to understand them: that’s where our problem lies. Because when you get into the Renaissance, you get a turning point in all of human history. It’s a precious turning point which is specific to that particular century. And what comes with Kepler’s discovery, when Kepler defines the principle of the Solar system,—which is an ontological conception, not a formal one,—that conception changes everything! And people who don’t accept that change are inherently stupid, and a threat to civilization. It’s true!
Because it’s like the guy who drives off the cliff, saying, “I have my rights.” Pfff, boom! They’re not so smart, you know.
Beets: I’ve noticed.
LaRouche: That’s why this is so important: to get into the ontological implications of these issues, is what the issue is! Not the effect. Contrary to Die Hauptsache ist der Effekt [“The main thing is the effect”], it is not just effect! Die Hauptsache insists, there is something better. The future is the effect.
Beets: Okay, that’s a good place to leave it for this week.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4250lar_pac_new_paradigm_april_9_2014.html