Re: Hyman's Beef

[Hyman Blumenstock <hystock@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Bruce R. McFarling wrote:
>
>         It is a cute rhetorical trick to agree with a position
> that is different from the one that I took.  What is false
> is this notion that "all" eocnomists are trained to follow
> a "holy writ".  That's not how schools of thought maintain
> their core models in academia, because there are very strong
> incentives to a young academic to find a point on which to
> disagree with the currently accepted position in a field
> in economics.

Hyman says: I presumed that the "core model" is that which is expressed
as early as page ix of the preface of Professor Heinz Kohler's text,
titled "A Note to the Teacher, wherein he states: "....under the main
theme of our discipline, the theme of > overcoming > scarcity."  Of
what, I earnestly ask.  The only scarcity we know today is of Money, and
that is purely imaginary.  Is it common sense?  Or is it venality of the
first order.

That is what I meant as "holy writ," further expressed on page 2 of this
almost 800 page text, at the summation statement of the very first
paragraph, the strangely obfuscating phrase, "Human wants are virtually
infinite."  Am I incorrect on this assumption, especially since another
text book authored by the Wonnacutt brothers, Paul and Ronald says
essentially the same thing, but substitutes the word "insatiable" for
"infinite."  If my criticism is valid even before the main body of the
text, then what of the validity of the entire 800 pages of text that
follows, no matter how each different professor comes up with as many
variations on that theme as there are professors.

>         The mainstream position is *not* maintained in the form
> of a 'holy writ', rather it is constantly *rewritten* with the
> the core models of the mainstream maintained intact.  That is
> the primary requirement for a model to be a viable 'core model'
> is that it retransmits itself intact in the work of academics
> who are constantly rewriting the theory of the school of thought.
>         So, first, I do *not* excuse *those economists who make*
> these excuses.  An academic scholar is responsible for the
> theoretical and empirical positions they take in their research
> activity.  Period.
>         Second, what I was stating was that I have observed the
> criticism *by economists* of *economists who make* these excuses.
> So it *is* possible to differ from the mainstream -- even if there
> is a price to be paid -- and economists actually do differ from
> the mainstream, so it is possible to pursue responsible academic
> research in economics even if you dispute the core models of the
> dominant schools of thought in the discipline.

Are these the same "core models" that I presumed above, that of scarcity
of Food?
>
>         Finally, to ask any academic to *not* criticise the
> arguments of anyone, whether Solow or Marx or LaRouche, is to
> ask them to uncritically accept the position of that individual.
> It's absurd to use criticisms of Marx as evidence that there is
> a holy writ.  First, Marx is not a 'slight deviant' from 'Economics
> 101': Marx's economics was founded in classical economic theory,
> and to the extent that many of the features of neoclassical economics
> are a response to the threat that Marxian analysis might become the
> dominant form of classical economic analysis, the tensions between
> 'Economics 101' and Marxian analysis are real and deeply rooted.
>         Further, what of the example of the Marxian economists who
> criticise the work of Marx while building Marx's arguments into the
> foundation of their economics.  They are not criticising Marx's
> analysis because 'there will be the devil to pay' -- they have
> already paid that particular devil.  Just as Post Keynesian economist
> are examples of economists who pursue lines of research *for which*
> there is 'devil to pay'.  There *is* a price to be paid, but there
> are many who have found the means to pay the price.

I had presumed that Marx had a noble purpose in mind in attempting to
alleviate the misery of the downtrodden. Whether his theme was actually
followed or not, I would think is irrelevant to his theories.  What was
practiced while slandering his name by alleging that he was the suthor
of that same old practice, was the same old "strong get all and the weak
nothing," for which Marx is no condemned.  Is there any evil intent on
his part that I'm apparently unaware of?

>         Regarding LaRouche, I encountered LaRouche as a sophomore,
> and didn't find any reason then to delve any deeper.  AFAIR, it
> was rubbish -- tightly argued cases founded on whatever premises
> and reading of the evidence were required to reach the desired
> conclusion.  That's one of the things that helps sustain dominant
> schools of thought: just because someone thinks there are
> weaknesses in the core models of a dominant school of thought,
> doesn't mean they will approve of *every* dissenting position.
> In fact, the same willingness to dissent from the dominant school
> of thought means that dissenting schools of thought tend to
> include a large proportion of opinionated cusses who are difficult
> to organise into a coherent group  of scholars.

I just took another look at LaRouche on his web page
<http://www.larouchepub.com/> and included an attachment of one of his
speeches, part 2 of 2 parts.  Part 1 is just as riveting to one's
attention, as are all of his statements listed.  As critical as I
believe I've learned to be, I could not find anything to criticize, but
nod in horror at his allegations.  And here am I, a questioner of
everything based upon my upbringing of being a do-gooder, not a liar,
not a cheat, but think well of everyone, respect the erudition of those
called "professor," and humbly fade from sight in vulnerable
embarrassment and humiliation when I discover an error on my part, yet
who cannot find LaRouche anything but a victim himself, as we all are of
an insidious conspiracy against the welfare of the world.  Please take a
look and correct me if I am wrong.

Hyman
>

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<TITLE> Summon the moral and intellectual resources to overcome the crisis
Part I, by Lyndon LaRouche</TITLE></HEAD>
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<H2><B>Summon the moral and intellectual resources to overcome the crisis
</B></H2>
<H4>by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.    </H4>
<H4>July 27, 1997</H4></TD></TR>
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<H3>Part II: The just society</H3>

<P>So, what is a just society? A just society must be based on truth. What is
truth? The discovery of truth, is truth. The educational process by which a
child comes from ignorance, and though good nurture and good education, the
child is able to increase its power to know and master the universe, and <I>knows</I>
that quality in it, by which it achieves that, is good. It's beauty. That's the
sense of true truth and beauty and justice.  </P>
<P>Now, what's a good society? A good society is one in which two things are
immediately satisfied. Number one: Every child has a right to that quality of
education, in so much as the society which exists has the means to provide it,
that is, the knowledge to provide it. Every child is entitled to share the
knowledge which the society has inherited from its predecessors. All children
have the right, all human beings have the right to all human knowledge, in that
sense. And every child has it.  </P>
<P>Now if we educate a child so, and if, living so, making those kinds of
discoveries, and those kinds of improvements, is the normal human expression,
then society must organize itself, to solve its necessary problems, but to
provide each of these children, as they grow up and become adults, with the
opportunity to live that kind of life. To do something useful, in some way or
other, where they are satisfied that they are expressing that quality which
makes them human. They are not imitating an ox; they are not imitating a
jackass, like Prince Philip or something like that; they're doing something
human. And therefore, ought not society be constituted in such a fashion that we
fulfill this?  </P>
<P>Then we have another question, which gets us a little deeper, but it's based
on the same principle. We are all born, and we are all going to die. Now,
therefore, what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of a mortal life? It
has a beginning and an end. Obviously, the meaning is, what it leaves behind,
which is not riches, it's something much more important. What's the differnce
between relations between human beings, and monkeys? Human beings' social
relationship is based on <I>ideas.</I> What is the relationship of a parent to
a child, of a teacher to a child? The social relationship of a teacher to a
child, is ideas. When you learn, for example, what Eratosthenes did, an example
I often use, in estimating the size of the Earth, from inside Egypt, over 2,200
years ago, by just looking up at the Sun and stars. And a child can replicate
that. What is a child doing? A child is establishing a relationship, a personal
relationship with Eratosthenes, not because they're repeating and honoring
Eratosthenes' name, or repeating the results of his measurement, but because the
child, in properly studying this experiment, is reliving it. The child is
reliving the discovery of principle that Eratosthenes made. The child is
reliving the moment <I>inside the mind of Eratosthenes,</I> when Eratosthenes
made that discovery.  </P>
<P>Now, of course we have a problem these days: We don't understand these
things too well. It's because--well, I'll give you an example, it seems to be a
digression, but it's not.                  </P>
<H3>The case of poetry</H3>
<P>Let's take the case of poetry. Let's take the case, to be explicit, of
Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, who should be known to all of us. Now, ask
somebody to recite Shakespeare, just a piece of it. Ask a baby boomer to recite
Shakespeare. It will never work. It's horrible! Baby boomers have no musicality.
A baby boomer, speaks, how? A baby boomer speaks in a monotone, he speaks
regularly. He keeps a fairly narrow dynamic range of utterance. There's not much
inflection. You can't recite Shakespeare that way. Not that it's a matter of
style, it's not a matter of style, it's a matter of <I>content.</I> &quot;To
be, or not to be. That's the question.&quot; You <I>can't do that</I> in narrow
dynamics! You see, the baby boomer never learned to speak. The baby boomer was
taught to <I>recite text.</I> To imitate phrases and recite text, not to speak.
 </P>
<P>I use an example with people, the case of a simple part of Shakespeare, the
prologue chorus to a rather ordinary, relatively ordinary play of Shakespeare's,
in the opening of <I>King Henry V.</I> You can imagine London, the theater in
London, and this actor appears on stage, on a virtually bare stage. No scenery,
no drops, no nothing, just a <I>bare</I> wooden stage in a wooden theater. And
you've got people down here, and you've got people up there in the balcony,
sitting about on three sides, all looking at this stage. And what does this
speaker-chorus do? The chorus says, &quot;We're about to present a play here.
I'm going to ask you to use your imagination. Where you see one man, I want you
see an army. I want you to hear the horses, and hear the beat of their hooves on
the field in battle. I want you to hear the clash of arms of great armies.&quot;
 </P>
<P>That's poetry, that's utterance. It's not to get people to hear your words,
and agree or disagree with your words. The function of poetry is to evoke from
within the mind a <I>cognitive process,</I> and written text is nothing but
shorthand, for uttered speech. You must speak in such a manner that you address
the mind. You're not speaking to a recording device.  </P>
<P>You see the way people punctuate. Read the original Shakespeare, see how
it's punctuated. How is it punctuated? What is the principle of punctuation in
Shakespeare? Is it grammar? <I>No</I>. Never go to a grammarian's funeral! He
was already dead, before he died. The function of punctuation, is to denote, to
the reader of the shorthand, called &quot;text,&quot; some keys to understand
what the spoken utterance was. To assist the reader in re-creating, to hear the
spoken utterance, not to read the text. The minute you have a rule for reading
text, you don't know how to think anymore. You don't know how to hear.  </P>
<P>So, the American population is denied poetry. The American population goes
to school. Now a term that is used to show how we were destroyed--and this is
part of the story--I use a word, the German word, which Schiller used, a term of
derogation, called <I>Brotgelehrte,</I> which I translate into English as
people who sing to earn their supper, not for the benefit of the music. </P>
<P>There's a child in school, who says, &quot;Hey teacher, is this going to
come up on the examination? If not, why do we have to hear this nonsense?&quot;
People who study only to learn how to behave, so as to qualify for employment,
not people who study science to become scientists, but people who become <I>well-paid</I>
scientists, to make a career.  </P>
<P>This was something that happened to baby boomers, because it happened to my
generation, when they were scared, when they came back to Truman instead of
Roosevelt from World War II. And everybody was scared. The wives especially: &quot;Don't
do anything, don't say anything that impairs our family household financial
security, or your job prospects.&quot; And that dominated the country from 1946
through 1952. And then we went from Truman to &quot;Eisenhowever,&quot; and it
wasn't quite certain which way you would go. And then the baby boomers were
raised in these families which had given up the commitment to truth and
morality, in place of political correctness. And nobody wanted to think, or very
few of us wanted to think; we wanted to know what it is we had to be overheard
thinking, overheard saying. And we got away from the beauty of knowledge, the
beauty of education. We no longer taught our children in schools in a Classical
humanist way.  </P>
<P>We should say that we will shove nothing in a child's mind which the child
has not been induced to think, to know. By presenting the child with a problem,
when the child is ready to face the problem, and assisting the child in a class
which is not unduly large, by the interplay in a class, thus evoke from the
members of the class, a reenactment of the mental act of discovery. So that
every couple of sessions of the class, there would be a new discovery, maybe
three sessions, working through that discovery, then discussing it, reviewing it
afterwards. Then going on to the next question, the next discovery.  </P>
<P>A Classical humanist education. You read the ancient Greeks to understand
the Greeks, as they <I>thought,</I> to learn how they thought, to learn how
Homer thought. These aren't stories! Take Homer for example: Why is it important
to have your child study Classical Greek? Well, for example, European
civilization comes from the Classical Greek, so it's a good place to start; you
ought to learn what happened first. In Homer, for example, what do you have? You
have conflicts among men, factions among men who were in conflict. But you also
have gods, they're always there. The gods of Olympus, are always present. And
the gods have conflicts among themselves. And the men take sides with the gods,
and the gods take sides with men. And you have this interplay between the gods
and men. And if you really follow that, particularly the wonderful case of
Ulysses, in the Odyssey, if you follow that, you get an image of the <I>mind</I>
of a person, almost 3,000 years ago, in Greece. Because you can hear what is
occupying their mind. Then you go on to Aeschylus, at a later point, dealing
with the same material. Or Sophocles, dealing with the same material. Then you
see the same problems addressed by Plato, in the Socratic dialogues, the same
problems. And you see the birth of European civilization....  </P>
<P>The child follows another story: How is the Greek mind changing from the
time of the Homeric epics into the time of Plato and thereafter? And what do
these changes have to do with us? What did the Apostle Paul or the Apostle John
see in this? How did that affect us today? Our conception of man, our conception
of nature? The child <I>knows</I>.  </P>
<P>What we came up with in this century, especially in the postwar period--in
my time in school it was already going in that terrible direction, but after the
Second World War it became terrible. We had mass education with less knowledge
and more learning, or even less learning, later. And we got away from the
conception of man in the image of God, and the relationship of the process of
education to the idea of man in the image of God. Something really precious
there.             </P>
<H3>Two million years of history</H3>
<P>We lost historical sense. When I think back, I think 2 million years.
Mankind--2 million years--it's perfectly comprehensible to me, to anyone who
studied these materials. Human history:  Well, what do we know about human
history? As such, we have about 8,000 years, from Central Asia, between 6,000
and 4,000 B.C., is our earliest general knowledge about human society, and how
it was organized. Some of the ideas, because they had some solar astronomical
calendars from that period, which, when reproduced, tells you something about
how they thought.  </P>
<P>We depend upon these people. They lived; we live with their ideas. What we
are able to do today depends upon what people <I>unknown</I> to us discovered,
in these periods before. They're part of my life. And I'm going to die, and they
died. And yet I sense, every time I <I>know</I> something, which I do because
they discovered it, I have a sense of an immediate relationship with these
people! When I study and reproduce an idea which was originally discovered by
someone hundreds of thousands of years ago, I have an immediate relationship
with that person. And I think about them. With my kind of education and
background, my head is very heavily occupied with a large population of people
to whom I'm indebted, whom I know very intimately, because I know intimate
moments from the inside of their minds, when they were doing some of the most
important things that their minds ever did, making these kinds of discoveries,
which is a very important moment in anyone's life, when they make important
discoveries.  </P>
<P>Therefore, I think about the future. I think about the people who are yet
unborn, who I don't know. When I'm dead, and what I think today, will determine
<I>how they live,</I> and things that I think today, that they must know, and I
say, what is this voyage from birth to death, for me? What was the voyage of
those who lived before me, who lived and died before me? The same. What did they
contribute that's lasting? Fortune? Wealth? No, that's not what's important.
What they contributed is <I>the process of ideas,</I> they contributed to a
process which is natural to man in the image of God. And when I relive the ideas
which they produced, I'm reliving the inside of their minds. And they are alive
in me. They're in my head! When you think about anything in science, what do you
think? You think about using a principle, you think about, in your mind, the
person who developed than principle. That's how you know it. You can almost see
the face: Sometimes you know the face and you recall it, and when you're
thinking and sitting in a room alone, thinking and working on some scientific
work, all these faces, all these people, long dead, are with you, present, as if
they were sitting and talking with you in the same room. Because they're in your
mind, through the ideas which they transmitted, which you enjoy today.  </P>
<P>You can re-create, and you say: Everyone has a right to be that kind of
person. Not merely to make discoveries, not merely to be useful, but to think
about what it is to have a <I>life,</I> to go through this mortal span of life
from birth to death, and to <I>live,</I> something, to <I>do</I> something, in
the realm of ideas, which honors those who gave you something from before.
Thousands of years, nameless people, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years
before. To honor them, because they gave you what you can do today. And to be an
honorable person, through your agency, your mortal life, to those unknown who
come after you.             </P>
<H3>The simultaneity of eternity</H3>
<P>In Christian theology, this is called the simultaneity of eternity: to live
and have an identity, as a necessary person, in one's own place and time, in
respect to the simultaneity of God's eternity. That is the basis for the good
society. People who had this view, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century,
coming after this terrible period in the preceding century, the so-called new
Dark Age, conceived what is called the modern nation-state. No longer should 95%
of the population live like cattle in the service of a minority, a lordly
oligarchical minority and their lackeys. No longer should people live like
cattle in herds to be culled and slaughtered at the pleasure of the lordly few.
No longer should people be Yahoos under the domination of the rear-ends of
horses, called Houyhnhnms, or British aristocrats.  </P>
<P>But society must exist in order to provide each and every individual that
opportunity of life, which is consistent with man made in the image of God, to
exert dominion on this planet. To provide universality of education, of this
kind of classical humanist education, in ideas, to establish a personal
relationship, through ideas, with valuable people long dead. To feel the
enrichment of their lives on one's own life. People who are long dead become
personal friends, who you know through the gifts they've helped you to receive.
To become a person who lives so, as those honored dead who gave you so much, and
to be that to coming generations. That every person has the right to be that
kind of person. And to have a society which values every person, for that
reason. Which protects the good that people do, so that when you're dead and
gone, the good that you've done, in educating in transmitting ideas, adding to
the stock of ideas, that society will protect your contribution, to ensure that
future generations can enjoy it. And you can go to your grave in peace, saying,
&quot;I have lived a good life, from beginning to end, and I have an identity
which is untarnished and durable in the simultaneity of eternity.&quot;  </P>
<P>That was the modern nation-state! They took a young man, who was a prince of
a very bad king in France, who was later called Louis XI. And people from the
Renaissance in Italy, reached out to this young man, this Dauphin, and said, &quot;We're
going to make France the first modern nation-state. We're going to train and
educate this young boy, to become that kind of a king.&quot; And so this fellow,
who became king in 1461, and died in 1483--during that period of his life, took
a nation, France, which was not a nation, which was chopped into pieces, and
made it a unified nation. He uplifted people, he established in his kingdom the
first hospital, which still exists today, in Beaune, in France, in the Burgundy
region. He established the first form of a publicly or state-sponsored secondary
school, open to children of all classes. He shifted the power in society away
from the nobility, the financier nobility and the landowners, toward an urban
intelligentsia, which had educated people who had been drawn from all statuses
in life, as young educated persons, to be educated.  </P>
<P>In other words: the birth of a modern nation-state.  </P>
<P>We live in a country, the United States, which was established in that
tradition, through the influence of people like Leibniz, and through leaders
like Benjamin Franklin, who sought to build in this nation, a republic, which
would satisfy precisely the requirements which I've indicated today.
Requirements which are specified in what is supposed to be the fundamental law
of our country, the preamble of our Federal Constitution, in which we are
obligated, not merely to provide certain things for ourselves, living, but we
are obligated to provide these benefits for our posterity: the nameless unknown
who come after us. Who can vote today, has no right to determine law. Law is
eternal. Law is the nature of man, and man's relationship to the universe. That
can not be changed. No legislature, no popular majority has the right to change
that. But we are responsible, to serve that principle and deliver it intact, in
practice, to our posterity. To ensure that this form of society, as Lincoln was
to say later, at Gettysburg, and elsewhere, that this form of society shall not
<I>perish</I> from this Earth, and we shall defend it.  </P>
<P>Now, the problem is this. From the beginning, with the introduction of this
new form of society, of which our nation has been, at times, the leading
expression on this planet, it's our great privilege, and our responsiblity, and
our duty, to serve the best that our nation represents for humanity. This
nation, and this form of society, was never able to run on its own. The
landowning class, or the aristocracy, and the loan sharks, the financier
nobility, never gave up power. So, as we established a better form of society,
and improved life on this planet through the impact of scientific and
technological progress, and new political forms, nonetheless, we did so under
conditions of a kind of <I>standoff</I> with our enemies, the enemies being the
feudal landowners--who were essentially assimilated, generally--and the loan
sharks. Today, Wall Street is a good example of that, the Wall Street mentality.
The financier parasites who sit upon society and suck it of its juices, and who
say, &quot;We have too many people,&quot; or &quot;The poor want too much.&quot;
Or, &quot;We have to protect Wall Street's interests; therefore, people have to
suffer, children have to die, nations have to die, because we think there are
too many people here or there.&quot; In which the principle of goverment is
betrayed.                </P>
<H3>The striped-pants boys</H3>
<P>Now we lived under a condition of nations. And the enemy, the oligarchy is
the proper name for it--we had them in our country. Franklin Roosevelt refered
to them as &quot;State Department striped-pants boys,&quot; and things like
that. The Wall Street crowd was another term for these disreputable specimens. &quot;British&quot;
was also a common term used to describe them, British oligarchs, in my time.
This fancy love and admiration of British oligarchs is a fairly new phenomenon,
among baby boomers and afterward.  </P>
<P>We had a standoff, but they depended upon us, because <I>we</I>, with
modern education, with the machine-tool industry, with scientific and
technological progress, provided the <I>means of national defense,</I> to keep
our nation from being destroyed. So every time these guys would get a war
whomped up someplace, or coming, they would rely upon <I>us,</I> those who
represented this kind of society, scientific and technological progress,
universal education, these sorts of things; they would rely upon us to produce
the means by which to defend the nation. And when the military threat had gone
by, they'd put us back, if they could, into a closet, or suppress us. And Wall
Street would take over once again, and loot us all over again.  </P>
<P>But, then a change came, it came in the middle of the 1960s, and I see
around the room that most of you saw it. In 1962, the missile crisis. People
were running into churches, who didn't know what they were. Anything that looked
like a church, they'd run into it, during those weeks when those ships, Soviet
ships, were speeding toward Cuba. The degree of terror in this country was
beyond belief, especially among young children who were then adolescents, who
did not know what morality was, because their parents hadn't taught it to them,
the schools hadn't taught it to them. <I>They're terrified</I> that tomorrow
morning, or tonight, maybe the nuclear weapons are going to hit and we're all
going to be fried. Thirteen months later, we had a President who was opposed to
some of these deals, who was assassinated. Martin Luther King, later on, was
killed. And the horror of the Vietnam War, on television every night, brutalized
the nation. But at that point, the oligarchs--whom some like to call
oilygarchs--these fellows said, &quot;We have now reached the point, because of
the terror, that has caused the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United
States, to enter into a process called de@aatente, under which they are
gradually going to give up war, except for little wars like Vietnam, or
something like that, where they can kill a lot of people without threatening
much of anything--except people--and we're going to produce world government.
We're going to eliminate the nation-state, and have world government. What we're
going to do is eliminate technology, or cut it down; we're going to take away
education from people; we're going to get them out of science and technology;
and we are going bring society back to what Jonathan Swift saw in England under
King George I. We're going to create a society in which 5% of the population are
lords, ladies, and lackeys, and 95% are Yahoos. We're going to turn the children
into Yahoos.&quot;  </P>
<P>And that's been going on, all over the world, for the past 30 years.  </P>
<P>What happened is, that 30 years ago, when this effort was made, people of my
age, and older, were people who were running the policymaking institution of the
world, including the United States. People who are now deceased, or are now in
their 80s or 90s, were making policy; they were occupying top positions in
government, in universities, in industries, in churches, and so forth. And they
wouldn't accecpt the radical changes that some of these people wanted to make.
So, what did these evil fellows do? They went to the university campuses, and
they introduced the counterculture. And the people who passed the course, that
is the people who flunked humanity, were relied upon to occupy, a generation
later, the top-most positions in government, in business, in education, in the
church, and so forth. So, by getting the very worst people tracked into their
march throught the institutions, in the top-most positions, as my generation and
the older generation died out, or became retired, the younger people moved in.
</P>
<P>And, who moves in? Generally the college students, or certain sections of
them. And by tracking those who are coming out of this college track, into
dominant positions in government, who had these crazy new ideas about a
post-industrial utopia, about eliminating technology, stopping scientific
progress, and creating a perfect society, with 95% of pleasure-seeking Yahoos,
almost incapable of human speech, as Jonathan Swift saw in his imaginary
Houyhnhnms, land of the Houyhnhnms, or George's England.  </P>
<P>Now, what does this mean? The ability to sustain a population of over 5
billion people on this planet, depends not only on modern technology, but on
improving it. We could sustain up to 25 billion people on this planet, with no
great problem. The technology that we possessed, on this planet, at the end of
the 1960s, <I>if fully developed and marshalled,</I> could sustain every person
on this planet, with a population of 25 billion people, with an income
comparable to the average income of the middle class in the United States in the
1960s. With no pollution--with less pollution.             </P>
<H3>If you take away technology</H3>
<P>So, we could do that. But what happens if you take away technology? What if
you go back into a paradise, an ecologists' paradise? The ability of this planet
to support the existing level of population collapses. What kind of a population
could we maintain on the basis of the kinds of political institutions which
existed in the Fourteenth and early Fifteenth Centuries, when the modern
nation-state was born? The total human population of this planet reached the
level of a couple hundred million, at about the time of the Roman Empire.
Largely as a result of the effect of Greek civilization, and some things in
China and India, in improvements of human conditions. The level of the human
population of this planet did not reach above a few hundred million persons
until the Fifteenth Century. The entire growth of the increase of population on
this planet, the increase of life expectancy, the improvement of the demographic
characteristics of family households, which has occurred in every part of this
planet, is a result of the revolution in political institutions, and scientific
progress, which has occurred through the European revolution that created the
nation-state.  </P>
<P>If you take that away, it's like taking out the foundations from under a
building. And very rapidly, the population of this planet will collapse back
toward several hundred million people. And that is what you're seeing happening
in Africa today. First of all, you take away the right to progress; the next
step, is you take away the nation-state itself, you take away the
responsibility.  </P>
<P>How did they destroy Zaire? First of all, IMF, the International Monetary
Fund, ordered Mobutu to begin destroying his own country. Zaire ceased to be a
nation-state, and began to disintegrate. Then, they decided to destroy it
utterly, which they've now done. Then carve it up, so that the choice parts, the
mineral parts, and so forth, are taken over by private companies associated with
the British Commonwealth. The national borders of the nation-states of Africa
disappear. Whole parts of Africa are turned into no man's land. Only a few parts
survive, where the precious assets are that somebody wants to hold; hold this
area, with the aid of the Crown Agents to supervise it, and mercenary armies to
defend the territory. In the rest of Africa, the effect is then what? It is the
logic of famine and epidemic disease. If you have, like this ebola virus, and
other things like that, if you have killer epidemic viruses which hit
populations in reduced circumstances, for which these populations have no
built-in immune factors, acquired immune factors, the rate of death is terrible.
You can not find enough people to bury the people that have died. And that is
what threatens Africa.  </P>
<P>The same process is now under way in large parts of the Americas, in Central
and South America.  </P>
<P>So, what we're seeing, as I said earlier, is we've reached the point of a
civilization, like biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, which is manifesting a loss of
the moral fitness to survive, has repudiated the principles upon which modern
civilization's achievements--mixed as they are, tainted and contaminated as they
have been--have all depended. Obviously, we're dealing not with a mere financial
and economic crisis, although that economic crisis and financial crisis is
beyond anything that any of you have ever known, in this century, on this
planet. And it's coming now; it's not something that's forecast, it's <I>happening</I>
now. But there's something much deeper. The financial and economic crisis, is a
reflection of a much deeper moral crisis.  </P>
<P>Is that a totally pessimistic message? No, it's not. Let's go back in
history. Go back to the Fifteenth Century. Go back to the time of the Golden
Renaissance. Who made the Renaissance? Of all the population which existed at
that time, only a tiny minority made the Renaissance. In every great event that
happened in every country, it was always a tiny minority, whose leadership <I>in
the domain of ideas,</I> brought about those revolutions which solved the
problems and provided a blessing to humanity. It is the same today. The problem
with us, as a nation, is that we have grown too accustomed to tolerating things
we should not have tolerated.  </P>
<P>For example, a typical thing is, you talk with somebody on the phone about
the stock market. You say, &quot;Well, you should get out of mutual funds. I
can't tell you what date the market is going to collapse, but this thing is
going, and if you're in mutual funds, you're in the worst place of all. You
could be totally wiped out. You could not only lose your money, you could find
yourself with a debt that you didn't think you could have.&quot; But they say, &quot;I
need the money, I need that extra margin of income. I need it!&quot; You talk to
them about the stock market. You tell them, &quot;Look, a 20 to 30% collapse is
what you've got to prediscount. When? Could be August, could be October, could
be later. But, it's going to happen, and you don't want to be there when it
happens.&quot; &quot;Tell me what date it's going to happen, so I'll pull out
the day before.&quot; Eh? That's what you get.  </P>
<P>So what people do, is they go through life saying, &quot;Well, maybe it
could happen.&quot; Or, they say something else which is even sillier; they say,
&quot;<I>They</I> would never let that happen to my money.&quot; Who's they?
The guys that are going bankrupt?      </P>
<H3>We can solve the problems that confront us</H3>
<P>So, there's a tendency in humanity to postpone facing reality. It's only
when people recognize that what they're doing ain't going to work, that they are
actually forced to sit down and think it through, and think what <I>must we do</I>
to solve this problem.  </P>
<P>We have solved, in humanity's history, we've solved problems which are as
dangerous as this before. We can do it again. We just have to find the will to
face up to doing that.  </P>
<P>For example, I remember I was in New York City, on the famous day, Dec. 7,
1941. I was in here on business, and I had an appointment, which had to do with
employment, employment prospects, which happened to be on a Sunday, because it
involved a company which was recruiting here in New York City. So, I was going
to that appointment. I was up on Sunday morning, and I walked down to the hotel
where we were going to meet the people with whom we were going to have this
discussion about this employment prospect. I walked into the lobby, and there
was something very funny about that lobby. A lot of people there, sitting,
stunned. And then I heard the voice of the President, President Roosevelt. And I
saw, in those few moments, I saw a people that I knew, the American people, as
exemplified by those in New York, and what happened elsewhere: There was an
immediate, instant transformation throughout this country, in a matter of less
than a couple of hours, as attitudes of the most fundamental sort, from coast to
coast, were changed. What people were doing, was they were running around trying
to find recruiting stations, military recruiting stations, and things like that.
But the reactions were sudden, and fundamental, and sweeping.  </P>
<P>In times like these, that's the kind of thing you expect. And we're getting
to the time, where the hope is, that we will be frightened enough, without being
terrorized, into recognizing that we have to change. The things we've put up,
which are destroying us, which are making us morally unfit to survive, are
things with which we have to deal.  </P>
<P>Then you look at this nation. Look at this nation: Look again, just at its
history. This nation was a great success, as of 1783. It wasn't yet perfected,
it took until 1789 before we could get a decent form of government, with the
inauguration of George Washington. But at the same time, a terrible thing
happened in France. Because this nation's existence was actually dependent upon
the power of France. In 1789, France collapsed, and came very rapidly under the
dictatorship of our deadly enemies, the Duke of Orleans, and Robespierre's
Jacobins, Robespierre's  faction of the Jacobins. In the years that followed,
between 1789 and 1814, we had <I>no friends, but only enemies</I> throughout
the nations of Europe, and the world. None! The nations of Europe in 1814 came
under the control of the Holy Alliance, better called the Unholy Alliance, every
member of which was dedicated to the destruction of the United States. We
consisted, in this nation, of a few million people, scattered on the Atlantic
shores and the Caribbean shores. That's what we were. Against almost the
entirety of the world.  </P>
<P>And that continued until almost the 1850s, when the United States got its
first ally, after 1814; when the French and the British ganged up on Russia, a
young tsar, Tsar Alexander II, allied himself with the United States, or the
patriots of the United States. And when the Civil War, which was organized by
the Briish, broke out, which was the result of the corruption in our country,
Tsar Alexander II saved the United States, because he did two things: First of
all. he sent a message to London and France, and told the French, and the
British, and the Spanish, that if they dared to interfere on the side of the
Confederacy, against the United States, that Russia would launch war against
them throughout Europe. Secondly, Tsar Alexander II sent the Russian Navy, which
had been built with the help of American patriots after the Crimean War, he sent
the fleet to New York harbor, out here, and to San Francisco, with sealed orders
to make war against the Confederacy, the British, and French, should they act in
any way to interfere against the United States.  </P>
<P>We emerged from that. From Lincoln's adminstration through 1876, the United
States emerged as the most powerful economy on this planet, the technologically
most advanced. The advancement of the German economy came as a direct result of
German collaboration with the United States, in doing in Germany what had been
done already in the United States. <I>We</I> created Japan in that period;
Japan was nothing but a bunch of islands under feudalism. It was the United
States that made Japan a modern nation, directly, and an ally. It was the United
States that created movement for the freedom of China. <I>We created Sun
Yat-sen</I>, and backed him, for the independence of China.  </P>
<P>So this nation, beleagured on a planet for many decades, torn by evil within
it, in terms of the Confederacy and what that represented, by the evil that was
and still is Wall Street--we, in our time as a nation, have done great things.
The nation-state which was created in the Fifteenth Century, was created by a
handful of people. These achievements we have at our disposal, these lessons.
And anyone who understands these lessons of the achievements of civilization,
from the distant past, but especially from modern times, knows that, as we
understood from Dec. 7, 1941 in this country, we can do whatever is necessary to
solve the problem.  </P>
<P>And I saw in that period, I saw a gray-faced people, who hadn't had decent
work, but had formerly had some skill, throughout the Depression, I saw them
stumbling into shops that were junk shops, and I saw, after a year or so of this
process, that these people, who had virtually lost skills, had been gray-faced
in their mental life and appearance, were producing production miracles. And
that these plants, which were junk heaps, were the places where these miracles
were being created. The United States began turning out machine tools, and the
U.S. government began sticking machine tools of an advanced type in every nook
and cranny. In Brooklyn, for example, here, in New York City. And from the
wastelands of Brooklyn, industries sprung up, new industries, revitalized. Which
is part of the process of creating the power by which this nation addressed this
problem in World War II.  </P>
<P>We can do it again. But we have to recognize the principles. We have to
rethink, reflect upon those things that once made us great, or made us a nation
of promise. Reflect upon the lessons that we should have learned from human
history, and reflect, above all, what is valuable in life. Because once you
understand, that what is important about your life, from its beginning to its
end, is finding and realizing a permanent identity of which you need not be
ashamed, in the simultaneity of eternity, then you have unlimited courage, and
unlimited moral strength, and <I>you can do anything.</I> This is the time when
we have to turn in on oursleves, and find the secret wellsprings of moral
strength within ourselves. And inspire others to do likewise.  </P>
<P>Look the evil of this danger fully in the eye. Look at the horror of Africa
today in the eye. Look at the horror in Central and South America in the eye.
Look at the homelessness on our streets, the bankruptcy of our medical system,
the murder that's going on in the name of medical practice under these insurance
companies. Look this in the eye, and say, &quot;We're going to deal with it, and
we have the intellectual resources to summon in ourselves and in others to deal
with it.&quot;  </P>
<P>In times past, a few have provided leadership; in the times present, a few
must provide leadership.  </P>
<P>Thank you.  </P></TD></TR></TABLE>
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