Lyndon LaRouche Addresses his Youth Movement
Looking for Trouble:
The Will To Change the Universe

Well, I'm glad to see you all arrived here safely. And we hope you'll leave safely, after what I have to tell you.

You know, it's time to get serious. And we have some old fogies—you know what an old fogy is, somebody over 45, and under 62—who are rather pessimistic about life. You know, if they don't get instant rewards. It's sort of a case of a mass commitment to ejaculatio praecox: It's called a Baby Boomer. Instant gratification. And instant frustration.

But they tend to be pessimistic about our situation. And obviously, most of them are draft-dodgers, and therefore, don't know much—like Cheney, Cheney's a draft-dodger. He's 63 years old. He's just one year over the official Baby-Boomer age, and he dodged the draft. His wife got pregnant to help him dodge the draft. He was about to be wh-t-t-!, and she got pregnant. Miracle, she pulled a miracle.

But, the problem with this is, we are not in a situation that requires pessimism. The Baby Boomers tend to be pessimistic, if they don't get [whimpering] “instant gratification.” And therefore, they want, say, [snarling] “Well, you weren't elected President yesterday! Therefore, I'm pessimistic! What're we doing all this for?”

We're now in a situation, you have a presumptive candidate for the Democratic nomination, who is currently a global disaster. And not only is he currently a global disaster, he is perceived as a global disaster, even by those who are protecting his candidacy. So, at this point, it probably is the case, but for what the Democratic Party generally did with respect to me, Cheney would be out, already, a year or so ago; possibly even, we might not have had an Iraq war. Certainly, if the Democratic Party had not excluded me, we would not have an Iraq War. It couldn't have happened. Because, once the debate of the issue—the controversy over the cover-up—had occurred, you couldn't go ahead with the war.

We had a bunch of gutless people, who, in the fall of 2002, capitulated. And if I had been in the picture in the Democratic Party, it wouldn't have happened. They wouldn't have dared. Because some of them were intelligent enough to recognize I was putting a penalty on them all. But, they weren't afraid of me, in the party, because they were fools. I did lay down the grounds for the penalty. But they said, “We can ignore his threat of a penalty, because he's not going to be there, to collect on the penalty.”

Now, you've got a point, that you have a war ideologue, which is insupportable. And you have horrors that are going on there. Now, evidence of the horror became manifest, in terms of some dirty pictures. We understand we have not gotten the full edition, which we were promised by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who will give you some more really ugly pictures. The worst is yet to come, he's promised. And considering the people he works with, I wouldn't doubt that. I would expect it.

But the policy was already there! You didn't need the pictures, to know the policy. You didn't need the pictures, to know that's what was happening in Guantanamo Bay. You didn't need the pictures, to know all these arrests and suspensions and roundups, like roundups after the Reichstag Fire in Germany. Goering set fire to the Reichstag, and they began rounding everybody up they didn't like. Here, in the United States, they began rounding up Muslims—just rounding them up! And holding them, for various periods of time, with no civil rights, under Ashcroft, and similar kinds of things under Bush.

So, we know this was all going on! It was no mystery. But, it went on. It went on, and on, and on, largely because of the Democratic Party leadership, the Democratic National Committee. It went on, because I was excluded from the fight, officially. They thought they had me out of the picture. They didn't feel themselves accountable, to what I was saying about them.

Now, that has changed.

The pictures were simply the trigger, the detonator, on the explosive charge, which was already there. And what has helped to make this that, is, most people who know anything, know about my LaRouche Doctrine. It is influential throughout the Middle East, so-called. It is spreading around the world. Everyone sophisticated in Washington knows it's there. Our military experts know it's right. And so, the pressure's on.

Because, we have two issues: We have the biggest financial crisis in modern history, which most people know about, behind the scenes. They just agreed to pretend, like typical under-62-year-old people, to pretend it isn't there.

“I don't go there! You can talk about depressions. They've come. I will ignore them! They don't exist!” It's like the Pooka, the New Yorker cartoon series of Thurber. The rabbit, the mysterious invisible rabbit. The giant invisible rabbit, the Pooka. [whispering] “The depression isn't there! It doesn't actually exist! Why? [then shouting] Because we refuse to acknowledge it! It won't come, either!”

Why won't it come?

“Because we and the Republicans have agreed, the White House has agreed, it will not come! Until after November. Until after the election. It will not come until after the election!! We have decided!!”

They have told Europeans: “It will not come until after the election. We have fixed it.”

They fixed precisely nothing. It's coming on.

But, under the conditions of the continuation of the Cheney policy, conditions of warfare, it will be impossible to carry out anything resembling an effective defense, against the onrushing financial-economic collapse. It just won't be possible. If you don't have cooperation and trust among nations—.

Let's take one example, a little case in point: Now, in the past week, the price of petroleum, on the London petroleum marketing exchange, which sets the price at the end of the day, at the close of doing business, rose to the vicinity of $40 a barrel. And it has not stopped there. A great part of the world's petroleum supplies, on which we have made ourselves, like fools, excessively dependent by suppressing nuclear development—. If we had done in the United States, what was done in France even, in terms of percentage of power generation and distribution from nuclear power, we would not have the degree of national insecurity we have on power generation and distribution, today.

But now, in this condition, where the game has been rigged, to make the world dependent upon petroleum supplies, as a basic fuel stock, internationally, and in which the Gulf area is the richest producer of petroleum at the lowest price on the planet—what happens if you have a general outbreak, a disruption, tantamount to what's going on in Iraq, in the Gulf region? Iraq is one of the major petroleum producers in the world. It's a key part of the complex, north of the Gulf itself, it's the most important producer of cheap petroleum supplies, because of natural conditions there. If this entire area begins to go up in smoke, can you afford to drive an automobile in the United States?

How many power stations in the United States are dependent upon petroleum? Petroleum-burning, or natural gas? How much of the industry of the United States—look at those trucks, careening along the highways, because we don't have railroads any more, at least in most of the country? What happens to all those trucks? What happens to the physical economic structure of the world, especially Europe and the Americas, under those conditions?

Therefore, as long as you keep Southwest Asia, a strategic part of this planet, in the condition it's in now, with an increasingly explosive condition fostered by the situation of U.S. policy in Iraq, under the conditions of an already-ripe explosion and collapse of the world monetary-financial system, what is the strategic interest of the United States and its people, in carrying out my Doctrine—now?

People say, “What are your chances of being nominated and elected?” I say, “Probably much better than your chances of surviving my not being elected!”

That's the way people have to think about it. You do come, in the course of history, to points of crisis, which have been ripening all along, and which you, maybe like a Baby Boomer, an under-62er, have been pretending you could ignore. And the crisis comes, and you have to make a decision. The decision involves several things. It involves changing what you assume to be unchangeable. You say, “We will never do that! No one will ever accept that! No one will ever do what you say. So what're you talking for? Nobody is ever going to accept what you're going to say!” Suddenly, you come to the point, “Well, in other words, you're saying you don't wish to survive.” You have to change your values, you have to change your way of thinking, or you are not going to survive. That's where we're at.

We are at one of the great points in history, which I've been talking about for a long time—it was coming on; we talked about it. People said, “No, no, no, no! It's not going to happen. We're instant gratification people. If it didn't happen yesterday, it will never happen!” It goes on, and on, and on. And finally, the time comes to pay the bill. “I will never pay that bill! That is, to make the changes in policy, the changes in my way of thinking, which you say I have to make: I will never do that! So, history will just have to accept the fact, that I'm not willing to go along with that. Therefore, you're wrong! Because we will never accept that.”

Take the case of the Peloponnesian War. Athens, which had risen, in the time of Pericles, to a position of an unusual degree of strategic power in the region, as being the head of a coalition, which had, at least on the maritime side, had defeated the Persian Empire, in a rather decisive way. And, at that point, on the basis of the spread of an ideology, which is virtually identical with what is popular in the United States today, called “popular opinion”; “majority popular opinion”; “popular tastes.”

These were the Athenians who said, “We are now (like Washington)—we are an empire! Our last competitor, the Persian Empire, has collapsed. Sparta has accepted our leadership. We have no competitors! We can now run the world! We are now an empire!” And therefore, they went to the small island of Melos, and said, “Well, here are your orders.” And the Melians said, “No. You're not treating us properly.”

“Well, you do that, or we'll kill you.”

And the Melians said, “We won't do it.”

So, they came, and they killed the men, and many others. They committed genocide, against the population of the small island of Melos.

This act had the arrogance of the Athenians under Pericles. And they went into a general war, which became known as the Peloponnesian War. It became a war between certain groups of states in the area, aligned with Sparta, and those allied with Athens. And they weren't satisfied with that! Under Thrasymachus, who was a most notorious character, an opponent of Socrates in The Republic, they went into Magna Graecia, that is, the southern part of the Greek colonies in Italy and adjoining territories: Sicily and Southern Italy. And they extended the war there, under Thrasymachus.

As a result of that, Greek civilization, politically, as such, was doomed. It never recovered from that effect. And despite the aftermath of Alexander the Great, who was influenced while he lived, by Plato's Academy of Athens, despite that, this cleared the way for the emergence of the Roman Empire, or the Roman conquest and Roman Empire, especially from about 200 B.C., at the time the Romans conquered Syracuse, and killed Archimedes.

There was a turning point, down, in general trends in European civilization as a whole, until the 15th-Century Renaissance.

That is popular opinion for you. It was called, then, “sophistry.” Today, in U.S. politics, it's called “spin.” “I don't spin things that way.” “You say this. I have a different spin!” “I have my desires! And you're not going to spin me out my desires!”

And that's the situation we have.

So, you have a population, a culture, an opinion, and trends, which are clinically insane, like those of the Athenians of the time of Pericles, when they started the persecution of the people of Melos. We are doing, in a sense, in Iraq, what the kingdom of Pericles, or the leadership of Pericles, did to the people of Melos and other countries. And we're headed toward a similar consequence.

Now, Socrates was subjected to judicial murder, by an organization known as the Democratic Party of Athens. The tradition of democracy, the very meaning of “democracy,” today, in the United States—the popular understanding of the meaning of the word “democracy,” in the United States and Western Europe, is identical to the conception of sophistry, practiced by the Athens of Pericles. In other words, we are not only in a parallel situation, to that which brought the downfall of the leading culture of that period—Athens—we are falling for identically the same reasons. And we call it “democracy.” We call it “popular opinion.” We call it “public opinion.” We say, you can not go against “public opinion.” You can not go against the Democratic Party's “public opinion,” within its ranks. You've got to stick to what the newspapers and the mass media accept. This is sophistry. This is moral stupidity.

How much moral stupidity can you report upon, in your experience? How many people say, “You can't do it, the mass media won't support you”? How many people say, “You can't do it, public opinion won't support you”? How many people say, “You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We made the changes, and you can not go back and fill the tube again, and go back to what things were before”? How many people say that? How many people tell you, the system is going to be that way?

What are they telling you, if they are right, in their forecast of what's going to happen, what is going to happen? The United States will virtually disappear. And the rate of death in the United States, and the rate of poverty, will be far worse than anything you can imagine today.

So, they have the power, in a sense, to stick to their popular stupidity, and to behave the way they've been behaving up to now. But, can they outlive the results of that conviction?

In other words, they either go our way, or this nation is doomed. It is not doomed because we're so smart. It is doomed because we have chosen a rational alternative, as Socrates and Plato did, to the alternative called “democracy,” in the time that the Democratic Party of Greece—so-called, by the Greeks themselves, at that time—committed the judicial murder of Socrates, in a trial, which reminds you of a kind of a political trial that occurred in the United States recently: The way the court system functions, in recent decades.

In other words, you're looking at a nation which tells you that it is doomed. When they tell you, “this is popular opinion,” they're telling you, “we have decided to die, as a nation.” And you see it in Iraq. People say, “How could they do that? What was their interest? There must be a rational reason why they did it?” There was no rational reason. There was an obsession, just like Ashcroft's religious obsession. like religious fanatics' obsession. Do you think the Battle of Armageddon is going to mean that God is going to intervene, and these guys aren't going to have to pay the rent next month? They believe it! They say they believe it. They get up there, and they give these long-winded speeches at these revival meetings, and they promise things exactly like that. Do you believe that any of the things these preachers say is going to happen? Do these people appear to believe that? They appear to believe it. Fanatically. They appear to believe it, with or without DeLay! That's the kind of society we live in.

So, you are in a very interesting period in history. Can you do something, to change the course of the United States, today, as the Greeks had reason to wish they had changed the policy of Athens, back at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War? If we don't make that change now, what will happen to us will be far worse than what happened to the Greeks in the Peloponnesian War. We will destroy ourselves.

So therefore, the pessimist is a person—among us, and around us, we run into—people who say, “Well, we're not successful. We're not going to be successful, because we're going against popular opinion. We're going against the mass media-determined opinion. We're going against authorities, who will not support us, because we 'offend' them, with telling them they're behaving like fools. We 'offend' them, by behaving like Socrates, and telling the truth.”

And see, the point is, some of you are younger, and you have more juice in you, and therefore, you have more guts, when it comes to defying a generation which you know, as your parents' generation, which you know has made a mess of this nation, and of the world. And you know that you have no future, under the ideas which are prevalent in your parents' generation. And you've got some juice in you. And therefore, you're capable of saying, “Well, I'm supposed to have a future for at least 50 years from now, or 50 or 60 years from now. What kind of a future is it? Does it even exist?”

So you have a conflict between what you perceive, being young adults, in that age-group where you have more vim and vigor than the old farts do. They don't have to lack that vim and vigor. They just chose to lack it! They want a sense of security—which is otherwise called “stupidity” and “inertia.” “By not being forced to move, I'm secure.” “If I can stick to my old habits, I'm secure!” “If I'm within the bounds of popular opinion, I'm secure.” “If I dress properly—.”

You know, just let's take the case of these Milanese models: You get a girl, and she's been vomiting too much, she's so skinny you wouldn't see anything except a floating head, unless she were wearing some indescribably ugly rags! Torn rags! This is called “fashion”! People are trying to compete, in the United States and elsewhere, women are trying to compete—some women who are much too old to do this! As a matter of fact it's bad for their health—are trying to do this, in order to be “popular”! To compete in popular fashion! That's what we're dealing with.

So therefore, what you do: There's only one thing you can do—the thing that Socrates did, and the thing that Plato did. The legacy of that period, of the work of Socrates and Plato and similar people, who followed them, which gave us the basis for developing and creating modern European civilization, especially as expressed by the work of Dante. Now, Dante was a loser! Dante Alighieri: He was a loser! He was killed! On the way back from Venice—mysterious death. He was despised. He was pronounced a heretic. His writings were banned by the Vatican (which was a very corrupt Vatican at the time).

As a matter of fact, the Vatican collapsed! We had three Vaticans, and possibly four, in the course of a new Dark Age, in the 14th Century, when one-third of the population of Europe was lost. That is, the level of population dropped by one-third. Half the parishes of Europe vanished from the map, in a period of about 30-odd years. The new Dark Age. Mass insanity, like the Republicans today, the Republican religious fanatics of today. The single-issue fanatics of today. Mass insanity! And Europe was almost destroyed.

But, it was the ideas of Dante, and what he represented, the ideas of Abelard of Paris, again a victim, these ideas gave us the foundations of a modern European civilization, founded in the period of the Council of Florence in the 15th Century. These were the ideas of Socrates, the ideas of Plato, above all others. The idea of Christianity, which was not that of the Vatican of that time, but was that of the followers of Plato, of Paul's I Corinthians 13, the concept of agape.

So, in the history of mankind, it was the struggle for truth against populism, against what we call in the United States today, “democracy,” or “public opinion,” or “official opinion of the news media”: It was those who fought against that, who fought for truth, who made history. And some of them didn't make it much, in their own lifetime, except to get persecution, but they made it for the future.

Now, this comes to the question of, how do you assess your life? You assess your life, as death and birth as bookends, and you exist only between the bookends. And therefore, you have to make it pleasant reading between the bookends. Each page must be pleasure and comfort, and satisfaction. And don't worry about the future. There'll be so much pleasure, you won't notice you're passing.

Or, knowing that this is the nature of man: That you are born and are going to die, sooner or later, is it while you spend your life, and do what affects humanity, that counts? All of the effective people in history, were people who did that. They made that choice. They had a conception of birth and death, as sort of the bookends of mortality. But, they also saw in themselves, something which was more than mortality: The ability to discover truth; to discover principles of the universe; to introduce these to humanity; to pass them on to humanity, to be used by present or by future generations for the benefit of mankind.

And a sense that you live, in creating the future of mankind. You live, in bringing forth from the past; you correct the injustices of the past. Truth was fought for in the past, by civilizations that were crushed, by people that were crushed. When you do something to bring justice to the dead, even thousands of years later, you are doing something that makes your life important. Because, you're not only bringing justice to them, you're preserving and putting into perspective the importance of what they did, for tomorrow. As we do with these Platonic studies, and other studies. We're trying to find the most ancient expressions of humanity. We're looking for contributions of tens of thousands of years ago, and longer, which have permanent value for humanity, which we should understand today; assimilate, and see what we can do with them, see what we can larn from that, see what we can contribute to a better understanding of mankind's future. These are the kinds of things we have to do.

If we are those kinds of people, if we are secure in our sense of personal identity; if we are people living in the present, who do honor to the past, and who provide for the future, then, what do we have to fear? They kill us? We're going to die anyway. What have they taken away from us, except the opportunity to do good?

So therefore, our job, and your job—the only way you can find the strength inside yourselves, to do what you have to do—is to locate your identity accordingly, as an historic individual: A person who is serving to bring justice out of the past, out of the contributions of people past; and working to build a heritage, from which the future of humanity can prosper.

You know, it's like the case of Martin, his last speech, the day before they came to kill him: What was he fighting for? Was he fighting for civil rights for so-called “African-Americans”? No, he wasn't doing that. He had a higher mission: To make the nation right—for everyone. And his power was, that he was not a single-issue idiot. He was a leader of the entire nation, trying to bring the nation to an understanding of what was right. And we, who come from the lowest, shall reach the highest, because we are making a great contribution to this nation, and to all humanity, by bringing the United States to what it was intended to become. That is a sense of immortality.

It is a sense, also, of truthfulness, because you can not believe that you are actually earning, in a sense, immortality, for living now, unless you can believe that what you're doing is truthful: It corresponds to the laws of the universe. It corresponds to principles of a verifiable truth. You can not assert an opinion, because you choose to believe it, and fight for that opinion, because you “feel” you should fight for that opinion. That's not worth anything! You have to know, with absolute certainty, that what you're doing is right.

And therefore, the first thing you have to deal with, is, do you know what is right? So therefore, the importance I stress on Gauss, on the 1799 paper, which is absolutely unique. You won't find the same thing directly expressed, in any later paper of Gauss. But only in that paper, the first one he ever published, as a scientific paper, in which he attacked Euler, Lagrange, d'Alembert, and so forth. He attacked them, on what? He attacked them on what issue? The issue was, the nature of man. It was a concept that he had acquired, partly under the influence of two of his teachers, Kaestner and Zimmermann. He had this concept of an anti-Euclidean geometry from them. Throw away the axioms, definitions, and postulates of an a priori, or idealistic, notion of geometry. Limit yourself to what you know are universal, physical principles: That is, principles which lie beyond sense-perception, but which affect sense-perception, and by the Socratic method of hypothesis, you can discover what these principles are, that you can not detect directly with your senses. But principles which affect what you see with your senses. Principles; universal principles. No principles must guide you, or govern your mind, except what you know to be universal, in that sense.

Don't say, “Well, my experience teaches me....” Say, “Don't be an idiot! Your experience never taught you anything.” Look, I've got a goat out there. The goat has got a lot of experience. That goat is doing the same damned thing his grandfather was doing! If he gets a chance, huh? Now, he's learned from experience. You can vote for Bush, by experience. “I did it before. I'll do it again.” Without considering how the universe is going to react to this phenomenon of your voting for Bush!

So therefore, you have to know that the principle is actually valid, in terms of beyond the senses, which means, that only the human mind can discover a universal principle. Only a human mind can take, and seek out, the paradoxes, the inconsistencies, the errors, in experience; and find a pattern in these errors, and define what the universe must be like to cause this to occur; and then, to test that principle, that you think you have—that solution you have—and test it, by applying it, to demonstrate, to test whether that principle is true or not.

And that's what you know. And you have two areas to work in. The reason I proposed the Gauss 1799 paper, was because it proposes this question, what Euler, Lagrange, and others denied. They denied the existence of principles existing beyond the perception by sense-perception. That is, the principles could not be perceived by sense-perception, but only be adduced by the method of hypothesis, by proving experimentally a discovery of a principle, which lies and operates from outside sense-perception. So that what you have in sense-perception is essentially the shadow, cast by a principle upon the domain of sense-perception. Sense-perception is like a screen, and what you know is the shadows that real principles cast upon the screen, the projection screen of sense-perception. Only a human being can do that.

That is unique. That's the first thing you have to learn. And the first place you apply it, is where? You apply it to physical experiments, that you, with your mind, can directly observe: How does nature behave? You try to find the principles that run nature. You look, as we do, generally, you look at abiotic principles, non-living processes. You conduct experiments which are based on the assumption that the processes are non-living. Then you have a second class of physical experiments, which deals with so-called living processes. And you're concerned about the principled distinction, primarily, between those classes of experiments which correspond to non-living processes, and those classes of experiments which involve another principle, an additional principle which is not found in non-living processes.

And you look, as Vernadsky did, at the planet. And the planet is a biosphere. What does that mean? That life is more powerful than abiotic principles. That life penetrates, and acts upon the domain of abiotic principles. Life does not come from inorganic processes; life is a principle, in the universe, which acts upon what we call inorganic processes, to produce the combined effect, such as we call the Biosphere: a planet which has fossil layers and so forth—including the atmosphere, which is a fossil, a product of living activities, which produced the atmosphere, which produced the oceans, the water, which produced the fossil layers on this planet; which concentrated certain minerals and certain deposits within the fossil layer, which you will not find concentrated as efficiently, for your purpose, anywhere else, except by knowing which fossil made that deposit. Who made all that chalk, on the cliffs of Dover? Trillions of animals, who died, and left their little bodies behind, as chalk, as a result of what they had consumed.

So, the planet is becoming, more and more, a living creature. Because what we call the “inorganic” or abiotic processes of the planet, are constantly being gobbled up! And taken over, by a superior force, called “life”!

And then, we find a third one: The planet is being transformed, the Biosphere is being transformed, by a more powerful force! The more powerful force is the ability of the human mind, to discover a universal physical principle. And the changes in the planet as a whole, as a result of man's discovery and application of physical principles, is changing the planet into what Vernadsky called a “Noösphere.” That is, the ratio of the total pure weight, of the mass of the planet is being increased, so the products of man's intervention, through man's discovery of principles, is becoming more and more. And if this continues, the whole Solar System is going to become a product of the human mind, which has gobbled up, assimilated, and mastered all processes of non-living and living processes on the planet.

That's the process. Nice, huh?

This is what's known as “being created.” This is what is known as “man in the image of the Creator,” a power which exists only because of the powers unique to the human mind: of forming a valid hypothesis, and verifying that hypothesis by experimental methods of an appropriate type.

That's number one. That's one department of knowledge. And that's what Gauss refers to. There is no truthful mathematics, unless it takes into account the existence of phenomena, objects, which are not phenomena of the senses, but phenomena of the mind, called “verified universal physical principles.” And therefore, when you write a mathematical formula, as was later made clear by Dirichlet, a teacher of Riemann's, and Riemann himself, the concept of the complex domain.

What do we mean by the complex domain: It means, on the one hand, your calculations at the blackboard, so to speak, must reflect, first of all, what you actually observe with your senses, or observe with an instrument which functions as an extension of your senses. But, that is not what explains the universe. That is not the universe. You must now say, that there's also something else in there, which is not accounted for by these so-called sense-perceptual constructions. It comes like a shadow. It's like the loop in the orbit of Mars, which comes periodically, where Mars appears to go backward upon itself in its orbit, and then come back into the regular orbit: an anomaly! Not explained by any of the usual nonsense.

So therefore, what is this anomaly—or any other anomaly? It's the shadow of the hand of the real universe. Concept of principles reflected, as a deformation, a distortion, a modification, of what the senses see, directly and explicitly. What do you call that? Well, you say, let's take the complex domain. And you introduce the concept of the complex domain, which casts shadows upon the perceptual domain. That's the complex domain.

And what Gauss is saying, clearly, in the question of the fundamental theorem of algebra, at that point, is exactly that: It is a fraud, by Euler, by Lagrange, and by the other haters of Leibniz, to insist that mathematics can work on the basis of a Cartesian or Euclidean model of mathematics. Because that model, is the model of the universe, as seen by animals! Not by human beings. The human mind sees the universe as principles acting upon the universe, distorting the shadows of sense-perception, imposing something upon sense-perception which is not consistent with a sense-perceptual view of the universe. That's number one.

That's the principle of truth. And that's what Euler and Lagrange reject. They reject the notion of truth, because they reject the idea that we must discover the universal physical principles, which actually govern the universe; principles which they can not directly determine, through the senses, by extrapolation from sense-perception, but which we must account for, as distortions, of a sense-perceptual universe, caused by these principles.

It is this kind of knowledge, by man, applied to the universe, which creates the Noösphere, an idea which already existed among ancient Greeks, the idea of Noos. The idea of the power of the human mind, the creative power of mind, to discover the principles of the universe, and, with that discovery, to apply these principles of the universe to the universe, as an act of man's will, to change the order of the universe.

This is the concept of creativity. It is not new to Vernadsky with the concept of the Noösphere—on the contrary. Vernadsky proceeded, on the basis of Classical Greek precedent, on this account, and he proceeded on the basis of recognizing that the kind of universe that he knew, from the standpoint of his biogeochemistry, as the Noösphere, was a reflection of the power of the human mind, becoming manifest as transforming the universe, into something dominated entirely by the human mind, and the acts of the human mind.

So, you can discover that principle.

Now, you get another problem, which you can also observe: the behavior of people. Now, this is almost a form of disease, and you have to have a clinical attitude about the whole business. Otherwise, you don't understand people. If you don't look at people as a disease, you can't understand them. [laughs] Because their behavior is absurd. But, nonetheless, despite the absurdity, which is prevalent in our time—it's one of our greatest contributions—we have proceeded further, and to higher levels in absurdity, than had been known in mankind before this time. That is the achievement of our age.

But: We also observe, that, despite this, you see, for example—take the case in history, I've referred to it often: Now the Roman Empire was an abomination—before it came into existence. It came into existence, because it was already an abomination! And it was an abomination, produced by an abomination. Roman law, Roman tradition: It's evil. It should never have happened—but it did.

And then, in Roman culture, for example, you had the case of Cicero. And Cicero was a positive figure, who was killed in the time of the civil wars, and the death of Julius Caesar, the assassinated Julius Caesar; and, soon after that, Caesar's great enemy Cicero was murdered. So, you see that.

Then, you go into another period of evil, from about the 9th Century A.D. into the Dark Age: This is an age of evil. This is the age of ultramontanism, when the Christian Church, from the top, became corrupt—rotten, and evil. How? Well, they adopted a policy, from the Roman Empire, a policy which they used to call the Donation of Constantine—which was a fraud; it never happened. But, it was created, as a myth, as a piece of fiction, to try to control the Church, and control the Christians. The argument was that the Pope had divine authority, given to him, as a power by the Emperor Constantine! This pig!

Now, pigs do not give divine powers. They may give a lot of pork—but not willingly.

So, this thing was actually a creation, in the decline of the power of Byzantium, a bunch of swine, living at the north of the Adriatic Sea, in an area which was emerging as Venice, which was an area of pirates and money-lenders, usurers; which formed a society, based on Roman law, the general law of the family of Roman society. A large family would appoint a leader of that family, who was the leader of various predatory operations, such as usury, but generally thievery of that type, loan-shark type of thievery.

And so, this system took over the power in Europe. It began to chew up, essentially, chew up Byzantium. It became a maritime power, and a rentier-financier-oligarchical power. It exerted its power, as the bankers of Europe, from Venice, through an alliance with a bunch of—well, a bunch of criminals, called the Normans, which became known as Norman chivalry. They made an alliance with certain forces controlling the Papacy, which were ultimately allied with them, including the Cluniacs, from the Benedictine area of Cluny. And they set up a system, which was the ultramontane system. It was characterized by the Crusades. And the Crusades began, of course, with the Albigensian Crusade, and then actually, the Norman conquest of England, killing all the Christians, who were called Anglo-Saxons at the time. I don't think England has fully recovered from the extermination of Christians by the Normans, to the present day.

So, this Norman system, the system of the Crusades, Norman chivalry, the blessings of Cluny, the control of the Papacy by Cluny, largely; and control of all of this by Venice, which was financing the Crusades, and taking in the loot, as the loan-shark! The loan-shark sent the chivalry out to kill and rape. The chivalry came back, and deposited their loot with the bankers. The bankers were the loan-sharks; the loan-sharks, the bankers, were Venice. That was the system.

This system ended up creating the new Dark Age, of the 14th Century.

Now, in this period of darkness, you have some beautiful things were done. The Cathedral of Chartres, for example, in France, is an example of a great work of art. And in principle, a cathedral building typifies a great culture that is struggling to emerge under the domination of this evil empire, this so-called ultramontane system—that no government should exist, except the government of this imperial authority; and the Pope was supposed to be the stooge for the imperial authority. And that's the way they ran things.

But even in this evil age, the beauty of mankind, the beauty of the human mind, asserted itself against tyranny, with contributions from which we benefit today. Among those, were the contributions of one of the greatest minds of that period: Dante Alighieri, whose work was the foundation of the idea of modern art: Modern poetry, modern drama, in its modern form, come essentially out of the work of Dante Alighieri. The ideas of statecraft.

So, this requires us to look at a second area, apart from so-called “physical effects.” Apart from simple physical effects, you look at another object, which is anomalous, and this is frightening: the human mind. Now, you look at the behavior of the human mind, and you look at it from one standpoint in particular. You don't start with the individual human mind, though you're going back to the individual human mind. You look at social relations, and social processes. You say: How is it possible, that individuals who make individual discoveries, of universal physical principles—how is it possible that they're able to agree to cooperate, in using those principles and applying them to make society better? How does man learn how to behave, with respect to man, on the basis of recognizing that there's something about a human being that's different than an animal? The human being is capable of discovering, through hypothesis, and through experiment, universal principles, which are true: They're true in man's relationship to nature; they're true in man's relationship to inorganic nature, and organic nature.

Now, what is true, in terms of principle, in the behavior by mankind himself, or among people? Where's the lawfulness in that? Is this subject to laws of principle, as living processes are, or non-living ones? Are there universal principles of human behavior, which are truly universal?

This becomes, then, the study of what? How do you go at this? You study history. You study history, not as it's taught, usually. You study history, as sometimes people learn it, by institutions which don't intend to do that. They tell you traditions, they give you explanations about how mankind went from one generation to another.

But look at mankind from a much more interesting standpoint: Mankind's power over nature, comes from an increase in the accumulation of, and application of, discoveries of universal physical principles, as the Socratic method defines that, as Plato defines it. By these principles, man acquires what the Classical Greek—that is, the pre-Aristotle, pre-Euclid Classical Greeks, defined as “powers”; and this is the most important thing for you to know: the concept of powers. It has one, which seems to be deceptively simple. Another is not so simple—it's much more fun, because it changes the way you define yourself. Once you begin to understand this principle, which is denied to you in virtually every university that you ever attended. Once you understand that, you have to change. Your conception of yourself has to change. And your effectiveness as a person has to change, for much to the better. That was the simplest aspect of it.

When you rediscover a universal physical principle, if we are able to cooperate in using that principle, we are able, therefore, to increase man's power in the universe, as measurable per capita, and measurable per square kilometer of surface area of the Earth. It's expressed partly as technologies, which come as a product of the discovery of these principles. Man now has more power, the individual has more will-power, to change nature, and to change its behavior, to lift mankind to a higher standard of living; to make possible more people, to live. Because, if we were simply what we appeared to be, we are a variety of great apes—and not so great, at that. Under those conditions, taking the past 2 million years, as our estimation of what the ecology of this planet has looked like, during the Ice Ages, mankind's population could not have exceeded somewhere between a single-digit million living individuals.

We now have over 6 billion people living on this planet. How did that happen? Obviously, mankind did something that no monkey could do, no gorilla could do—and, George Bush couldn't do, either. He may qualify as an ape; or, he's aping the wrong people.

We can increase the power of mankind, per capita, to exist in the universe. This is one of the most important things: Mankind, by discovering and applying universal principles, can increase man's power in and over the universe. The principles already existed. They existed in the universe, but once we discover them, rather than being merely affected by them, they now become subjects of our will: And that's the important point I want to make to you. Will. Your will. What is the meaning of will? Will-power?

Because, you are not now discovering a “rule,” by which you act. Oh, some people do that. They go to school. They study textbooks. They rehearse making experiments. They learn the rules! They hear about “energy,” which doesn't exist. Energy is an effect, it's not a substance. They learn the rules: “Now, if we obey these 'rules' (and maybe with a little bit of cheating, to help out), we can make something of this.” Hmm? That's what you get. You try to enforce the “rules.” So now, you are a subject of the “rules.” You go to a university to become a subject of the “rules.”

The way you punctuate, is not the way you think. It's the way you were taught to behave. And, most of the way you punctuate, is idiotic. You can not communicate ideas, the way most of you punctuate—at least, you couldn't communicate them clearly. You hear some people speaking, speaking as if they were a teletype machine gone amok? There's no punctuation in their speech, typical television-radio announcer, today. Dr-rr-rr-t! Nothing to it! There's no expression! There's no division of subject! The idea of subject with a relationship to subject, doesn't exist. Contrast, irony, doesn't exist. The function of irony is denied! It becomes dolts! And I know, I have to deal with a lot of them.

So, therefore, the question is, do you simply learn to obey the rules, which you call principles, as described in mathematical or similar terms, from lectures, educational programs, rehearsals? Or, do you actually have the will, the efficient will, to change the universe?

This is where I get into trouble, because I do have this will. Typical, for example, in Kepler: In Kepler's translated works, his conception of universal physical principle, of the type that Gauss is referring to in attacking Euler and Lagrange, and so forth, he uses the conception of “intention.” He says that a law of the universe, a physical law of the universe, reflects the “Creator's intention.” In other words, the universe is no longer a machine, a clockwork machine, which is ticking along to fixed laws. The universe is now seen as some intellectual force; an efficient intellectual force is moving the universe, in a way we recognize as universal physical laws, as distinct from mechanical or clockwork types of laws. So, Kepler says: This is the intention of the Creator. The concept of gravity is the intention of the Creator. It is not a principle, like a clockwork design applied to the universe: It is an efficient intention, by an intellectual power.

Now, when you generate a discovery, or re-generate the experience of making the discovery, your relationship to the universe is far different than the dolt who passed the examination in the university; than the engineer, who looks it up with his slide-rule or whatever, his computer, and looks up tables, or looks up formulas. This guy is a dolt. He is not a person of will and intention. Except perhaps for other things, but not for science.

Will comes in this way: You have to think about the process by which a discovery occurs. And don't look at a discovery as a shadow, an effect of something that happened. You have to account for the way this act of discovery came into being.

Now, I had the pleasure of addressing a Building Trades Council meeting in Louisville, Ky., the day before yesterday. And I went through this with them, and I'll just give you a summation. I said: “I am a troublemaker. And you know, that every job you go on, is usually bad. And your job is to make a bad job, which you are given to do, a good job, because, every job is defined incompetently, in one degree or another.” What you have to do, is recognize, of course, the incompetence of the assignment you've been given. And then, you have to discover what the problem is; what the trouble is. So, you are looking for trouble! You concentrate on looking for trouble. You expect it. You demand it! Because, you know, that this thing, that is not going to work, involves assumptions which are false. You have to find out, how these ideas, these false ideas, came into being. And you've got to discover the nature of the problem, and you've got to develop a solution for the problem, within the practical terms in which you are operating.”

That is what a typical engineer or building trades team is doing. They're given a job—“Here's a blueprint. Do it.”

“Well, this thing'll never work. What's wrong with it? Why doesn't it work? What's wrong with the design? We've got to fix it. We've got the job, of doing this job. If we do it, as we are told, it's going to be a monster. It will fail. Therefore, we have to concentrate, and think: What is wrong with this? What is the trouble with it? And therefore, we have to turn a bad job, which we're given to do, into a good job, to get the result intended.”

Now, what this means, is, the person who does that, is a different kind of person, than the usual punk coming out of university. They are looking for trouble. They become good students, because they are looking for trouble. They're given, “This is what you will do.” “Uh-oh! Another flop! I've got to find out what's wrong with this creature, that's telling me this. I've got to find out what the truth is!”

Don't swallow it, because you're taught. I recall, years ago, my parents and others used to tell me to do something—I'd never do it. They'd say, “Wait till you're grown up. And wait until you have your degrees, and then, you can criticize. Until then, learn what you're told to learn! Pass the examination, and read the books, and repeat after me!”

Now, a good scientist never did that. A good scientist is a rebel. “This guy's tellin' me something—huh!” [laughter] “He said, 'do it this way'! Uh-huh! Now I'm going prove this bum is wrong.” Right? “I'm going to find out what the trouble is, with the way he's thinking! Not what he's thinking, but the way he's thinking.” Hmm?

So therefore, your intention is not, simply, operating with a certain formula, as a principle, to discover the formula by looking it up in the book. “Look on the Internet! It must be there someplace!” And then apply it!

That is not really human. We are getting more and more to the point, we can get computers to do that; what d'we need that guy for? We need human beings for their human potential, not for their machine-like potential. The point is, you have to be the kind of person, who is looking for trouble. You're looking for the bad job that is presented to you, and you're trying to make a good job, out of the bad job you're asked to do. And you have an attitude of always looking for the error, the falseness in the assumptions given to you. You develop the ability to smell out those errors, as typified by the Gauss 1799 paper: Wherever you find somebody arguing the way Euler did, the way Lagrange did, the way Cauchy did; whenever you find someone thinking like that, you know, you've got a mental case on your hands! This guy does not belong to this universe.

Therefore, now what you have to do, is recognize, you've got trouble. There's something wrong here. Now, what is the practical implication of the fallacy of Cauchy, the fallacy of Euler? Why is Newton an idiot? Prove it! Be a troublemaker: Prove it!

Now, this is a way of thinking. It's a natural, human way of thinking, as opposed to learning how to behave. Being a troublemaker. You have the intention. You are copying what Kepler recognized in the universe. Or, Plato and Pythagoras recognized in the universe: That when mankind makes a discovery of principle, a natural principle, mankind has acquired a new power, from the Creator, over the universe. And this power changes man's relationship to the universe.

But, the essential thing, is not the discovery of this result. The essential thing is the passion, the sense of intention, which drives you to make those discoveries, and to act upon them. In other words, it's not applying the right formula to the situation, that creates a scientist (not, at least, a good scientist). What creates the good scientist, is that he is intrinsically a troublemaker. He knows that society is a lot of fraud. And therefore, he's always looking for what is wrong, and trying to develop in himself, or herself, a mental map of the kinds of mistakes that are made by the society now.

And therefore, whenever you run into a situation, where you find typical behavior, of a class of type that you know is wrong, you go by instinct, to change it! And, the one thing you want to do, is change it. Because, you know that the act you perform today may be necessary. But the human action is what you do to change the universe, by developing new powers. And how? Every time you face a challenge, which you know epistemologically to be wrong, you are going to try to find the answer, and solution. When you try to find the solution, you're going to be determined that it be implemented: That's your intention. You're now acting like God. You're now acting in the likeness of the Creator. You are a troublemaker, like the Creator.

And, George Bush doesn't like that very much.

Anyway, so, that's the point, the point on that. Is, you're in the situation, you're young, you're adults, therefore, you have this potential. You have more energy, than the old, dried-out old husks your parents are. The under-62ers. The disaster area. You have that. Therefore, you have the energy and the flexibility, to be able to be persons of intention; to be persons of will; to express will, in this sense. Not as the idea of a formula, but as the commitment to discover what is wrong. To be able to develop in yourself, the ability to recognize symptoms, of where wrong thinking is coming out. Like the great military commander who succeeds, because he outflanks the opponent. He recognizes the principle they didn't recognize, and uses it, as an act of will, to win the battle or the war.

What I'm doing, in a sense, with this election campaign. I'm outflanking the bastards. They say, “Well, if you don't win that primary, how ya gonna win?” “Don't worry, buddy. Wait till we come to Moscow, and you'll see how Napoleon fares.” That's what happened to Napoleon: He got to Moscow, and that was the end of him, or the beginning of the end.

And that was the plan. It was an intention, founded, actually in the discoveries of Friedrich Schiller, in the studies of the Netherlands war, and the Thirty Years War. And his in-law, von Wolzogen, made the study, based on Schiller's studies; presented it to the Prussian general staff which was advising Czar Alexander I. The choice was made: Do not try to beat Napoleon and his Grande Armée at the borders. Don't spend your troops, trying to defeat him at the borders. Draw him in, by retreating. If he goes toward Petersburg, retreat toward Petersburg. If goes toward Moscow—God save him, we'll get him there.

Moscow was mined. The battles were drawn out, to make sure that it took time for Napoleon to get to Moscow. By the time he got there, it was winter. And the city was mined. Napoleon's troops celebrated their occupation of the city—and the city blew up!

Napoleon, without logistics, had to retreat. And the Russian Army, with its Prussian volunteers in it, fell upon the heels of Napoleon; large sections of the Russian population mobilized as guerrilla fighters, against Napoleon. And Napoleon reached Poland first, long before the rear guard, headed by Marshal Ney came in. Marshal Ney came in, in the winter. Napoleon greeted him, “Where are your troops?” Marshal Ney looked at him, forlorn. “I am your troops. I am your rear guard.”

In the history of battles, the history of struggles, that is often the way it goes. You don't say: If you're going to win, these are the rules by which you win. The minute the enemy presents you, and says, “These are the rules, which you have to play by; the rules, by which you will be scored”: Smile. You got the sucker.

Thank you.