The issue of discussion today that Dennis posed is, “Is it a new dark age, or a new age of civilization; a new dark age or time for a renaissance?” And that, I think, has been the fundamental history of our planet, as long as humans have been here. And as Lyndon LaRouche knows very well, and I’ve always been an admirer of his work because of his understanding of a very long lineage. There’s a lineage, as many of us know, of those humanist thinkers, in the Platonic tradition, let’s say, that has always valued the place of man, somehwere between angel and animal, whose mission, God-given, is creativity. Whose inherent nature, as being created in the image of God, would be, we are creative beings that have a power to uplift emotionally, spiritually, and physically, that of ourselves and of our fellow man. And that it’s a generational process, that ideally we are progressing historically. And in opposition to that impulse–which I think is innate–but in opposition to that we have a select group that we might call elites, or oligarchs, or imperialists, who believe in the nature of empire–which is to say slavery. And no one really likes to consider what slavery means any more, because we feel like we’ve gone beyond it. And yet the nature of slavery is money; it’s monetarism.
The empires are always predicated on the value of money, as opposed to the value of humans. People will tell you money in our culture now is supreme; if you have money, you can do things. If you have money, you can make a life. And yet they don’t recognize that what we’re living in is a debt trap. It’s been foisted upon us by a financial system that is in opposition to everything that a humanist stands for, because humanists realize that in the world we’re living in currently, we young people have no future. We are looking at no prospect for ever emancipating ourselves from the debt slavery that we’ve inherited.
That’s the point we stand at now. So from the point of view of a young person, you can easily be a pessimist and say, “We’re going into a new dark age, and we’ll begin to cannibalize ourselves in order to survive.” But that’s not my belief.
Everything begins with ideas. The American Revolution began with ideas. It was a very small group of people who achieved the American Revolution, and the American Revolution carries on to this day in the form of the American System. The American System of Economics is predicated on the humanist tradition, because the American System says the value is not in the money that’s owned by the bankers, or the central bankers, and that’s issued to you in debt, and as a result, everything you create is created as a continuation of that debt. The American System says the value is in what you can create. The value is in the technology that you create to make your life easier; to offer hope to mankind. True hope! Not Obama’s hope. The actual sense of hope being, for example, dreaming of the stars, dreaming of man’s mission to travel the stars, to become inter-galactic in our consciousness. To improve our standards of living. Because as anyone who has traveled the world knows, as your standard of living increases, your ability to produce things and to acquire increases.
So, you have to recognize what’s essentially happened over the 20th Century. We’ve been sold the notion that, by cheapening the costs of production, we’re actually enhancing our ability to create. That we are evolving, by evolving free-trade techniques. This is an essentially British imperialist philosophy.
When you go to a school like Princeton and you take an economics class, they tell you there’s Adam Smith’s version of free trade, and then in opposition to that, there’s Karl Marx’s form of communism. Never really telling you that both Smith and Marx were trained by the same British elite–Marx at the British Museum library in London, and Smith as an agent of the British Empire, notoriously such. So they’re creating a false paradigm of free trade vs. socialism/communism. And as a result we’re at a point where people of every average mean look around and say, “Our system has failed. Capitalism has failed.” But they don’t recognize that what was buried was the American System.
The American System, if you want to read up on it, I would suggest beginning with Henry Carey and his writings. Because philosophially, spiritually, morally, economically, it is the most rational point of view you can have. Which is that there is a harmony of interests between all people. See there’s a harmony of interests in the sense that the people you pay as your laborers, the people that you want to have a decent standard of living, are your consumers.
If you go to the policy of free trade, for example, and you drive down the working class’s wage standard and you drive down the standard of living, those people resort to a debt system–what we call credit, but it’s essentially a debt system. In order to afford something that they used to be able to afford within their own purchasing power. Now, they become debtors in order to afford that. But we say, “We’re making profit! This is the only way we can compete.” So what you’ve created now is a mentality of survival. It’s a mentality of animals, essentially, competing for survival as opposed to cooperating. The debt slavery mentality creates the culture in opposition to the Classical culture that we’re discussing today. Because the debt system mentality, the enslavement of mankind, the bestialization of mankind, turning man into an animal, essentially creats a culture of sensationalism. It creates a culture of desiring instant gratification and instant success. It creates a culture that doesn’t have time to appreciate the evolution of work through progress. All good work takes time. All Classical culture, Classical creation, Classicla art was predicated on a notion of investment of time to thought, to analyze, to assess.
And I’ll give you a perfect example. 9/11 at the time of the attack–whoever may have perpetrated it–was considered a tragedy. It {wasn’t} a tragedy. It was a shocking incident; it was a moment of awakening in the American psyche. Regardless of who perpetuated the attack, there was a moment of realizing that we were not in the world; that we were part of a global community; that we needed to start recognizing who in truth were our enemies and our friends, and how we were going to elevate the people of the world in actually a positive sense, as opposed to what becomes now, a tragedy. 9/11 becomes a tragedy now, ten years later, because we used that incident to perpetuate wars that have augmented the amount of bloodhsed, chaos, destruction–culturally, internally, as much here as abroad. That’s the tragedy of 9/11.
We’ve come to the end of our history. The moment when Obama allowed the assassination of American citizens, regardless of on foreign soil or domestic–the moment that he executed that authority, we ended our history as Americans. Because the Constitution that provides protection for due process, that same due process that we honor in every Classical conception of politics, of economics, of living–was abrogated. It was violated and destroyed. The fact that the director of the FBI can be asked now, by a Congressional committee, whether the U.S. government has the right to assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil, and he can’t give an answer, shows you there disrespect for humanity.
Not to say that America is the only country in the world; not to say that we are necessarily the shining pillar on the hill; but to say that what we honored, what our founding fathers honored, in the system of the Constitution, giving a balance of powers between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches; with the conception of a republic being predicated on the people, was lost. The American people have forsaken their right. They’ve given it up, without a thought!
Last year I did a little piece, called “Impeach Obama 2012,” which went viral, through Alex Jones and with the support of Dennis Speed here. And it was only a ten-minute piece; without malice, it was not intended as malice, but simply intended to elucidate certain points that Obama had violated constitutionally, that deserved attention and potentially impeachment. (And by the way, people know that impeachment doesn’t mean the removal of the President; it simply means that you have to take accountability and responsibility.) But rather than this video gaining millions of viewers, as I’m sure Lady Gaga’s last video did, this video gained less than half a million viewers.
You might say we’re in a new dark age. That’s what it would look like statistically. But so long as the idea of the American republic exists, so long as the ideas enshrined in our Constitution–. Remember, the preface of our Constitution says that Congress is there for the benefit of the general welfare. That principle is a humanistic principle. So long as we remember our fundamental humanity, so long as we stop to reflect upon the consequence of our actions, there is still hope for this country.