The Coincidence of Opposites: The Hypothesis Which Lies at the Foundation of a Durable World Development Policy

During the year 1983, in which Republican President Ronald Reagan advanced the seismic change in post-war military strategy known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), stunning the entire trans-Atlantic world by embracing the inspired proposal of 1984 Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche authored a number of documents subsequent to that March 23 achievement. They included his “The Implications of Beam-Weapons Technology for the Military Doctrine of Argentina,” May 1983; “Saudi Arabia in the Year 2023,” June; “A Fifty-Year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin,” August; and two December documents, “The Design for a Leibnizian Academy of Morocco,” and “A Proposal To Begin Development of a Long-Range Economic Development Policy for the State of Israel.” LaRouche, besides his participation in many seminars and conferences that year, also took time to describe for all, in “The Science of the Human Mind,” written in October of 1983, what he meant, when LaRouche entitled the much-earlier “Open Dialogue with Leonid Brezhnev: The Content of Policy Is the Method by Which It Is Made.” The rediscovery of the Promethean “principle of power,” the power of labor, technology, and productive work, today under assault by the British Empire’s Great Reset, is the core of the LaRouche economic method, and all policy initiatives that flow from it.

Though there are forces that clearly intend to prevent even President Joe Biden from meeting with President Vladimir Putin, using everything, including the bogus Belarus affair to do so, Russia intends to do its part to not play the provocation game. Meanwhile, the physical reality of the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, whether in Palestine, India, or Honduras, are not a game: that deadly reality, even for countries like the once-protected Vietnam, has forced the truth to the fore: “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.” The bankruptcy of the United States’ policy on making vaccines available to the world in a timely fashion was luridly on display in the press conference addressed by the CDC’s Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Biden’s Covid coordinator who, after blathering about “80 million vaccines distributed to the world by the end of June,” was caught covering up for the fact that over 100 million vaccines are already produced and not about to be used, not counting the 67 million that the states already have, and are having problems finding people to take. The issue, however, is not whether to vaccinate either American children, or Indian physicians. The issue is: What are the hypotheses that must be the foundation for a world physical-economic development policy?

Only the philosophical method of mass organizing developed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, in his “De Docta Ignorantia,” is adequate to the challenge faced by mankind today. One sub-chapter of LaRouche’s May ’83 “Argentina” document is entitled: “‘Mad’ as a Malthusian Dogma.” Truly, the trans-Atlantic thermonuclear war-fighting policies presently being considered, such as “Prompt Global Strike,” reflect a cult-like form of religious belief, not rigorous strategic thinking in the 21st century. Besides being a rejection of the 1983 breakthrough by Reagan and LaRouche, preventive war and thermonuclear first strike is, together with the “Great Reset,” a pathetic front for the inevitable demise of the $2 quadrillions-plus bankrupt financial system. Neither scheme can work, except to exterminate all, or most of the human race. (Malthusianism also often has the ugly habit of destroying its proponents first.) But, though this “new world order” will fail under any circumstances, what will succeed?

From a physical-economic standpoint, the opportunity afforded by the merciless, “Masque of the Red Death”-like prompting of humanity to change its ways, by the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, has, for perhaps the first time since the successful LaRouche campaign for the SDI in 1983, brought mankind and its governments, face to face with self-development, or self-destruction. A world health platform, demanded by elected officials, medical personnel, clergy, military, and all persons interested in justice, whether for Palestine, the African continent, or the urban poor in nations all over the world, can overturn every axiom of geopolitics, can take exception to every “rule of law,” can reset “the Great Reset,” solely by forcing an insistence on the idea that the world needs more people, at higher standards of living, achieved even without and independent of the prior resolution of outmoded forms of conflict and division that have characterized the relationships among states up to now.

The deeper enemy we are facing, as pernicious as with the Dionysians of the Great Reset, is Kantian pessimism, seen, for example, in the cynical reflections of University of Washington Prof. Karen Levy: “With COVID-19, thinking like a pathogen leads to an inevitable conclusion: Getting the vaccine out to everyone in the world as quickly as possible is not just an ethical imperative, but also a selfish one.” This will, and should, inspire no one. The antidote to this can be found in the optimism of genius. Karel Vereycken recounted in the 2013 article “The Secret of the Florentine Dome” that Antonio Tuccio Manetti (1423-1497), author of “The Life of Filippo Brunelleschi,” who had met Brunelleschi when alive, reported regarding the contest to build the Duomo at Florence: “Even more so since the construction masters were already worrying about the difficulty to have to build a vault that wide and so high: seeing its height and width, its weight, its buttressing and supports, arches, and other armatures, which all had to be raised from the ground, it looked in such a fashion that not only the effort seemed awful, but its realization properly impossible.”

To those who invoked that impossibility, Brunelleschi sharply answered that the dome was a sacred building and that “God, for whom nothing is impossible, will not abandon us.” To start the project, he suggested to the wardens of the Opera del Duomo to organize an international conference and invite all the architects, engineers, and masons “as many one could find across Christendom.”

So they did, and during that meeting, “From the words of Filippo, the wardens deduced the verdict that such a building so big and of such a nature could not be terminated and that it had been a naïveté, from those architects of the past and of those who conceived the whole project, to believe so. When Filippo said, contesting that wrong opinion, that it could be done, they all answered in chorus: ‘How will the centering [falsework] be done?’ but he insisted again that it could be built without such centering.”

Lyndon LaRouche, in “The Issue of Mind-Set” remarked that “The case of Filippo Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome of the famous Cathedral of Florence, typifies the axiomatic sources of the achievements of the Renaissance as a whole. If one examines the nature of the problem which Brunelleschi solved, viewing this as would a physicist in the tradition of Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, one is startled, at first, by the fact that, as early as the middle decades of the Fifteenth Century, the catenary was used, not merely as a form, but as a physical principle of curvature, to solve the otherwise insoluble problem of construction posed. Brunelleschi used a ‘hanging chain’ form, to guide the workmen in the construction. Other ruses of a principled nature, used by the same Brunelleschi, including camera oscura constructions, afford the modern investigator the means to peek inside the cognitive processes which the great architect mustered in the course of the most notable innovations used in his work.”

Such a construction of a durable world order is the task of the moment. Recalling the Mind-set of LaRouche’s 1983 year of creativity, and its impact on the world, provides the standard, both of the American Presidency and of the dialogue among nations, to which we must aspire.