danielg
13-11-2007, 07:23 PM
Video Games and the Wars of the Future
"In 2013, the Army will unleash a new breed of soldier. A soldier whose lethality has been honed by the finest technologies. A soldier equipped to see first and strike decisively. Today, he's yours to command."
—Advertisement for the video game,
"Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter"
Welcome to Dick Cheney's fantasy world, where the United States fights permanent wars against the "failed states" of the Third World, with legions of Special Forces hunter-killer squads backed up by "shock and awe" air power. This is the reality that Cheney and his backers are actively promoting. And despite the colossal failure of the Iraq War, this so-called Revolution in Military Affairs continues, with heavy emphasis on automated and space-based weapons systems, "information dominance," and computer simulation.
If the wars of the future are to be fought by a new breed of soldier, a ready pool of potential recruits is already being trained. Many of them have not yet entered the military, and some have never touched a weapon. But, thanks to a recently consummated marriage that has been dubbed the "Military-Entertainment Complex," the games of today are preparing them for the wars of tomorrow.
"Ghost Recon," which is based on the premise of a near-future "U.S. intervention on Mexican soil in order to bring back Democracy," was developed by Ubisoft in conjunction with the U.S. Army to showcase its Future Force Warrior concept, which it plans to implement in the near future. "America's Army," an enormously popular online game, was developed by the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, and released in 2002 as the "U.S. Army's Official Game" to bolster recruitment.
These are only two examples of dozens of similar titles plying virtual violence as entertainment—and as training.
With American fighting forces bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, this new phase in the militarization of entertainment and the commercialization of war, is only the latest in a long-term project to destroy the U.S. military from within, which goes at least as far back as the 1957 publication of Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State.
A true war-avoidance policy today requires examining the long arc, beginning with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, up to the present moment of existential crisis, as one, unified process. Combined with the man-machine doctrine of cybernetics, the postwar military transformation has been a key feature of the imperial policy of globalization now being used as the imperative for new wars of "Democracy."
The Soldier and the State
At the time that Huntington wrote The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, the United States was already in the midst of a transformation into a post-industrial state. President Kennedy's extraordinary scientific-industrial drive for the Apollo Project was a temporary interruption in the design for what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a "technetronic" society. As capital-intensive investment in agriculture and industry gave way to an emphasis on the "white-collar" service economy, another pillar of national sovereignty, the institution of the military, was under assault by what President Eisenhower famously warned of as the "Military-Industrial Complex."
Repudiating the obvious lesson of World War II—that the country's military strength was unmatched when it combined a science-driven industrial-logistical base with a clear moral advantage—Huntington called for a reversal of the idea of the citizen-soldier, which had been embedded in America's republican military tradition since the time of George Washington. Instead, he argued that a "professional" military was one not bound by the principles of the nation, but merely trained in "the management of violence."
"The professional army which fights well because it is its job to fight well is far more reliable than the political army which fights well only while sustained by a higher purpose," he wrote. "The military quality of the professional is independent of the cause for which he fights. The supreme military virtue is obedience." According to Huntington, the Korean War was exemplary, because it was the first major war in which the American soldier "fought solely and simply because he was ordered to fight it and not because he shared any identification with the political goals for which the war was being fought. Instead, he developed a supreme indifference to the political goals of the war—the traditional hallmark of the professional."
The Soldier and the State, which is on required reading lists for military officers today, was written at Harvard, under the supervision of, among others, Paul Nitze and William Yandell Elliott, forebears of the fascist neo-conservative movement. Nitze and Elliott were among those pushing an escalation of the Cold War through the constant threat of military confrontation against the Soviet Union.[1] To help shape the appropriate public sentiment for such an outright subversion of U.S. interests, Huntington took aim at the "ignorance and naive hopes" of an American population steeped in the anti-imperialist tradition of peace through development, reflected in Eisenhower's 1950s Atoms for Peace program.
It is no surprise that Huntington explicitly attacked the influence of France's École Polytechnique on the 19th-Century curriculum of West Point, America's premier academy for military officers. With a heavy emphasis on subjects like constructive geometry, West Point produced the leading engineers in the country, who directed the massive rail-building projects that integrated the continental expanse of the country. These served as an essential part of the nation's military and economic security. Through this kind of education, the military was not producing trained killers, but productive citizens who could think creatively .
Man and Machine
The cybernetics project of Bertrand Russell's protégé Norbert Wiener also attacked the "naive" belief in progress that Americans, inspired by the promise of new breakthroughs in nuclear science and space travel, stubbornly defended. Progress, Wiener argued, was merely an illusion, since the entire universe (including the human race) had been handed an irreversible sentence: death by entropy.
"May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom," he wrote in his 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. "The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness."
Wiener claimed that while living organisms, including human beings, may appear to exhibit non-entropic characteristics, they are merely isolated systems fighting the natural tendency towards disorder. They do this through feedback mechanisms, which amount to nothing more than information exchanges through electrochemical impulses transmitted throughout the nervous system. Since every feedback mechanism in a living organism has its correlative in a mechanical system, he said, there is fundamentally no difference between animals—or humans—and machines.
Therefore, Wiener says, society, like an individual organism, could be reduced to a system of communication and control, and be programmed. A series of cybernetics conferences were held under the sponsorship of the Josiah Macy Foundation to elaborate such methods of social control. Many of the social engineers who attended, such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, were instrumental in the Frankfurt-School manipulation of the anti-science 1960s rock-drugs-sex counterculture, through such agencies as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.[2]
The effort to infuse the doctrine of cybernetics into all aspects of culture and economic policy can be heard today in the oft-repeated maxims of globalization, which hail the mythical realms of "Information" and "Cyberspace." Wiener goes so far as to predict that the day will come when we are able to "transmit the whole pattern of the human body" as if through telegraph, to be reconstructed by an appropriate "receiving instrument."(!)
But though Wiener's pseudo-science easily lent itself to science fiction, cybernetic theories of automation were being put into practice. The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA (today called DARPA), was the dominant sponsor of computer-related research beginning in the 1950s. Cold War-driven projects like SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment), an automated air-defense network of unmanned jet planes, led to a growing interest in war gaming and command systems studies. The coming age of automation, according to Wiener, would usher in a "Second Industrial Revolution."
Behavioral psychologists like J.C.R. Licklider, meanwhile, spun new theories to explain the emerging interface between man and machine. Licklider had been a participant at Wiener's cybernetics conferences and was hired by various government, academic and private research labs, many of which sprang up with funding from ARPA. While heading the Command and Control Research division of ARPA in 1960, he wrote a paper titled "Man Computer Symbiosis." In it he stated, "The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."
That hope would take form in such later projects as DARPA's Augmented Cognition (Aug-Cog) to create soldier-computer "dyads," and the movement for a "Post-Human Renaissance," where "there are no demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, between cybernetic mechanism and biological organism."[3] This would become the holy grail of the front-end research that has spun off not only future battlefield technologies, but also much of today's video game industry.
Counterculture to Cyberculture
The effects of the postwar assault on FDR's legacy exploded into full view with the Vietnam War. Most important, it signalled the top-down degeneration of U.S. policy in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination, while experiences on the battlefield showed that kill-power alone doesn't win wars.
Combat training had increased the firing rate—that is, the percentage of American soldiers who would shoot their weapon at the enemy with the intent to kill—from the 15-20% during World War II, to over 95% by the end of the Vietnam War. New methods conditioned soldiers to shoot at human-like targets on reflex, to break down the natural psychological aversion to killing other human beings.[4] This kind of stimulus-response operant conditioning would become a central feature of video-game "shooters" that could be found at most arcades beginning in the 1980s, and are now a fixture at U.S. military installations worldwide.
The concept of the "electronic battlefield" was also introduced during Vietnam, where automated or semi-automated systems coordinating land, sea, and air power could supposedly sanitize warfighting.
Military planners, sitting in front of display screens hundreds of miles away, would call in airstrikes on digital blips, registered from sensors, inserted along the Ho Chi Minh trail, a key supply route for the North Vietnamese. Systems analysts extrapolated the amount of damage their bombs were inflicting on enemy equipment and personnel, but soon discovered that their readings were vastly inflated. (It was claimed that more trucks had been destroyed in these operations than actually existed in the country.)
Surrounding these new developments in military practice, was the transition from "counterculture to cyberculture" then taking shape amidst the social and political trauma of the Vietnam years, and chronicled by figures like Stewart Brand in his 1972 Rolling Stone article, "Spacewar! Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums." ("Spacewar!" was an early video game, created as a recreational side project at one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ARPA-funded computer labs).
This new cyberculture would embrace not only the anti-authoritarian romance of digital communalism, typified by the advent of the Internet, but also the supposedly liberating principles of "market populism"—that is, the anti-government economics of globalized free trade.[5] As stated by two of today's leading advocates of the Revolution in Military Affairs, Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, this supranational economic model was far better suited for the operations of private mercenaries than for national armies that might, after all, be called upon to defend national interests.
Third-Wave War
By 1980, nearly a decade of deindustrialization and deregulation had followed the elimination of the gold-reserve-based Bretton Woods system. The transition to the so-called Information Age as the natural evolutionary shift from "second wave" industrial civilization, to "third wave" post-industrial civilization, was celebrated in Alvin and Heidi Toffler's 1980 The Third Wave. In their 1993 follow-up book, War and Anti-War, they argued that under the clash between second- and third-wave cultures, nation-states would dissolve, as they faced "endless outbreaks of 'small wars.' " Militaries, including privatized "professionals" on contract with the United Nations or individual states, would have to be reshaped to adapt to this post nation-state world of "anarchic turbulence."
At the same time, military officers like Gen. Donn Starry, were closely studying how to apply the concepts of the third wave to warfighting. Starry was then head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, which was formed in 1973 to rethink Army doctrine, and would draw on some of the worst concepts then being popularized to sell the end of national sovereignty in the sleek packaging of "globalization."
In the aftermath of Vietnam, cyberfreaks, new agers, and downright occultic Satanists had thrown their efforts into remaking the military. Army officers Col. Paul Vallely and Lt. Col. Michael Aquino authored a 1980 discussion paper titled "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory," detailing a scheme to utilize new technologies to wage the equivalent of psychological total war, using America's dominance of "electronic media" to "make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago."[6] In the Hobbesian virtual world projected by these utopians, the U.S. military would be the world's high-tech Leviathan, playing "whack-a-mole" with any upstart regional power that refused to accept the emerging consensus for a globalized world order.
The new paradigm was called "Transformation," and would emphasize smaller, more mobile, more lethal forces, not dependent on the (quickly shrinking) in-depth industrial capacities of the national economy. The "lethality" of the individual "warfighter" would be enhanced by networked communications and other digital technologies. The new military ideal would no longer be the model of the citizen-soldier, but that of the cyborg.
The Military-Entertainment Complex
It was also in 1980 that the military formed its first major partnership with a video-game company, when the Army contracted with Atari to modify its tank-shooter arcade game "Battlezone" for official training use.
Video games had come into their own during the late 1970s, having been developed by veterans of early ARPA-funded defense projects. By 2006, video and personal computer (PC) games had become a $13.5 billion industry (not counting the many online games available free), including a huge array of war-based games, ranging from simulations of fictional NATO counterterror operations in "Rainbow-Six: Rogue-Spear," to re-enactments of World War II battles in the "Medal of Honor" series. Game company Kuma\War (motto: "Real War News. Real War Games.") goes a step further, offering re-enactments of battles only days or weeks old, with a constant real-life source for updated missions coming straight out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Already, by the early 1980s, when games and graphics were prehistoric by comparison, military recruiters began to troll video arcades to find kids whose skills would serve them well in future combat roles.[7]
With the end of the Cold War, the military's transformation kicked into high gear. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney massively downsized the military, hired Halliburton to conduct a secret study on the privatization of core military functions, and authored a Defense Planning Guidance calling for the United States to maintain lone superpower status through preemptive wars. He also oversaw the deployment of 500,000 American troops for the 1990-91 Gulf War, during which U.S. technological supremacy was seen as proof, by advocates of the Revolution in Military Affairs, that war had entered the information age.
President Clinton's Defense Secretaries William Perry and William Cohen were also big fans of "information warfare." In a 1997 speech at Fort Irwin, Cohen told the troops: "What we're witnessing now is the transformation of the level of information as broad and as absolute as one can conceive of it today. So, actual domination of the information world will put us in a position to maintain superiority over any other force for the foreseeable future."[8]
Despite the proliferation of euphemistic phrases and acronyms to describe this supposedly new form of war, the stench of old-fashioned British-style imperialism is hard to cover up. For example, Pentagon advisor Thomas P.M. Barnett, in his book Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2005), outlines a lunatic plan to enforce globalization through a combination of "Netcentric" (high-tech automated weapons systems) and "Fourth Generation" (Special Forces counterinsurgency) war, to export security from the "Core" (the globalized Western world and its allies) to the "Gap" (everyone else). He gloats that young people are already attuned to this policy, given that they are "the most overly programmed ... generation that America has ever produced."
'All But War Is Simulation'
In 1992, the U.S. Army established the Simulation Training and Instrument Command (STRICOM), tasked with developing the Advanced Distributed Simulation Technology program and furthering links between simulations research and the armed forces. It has since changed its name to PEO STRI (Program Executive Office for Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command), but has retained its motto: "All But War Is Simulation."
Ten years earlier, SIMNET (Simulated Network) had been launched by DARPA's Jack Thorpe, a retired Air Force major. With the help of private contractors Perceptronics and BBN Laboratories (which once employed behavioral psychologist Licklider in the 1950s), the military sought to create a "networked virtual battlespace," which would allow multiple people to train simultaneously on different modules. When SIMNET became operational in 1990, one of its first applications was the Army's Close Combat Tactical Trainer for tank warfare, which would be a major part of ground operations during Desert Storm.
Of course, computer-simulated combat was not confined to military research centers. A whole generation of youth was spending increasing amounts of time in virtual battle in the arcade, on their home video-game consoles, and increasingly on their PCs. The 1993 release of id Software's "Doom" for the PC was something of an innovation. Although the first-person shooter genre had been introduced with the previous year's "Wolfenstein 3d," "Doom" had more violence and better graphics. Subsequent versions also included the source code, allowing players to modify the game to their personal specifications.
It was such a modification that produced "Marine Doom." In 1996, Marine Commandant Charles Krulak issued a memorandum with a directive to find ways to ensure that "Marines come to work and spend part of each day talking about warfighting: learning to think, making decisions, and being exposed to tactical and operational issues," including through the use of "computer-based war games." The Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office established a "Computer Based Wargames Catalog," and two Marine programmers, who would later go on to work for video-game companies, modified "Doom II" as a tactical trainer for four-man fire squads.
A 1997 report entitled "Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense," summarized the proceedings of a National Research Council conference which brought together representatives from the military and entertainment world. Their goal was to map out a working relationship whereby the same cutting-edge simulations and virtual reality research brought to bear on enhanced training programs for the military, could also be used in commercially developed video games. Such would be the mission of the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT).
Just Like the 'Holodeck'
With $45 million from the Army, the ICT was established in 1999, at the campus of the University of Southern California to be the premier laboratory for the science, and art, of fantasy. It is staffed with Hollywood writers, graphics designers, and computer engineers, whose simulations research revolves around behavior modelling and artificial intelligence.
But the ultimate aim, explicitly outlined by some of ICT's creators, is to actually construct Star Trek's "holodeck" (the holographic simulations room used on the TV show). Though the "immersive experience" they have achieved so far is still limited to wraparound projection screens, vibrating headsets, and a "scent collar" that can emit the authentic battlefield smells of gunpowder and Arabic spices, their mandate is to push the boundaries of interactive simulation.
As stated in the summary for the ICT's Sensory Environments Evaluation (SEE) project, whose research includes the role of video-game play on performance in simulated environments: "Recent neurobiological studies have found that emotional experiences stimulate mechanisms that enhance the creation of long-term memories. Thus, more effective training scenarios can be designed by incorporating key emotional cues." Creating memories is exactly what simulation research is all about, according to West Point graduate Michael Macedonia, the chief scientist and technical director of PEO STRI who helped create the ICT.
In addition to conditioning through immersion, new combat training techniques emphasize "increased situational awareness" for "data-rich environments," namely, the urban battle zones American soldiers are expected to fight in during the coming years. DARPA's Improving Warfighter's Information Intake Under Stress project, otherwise known as Augmented Cognition, shows where this research is headed.
Through a device attached to the soldier's head, brain activity would be regulated by a computer interface, to optimize the incoming information flow of auditory and visual data from the environment, creating a symbiosis between man and machine called a dyad. Here is Huntington's professional soldier with a cyberculture twist: a souped-up warrior whose primary virtue is that he can "process information" faster and better than the enemy.
The training techniques being designed by today's "visionaries" in virtual technologies and artificial intelligence are, in reality, based on nothing more than the reductionist belief that the human mind is a programmable system, not fundamentally different from an animal or machine. This absurd premise had already been thoroughly refuted by the time of Plato, where, in dialogues like the Meno, Plato demonstrates the characteristic power of the human mind to transcend logical systems—in other words, to change the rules of the game.
Killer Graphics
With ventures like the ICT, the gap between official training simulations and gaming entertainment, which had been shrinking for 20 years, has all but vanished. The commercial logic of using video games for training is reflected in growing profits for game companies, while the military logic of relying on recruits primed on violent games jives with the new emphasis on lethality.
Earlier this year, "America's Army," "The Army's Official Game," surpassed 8 million registered users, as one of the most played games. Like the extremely popular "Counterstrike," "America's Army" is a networked first-person shooter, with the added feature of taking the "recruit" through virtual boot camp and basic combat training before the start of a variety of simulated missions, all of it rendered down to authentic detail. Although it is a recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, the game is available free to anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection.
While the PC-based "America's Army" was produced by the Navy's MOVES Institute, the ICT Games Project, with the collaboration of Sony, and gamemakers THQ and Pandemic Studios, turned out the console-based "Full Spectrum Warrior" in 2004, with a sequel in 2006. The commercial version is only slightly different than that used as an official training aid, though a simple code available to gamers unlocks the military version. The game—whose title refers to the Revolution in Military Affairs concept of full-spectrum dominance, a key term in the Defense Department's "Joint Force" blueprints for future war—simulates urban combat against fictional Middle Eastern insurgents like the Mujahideen al-Zeki and the Anser al-Ra'id.
Though players gun down "insurgents," and blow up buildings, cars, and people, developers emphasize that, more than anything else, these games teach "leadership skills" and teamwork.
The Next Revolution
While globalization has brought our once-proud economy to the brink of a violent implosion, our military has been reduced to fighting brutal wars of occupation.
In Iraq, we see none of the gleaming attributes implied by high-flying phrases like "Netcentric Warfare," "Full Spectrum Dominance," or "Third Wave Cyberwar"; but only the decay of wrenching poverty and desperate futility brought on by endless urban combat. The actual Revolution in Military Affairs has aimed to destroy the fundamental principles of the military itself.
A challenge stands before the young adult generation of the world today, the choice of pathway for the next 50 years of human history. Recent developments suggest an imperative that does not involve the permanent wars of Cheney's preference. Instead, they point to the possibility of worldwide corridors of development, spanning the globe in a network of nuclear power plants, magnetic levitation rail lines, and new agro-industrial centers.
Such an undertaking would bring sovereign nations into new relationships of cooperation to uplift their populations, and call upon transformed institutions—including the military, reconnected to a national sense of purpose—to carry out the greatest engineering feat in human history.
This is a mission that will also call upon the creative powers of the next generation of world leaders, powers not dulled by digitally enhanced fantasy. Such is the new breed of statesmen ready to emerge.
[1] Speech by Clifford A. Kiracofe, Jr., "U.S. Imperialism: The National Security State," EIR, March 17, 2006.
[2] Jeffrey Steinberg, "From Cybernetics to Littleton—Techniques in Mind Control," EIR May 5, 2000.
[3] Tim Lenoir, "All But War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex," Configurations, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 289-335.
[4] David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995).
[5] Harley Schlanger, "From Hippies to Hedge Fund Operators: The Case of Jeff Skoll," EIR, April 20, 2007.
[6] Jeffrey Steinberg, "Cheney's 'Spoon-Benders' Pushing Nuclear Armageddon," EIR, Aug. 25, 2005; and "Satanic Subversion of the U.S. Military," EIR, July 2, 1999.
[7] Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press 2006).
[8] James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001).
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danielg
13-11-2007, 07:25 PM
The LaRouche Show
MySpace, Facebook Turn Youth Into
Cyber-Fodder for New Hitler Movement
Here is an edited transcript of The LaRouche Show of Nov. 2, hosted by Harley Schlanger, Lyndon LaRouche's Western States spokesman, who was joined by two members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, Oyang Teng, whose article "Video Games and the Wars of the Future," appeared in the Aug. 10 issue of EIR, and Cody Jones, a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee. The show airs every Saturday afternoon, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time, at www.larouchepub.com/radio/index.html.
Schlanger: On today's program, we are going to examine and dissect the movement which was designed to create a mass-based fascist movement, targetting the youth of America for recruitment. As we will demonstrate, this movement was launched by a gang which is using a model that is centuries old, going back to Paolo Sarpi and Venice. It's a movement which is anti-science and anti-technology, yet it claims to be a product of the so-called high-tech revolution. It's a movement which, while proclaiming to be decentralized and anti-hierarchical, is actually controlled by the highest level of the financial oligarchy. And, while proclaiming itself to be democratic, it's transforming those in the 16- to 30-year-old age-group into stormtroopers, cold-blooded killers for a fascist movement.
I'm talking about two interrelated aspects of the so-called digital revolution: Interactive websites, such as MySpace and Facebook; and violent video games, which are already leading contributing factors in mass murder, as in Littleton, Colo., and last Spring at Virginia Tech University. In remarks last Tuesday night [Oct. 30], Lyndon LaRouche identified these computer cybernetic operations as "mental cemeteries, aimed at trapping the entire youth generation, and turning them into cyber-fodder for the new Hitler movement."...
As you know, a part of my function over the years, has been to look at the culture, or rather the accelerating degeneration of culture, so we can create an awareness of how the present-day financial oligarchy launches synthetic movements to destroy human creativity, reducing the majority of the population to the status of what LaRouche calls "human cattle." One of the things we've discovered is that the ultimate weapon in social control, is to convince youth that they are voluntarily, democratically, and with free will, "choosing" what is, in fact, mental slavery. You two recently presented a forum at a cadre school on the origins of cyberspace as a mechanism of social control, so I'd like to begin by asking first Cody, and then Oyang, to summarize your findings.
Wiener and the Cult of Cybernetics
Jones: Okay. I had centered on the figure of Norbert Wiener, who, people may know, was a student of Bertrand Russell, who committed his whole life to one-world government; who had proposed nuking the Soviet Union, prior to his finding out that they themselves had developed the bomb; and who had written numerous attacks on people like Leibniz and Bernhard Riemann, who are at the foundation of Lyndon LaRouche's own intellectual development and his discoveries in physical economy. And so, effectively, what you have with Wiener, who coined the term "cybernetics," and had developed the whole idea of "information theory," was an attempt, as you had mentioned earlier, Harley, to revive or bring back to the forefront, the tradition of Paolo Sarpi, which is the tradition of eliminating creativity, eliminating discovery, and clouding it over with the idea of "information" and linearization of that discovery process.
And so, what he does in his book Cybernetics, is, he starts off with saying, we can eliminate such things as trigonometry from our investigations in science, particularly as it relates to the computer, which, in effect, is to eliminate that whole arc of development, that LaRouche has emphasized, going back to the ancient Pythagoreans and Egyptians in their work on Sphaerics, up through Riemann's work on hypergeometries.
Schlanger: Well, in doing that, Cody, Wiener is actually following an old model of attacking the original discovery and trying to formalize it, right?
Jones: Right, exactly. And that's exactly what he does. He says, the thing which is more appropriate to dealing with the so-called science of information theory, is to use formulations that come out of Brownian motion, as opposed to elliptical functions, etc. Brownian motion is simply the idea that everything is random, and that everything can be understood by simple statistical analysis. You can't really know principle, you can't know the truth behind anything, but you can get statistical analysis and an idea of how random events will probably turn out.
And so, in doing that, he had, as you said, wiped out the idea of discovery, wiped out that whole arc of development that LaRouche has been pointing to, and replaced it with this formalization, a sort of "flat Earth" view of reality, and created an alternative reality.
Schlanger: In one of his articles, Wiener said the science of cybernetics is the study of effective messages of control. So that's somewhat interesting there. But he reduces human creativity to an interface between man and machines, and says that, essentially, humans are organisms through which bits of information flow and are processed. So that's where you have the destruction of the creative idea, right?
Jones: Exactly. If you look, for example, at the work that's been coming out of the so-called Basement teams [members of the LYM, working on fundamental scientific discoveries, in the basement of a home in Loudoun County, Va.], they've been looking at the development of things like elliptical functions, higher transcendentals—these are things where singularities pop up, as paradoxes from a lower system as you try to approach a higher system. What Wiener does say, is, we can eliminate that, and replace those singularities with infinite approximations. It's tantamount to the idea that you could square the circle: that we can replace the circle with an infinite series of straight lines and angles. And by doing that, you eliminate the actual creative process, and the whole history of the development of modern science.
Schlanger: Now Oyang, why don't you pick up from what Cody has just developed in terms of the framework launched by Wiener in cybernetics. How did that end up getting transferred into the computer revolution?
Teng: Well, I would also just add, in terms of Wiener's work, if you look at the way that he describes the science of cybernetics, he's pretty self-consciously aligning himself with the tradition of Zeus, because he even goes through the parable of Prometheus, but says that the lesson to draw from that, is that every time we make scientific discoveries, it comes back to bite us, and therefore science has to be effectively controlled by an elite; and makes a very big point of saying the entire universe is governed by the law of entropy. And so, if the entire universe is simply a chaotic, random process, then, in that context, he says, we study cybernetics, which are these local areas, where certain systems are trying to fight this tendency toward disorder. But the effect being, that you eliminate universals from any consideration of cause; that you're simply looking at what he calls "feedback mechanisms," through the flow of information.
So, if you think about the way people talk about globalization today—the Internet revolution, the Information Age—all of that was already laid down as a pattern by Wiener's work. And what came afterwards, is basically reducing the entire universe, and therefore societies and human cultures within that universe, to just a sort of random accumulation of different interactions.
The appeal of MySpace and all of these social networking sites, is that you've got no constraints. And if you think about the video-game world, this is a very well-documented history. This came out of the research that was done, starting with the Defense Department, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA—it became DARPA—and that was all coming off of Wiener's work, and looking at how you create command and control systems in the military. And it's well-known that this then laid the foundations for things like the Internet, the personal computer, and increasingly, as you get into the '80s and '90s, as the idea of the "Information Age" becomes the idea driving economic policy, then it becomes the fusion of entertainment and the military.
That is to say: "We've got to create a military that's adequate to a world where there's going to be no nation-states, and therefore, we're going to have to be drawing from a population which is increasingly submerged in virtual reality; these are going to be the foot soldiers for the 21st Century." And that became what today is coming out in the form of things like Halo 3 and these other video games, which is directly the product of research going from the military, crossing over to the entertainment "industry," and using the theories of Wiener and the people that came after him, to say, "Well, we're really moving into an era of post-humanism. And the human individual is going to be simply, effectively, a digital system, or something that can be interfaced with a digital system." And that's really, in terms of the cultural aspect, behind what you've got in the video games, this is what people are putting themselves into as they sit in front of the screen for four or five hours at a time.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Schlanger: Okay, I want to go into that a little bit more.
Now, Oyang, I wanted to follow up something that you brought up, which is the role of ARPA, or later, DARPA. The defense community was very much involved in the beginning in the work on computers, but there's a mythology out there, which is promoted by people such as Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue, which is, "Well, the defense community was trying to develop it through mainframes and gigantic systems. But fortunately, a bunch of pot-smoking hippies infiltrated this defense community operation in the [San Francisco] Bay Area, and provided the anti-hierarchical, democratic quality which we see today in the Internet." I'd like to know what either of you have to say about that. How do you refute that argument?
Teng: I think the key is, if you look at someone like Timothy Leary, you look at some of the gurus of the counterculture back in the '60s and '70s, who were the icons of the LSD drug culture—you know, the "tune in, turn on, drop out" phenomenon—these guys themselves said that virtual reality and the cyberculture was an advancement on the kind of social control and mind-altering experiences that you could have with even something like LSD. As Leary said, the biggest problem we're running into is this commitment, this Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality. He said, this has plagued Europe and the United States for centuries.
And so their whole polemic was against the idea that there is such a thing as reality. And it's not a surprise that these are the guys who come out as the leading promoters of a virtual form of economics, in the form of globalized hedge fund operations, computer modelling, and the idea of using the Internet to replace production.
So they were self-consciously in the driver's seat in the transition from the counterculture to the cyberculture.
Schlanger: You mentioned something really interesting there about this idea of replacing production, and this is one of the points that LaRouche has been unique in making, in connecting this idea of cybernetics with the post-industrial society. And I've just been working on Alan Greenspan's autobiography, where he talks about how we've "moved beyond matter," in the economy. It's now the "light economy." And there's this whacked-out piece by John Perry Barlow, who is the former so-called "lyricist" of the Grateful Dead, called "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." And in it, he says, in cyberspace, there is no matter. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders! He says, we are forming our own "social contract," but it's a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
Cody, I wonder if you could comment on that?
Jones: Well, what you see with cyberspace, is the "end of history" doctrine. Because, as LaRouche has pointed out, history really is a higher-order succession of discoveries—discoveries of principle, whether it's in science, or art, or statecraft.
In cyberspace, discovery has been eliminated, because you're in a fixed system, with a fixed set of axioms, where everything that you do, has to take place according to some logical deduction from that system. So, by its very nature, creativity, discovery of a new principle, is banned. Hypothetically, you have someone like Wiener, who discusses the possibility that computers or machines could start to produce other machines—they could become self-replicating. Well, even were that to take place in that system, you'd be still operating based off a fixed, logical system, whereas, say those machines started to come up against real boundaries, in terms of depletion of resources, etc., that system would never allow for the discovery of a new principle, of a new resource, to overcome the boundaries which they are running up against.
And this is indicative of the problem we're running into in our modern economy, which is, people who think from this standpoint, have no idea how to now deal with the kind of real boundaries we're running into in our physical economy, like lack of water, energy, breaking down of infrastructure, etc.
So, it really is a disease which is dooming mankind right now.
Social Engineering by Computer
Schlanger: Well, Cody, let me bring this to the question, also, now, of the social engineering websites, like MySpace and Facebook. You're one of the founding members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and we, on the West Coast, noticed that there was a hunger among a section of the youth, seven and eight years ago, for truth, for purpose, for meaning. I'm wondering, have you noticed that that's changing a bit now, as we have younger people who have grown up completely immersed in virtual reality and the computer revolution?
Jones: Yeah, of course. You still have the singularities. You can't completely kill the human spirit. But one thing which many of us have discussed and noticed, is that, on the campuses now, the ability to interact socially has been almost totally destroyed. Just carrying out a simple conversation, human-to-human interaction, where you actually use your speaking voice, and have to communicate an idea in real time to a live human being—that's really been destroyed.
So, you're seeing just a general literacy level, and an ability to interact socially, that have been severely crippled. And obviously, as LaRouche has made the point, and as our movement has been committed to, it's really through the social process that new ideas are communicated from one human being to another, through metaphor, through paradox. And to the extent that that's being attacked and destroyed, it's really an attack on the ability to communicate new ideas.
Schlanger: And how prevalent is MySpace with people we're meeting now, say, who are freshmen, 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds?
Jones: It's quite prevalent. You have this phenomenon, that a lot of people like to claim that they're not on it, because it's becoming one of those things, where it became so cool that now it's not cool any more. But we've actually caught some of our contacts: "No, I'm not on MySpace. That's not cool any more." And then you go on MySpace and look up their name, and their page pops right up.
So, it's very prevalent, it's a dominant form of social activity in today's culture.
An 'Open Conspiracy
Schlanger: Here are two quotes from the so-called co-founders of MySpace: One is a guy named [Chris] DeWolfe, who said, "This generation wants to be known, they want to be famous. MySpace facilitates that. This generation is self-involved." And then he later describes MySpace as a "lifestyle choice." The other founder, Tom Anderson, who is supposedly everybody's friend, says, "I think of it [MySpace] as the reality TV of the Internet."
Now, Oyang, you wrote on the question of the violent video games. I assume that's quite prevalent also. What was the most startling thing you discovered from looking at this?
Teng: Well, number one, the axioms behind the research that led to this stuff are actually out in the open. This a perfect example of an "open conspiracy," which is generally the most dangerous kind: You don't have to go searching behind the curtains to find out why this is being used to destroy a whole generation of people. Wiener is very open with it. The people who are carrying out the research today, the front end of the research, the simulation technology, which is being fused into the entertainment/mass marketing of these games, these guys really believe in the fusion between the human being and the machine, as effectively a "cyborg."
And these are people who probably grew up with a little too much Robocop and Terminator, and this kind of outlook. And science fiction actually plays a huge role, if you look at the literature, and even just in the nature of the work itself, they are kind of flagship institutions for simulations in video-game research, as it paired with the military: this outfit down in the University of Southern California, called the Institute for Creative Technology. And their mandate—maybe it's their unofficial mandate, but it's open and explicit—is to create the "holodeck" from the Starship Enterprise: Which is the simulations room where, effectively, you can create reality inside of a room, any kind of reality you choose. And this is really what these guys are driving for. Their view of the world is totally dissociated.
Schlanger: Both of you live in California, where in a sense, we're having a social experiment of a fascist, George Shultz, working with a Democratic fascist, Felix Rohatyn, to create a governor who some think is a cyborg; who is there to impose fascism, through cuts in social welfare, cuts in education, cuts in health care, while portraying himself as a "man of the people." So, in a sense, we may already be further down this road to the Brave New World than most people think.
Jones: One point on that, Harley. It's important for people to know that, as we mentioned with people like Wiener, one of the first cybernetics conferences, one of the attendees there was a guy named Kurt Lewin, who was part of the social engineering project that came out of the '40s, and developed into the hippies movement. One of the protégés of Kurt Lewin, was in fact, George Shultz, who studied under Lewin, and then went and studied under Milton Friedman. So, he sort of brings those two schools together, and now he's controlling this cyborg, as you said, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Murdoch: the 'Digital Immigrant'
Schlanger: Well, we decided on this program, we're going to be fair and balanced, as Fox News claims to be. So, we've invited the owner of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, to come on the program, to present the other side of what you've been hearing so far.
So, let me welcome him: Good afternoon, Mr. Murdoch, or should I call you, Sir Rupert?
[LYM member Aaron Halevy is heard, with a heavy "Aussie" accent, impersonating Murdoch.]
"Murdoch": G'day, yes, that's fine.
Schlanger: You described yourself recently as a "digital immigrant." Why did you decide to buy MySpace.
"Murdoch": Well, y'know, it really has to do with just trying to advertise, that's a big part of it. I think this is an area in which my news enterprise has not been involved. And getting involved in the Internet is an important area to conduct business, and I think we can make a lot of money of it. So that was the initial conception. We spend a bit here in the investment, but you do have an access to a lot of people, a lot of people consuming ideas, spending their time on the Internet, a lot of young people. So, that was the idea.
Schlanger: What about the charge that some people make, that you wanted MySpace as part of a profiling operation.
"Murdoch": Uh, well... well, in a certain way. It's important to have the ability to see what people are into, to see their likes and dislikes, so you can, again, like I said, advertise to them. We do have a certain way of monitoring the way people—what movie they like, what books—well, they don't read books any more; what video games they like and things like that. So, we can use that information and sell it to different companies and advertise back.
Schlanger: Now, this is a question that may get you a little upset, because you have an image as a conservative. But what do you say to those who way that MySpace is nothing but a "digital meat market" in which people invent identities for purposes of hooking up for sex?
"Murdoch": Ha-ha-ha... Well! That's obviously a bit of a stretch. I don't necessarily think that everyone's doing that. I mean, there's big discussion about—you want to socialize, you want to meet people that you may not meet. You know, young people today are very anti-social, so to speak, so this gives them a chance to express themselves freely. And honestly, I think, part of the problem is, these days, religion is becoming less and less effective. And so, people start thinking, "Well, I don't want any God or anything controlling my decisions, my emotions." And in the end, what this creates is a condition where people can decide for themselves, where they can engage in what they like, and what they dislike, and no one can tell them what to do. I think that's the real point here.
Schlanger: Well, it sounds like you're buying into this line that it's "democratic."
"Murdoch": Oh, definitely. Well, it's even beyond democracy, or anything. It is, I think—it's globalization to its extreme. It really does knock down the borders. It creates a totally free market, in which people can decide what things they're going to consume, with no one really telling them what to do.
Schlanger: What would you say to the charge we've made on this program, that MySpace is really just a component of psychological warfare against youth, on behalf of a fascist movement, run by financial oligarchs, such as yourself?
"Murdoch": Well! Y'better watch what you say. Because, really, it does go back. I mean, you look at Bertrand Russell, I mean, he's one of my mentors, one of the people that I associated with, maybe back and forth, in between when I was working for Lord Beaverbrook during the time of the Nazis and afterwards, and you know, the idea in the beginning was to have a society where we could get rid of dictatorships, get rid of government in general. And y'know, Huxley and Adorno, they had different ideas on this, and y'know, you want to try to convince people, basically, that they're making their own decisions. And that the conclusions they come to are purely their own. So, in effect, as Huxley said, you create a concentration camp without tears.
I mean, honestly, I think that's where you and your fellows belong, because, uh, the things that you're doing are not really useful in this economy, and that's one thing I did want to make sure that you and anyone else here listening, has a certain understanding of: that this is not really going to be in existence much longer.
Schlanger: So you actually believe that globalization will succeed, and that you can induce youth to destroy their own minds?
"Murdoch": Oh, definitely! I mean this—it's not something—what's in their minds, is not necessarily anything that is valuable. I mean! I dunno, we've been monitoring different things, Harley—we've been watching what you've been doing, and obviously I think that you should be eating grass—you and your friends here. Because, y'know, these things are not necessary any more: We can have one nation. We don't need nation-states, we don't need any of these things.
Y'know, Bertrand Russell, he had the conception that, as I said, religion plays a reduced amount of control on the population, but the media, movies, newspapers, things like that, are increasing in their ability to help people make decisions on what they should think. Now, I would put the Internet in that list, for sure.
Schlanger: Well, Sir Rupert, we hope you'll stay on. Maybe Cody and Oyang will have a question for you. But for the moment, we'd like you to be quiet and sit back and listen.
"Murdoch": Oh, yes. Can I get their last name—Cody What?
Financiers' One-World dictatorship
Schlanger: So, Cody, how accurate is this characterization of Rupert Murdoch, in your thinking?
Jones: Yeah, I think it's right on point. It's very clear, if you look at the figure that was mentioned, Bertrand Russell. He, himself, had been very explicit about his intention to create a one-world government, a one-world dictatorship. And Murdoch is simply an expression of that ideology.
Schlanger: And Oyang?
Teng: I would agree.
Schlanger: Now, when we look at something like what happened at Virginia Tech, I don't know if you were in the War Room [the LYM operations center] at the time, Oyang, but there was an effort to bring up this issue of video games. And one of the things we discovered, is that Bill Gates and Microsoft—Gates just pumped some money into Facebook—that Gates has a vested interest in these video games. Oyang, would you say something on that?
Teng: We'd done some work looking at the financial control over the whole video-game apparatus, they made a big deal about the fact that it's surpassed movies in terms of gross sales worldwide and in the United States, and so forth. So what you find, when you begin to look at the control, the financial control of things that people think are just part of their culture, part of the youth culture, something that's their own, actually you find that it only exists to the degree that it's been financed, supported, funded, and created by hedge funds, by the biggest financial players in the world. And Gates plays into this thing.
There was a famous movie clip circulating, which you can find online, which shows him actually entering one of his own games, Doom, and blowing away a couple of the demons in Doom, as part of a promotional package for Microsoft.
So, these guys, a lot of them, someone like Gates probably believe some of their own propaganda about the wonders of virtual reality. And I don't know if Gates quite fits into the category of top oligarch in the world, but one of the problems with these guys, is that they are—actually because of inbreeding, and maybe inbreeding through Internet chatrooms, and other things—they have actually reduced the quality of the gene pool among the oligarchy: So these guys are not too bright. And actually, you can see that in the fact that their financial system is collapsing.
"Murdoch": No, no. No, it's not. Actually, if you look at the Dow Jones, and the Wall Street Journal, you can see clearly that it's not collapsing. That's a lie.
Schlanger: Now, Cody, let me ask you a question on this: Because we talk to a lot of people, who argue that MySpace is just a way of communicating, a way of staying in touch with their friends—
Jones: That's right.
The MySpace Fantasy World
Schlanger: When you run into somebody who says that, how do you answer them?
Jones: Well, first off, you have to ask them: What are they communicating? To differentiate between exchanging information and trying to find a way to exchange bodily fluids, and actually communicating ideas. And that's effectively what MySpace is: It's just a way for people to avoid reality, and avoid discussion of ideas, and sort of let their inhibitions run wild.
So, the best way to deal with it, is to make fun of it. I don't think anyone, if you really corner them, can seriously say that MySpace is a means of "communicating profound ideas respecting man and nature."
Schlanger: I've heard people say that fascism, the essence of fascism, is trying to stop people from getting on MySpace. Why would someone say something like that?
Jones: That's part of the brainwashing. If you look at the history of, say, the fascist movement in Germany, it came out of the cabaret movement, which was a real free sex, sex with anything that moves, pure decadence.
Schlanger: It was a counterculture.
Jones: Yeah, the counterculture. And that's what then spawned the fascist movement in Germany in particular. Now, it was out of those same networks, that the people came that then produced that counterculture which is now the essence of the current MySpace. What goes on there? That's what it is: You're free from any constraints of physical reality. You can be a pedophile, you can be a rapist, you can be a killer, you can be a dope smoker, you can do whatever you want, free of the constraints of reality and morality, and physical economy, etc. And so, it is the basis of a fascist movement, as LaRouche pointed out: Because when you get someone in that fantasy state, if all of a sudden you pull the plug—the lights go out, the power goes down, because we haven't invested—you're going to have a bunch of enraged, homicidal killers.
Schlanger: Who know how to kill now, because they've been on these video games.
Now, I'm going to read you a quote from someone who claims to be a very successful practitioner of MySpace. This is from a profile on MySpace in Vanity Fair. This guy says: "I know guys who are not even as good-looking as me, who get laid like crazy because of MySpace. I'm actually shy. There are women I wouldn't go up to at a club, but I'll e-mail them on MySpace. For some reason, you get on there, and all the barriers come down. Girls will say things they'd never say to you in public. And there's the mystery element, the intangible thing. 'Is he real?' It makes them want you more."
I mean, a part of this is just an unleashing of the fantasy and libidos, exactly as Aldous Huxley described in his Brave New World, hmm? Oyang, you want to comment?
Teng: Yeah, and of course, the way that people now learn economics, whether it's through school or just what they're getting from popular culture, is that the fundamental driver for economics, today, is your libido, anyway. So if you have access to more, I think as that guy's quoted, "more ass" than ever before, then really you're playing a fundamentally important role in the economy. That's the rationale.
Schlanger: Now, we brought up this question of the interface of news, sports, and entertainment. Of course, Sir Rupert, that's what you're doing with Fox, right?
"Murdoch": Oh right, definitely. Y'know, the way I see it, you've got a certain amount of time; people have more time, because there's not that many jobs. So, one of the things is, you can monopolize their time: You've got iPods, you've got the Internet, you can actually purchase that, and try to take that away, y'know, advertise to them the entire time. That's what you can do in sports, you can do that with sex, everything. It works very well.
And the thing I think you guys are all wrong on, is that you see it as bad. Because, honestly, I see this is definitely, this is what people want. I'm just providing them with what they want themselves.
Schlanger: Isn't that the whole purpose of virtual reality? Cody, you were talking about this earlier, in terms of the attempt to free oneself from the sense of responsibility about society. If you're trapped in a fantasy-world 24 hours a day, you can see the auto industry close down, houses being foreclosed, banks collapsing, but you're still online in your fantasy—until you can no longer pay the electric bill. So, isn't that basically what we're talking about?
Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of it, is that if you look at people's entire education, the way they're raised, and then the economy that they develop in, they grew up in a world where the idea of being able to intervene to change a reality which they may not like, has been robbed from them: The sense of the human intervention into reality to change it for the better, has been taken away. And that would otherwise potentially create frustration, revolt, etc., so then that's pacified through presenting them, "Well, here's your alternative. You can't actually change the world, but what you can do, is you can change reality through the Internet, through these kind of MySpace fantasies, etc." So it becomes a way to—it really is a concentration camp of the mind, "without tears."
Teng: I want to say something, too. Because, people probably know that LaRouche PAC—we've got a website, which our intent may be a little ways off, but it's to take over the Internet with Reason. But the key to the effectiveness of our website, versus say, something like MoveOn.org, is that our website is effective and active because it's based on what we're doing as a movement in real life, on the ground, around the world. And it functions to actually further, and deepen the dialogue around the actual strategic nature of the situation we're in. As opposed to just throwing up a website, and saying, "Well, if we can get X number of people on, and somehow aware, then that is going to magically create the kind of mass, spontaneous social change that's needed."
And that's really no different than the mentality, the ideology behind the free market, which is that you've got this mysterious "Invisible Hand," which is going to somehow regulate the universe. And more often than not, as we've pointed out to people, it ends up spanking people. And it's part of the whole idea that you give up any kind commitment to responsibility for the direction society goes.
Schlanger: Well, you know, they say that Bush said to Greenspan, "Is that the Invisible Hand in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" [laughter]
What we keep coming back to then, is this question of human interaction, as opposed to people in a process of self-discovery in virtual reality. Which, of course, is not a process of self-discovery, it's a process of masturbation.
Now, I want to get back to this question of real discovery then, as the counter. Because I hope we get some people to listen to this program, and if you're listening to it, you can tell your friends to get on it, and it's archived at http://www.larouchepub.com/radio/archive_2007.html. And we intend to follow this through: We're going to continue a campaign, we may be putting out a pamphlet, titled, "Is Goebbels in Your Laptop?," because this is an important issue.
A Real, Creative Life
But we also have to present the solution, and this is where it gets a little more difficult. But both of you have been involved in the choral work, you're involved in the science work. What is it that is the counter for someone who's looking for identity in a phony, made-up identity posted on MySpace, or the sense of power you get from massive kills in a video game: What's the counter to that?
Jones: Well, the counter to that, is primarily the work that's being done, in the Virginia area, in the Leesburg area; out of the Basement; and also the music work. Where, what you find, and this is the principle that Leibniz had brought up, it's the principle upon which our nation is founded, which is that real human happiness is derived through discovery of principle, and the communication of those discoveries to other human beings. Developing a sense of immortality, through discovery and through passing on a greater potential to the next generation, that that's what lives beyond you.
And so this is what we're doing: reviving the arc of development of that process of discovery, and the history of creativity on planet Earth.
"Murdoch": Listen, listen! You're making me sick, over here, with what you're saying! This is the most stupid thing I've ever heard! You're trying to say that ideas have some kind of effect on society, or on history [laughing]. This is childishness.
Listen, let's put Harley aside here. Let's look at the facts: You guys are young, you're bright. Why don't you guys come back into college? Get a degree, I can even help you out, and get you guys into something where you can actually change something. Because really, working with this, doing these discussions, singing, these things are going to have no effect, and actually, I think I've done with this! [hangs up]
Schlanger: I think we just lost Sir Rupert. He's probably going to go play with his mouse.
A Presidential Election Year
Oyang, we have a question that was e-mailed in on the MySpace [section of www.larouchepac.com] and the Presidential campaigns. I see that, I think on New Year's Day, there's actually going to be what they call a "MySpace Presidential Debate." And the person writes in to us, "It looks like this has invaded the Presidential campaign. What about that? What about young people and the Presidential candidates?"
If you have any thoughts on MySpace hosting a Presidential "debate," I'd like to know that. But what about this question about getting young people involved, not just sending e-mails, but actually out in the street and organizing?
Teng: Oh, I wasn't aware that the Presidential candidates were looking for new sex partners, but ... maybe that's a scandal we'll have to follow up.
But I know Cody and I both joined the LaRouche movement during a Presidential campaign. It was when LaRouche was running his own Presidential campaign, and LaRouche has never made a distinction between electoral politics, and engaging the youth, and how to create a Renaissance. That was never something that was dichotomized as separate things. And the whole idea that the way you appeal to youth is with beer, music, and bribes, which is effectively how these operations are run, itself shows the kind of view that these guys have of not just youth, but of human beings in general.
Because, if you look at the election last year, we actually unleashed a revolutionary process inside the youth generation, the 18-to-35 generation, around the midterm elections. And it was around a campaign to expose the inner workings of the Lynne Cheney campus Gestapo operation. But in creating a mass effect around the country as part of a political mobilization with the idea that the youth were going to be responsible for the direction of the country, and engage people in an actual dialogue around what ideas are needed for the future of the country. And then, saying from that, how are we going to implement it—that actually unleashed a process where you had record numbers of youth voters come out, to put the Democrats in with a landslide.
Now, I've heard the argument that this was done because of blogs and chatrooms and things like that, and I always have to wonder: If it was simply a matter of just getting enough people online with information, we never would have had Bush, either the first time, or definitely not with the reelection.
Schlanger: This gets back to the question of human interaction. And I'd like to direct this next question to Cody. We have a rather long e-mail from John, who writes about his excitement of going back to the ideas of the Founding Fathers. And he said, he initially discovered LaRouche from reading Dope, Inc. and then, The Political Economy of the American Revolution. And he's very excited with the work that's coming up now, with the American Patriot Files, the revival of the study of the American System around James Fenimore Cooper.[1] Cody, do you want to say something about that project?
Jones: Yeah, one thing that LaRouche has recognized, in addressing both this problem in the MySpace, Facebook, etc., is that this is a consequence of our having been robbed of our sense of history, of where this country came from, and consequently, losing sight of where it's intended to go. So, what's been launched, is a project to really delve deeply into the ideas, and the figures who shaped and made America possible. And one of those leading figures is James Fenimore Cooper, both in terms of his communicating the ideals of the United States, what it's intended to represent. But also as a figure who embodied the method of real intelligence work, which LaRouche has often pointed to: that intelligence is not the spook world that is often portrayed, but intelligence is understanding the fundamental battle between oligarchism and the humanist fight, typified by Plato, Cusa, up through Kepler, etc., and the Founding Fathers. And so, embodied in that, is James Fenimore Cooper as one of the leading figures in shaping the period that led into, then, the Lincoln revolution.
So, this is something which the youth are now embarking on, and really trying to understand, what is our real history? Where did we come from? And how do we move forward from the dark age, we're presently collapsing into?
Schlanger: It seems that a common point that both of you have been making as members of the Youth Movement, is that, in fact, the momentary, or moment-to-moment titillation that one gets from the so-called entertainment of the Internet, is actually dwarfed by the genuine emotion, and passion, and excitement of discovering that you have a mind that can affect events in the world. I presume that's a big part of what you're talking about. So, what are you doing on the campuses up in the Bay Area, Oyang, where in a sense, you're going head-to-head against the cyberspace, Silicon Valley—you know, some people think "Silicon Valley" is the women on MySpace. But there actually is a Silicon Valley up there, and you've got people who have made huge amounts of money, essentially with swindles on the New Economy. How do you communicate these deeper ideas to people, when you meet them on campuses?
Teng: This is the difference between living in a fixed system, and actually confronting one's mind and someone else's mind with the paradoxes of the actual universe. I mean, what you get with the MySpace/Internet/video-game phenomenon, as Cody was mentioning, is just a more distilled version of a totally fixed, axiomatic system, which may be more and more sophisticated as you get better and better graphics, and more and more computing power and so forth. But you're always within a fixed, axiomatic, logical-deductive system. And that's how most people live their lives, whether they're in the Internet, or in general.
Schlanger: That's a "comfort zone" then. It doesn't challenge you much.
Teng: Yeah, exactly. There's this certain belief structure that you have to follow, and you think that that will get you by, day to day. What we do, is something as simple as confronting someone with a geometrical problem, the idea of working through, themselves, some actual scientific or simple geometrical problem, either at the table [where we organize], or coming into the office. And recognizing that even in the act of trying to discuss what's true, as opposed to having the terms of the discussion be what's popular, even the idea that you're going to try to figure out what's true, itself is a confrontation with the culture. And you'll find that most people, when given the right kind of environment, where they're not constantly bombarded with other stuff, that's what they're going to want to choose, that's what they're going to want to explore. And we've got to create the political conditions, where that's evoked in a larger and larger mass of the population.
[1] Patrick Ruckert, "The Fight for the American Republic: James Fenimore Cooper and the Society of the Cincinnati," EIR, Oct. 26, 2007; Anton Chaitkin, "The Patriot File, Unearthed," EIR, Nov. 2, 2007; Roger Maduro, "Rediscovering Mathew Carey; 'The Olive Branch': How a Book Saved the Nation," EIR, Nov. 9, 2007.