When human societies enter a systemic, or breakdown crisis, they produce moments which seem to live in two “worlds” at the same time—worlds which are mutually contradictory or, more precisely, incommensurable. There is the equivalent of a mathematical discontinuity between them.

They are what Lyndon LaRouche referred to frequently as “singularities,” unique moments of transition between two mutually irreconcilable conditions of the system.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was one such moment in recent history. Another was the beginning of the French Revolution, that “great moment [that] has found a little people,” as Schiller wrote.

Afghanistan represents precisely that kind of an opportunity/danger today, which is why Helga Zepp-LaRouche insists: “I compared [the Afghan pullout] to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification and the end of the Soviet Union… In a certain sense, it’s different in scale, maybe, but not in terms of essential quality, because the end of the Soviet system was the end of a historical phase, the end of a system. And what the Afghanistan withdrawal signifies, it’s also the end of a system of endless wars.”

The alternatives now facing that region (and the world) are to either descend fully into the hell of drugs, terrorism, an uncontrolled pandemic, and economic collapse; or to enter a new paradigm of win-win relations with the Belt and Road Initiative. Zepp-LaRouche stated: “The development and integration of Afghanistan is in the interests of the Afghani people, it is in the interests of their neighbors, in the interest of the entire Eurasian continent. So I’m quite optimistic that it can happen, but the crucial question is, will the United States cooperate with Russia and China?”

Everything hangs in the balance. The danger of British-promoted confrontation between the U.S. and Russia is escalating (as are U.S.-China tensions), to the point that the Russian Foreign Ministry yesterday held a board meeting chaired by Sergey Lavrov, which issued a sharply-worded statement that “bilateral relations [with the U.S.] had approached a dangerous confrontational threshold through the fault of Washington, who have provoked an unprecedented escalation between our states over the recent years.” This, they note, despite the potential for strategic dialogue signalled by the June 16 summit between Biden and Putin.

What, then, is the nature of moments of singularity such as today’s, and how are we to act upon them? The outcome of such transitional moments is not foreordained, but is subject to Man’s willful intervention.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in an October 1987 writing “On the Sweetness of Truth,” written to celebrate the 65th birthday of her husband, the late Lyndon LaRouche, discussed Nicholas of Cusa’s work “The Vision of God”:

“The universe consists of negentropically growing manifolds of ever higher orderings, whose microcosm is human Reason. If the person now recognizes this divine order of creation, at each singularity, that is to say, at the transition from one manifold into the next higher, by his creative efforts he will determine the ‘terminus specie’ which enables further development … It is at this moment, that creating and being created coincide also for human beings, since the actualization of infinity in one point (terminus specie),— in a singularity — means, that the knowledge upon which he bases his creation, must be adequate, that is to say, it must represent the greatest possible approximation to Truth at that time. Through the creative act, the human being extends anew the lawfulness of the universe in a lawful way.” [emphasis added—ed.]

In his October 1995 “Riemann Refutes Euler: Background to a Breakthrough,” LaRouche addressed the same concept in terms of music and classical composition:

“The singularity in question is generated by the difference in direction of time-sense—backwards versus forwards—of the two, interacting ideas respecting the poem or musical composition in mid-performance… The character of these ideas as singularities arises from the way in which their existence is generated subjectively: by the same kind of processes underlying the reading and composition of a valid Classical strophic poem. The quality of ‘singularity,’ and the associated form of mathematical discontinuity, arises from the opposing senses of time associated with the interplay of perfected ideas with the process of their development.” [emphasis added—ed.]

The Afghan singularity, and its creative resolution, will be the subject of a Schiller Institute international seminar on Saturday, July 31. And it will come into proper focus as such, located between the Saturday, July 24, Schiller Institute webcast on the fraud of climate change and the coming blackouts; and the Saturday, Aug. 14 seminar sponsored by the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971.”