China’s President Xi Jinping gave the closing speech at the 76th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. During his speech, he said: “Facing the severe shocks of COVID-19, we need to work together to steer global development toward a new stage of balanced, coordinated and inclusive growth. To this end, I would like to propose a Global Development Initiative.”

At the close of her discussion with the European organization on Tuesday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said: “We have to escalate our intervention, counting on the fact that the majority of countries are moving in a different direction, of cooperation and not a military confrontation. But it is going to be, for sure, a roller coaster ahead. But we have to steer with the clearest strategic conception— that we have to get out of it with a New Paradigm, that has to start with a world health system, and the modern health system has to start in Afghanistan. So as long as we keep an absolute focus on that, I think we can catalyze whoever is a decent person, and that’s what has to be escalated on our side.” The statements of endorsement by Surgeon Generals Jocelyn Elders and David Satcher of the Schiller Institute Afghanistan perspective should be thought about, now, from the standpoint of the international potential of response to Xi Jinping’s speech of yesterday. The proposal for Pino Arlacchi to play a role in negotiating with the Afghanistan government, as a trusted and trustworthy senior figure committed to the eradication of the drug trade and the establishment of a health platform for that nation, should be endorsed wherever possible.

Indeed, we have been escalating on our side. The LaRouche forces have in the last 48 hours made the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche resonate in Pakistan, China, France, and the United Nations, in addition to the various other places where organizers conducted physical deployments in the world, or spoke to people on the phone, or intervened in various conferences and gatherings. Sometimes we have been applauded, sometimes denounced, but never ignored. The polemical drive for a new era of cooperation through the principle of the Coincidence of Opposites, deployed as a strategic intervention in the Afghanistan theater, is the higher complex domain of military strategy, the “Paradiso,” a domain of power that creatures that dwell within the Inferno of geopolitics cannot even imagine to exist.

In France, one think tank denounces the Schiller Institute in a 637-page document as involved in what they call “The Chinese operations of influence - A Machiavelian moment.” Machiavelli’s History of Florence was not consulted by them. It should have been. The two contrasting speeches of Biden and Xi—one from Venice, and the other from Florence—can be seen as the emerging book-ends of the debate on the topic, “development or depopulation,” that the philosophical association founded by Lyndon LaRouche must now propel to prominence worldwide. The LaRouche work, “There Are No limits To Growth,” from volume I of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation is, after all, the counterpole to the still-dominant Club of Rome’s Limits To Growth and later 1991 The First Global Revolution.

This is not to stoop to the level of identifying the United States and China as two opposing teams in a soccer match. “Florence” and “Venice” here refer to the axioms actually underpinning the outlook of the two speeches given yesterday. The premises underlying Biden’s speech spell disaster. The premises underlying Xi’s speech define a productive future for mankind. Our association should conduct classes, wherever possible, on There Are No Limits To Growth, to allow our fellow citizens, especially youth, the choice to overturn the axioms they don’t know they have, so that they may take up a global development initiative in the form of the World Health Platform.

Lyndon LaRouche, in a 1989 interview from his jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia, offered this useful advice on how to teach: "In knowledge, in teaching, you have two problems. One, you have to get away from sheer, arbitrary irrationality, the prejudices that people bring into the classroom, so forth, and say, well, let’s get this in an orderly fashion, at least. Let’s give that much to Aristotle, let’s get your knowledge in a consistent, logically organized form . And then say, well, now, we know this is not the truth, but it’s very useful to put it in this form because this enables us to conceptualize what we have to do to correct formal knowledge, to arrive at what really is the truth. And so, I was using all kinds of devices to try to get students to focus to that point.

But my idea of the course was always to bring the course to precisely that point, (that) is, to present an orderly, logical form of representation of the field; then show paradoxes which flow even from the cleanest, most rigorous presentation of that field, and then show what the solution to the paradox is, and hope that the light would go on in the students’ head. And the student for himself or herself would have realized, “oh yes! This is the solution.” And experience the creation of the solution, so to speak, in their own mind. Which is always my pedagogical… I like to teach that way. I wouldn’t enjoy teaching under any other circumstances."

Dante Alighieri’s forecast of the tragedy that would befall Florence, the Commedia, used this Socratic method of teaching. This is demonstrated through Dante’s dialogue with Virgil, and later transformed the higher dialogue with Beatrice on matters of scientific method. In this way, Dante used Plato’s dramatic method to provide a solution, both to the contemporary calamity that Dante richly described, and to our own. He not only placed many of his contemporaries in the appropriate circles of a Hell of their own design; he not only instructed the reader how to extricate oneself step by step from that Inferno, into Purgatory, through the intercession of the poet Virgil; he also demonstrated the power of the mind could discover new physical principles, new degrees of freedom, as later seen in Florence in the form of the Brunelleschi Dome.

The United States need not be condemned to conflict with China on behalf of Orcus, the god of the underworld, who was, by the way, also the punisher of broken oaths. (France, take note.) President Xi offered this alternative: “We need to seize the historic opportunities created by the latest round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, redouble efforts to harness technological achievements to boost productivity, and foster an open, fair, equitable and non-discriminatory environment for the development of science and technology. We should foster new growth drivers in the post-COVID era.” The proposition is “There are no limits to growth.” Who will oppose it and who will defend it? Let the Great Debate begin!