There are No Limits to Growth
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Introduction
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Founder of the Club of Life
Dear Reader,
The Club of Life was founded on Oct. 22, 1982 in Rome,
Wiesbaden, and many other cities around the world, and today, a
year later, is already an anti-Malthusian mass movement in which
many leading politicians, scientists, trade unionists, industry
representatives, teachers, jurists, and others collaborate on four
continents and in over 30 countries.
The idea of the Club of Life caught fire because many people
in many countries found it unbearable to see the constant spread of
cultural pessimism and considered it an urgent necessity to create a
new institution, based on human reason, on scientific and
technological progress as well as cultural optimism.
The Club of Rome and its co-thinkers have in the course of
over 12 years done enough mischief with their prognoses of the
decline of the world a la Oswald Spengler. We can thank the Club of
Rome's and similar writings, poured into the international market
through a mammoth propaganda effort, for poisoning the spirit of
young people in particular, who have been convinced that
technological progress is the incarnation of the Devil himself.
The Club of Life has set for itself, among other tasks, that of
proving that the theses of the Club of Rome are, from a scientific
standpoint, sheer quackery. This book is the first of a planned series
whose goal is to discredit and counter the influence of the Club of
Rome, the Aspen Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and others. And
there is no one more worthy of beginning this job than my husband,
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
However, the Club of Life will not restrict itself in its
publications to the unfortunately necessary attack on organizations
which hopefully will soon be consigned by history to insignificance;
rather, we want to present concrete research and development
programs which demonstrate how the presently existing limits to
growth can be overcome.
The Club of Life has set no small task for itself. We intend
nothing less than to bring about a new worldwide humanist
renaissance. We want to orient ourselves to earlier high points of
human culture, the Classical and Renaissance periods, and study
how mankind overcame the earlier dark ages which show close
parallels with the present situation. We proceed with confidence that
we, strengthened by the superior examples of great humanists of the
past, can again bring forth great composers, poets, and scientists.
And we are firmly convinced that man is endowed with
reason, and that it cannot be mankind's purpose that only a few
individuals reach the level of reason in their thinking; on the
contrary, we are convinced that through our efforts the Age of
Reason can be attained.
May this book enrich and inspire you.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Wiesbaden, August 1983
Author's Acknowledgments
To list, by name and contribution, all of those whose
researches have more or less directly contributed some important
part to the content of this book, would require a book in itself. In
place of such a detailed acknowledgment, a few general remarks and
some examples are given here.
For more than a decade, this writer has served as primus inter
pares within an international association whose functions have taken
the general shape and content of Plato's Academy at Athens, or,
perhaps one might say either the specifications for an Academy
given by Gottfried Leibniz or the work of constructing Academies
on Leibniz's model by Dr. Benjamin Franklin. For most of that
period, this association's day-to-day activities have been linked most
prominently in developing and maintaining an international
political-intelligence news service. It has been chiefly work done in
connection with the work of that news service which produced the
research reflected in the following chapters.
In form of organization, this news service was constructed
according to the model of common features of the leading
newsweeklies of the United States, dividing the world into regions,
and nations within regions, and adding to areas of special
responsibility so defined special subjects such as political economy,
science, law, music, and so forth. The news service's functioning
was distinguished most significantly from the work of most leading
newsweeklies on two points. The editorial standpoint adopted has
been that of fifteenth-century, Golden Renaissance humanism, the
standpoint typified by Leibniz and, more or less efficiently, Dr.
Benjamin Franklin. The method of approach to current events has
been emphasis on deep historical studies of the political and
intellectual history of the general populations and factions existing
in each area of specialist responsibility.
The historical researches fostered by these policies of practice
have had two notable points of emphasis in common, apart from the
governing, specified humanist standpoint. First, the research done
has emphasized primary historical sources, collecting as
comprehensively representative a selection of works as possible
written by spokesmen of leading factions during the period being
examined. Second, emphasis on uncovering the efficient continuity
of evolving development of cultural values and internal history of
ideas over successive intervals of the past, into the present.
This attention to primary sources, comprehensive selections of
correspondence and other writings from the period being
considered, has demonstrated most frequently that the account of
history provided by most university textbooks and similar published
sources today is chiefly mythology. In most current history text-
books and related sources, a small selection of dates, names of
political factions, of key personalities, and so forth, is assembled,
and these facts rearranged in such a way as to fit some academically
accepted explanation. The fraudulent accounts of U.S. history by
such influential writers as Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A.
Beard, Walter Lippmann, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are
unfortunately not untypical of the versions of national histories
offered by academics of leading universities in most nations. What
such textbooks offer would be unrecognizable to the leading figures
actually engaged in the momentous struggles of the places and
periods indicated.