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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.

Although the popularized mythologies about the past generally accepted today may, and usually

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