Humor
"All right, now, when you're dealing with something ugly, my view is, that you start, as did my great friend Francois Rabelais of France, who faced terrible conditions; and the case of Don Quixote , of our dear friend Miguel Cervantes: When you face a terrible situation, and Spain was a terrible place at the time; there was nothing good in Spain. There's nothing good in Don Quixote : Everybody is nuts. Greedy and nuts: There aren't any good Spaniards in Don Quixote . They're all nuts. So but, Miguel Cervantes used humor, great humor, as a way of trying to mobilize people in Spain to an awareness of what their problem was. To desire to rise above being either Sancho Panza you know, belly, that's what it is for, this crazy old knight, with a bucket on his head. To become real. To enter modern civilization."
"Francois Rabelais faced a similar situation. He was a great thinker. He joined many religious orders. He was a power in his time. He was a great physician, among other things (which is where he got some of his vocabulary from), but he dealt with his Pantagruel and his Gargantua dealt with the situation with humor. Because, when people can laugh, and laugh about terrible problems, to see the irony of the situation, then, instead of being gripped by fear and terror, they can clear their heads and think seriously, about what're we going to do about this problem? And put it in perspective. Not be in awe of the problem but be the intellectual master of the problem. And being the intellectual master of the situation, is key to being the physical master of yourself."
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 16, 2005 Webcast
