It is owing to the need to address this as a degeneration in the quality of mental life of the population—both populace and leaders—that Lyndon LaRouche directs us in his “Shakespeare as a Scholar: U.S. Politics as Tragedy,” to the power of great drama to craft the historically specific metaphors needed to inspire us in this fight for humanity's future. As LaRouche writes: “What must be evoked by the performance of Classical drama is not merely a documentation of interpersonal relations. What must be accomplished, is to lift the member of the relevant audience upwards, away from the pathetically small-minded immoralities of so-called 'morality plays,' to pass judgment upon the impassioned, historical unfolding of processes of entire societies.”

LaRouche's argument is continued by presentations by Michael Liebig and Susan Kokinda—“Sophistry: Destroyer of Nations from Within” and “Plato's Dialogues, the Tragedy of Athens, and the Complex Domain”—on Ancient Greece's auto-cannibalization in the Peloponnesian War, a self-inflicted destruction wrought by the triumph of the ideology of sophistry over the political process, as Plato portrays Socrates in battle against it in his dialogues. But, as Kokinda writes, “If the dialogues were no more than a history of Athens' tragedy, they would have their place in the important literature of our culture. But, what makes them a cornerstone of Western civilization, is Plato's discovery of a solution to the tragedy—a solution found in his examination of immortality, and of the concept of the complex domain.” Kokinda demonstrates the underlying coherence between the discoveries of the Ancient Greeks and Plato, and those of the physical scientist Carl Gauss, using LaRouche's essay “Visualizing the Complex Domain” as a guide to understanding. This question is taken up later in the magazine's Pedagogical Exercise on “The Geometry of Change,” and in its Exhibit review, “Learning the Lessons Egypt Taught the Greeks.”

How man can elevate himself above the world of the senses to become truly human through his participation in the eternal—immortality—is the subject of the Sublime. What better way to approach this, than Fidelio's Special Feature—“A Schiller Birthday Celebration!”—in which Helga Zepp LaRouche creates a dramatic dialogue from the writings of Friedrich Schiller, the great German “poet of freedom,” as a challenge to the LaRouche Youth Movement, to take his beautiful ideas into their hearts, and make them their own.