The End Of Our Delusion

Last weekend, I was poking around the landscaping around the front of my house, when I found a water-damaged copy of Lyndon LaRouche's "The State Of Our Union - The End Of Our Delusion!" I guess someone had left a copy on the porch in February, and that a storm had blown the book into the bushes. Reading the title, I thought: "At last, he's come to his senses," until I realized that he wasn't talking just about himself.

The last time I paid attention, in 1984, Lyndon LaRouche was a kind of crypto-Republican: today, he is a kind of crypto-Democrat. I guess he is always a crypto-whoever-seems-to-be-on-top-at-the-moment.

So, what does the crank believe these days? Amazing things. I didn't realize how many axes he had to grind against the last several hundred years of scientific thought. He seems to believe in a mechanistic universe bereft of statistical influences. The citizenry, as usual, are lost:

Every known culture of mankind in history so far, whether a happy or wretched one, presents us with a people who, at large, are engulfed within an intricate mass of axiomatic-like assumptions. Some simplistic opinion would describe such a population as "programmed." Others would refer to sets of false beliefs which either are, or pretend to be universal physical principles, as the so-called "laws of our universe." Against this reality, the virtual idiot is the man who insists that his judgment is not affected by such cultural-environmental "fences" around the range within which his mental processes are permitted to wander. We sometimes speak, for example, of "accident proneness," or of an individual controlled, like an enraged dog on a leash, by his, or her most gripping obsessions.

"Engulfed within an intricate mass of axiomatic-like assumptions": Yup! That's me!

Times are bad:

This lack of rational rules of monetary and other economically relevant behavior, has created a British system of modern monetarism which is not merely utterly irrational, but is a degrading system of usury, which degrades the notion of economic value to the lunatic antics of a giant gambling casino, with no efficient regard for determining the relatively greater or lesser value of production and trade for specifically human objectives.

LaRouche seems to believe scientists and mathematicians had much more political influence than I believe an examination of the historical record would merit. Politicians don't give a rip about scientists, most of the time, unless they come up with a new bomb or gun. LaRouche really doesn't like that bastard, Leonhard Euler, even though Euler is prominent in the canon of mathematical thought. I've never thought of the theories of Gauss and Euler as being anything but complementary, but Lyndon saith no:

This was the same period of the writing of "Specimen Dynamicum" and of the opening of the collaboration of Leibniz and Jean Bernouilli in elaborating the catenary-cued principle of universal physical least action. This preceded the opening of Leibniz's role as a crucial political factor in the process, under England's Queen Anne, in the English succession to the institution of the British United Kingdom. During that same period, the preference of Leibniz's enemies, was to counterattack against Leibniz's powerful influence of that time by adopting the work of Descartes as the basis for an anti-Leibniz program in England itself. In light of the fact that the Netherlands-programmed Descartes retained nominally French attributes, it was deemed impracticable to import Cartesian ideology under an explicitly Cartesian label, into a France-hating England of that time. So, Hooke and other suitably skilled and witting followers of Galileo's hoaxes, were employed to synthesize a neo-Cartesian, anti-Leibniz cult in England, including a faked attribution of the invention of a calculus to an obscure academic figure known as a specialist in black magic dogma, Isaac Newton.

The most notable figure in the promotion of this creation of a synthetic, English-speaking "René Descartes" named Isaac Newton, was a Venetian, Abbé Antonio Conti, a devotee of the work of Descartes residing in Paris at that time. Conti would figure, until his death in 1749, as a keystone figure in the organizing of a network of anti-Leibniz salons throughout much of Europe, a network which included figures such as D'Alembert, de Moivre, Voltaire, Maupertuis, Leonhard Euler, Lagrange, et al., whose systemically vicious errors were demolished in an exemplary way by Carl F. Gauss in 1799. Important Nineteenth-Century followers of the legacy of those salons included London-sponsored adherents to the Newton clique such as Laplace, Augustin Cauchy, and the so-called founders of "thermodynamics" Clausius, Grassmann, and Kelvin. The concoction of the fraudulent "Second Law of Thermodynamics" was an outcome of this process.

Amazing! LaRouche doesn't believe in the "Second Law of Thermodynamics", which states that the entropy of the universe increases with time. This is problematic, but LaRouche seems to believe these concepts were foisted on an addle-brained public by a corrupt cabal of scientists in league with corrupt economists and politicians long ago. Does this mean LaRouche also believes in perpetual motion machines? How does LaRouche explain the operation of refrigerators? Can't tell.

LaRouche doesn't seem to like information theory much either:

The common feature which united such apparently diverse types of Fabians as Helphand, Crowley, Russell, and H.G. Wells, is the orchestration of diverse elements which combined "permanent war and permanent revolution," to the esteemed geopolitical advantage of an Anglo-Dutch Liberal domination of the world. "Information theory," as developed under Russell protégés Wiener and von Neumann, was among those means of the psychological-warfare methods developed with aid of the work of Rees's London Tavistock Clinic. The promotion of a recreational-drug culture, within the post-World War II U.S.A., and elsewhere, was a crucial element in this imperial scheme.

Gee, and I thought recreational drug use was all about getting high....

Well, you get the drift. Just toss many of the scientific thoughts behind our technological civilization, and embrace LaRouche and his new style of politics, with its rational hydrogen economy, and irrational authoritarian style....