Math with Lyndon LaRouche

Nukes with Bertrand Russell

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

Once upon a time I was in math class, feeling hopelessly confused about life and reading Substack and Internet sites hoping that this would miraculously sort it out in the span of one math class. I remembered Bertrand Russell’s quote about the foundation of unyielding despair and I wanted to see someone argue with it since I thought explaining the meaning of life would sort out my confusion and it’s pretty uplifting to hear people take down depressing philosophical arguments regardless, so I put my search into Google and I found an article about how Bertrand Russell is the worst by the Schiller Institute published in some magazine apparently called Fidelio like the Beethoven opera.

I’d actually vaguely seen those names before but didn’t think much of them other than some vague sense that naming things in that way was admirable because hey, I like all this old culture and German Idealist stuff, it is much more sophisticated than, say, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and books about English professors contemplating adultery that are usually equated with intellectual rigor in modern Anglo-American culture. I know more about Goethe than Schiller but I know a decent bit about Schiller too, and Beethoven is also quite nice. I’ve sometimes looked for English translations of just Schiller poems before and got linked to the Schiller Institute, and I saw a really interesting article about population demographics and Renaissances before from them too that I actually shared with people in my sense of optimism for the future. The Schiller Institute was definitely just some organization dedicated to promoting Schiller and his ideas, because as we all know, it’s a lot like the Confucius Institute, which is totally just some organization dedicated to promoting Confucius and his ideals and not anything worse, and I thought I wanted to read more from the Schiller Institute.

So I was sitting in math class and then my next math class engrossed in this long article about how Bertrand Russell was worse than Hitler written by an interesting organization named after Friedrich Schiller. I could already believed that Bertrand Russell was a worse person than Hitler because anyone who was that nihilistic seems likely to have been pretty awful, and I learned a lot about history such as that apparently Bertrand Russell is nearly single-handedly responsible for the United States nuclear program, as in he got Einstein and Oppenheimer and all these other people on board with the idea that if the US didn’t build the bomb first the Nazis somehow would, and he was basically single-handedly responsible for actually dropping the two nuclear warheads on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing about an old dude whose belief system was “unyielding despair” doing any of this seemed surprising to me at all. If you’re a complete nihilist why should you care about anyone, or the future, or anything other than maybe cynical power-plays after all? It sounds much more like the philosophy of one or another stripe of fictional villain than some pacificist humanitarian that the secular humanists imagine, after all, and I reflected on that.

Schiller Institute "How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man"- FIDELIO Article 1994.,LaRouche

Schiller Institute (Pt. 2)"How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man"- FIDELIO,1994.-- LaRouche

Schiller Institute Part 3 "How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man"- FIDELIO 1994 by LaRouche

I learned a lot about history, not a primary interest of mine, and encountered more agreements with certain kinds of German Idealist ideas I already held, such as the power of narrative and art in shaping public opinion, the fundamentally liberal and progress-oriented nature of Christianity which I too thought was more responsible for the Renaissance than the Dark Ages, and that someone popular like Bertrand Russell can potentially have a worse impact and be driven by worse ideas than Adolf Hitler. I was admittedly rather put off by the weird references to Venetians and the British, which I thought sounded very reminiscent of euphemisms for Jews since it’s basically equating merchant people and the empire that founded the modern state of Israel and had some Jewish heads of state like Disraeli, but I was willing to think, this sounds sketchy but if everything else they say is OK maybe it’s not something bad.

Then I got to the part where I was reminded that Bertrand Russell, at one point, was actually considered to be a mathematician and not only a nihilistic Anglo analytic philosopher, and the article itself started explaining what it viewed as the problems with Bertrand Russell’s mathematics and how Gödel took his work down, and tied that in with how evil they viewed Bertrand Russell as being. It was actually a description of math in math class. I was reading about math that wasn’t the math they were teaching in math class for the first time in years and I remembered how that was and thought it was very good and at this point I really appreciated this strange site despite the fact some of its comments made me uneasy and I thought the strong condemnation of rock music and pop culture without much of an explanation was confusing, though I’d personally thought those things were negative a mere couple of weeks ago and thought that maybe we needed either a return to “high” culture or the invention of an entirely new kind of culture that breaks from the past myself.

I wasn’t all in on rock music and pop culture but I didn’t want to condemn it either without actually having a good explanation so I held my judgments on that as well, I thought I could at least respect this site that was explaining how horrible nihilistic philosophy, needless acts of military aggression against innocents, and bad math were all related and actually work out some examples of the math to boot rather than just discussing the idea of math from some kind of weird philosophy perspective. I’ve repeatedly felt sort of nostalgic for the days where I would talk or read about some kind of advanced mathematics idea that wasn’t being taught while sitting in my math classes even though I’d given up on trying to immediately return to such a state without preparation, and here it had basically serendipitously landed in my lap because I looked up something that seemed tangentially unrelated at the time.

Needless to say, I saved it, I read and reread it, I wanted to share it to my friends, acquaintances, and strangers, with some disclaimers that yes, there were some claims on the site I wasn’t entirely comfortable with but I’d still thought it was enlightening overall and wanted them to enjoy that too and maybe the problems with society did all go back to the British Empire or something in medieval Italy after all and we could actually solve it and get a new Renaissance. I saved all of the Schiller Institute articles and read and re-read them for a couple of days. I started to get really familiar with the content even though my misgivings and uncertainties about some aspects still remained. At this point I looked at the name of the author of the Bertrand Russel article again and though that Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. sounded vaguely familiar and I was trying to remember where I heard that. I remembered that some people identified him as a conspiracy theorist, a perpetual presidential candidate and someone who actually ran from a prison cell for part of that time, and an “anti-cult cultist.”

Since the name was starting to ring some bells I decided I wanted to really research Lyndon LaRouche and I learned he was a rather awful guy and is credited with Americanizing fascism. There were fascists in America long before Lyndon LaRouche, like the German-American Bund, but those were just Americans who supported Nazis or other types of fascism abroad, whereas LaRouche was Americanizing fascism because he wanted to be the dictator of America, and this has the effect of seriously rendering all the lecturing of various Marxist professors and teachers about what Nazism in Europe looks like and how you can avoid Nazis or becoming a Nazi nearly completely useless because, for all that “the British and Venetians are inferior subhumans” is definitely reminiscent of Disraeli fictionalizing himself as Contarini to pretend not to be Jewish because “Mediterranean merchant people are all basically the same,” it bears very little resemblance in either aesthetic or structure to a Klan meeting or a Hitler rally, and the LaRouchite movement knows you can’t be overtly racist in America anyway because, contrary to what all the so-called “woke” Marxists like to say, America is really not a racist country. Hitler is into painting and LaRouche is into math because America is also not historically an anti-intellectual country. It’s easy to see hints of Antisemitism and more classical Nazi ideas in ideas like 9/11 trutherism if you look for them, but that’s not exactly what Marxists present as being like neo-Nazis with a Unite the Right rally, and I suspect a lot of that is because every Marxist I’ve encountered personally has been a 9/11 truther themselves.

I learned he was originally a Marxist but then he quit Marxism to create American fascism and spread conspiracy theories instead. Some people said he quit Marxism because he didn’t like the women’s rights movement which was then gaining ground in leftist circles, and other people think he barely even cared about that and was basically just a narcissist who wanted to be the dictator and quit when Marxist parties didn’t support that anymore. He apparently had some connections to intelligence agencies even though he wasn’t formally a part of them, which is considered by virtually everyone to be too much connection considering he was a crazy person who ran for President many times and convinced a significant minority of people to vote for him on the grounds that they thought America needed a fascist dictator to protect against the “(((subhuman British)))” so it might as well be him. Many of the popular conspiracy theories originated with him as well, such as the idea that Bush did 9/11, or that music needs to be tuned to 432 Hz (music was never tuned to 432 Hz, only much higher or lower, and I would guess that’s because 432 Hz messes with your brainwaves and if it’s similar to “the Earth’s frequency” then I suspect “the Earth’s frequency” also messes with your brainwaves in negative ways,) or whenever you see all this Anglophobia, especially on Reddit and Chan boards. Krautchan, which created some of the really popular Reddit memes despite being somewhat obscure, is probably a LaRouche front too if you’ve ever even glanced at it, not that that’s close to the pinnacle of the Internet. Just if you see someone say “Bri*ish” or “britbong” maybe you should back away slowly, same with 9/11 trutherism and the 432 Hz stuff.

He was actually one of the first people to be anti-Bush, even if this is just because he thought Bush was a puppet of the Israeli government (which he also Antisemitically equates with “the Jews” it’s possible to criticize the Israeli government and not think that represents Jewish people or even all Jews who live in Israel, just ask the Jews in Israel who are targeted by the Israeli government for one) and not for any correct reasons. A stopped clock is right twice a day after all, and to make matters worse, I think the relative success of the LaRouche Movement is because they weren’t wrong about literally everything, just repugnantly wrong about some really important things, which were ultimately what destroyed them. You don’t become a villain by being bad at everything after all. I think what they were right about kept them going for a while and what they were wrong about caused the movement to eventually fall apart due to the tensions between these two aspects.

The thing is just the things they were right about are these German Idealist concepts that basically no one in purely Anglo culture is very familiar with and that driving their few successes probably looks mysterious and almost mystical to outsiders, like how can these nutjobs be so influential that they can get a candidate running from prison multiple times (even if he doesn’t come close to winning) and even work their way into government intelligence agencies. I think it’s frankly because the LaRouchites were half good (but only half good, and therefore half bad and delusional) at the art of perceiving with your mind. I want to write one of the Metamorphology Expanded posts about that since that idea really comes from the Romantic science and German Idealism even if I use it a lot in my writing and the amateur criticisms I do. Metamorphology Expanded: How To Perceive With Your Mind. I teach people how to perceive with their minds, which is heresy.

The thing is, this whole idea of seeing Schiller as some kind of mathematical formula that can be used to psychologically inspire and/or manipulate people and seeing Christianity as leading to progress I think are both ideas that really only appear clearly in this sort of evolutionary and mind-first way of viewing the world. All the Antisemitism and dictatorship and whatever might be things many people associate with Germanic culture, and I think that has done a lot to scare people away from seeing that the ideas of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Kant, etc. really weren’t that at all to be honest, but people still don’t understand how it was abused because it’s all alien to them still with the Anglo analytic philosophy background, which is epitomized by the lack of any aesthetics in some semi-popular modern analytic philosophy movements.

The thing is for a while I’ve kind of viewed the proper way of using these kinds of ideas as basically being the only real counter to all the “elite occultism” which I think is definitely real, but I’ve generally not been so alarmed about because… I have these ideas. Since secular humanism has died, paranoia about elite occultism has been on the rise, which mostly replaces the dismissal that it even exists. I think it exists and I’ve thought it exists for a long time, but I’ve never been paranoid about it. What elite occultists learn is basically “this is the eye of Ra, this is the wheel of Hathor, this is the naga Lilith, this is the flame of Vesta, etc.” with of course lots of variations depending on which group it is.

What they don’t learn is how to understand the psychology behind that. If you want to understand the psychology behind that, get into Jung, which is literally the same kind of German Idealist thing, taking the Urtype from Goethe and applying them to mythological, folklore, and general story elements. This allows you to see how they actually work and that’s how people like George Lucas made Star Wars. The elites do learn occult things most people don’t, but that very method of learning involves a lot of rote memorization, which I think is itself part of the evil of it because that’s about as humiliating as all the rituals they’re supposed to do are. All these occult cults are just variants of the same thing. Notice that Naomi Wolf, one of the paranoia-stokers, was herself in one. She also promotes senseless 432 Hz music (which is probably also ironically neurologically harmful if it’s the mu brainwave frequency, which appears to be exactly why it was never really historically used) which literally comes from Lyndon LaRouche. I don’t think she ever really got rid of the mentality even if she wants to appeal to “common” people now instead of Skull and Bones stuff. You’re not common though, you’re hopefully a McKuen Mutant among many other cool things and not someone who got lost here, though I know some people do. Broad is the road that leads to destruction. Read the Cultural Futurist and don’t be just a populist or slacker loser. Sometimes Jesus and Nietzsche do have a lot in common but that’s another story. Many people also never really leave the cults they claim to (including apparently Naomi Wolf) and just end up sort of running cover for them and that’s also another story.

"Is Elite Occultism Real?"

So even though Lyndon LaRouche is certainly a horrible and not very attractive person, it provided me a window after being introduced to Dijkstra regarding what math has to do with the real world and why people in math aren’t the losers from The Big Bang Theory. Math frankly has a lot to do with every kind of philosophical, political, religious, and general big-picture question out there, if you want to look at them through the window of math, and that makes every step of the way interesting instead of parts of it seeming like a slog you need to get through to get to the parts you really want to do (e.g., all the prerequisites if you want topology for physics and biology or category theory or type theory for programming, etc.)

Schiller Institute (Pt. 2)"How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man"- FIDELIO,1994.-- LaRouche

In 1931, a very gentle, self-effacing young mathematical genius, an Austrian by the name of Kurt Gödel, submitted a paper which implicitly obliterated all of the mathematical work of Bertrand Russell, and also debunked some very pompous, related absurdities of hesychasts such as John Von Neumann. Considering the content of his remarkable paper, the degree of personal modesty with which Gödel presented his argument, both orally and in his now-famous paper, is fairly described as "awesome."

That paper is entitled, in its English translation, as "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I."¹³⁰ In principle, the kernel of Gödel's point is an echo of the devastating proof against the Eleatic school supplied by Plato's Parmenides approximately 2,400 years earlier; the conclusion presented was well known to Leibniz,¹³¹ and had been addressed by such Nineteenth-Century titans of science as Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann (as we shall note), Weierstrass, and also Georg Cantor.¹³² In short, the mathematical-physical principles of the case were laid down fully more than a decade before Russell's hoax, and three decades prior to Gödel's 1931 paper. The historic significance of the Gödel of 1931 is not that he had refuted Russell's sophistry, but that he had refuted Russell and the radical positivist school as a whole, on their own formalist terms. The resonating effect of his paper was therefore devastating at that time and later.

Do we want to listen to the great American fascist be the one to debate Bertrand Russell on math, nihilism, and nuclear proliferation? Not really, but a stopped clock is right twice a day and it did show me the connections between all these ideas. I wouldn’t even have known that 9/11 trutherism or 432 Hz weirdos were signs of much darker things if I didn’t accidentally get pulled into thinking the Schiller Institute was a nice site about Schiller with some kind of odd ideas that I mostly ignored for 2 1/2 days before researching more about Lyndon LaRouche, and the deep philosophical comments on math are interesting, but do get them mostly from people who are better than Lyndon LaRouche.

Riemann, Cantor, and Lyndon LaRouche | Mathematics without Apologies, by Michael Harris (wordpress.com)