stringing this along
Editorial decision on my part: the next post about Lyndon LaRouche that I will have on this blog will be in March.
Steve: Do you know the difference between man and beast?
Are you sure you want me to answer that question?
Biologically, a small slice of DNA. In most religions, the presence of the soul. I grunt and say “opposable thumbs”, thinking that if some other animal developed those they would develop culture and self-conciousness — which the presence of culture is pretty much the antrhopological answer. Adolf Hitler’s answer to that question involves bloodlines.
The LaRouchian answer to that question ends up coming out pretty badly for the man.
Bestializing is thrown around quite casually in LaRouche’s literature in terms of what various plotters are doing to the masses of people. The Gay Movement, the CIA, and the Dick Cheney Administration are, therefore, Beast-Men.
In terms of culture, Beethoven is a Man, The Beatles are Beasts. The French Revolution was Beastial (and very Aristotlean, I might add), the American Revolution… ARE WE NOT MEN???
Cue Ruth Williams in Younger Than That Now, page 229.
The political philosophy feeding LaRouche’s party in 1974 was deemed “Beyond Marxism.” Mastery of it was a requisite of membership. Among other things, we were told the black community was a CIA target and blacks were being manipulated within their CIA-controlled ghetto culture. Jazz was defined as brainwashing. The final logic of this scenario was that black inner city youth — who had obviously succumbed to their CIA masters — could be addressed as “nigger”.
“What are you people, fascists?” Bill interjected when we were told this at a briefing. Others in our group quickly backed him up. There was nervous laughter. “Why don’t we just call ourselves the Ku Klux Klan?” I asked. More laughter.
The speaker merely smiled and switched to a discussion of
Beethoven.
Softly deterministic, I suppose. In a different context I can just say that we’re products of our environments, and marketing firms are busy selling us junk and have crafted our personality for us, and in the thematic category most people would look around and agree with that. Issac Asimov said that there are only seven plots going on all around us.
In practical reality, dealing with Absolutes fails us — unless you can calibrate absolutes to a degree I can’t.
I will continue to dwell on mocking the infatuation with doubling the square. It is at once a beatnik hipster poetry line — ironic because the beats surely fall into the realm of Beasts. I am reminded of an Onion parody in “Our Dumb Century” of the “Race for the Moon” between NASA and Hippies.
Incidentally, to Double a Square…
The answer to the question of why the cult leader LaRouche puts this at a premium is that it encourages, quote-in-quote, “non-linear thinking”.
Further: this smacks of the “It’s the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, etc” and “connect the lines so they do not cross and there’s 5 of them” on a 3 dot by 3 dot grid whose answer is to “think outside the box” — both puzzles kept being tossed at my classes in middle school as some sort of ritualistic cleverness.