The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness - by Michael Minnicino

The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness - by Michael Minnicino -
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http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/laroucheonh2.htm
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Heidegger Athenaeum
TThe Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness

Why Lyndon LaRouche Is The Only Antidote
by Michael Minnicino
Printed in The American Almanac, February, 1993

Appendices: Erich Fromm -- 1970 -- "Socio-Psychological Changes -Patriarchism to Matriarchism" Experiment at Ascona - the Creation of the "New
Age" The Theory of the "Authoritarian Personality" The Authoritarian Personality
and the Media ``Who will save us from Western civilization?''
--Georg Lukacs, 1914 ``Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture's got to Go''
--Stanford University students, 1988
The Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom died in October 1992, at the age of
62. A translator of Plato and Rousseau, and a long-time college educator, Bloom
became widely known for his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.
Closing touched a nerve. At the time of its publication, it had become clear that
the worst lunacies of the drug-rock-sex ``counterculture'' of the late 1960s had,
over the subsequent 20 years, never abated on the nation's campuses; in fact,
many of the leaders of that counterculture--now equipped with Ph. D. s--had
become the dominant minority in college faculties and administrations. This
minority was consciously training their students to be a thought police
enforcing ``political correctness,'' ready to denounce and punish any student or
instructor deemed guilty of racism, sexism, insufficient sensitivity to the
homosexual ``lifestyle,'' or too high an appreciation of Western Judeo-Christian
culture.
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In the five years since Bloom's book, the situation on campus has become
worse. Even as Bloom's thesis was being debated, students at California's
Stanford University, supported in person by Jesse Jackson, were successfully
overturning the university's Western Civilization course requirement as ``racist'';
at their demonstrations, the students chanted, ``Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western
Culture's got to Go.'' Across the country, students have successfully demanded
that readings from ``DEMs'' (``Dead European Male'' writers) be replaced by
supposedly more relevant female and Third World authors. Most major
universities now subscribe to quotas, to ensure a politically correct mix of
whites, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals. Most schools now also have
speech codes, like the model code promulgated at the University of Wisconsin,
which, for instance, permits a black studeno call a white ``honkie,'' but would
punish a white student for calling a black ``nigger.''
This article has two purposes. First: I shall demonstrate that all manifestations of
``political correctness'' are generated by a single core philosophy which is
actively evil. The antics on campus often appear humorous, and make good
news copy; but, what stands behind them, is evil--a philosophy of evil that is
responsible for genocide and untold human misery, and represents a danger not
only to American education, but also to the continuation of the American form of
government.
Second: The politically correct rampages that gall so many observers will not be
defeated until the evil philosophy underlying those atrocities is confronted with
an opposing philosophy which comprehends the actual function of education.
LaRouche is the only thinker today who is still asking the question, ``Why
educate?'' The only effective means of combatting political correctness is
bringing the ideas of LaRouche onto the campus.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Postmodernist Hell
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Most of Professor Bloom's book is devoted to a single thesis: American
education is ultimately based on eighteenth-century British liberalism; however,
this liberalism has allowed itself to be subverted over the last 100 years by what
Bloom called ``the German invasion.'' Specifically, American philosophy has
become dominated by the ideas from three, nominally German sources: the
nineteenth-century philosopher Frederich Nietzsche, his twentieth-century
follower Martin Heidegger, and the Critical Theory of the the so-called Frankfurt
School, including Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and
Theodor Adorno.
Bloom is wrong in thinking that British liberalism is the positive basis of
American education. At its best, American education was based on the German
system of classical education, the same system subverted in Germany by
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Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. Bloom's criticism of the latter as
the source of political correctness is on the mark. However, he is ultimately
unable to effectively combat it because he had no rigorous basis for criticizing
British liberalism.
``Political correctness'' was a phrase originally used in Communist Party
intellectual circles in the 1930s and 1940s. It was revived by neoconservative
authors around 1990 as an insulting characterization of a general school of
thought that might be more scientifically called postmodernism.
All the lunacies being taught on campus are postmodernism. The
postmodernists spend much of their time polemicizing with each other over
who, exactly, has possession of the true grail of postmodernism; thus, there are
structuralists, poststructuralists, feminist deconstructionists, Third World
lesbian
feminist
deconstructionists,
and
so
on.
However,
all
postmodernishought has its proximate origins, as Bloom implies, in the three
sources of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernists
will not deny this; most celebrate it. What, then, is postmodernism?
In 1936, Nazi Culture Minister Josef Goebbels, on orders from Adolf Hitler,
formed a committee of academics to edihe complete works of Frederich
Nietzsche. Martin Heidegger was placed on that committee; in preparation,
Heidegger prepared a series of lectures on Nietzsche's work. Heidegger
concluded that the most important thing that he shared with Nietzsche was the
commitment to extinguish the last traces in Western civilization of what he
called ``physical humanism.'' This commitment was also shared by the Frankfurt
School.
``physics'' is the investigation of that which is not in the physical world, which
generates the physical world, or generates changes in the physical world. Many
readers will say at this point: ``Something which is not generated by the world,
but which operates in the world? That's God.''
God: a perfectly valid response. That answer doesn't exhaust the subject of
physics, and many physicians would deny the existence of God, but it gives us a
common ground to admit the validity of the investigation. So what Heidegger is
saying is: We have to remove as a subject of discussion, any theory which
admits of the possibility of human activity connected to a physical agency.
Now, go back to Nietzsche, the context for Heidegger's analysis. Nietzsche is
probably most famous for a single sentence, written a little over 100 years ago:
``God is dead.'' This, it should be noted, is a lot nastier than the classic atheist
argument that ``God does not exist and here are my proofs;'' Nietzsche was
saying, ``God is dead; I killed Him; and I want you to kill Him too.'' This
statement--``God is dead''-- is the basis of all politically correct postmodernism.
Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a professor of classics who abandoned his
academic career in his thirties to write wildly polemical philosophical works. In
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1888, he collapsed on the street and spent the remainder of his life in
semi-catatonia; syphylis was the probable cause. Nietzsche wrote to prove that
the highest concepts that mankind has developed, the idea of God, the idea of
morality, of good and evil, are foolish and false; mankind evolved these ideas
over the centuries as a self-consolation, to escape the mental pain of admitting
that this material world, and our very short-lived bodies are all that we have, and
all that we can expect. At the very beginning of human civilization, says
Nietzsche, the physically stronger and smarter minority of the population
became the rulers over the majority. Morality was developed by these primordial
rulers as a means of social control: Good was wanted people to do, and bad was
didn't want people to do. However, the subject peoples chaffed under this
aristocratic rule and became vengeful, so the rulers had to invent the concept of
God to justify their orders. But, this ploy by the master race contained the seeds
of their own destruction. They had to create priests to administer this religion,
and these priests started to believe their own propaganda, and began to oppose
the aristocracy. Ultimately, you have what Nietzsche calls ``the most priestly
people,'' the Jews.
`Àll that has been done on earth against `the noble', `the powerful,' `the
masters,' `the rulers,' fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have
done against them,'' said Nietzsche. Here, incidentally, is where Hitler got the
core of his anti-Semitism; even in his mass murder, Hitler was pursuing what he
thought were philosophical ends. Why were the Jews bad? Because they gave
us Jesus.
According to Nietzsche, Christianity is thus a Jewish plot, whose conspiratorial
origins are lost in the fact that the plot has been so successful over the last two
thousand years. And that's what Hitler said too: First we must eliminate the
Jews, then we will deal with enervating effects of Christianity on the Nazi master
race. Therefore, Christianity is the most false of all false myths of religion. What
we must do, says Nietzsche, is to return in our minds to the past--before
Christianity, before Jewish monotheism, especially before Socrates and Plato,
who demonstrated that there must be a self-subsisting Good which is connected
to the evolution, through mankind, of the physical universe. Modern man must
`èternally return'' to a sufficiently primitive time when man was starting to make
his own god-myths. Homer, says Nietzsche in a famous example, was a great
author not because he wrote about the gods, but because he created his own
gods.
Nietzsche's revolutionary New Man of the future, the Uebermensch or superman,
must strip away all the values with which he has lived--equality, justice,
humility--and see them as illegitimate overlays on society. We must have an
Umwertung aller Werte (the ``transvaluation'' or ``revaluation of all values''): Each
man makes his own values, makes his own concept of good and evil, based
upon his own physical and intellectual strength. The man of the future must be a
beast of prey, an `àrtist of violence'' creating new myths, new states based upon
the essence of human nature, which Nietzsche identifies as Wille zur Macht, the
``Will to Power.'' At the same time, the old illegitimate physical overlays must be
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pitilessly destroyed, starting with Christianity. As Nietzsche concludes: `Ì am

the Antichrist.''
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Being Unto Death"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Heidegger and the Frankfurt School can essentially be characterized as
commentators on Nietzsche. (We can also include Sigmund Freud in this
category, but for reasons of space, we only offer the suggestion.) Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976) began his first Nietzsche lecture in Nazi Germany in 1936,
by announcing that Nietzsche was ``not merely so subversive as he himself was
wono pose.'' Nietzsche didn't go far enough.
Nietzsche's will to power, said Heidegger, still retains an unnecessary physical
quality, because it allows the individual ego to create a conception of the
physical universe without sufficient reference to the actual objects of the
universe; that is, if God is truly killed, then objects are all we have, and therefore
the sole determinant of our will and our ideas. In this context, Heidegger told his
students that ``Christian philosophy'' is a contradiction in terms. Actual
philosophy must distinguish between Sein (``Being'' in the abstract) and Dasein
(literally, ``being-there,'' the notion of being as it is lived in the world of
experiences). The mental history of man is Dasein attempting to grasp Sein, or
what Heidegger and his followers called the struggle to be `àuthentic.'' The
problem is that phenomena--including other people, races, social systems, as
well as hard little objects--are ``historicized.'' They are historically specific;
Plato's ideas, for instance, were thought in the context of a specific point in
history, which is not our point in history, but they are treated as real in our point
in history, whereas, as Heidegger says, they aren't real.
Heidegger goes even further: Life itself is ultimately `ìnauthentic'' because we
are all mortal, and there is no immortality. Therefore, the most authentic and
human we can be is Sein zum Tode (``being unto death''), the recognition that
Being ends in death. (Some readers will notice at this point in our survey, that
this is the origin of postwar existentialism, which merely took these ideas to
their logical ends, and announced that the most authentic act, the most truthful
achat a human being could achieve was blowing one's own brains out.) Sein
zum Tode being the case, the most a people can hope to do, is find what
Heidegger calls `à Hero,'' who will transcend the historicity which has been
handed down to them, and will create a new, more authentic history. For Martin
Heidegger, that Hero was Adolf Hitler; and, it is undeniable, thahousands of
young German intellectuals followed Hitler to their deaths, based upon
Heidegger's teachings.
The Frankfurt School is largely Nietzsche and Heidegger, plus a Communist
organizing program. The Frankfurt School was founded by Georg Lukacs, a
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Hungarian aristocrat who became a literary theorist based largely upon the work
of Nietzsche and his various elaborators. Around the time of World War I, Lukacs
veered toward Bolshevism, and became commissar of culture during the brief
Bolshevik seizure of power in Hungary in 1919. After the 100-day ``Budapest
Soviet'' was defeated, Lukacs fled to Moscow and became a high official of the
Communist International, the Comintern. There, his task was to answer the
striking question: Why did Bolshevism succeed in Russia, but fail to take hold in
the West despite Communist insurrection across Europe? To this end, Lukacs
gathered a group of Marxist sociologists and philosophers who set up the
Institute for Social Research (ISR) in Frankfurt, Germany in 1922; this became
popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The ISR determined that the key was
that Russia was dominated by a peculiar Gnostic form of Christianity which was
ultimately pessimistic. This kind of Christianity deemphasized the role of the
individual soul as a subject acting in the world, and replaced it with the kind of
individual who derived identity by submerging him or herself in the ``communal
soul.'' The Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia, said the ISR, because they
convinced a portion of the population that their revolutionary movement
represented a new secular messiah; that is, they were able to unleash, through
propaganda and terrorism, all of the popular resentment--or Nietzschean
``vengefulness,'' if you will--against the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church
bureaucracy, while at the same time maintaining the ideology of the communal
soul. They were able to make a simple shift: You derive your identity not from
the Church or Holy mother Russia, but from the Party.
The ISR investigators asserted that the problem was that, despite the most
pessimistic efforts of Nietzsche and his followers, the West still was dominated
by a Judeo-Christian culture which emphasized the uniqueness and sacredness
of the individual soul. Worse than that, from the ISR's standpoint, the culture of
the West maintained that the individual, through the exercise of his or her
reason, could discern the Divine Will in an unmediated relationship; that meant
that the individual could change the physical universe in the pursuit of the
Good--that mankind could have dominion over nature as commanded by the
opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. This meant that every individual in the
West--however deep down--was still optimistic; they still believed that the divine
spark of reason in every man and woman can solve the problems facing society,
no matter how big those problems are. And that meant that the West could not
have a successful Bolshevik revolution. Thus, in 1914, Lukacs could write his
great complaint, ``Who will save us from Western civilization?''
The ISR's particular contribution to the theory and practice of postmodernist
Hell was to realize that Western culture could be manipulated in such a way as to
self-destruct. All that is in culture had to be abolished through an active theory
of criticism, while at the same time, new cultural forms had to be created--forms
which would not enlighten nor uplift, but which would expose the true
degradation of life under capitalism and the false myths of monotheism. What
was needed was what Lukacs called the `àbolition of culture,'' a new ``culture of
pessimism,'' a world in which the individual does not believe that he or she can
have a personal destiny, but only `à destiny of the community in a world that
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has been abandoned by God.'' The political task was to fill the people of the
West with hatred, pessimism, and hopelessness--while simultaneously making
them so stupid that they saw no other solution to their problems than wild,
uncontrollable revolt.
In the 45 years following 1922, the ISR spun out theory after theory (collectively
known as Critical Theory), designed to forcibly remove the joy, the divine spark
of reason, out of our appreciation of art, literature, and music. Walter Benjamin,
who is very popular on campuses today, took on the question of artistic
creativity. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Benjamin and his colleagues were
determined to locate the origins of philosophy before Socrates and Plato.
Benjamin admits that most people think that Socrates started philosophy with
the subject of the reasonable mind hypothesizing the nature of the physical
universe, and seeking successively higher hypotheses to better that
understanding. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, basing himself on Socrates, Plato, and Nicolaus of Cusa, had
demonstrated that this hypothesizing mind could not be material; matter does
not think. (Keep in mind that Leibniz is not talking about thinking as simple
mental activity, as Freud does; he defines thinking as creative activity.) The
creative mind can apprehend the truth of the physical universe, but it is not
determined by that physical universe. The creative mind is self-consciously
reflecting on the past understanding of the universe in the present to effect the
future understanding of the universe, and the creative act is as immortal as the
soul which envisions it.
All this is wrong, says Benjamin. Philosophy begins with the material object, not
the mind. Way back in the primordial past (reliance on this hypothetical
``primordial past'' is obsessive), man was confronted with the objects of
physical reality; philosophy began with man's naming of these objects. Since
there was no science, no technology, no physical economy back then to get in
the way, the name of the object was the essence of the object; to name
something was to say all there was to say about that object. But, with the great
evil of human progress, man becomes estranged or alienated from the objects of
nature. Creativity exists in a fashion, but it is only the attempt by man to get
back to that primordial name or essence of the object, past the impediments of
capitalist society. But creativity cannot be immortal or universal since it is based
on the material world; the creative act must be specifically related to its point in
history--again, the historicity of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The creative act of
Mozart or Shakespeare cannot be known as Mozart or Shakepseare understood
it in their point in history, but only as we understand it in our own, `àlienated''
point in history.
Therefore, there is no universal history; there is no universal truth; there is no
natural law. The best art in the modern period, says Benjamin, cannot be judged
by the bourgeois concepts of good and evil. Benjamin gives the example of the
consciously evil art of the French Symbolists and Surrealists: Their ``Satanism,''
as he calls it, cannot be judged as bad, because it exposes the false morality of
``capitalist art.''
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Theodor Adorno, a musician himself, did the same thing for music. Beethoven,
says Adorno, actually yearned to write atonal music and this is supposedly
shown by his chord structure; however, Beethoven simply didn't have the guts
to break with the social structures of his periodm, which would not have
accepted the revolutionary change to atonalism. Today's music must be atonal
because atonalism is ugly, and only ugly music tells us the truth about the
ugliness of our own miserable existence.
The purpose of art, said Benjamin, is to organize pessimism, and ``To organize
pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics.''
The Frankfurt School was not satisfied with theory; they attempted to put this
nonsense into practice. The entire institute (with the exception of Benjamin, who
died in 1941 of a self-administered drug overdose) decamped to America as
Hitler was coming to power. Sponsored by such institutions as CBS, Columbia
University, the American Jewish Committee, and the B'nai B'rith, it became the
dominant force in sociological and communications theory. It developed the
concept of the `àuthoritarian personality'' to get scholarly justification for its
irrationalism, defining as `àuthoritarian,'' anyone who has too high a regard for
family, nation, or reason itself. The Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is the
basis for today's `èntertainment industry,'' a phrase which the School coined; it
is the theoretical basis of all of today's television, film, and music programming.
It is the basis of the public opinion polls that have become the determining
factor of politics in America.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Know Your Enemy
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is what is behind all the nonsense about DEMs. ``Why are you forcing us to
read Homer, Plato, and Cervantes? These are all male writers who share a
common Western culture; all they can write about are their own experiences and
their own values. They can't say anything important to a woman or a black
person, or a homosexual. You have to read female authors, and black authors
and gay authors for that, because, as we all know, mental life is delimited by
materialism--all we can say about life is how our different instinctual and genetic
structures, as women, as men, as blacks, as homosexuals, interrelate with our
experienced existence (``Dasein'') as men, women, blacks, or homosexuals.''
In 1967, a Frenchman named Roland Barthes founded the literary theory of
``poststructuralism'' with a single statement, basing himself completely on
Benjamin and in conscious emulation of Nietzsche's famous sentence: ``The
author is dead.'' By this he meant: Let's go all the way and admit that any
important literary figure was so completely determined by his conscious and
unconscious interaction with his material existence that to talk about ``the
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author'' is obsolete, and to say that some past author has anything to say to you
today, is hopelessly naive. Even the words that the author used are freighted
with the meanings imposed by the ruling class of that specific period, so the
words themselves are suspect because they subtly convey capitalist oppression.
In 1979, while accepting a prestigious professorship in Paris, Barthes
concluded: ``Language is fascism.''
Many readers have seen reports of the experimental Rainbow Curriculum in New
York: children have to be taught tolerance for the homosexual lifestyle, the
Satanic lifestyle, and so on. This is called ``values clarification'' in new
educational texts. `Èxcuse me,'' says the parent, ``Could you teach some family
values, some universal values of good and evil?'' The school responds, in effect:
`Ùniversal values? Are you an authoritarian? Are you a religious fanatic? The
only universal truth is that a syphilitic Nazi was right: We all create our own
values--Umwertung aller Werte.'' It comes as no surprise that John Dewey, the
founder of modern American educational theory, was a public and committed
follower of Frederich Nietzsche.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Nazism-Communism
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Postmodernism, in its political expression, invariably takes the form of NazismCommunism. By this, I do not mean some mushy concept like ``totalitarianism.''
I am not talking about Nazism or Communism, but ``Nazism-Communism,'' a
specific ideological type which allows the victim to move--without serious
philosophical contradiction--back and forth between Nazi Party and Communist
Party card-carrying membership.
Martin Heidegger was, tragically, the most influential German academic at the
time of Hitler's assumption of the Chancellorship in January 1933; many in that
nation looked to him for guidance concerning the Nazis. He answered them in
May 1933 by joining the Nazi Party and assuming the rectorship of the University
of Freiburg, replacing a rector who had refused to implement anti-Semitic
regulations at the university. An enormous amount of ink has been wasted over
the last 40 years in the attempt to minimize or justify Heidegger's Nazism as a
confused interlude. At the time, however, Heidegger left no doubt that the `ìnner
truth and greatness of this [Nazi] movement'' was exactly what he had been
talking about for the previous decade. Heidegger even tried to recruit his
cothinker and university colleague, Karl Jaspers, to the Party. Jaspers had no
choice in the matter, since his wife was Jewish; at one point, however, Jaspers
reports that he challenged Heidegger on Hitler's ignorance of philosophy.
`Èducation is altogether unimportant,'' answered Heidegger, ``just look at his
marvellous hands.''
At the same time that Heidegger was making these statements, his students
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included a large portion of the group that would dominate postwar academia on
the Continent. Among the Germans were Hans-Georg Gadamer, the faculty
adviser to the 1960s generation of student radicals. French existentialist
Jean-Paul Sartre, arguably Europe's most famous Communist of the 1950s, went
to Nazi Germany for the sole purpose of studying at Heidegger's feet; it is not
exaggeration to say that Sartre learned his Stalinism from a Nazi.
Heidegger's other famous student, the Frankfurt School's Herbert Marcuse, had
left Germany by the time of the Nazi regime, and was in America, on his way to
becoming the single most important ideological guru of America's New Left. In
the 1960s, Heidegger himself came full circle, and announced that ``the Marxist
view of history excels all others''; by this late date, Heidegger also publicly
agreed with Marcuse that the origin of totalitarianism, including Nazism, was
really technological progress, which destroys philosophical thinking and
increases alienation. Predictably, the extremist ecologist Green Party of Germany
began to take up the arguments of both Heidegger and Marcuse.
The list goes on. Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale
University until his death in 1983, was America's leading practitioner of
``deconstructive'' literary theory, and an uncompromising critic of the
authoritarianism allegedly embedded in language. In 1987, it was discovered that
de Man had written anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi articles for a collaboratist journal
in German-occupied Belgium in 1941-1942; the Belgian Resistance had publicly
denounced him as a traitor. The deconstructionist movement that de Man had
helped develop took these revelations in stride: ``The author is dead,'' therefore,
the historically specific Nazi de Man is a completely different entity than the
historically specific Yale deconstructionist.
Today, we have evidence that postmodernism is reverting, lawfully, to its raw
Nazi-Communist form. The architects of the rape- and murder-camps built as part
of the Serbian `èthnic cleansing'' of the former Yugoslavia have been shown to
include a group of nominally leftist psychiatrists trained in the Nietzschean
psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. It must be emphasized that these horrors in
Bosnia are simply the ``culture of barbarism'' sought by Lukacs, and the ``forced
retardation'' of Adorno, and the ``primitivization'' of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
What is going on in Bosnia is a forced march to tribalism, and postmodernists
think tribal existence is a positive good, where people live more `àuthentically,''
and the will to power is fully liberated. This also explains the dominance of
postmodern theory over today's `Àfro-centrist'' and `ìndigenous peoples''
movements.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Author Lives!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lyndon LaRouche is the last great practitioner of ``physical humanism,'' in the
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sense that Heidegger used the term. All the critics of postmodernism, from
Bloom on down, are defensive: ``We respect your opinion, and we should widen
our scope to be more sensitive to other cultures, but please don't force us to
give up our Homer.'' Lyndon LaRouche says: No, you are completely wrong.
Great authors are not dead, and I can prove that your own physical existence is
dependent on those authors' living ideas.
In three recent articles (see references) LaRouche has outlined a comprehensive
reform of America's elementary and secondary education system. These reforms
and the philosophical method that stands behind them, represent the only
effective antidote to politically correct postmodernism. Piecemeal opposition is
absurd in the face of a coherent philosophy of evil; only a complete philosophy
which answers the question, ``Why educate?'' can work.
``The purpose and content of humanist education,'' says LaRouche, `ìs not the
accumulation of mere information and recipes but rather the direct fostering of
the individual spark of creative genius (imago viva Dei--the image of the living
God) in each student, by a total emphasis upon incorporating in the student's
mind crucial moments from the acts of crucial, valid discoveries by (implicitly)
all of the greatest known creative geniuses of all history.'' LaRouche demands
the abandonment of all ``value-clarification'' and `èthno-centrism'' from
education. Rather, we help the studeno reexperience--without idiotic reference to
``race, creed, color, or sexual preference''--the creative moment of scientific
discovery. We order those experiences, firstly, on the basis of how each of those
discoveries advances human understanding beyond the previous one; and,
secondly, how all of those advances, taken as a whole, perfect humanity's ability
to fulfill the command of Genesis to be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion
over the earth. That is, we help the student experience, insofar as mankind can
experience, the overall and ongoing act by which the Creator is creating the
human race.
As LaRouche emphasizes, the purpose of elementary and secondary education
is not to teach ``science,'' but scientific method, as the only possible preparation
for further studies. LaRouche goes so far as to offer a basis for ordering of
pashinkers upon whose successive scientific discoveries our Judeo-Christian
culture and our literal physical existence depends; he also notes in this
contexhe most influential representatives of the opposing, `òligarchical''
tendency in the history of thought. It is striking that LaRouche's list matches
almost exactly one offered by postmodernist Wilhelm Dilthey about 75 years ago.
Dilthey, a colleague of Nietzsche, highly praised by Heidegger, and the teacher
of several Frankfurt School personnel, divided philosophy into two schools of
thought: One was represented by Socrates, St. Augustine, Cusanus, and Leibniz;
and the other by John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and the mechanistic scientist
Helmholz. But for Dilthey, the ``values'' are reversed: Socrates and his followers
are not to be studied, but their influence destroyed!
LaRouche here is trying, almost singlehandedly, to revive the educational theory
of Leibniz, the thinker Nietzsche called the ``greatest brake shoe on the
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intellectual integrity of Europe.'' Almost 300 years ago, Leibniz identified that
there could only be two methods of education, the ``recitatorial'' and the
``scientific'': The recitatorial ``method is thus used for reducing things already
known into a synopsis, and it also serves the purpose of teaching those who are
looking for a historical acquaintance with doctrines without the reasons for
them. But it does not preserve the order in which some truths are born of others;
it is this order which produces science.... So I consider philosophy not as an
orderly exposition of principles with which schoolboys or businessmen who
require only rote learning can be satisfied, but as true science not yet made
public.''
Education will either teach to confirm already known prejudices, as it does at
Stanford; or it will create minds whose thirst for understanding is endless, which
look for that ``true science not yet public.'' We will teach children to understand
our physical universe in the consciousness of the immortality of great ideas of
the past, and in the immortality of their own creative acts. LaRouche expresses
this beautifully in his paper, `Òn the Subject of metaphor'': ``So ... the pupil's
mind is populated, in effect, by a growing number of such past historical
personalities of science, to the effect that the pupil not merely imagines these
persons as if they were merely characters in some story, but knows each as a
living, thinking person, through replication of some creative processes of each
within the student's own mental processes.''
It must be emphasized: The alternative to LaRouche's idea, is book-burning. The
postmodernists already have imposed a very effective censorship on America's
campuses. Of course, one could respond by burning the postmodernists'
books--but all that would leave would be ashes. LaRouche is offering a future in
which each parent confidently knows that the divine spark of genius in his or
her child has been kindled at an early age. Then, we can tell the postmodernists
to publish all they want, for we are confident that our children will ignore them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------For Reference
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The articles by Lyndon LaRouche cited above are published in Fidelio,
published by the Schiller Insitute. They are: `Òn the Subject of metaphor,'' Vol.
1, No. 3; ``Mozart's
1782-1786 Revolution in Music,'' Vol. 1, No. 4; `Òn the Subject of God,'' Vol. 2,
No. 1.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Captions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
13 / 18
Scenes during the 1980s of the drug counterculture, the environmentalist

movement, and the gay rights movement--all transmission belts for the
institutionalization of the ideology of ``political correctness'' on the nation's
campuses.
`Àll the critics of postmodernism, from Bloom on down, are defensive: `We
respect your opinion, and we should widen our scope to be more sensitive to
other cultures, but please don't force us to give up our Homer.'''
``Lyndon LaRouche says: `No, you are completely wrong. Great authors are not
dead, and I can prove that your own physical existence is dependent on those
authors' living ideas.'''
Lyndon LaRouche holding a seminar with college students in 1973. Getting
LaRouche's ideas onto the campuses today, is the only hope of reversing
``politically correct'' lunacy.
``The horrors in Bosnia are simply the `culture of barbarism' sought by Lukacs,
the `forced retardation' of Adorno, and the `primitivization' of Nietzsche and
Heidegger.''
``What is going on in Bosnia is a forced march to tribalism, and postmodernists
think tribal existence is a positive good, where people live more àuthentically,'
and the will to power is fully liberated.''
Recent news coverage of war crimes in Bosnia. The invariable political
expression of postmodernism is ``Nazism-Communism.'' The Frankfurt Schooltrained organizers of rape and genocide in Bosnia are fulfilling Georg Lukacs's
demand for a ``new culture of barbarism.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Appendices:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Erich Fromm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Top
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------In 1970, forty years after he first proclaimed the importance of Bachofen's theory
of the Great mother cult revival, the Frankfurt School's Erich Fromm surveyed
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
14 / 18
how far things had developed. He listed seven ``social-psychological changes''

which indicated the advance of matriarchism over patriarchism:
``The failure of the patriarchal-authoritarian system to fulfill its function,''
including the prevention of pollution; ``Democratic revolutions'' which operate
on the basis of ``manipulated consent;'' ``The women's revolution;'' ``Children's
and adolescents' revolution,'' based on the work of Benjamin Spock and others,
allowing children new, and more-adequate ways to express rebellion; The rise of
the radical youth movement, which fully embraces Bachofen, in its emphasis on
group sex, loose family structure, and unisex clothing and behaviors; The
increasing use of Bachofen by professionals to correct Freud's overly-sexual
analysis of the mother-son relationship -- this would make Freudianism less
threatening and more palatable to the general population; and ``The vision of the
consumer paradise.... In this vision, technique assumes the characteristics of the
Great mother, a technical instead of a natural one, who nurses her children and
pacifies them with a never-ceasing lullaby (in the form of radio and television). In
the process, man becomes emotionally an infant, feeling secure in the hope that
mother's breasts will always supply abundant milk, and that decisions need no
longer be made by the individual.''
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Experiment at Ascona -- the Creation of the "New Age" Return to Top
An overwhelming amount of the philosophy and artifacts of the American
counter-culture of the 1960s, plus the New Age nonsense of today, derives from
a large-scale social experiment sited in Ascona, Switzerland from about 1910 to
1935.
Originally a resort area for members of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy cult, the
little Swiss village became the haven for every occult, leftist and racialist sect of
the original New Age movement of the early 20th century. By the end of World
War I, Ascona was indistinguishable from what Haight-Ashbury would later
become, filled with health food shops, occult book stores hawking the I Ching,
and Naturmenschen, ``Mr. Naturals'' who would walk about in long-hair, beads,
sandals, and robes in order to ``get back to nature.''
The dominant influence in the area came from Dr. Otto Gross, a student of Freud
and friend of Carl Jung, who had been part of Max Weber's circle when Frankfurt
School founder Lukacs was also a member. Gross took Bachofen to its logical
extremes, and, in the words of a biographer, `ìs said to have adopted Babylon
as his civilization, in opposition to that of Judeo-Christian Europe.... if Jezebel
had not been defeated by Elijah, world history would have been different and
better. Jezebel was Babylon, love religion, Astarte, Ashtoreth; by killing her,
Jewish monotheistic moralism drove pleasure from the world.''
Gross's solution was to recreate the cult of Astarte in order to start a sexual
revolution and destroy the bourgeois, patriarchal family. Among the members of
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
15 / 18
his cult were: Frieda and D. H. Lawrence; Franz Kafka; Franz WerBfel, the
novelist who later came to Hollywood and wrote The Song of Bernadette;
philosopher Martin Buber; Alma Mahler, the wife of composer Gustave Mahler,
and later the liaison of Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and Franz Werfel;
among others. The Ordo Templis Orientalis
(OTO), the occult fraternity set up by Satanist Aleister Crowley, had its only
female lodge at Ascona.
It is sobering to realize the number of intellectuals now worshipped as cultural
heroes who were influenced by the New Age madness in Ascona -- including
almost all the authors who enjoyed a major revival in America in the 1960s and
70s. The place and its philosophy figures highly in the works of not only
Lawrence, Kafka and Werfel, but also Nobel Prizewinners Gerhardt Hauptmann
and Hermann Hesse, H. G. Wells, Max Brod, Stefan George, and the poets Rainer
Maria Rilke and Gustav Landauer. In
1935 Ascona became the headquarters for Carl Jung's annual Eranos
Conferences to popularize Gnosticism.
Ascona was also the place of creation for most of what we now call modern
dance. It was headquarters to Rudolf von Laban, inventor of the most-popular
form of dance notation, and Mary Wigman. Isadora Duncan was a frequent
visitor. Laban and Wigman, like Duncan, sought to replace the formal geometries
of classical ballet with recreations of cult dances which would be capable of
ritualistically dredging up the primordial racial memories of the audience. When
the Nazis came to power, Laban became the highest dance official in the Reich,
and he and Wigman created the ritual dance program for the 1936 Olympic
Games in Berlin--which were filmed by Hitler's personal director Leni
Reifenstahl, a former student of Wigman.
The peculiar occult psychoanalysis popular in Ascona was also decisive in the
development of much of modern art. The Dada movement originated in nearby
Zurich, but all its early figures were Asconans in mind or body, especially
Guillame Apollinaire, who was a particular fan of Otto Gross. When ``Berlin
Dada'' announced its creation in
1920, its opening manifesto was published in a magazine founded by Gross.
The primary document of Surrealism also came from Ascona. Dr. Hans
Prinzhorn, a Heidelberg psychiatrist, commuted to Ascona, where he was the
lover of Mary Wigman. In 1922, he published a book, ``The Artwork of the
Mentally Ill,'' based on paintings by his psychotic patients, accompanied by an
analysis claiming that the creative process shown in this art was actually more
liberated than than of the Old Masters. Prinzhorn's book was widely read by the
modern artists of the time, and a recent historian has called it, ``the Bible of the
Surrealists.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
16 / 18
The Theory of the Authoritarian Personality

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Top
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Frankfurt School devised the `àuthoritarian personality'' profile as a
weapon to be used against its political enemies. The fraud rests on the
assumption that a person's actions are not important; rather, the issue is the
psychological attitude of the actor--as determined by social scientists like those
of the Frankfurt School. The concept is diametrically opposed to the idea of
natural law and to the republican legal principles upon which the United States
was founded; it is, in fact, fascistic, and identical to the idea of ``thought crime,''
as described by George Orwell in his 1984, and to the theory of ``volitional
crime'' developed by Nazi judge Roland Freisler in the early 1930s.
When the Frankfurt School was in its openly pro-Bolshevik phase, its
authoritarian personality work was designed to identify people who were not
sufficiently revolutionary, so that these people could be ``re-educated.'' When
the Frankfurt School expanded its research after World War II at the behest of
the American Jewish Committee and the Rockefeller Foundation, its purpose
was not to identify anti-Semitism; that was merely a cover story. Its goal was to
measure adherence to the core beliefs of Western Judeo-Christian civilization,
so that these beliefs could be characterized as `àuthoritarian,'' and discredited.
For the Frankfurt School conspirators, the worst crime was the belief that each
individual was gifted with sovereign reason, which could enable him to
determine what is right and wrong for the whole society; thus, to tell people that
you have a reasonable idea to which they should conform, is authoritarian,
paternalistic extremism.
By these standards, the judges of Socrates and Jesus were correct in
condemning these two individuals (as, for example, I. F. Stone asserts in one
case in his Trial of Socrates). It is the measure of our own cultural collapse, that
this definition of authoritarianism is acceptable to most citizens, and is freely
used by political operations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Cult
Awareness Network to ``demonize'' their political enemies.
When Lyndon LaRouche and six of his colleagues faced trial on trumped-up
charges in 1988, LaRouche identified that the prosecution would rely on the
Frankfurt School's authoritarian personality fraud, to claim that the defendants'
intentions were inherently criminal. During the trial, LaRouche's defense
attorney attempted to demonstrate the Frankfurt School roots of the
prosecution's conspiracy theory, but he was overruled by Judge Albert Bryan,
Jr., who said, `Ì'm not going back into the early 1930s in opening statements or
in the testimony of witnesses.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
17 / 18
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The "Authoritarian Personality"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Top
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------To be illustrated with a pix of a TV anchorman at his desk
The most important thing to understand about ``the authoritarian personality,'' is
that it is a sociological construct: it is not based on actions, but on
predilections, on the measurement of alleged attitudes which are politically
interpreted to mean whatever you want. It is ``thought crime,'' in the sense that
George Orwell used that term in his 1984.
Try the following mental experiment: There is a crowded opening of a new
exhibit at a famous art gallery; a man walks in, and from his overcoat, he pulls a
revolver, and fires three shots in the air. What is the nature of this bewildering
act?
If the man is Tristan Tzara, then the act is a work of art. If the man is Spike
Jones, then the act is a joke. If the man is a Palestinian, then the act is terrorism.
If the man is Lyndon LaRouche, then the act is political extremism. Most people
today, need go no further than the knowledge of the name. They are sufficiently
retarded in their reasoning by the mass media, that they have returned to Walter
Benjamin's Aristotelian Eden: the name tells them all they need to know. We
begin to see the power of the Frankfurt School's techniques of ``re-naming,'' and
repetition. We also begin to see why, when Lyndon LaRouche became an
unignorable political phenomenon after the 1986 elections, there had to be such
an obsessive repetition of the phrase ``political extremist,'' in connection with
his name.
It's all marketing: You create problems like ``static cling,'' or ``ring around the
collar,'' or ``political extremist Lyndon LaRouche,'' in order to justify solving
those problems.
The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The
American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New
Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute
them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Publications and Subscriptions for sale. EIR Issue: Who Controls the Media?,
$10.00.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011. 02. 15. 12:44
18 / 18
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TThe Evil Philosophy Behind Political Correctness

Printed in The American Almanac, February, 1993

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