Views of Lyndon LaRouche and The LaRouche Movement - Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism

LaRouche's philosophy references an old dispute between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle believed in knowledge through empirical observation and experience. Plato believed in The Forms. According to LaRouche, history has always been a battle between Platonists—rationalists, idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and the primacy of ideas—and Aristotelians—relativists who rely on empirical data and sensory perception. Platonists in LaRouche's worldview include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche states that many of the world's ills are due to the fact that Aristotelianism, as embraced by British philosophers like Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Bentham and represented by "oligarchs", foremost among them wealthy British families, has dominated, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. LaRouche frames this struggle as an ancient one, and sees himself and his movement in the tradition of the philosopher-kings in Plato's Republic.

LaRouche and his followers use Neoplatonism as the basis for an economic model that posits "the absolute necessity of progress". Economies evolve in stages as humanity devises new technologies, stages that LaRouche compares to the hierarchical spheres in Kepler's model of the solar system based on the Platonic solids. The purpose of science, technology and business must be to assist this progress, enabling the Earth to support an ever-growing humanity. Human life is the supreme value in LaRouche's world view; environmentalism and population control are seen as retrogressive steps, promoting a return to the Dark Ages. Rather than curtailing progress, because of dwindling resources, LaRouche advocates using nuclear technology to make more energy available to humanity, freeing humanity to enjoy music and art.

In LaRouche's view, the people opposing this vision are part of the Aristotelian conspiracy. They may not necessarily be in contact with one another: "From their standpoint, are proceeding by instinct," LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously." Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led LaRouche to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, pro-lifers, and followers of the Ku Klux Klan—even though LaRouche counts the Klan itself among his foes.

George Johnson, in Architects of Fear (1983), has described LaRouche's Neoplatonist conspiracy theory as a "distortion of a real philosophical distinction". He has written that the resulting philosophy can be applied to any number of situations in a manner that becomes plausible once one accepts its basic premise. In his view, it forms the foundation of a conspiracy theory that rationalizes paranoid thinking, an opinion echoed by John George and Laird Wilcox in American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (1996). Writing in The New York Times in 1989, Johnson described LaRouche as "a kind of Allan Bloom gone mad" who seems to "believe the nonsense he spouts", a view of the world in which Aristotelians use "sex, drugs and rock-and-roll" and "environmentalism and quantum theory" to support wealthy oligarchs and create a civilization-destroying "new Dark Age".