Barmy as three ferrets in a burlap sack.

I had another brush with Lyndon LaRouche's zany cultists this afternoon. It was a bright and cheerful day, and I was feeling full of beans. I was heading to the HUB for some pizza when I spied yet another of LaRouche's dupes flogging his table full of pamphlets with titles like 'Children of Satan II' and spewing untruth into the ears of the unwary...He was giving his little spiel to an unfortunate girl as I passed; I happened to catch sight of his notepad, on which I observed him scrawling what appeared to be geometry. I felt it my duty to whisper in the poor girl's ear as I passed that the LaRouche people were crazy, since they sort of are. Mr Cultist--I don't know his name, so let's call him Pickles--happened to overhear, and did protest. How could I say such a thing? Had I even read their stuff, he asked?

Pickles engaged me in discussion. Which is to say, after he found out I was a mathematician, he threw out more or less unconnected, off-topic factoids from mathematics and (once or twice) physics, trying to wow me and cow me with his erudition until I succumbed. The thing was, he got all of his mathematical and physical points fundamentally very wrong. Like the other LaRouchies I've talked with, Pickles was jam-packed with names, dates (some even correct), buzzwords, and even a few pieces of genuine information. None of it, however, made sense. I pointed out to him his factual errors. Perhaps I took a somewhat combative tone, but I think on the whole I was fairly civil. He tried to talk about heat but he didn't know what statistical mechanics was. He tried to talk about nuclear forces, but didn't know the difference between a lepton and a hadron. (He thought a positively-charged electron was a proton.) Just like the last one, he was all about demonising Isaac Newton and Euler; I've also heard and read LaRouchian assaults on Lagrange, Cauchy, Hermite, and others. They're all about Kepler, though. And Gauss. Gauss' proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra seems to have mystical significance for them; I tried to explain that there are better modern proofs, but apparently most of modern mathematics is a malicious fraud ignoring the philsophical implications only Lyndon LaRouche has the wisdom to see. When he did his Newton/Kepler schtick, I tried to convince him that Newtonian gravitation was a hell of a lot more powerful than Kepler's laws of planetary motion; according to him, I was missing the point. After all, Newton was a warlock. And Kepler was an astrologer, I told Pickles; so? I kept hammering away at Pickles until he was completely sick of me, and he told me I was ignorant and closed-minded. A passing, gallant gentleman overheard, and leapt to my defense. He'd been dealing with LaRouchies for thirty years, he said, and it seemed he was even sicker of them than I am. He gave Pickles what you might call an earful. LaRouche's cult was packed with egomaniacs, he said, out to puff themselves up with fancy-seeming snippets of information they really didn't understand, flashing it around to make themselves seem superior and degrading anyone who argued with them. Which has certainly been true of all the LaRouche cultists I've met. In the end, Pickles got so sick of us that he told us to 'stop masturbating onto his table' and walked away.

It was a beautiful, beautiful moment.

Lyndon LaRouche seems to run a sort of intellectual cargo cult. He and his followers use mathematics like a talisman. They seem to think of it in magical terms. They scoop up bits and baubles and phrases from real mathematics, and they chant their stolen scraps like spells or incantations, as if the power resided in the words alone: as if saying it made them an Authority. And there is a certain power that comes from mathematics. I have yet to harness representation theory of semisimple Lie groups to make laser beams shoot from my eyes or bend the masses to my will, but there is still power. There is the power that comes from an ability to think logically and model the physical universe, but this is uninteresting to LaRouche and Pickles; this power takes long years of careful study to achieve. They want power over other people: they covet the power that comes with credibility and with 'expert' status. They mouth the words and expect the power to flow through them. Everything, to them, is about personality; nothing descends, in the end, to logic or fact. To discredit Newton's mathematical contributions they claim he was a warlock; they can't distinguish the man from his work. It doesn't matter if Newton was barmy as three ferrets in a burlap sack; he was still a genius. But it has to be all about personality to them, because without it, they are nothing. All they have is their Black Mass mockery of real scholarship, trappings and appearances. Their cargo-cult airfields. Which can fool someone, if they've never seen an airfield before. (Mathematically, most people haven't.) But when challenged they invoke their crude idols of bamboo and bone, utter their Words of Power...And it all fails them. The airplanes never land.

And since it isn't big enough to deserve a posting of its own, I'll add here that Moonies have something far, far sillier than the Mormon Magic Underwear: Moonies have the Holy Handkerchief. After man and wife are properly joined by the Unification Church, they are to ritualistically mate on three consecutive days under the watchful eye of a photo of the Reverend Moon, having sprinkled the Holy Salt. Then they are to wipe their naughty bits with this Holy Handkerchief, which they are never allowed to launder. Ever.

It has long been said that some people will believe anything. I cannot bring myself to disagree.

Posted by aloysius at March 31, 2004 08:04 PM | TrackBack |