Lyndon Larouche Vs. L. Ron Hubbard: Why Two Paranoid Cults Tried to Redefine Music

Lyndon LaRouche vs. L. Ron Hubbard: Why Two Paranoid Cults Tried to Redefine Music reasoned.life/2018/05/why-larouche-and-hubbard-tried-to-redefine-music May 9, 2018 Today, we’ll take a look at how paranoid, far-right fringe political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche attempted to intimidate the musical world into redefining one of the fundamental aspects of musical physics. In some sense, LaRouche’s efforts are similar to what Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard did when attempting to reinvent the sound recording process as part of his own aesthetic theory. The two stories are good for a few laughs. But ultimately, the moral of the story is quite serious. First, cults behave like totalitarian states in their attempts to control artistic and creative expression. Second, these examples remind us that cults are able to get their followers to believe strange things and to engage in quixotic quests that accomplish little save stroking the egos and lining the wallets of power-mad cult leaders. Scientology is far from alone in this regard, and combining our experience in Scientology’s ability to get members to do bizarre things with what we learn about similarities between cults can help the cult awareness community to help people more generally in the future. It would be extraordinarily surprising if a large number of other cultic groups did not attempt to redefine the very foundation of what it means for something to be art. While not all cults do so, we would suggest that the severity by which any group attempts to restrict its members from experiencing certain types of art or where it attempts to reinvent aesthetics is directly correlated with the level of cultic involvement it tries to get from readers. 1/17 Power of Source Album Cover, 1974. Are we having fun yet? About Lyndon LaRouche and His Groups I haven’t researched paranoid political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche and his groups more than casually over the last few years, so a large part of this section is summarized from his Wikipedia entry. If you read the Wikipedia article, note that it is relatively mild in tone and treads gently in discussing the cultic aspects of his organization, which controls members’ lives to a degree consistent with other heavy-duty cultic groups. I recall someone who posted several years ago under the handle of “Cultwife” on Tony Ortega’s blog, who lost her husband years before to LaRouche; her personal narrative is consistent with the experiences of other former LaRouche followers. 2/17 Lyndon LaRouche. Source: NationalVanguard.org Lyndon LaRouche is a political gadfly who over a 60-plus year period has created a number of political organizations to espouse various economic and governmental theories that are fairly far out on the fringe. Originally, his views were hardcore far-left socialism but he rapidly shifted to ultra-right lunacy by the late 1960s. Much of his material is paranoid economic and political theories that are easily debunked by people with only minimal education in economics or who consume reputable news. He also has a number of bizarre scientific notions that have driven him to create front groups ostensibly to advance science-related causes such as spending on development of fusion energy. At his height, LaRouche organizations had perhaps 10,000 active members and over 100,000 subscribers to several magazines the groups published. Various estimates suggest that LaRouche has perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 followers globally today. The most dedicated followers live in decrepit group housing and work long hours soliciting donations, recruiting members, and waiting on leadership. In the early 1970s, LaRouche began to publish “intelligence reports” with his views on world events; he used followers from around the world to collect and forward news articles to him, which he would then editorialize on, typically attempting to fit the news into one of his conspiracy theories. LaRouche started to use this newsgathering organization to attempt to approach and influence politicians, including attempting to offer “data” to the CIA and NSA on groups that LaRouche thought were enemies of the US. LaRouche and various followers were able to meet with senior officials in the Reagan Administration on several occasions, until these meetings were revealed in the press. 3/17 LaRouche’s intelligence analysis is, of course, not unlike what Hubbard was doing at the same time, in the “Orders of the Day” issued when he was aboard the Apollo and the rest of the motley Mediterranean flotilla, where he took a news clipping and provided “special insight” into current events, with a heavily conspiratorial bent. There’s no way to know whether Hubbard and LaRouche influenced each other in this respect, because they were both already paranoid and possessed by delusions of grandeur, dreaming of taking over governments (Hubbard’s follies in trying to take over Rhodesia, Malawi and other places are well known, and LaRouche frequently ran for president of the US as a fringe candidate). It’s ultimately irrelevant whether one influenced the other, because people indoctrinated into the cult milieu seem to gravitate towards conspiracist thinking naturally; it doesn’t appear that cult leaders need to be taught explicitly to include this in their thought reform programs. Essentially, LaRouche is the founder of a political cult that is in many ways the equal of Scientology in organizational complexity and in the depth of the mindfuck that members suffer, though it has not been as successful in attracting members over its life, and its available cash is less. However, the relative quiet of the LaRouche groups in the last few years could be an asset, since their brand name is not as toxic in the broad reach of society as Scientology’s is today. “Scientific Pitch” In days of yore, there was no universal standard for what frequency would anchor a given system of musical notation. One note anchors a particular tuning, and all other notes are derived from the frequency of the note that the pitch scale was based on. Each conductor used what felt best to them. While variations were not extreme, they were enough to change the “brightness” of the sound significantly. Over time, the musical world settled on one of a few pitch standards. The nearly universally used standard today is the “A440” standard, where the A above Middle C oscillates at 440 Hz. In the 18th century, a physicist proposed a standard now called “scientific pitch,” where the frequency of the Middle C note was defined as precisely 256 Hz – Middle C in the A440 standard works out to be 261.62 Hz. The difference would presumably be extremely noticeable to musicians, perhaps not in a good way. But the idea of 256 Hz as a defining frequency for music had appeal to mathematicians and physicists, including Joseph Sauveur, the inventor of the scientific pitch idea. That’s because 256 is an exact power of two, and thus a table of frequencies in octaves would be very tidy when written out, since all C notes would also be an even power of two. The idea of regularizing measurement systems and “tidying them up” was well under way in Europe at the time, and would culminate much later in the 18th century with the development of the Metric system. 4/17 Unsurprisingly, Sauveur’s attempt to impose arbitrary order on the musical community was not a hit and it fell by the wayside, apart from occasional attempts to revive it, for nearly 250 years. Perhaps the only notable attempt to drive scientific pitch was by legendary operatic composer Giuseppe Verdi in the late 19th century who advocated the idea briefly, though even a composer of his stature was unable to interest the broader musical community. Scientific pitch would remain relegated to obscurity after Verdi for a century, when it garnered an unlikely advocate. Giuseppe Verdi, as drawn in Vanity Fair magazine, 1879 LaRouche’s Activism on Behalf of Scientific Pitch: From Odd to Cultic 5/17 Friedrich Schiller painted by Ludovike Simanowiz, 1794. Source: Wikipedia 6/17 In the 1980s, Lyndon LaRouche’s wife created an organization in Germany called the Schiller Institute. This was created to advance the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, an important German playwright who also wrote extensively on the philosophy of aesthetics, among other things. Schiller also pursued musical adaptations of his works, with both Beethoven and Brahms writing scores to set his poems to music. The final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one score for Schiller’s poetry, and Schubert scored 44 different Schiller poems. Verdi, who tried to promote C256 tuning, was also a fan of Schiller’s musical work, incidentally. I haven’t taken the time to try to find out why Schiller’s ideas were so compelling that an advocacy group was needed two centuries after his death. It may simply be that LaRouche’s German-born second wife, who he married in 1977, was interested in the playwright’s work, so LaRouche funded her passion. He wouldn’t be the first rich husband in history to fund his wife’s vanity business. The Schiller Institute is not exactly a roaring success of late; its 2015 IRS Form 990 reveals income of $37,617 and expenses of $80,175. And its focus appears to have wandered from the questions of aesthetics that its namesake grappled with. It’s been involved in speaking up for maglev trains and climate change, advocating against Clinton-era special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and a mishmash of other causes. It’s unclear whether Schiller himself advocated for use of scientific pitch, so I’m not readily able to discern why LaRouche’s Schiller Institute felt it so necessary to champion such an obscure and discredited issue.

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