Nov. 15, 1977 (NSIPS) WIESBADEN, BRD—One of the more nasty of the delicious little pleasures of my life nowadays is my observation of the increasing number of persons who, on the one side, charge that I and my immediate associates are part of some vast and dark conspiracy, and yet who, making such allegations, violently object to what they identify as “conspiracy theories of history.” The further, special irony of this business is that during approximately a year or so, I have been engaged in activities which might be described as a kind of conspiracy, which I find it most amusing as well as useful to report.

It happens that there are extensive networks, involving variously public figures, semi-public figures, and obscure individuals, networks overlapping public and private institutions in many nations. They go back thousands of years, but in most recent centuries have involved such names as the Knights Templar, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, and such key names as Dante Alighieri, Nicholas of Cusa, France’s Louis XI, Erasmus of Rotterdam, France’s Henry III and Henry IV, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz, Spinoza, William Penn, James Logan, Benjamin Franklin, several popes, and many others. The central characteristic of these networks is Neoplatonic humanism, and the characteristic political objective of these networks is the establishment of the world hegemony of an ecumenical system of sovereign humanist republics.

These networks stand in direct opposition to another set of networks, the latter networks often intersecting the same public and private institutions as the first. These are the anti-humanist networks, whose spiritual center for more than 200 years has been the City of London. The political objective of these latter networks has been the establishment of anti-republican world rule under either an empire as such, or a “concert of nations” ruled from London to the same effect as an imperial order.

These present sets of networks can be traced back approximately 3,000 years to the high-point of Phoenician culture. This is not merely a matter of intellectual pedigrees or likenesses. There is an unbroken continuity which has persisted through all the changes in names, and so forth, which have occurred during this span of thousands of years.

During the most recent years, most notably since the middle of 1975, I and my associates have found ourselves increasingly in the middle of patterns of associations with other forces, patterns whose deeper significance we did not at first comprehend. As this experience has broadened and deepened, and as we explored the history of ideas of factions more fully, the significance of the patterns emerged.

To make the connection clear, permit me to say something that must at first appear to be at least slightly exaggerated to the ordinary reader. The Labor Committees[fn_1] today are an organic part of the same conspiracy that organized and led the American Revolution and wrote the U.S. Constitution. Do not attempt to take me off the hook on this point. I am not suggesting that the Labor Committees represent some sort of intellectual continuity to the networks of the American Revolution. I am insisting on a direct connection. This is not merely a fact. It is a fact of considerable relevance.

The American Revolution

The best way to set the stage for the point to be made is to summarize the direct connection between Benjamin Franklin and the 15th-Century Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).

Readers of Benjamin Franklin’s writings know that he organized a secret club in Philadelphia, named the “Junto.” Each member of the “Junto” organized another similar circle around himself, and so forth and so on. Each circle, except for the key leading member, was kept unaware of the higher circles leading into the “Junto” itself. That is how the American Revolution was organized.

However, what is less well-known is that the “Junto” was not the highest level of that conspiracy. Franklin was a protégé of James Logan, and not accidentally so. James Logan was the secretary of William Penn, and both Logan and Penn were members of an international conspiracy sometimes known as the “Commonwealth Party,” because of its connection to the inner circle around John Milton and others of the Commonwealth Movement in England. This Commonwealth Party in England and America was directly interlinked with the French Erasmian networks and the networks centered around Leibniz, extending into Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, the Spanish Bourbon courts of the 18th Century, and with branches in and around the court of Russia’s Catherine the Great.

The Commonwealth Party was not a movement which sprang up ex novo out of the fight against the evil Stuarts. Exemplary, John Milton’s father was a musician associated with the same humanist circles in England which had built the “Protestant League” in opposition to the Spanish Hapsburgs, and which had worked in common cause with the Netherlands humanists and Henry III and Henry IV of France. The central intellectual figure of that European network at the end of the 16th Century was Giordano Bruno. The Giordanista networks throughout Europe at the close of the 16th Century, including Kepler and Galileo, were the immediate nucleus for the Commonwealth Party and its European networks, and the context in which Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz continued and developed the conspiracy during the 17th and into the 18th Century.

The immediate predecessor networks for the allies of Giordano Bruno were the Erasmian networks, generically including the leading figures of Florence and Padua during the late 15th and early 16th Century. This included Niccolò Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Gresham, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Miguel de Cervantes. The seminal intellectual figure for Giordano Bruno was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who, “together with Erasmus, Thomas à Kempis, and France’s Louis XI, were leaders of a network associated with the Brothers of the Common Life, a quasi-Augustinian teaching order founded towards the end of the 14th Century in the Netherlands by the great Gerard Groote.

Groote, who represented the northern Hanseatic cultural expression of a humanist movement directly linked to Padua, thus expressed the surfacing of networks which had been driven underground during the anti-Hohenstaufen inquisition of the late 13th Century. The remains of the Hohenstaufen and Hanseatic networks, the remnants of French humanism, of Toledo, and of the Knights Templar had gone underground inside institutions of the Catholic Church and networks of the type known as the Freemasons. The continuity was never broken.

The connections are much older. The predecessors of the Hohenstaufen were the German emperors who were crushed at Canossa with the humiliation of Henry IV. They were the Albigenses of Languedoc, crushed in a bloody, genocidal crusade during the 12th Century. During the 11th Century, a pair of Jewish banking families converted to Christianity for the purpose of seizing the papacy, establishing, with the accession of Hilderbrand, a corruption of the papacy which generally persisted until the emergence of the conciliar reforms during the late 14th Century. The papacy of that period, as during the period following the 1527 sack of Rome,[fn_2] was not a religious issue (although it was a religious problem), but a hideous center of corruption, which employed the papacy chiefly as an instrument of usury on behalf of the various Italian banking families which poisoned and bribed their way into the office for that purpose.

There are today in France families which embody a conscious continuity of struggle against this anti-humanist evil since approximately the time of Charlemagne.

Although the networks have maintained an essential continuity datable from the fight of the Platonic humanists against the corrupt and evil Macedonian spy, fraud, and poisoner Aristotle, it has been the characteristic of the ebb and flow of the humanist networks that their insurgence is associated with the catalyzing influence of the great intellects. The direct links between Cusa, Erasmus, and Bruno, and the direct links from Bruno into Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, are exemplary.

Benjamin Franklin’s mentor, James Logan, was a contemporary of Leibniz, and was in direct communication with Commonwealth Party and Leibniz networks in Europe. Nor was there anything accidental in Franklin’s connection to Logan. The Massachusetts Bay colony was established by Commonwealth Party men who otherwise represented a high level of humanist culture. Increase and Cotton Mather were versed in Neoplatonic humanist literature, including such sources as the great Ibn Sina. Young Ben Franklin’s troubles in Boston, where his family was part of a network, caused him to be passed, with aid of other members of his family, to Commonwealth Party networks in Philadelphia. Young Ben Franklin’s success in proving himself worthy, first in Boston and later in Philadelphia, brought him into a trusted position at an early age.

The Labor Committees and the Networks

The work of the Labor Committees, especially since mid-1975, has brought it directly into contact with the humanist networks of today. By virtue of an increasingly significant role, the Labor Committees have contributed to that cause, including a strengthening of the existing networks. A pattern of informal connections has emerged. Our relationship to those existing networks is analogous to that of Giordano Bruno to the existing networks of the late 16th Century.

The lawfulness of these developing network connections is most efficiently understood by situating my own development within the Neoplatonic humanist framework.

Although my earlier development and family circumstances were principally determining, my formal intellectual development was shaped in direction at the age of 14 by Leibniz’s Monadology and an immediately following immersion in Kant, especially Kant’s Preface of the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason. These two and related literary influences of that period were not merely intellectual influences, but intensely sensuous intellectual influences. I already deeply hated intellectual and moral indifferentism as I encountered it among my peers and school teachers, and within the Society of Friends as I then knew it. Leibniz’s world-view satisfied my moral appetite for knowledge, and Kant’s devastating attack on British empiricism expressed for me my own view of the stale oppressiveness of the organic moral and intellectual indifferentism I encountered in most facets of daily experience.

Such intellectual experiences are to be prized for the early intellectual development of the child and the young adolescent. Without a sense of intellectual direction, without reference-points of intellectual moral integrity at an early age, it is most difficult for the child to develop an impassioned commitment to fruitful self-development.

About us, as children and youths, our peers are mostly pursuing sheer sensual gratifications or some combination of sensual delights and earned individual status. These are peers who have accepted the grey-brownish hues of banality circumstances seem to decree for them. “Accept our common fate, accept it on the same terms we do.” In the worst case, we see this sort of social process spreading the rock-drug counterculture among youth. Otherwise, before we had such recent horrors in our culture—during my youth—it was banality.

Life was generally accepted as a matter of striking a balance among personal sensual gratifications, personal security, and some striving for relative social status. Yet, how can a child find the confidence to resist such pressures? On what social authority? Without authoritative figures to show a child the possibility of such alternatives, figures which also impart some sense of the intellectual self-discipline required, escape from banality would not be feasible.

True, it was 16 years after first reading Leibniz’s Monadology that I struck upon the germ-form of my own special contribution to knowledge. That germ-form was the discovery that Georg Cantor’s notion of the transfinite put Riemann’s fundamental conceptions into the necessary focus for solving the crucial, then yet-unsolved problem of economic analysis: the kind of non-linear processes which account for the effects of technological progress in determining the value of production. Cantor’s acknowledged debt to Leibniz and Cusa is most appropriately cited in that connection.

The most essential conception for fundamental present and immediate-future scientific work in all fields, the notion of the transfinite in connection with relativistic “nested” continua, is not only implicit in the Monadology, it is the central conception of that work, a conception directly developed on the basis provided successively by Cusa and Bruno. The connection between my work at the age of 14 and the development which emerged 16 years later was essentially direct, and causally connected.

Although the Labor Committees’ work in biology and physics is chiefly a manifest result of projects begun approximately 1971-72, these projects were undertaken both as direct extensions of work completed in economics and with foreknowledge of the general character of the results which should be achieved. The fact that man’s mastery of the laws of nature through realized advances in productive technology represents a consistent demonstration of the principle of negentropy in nature in general, shows conclusively that the more fundamental aspect of natural processes generally must be negentropic. By posing crucial hypotheses on the basis of that knowledge, the indicated sorts of results in any field must follow. One cannot predict what one will discover, but one can predict the kinds of discovery which must follow from a combination of empirical studies which, variously failing and succeeding to prove a hypothesis, have nonetheless been appropriately defined for investigation by the hypothesis of negentropy.

The development of a network of closely associated collaborators around the programmatic economic analysis of the Labor Committees lawfully evolved as a more broadly based enterprise, a revival and an advance in the continuity of Neoplatonic humanist thought and practice. What happened is consistent with the history of scientific progress. The collaboration of trained professionals around the initial focus of a significant breakthrough in any aspect of scientific knowledge is potentially the basis for a general advance in various aspects of scientific knowledge and practice. By virtue of being qualitatively in advance of any preexisting currents of thought and practice in matters of economics, the Labor Committees developed the levers of methodology through which to aid in advances in several branches of knowledge.

Given the Labor Committees’ task-orientation, the organization’s work was not only focused to the effect of relevance on the most critical problems of this period, but represented a continuing source of contributions to knowledge of the sort most useful to those networks and other forces consciously or at least organically oriented to the Neoplatonic humanist outlook and its objectives.

Thus, as has occurred repeatedly in the past, the leading contributions of the Labor Committees contributed to the strengthening of Neoplatonic humanist networks generally.

In response to this, out of all sorts of places in society, vestiges of old humanist networks have turned up for our notice—and collaboration—and networks potentially of the same general quality have also appeared in various locations. Our general approach has been to bring these networks into coherence for crucial tasks before us.

This is not merely the proper explanation for what is occurring in this connection. It is by viewing the process in those historical terms of reference that one best learns from history how to approach the urgent tasks immediately before us.

To be continued.

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[fn_1] The National Caucus of Labor Committees was formed from Lyndon LaRouche’s classes in physical economics, taught beginning 1966 in New York City, and then in 1968-69 on the campuses of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of ferment among young people over the Vietnam War, LaRouche presented the science of international economic development as the means to end, finally, centuries of colonialism, imperialism and war, and revive the Classical culture of the Renaissance for modern nations. “Labor Committees” represented the commitment to find common cause with working people and their unions, from whom anti-war youth were often divided. By 1971, LaRouche’s ideas had spread to bring together an International Caucus of Labor Committees. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] The sack of Rome was one phase in the War of the League of Cognac, a power struggle between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V on the one side, and the alliance of France, Pope Clement VII, Venice, England, Milan, and Florence on the other. [back to text for fn_2]