On Scientism

And the Holy Office of the Inquisition

We’ve been on a bit of a roll in discussing the nature of science, scientism, The Science, perceptions of reality, and how these things play into totalitarianism. Below is a repost of a recent piece by Richard Gale and Dr Gary Null via Global Research, who do a good job of summarising some key points we have been exporing and touching on some we’ve missed. To get a feel for their thesis, they sum up their article with “…the rise of Scientism, as a coadjutor for a new Inquisition, is a self-deceptive illusion that views itself as virtuous. Nothing could be farther from the truth because this is the case for all dogmatic, militant, regressive religious beliefs in general that entertain hidden motives to persecute its perceived enemies.”

(I’ll pop in some other key posts below this article, including some recent salient thoughts from John Carter via his postcards from Barsoom)

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The Tyranny of Modern Scientism

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null

In 1976, Dr. Halstead Holman, the youngest professor to be named chairman of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine at the age of 35, wrote,

“the medical establishment is not primarily engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge into medical practice; rather in significant part it is engaged in special interest advocacy, pursuing and preserving social power.”  

Holman called for a paradigm shift in medical laboratory research that would be innovative, support intellectual freedom, and have the courage to tackle the many challenges and shortcomings clinical medical practice faced.

The greatest obstacle Holman confronted within the medical community was what he called “excellence deception,” which he defined as an “ideological justification” that rejects criticism and insulates itself from alternative medical theories and opinions.

Consequently Holman was calling out the hubris that pervaded the higher echelons of the medical establishment.

A decade later, Dr. Robert Petersdorf, an internationally renowned expert in infectious disease, also worried over the direction modern medicine was headed. In 1989, Petersdorf stated, “We can no longer tolerate dishonesty, cheating, fraud and conflict of interest that have invaded science and medicine.” Looking back over the past three decades, Holman’s and Petersdorf’s warnings may have just as well been feathers floating down a cliff. The paradigm shift never occurred.  The medical profession has instead become increasingly corporatized, dogmatic, and oppressive.

Corruption is a high-stakes game played by the pharmaceutical complex, without which we might actually have a functioning healthcare system that improves public health. Whether it be concealing or fudging prior knowledge about drugs’ adverse effects to maximize profits, publishing junk clinical trials, buying off legislators, or engaging in devious retaliatory efforts to pressure and silence critics, these are only the costs of doing business that keep drug companies’ and Wall Street’s coffers overflowing. And this corporate culture of deception has the full approval of governments’ health ministries and the World Health Organization. Today our lives are at the mercy of a powerful cartel of medical bureaucrats in white physician coats intent on protecting a corporate-based inquisition to stifle dissent.

If anyone doubts that the Inquisition was only a dark anomaly in western history when the Church and superstitions reigned, and that our “enlightened” civilization would never fall back again into such tyranny or repeat the horrors of witch trials, you have not been paying attention. Monty Python got it correct, the Inquisition’s “chief weapon is surprise and fear… fear and surprise… and ruthless efficiency.” During the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, fear, not science base on viable consensus, ruled over the population as a means to police compliance.

For years, Noam Chomsky has been pointing out the censorship that emerges when propaganda is united with a control over the media. Today’s media is no longer distinguishable from the CDC, the FDA and Silicon Valley’s technological masters of cancel culture and virtue signaling. The architecture of scientific materialism’s Inquisition has grown steadily. Tuomas Tahko, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, warns that the rise of a “Scientific Inquisition” is an effort to “convert us all to naturalism [scientific materialism or Scientism] and to denounce the false gods of intuition, a priori reasoning and thought experiments.”

When modern medicine’s greatest threat becomes “intellectual freedom,” even the freedom to carry out thought experiments outside the parameters of the dominant scientific tradition is heretical. The frontline physicians who found strong evidence for cheap off-patent drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments against SARS-2 infections acted upon their intuitive suspicions and prescribed these drugs. They were proven correct; yet, despite having saved countless lives, who would have otherwise died in intensive care units due to the medical bureaucracy’s faith in the unfounded and barbaric medical advice from Anthony Fauci and the CDC, these physicians were vilified and viciously attacked in the media. “The philosophies of one age,” wrote the father of modern medicine William Osler, “have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday have become the wisdom of tomorrow.”  For the hardcore followers of modern scientism, particularly those in the medical and biological sciences, a human being is nothing more than an animate machine controlled by a computer in the skull that will break and ultimately cease to function.

This is not an exaggeration. One of sicentism’s most popular voices, Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, would have us believe:

 “What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors and rapidly firing neurons… But it goes even further: If our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which in turn are made up of even smaller robots.”

Or even a brilliant genius such as Stephen Hawking who describes the existence of the human race as “just chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Hawking also believed the brain was simply a computer that could survive outside the body and replicated in artificial intelligence to reach immortality.  He also believed a computer virus was an actual life form.

Dennett’s and Hawking’s scientism, as well as many others in our educational institutions, are in line with the long term goals of the World Economic Forum for humanity’s dystopian future.  In our modern civilization where human life has lost all existential meaning and therefore it has forfeited its social moral compass, Klaus Schwab asks the appropriate questions: “Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What does it mean to be human?” The fact that we are even asking these questions indicates how far modern humanity has been torn away from itself. The potential consequences of this catastrophic self-inflicted dementia permeating scientism are literally terrifying.

Since Scientism embraces an extremely limited, and a rather demented view of reality, which discards much of human experience such as intuition and creative flights of the imagination as subjective nonsense, there is no room for “thought experiments” in modern reductionist science. Hence, no investigation or research is warranted nor should be funded that explores outside the conventional box. To even consider that biomolecular health and disease may be understood from certain principles of quantum theory is anathema; yet, for quantum physicist Prof. Marc Henry at the University of Strasbourg, understanding the particle-signal quanta of cellular biology is exactly what medicine needs to start learning.

In the 15th century, the Dominican friar Tomas de Torquemada established the Holy Office of the Inquisition and became its grand master. Today the Grand Inquisitor is a large and flexible consortium of power brokers and Big Pharm CEOs who exert enormous control over the CDC, FDA and the World Health Organization. Silicon Valley tech giants and billionaires such as Bill Gates bankroll the censorship of dependable evidence that threatens conventional healthcare and its regime. Our politicians, through the lobbying efforts of pharmaceutical henchmen, pressure internet firms to block, censor or blacklist dissident voices who call for public debate on health issues that directly impact all Americans. An Inquisition cannot succeed in advancing an invasion of terror without an army of fanatical fear mongers who can take control of the public’s channels of communication by stealth and surprise.

The radicalized scientific materialists through such organizations as the Center for Inquiry, the Skeptic Society and the Society of Science Based Medicine, which are aligned with the equally militant New Atheism, carry out orchestrated campaigns to brainwash the public into Scientism’s dogma through Wikipedia and social media. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, professional medical institutions such as the AMA, and the entire mainstream media are also complicit in this medical tyranny. The mid nineteenth century father of faith-based Scientism, Thomas Huxley, would be proud of the reformation he started. “We are on the eve of a new Reformation,” wrote Aldous Huxley’s grandfather in 1859, “and if I have a wish to live… it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” The primary enemy of today’s Scientism is critical thinking, especially within the medical community itself. Its success is all around us as we witness this malevolent doctrine being embedded into national policy

Modern institutionalized Scientism has but one command: play by our rules or be ostracized, persecuted, and ultimately have your reputation blemished. Even brilliant scientists, respected throughout the international community, may find themselves on the rack if they deviate from the norm.

One of the more tragic examples of a brilliant scientist who was victimized by today’s scientific Inquisition was the late Nobel laureate Dr. Luc Montagnier.  In 1983, Dr. Montagnier discovered the HIV virus. Later in his life he entered into a forbidden zone to validate quantum properties that might explain homeopathy’s efficacy. His research involved the teleportation of genetic frequencies from his French laboratory that were then successfully restructured into actual DNA or RNA amino-acid sequences at a university laboratory in Italy. Yet for this accomplishment, which some believed should have warranted a second Nobel award, this brilliant scientist was attacked for being a quack, a charlatan, by the militant scientific community and Wikipedia. Montagnier was also labeled a conspiracy theorist for having been one of the first geneticists to review the SARS-2 coronavirus genetic sequence and to suspect it had a lab origin.

Quantum mechanics, pioneered by Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and others, should have ushered humanity into the post-materialist world. Unfortunately modern medicine, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and other life sciences, which have been hijacked by private corporate interests, have lagged dismally behind. The most ardent proponents of Scientism are determined to prevent medicine from evolving beyond its current reductionist, materialist perspective. For that reason its followers adamantly oppose funding research that may someday explain why and how alternative healing modalities have been successful for countless people around the world. Consequently Scientism is the strongest opponent of the growing trend in CAM therapies entering medical school curriculums.

It is reasonable to question how objective, how fair, how honest are Scientism’s leaders when they are unwilling to enter open and hopefully productive dialogue with those that they oppose. It is an odd psychological fact that a mental obsession can potentially produce its opposite.  If an idol or dogma is revered faithfully enough, it can eventually flip and confirm its antithesis. We witness this today in the paradox that riddles modern Scientism; the cockiness of reason morphs into rigid blind faith. Every fundamentalist faith, whether it be a religious belief (one faith versus every other faith), economic polarities (capitalism versus Marxism), a political persuasion (conservative versus liberal) or a dominant paradigm in any given science, generates a layer of unyielding cynicism and denial that becomes increasingly intolerant. Cult author and futurist Robert Anton Wilson called this phenomenon “a psychological scotoma” — a blind spot of vision in an otherwise unobstructed normal visual field.

Although skepticism (with a small “s”) can be a very healthy attitude, it requires a willingness to present questions that might put our own skepticism into doubt. Yes, evidence deserves to be evaluated critically; but it also demands that there be enough allowance for our skeptical biases to be proven wrong. The only escape from skepticism’s trap is to be skeptical towards one’s own cherished beliefs. Yet, the rise of Scientism, as a coadjutor for a new Inquisition, is a self-deceptive illusion that views itself as virtuous. Nothing could be farther from the truth because this is the case for all dogmatic, militant, regressive religious beliefs in general that entertain hidden motives to persecute its perceived enemies.  Richard Feynman, arguably among the most famous quantum physicists and mathematicians of the late 20th century, wrote, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”  The good news is that humanity has managed to survive major catastrophes over the millennia. No doubt humanity will also survive the tragedy of Scientism and its bellicose child — modern corporatized medicine.

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow

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Along similar lines:

The Temple and the Network

Are You A Machine?

Science Is Just Applied Common Sense

Science, Truth and Dangerous Crossroads

Science vs. Joinence