Science, Truth and Dangerous Crossroads
A response to a fellow academic heretic part 2
Good Citizen has written to me on the topic of “New Religions at a Dangerous Crossroads,” a rather expansive subject in which many topics orbit the treacherous black hole know as “the religion of scientism”.
Have a read of his letter first so you are orientated for my reply.
My first reply…
Hello Good Citizen,
As I continue my correspondence I’ll quote parts of your letter as orientating place markers for us both.
Today we have all manner of new methods of being 'influenced' by information that mold our beliefs, whether technological or decentralized, or distributed. What perhaps they used to call the 'global village', we are interconnected through technology beyond our local influences. These are now the dominant sources of information distribution and consumption and are centrally controlled by ever-smaller concentrations of power. I have called these technologies ‘herding systems’, that seek to control, manipulate and funnel the masses in the same direction, reinforcing ideas and beliefs through a kind of digital hive mind.
I cannot agree more and the last few years has brought this fact into sharp relief. Your label of ‘herding systems’ is apt as the motivation of such centrally controlled propaganda is exactly as you say, to “control, manipulate and funnel the masses in the same direction,” in a way not possible in ages past. As I’ve said in my previous reply, our perceptions are rather limited, from which we create sweeping and absolute beliefs about ourselves and the world. If that sensory information is all coming from the one source (the ‘herding system’) with the one simplified model of reality, then we will become hypnotically transformed1 into die-hard believers.
We are also naturally lazy and readily absorb information, like passive couch potatoes, especially if it’s personally significant and even more especially if it involves some sort of danger. So the messaging of personal danger in perpetual states of emergency is the perfect angle to get people engaged in a deep emotional level. This messaging is what I’d call “affect salient” and triggers automatic responses of alertness and focus - often strongly consolidating in our emotional memory2.
But what if we are not just passive absorbers of whatever the ‘herding system’ is telling us? What if we engage curiosity, ask questions, not take everything at face value? There are whole other brain networks that come into play when we are curious and exploratory, networks that necessarily can’t entertain fear at the same time. It’s an approach orientated stance (as opposed to fear which is an avoidance orientation). Now our default is to conserve energy and being curious and thinking about stuff is expensive in this regard - so there’s a part of us that just doesn’t want to think too hard. But there is a greater cost if the passive absorption of propaganda is turning you into a cult member! Expend the energy now, especially as we know we are being bombarded by propaganda, and be curious3.
There’s another aspect of our brains that is working against us (or at times for us) and that’s a principle of consistency. This is where the networks of our brain are used to flowing in a particular direction and a different thought would require some inconsistencies in that neural flow. Our brain doesn’t like this. It doesn’t like being challenged in this way simply because it’s not energy efficient. Nevertheless this is how we learn, and why learning is an effort. Imagine a city with a main road running though the middle - this is the usual flow of traffic and where the most traffic flows. This main road is akin to the usual neural flow in our brains networks. Now imagine that there’s a more direct way through the city but that it takes you through a lot of minor streets and even some one-way back streets. The distance may be shorter, but it takes longer than the main road going the long way around. But, you want to make the shorter distance the path most traffic should go (i.e. you want to change your mind). So what needs to happen? Roads need to be widened, probably some buildings need to be sacrificed, maybe a bridge needs to be widened, maybe you need to go under a city block. It’s a major and expensive undertaking. The benefits would be much time saved by traffic for decades to come (i.e. you could change your automatic way of thinking forever). But will you pay the cost to make that happen?
Be curious.
It seems self-evident then that if one declares themselves not part of something, even if others point to what they claim is scientific evidence, they are denying the tenets of whatever it is that group of people believes and are a ‘non-believer’. The more significant those tenets are in shaping that group's world the stronger they adhere to them, and the more of an outsider the non-believer becomes. If it is their (the group) entire raison d'etre then the more of a threat that outsider becomes, especially if their views are ever expressed that challenge or expose that groups’ beliefs in a way that reveals them to be worthy of greater scrutiny.
Yes group dynamics are like this and no more fiercely than during war (and we could say the Covidians have couched the so called pandemic in the rhetoric of war). The intolerability of non-believers becomes more sensitive (and more aggressively opposed) as the non-believers are categorised (in simplified caricature) as fundamentally dangerous4. This is both a protective measure and a unifying factor (us against them) for the believers that has all the hallmarks of a paranoid, abstracting, and never-seeing-ones-error left hemisphere view of the world. And exactly as you say, if the very reason the group exists is to uphold and propagate a certain doctrine (like safe and effective and necessary vaccines) then the slightest departure from pure doctrine is a great threat and needs to be neutralised at all costs.
It usually happens that sooner or later the non-believer will be challenged to justify their reasons for being so and if any undermine or challenge the beliefs of that group they become a kind of virus that has been introduced into this social body. This can also happen in the digital sphere when one finds themselves in an echo chamber of people reinforcing their established views and dares challenge them.
I’d say the challenge to justify ones unbelief is a last resort as the potential is there for such a challenge to get out of hand - become an opposing virus, as you say, that may infect and maybe kill the believing body. Purging unbelief is, as we have seen lately, firstly to mute, discredit, or otherwise cancel the unbeliever as an obvious and dangerous aberration.
There exists what scientists consider a foundational body of knowledge that has emerged through the process of scientific discovery, but also what we personally consider truths or beliefs that don’t adhere to those rigorous standards. That foundational body of knowledge, however, which is molded and shaped by academia (often funded by outside sources with an agenda) has a tremendous influence on what informs personal beliefs.
This is certainly true today where ‘science’ is upheld as the ultimate truth teller. “But the science says…” as if ‘science’ were some ancient purveyor of wisdom, truth, and enlightenment. In our materialist modern age science has taken the place of religion as the source of truth, stability and even salvation. Politicians wield ‘the science’ like some ancient battle axe in a self-proclaimed struggle against the evils of ‘misinformation’ and the even badder ‘disinformation’ enemies of all that is good and virtuous in the world.
The contributions of science over the ages has been of great value but have also intrinsic limits to how such methods and conclusions can fully explain the world. We are now so entrenched in the idea that science can show us all things that it almost seems absurd to suggest that science has some rather limiting factors in this regard. There is a common idea that science will eventually answer all our questions, a concept called scientism, and as you point out in your letter Good Citizen, a growing religion, nay, more like a cult (‘thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ saith The Science).
Nevertheless good science is ever aware of its own limitations and of what realms it has power to know and what realms it cannot speak.
One of the severely limiting facts about science today is that it uses the model of the machine almost exclusively as a theoretical foundation for everything. Even the flowing and living organic world is conceived and theorised as machine-like. In fact this metaphor of the machine is so pervasive and deeply entrenched it is difficult for us to not see everything in the natural world as machine-like. This paradigm is, again, the work of the left hemisphere - a dogmatic view of the world as mechanical. Dogmatism like this obscures the truth. Scientists are unwittingly the obscurantists5 of today - practicing the dominant methodology of the day that may reveal some truths and yield some utility, but cannot describe all truth.
When you say, Good Citizen, “we personally consider truths or beliefs that don’t adhere to those [scientific] rigorous standards,” what I take this to mean is that we have beliefs outside of the mechanistic view of materialism that may have been conceived by biased and agenda driven groups. I don’t think this is an overly cynical perspective historically, and I certainly know it to be true now when so much of science is funded by entities with very biased commercial goals. The metaphysical has almost been obliterated in this modern age as it’s threatening to the commercial goals of the current oligarchy. After all, someone who believes that “there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling,” may not believe in the utility of an experimental gene therapy to save them.
As a human being one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If such humility could be conveyed to everybody, the world of human activity would be more appealing. (Albert Einstein)
OK, I’ve said too much again and not covered that much ground - but interesting ground nevertheless.
Kind regards,
Winston Smith
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And by transformed I mean from the foundations - the very neural architecture that underpins our cognitive processing will have been altered and conditioned to naturally flow in a particular direction. We are on autopilot, but according to the script of another.
At a certain level of arousal (say like when you are hearing about a deadly outbreak of a virus in your neighbourhood) can produce the right levels of neurochemicals to establish a strong memory (both autobiographical and emotional) quickly in order to keep you safe - you don’t want to forget easily that there is mortal danger nearby!
By reading this substack I’m confident that you are one of the curious.
You will have no doubt seen many war propaganda posters where the enemy is an obviously exaggerated caricature and the representative of the group, the hero, is similarly a heroic caricature. The abstraction from reality is readily accepted by the left hemisphere - easy categories, black & white, no curiosity or questioning needed. We are seeing the same right now with the Ukrainian conflict.
And not only obscuring the truth but manipulating for commercial gain - the thing that comes to mind is transhumanism that bases so much of its understanding on a mechanical model of humanity so as to seamlessly enmesh the organic with the mechanical. If we truly believe we are just machines, it’s not much of a stretch to accept our machine enhancement or modification in the transhuman vision of utopia.
The focus on left brain learning and the neglect and denial of the importance of the right starts early. It is like a tree that has one side in sunlight and the other in darkness. Undeveloped. Unbalanced. The tree might mistake this for the normal state of a healthy tree. Perhaps that is a poor metaphor for what results from social and cultural programing.
https://youtu.be/Q2O9k91Jvsg
The pervasive metaphor of everything-as-mechanism is rarely, if ever, interrogated, and indeed leads directly to the imperative that everything that is not obviously mechanism - biology, psychology, society - be engineered to more closely resemble mechanism. This is implicit in terminology such as 'social engineering' or 'human resources'. This reduction of humanity to mere life, and reduction of life to mere mechanism, was identified by the mystic Rudolph Steiner as one of the three principle demonic influences, what he termed the Ahrimanic.
It seems to me that a way out of this prison is to deploy a different metaphor: everything-as-spirit (or consciousness or whatever term one prefers). It may be notable that the Japanese, who have a deep cultural influence from the animistic worldview of Shintoism that ascribes spirit even to 'inanimate' objects, have proved somewhat more resistant to the coronavirus mass psychosis than most other countries. Even their science fiction, filled with transhumanist themes such as cyborgs and giant robot suits, is suggestive of making machines more organic, rather than making life more mechanical.
At the level of fundamental physics, much of the 'mysterious' behavior of quantum systems - uncertainty, observer effects, and the like - is really only bizarre if one insists that subatomic particles are dumb matter. If one instead assumes, as Leibniz did in his Monadologie, that the fundamental particles are possessed of the basic elements of consciousness, awareness, and free will, their behavior becomes perfectly sensible. From such a foundation an entirely different worldview emerges. It speaks to the monomaniacal dedication of the left-brain insistence on a mechanical universe that, despite the plethora of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the suggestion that electrons might have tiny minds is never even entertained.