The Church of Material Scientism
God is dead. Believe in Science!
…so shouts the hushed proselytizer in the back of atheist agnostic reactionary’s tortured mind.
Terse mantras like these are not a far cry from the neoliberal campaign slogans that have leapt from mom décor to lawn signs.
In this house we believe Black lives matter Love is love Women’s rights are human rights No human is illegal Science is real Kindness is everything
None of these truisms can be contested without risking a self-righteous, egoic meltdown.
In these homes , we find a web of unfalsifiable (and hence perhaps unscientific ) beliefs held as doctrine.
🤪 “Killin’ it with Kindness”
Made in China
reads the plaque over the microwave oven ☢️
Whether or not a theory must be falsifiable to qualify as responsible science, what we do know is that holding unproven beliefs and ideologies beyond question (a.k.a. dogma ) strains relationships, breaks families, starts wars, craters companies, and quite likely crumbles civilization(s) .
You don’t need a picket sign to convince us that science is a worthy approach to understanding the world. You need a hypothesis, an experiment, observation, evidence, and a clearly presented interpretation of the results.
When any of these elements is absent,
so is science.
But the true believers of material scientism are likely to be lurking nearby.
So be wary. When we blindly accept murky interpretations of sloppy experimentation, we are practicing totalitarianism rather than science.
When we tout the credentials of a speaker more than the truth of their claims, we are practicing politics, and more precisely fascism.
Frequently, faithful adherents of material scientism will condemn evidence that opposes the central doctrine as “pseudoscience”.
This is the same device used by the Inquisition to condemn “heretics” who thought the Earth revolved around the sun. And by witch hunters, and Nazis, and today by the stoolpigeons of Fauci and friends, all of whom declare their chosen scapegoats to be “unclean” 💉
Similarly, the CIA once attempted to rein in the suspicions that John F. Kennedy’s assassination smelled fishy by labeling the theories of a greater conspiracy to obliterate the fearless paragon of hope that JFK had become for much of the world, labeling suspicions and evidence of foul play as “conspiracy theories”.
These are all castings of the same unassailable cultural stigma, a brand of taboo that changes shape each generation. With it the Oppressor—the fears of the collective unconscious embodied as hologram that animates us and speaks from our mouths—sears the flesh of those warriors of love with voices of Truth who dare to speak up when the illusion is thick.
Ironically, surrounding a term in “scare quotes” is another form of this insidious stigma.
🐮 When we kowtow to the propaganda machine, afraid to stand out as we watch the free thinkers debunked, discredited, ostracized, exiled, and forgotten, we become like cattle led by the nose and prodded through mazes to fatten up (our souls) for slaughter
🥩
Tangentially, the word ‘vaccine’ stems from the Latin, vacca, meaning “cattle”, applied to the now-ubiquitous injections for the samples of cowpox used in early attempts to inoculate humans against smallpox. Now it seems likely that the milkmaids, whose naturally immunity to smallpox those shots sought to medicalize, may have owed their unusual vim and vigor to the copious amounts of raw cow’s milk they consumed as a matter of course in their field of work.
A scientist must set out to prove themselves wrong.
This falsifiability is the path to deeper understanding.
But a myopic focus only on what can be disproven (by nature) cannot lead us to Truth .
Even the most fervent adherents to the Almighty Lord Science must admit that proving things wrong doesn’t prove anything right.
The current ferment of institutional research science stands in stark opposition to the optimal strategy for breakthrough and discovery
Beginner’s mind: to embrace one’s profound, innate ignorance in order to free oneself from limiting beliefs and engage more radically with the mysteries of the manifest universe.
Today, those who employ beginner’s mind to established fields of science rarely find financial or even philosophical support in the halls and chambers of academia, the laboratories of Big Science, or the boardrooms of investment banks and institutional financiers who are so dedicated to the cancerous growth of interest-bearing money that they would rather we all steep in toxic metastasis than question the premises upon which their illusion of control lies.
The world is made of matter. Atoms, quarks, leptons, mesons, bosons. Particles act like waves and vice versa depending on who’s looking.