The Sudden Death of Science and Reason
Many people have an angry sense that they have been oppressed by the sciences and the media. They are fed up with the endless boasting. They suspect that the media and the scientific community hold them in contempt. They are right!
Anyone living in The West has this feeling that there is a band of serious experts who derive enormous pleasure from telling them what to think, what doctrines to uphold, and what positions to defend. This scheme among experts if delivered in small manageable doses, like in your GP's surgery, one is happy to listen, after all, your doctor might know what they talking about. But as a cultural and sociological phenomenon, it gets on everyone's nerves after a while.
Before the covid-19 pandemic, what headline in a newspaper was set to generate a sense of disbelief, aggression, and anger than ‘scientists say:’. Because we know what comes next. It’s not the scientists saying anything, it's the public relations and political arm of the scientific community telling the scientists what they think they should say to the public. And within a short period of time, what serious scientists say is changed overnight. Take the history of medicine in the last 60 years — one triumphant imbecility after another revealed to be a phony as the $3 bill. Take medical beliefs in barbiturates, thalidomide, and lobotomy (Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for inventing lobotomy). But of course, these people are shameless.
Even worse, since the covid-19, the band of scientists advising governments in The West on how to manage the virus has mainly consisted of behavioral experts — in persuasion and frightening people. Moreover, this band of experts have a stellar record of getting things wrong. For example, in the UK, anytime there has been a lockdown there has been a spike in infection rates — the opposite intended effect of a lockdown.
The crowd is often wrong. Nietzche once said: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” A couple of months later he descended into insanity, aged forty-four.
Regardless, the media and chattering class also have a distinguished history of getting things wrong. Take Brexit, Trump, and every other plebiscite since 2016. I don’t know why there seems to have been a disproportional response to the covid-19 pandemic in The West. But what 2020 has shown is that there is a lack of vision and courage from the intellectual class.
