The Church of the White Coat

About the dark clouds on the horizon of science

Krisztián Pintér, 2019
pinterkr@gmail.com


About truth-knowers

One of the first professions mankind invented is the truth-knower. Yes I just coined this phrase, but it expresses the concept nicely. These people went by different names throughout the many millennia, shaman, sage, medicine man, philosopher, priest, and recently, scientist.

The role of the truth-knower

Truth-knowers were tasked with nothing else than figuring things out and be right. Other people approached these truth-knowers, brought them gifts, and asked them about disease, crops, life issues or anything really. One might object at this point that some of the aforementioned jobs only involved contacting the spirit world, and not general knowing-all. Moreover, some other jobs were more involved with morality and what people should do, as opposed to what is true. To this, we reply that morality, spirit world and science are one and the same. For people never want answers to abstract questions, but how to conduct themselves in the world. What actions should they take to increase their wellbeing, here or in the afterlife, preferably both. Whether knowledge comes from vials and equations, or the spirit world, or maybe God himself, makes no difference. The fact that shamans and priests described reality poorly compared to science is not a fundamental difference, it is just a level of sophistication.

The only role of the truth-knower is to know and tell. Decision making was never their job, and in fact, in most groups, they were deliberately removed from decision making, either genuinely or formally. If we think about it, such separation makes perfect sense. Nobody can be trusted to measure their own merit. You can expect a truth-knower to stick to the truth if he is outside of the game. His power entirely lies in his ability to be right, his reputation as truth-knower.

The power of the truth-knower

Should a class of truth-knowers emerge, through decades or centuries of honest devotion to truth and nothing else, such a class acquires immense amounts of "soft" power. They can never command directly, instead, they have an insurmountable influence on people. This power, although profound, can not be directly used to achieve ulterior goals, or any goals for that matter, for they have to follow their own rules and traditions to be credible. In some sense, it is not them who are speaking, but the truth itself, and they are merely the mediums through which truth talks to us.

Since they possess knowledge the general populace does not, they will always be surrounded by a kind of suspicion. Do they represent the truth faithfully? How do we know? The only way is to meticulously build trust, one bit at a time. Trust is hard to build and easy to squander. Uncorrupted, the rank of truth-knower can stand firm for hundreds of years. Corrupted though, the cracks spread fast.

Corruption of the truth-knower

The powers that be will not watch such a great power lie unutilized. Look at it from the point of a king. The king has to employ a variety of techniques to keep the ruled in line. Class divisions, military power, diplomacy, and early identification and elimination of resistance are just a few to name. A class of priests that can simply tell people what to do, and they just follow on their own without coercion, is grave danger if you don't control it, and a magnificent tool if you do.

Therefore rulers naturally had this attitude toward any kind of truth-knowers: crush or control. The usual pattern is to try to crush first, while it is small. Alas, ideas are very hard to contain. Ideas can spread from one person to the other, thus even mass murder is not a reliable method against them. On top of that, the more aggressively you try, the more exposure and sympathy you give to the idea. Eventually, you might opt for another strategy: surrender.

Not surrender your power, of course. Surrender your stance against the ideology in question, instead, adopt it, submit yourself to it, become an agent of it. Use your power to aid and strengthen it, spread it, and rule in the name of it. This is harder than it seems though, since, as we have established, the truth-knower caste is not free to say as they please. They have their reputation to care about. The ruler must tread lightly if he wants to get the most use out of his new acquisition.

For one, the illusion of independence must be of the highest priority. There can not be a Ministry of Truth in your organization, as nobody expects any truth to come out from such a department. In fact, it is advisable to put the truth-knower class above the ruling class, albeit excluding them from the actual decision making processes. This way you can enjoy the obedience they generate, while still keeping their hands clean.

The fall of the truth-knower

Don't forget who the true master is. A corrupted truth-knower class is an extremely useful tool, but a tool regardless, not the top of the food chain. The powers that be keep them in good shape as long as possible, just like a good shepherd keeps his flock in the best shape he can. Being a sheep in a flock might even be a better experience than being a wild game, and that includes the butchering at the end, which is still better than being eaten alive by wolves or dying in hunger and disease. The only thing sheep lose is their freedom. And freedom is only precious for those that value it.

A shepherd might tend to his flock, but only if he expects to reap the benefits. Should the flock catch some disease, or being replaced by some other method of cloth or meat production, their days are numbered. They don't have any influence on their future, and they don't have any intrinsic value other than what they bring to their owner. If the truth-knower class loses its hold on people's minds, the end is near.

It can happen for various reasons. Ideologies tend to age badly. Human knowledge extends with time, and eventually becomes at odds with the old wisdom. A new wisdom is needed. However, this does not sit well with the truth-knower class, for if they can change their minds so easily, how do you explain their past confidence? How can you maintain your reputation after being so wrong for so many decades or centuries? New knowledge is often rejected by the old class of truth-knowers, and thus a showdown is inevitable eventually. The old knowledge very rarely wins in the long run, simply because the new one is much more powerful.

But there are dangers other than obsoletion. Obviously, the ruler class must steer the truth-knowers according to their goals, this is the whole point. Risks have to be taken, and so failures inevitably happen. Every now and then, suspicious cases will surface, raising questions about the intent and methods of the class that should not be questioned. Incredible is the ability of the people to ignore such signs. Incredible, but not infinite. You might manage turmoil once, twice, or any number of times. But eventually you fail. The power of truth-knowers disappears in an avalanche.

Welcome the new truth-knowers

God is dead, claimed Nietzsche, and it was not a value judgement on his part, but merely an observation. The question whether religion is useful or not, was useful or not, loses its relevance as religions, one after the other, fade to insignificance and obscurity. This last caste of truth-knowers did their fair share in destroying their own ideology, but to be frank, there's not a lot they can do at this point. The utter inabilty of any, even modern religions to explain the world as we know is undeniable. We need better truths.

The rise of science

Science is old, but thanks to its exponential growth, we can, being somewhat arbitrary, call the 19th century the century of science. This was the century in which science knocked on our doors from time to time to sell something new. It sold the most incredible items. It sold electricity, it sold vaccines, hygiene, modern engines, canned food, machines of all kinds, long distance communication, fertilizers, and many more impossible to list. Many of science's claims were very hard to believe. Take for example the concept of vaccines. You inject yourself with a treated sample of the illness itself, of which very little were known before, and you magically won't get sick. Magnetism is still mysterious to the common man after more than two hundred years. Concepts like atoms and photons, followed shortly by Einstein's theories of relativity, sound like a weird dream. But you don't doubt someone that brought you an electric motor and saved your children from deadly disease.

The role of science

Science acquired an unquestionable reputation after their most nonsensical claims were proven right. At this point, if they say the Moon is cheese, nobody will question them. Everyone will talk about it, did you hear, the Moon is cheese, wow, who would have thought.

Science established itself as the solver of all problems. Eventually, we were not sitting home waiting for science to show up with something new. We demanded them to solve all the problems we had. Where is the cancer treatment, you lazy bums? Why we don't have personal aircraft and spacecraft? How can we scientifically optimize our government and public decisions? Science is infallible. It might not be able to solve everything right now, but it will eventually, and hopefully soon.

The scientific method is independent of human values, beliefs, even lives. The white coat usually worn by scientists should have been a religious symbol, only we stopped believing in such symbols lately. The white color represents purity and represent the clean slate, on which our new knowledge is being written. This purity was the engine that powered the ascension of science, but good things tend to end when you are not watching.

The fall of science?

How could politicians overlook such a great opportunity? Those in the business of controlling people watched the influence of science with ever growing appetite. Using science for nefarious purposes is not even an idea, it is straightforward. The only question was how. But that's just techniquality.

As with many things in life, progress was not made by one big idea. Progress was made by the continued effort of looking for opportunities, pushing the boundaries, throwing things at the wall and see what sticks. Slow and steady progress is almost always the way to go forward. You need persistence, a clear vision of your goal, and perhaps an exaggerated sense of self-importance and utter disregard for other people or the future. Unfortunately, we have such people in abundance.

If you think corrupting the scientist class is any harder than corrupting religious leaders, you are in for a disappointment. In retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Priests and sages, just as scientists, probably were the brightest people of their time. They were often selected and filtered on that criteria in the first place. Then they spent a life studying and thinking as a profession. They were pretty good at it. Yet, time and time again, they were corrupted by power to the level of symbiosis. Granted, mankind gets smarter with time, thus we can imagine such tactics becoming ineffective at one point. But scientists being smart, in itself, is not a remedy.

As of now, in essentially all countries, and especially all developed countries, science and research is strictly controlled and influenced by the state. In business circles, if you own 30% of a company, you are automatically assumed to control it, and laws apply accordingly. Even if you can demonstrate that you never actually voted for years, the very possibility that you could is enough for the assumption. But states have the audacity to claim academic freedom while large parts of university budgets, research sources and researcher/teacher salaries are state granted. It does not take a genius to see through the deception, a bunch of power hungry politicians will not pay a truckload of money for nothing.

The scientific community at large seems to be content with it. You don't hear lamentation about state funding or state control as long as the loot is not getting smaller. Scientists welcome ethical rules imposed by the state, they happily follow guidelines and principles handed to them by senators or bureaucrats. They even propose advancements to these.

The arrangement might seem familiar. Officially, science is not a subordinate of governments, but the opposite, science is placed on a high pedestal, influencing policy for the betterment of mankind. They even coined the term science based policy, to describe this relationship. To anyone actually knowledgeable about some particular field of science, whatever the government does seems to be at most mildly scientific, but even that is a stretch.

The toll

Here we list some of the fields that has been successfully corrupted right in front of our eyes. A few disclaimers to calm down angry people. We are not saying here that all or any one claim uttered by these scientists would be wrong. The techniques of control varies from case to case, falsifying, selective funding, cherry picking, sometimes even popular opinion might be enough to twist the discourse. The main problem with government interference is exactly that it clouds our ability to see clearly. They might even be perfectly correct in their analysis, but we have no way to know. You would not trust a product review from someone selling it.

Medicine

Draconian regulations render research nearly impossible to finance. To remedy the problem, governments continually extend intellectual property laws, which further hinders both progress and competition in various ways. As a result, we have pharma giants, drug manufacturers getting bigger and bigger through mergers, doing nearly all the research in the field. Not patentable methods, for example prevention and lifestyle changes, will not be researched. These giants grew so enormous, they now have serious influence on policy making. Medical procedures, safety standards, and intellectual property laws are being tuned to suit these behemoths, and erect insurmountable barriers for upstarts to enter.

The consequences are nothing short of catastrophic. Actual science leaks into the field of medicine at a snail's pace. New drugs are held back for decades, not to mention those that don't get developed in the first place. When they hit the market, the price must contain all the waiting and the bloated expenses caused by the approval procedures. Doctors are not allowed to follow their own conscience. Very little is known about the actual causes of endemic diseases. For the first time in recent history, life expectancy is, or soon will be decreasing in the developed world.

Nutrition

Food production is a war asset, therefore of primary importance to all governments. Especially sugar and grains, which are long shelf life, easily transportable and cheap sources of calories. Meddling with agriculture also gives a great opportunity to buy votes by handing out subsidies to farmers and impose tariffs on imports. The only problem is if your chosen products don't sell quite well enough in peacetime.

This can be fixed by phony science and nutritional guidelines. Since the sixties, governments push us away from fat and meat, and towards grain and sugars. The science behind this is so terrible it should be a scandal (just look up the seven country study, the most famous piece, which is a complete fabrication). Recently, we have good science on the issue, and concerns have been voiced if grain based diet actually causes many of the major diseases of our time. Such reports so far did not manage to even scratch the surface of nutrition policy.

Sociology

Sociology without government support wouldn't be done by sociologists: sociologist would not be a profession. You can do sociology as part of your publication repertoire, but even if monetized somehow, probably would not pay your bills. Only if you can amass enough readers that are willing to donate, you can ever hope to do it for any other reason than pure intellectual interest in the subject.

Enter the state. Sociology as a diverse profession is entirely a state invented institution, they're the eyes and engineers of social control. A ruler needs data, and a lot of it. A ruler also needs techniques and insight, how a certain goal can be achieved. In this function, they more similar to clerks as opposed to priesthood. But they also serve that role to some extent, providing analysis or policy recommendations that often don't pass the test of common sense, but always serve some political ideologies.

Psychology

Mostly unnoticed, in the last century psychology have grown from a study of the mentally ill, or the study of quirks in the human psyche to an immensely useful tool to shape and manage our lives. Psychology is in the phase of explosion, and it won't take another century before it will be obvious to everyone. Hopefully, that is.

Politicians don't seem to have noticed the relevance of this field. The most probable reason is the shortsightedness of contemporary politics, due to the turbulent nature of modern ruling techniques, namely democracy. Anything over a dozen years in the future falls entirely outside of the attention horizon of political actors. Unfortunately, as a spillover from the complete takeover of the medical sciences, psychology is heavily regulated, which makes it alarmingly easy to shape its future.

There are areas inside psychology though, which are good prospects to the status of priesthood, and they can't be accused with the lack of effort. Behavioral science proposes quite some arguments why a central governing entity is needed to fix our unpleasant nature, to our own benefit of course. They explain how choice, especially too many choices, is actually harmful to happiness. How people, individually or as a group, can't be trusted to make decisions about their lives. How human beings are automatons, puppets of their own biology and evolutionary history. Who dares to take a bet? These arguments will show up as rationale for policies really soon.

Economics

Modern governance is the art of robbing the populace in secret. The role of economics is to create the theories needed to justify legal plunder. Nobody in the right mind would play a game in which one party can create new money, and spend it. This behavior is routine with central banking, and deemed beneficial by the economist priesthood. When a loud or influential group faces competition, the government offers its helping hand, crushing the competition with tariffs, regulations, quotas and bans. This is just an act of aggression without the lipservice of select economists. Everybody should be able to understand that value is not created by government mandate, value is only created by work and cooperation. Yet, magical concepts like market failure, stimulating demand, combatting unemployment with activating idle resources, defensive tariffs and so on sell ideas that, what a coincidence, always grow the government's power, and never shrink it.

Climate science

Climate science is so deeply politicized, it is essentially impossible to see clearly. Whether the climate continues to warm, and if so, how fast, whether sea level rise is a serious threat, and if so, what is the timeframe, we can't even guess at this point. We can be sure of two things though.

One is that climate priests lie through their teeth, and don't even seem to be ashamed of that. Please observe this quote from none other than the high priest of climate science, Stephen Schneider.

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

That's a decision, no need to hope. The other thing we can be sure of is that alarmist politicians are not particularly afraid of climate change. If anyone would seriously believe that mankind will see devastating cataclysm in a few decades, that person would surely do something to at least help himself. We would see people invest a lot of money in technologies that we will be in dire need of, like the construction industry or irrigation. The would buy land in places where the weather is expected to be more suitable for agriculture, like Siberia or Greenland. Support or invest in technologies that can reverse or alleviate the effects of climate change. But none of these happens. The only proposal is to reduce emissions, but even that is not happening, they just talk about it. Climate politicians and climate priests don't strike one as being terrified.

What's next

The problem with corrupting science is that there is no next science, at least we can't reasonably expect one. We have very good reason to believe that this is it, science is the final answer to our questions about the world. If something else comes in its place, as of now all we can see out there is vastly inferior. We will need to restore the reputation of science in order to truly go forward, but restoring reputation is even harder than building one. Especially if the blunders are so enormous, death, stalled progress, misery, lies, destruction of rational conversation, any one of these can turn people away from this plague for life. And we did all of them.

Restoring the reputation of science is possible, but only if we fully understand and explore how and why it was corrupted, and how can we avoid these mistakes in the future.