Impartiality, Science and the Devil
I have been writing many blogs on many websites, and I am very aware that these blogs contain many highly original ideas, and that these could be considered as MY intellectual property, and I could use them to make money. So, why don't I? The answer is because I am a human being, AND I NEED TO SHARE. This requires some explanation, and I will give it.
As a young scientist, working in research labs, I was known as 'someone who answers questions'; when I helped a colleague, lending him my experience and expertise to set up some experiments, and the work was successful and publishable, he came to me and asked if I would like to be named a co-author of the paper he was publishing. I declined, and accepted, instead, a reference in the acknowledgements ... (know, here, that a scientists reputation, and thus salary and employability rests on: 1) the number of papers he has authored, and 2) the number of times he has been referenced in other people's papers... so, declining an opportunity to be co-author would be considered very unwise, reputation-wise.)
I am making two points here: it is exceptional in the world of science to share knowledge/expertise, even among colleagues (competitors for promotion?); but, it was so instinctive and deeply ingrained in me to do so, that I behaved 'oddly', and to the possible detriment of my career.
But, the fact is that had I not done so, it would have been to the detriment of me as a human being, and I would not now have the fertile mind that is capable of coming up with all the original ideas that these blogs contain!
I have talked elsewhere of two fundamental aspects of the natural world: 1) it is fundamentally cooperative, rather than competitive, and 2) it is INTERACTIVE, so, at the most fundamental level, every action has a reaction, or, every action has consequences.
As to the first: scientists, and especially those who support the 'selfish gene' theory, (and ex-Thatcherites), would argue with this, but, the situation is very simple, and brooks no argument. IT IS THE DIFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF ANY SYSTEM THAT IF IT PRODUCES DIVERSITY IT IS COOPERATIVE, AND IF IT PRODUCES MONOCULTURE, OR SAME-NESS, IT IS COMPETITIVE. All you have to do is look out of your window at the scenery ... do you see diversity? yes? then you are looking at something that is based on cooperation.
Scientists, as I say, will argue. They will pull out of the hat, abstruse details about the behaviour of animals you have never heard of, or some such. In other words, they will nit-pick, and use their 'expertise', to intimidate, and divert you from the simple, in-your-face TRUTH.
You see, that is what expertise is about. It is about making perfectly simple things seem complicated and intimidating ... so that you will NEED the EXPERT.
And that brings me to THE DEVIL. Creation of the Devil is an old trick --- religions cottoned onto that one aeons ago, and have been trading on it for thousands of years!
I am old enough to remember when the film THE EXORCIST first came out, and I saw it, along with all the other horrors of the same ilk ... and I can well remember what I felt, what it MADE ME FEEL, at the time ... I was, at that time, an atheist, if I was anything, yet, watching all that stuff, I just thought, 'thank goodness for the church, and priests, people who can, and are prepared, to protect us from all that stuff if it really exists!' Oh, boy, did they get me! That is JUST WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL. The devil is quite possibly the churches most profitable invention!
Well, I have pointed out elsewhere that science is, at root, also a religion, and it, too, finds it most profitable to invent devils. Some of the more recent are: GLOBAL WARNING, assorted epidemics ... of course, that last is a REAL winner. Scare people about their health and set yourself up as the person with exclusive access to the answers and you are REALLY onto a winner. Look at how people flock in their thousands to Lourdes because they have heard there is a cure ... well, on the same basis, 'they have heard there is a cure', they flock in even greater numbers to health centres arround the country .... but the medical profession has gone one better: they promise that, if you let them jab you, and dose you, they can STOP IT FROM HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Now, is that a licence to produce (and sell) cures for manufactured diseases, or is that a licence to produce cures for manufactured diseases!
And now, just ask yourself, what do all those scare stories, all this worry about screening and preventative medicines do to me? Do they perhaps (apart from scaring me into the arms of the doctors and drugs companies), as I say, do they perhaps stress me out so that my IMMUNE system suffers, and I BECOME SUSCEPTIBLE TO DISEASE!
So, yes, science intimidates with manufactured details, and creates its own (non-religious, in the conventional sense) devils to scare you into its arms!
And then, look at science from the inside: if these are such wonderful people working for the good of us all, why is it that they will not share knowledge and expertise, EVEN WITH COLLEAGUES? And, then there is this: I worked in, what, at the time, was the biggest industrial reseach centre in the UK, and for the biggest industrial engineering companies in the UK, and what did I spend my time doing? I was involved in the early days of optical fibre technology. The Japanese were the first to find a way of manufacturing optical fibres of useful quality. But, of course, they patented the technique. Oh, dear, that means that any other company that uses that technique to make optical fibres will have to pay royalties to the Japanese! That will reduce profits! Can't have that. So, my company, and many others in this country, the USA, and others, were paying a lot of scientists a lot of money to find other ways of making optical fibres ... NOT A BETTER WAY, JUST A DIFFERENT WAY. The fact is, that optical fibres are EXTREMELY difficult to make, and the Japanese had, as so often is the case with FIRST inventions, come up with really the ONLY good, viable, easy, relatively inexpensive (note; relatively) way to do it. So, WHATEVER other technique all those scientists might come up with, it WAS GOING TO BE WORSE, and it was going to produce inferior, but more expensive, fibres! But that does not matter. The point is that the PROFITS would be going into the pockets of the directors of the lucky company. AND, the LUCKY company would not only be the one that came up with this different way of making optical fibres, but the one that also had the clout to ensure that it's product was the one that cornered the market!
So, science scares you into its arms with manufactured devils, and then sells you invalid, or at least, inferior products that will supposedly cure the problems science created in the first place ... what a merry-go-round!
This, then, is competition at work! It really is not viable. A world that tried to work that way would not get off the ground.
I do not deny that nature uses competition OCCASSIONALLY (refer to what I have said about 'there is no such thing as bad medicine' in other blogs), but, the root and heart of the natural world is, AND HAS TO BE, cooperation.
Under those circumstances, IT IS NATURAL, AND THEREFORE INSTINCTIVE, FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO BE COOPERATIVE. So, going back to my description of my cooperative behaviour as a young scientist, and my cooperative behaviour in these blogs: I AM BEHAVING INSTINCTIVELY; I AM ONLY DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY.
The converse of that is that, in inducing people to believe in competition, society is inducing them to behave against their own better natures. And this is not trivial matter. It kills us, or kills that in us which is really alive, and human ... having said which, you just have to look at what happens to animals when they are forced to behave in ways that are not natural to them: they go bonkers! They suffer, and get ill!
So, who was wanting to know the nature of EVIL, and where all the suffering and ills of this world come from?
As a young scientist, working in research labs, I was known as 'someone who answers questions'; when I helped a colleague, lending him my experience and expertise to set up some experiments, and the work was successful and publishable, he came to me and asked if I would like to be named a co-author of the paper he was publishing. I declined, and accepted, instead, a reference in the acknowledgements ... (know, here, that a scientists reputation, and thus salary and employability rests on: 1) the number of papers he has authored, and 2) the number of times he has been referenced in other people's papers... so, declining an opportunity to be co-author would be considered very unwise, reputation-wise.)
I am making two points here: it is exceptional in the world of science to share knowledge/expertise, even among colleagues (competitors for promotion?); but, it was so instinctive and deeply ingrained in me to do so, that I behaved 'oddly', and to the possible detriment of my career.
But, the fact is that had I not done so, it would have been to the detriment of me as a human being, and I would not now have the fertile mind that is capable of coming up with all the original ideas that these blogs contain!
I have talked elsewhere of two fundamental aspects of the natural world: 1) it is fundamentally cooperative, rather than competitive, and 2) it is INTERACTIVE, so, at the most fundamental level, every action has a reaction, or, every action has consequences.
As to the first: scientists, and especially those who support the 'selfish gene' theory, (and ex-Thatcherites), would argue with this, but, the situation is very simple, and brooks no argument. IT IS THE DIFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF ANY SYSTEM THAT IF IT PRODUCES DIVERSITY IT IS COOPERATIVE, AND IF IT PRODUCES MONOCULTURE, OR SAME-NESS, IT IS COMPETITIVE. All you have to do is look out of your window at the scenery ... do you see diversity? yes? then you are looking at something that is based on cooperation.
Scientists, as I say, will argue. They will pull out of the hat, abstruse details about the behaviour of animals you have never heard of, or some such. In other words, they will nit-pick, and use their 'expertise', to intimidate, and divert you from the simple, in-your-face TRUTH.
You see, that is what expertise is about. It is about making perfectly simple things seem complicated and intimidating ... so that you will NEED the EXPERT.
And that brings me to THE DEVIL. Creation of the Devil is an old trick --- religions cottoned onto that one aeons ago, and have been trading on it for thousands of years!
I am old enough to remember when the film THE EXORCIST first came out, and I saw it, along with all the other horrors of the same ilk ... and I can well remember what I felt, what it MADE ME FEEL, at the time ... I was, at that time, an atheist, if I was anything, yet, watching all that stuff, I just thought, 'thank goodness for the church, and priests, people who can, and are prepared, to protect us from all that stuff if it really exists!' Oh, boy, did they get me! That is JUST WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL. The devil is quite possibly the churches most profitable invention!
Well, I have pointed out elsewhere that science is, at root, also a religion, and it, too, finds it most profitable to invent devils. Some of the more recent are: GLOBAL WARNING, assorted epidemics ... of course, that last is a REAL winner. Scare people about their health and set yourself up as the person with exclusive access to the answers and you are REALLY onto a winner. Look at how people flock in their thousands to Lourdes because they have heard there is a cure ... well, on the same basis, 'they have heard there is a cure', they flock in even greater numbers to health centres arround the country .... but the medical profession has gone one better: they promise that, if you let them jab you, and dose you, they can STOP IT FROM HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Now, is that a licence to produce (and sell) cures for manufactured diseases, or is that a licence to produce cures for manufactured diseases!
And now, just ask yourself, what do all those scare stories, all this worry about screening and preventative medicines do to me? Do they perhaps (apart from scaring me into the arms of the doctors and drugs companies), as I say, do they perhaps stress me out so that my IMMUNE system suffers, and I BECOME SUSCEPTIBLE TO DISEASE!
So, yes, science intimidates with manufactured details, and creates its own (non-religious, in the conventional sense) devils to scare you into its arms!
And then, look at science from the inside: if these are such wonderful people working for the good of us all, why is it that they will not share knowledge and expertise, EVEN WITH COLLEAGUES? And, then there is this: I worked in, what, at the time, was the biggest industrial reseach centre in the UK, and for the biggest industrial engineering companies in the UK, and what did I spend my time doing? I was involved in the early days of optical fibre technology. The Japanese were the first to find a way of manufacturing optical fibres of useful quality. But, of course, they patented the technique. Oh, dear, that means that any other company that uses that technique to make optical fibres will have to pay royalties to the Japanese! That will reduce profits! Can't have that. So, my company, and many others in this country, the USA, and others, were paying a lot of scientists a lot of money to find other ways of making optical fibres ... NOT A BETTER WAY, JUST A DIFFERENT WAY. The fact is, that optical fibres are EXTREMELY difficult to make, and the Japanese had, as so often is the case with FIRST inventions, come up with really the ONLY good, viable, easy, relatively inexpensive (note; relatively) way to do it. So, WHATEVER other technique all those scientists might come up with, it WAS GOING TO BE WORSE, and it was going to produce inferior, but more expensive, fibres! But that does not matter. The point is that the PROFITS would be going into the pockets of the directors of the lucky company. AND, the LUCKY company would not only be the one that came up with this different way of making optical fibres, but the one that also had the clout to ensure that it's product was the one that cornered the market!
So, science scares you into its arms with manufactured devils, and then sells you invalid, or at least, inferior products that will supposedly cure the problems science created in the first place ... what a merry-go-round!
This, then, is competition at work! It really is not viable. A world that tried to work that way would not get off the ground.
I do not deny that nature uses competition OCCASSIONALLY (refer to what I have said about 'there is no such thing as bad medicine' in other blogs), but, the root and heart of the natural world is, AND HAS TO BE, cooperation.
Under those circumstances, IT IS NATURAL, AND THEREFORE INSTINCTIVE, FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO BE COOPERATIVE. So, going back to my description of my cooperative behaviour as a young scientist, and my cooperative behaviour in these blogs: I AM BEHAVING INSTINCTIVELY; I AM ONLY DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY.
The converse of that is that, in inducing people to believe in competition, society is inducing them to behave against their own better natures. And this is not trivial matter. It kills us, or kills that in us which is really alive, and human ... having said which, you just have to look at what happens to animals when they are forced to behave in ways that are not natural to them: they go bonkers! They suffer, and get ill!
So, who was wanting to know the nature of EVIL, and where all the suffering and ills of this world come from?
posted by joan @ 3:44 AM
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