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“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Labor changed from a cumbersome but inherently meaningful existential task into a disembodied utilitarian necessity.
Simply put, in a society in which human relationships are satisfying, life will be bearable even if it has only primitive means of production. Whereas in a society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such society may be in terms of mechanical-technological evolutions.
To summarize, science led to a formidable ability to alter the material world through industrialization and mechanization. But this also gave rise to problems, especially regarding our relationships, both with each other, and with nature. Furthermore, we’re faced with problems that are caused by the fact that science—or that which passes for science today—is often neither accurate nor reliable.
Some researchers (such as Shapiro7 and Wampold8) estimate that up to 90 percent of the effects of medical treatments can be attributed to psychological factors.
Too far to generalize that all objective measurements are invalid.
In Chaos, James Gleick puts it this way: “Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.”3
Living? Is this the best description to use?
A digital conversation is not the same as a real conversation. We see this most clearly in infants. During the first six months, they learn to distinguish language sounds at an astonishing pace, but only while listening to someone who is physically present, not when listening to an audio or video recording (see Kuhl’s experiments10).
(“What babies learn before they are born”11)
psychic membrane that transfers the slightest ripple in body and soul.
?
The mechanization of the world causes man to lose contact with his environment and become an atomized subject, the kind of subject in which Hannah Arendt recognized the essential component of the totalitarian state.
Science adapts its theory to reality, whereas ideology adapts reality to theory.
As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”28
This is the way in which past societies went from bad to worse: stories – subjectivity – irrationality – poignant injustice – absurd horror.
I don’t think this is true.
Simpson’s paradox.2
In the summer of 2020, virologist and former rector of the University of Liège, Bernard Rentier, was given access to raw data about the so-called summer wave (called, at that time, the second wave). He subjected these data to a critical analysis and concluded that the estimated number of infections after adjustment for the total number of tests performed was between twenty to seventy times lower than the estimates reported in the media.4
This, despite the fact that prior to the coronavirus crisis, many people critiqued and complained about the system of for-profit healthcare and Big Pharma. (See, for example, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime by Peter Gøtzsche.7)
Several renowned researchers—for example, Michael Levitt, Nobel laureate in Chemistry; and John Ioannidis, a legend in medical statistics—protested vehemently.
At the end of 2020, a study was published that gathered the rare lung scans from flu patients around the world and compared them with
lung scans from COVID-19 patients.10
Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?
Silliness.
Simpson’s paradox
The explanation can be found, in part, among the following issues: Every research procedure requires countless choices, for which there are no strictly logical grounds.
Really? No logical grounds?
Today, not only trees, plants, dogs and cats,7 but also Christiano Ronaldo’s legs, Jennifer Lopez’s bum, Taylor Swift’s breasts, Julia Roberts’s smile, and David Lee Roth’s sperm have been insured against damage for up to millions of dollars.8 Not to mention the insurance against heartbreak, meteorite impacts, and damage caused by spirits and ghosts and alien abduction.9
The tradition of the Enlightenment led unintentionally to what Foucault called le grand renfermement: More and more “dangerous” groups were imprisoned.12
And the reverse is also true: The child feels the sensations of others directly in its own body. For example, when it looks at someone being beaten, its face shows the same grimace and it cries as if it were being beaten itself (transitivism).
Not certain about this.
There is always a word missing to definitively capture the meaning of words. For this reason, language as a rational system—as a system in which words acquire meaning axiomatically—has an intrinsic, irreparable lack. This immediately makes clear that even the insurance-of-the-insurance cannot free man from his linguistic uncertainty.
Not sure about this either.
The Enlightenment tradition, the ideology of Reason, was a persistent attempt to squeeze life into logic and theories. It placed all symbolism, mysticism, fiction, and poetry secondary. But this is exactly the kind of discourse that allows us the ability to respond to the uncertainty of life with creation and individuality and to find words that resonate with the Other.
We have to take this process into account in order to understand the astounding psychological characteristics of a totalitarian population: the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the collective, radical intolerance of dissident voices, a paranoid informant mentality that allows government to penetrate the very heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with
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This is one reason why the absurd elements in a story do not matter to the masses: The masses believe in the story not because it’s accurate but because it creates a new social bond.
The well-known conformity experiment by Solomon Asch demonstrates in a very convincing way the enormous impact of mass formation on individual judgment.26
Man has always fallen prey to the aforementioned “temptations”—the illusion of rational understanding and control, the resistance to questioning oneself critically as a human, the pursuit of short-term convenience, and so on.
Leaders and followers were captivated by the limitless possibilities the human mind seemed to offer. The whole evolution toward a hyper-controlled technological society—the surveillance society—is simply unavoidable as long as the human mind remains trapped in that logic and is (to a large extent unconsciously) controlled by those attractors.
In a mechanistic universe, it is inevitably the technical expert who has the last word, based on his superior mechanistic knowledge.
Operation Lockstep from the Rockefeller Foundation,13 Event 201 of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation),14 and COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab15 are examples of such endeavors.
The only consistency within the experts’ discourse is that the decisions always move toward a more technologically and biomedically controlled society, in other words, toward the realization of the mechanistic ideology.
This is exactly what the Sierpinski triangle shows us: Mind-blowingly precise and regular patterns can arise because individuals independently follow the same simple rules of behavior by being attracted to the same set of attractors. The ultimate master is the ideology, not the elite.
Ironically, conspiracy thinking confirms the leaders’ narcissism by taking them seriously and believing that they are truly steering the ship, or causing the waves to recede.
This gives rise to a polarization in society, which becomes divided between two camps: a large group (the crowd), who believes everything that appears in the mainstream media, however absurd it may be; and then another group, who completely distrusts the same story.
In this way, conspiracy thinking can be a reaction to mass formation, an interpretation of it, but it can also give rise to mass formation itself.
For this reason, conspiracy thinking is something to be dealt with carefully, on an intellectual level as well as on an ethical and pragmatic level. It often arises as an explanation for the phenomenon of mass formation, but it shows a tendency to drift off course into theories that are increasingly distant from a nuanced view of reality and, on a psychological level, often lead to simplistic and caricatural views. Arendt gave a moderate and, in all respects, sensible answer to the question of what extent mass formation and totalitarianism can be traced back to a conspiracy: There is a certain
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“Events are indeed orchestrated in the direction of more and more control, only the orchestrating power is itself a zeitgeist, an ideology … a myth [and not a conspiracy].”23
we have to conclude that, first and foremost, the problem cannot be solved by the violent elimination of an evil elite. The essence of the problem of totalitarianism lies in enormous mass dynamics. This means the elimination of totalitarian leaders will be to no avail; they are utterly replaceable.
The leader is, so to speak, just the apex of the pyramid of the mass movement, and if he is eliminated, he will be replaced without the system destabilizing.
Violence as a reaction against mass formation and totalitarianism is, of course, effective when carried out by external enemies of a totalitarian system—for example, the war of the Allies against Nazi Germany—but it offers few prospects for internal resistance and is generally counterproductive.
When the opposition uses violence, the crowd merely sees justification and a “get-out-of-jail-free” card to unleash its already enormous potential of frustration and aggression and take it out on those it views as the...
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In chapter 6, we identified three groups that form when a mass rises: the masses themselves, who truly go along with the story and are “hypnotized” (usually about 30 percent); a group that is not hypnotized but chooses to not go against the grain (usually about 40 to 60 percent); a group that is not hypnotized and actively resists the masses (ranging from 10 to 30 percent).
