Generally speaking, science is the best tool ever devised by mankind for the purpose of finding out the facts about the world. It provides us with the most accurate and verified information of all the sources of knowledge that we possess. It is more accurate than religion, it is more accurate than journalism, and it is much more reliable than politics. If you want to know something about the world, ask a scientist. Don’t ask a religious person or a politician.
On a more personal level, however, things are quite a bit different, because on a personal level, you can’t really verify science, and you don’t actually see it first-hand. You hear about science from the politicians and the journalists, or even worse, from the religious people, and what science survives this unreliable conduit is no longer science. It’s an interpretation of science that serves someone’s agenda, and to you personally, it’s served in form of a religion, which I call “scientism”. Scientism is the religion of science. It preaches salvation by science, and divides the world into scientific and falsehood. If there’s a scientific opinion about something, it’s a sacred dogma. If scientists agree on something, it’s to be viewed with the same worshipful reverence with which the Catholics view a council of the Church. If someone says a 97% of scientists agree on something, you don’t verify. You obediently comply and you don’t ask questions lest you be called one of those names that end all discussion and harm your chances of ever finding or keeping a job.
The problem is, the world isn’t neatly separated into science and falsehood. It’s separated into the part that is known to us and within our ability to process in any way, and the part that is completely beyond our grasp. The part that is within our ability to process is very small, and it is further divided into the part that the science has ways of dealing with, and the part that it can’t process because it’s incompatible with the scientific method. That’s why we have so much knowledge about chemistry and so little about human psyche; what we do know about human spirit is only the part that can be subjected to scientific analysis, and the psychologists like to believe that this part is much larger than my personal experience can attest.
There is also a big difference between science as a method, practitioners of scientific method, the scientific community, and the impression the general population gets about what it’s all about. What the general population thinks about science is basically what the newspapers and other media report. Think about it what you will, but I am less than pleased with my prospects of finding out any kind of objective truth with this method.
One of my problems with the so called “social media” is that it gives a platform to vocal but stupid people, who often know very little about what’s going on in the world, but they tend to have a huge following. Recently some ignorant musician went on a campaign to inform people that the Earth is really flat. There’s actually quite a following of conspiracy theorists who claim that NASA is all about computer-generated forgeries and that it’s actually impossible to go into orbit let alone to Moon and Mars, because the Earth is flat.
And that’s my main problem with the movie “Martian”. Regardless of how interesting and well made it is, it works with an implicit faulty assumption that we live in the same civilization that went to the Moon in the sixties and early seventies. We don’t. That then was a civilization ruled by white men who did what they thought was right and didn’t care much about anyone else. The result was that they stretched technology to the limits and did what people today would generally consider impossible, but not because it’s really impossible, but because they are stupid people whose arrogance and self-importance was inflated by the social media culture which conditioned them to believe that they are important and that they matter. Which they are not, and they don’t.
They are uneducated, because the education system in the West, and especially in America, under-emphasises hard science disciplines and a direct experimental approach, with the end-result of students getting degrees while thinking that it’s all just dogma whose purpose is to fill short term memory in order to pass the tests. On the other hand, what is over-emphasised is self-importance, self-confidence and rhetorical skills whose purpose isn’t to find out and defend the truth, but to win arguments for any side. Essentially, they are taught conceit and demagoguery, and that’s what we can see online – vain, stupid, conceited, argumentative people who post “selfies”, use the platform of social media to talk endlessly about their unimportant experiences and shallow thoughts, and never concede that they are wrong about anything.
As a result, this raises the noise floor so much, you can no longer reliably differentiate between the spikes of authentic signal and various social media propagandistic campaigns, with the end-result of nobody taking the serious stuff seriously, because we are repeatedly brainwashed with claims that everything is equally important and everybody matters. As a result, the civilization portrayed in the “Martian” doesn’t exist. It existed when Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev led the space programmes of their respective nations. It existed when important people were taken seriously, and stupid people didn’t have a platform from which to shout their worthless drivel, and as a result of them not having a voice, they couldn’t say stupid things and raise the overall civilizational noise floor.
What I’m saying here, is that ordinary people should be aware that they are not special. They are not important. Their opinions aren’t important, aren’t smart, aren’t well informed and, being aware of that, they should shut the fuck up and not drown out the voices of the few who actually have something important and relevant to say. The fact that everybody has a voice and a platform only served to reveal how stupid, unimportant and uneducated most people are, and why censorship and restricted access to public speaking platforms were such a great thing, that brought us to the Moon, gave us nuclear energy and produced all the great things of modern technology.
What social media gave us are the stupid conspiracy theorists who don’t know jack shit about how science and technology actually work, but who possess worthless degrees given to them by an education system that teaches people that truth doesn’t matter, that the facts don’t matter, but that presentation is everything.
As a result, we live in a civilization in which facts don’t matter, the truth doesn’t matter, and the media-created thoughtspace contains only presentation, propaganda, opinions and nonsense, and people like myself, who genuinely cut through that bullshit in search for truth and the facts are seen as some crazy right-wing kooks who say things that are completely out of touch with the stuff “everybody knows is true”.
Well, what you “know” is true is that 97% of scientists support the man-made global warming interpretation. That’s what the politicians tell you. That’s what the media tells you. But when someone actually bothered to ask the scientists, they said something quite different.
I once watched a Youtube movie called “Zeitgeist” that intends to reveal all the “bullshit” of religion, by uncovering all the “lies” Christianity, for instance, has been telling us. For instance, it states that Jesus is a myth, that stories about virgin birth are abundant in the Mediterranean circle of religions. I saw this movie because it was widely spread by “skeptics” and conspiracy theorists. Guess what, I actually bothered to be skeptical enough of the movie’s claims as to verify them, and found them to be complete and utter drivel. For instance, Krishna is quoted as an example of someone born of a virgin. Only he was his mother’s eighth child. This is something I noticed immediately because unlike the author of the movie, I actually know something. I proceeded to verify other similar claims, and they all fell apart, nothing even remotely makes sense when you look at the actual content of some belief, not the one-sentence presentation made by a liar and a conman. So, it appears that the self-proclaimed skeptics are the most gullible people you can ever meet. They will believe literally anything, as long as it isn’t the “official story”, and the cause of all this is that stupid, irrelevant, common people have been lead to believe that they are special, that they should question things and not simply accept them, and that narrative is everything and the facts are relative.
And when you have stupid people who are skeptical of what the smart people tell them, you get a doomed society.
Common people believe that we are all the same, that they are equal to the smart people, because they were never required to actually test this belief. If they were, their opinion of themselves as God’s special snowflakes would suddenly wane. At one point in life I was surrounded with average people who didn’t think I’m special because I looked like them, only more scrawny, I talked to them about the common banalities, but they heard that I’m supposed to be some Mensa-IQ guy so they got some IQ tests and offered that we solve them together, to see how we compare. I will never forget their faces when they saw with what ease I solved the test while they got stuck at the simplest questions, and not only did I do my test flawlessly, I simultaneously helped them with theirs. They felt humiliated, probably for the first time in their lives, and not because I laughed at them or made fun of them – on the contrary, I was as polite and forthcoming as always. It’s because for the first time in their lives they saw that not all men are equal, not because somebody told them, but because they were forced to confront the evidence in their living experience.
When people are told all the time that we are all equal, that IQ doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, that there is no more than 1% of difference between people, that all souls were made the same by God, they tend to believe that – “those scientists, they’re not really smarter, they are just deceiving us, but we know better”. I personally experienced many situations where I was faced with someone who knew much more about something than I did, and I couldn’t delude myself into thinking that we are equals; I was the stupid one, and if I wanted to overcome that I had to learn. I truly wish everyone had the same experience, and then this entire political correctness multicultural egalitarian bullshit would go away. There’s nothing more harmful to a civilization than belief that we are all the same and that everyone’s opinions and lives matter the same.
They don’t. Narrative is not all that matters. When some people succeed where others fail, it’s not due to discrimination, it’s because some people are better than others, and they are worth more. If you think you’re anyone’s equal, take an IQ test against a 1-percentile.