Science As A Closed Institution
by Alfred Lehmberg
A "closed institution" is a bad institution—generally. A lack of critical oversight on any institution leads to corruption of that institution—if it ever was uncorrupted—in all cases. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, always! Even with God, one would imagine. One gets to a certain age and that becomes obvious.
There are rules—checks & balances; break them at peril. Besides, we're just not that good, yet, eh? We lack the courage and constitution to be efficaciously arbitrary—non-constitutional—autocratic. Evidence?
Consider an unfettered plethora of scurvy chicken-hawking Christian priests, running blithely free, raping their flocks of their life-savings and Social Security, prosecuting piracy as a result of betraying their flock's faith, piracy to live splendidly in 10,000,000 dollar mansions ensconced behind jealous gates and higher walls... free to spew a toxic hatred and intolerance for the eminently tolerable.
Still, the masses (you and me) complacently allow them this, you see? Why? Why, indeed.
Running parallel to the preceding—and related one could expect—there is a most fulsome whining and carrying on, otherwise, by our hyper-educated science religionists, presently, regarding a "belief" on the subject of a so-called "pseudo-science," a pseudo-science rotting a "legitimate" science from within! Maybe. Probably!
Though, forgotten is that this may be a corruption that science facilitates itself. Yes, facilitates itself... and for a plethora of bad reasons.
So, again, this may be a too proud science, larded with its own hubris and lacking all humility—thinking entirely too much of itself, at the start! Do we betray it, or, has it first betrayed us? This is a fair question. This is asked remembering that science is, most oftentimes, not the scientist officiating it... even as those lofty tech mountains are moved or climbed!
Grandly pontificated in this alleged "rot" is what the aforementioned and du jour science apologists proclaim is facilitated, you know, by the mere consideration of various and sundry scientific so-called "heresies"! These are the heresies, I argue, a cut to the chase, that may be too quickly and arbitrarily declared "out of bounds" by these goal-keeping enablers, even arbitrarily disallowed by these jealous and sometimes pecuniary officialities. Dismissed without a look. That's not science.
No, these may be but the anxious pronouncements tediously propounded by moaning wan pontificators who would have us believe, for example, that the study of UFOs, their ancillaries, and other unsolved "anomalies" (or unsettling "peculiarities") in their regard... must destroy the very science that the more rational of us (ironically!) would use to attempt a serious study of those very things!
Science must not fear investigation it seems to this writer. No! It must welcome it!
Were we not all taught that "Science," incapable of mere fear, is that fearless investigation? Begs for it, even wrong! ESPECIALLY wrong! Admission of error is ever a step up... for real science.
Now, this reflexive fear is not surprising given the abject humiliation UFOs traditionally provide for an inappropriately arrogant science (arrogance is usually bad), but still: their protests are stuff and puling nonsense which dishonors them, and us, reader! "Science embellishes on its "sour grapes" where seemingly in-quixotic UFOs very "disrespectfully" refuse to jump into science's presumptuous test tube, on command! Well, this writer offers that it is science's unscientific resentment of uncooperative UFOs that fuels its dismissal of them! The reader is reminded that we don't conflate science with scientists so much as to observe that science is what science does.
See? It might be these science religionists, themselves, who encourage the very rot and disinterest they would decry! It might be the science religionists, themselves, who make science dull to the layman and uninteresting to the student otherwise anxiously sought!
It might be the science religionists, themselves, who limit an investigation to such a narrow reductionist band of filtered reality in method, repeatability, and measurement perhaps leaned on too much. It might be the science religionists, themselves, who unpropitiously pitch the proverbial papoose with the soiled bathwater (and... sorry... not!). Consider the symphony wholly unappreciated in the examination of its singular (read, meaningless!) notes.
Finally, it might be the science religionists themselves who depart from the reality of science. They might do this when they obstinately CHOOSE not to go where the data ultimately leads—for shortsighted, self-serving, and status-quo maintaining reasons, too!
Consider, ...was a broad-spectrum cancer "cure" discovered decades ago and shelved to sustain a corporate pharm's bottom line by continuing to merely treat it, incrementally? Can you say, "Cannabis," reader? ...Tip of an unimaginable iceberg... ...somebody knows!
Some of these science religionists pompously pronounce "reasonable-sounding proclamations of scientific fidelity and high-toned due diligence," but this is merely a fallacious cloak too airily worn, reader, an appeal to a more vacuous authority. They still won't first evaluate what they airily dismiss.
Wearing these cloaks, remember, are mere garden-variety human beings rife with embarrassing error and hubris and encumbered with jealousies of ego every bit as petty as any of the reader's own, perhaps. Certainly this writer's! We lack awareness of that so we act inappropriately, which is a legitimate presumption.
Human beings. Likely ten in a hundred of these, more under pressure, can be full-blown sociopaths—monsters, reader—and ninety percent of all of these are full of crap, in addition to being monsters, because ninety percent of everything, if you can believe Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Stanton Friedman or Jeremy Vaeni, is inconsequent crap. Some close on a 100%! Look at DJT.
Fealty, fidelity, and honorable conduct won't be guaranteed in proud "Scientia," just as it can't be "guaranteed," anywhere. Verily, these obtuse science religionists can be just as crooked as anyone else... look at the "Christian Priesthood" already alluded to. So, the only way one can be assured of having these qualities also alluded to is to demand that that Fealty, Fidelity, and Honorable conduct exists around yourself, eh?
One must produce, I re-phrase, all the justice (one can stand!) themselves, by themselves, and around themselves. The hijacked mainstream can't... won't—shan't—stand for very much of it themselves (that's contrary to the pecuniary, wrath of god pecuniary), so don't depend on it for justice!
The "well-meaning" but certainly ax-grinding klasskurtxians (interested only in keeping coveted positions at funding troughs!) assume the cloaks of these "scientific religionists," write the rules for that discovery with its retreating, so unapproachable, evidentiary horizons, and make up from convenient cloth the definitions of "evidence," to start! They set the "sliding-scale bar" of "proof enough" for the—very manipulated, conned, and complacent—rest of us. This writer offers that that explains the current competitiveness of "stupid" currently endured in the United States. Science presents badly.
What is the "sliding scale" bar? What is proof enough? Are we manipulated (non-efficaciously so) by our society for the unconscionable benefit of some shadowy elite?
How could we not be, just looking around the du jour existentiality of our reality, currently? Look at the behaviors, known and unknown, of ubiquitous billionaires fomenting fascism and anti-science, unfettered, as these words are written?
The "sliding scale bar" is the "killer app" rubric of plausible deniability employed by Skept-O-Bunkies (SOBs) regarding "extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence," for instance. The "bar that shall be cleared" is set by the SOBs, themselves, so there is never enough "extraordinary evidence" for a contested claim, resulting in Jean Van Gemert's observation regarding conjectured receding—forever backsliding—and therefore unachievable and so useless "evidentiary horizons."
As "proof" may counter a jealously entrenched mainstream, there "shall be" no proof extraordinary enough to unseat that mainstream. A non-efficacious manipulation of crass self-interest... by any other name? It is offal sweet.
The "reasonably observant" are not fooled. Too, the now well-described duplicitousness of mainstream science is sensed by the masses even if it cannot be articulated, as such, by those masses. All begin to perceive, to one level or another, that it is this conflicted mainstream defining the provenance of the ballyhooed and bemoaned "rot from within"... if that rot "exists" ...at all! "Stupid" might even seem justified if "smart" is going to prosecute duplicity... even if it's for tradition's sake... especially for tradition's sake where it's the betrayer!
People remain to have a sense of being bilked, shined on, or betrayed. Why would that be unless perhaps they are being bilked, shined on, or betrayed, in truth? We may pay the price for all this in a disrespected science... and parent officiality, during pandemics and concerning climate science, say? Yes... there are prices to be paid for being allowed to deliberately lie, without consequence, on public airwaves. This has been allowed since the Reagan Administration, but we digress.
See? Asserted here is that science may encourage the "rot," to a degree, themselves.
"Anti-Truth" may not decidedly be the fault of "fringe activities" arising, at the start, only as a result of the scientific VACUUM imposed by those same reflex reductionists identified as SOBs above and alluded to in the first place, eh? This is an informational vacuum decidedly remaining after those same mainstream science religionists (and their equally limited SOB-enabling apologists for same) complete their cultural "slash and burn" of individual sensibility, journalistically, and then sail grandly on... on our wind! In other words, when did we have to start looking over our shoulders at the professional classes best created to serve humanity and not PREY upon it? ...Closed institutions.
Cops, lawyers, bank officers, preachers, CEOs, doctors... agencies, institutions, and governments? Scientists? Increasingly lacking humility, do these become only more and more predatory?
The proof of all this is a very obvious, if anomalous, aerial activity that is still giggled at by the mainstream, 50 (if a little less so currently) years after it was first identified as a bona fide matter of (mind-bogglingly!) gainful scientific study! UFOs have humiliated Science at every turn, since, for its timidity, perfidy, and its tireless dismissal... of what they have steadfastly refused to investigate at all.
The stars, ladies and gentle-bunkies! No less than the stars are lost in this bowdlerized and so artless Cartesian but reductionist intransigence, an intransigence they would too readily accuse in the "detested" fringe... a fringe largely detested because they make the scientist re-do or re-think work thought done?
Mayhap! The late Stanton Friedman wrote a book about it! Not so much where science got angry but where science was so adamantly wrong and then would double down on that error!
Any true investigation demonstrates that there is very little to giggle at, after all. Moreover, science, as a junior institution in the measure of things, shouldn't smile... especially condescendingly. A condescending smile's a smirk, and smirks should only earn a sneer from superiors, contemporaries, and subordinates alike. They're not constructive. We've already discussed the utility of arrogance.
Somebody knows. It's in your, very likely, gainful interest, reader, to "know" as well. Besides, that visit to the cosmic dentist's office can't be put off indefinitely. Precluding your "knowing" are closed institutions, institutions without oversight for convenient reasons benefiting, and known, only to, "themselves."
Most institutions are closed even if only colloquially, or become closed to an individual if an individual can't or won't be "vetted" by same—unable or unwilling to clear arbitrarily emplaced hurdles regarding sensible politics, justified curiosity about the obtuse arcane, or a sentient atheism revolted by teacher-led prayer in public schools, say... or the teaching of historical error as fact... These Non-"vetted" individuals are denigrated, marginalized, and reviled by "closed" institutions. This writer has had personal experience with same.
Ironically it remains that Individuals (sic)—a result of their singular if transmittable inventiveness—are required for any lasting cultural success. Individuals are the elements of change required because what can't change dies... or goes extinct. The consequence of rigid and unchanging 'closed' institutions is the death of evolving progressive culture, its rising and advancing. Organized religion, the science of convenient "stupid," based on its own behavior and reputation, scientific or otherwise, is the meme of our extinction!
Individuals are key. Respect your individuals; only, don't take any crap from them, either! That follows. Psychopaths may have a required utility with the odd ability to "make the quick hard call," but not without oversight! Never without oversight! Oversight is... the way!
...What's closed, and WHY!
Is it honest? Is it fair? Is it constructive? Does it aspire! Then how or why would it be closed?
Read on.
Read on.