The corruption of science is one of the biggest problems our world has ever faced; it may, indeed, bring about the extinction of the human race. That prospect scares me and it should scare you. But more than being scared, my heart has been broken by the realization that the best hope of the human race - Truth, beautiful Truth - has been savaged and spoiled by the very guardians of the temple: scientists themselves under the influence of a ramified network of mutual pathological conspiracies that are divorced entirely from the body of normal humanity. I was pretty young when I first learned that science could make mistakes; I grew up next door to a child whose mother took Thalidomide during pregnancy. When I was 14, our family doctor prescribed "diet pills" for me: methamphetamines. They nearly destroyed my health forever. In later years, I learned from the news-magazine show, 20/20, that the recommended treatment my grandfather had received for high blood pressure, provided by the Veteran's Administration, was actually what killed him. These are just a few highlights of a lifetime of experiences with doctors and other medical professionals who actually got things wrong about 75% of the time, and the remaining 25% that they got right was non-critical. In all critical situations, had I listened to my doctor's advice for myself or my children, there would have been serious negative consequences. This is a disheartening perspective, certainly, but there it is: doctors are not trained to help you live a healthy life, they are trained by pharmaceutical company funded medical schools to support the drug economy. I once heard that in ancient China, medical practitioners were required to advertise over their doors how many of their patients had died. Obviously, they became highly motivated to find out what really worked because nobody would consult them if their advice and potions weren't beneficial. It would be nice if our civilization instituted a similar system. But, in a way, we do have such a system: social networks. The only problem is, a very large majority of people in our society will not believe 500 people who tell them that something really works because they have tried it in opposition to a single doctor who says "that's not recommended by the medical associations." This kind of person who follows the "constituted authorities" rather than empirical evidence is referred to by psychologist Bob Altemeyer as "The Authoritarian Follower" personality type. It is thanks to this type of person that even pure psychopaths in power can get away with the most egregious crimes in all fields of endeavor, from medicine to law, from industry to politics. The Authoritarian Follower believes that those in authority have the right to live by their own rules, and lying, cheating, stealing and murder in high places can thus be tolerated with a shrug of the shoulders. They will also willingly engage themselves in the same lying, cheating, stealing and murder if it is presented to them as necessary to protect their status quo. Corruption of Science. Putting those two words together in a conversation won't raise any eyebrows nowadays what with all the news reports of scientists in bed with big corporations cooking their data, Climategate, suppression of NASA scientists, not to mention the long history of BIG mistakes made by science that have led to horrible suffering for given segments of humanity. Everybody understands in a general way that scientists, like any group of people, have members who are less than ethical, or even downright rapacious. But I would like to suggest that the corruption of science is a deeper and wider problem than most people suspect; that it is a rot that pervades our entire Western culture and is, in fact, the root of all the evils to which we have fallen heir in the past several centuries. Further, I'd like to suggest that the Corruption of Science is due to the fact that it has been taken over by psychopathy with the support of the Authoritarian Follower personality type. In the last issue of The Dot Connector Magazine in my article "The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction," I cited some brain research that shows how the brains of the Authoritarian Follower personality type (as described by Bob Altemeyer) might operate and how this type is as well represented in the sciences as among religious people. I also theorized a bit about the origins of the conflict consisting in two different types of human beings: those possessing a certain spiritual potential (probably due to genetics, though the genetics were morphologically influenced by non-material factors) and thus capable of conceiving and operating within a spiritual ideological structure, and those who lack this capacity - also probably due to genetics - and thus forever constrained within a materialistic structure no matter how powerful and elegant the computing power of their physical brain
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