In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.
–Aldous Huxley
Previous Worth Pondering post.
Reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s lines:
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
The totalitarian–Marxist, fascist, whatever–seeks to seal up all the cracks.
I am reminded of a relative who, in his online comments, I am told, quite often points out that he is “scientific.” (Well, he is an EE by degree, who made his living as an entrepreneur with software, so he may have a point.)
In the only online discussion I had with him, I referred to a federal government database to refute his claim. His reply was to refer to the alleged Mark Twain line about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When I requested that he show me that I was mistaken- I provided the link to the fed database for him to use in refuting me- he did not do so.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve been in a meeting with Marxists, post-modernists, and social scientists all arguing about where the demarcation line is in science; sort of like that scene in “Anchorman” where the local news teams rumble in gang warfare.
The Marxists consider their ideology rooted in science, the social scientists who are acolytes of Karl Popper think Marxism is a pseudo-science, and the post-mods think that science is a bunch of patriarchal supremacist tyranny. Good times.
I wonder what Huxley would have thought of COVID with the attempts by people like Anthony “Attacks On Me, Quite Frankly, Are Attacks On Science” Fauci to claim Science as a social authority.
Brings to mind the “Climate Scientists” who accept only those published papers that toe the line on “Generally Accepted Principles of Climate Change”. Reminds me of the phrase used by accountants referring to the ‘generally accepted principles of accounting methods’ which is the disclaimer used to CYA of accountants world-wide.
The one-time candidate for POTUS, Algore, finds it convenient, and profitable, to deny any question on the subject of ‘Climate Science’, given that it has been decided by ‘consensus’. Actual facts? Who needs ’em? Thus spake the Algore.
Remember: No snow after 2012, no ice at the poles, and free navigation north of Canada.
But those who base their ‘science’ upon ‘feelings’ are re-assured that it will come to pass ‘soon’. Meanwhile arguments about what is essentially ‘noise’ in the graphs of future world temperature(a useless number) are carried on with the fervor of teachers arguing in the faculty lounge over pay raise differences, being such minuscule amounts.
Somehow we have gone past ‘acceptance’ of AGW and are now in the argument phase where ‘who suffers and how much suffering will they endure’ is the question of the moment.
We should enter the temple and overthrow the exchange tables…
Marxism (or Asimov’s Seldonism) as pseudo-science: it isn’t even wrong.