I used to hope we would someday arrive at the point that the words "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation" would forever be expunged from medical dialog. Now I am of a different mind: the use of those words identifies the speaker or writer as someone who can never be trusted about anything.
"In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension...Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
...
"Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures."
...
"The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life."
FF - The second is a paper about using the pseudoscience of Behaviorism to govern, rule, apply as jurisprudence. The first half (14 pages) of this paper is dry, explores game theory concepts of using behaviorism when adjudicating law. The second half (14 pages) contains the interesting discussion with concepts excerpted below:
Law and Behavioral Science
Law and Contemporary Problems (Duke Law School), Winter, 1963
"Looking far into the future, it may be predicted that the methods of legally directed thought control may eventually take over the direction and control of what some now call human values and that this power may be turned to scientific purposes. If this is to be accomplished, it should be along the lines of Experimental Jurisprudence. When this is done, there will no longer be any basis for the belief that social science is impossible because it contains no elements of control such as those found in physical sciences. The means of social control by law are now developing and increasing all about us. Mankind may soon be required to make the choice whether these powers are to be exercised for greed, lust and caprice of individuals or are to be used in the scientific advancement of the race."
Beutel is not altogether clear as to what he means by the "scientific advancement of the race," and the laws appropriate to this advancement; but he does have a test, of sorts, of good laws.:
"The laws to be enacted or recommended should be those which lead to the greatest sum total of satisfaction of needs, demands and desires, in that order of rank. Thus a more complicated person is certain to have greater wants than a simple individual, and his combined interests as a whole will therefore weigh heavier in the scientific scale than those of a less complicated (less intelligent, if you will) individual."
But supposing the "less complicated" people object to this dispensation?:
"If ... sufficient public interest is to be developed in adopting new scientific methods, it will be necessary for this small [at most "six percent of the entire population"] nucleus from which come the able scientists to convince the great majority to agree to types of governmental and legal devices which the overwhelming mass of people cannot even understand. Under the circumstances, the development of popular pressure for adoption of scientific discoveries into the legal and governmental field sufficient to overcome the inertia of those in control of the machinery is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve."
That the scientists should be restrained by the need to get the consent of the ("less complicated") governed is reassuring, but perhaps only temporarily, since we know that this restraint does not derive from any principle to be found in the book. The Declaration of Independence states that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," but Beutel dismisses its "theories" as mere "fictions," even more "advanced in the realm of fiction" than the notion of the "divine right of kings."
More re: science employed by ideological agendas. Marxism's scientific utility:
"We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history."
So what is "Science" in 2025? It's largely become what Marx and Engels thought it was, a merging of hard, natural sciences and soft, social sciences, like political science. And the article I link to below is a good encapsulation of The Science Wars, focused on how they first came into focus in the 1990's after decades of escalating battles and had restarted in the 2010's. It is written by a Marxist with a Marxist bias that comes through. But it does a decent job of presenting the other side of the ideological divides, if only to deconstruct them. While I find the piece to be a satisfactory primer on the history of the Science Wars I find the references it cites to be the strongest part of the article. By diving into those I found very credible sources, less biased, even more history of the evolution of science and the influence of social movements on what is presented as "science." Including the soft social pseudosciences like psychology, behavioral science, political science, etc. The social sciences of climate, gender, infectious disease all draw upon the obfuscation contained in the ambiguity of the word, "science," meant to convey authoritative immutable laws that are political agendas in actuality:
I also find the publication this article is contained in, "Science for the People," to be a useful roadmap for those Marxists who endeavor to use "science" to construct their utopian (dystopian) society. Take a look at the titles of other stories in the same publication the Science Wars piece comes from. A sort of "How-to" for much of what we see unfolding around us today in a world increasingly divorced from the natural world in pursuit of an imaginary world of Santa Claus's and Tooth Fairies:
A brilliant exposition! The roots of scientism is also found in the false paradigm of medical science which became firmly established with the Pasterian deception of germ theory which was really about tyrannical power and control and not genuine science; Pasteur and his proponents promoted a fake science which still dominates the world to this day; there wouldn't have been a Fauci and all of these insidious "scientific" fakes without the 19th century role model where scientific truth was hijacked and real scientific geniuses such as Bechamp and Florence Nightingale were vilified and ignored for following real science.
And yet, on Pasteur's deathbed he said "The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything," validating Bechamp but the seeds of germ theory had already taken hold and we see that entrenchment in modern medicine and public health policies
Here's a chilling quote from one of the technocrats affiliated with Musk et al. that confirms everything you're saying: "The neoliberal viewpoint is the community is just a means. It’s just an agglomeration of human beings. I’m a big believer in agglomeration effects, which is taking individuals together and creating synergistic economic output."
These are the people who are advising the Trump administration, who have been made colonels in the US military, who have been given access to all our data, and who are now actively engaged in a global technocratic totalitarian takeover.
A former Google tech leader in AI technology said we need a world body to develop a protocol for it. Having lived in CA and the complete insanity of the managerial class during Covid and its aftermath, his words were chilling. I could feel the boot heel on the neck as he spoke. AI will be a wild ride, but I would rather have the wild west than an Orwellian gulag.
The other day, I mentioned to a non-Catholic friend the Nicene Creed and its use of the phrase "God from God, Light from Light." I found this ancient prayer interesting because light is a form of energy. She responded, perhaps this is why the word 'Enlightenment' was created. The prefix en can be defined as "to cause to be in" or "on all sides, completely." I thought it was a brilliant observation and explains why the Enlightenment seems its own scientific religion.
One should be careful to distinguish among several varieties of rationalizations for totalitarianism. Scientism (or "positivism") is one of these varieties; it is derived from Plato's notion that an intellectually-superior elite (the "philosopher-kings") must centrally-plan social progress and thus dominate their intellectual inferiors. The secular "social physics" version of this ideology got its start in Napoleon's engineering school, the École polytechnique, and was promoted by such figures as Saint-Simon and Comte.
Another variety is the idea that social changes are dictated by forces that mere individual decision-makers don't really control. History proceeds from one stage to the next of its own accord; we are mere puppets of destiny. Conservative versions of this historicism stress that some existing regime already represents the pinnacle of social perfection and the final stage of history; the most famous champion of this view, Hegel, brazenly proclaimed that the state is god. In this system, disobeying the all-powerful state amounts to a Satanic rebellion against social perfection.
Revolutionary versions of historicism, on the other hand, stress that society is actually regressing towards an dark, apocalyptic crisis that will lead to a new and better stage of history. In this system, one can only choose to be on the winning or losing side of the climatic struggle, and anyone who wants to flourish in the next stage of history would do well to surrender oneself with the vanguard of the revolution and the god-like forces that are guaranteeing its inevitable success. Marx was the most famous champion of such a system.
Another variety is the para-moral idea that private ownership is somehow an obstacle to the pursuit of happiness of most people and is therefore immoral, a view popularized in the 18th century by Rousseau (building on a warped view of human nature formulated by Montesquieu). Envy is reimagined as a kind of virtue by such social justice warriors, and their radical egalitarianism is of course incompatible with any exercise of individual autonomy.
Yet another variety is built upon a nihilistic skepticism, especially skepticism about morality (a view promoted in modern philosophy by Hume). If "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary, subjective human constructs, then one can gain personal satisfaction only by doing the construction oneself and thus manipulating or forcing everyone else to submit to one's will, reimagining oneself as a kind of god. This sort of view was popularized by Stirner and Nietzsche.
It should be noted that all of the above totalitarian doctrines have their Christian theological counterparts. Technocratic progressivism got a huge stimulus in America from the combination of moral perfectionism and post-millennialist views about building the Kingdom of God on Earth that became very prominent among pietistic/evangelistic Protestant sects during the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Unlike Europe, early progressivism was largely a Christian phenomena in America, and only gradually assimilated to a more secularized positivist/scientist doctrine common in Europe.
Historicism is closely associated with Neoplatonism and with pantheistic-oriented theologies. Egalitarian social justice doctrines are widespread among Christians who interpret the Sermon on the Mount as a kind of manifesto for how our present society ought to be reorganized. Cult leaders who present themselves as prophets and/or Messiahs often follow the egotistical model of the Nietzschean Supermen. Thus, quite a few eschatological and soteriological deviations can turn Christians into totalitarians.
Secularism, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily imply that one will become enamored of any form of totalitarianism. The critical issue here is whether or not one believes that man's moral and intellectual autonomy is a necessary value or not for pursuing one's final end. To the extent that one's view of human nature regards the exercise of such autonomy as being necessary for optimization of one's pursuit of some human nature-based notion of happiness or "flourishing" (at least for adult human beings), then it doesn't matter whether one views human nature as having a natural or supernatural origin. What unites the totalitarians is their denial of the existence of such an ethically-significant human nature. Historicists and Nihilists deny the social significance of ethics altogether, while Positivists and Egalitarians take refuge in various para-moralisms to deny that adult individuals require autonomy (combining personal liberty with personal responsibility) to optimize the pursuit of the final end implicit in their human nature.
Excellent and comprehensive article. So important to the cultural discussion. Ultimately, the breakdown in society that opened the door to totalitarianism was a failure of theology.
The only defense or bulwark against Marxism and Scientism is a proper understanding of the nature of man and the nature of God. Theology. Once religious thought collapses, mankind is vulnerable. Once religious thought collapses, mankind is subject to the horrors of tyranny, which is where we find ourselves today.
The primary collapse in religious thought came in the era of Scholasticism, followed by Neo Scholasticism. When the Dominicans began their Inquisition and burning-stake religious practice, and then recruited Aquinas (a fellow Dominican) to write the manual on "who gets burned, who gets pardoned," we were all in grave trouble.
Aristotelian Realism in Scholasticism paved the way to Materialism that conceives man to be an animal, a herd animal. Once the sciences adopted the "man is an animal" view, we were well on our way to the indignities of herding, prodding, corralling, animal husbandry, and scientism.
A renewal or revival of valid theology and philosophy is our only hope. The sweet perfume of valid theology will drive scientism off its cultural platform.
"The assertion that science is the only valid form of knowledge is itself a metaphysical claim, smuggled in quietly through the backdoor," as this illuminating essay says.
How did we get to this point wherein half of the country has abandoned reason and gone insane, and is used as an army against the half that calls for a return to sanity? Yet those who abandon reason know perfectly well what reason is as they use logic every day in their lives; it's just that the logic of totalitarianism has taken over their thinking and inverted it as constant repetition numbs them. The subtext of the subversion of the logic of a sane society is: obedience is safety. Obedience, even, is freedom. "Our democracy" requires obedience to be safe from germs, CO2, terrorists, etc., etc.
Forgotten in this created confusion is that the world is shot-through with reason reaching for potentials that can be made real (whereas the totalitarians would say that we alone will tell you what's real,) and chief among them is the search for beauty as a harmony of the parts brought into relationship. We can see this beauty all around us in nature and expressed in great works of art, which touch something deep inside us: in Chopin's Piano Sonata #3, for example, we can't describe where it takes us except to say that it's real, full of realized potential, human, and beautiful. But this intuited sense is exactly what they want to kill in us, or else to relegate to a prescribed realm where we can "refresh" ourselves, and then go back to being obedient.
Like many others I'm dismayed that otherwise very bright people have been caught up in the censorship and propaganda campaign we're swimming in, surrounded and taking it in like the air we breath, and unconsciously. "Freedom is obedience"-- they can't articulate this themselves and would even deny that they believe such a thing, but their thoughts have been conditioned to enact exactly this formula.
An open mind, reaching for and testing potentials across all realms including the political and the medical, is antithetical to the totalitarian mind.
Dr. Kheriaty, That is a powerhouse of an article! The piece is stacked with quotable references and from my reading cuts the prosthetic legs out from under the teetering invalid of a narrative we have been propagandized with and force fed.
I'm curious what you'd think about the military foundation of the scientific and political claims and activities. My latest research suggests the post-covid era parallels the development of genetic bioweapons and countermeasures.
I'm even more curious what you'd think about the spiritual implications woven through my latest writing. For example, the act of telling people what to take into their body was the first lie told, according to the Bible, and heeding the advice was the first sin.
As I was reading this very thoughtful essay, it came to my mind that scientism, as described in the article, is very similar to something we might call “religionism”, which is to real religion as scientism is to real science.
Science is a way of approaching knowledge of the physical universe, religion the way of approaching spiritual truth — harmony with the divine will.
Both scientism and religionism exhibit intellectual hegemony by a self-appointed elite — be they “priests” or “experts” — who arrogate to themselves the “one true way” and quickly excommunicate, isolate, and ridicule dissenters, labeling them pejoratively as “deniers” or “heretics”.
The quite remarkable thing is that those in the thrall of scientism are fierce critics (and rightly so) of the intellectual bondage in which institutional religion can hold its adherents while utterly failing to recognize their own philosophical chains of rigid conformity to dogma. And sometimes the converse is true as well.
Scientism and religionism are both totalitarian in their genesis, practice and eventual consequence.
As Jesus said, in referring, if not necessarily to physical reality but to intellectual and spiritual reality: “The truth shall set you free.” Therefore that which doesn’t free the spirit isn’t truth.
I used to hope we would someday arrive at the point that the words "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation" would forever be expunged from medical dialog. Now I am of a different mind: the use of those words identifies the speaker or writer as someone who can never be trusted about anything.
When people say they "believe in" or "trust" science, I know they are talking about scientism.
I think this might apply in what we’re seeing-
“the purpose of government is not to protect rights or individuals; it's to codify which tribe gets to plunder and dominate the other tribes.”
(El Gato Malo substack)
So if the scientism camp can codify their position, they become the dominant tribe. This is happening, not just in government but also in courts.
Yesterday’s minority opinion often becomes today’s standard of care. Yes!
And anecdotes add up. If you pay attention to anecdotes, you will be 20 years ahead of US medicine.
Interesting read about science and totalitarianism found in this pre-WWII CFR piece:
Science in the Totalitarian State
Foreign Affairs, January 1, 1941
https://web.archive.org/web/20181125112623/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1941-01-01/science-totalitarian-state
"In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension...Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
...
"Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures."
...
"The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life."
FF - The second is a paper about using the pseudoscience of Behaviorism to govern, rule, apply as jurisprudence. The first half (14 pages) of this paper is dry, explores game theory concepts of using behaviorism when adjudicating law. The second half (14 pages) contains the interesting discussion with concepts excerpted below:
Law and Behavioral Science
Law and Contemporary Problems (Duke Law School), Winter, 1963
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2953&context=lcp
"Looking far into the future, it may be predicted that the methods of legally directed thought control may eventually take over the direction and control of what some now call human values and that this power may be turned to scientific purposes. If this is to be accomplished, it should be along the lines of Experimental Jurisprudence. When this is done, there will no longer be any basis for the belief that social science is impossible because it contains no elements of control such as those found in physical sciences. The means of social control by law are now developing and increasing all about us. Mankind may soon be required to make the choice whether these powers are to be exercised for greed, lust and caprice of individuals or are to be used in the scientific advancement of the race."
Beutel is not altogether clear as to what he means by the "scientific advancement of the race," and the laws appropriate to this advancement; but he does have a test, of sorts, of good laws.:
"The laws to be enacted or recommended should be those which lead to the greatest sum total of satisfaction of needs, demands and desires, in that order of rank. Thus a more complicated person is certain to have greater wants than a simple individual, and his combined interests as a whole will therefore weigh heavier in the scientific scale than those of a less complicated (less intelligent, if you will) individual."
But supposing the "less complicated" people object to this dispensation?:
"If ... sufficient public interest is to be developed in adopting new scientific methods, it will be necessary for this small [at most "six percent of the entire population"] nucleus from which come the able scientists to convince the great majority to agree to types of governmental and legal devices which the overwhelming mass of people cannot even understand. Under the circumstances, the development of popular pressure for adoption of scientific discoveries into the legal and governmental field sufficient to overcome the inertia of those in control of the machinery is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve."
That the scientists should be restrained by the need to get the consent of the ("less complicated") governed is reassuring, but perhaps only temporarily, since we know that this restraint does not derive from any principle to be found in the book. The Declaration of Independence states that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," but Beutel dismisses its "theories" as mere "fictions," even more "advanced in the realm of fiction" than the notion of the "divine right of kings."
Sad Foreign Affairs' "English" was already that bad in 1941.
More re: science employed by ideological agendas. Marxism's scientific utility:
"We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history."
- Marx & Engels on Science
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/marxsci2.html
So what is "Science" in 2025? It's largely become what Marx and Engels thought it was, a merging of hard, natural sciences and soft, social sciences, like political science. And the article I link to below is a good encapsulation of The Science Wars, focused on how they first came into focus in the 1990's after decades of escalating battles and had restarted in the 2010's. It is written by a Marxist with a Marxist bias that comes through. But it does a decent job of presenting the other side of the ideological divides, if only to deconstruct them. While I find the piece to be a satisfactory primer on the history of the Science Wars I find the references it cites to be the strongest part of the article. By diving into those I found very credible sources, less biased, even more history of the evolution of science and the influence of social movements on what is presented as "science." Including the soft social pseudosciences like psychology, behavioral science, political science, etc. The social sciences of climate, gender, infectious disease all draw upon the obfuscation contained in the ambiguity of the word, "science," meant to convey authoritative immutable laws that are political agendas in actuality:
Science Wars: The Next Generation
Summer, 2019
https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/science-wars-the-next-generation/
I also find the publication this article is contained in, "Science for the People," to be a useful roadmap for those Marxists who endeavor to use "science" to construct their utopian (dystopian) society. Take a look at the titles of other stories in the same publication the Science Wars piece comes from. A sort of "How-to" for much of what we see unfolding around us today in a world increasingly divorced from the natural world in pursuit of an imaginary world of Santa Claus's and Tooth Fairies:
https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/
A brilliant exposition! The roots of scientism is also found in the false paradigm of medical science which became firmly established with the Pasterian deception of germ theory which was really about tyrannical power and control and not genuine science; Pasteur and his proponents promoted a fake science which still dominates the world to this day; there wouldn't have been a Fauci and all of these insidious "scientific" fakes without the 19th century role model where scientific truth was hijacked and real scientific geniuses such as Bechamp and Florence Nightingale were vilified and ignored for following real science.
And yet, on Pasteur's deathbed he said "The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything," validating Bechamp but the seeds of germ theory had already taken hold and we see that entrenchment in modern medicine and public health policies
Abraham Flexner is far more to blame.
Thanks for another great article Aaron!
Here's a chilling quote from one of the technocrats affiliated with Musk et al. that confirms everything you're saying: "The neoliberal viewpoint is the community is just a means. It’s just an agglomeration of human beings. I’m a big believer in agglomeration effects, which is taking individuals together and creating synergistic economic output."
These are the people who are advising the Trump administration, who have been made colonels in the US military, who have been given access to all our data, and who are now actively engaged in a global technocratic totalitarian takeover.
A former Google tech leader in AI technology said we need a world body to develop a protocol for it. Having lived in CA and the complete insanity of the managerial class during Covid and its aftermath, his words were chilling. I could feel the boot heel on the neck as he spoke. AI will be a wild ride, but I would rather have the wild west than an Orwellian gulag.
The other day, I mentioned to a non-Catholic friend the Nicene Creed and its use of the phrase "God from God, Light from Light." I found this ancient prayer interesting because light is a form of energy. She responded, perhaps this is why the word 'Enlightenment' was created. The prefix en can be defined as "to cause to be in" or "on all sides, completely." I thought it was a brilliant observation and explains why the Enlightenment seems its own scientific religion.
One should be careful to distinguish among several varieties of rationalizations for totalitarianism. Scientism (or "positivism") is one of these varieties; it is derived from Plato's notion that an intellectually-superior elite (the "philosopher-kings") must centrally-plan social progress and thus dominate their intellectual inferiors. The secular "social physics" version of this ideology got its start in Napoleon's engineering school, the École polytechnique, and was promoted by such figures as Saint-Simon and Comte.
Another variety is the idea that social changes are dictated by forces that mere individual decision-makers don't really control. History proceeds from one stage to the next of its own accord; we are mere puppets of destiny. Conservative versions of this historicism stress that some existing regime already represents the pinnacle of social perfection and the final stage of history; the most famous champion of this view, Hegel, brazenly proclaimed that the state is god. In this system, disobeying the all-powerful state amounts to a Satanic rebellion against social perfection.
Revolutionary versions of historicism, on the other hand, stress that society is actually regressing towards an dark, apocalyptic crisis that will lead to a new and better stage of history. In this system, one can only choose to be on the winning or losing side of the climatic struggle, and anyone who wants to flourish in the next stage of history would do well to surrender oneself with the vanguard of the revolution and the god-like forces that are guaranteeing its inevitable success. Marx was the most famous champion of such a system.
Another variety is the para-moral idea that private ownership is somehow an obstacle to the pursuit of happiness of most people and is therefore immoral, a view popularized in the 18th century by Rousseau (building on a warped view of human nature formulated by Montesquieu). Envy is reimagined as a kind of virtue by such social justice warriors, and their radical egalitarianism is of course incompatible with any exercise of individual autonomy.
Yet another variety is built upon a nihilistic skepticism, especially skepticism about morality (a view promoted in modern philosophy by Hume). If "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary, subjective human constructs, then one can gain personal satisfaction only by doing the construction oneself and thus manipulating or forcing everyone else to submit to one's will, reimagining oneself as a kind of god. This sort of view was popularized by Stirner and Nietzsche.
It should be noted that all of the above totalitarian doctrines have their Christian theological counterparts. Technocratic progressivism got a huge stimulus in America from the combination of moral perfectionism and post-millennialist views about building the Kingdom of God on Earth that became very prominent among pietistic/evangelistic Protestant sects during the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Unlike Europe, early progressivism was largely a Christian phenomena in America, and only gradually assimilated to a more secularized positivist/scientist doctrine common in Europe.
Historicism is closely associated with Neoplatonism and with pantheistic-oriented theologies. Egalitarian social justice doctrines are widespread among Christians who interpret the Sermon on the Mount as a kind of manifesto for how our present society ought to be reorganized. Cult leaders who present themselves as prophets and/or Messiahs often follow the egotistical model of the Nietzschean Supermen. Thus, quite a few eschatological and soteriological deviations can turn Christians into totalitarians.
Secularism, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily imply that one will become enamored of any form of totalitarianism. The critical issue here is whether or not one believes that man's moral and intellectual autonomy is a necessary value or not for pursuing one's final end. To the extent that one's view of human nature regards the exercise of such autonomy as being necessary for optimization of one's pursuit of some human nature-based notion of happiness or "flourishing" (at least for adult human beings), then it doesn't matter whether one views human nature as having a natural or supernatural origin. What unites the totalitarians is their denial of the existence of such an ethically-significant human nature. Historicists and Nihilists deny the social significance of ethics altogether, while Positivists and Egalitarians take refuge in various para-moralisms to deny that adult individuals require autonomy (combining personal liberty with personal responsibility) to optimize the pursuit of the final end implicit in their human nature.
Excellent and comprehensive article. So important to the cultural discussion. Ultimately, the breakdown in society that opened the door to totalitarianism was a failure of theology.
The only defense or bulwark against Marxism and Scientism is a proper understanding of the nature of man and the nature of God. Theology. Once religious thought collapses, mankind is vulnerable. Once religious thought collapses, mankind is subject to the horrors of tyranny, which is where we find ourselves today.
The primary collapse in religious thought came in the era of Scholasticism, followed by Neo Scholasticism. When the Dominicans began their Inquisition and burning-stake religious practice, and then recruited Aquinas (a fellow Dominican) to write the manual on "who gets burned, who gets pardoned," we were all in grave trouble.
Aristotelian Realism in Scholasticism paved the way to Materialism that conceives man to be an animal, a herd animal. Once the sciences adopted the "man is an animal" view, we were well on our way to the indignities of herding, prodding, corralling, animal husbandry, and scientism.
A renewal or revival of valid theology and philosophy is our only hope. The sweet perfume of valid theology will drive scientism off its cultural platform.
"The assertion that science is the only valid form of knowledge is itself a metaphysical claim, smuggled in quietly through the backdoor," as this illuminating essay says.
How did we get to this point wherein half of the country has abandoned reason and gone insane, and is used as an army against the half that calls for a return to sanity? Yet those who abandon reason know perfectly well what reason is as they use logic every day in their lives; it's just that the logic of totalitarianism has taken over their thinking and inverted it as constant repetition numbs them. The subtext of the subversion of the logic of a sane society is: obedience is safety. Obedience, even, is freedom. "Our democracy" requires obedience to be safe from germs, CO2, terrorists, etc., etc.
Forgotten in this created confusion is that the world is shot-through with reason reaching for potentials that can be made real (whereas the totalitarians would say that we alone will tell you what's real,) and chief among them is the search for beauty as a harmony of the parts brought into relationship. We can see this beauty all around us in nature and expressed in great works of art, which touch something deep inside us: in Chopin's Piano Sonata #3, for example, we can't describe where it takes us except to say that it's real, full of realized potential, human, and beautiful. But this intuited sense is exactly what they want to kill in us, or else to relegate to a prescribed realm where we can "refresh" ourselves, and then go back to being obedient.
Like many others I'm dismayed that otherwise very bright people have been caught up in the censorship and propaganda campaign we're swimming in, surrounded and taking it in like the air we breath, and unconsciously. "Freedom is obedience"-- they can't articulate this themselves and would even deny that they believe such a thing, but their thoughts have been conditioned to enact exactly this formula.
An open mind, reaching for and testing potentials across all realms including the political and the medical, is antithetical to the totalitarian mind.
My goodness, what a writer you are! Thank you for such an excellent essay. God bless you always.
Dr. Kheriaty, That is a powerhouse of an article! The piece is stacked with quotable references and from my reading cuts the prosthetic legs out from under the teetering invalid of a narrative we have been propagandized with and force fed.
Bravo Sir!
We got here by allowing the newborn genital mutilators to commit the original sin on newborns 🙏💁♂️
https://substack.com/@morpheus11112025/note/c-152705598?r=270n93&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I'm curious what you'd think about the military foundation of the scientific and political claims and activities. My latest research suggests the post-covid era parallels the development of genetic bioweapons and countermeasures.
I'm even more curious what you'd think about the spiritual implications woven through my latest writing. For example, the act of telling people what to take into their body was the first lie told, according to the Bible, and heeding the advice was the first sin.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jrayj/p/operation-seldom-come-initiated
As I was reading this very thoughtful essay, it came to my mind that scientism, as described in the article, is very similar to something we might call “religionism”, which is to real religion as scientism is to real science.
Science is a way of approaching knowledge of the physical universe, religion the way of approaching spiritual truth — harmony with the divine will.
Both scientism and religionism exhibit intellectual hegemony by a self-appointed elite — be they “priests” or “experts” — who arrogate to themselves the “one true way” and quickly excommunicate, isolate, and ridicule dissenters, labeling them pejoratively as “deniers” or “heretics”.
The quite remarkable thing is that those in the thrall of scientism are fierce critics (and rightly so) of the intellectual bondage in which institutional religion can hold its adherents while utterly failing to recognize their own philosophical chains of rigid conformity to dogma. And sometimes the converse is true as well.
Scientism and religionism are both totalitarian in their genesis, practice and eventual consequence.
As Jesus said, in referring, if not necessarily to physical reality but to intellectual and spiritual reality: “The truth shall set you free.” Therefore that which doesn’t free the spirit isn’t truth.