One of my favorite chapters in Iain McGilchrist’s brilliant tome “The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World” is “Institutional science and truth.” Fantastic. Even if you don’t want to buy his book(s), even if you don’t want to read the entire massive text of the knowledge contained therein, please consider obtaining it through your local library and at the very least read this chapter.
If you’re at all concerned about the ‘health policy’ debacle of the past four years with its broad attempts at coercion, mandates, and even force and punishment, you would do well to educate yourself on the difference between ‘science’, ‘truth’, and ‘scientism’ as it appears in mainstream media and so-called public policy endorsement. Following are just bits to wet your appetite, written and/or compiled by McGilchrist who is a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and a philosopher. (His book was primarily written in the decade prior to the pandemic; published in 2021, so not produced as a specific response to that poorly handled mess.)
“The actual practice of science often falls far short of [model scientific enterprise] and it is worth anatomising the various ways in which this happens, to the detriment of both science and truth, and of the pubic at large — that’s us all.” (p.502)
“A survey of 1,576 [in 2016] researchers across scientific disciplines published in Nature revealed that more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiment.” (p.513)
“The public is served up two competing fantasies: that anything that comes from science is irreproachable, and that most of it is irredeemably flawed. This kind of polarisation makes rational debate about the true (therefore limited) value of science very difficult indeed.” (p.514) FYI, earlier McGilchrist has spent a lot of time sharing insights into what science is and is not, what truth is and is not.
“Ioannidis continues, with a further point that is ethically more troubling, but will hardly surprise anyone who understands human nature: ‘the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field the less likely the research findings are to be true’.” (p.515) The data that John Ioannidis was sharing with the public in 2020 and 2021 was ridiculed by those same people swayed by 'scientism', financial incentive and/or fear-mongering.
“The point is just this: that science is not immune from corruption on a fairly significant scale, and the significance is directly proportionate to the claims that are ritually made on science’s behalf. After all, some science-naive observers often seem gullible enough to believe that scientific pronouncements, ipso facto, represent ‘the truth’ with a capital T.” (p.523)
“Overall we see in public health advice [and policy] the hallmarks of the left hemisphere mindset at work: the triumph of theory over fact; denial when the evidence does not fit what one already just ‘knows’ to be the case; a refusal to see health in the round [as holistic and unique to the individual]; disregard of context; cut and dried positions; and an obvious desire to control.” (p.530)
I will stop there but there is SO much MORE. All of the above is reason enough to step back and consider one’s choices from a personal perspective. And to continue to support and endorse bodily autonomy as a freedom. No one else has the right to force me or you to accede to their idea of ‘scientific truth’ in what I choose to do with my own body — and because of these complexities, as well as the massive gray areas inherent within science, none of us should be punished by the choices we make with regards to our own bodies.