“Science Issues” Are Political

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There’s been much hand-wringing about the benighted heathens discovered by the recent Pew survey which found often large discrepancies between the views of the general public and of “scientists”* where it comes to what it pleases Pew to call “science-related topics” like climate change and GMOs. Blast that confounded democracy thing!

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The fraud here is the claim that in formulating their publicly stated opinions, “scientists” have a motivation and mindset different from that of the general public. In fact, scientists think about political issues in exactly the same way everyone else thinks about them – politically. The fraud is to depict controversies like climate change or genetic engineering as “scientific” issues when they’re in fact predominantly political and economic issues. The notion that these are primarily “scientific” issues is an authoritarian fallacy meant to discourage democratic participation and give corporate propaganda a free hand. It’s an ideological attempt to deny that the people have intellectual standing to dispute corporate decrees, wherever these can be dressed up as “scientific”. Therefore, the discrepancies in the views of scientists vs. those of the general public** reflect the fact that scientists are more likely to politically support their corporate paymasters. Therefore they espouse the party line of corporate decreed “science”. (There’s also the fraternity solidarity element of STEM types agreeing that any significant corporate technological project is part of their version of Cosa Nostra, “Our Thing”. Thus they furiously try to enforce cadre discipline on the infrequent occasions a member of the fraternity deviates from the party line. But that’ll be a subject for future posts.)

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As I’ve been writing, the demarcation line on these issues, contrary to the lies of the corporate media, is never “science” vs. “anti-science”. It wouldn’t be, since these aren’t scientific controversies. The line is the willingness to fall into line with corporate-decreed “science” vs. a refusal to do so. With many such “scientific” political controversies the corporate/anti-corporate line is clear. Climate change is an outlier because here there’s powerful corporate sectors on both sides, and the influence of Wall Street and the biotech sector evidently outweighs that of Big Oil, though the media remains studiously polite to the latter as well.

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*Evidently each AAAS scientist was asked all the questions. Now my question is, how is it possible for one person to have scientific expertise across such a wide range of subjects – climatology, energy, toxicology, human medicine, agronomy, botany, biology, ecology, oceanography, space travel? My, these must be the most extraordinary polymath geniuses in all of history.

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Unless, of course, Pew and the AAAS are simply perpetrating the standard fraud of allowing each narrow specialist to impersonate an expert in all the other fields, and then calling each a “scientist” where it comes to those fields. The truth is that each member of the AAAS cadre is an alleged “scientist” only where it comes to his own specialty, but a member of the general public where it comes to the other subject fields. That’s according to their own credentialist ideology. The fact that our scientists are willing, knowing participants in this fraud says it all about their honesty and integrity.

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**What on earth is a “general public”, and how is it conceptually valid to separate one alleged element and compare it to the mushy aggregate? How does Pew assure us that this general public really constitutes a well-blended mix, the way their figures claim, as opposed to a large number of distinct elements? In other words, how do we know there’s such a thing as a general public from which an element called “scientists” can be qualitatively distinguished? This notion that scientists comprise some truly unique group, as opposed to being just another political/religious group which has far more in common with other political/religious groups than differences, is in fact a highly dubious and contested proposition in itself. But this purely ideological proposition is of course essential for scientism’s attempt to maintain social authority.

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