Struggling with dogmas : a letter for Scientism

Dear scientist,

I will not say that I love you, it would be dishonest, since I am not talking with a person I know. But I feel tenderness for your condition, yes : pain and tenderness, and I can say it because it is true.

See, what I find tender in you is the evident suffering that you express, all the fear that you exhibit in fighting a battle that you do not understand, for reasons that you do not know, according to processes whose existence you do not even suspect. You’re like an ant, carrying its piece of bread to exhaustion, or rushing to fight with blind determination, depending on the chemical impulses that command it, without any consciousness of what it does.

One of the most often misunderstood aspects is why I speak to you, why I publish these dialogues. Many people think I do this to make fun of you, to humiliate you. That is not the case. To humiliate yourself you don’t need any commitment on my part. And I really don’t find any interest in measuring myself against you, it would be like wanting to measure yourself by arm wrestling with a kindergarten child. Holy moly, it would be like forcing him to be vaccinated by threatening to keep him away from the playground or from his class, in short, an act worthy of the mentally ill.
No, I really do not do that, let alone to change your mind. Many scientists, for example, write to me: “You’ll never convince me! And we would have no choice but to convince you of anything. First of all, never confuse the interlocutor with the recipient of a message: I speak to you but my message is not addressed to you. Would it make sense to talk to a Jihadist to point out that his behaviour is fanatical? My message is to third parties, to those who read our exchanges, not to you. See, one of the most interesting perceptual dynamics teaches that the human mind is much better able to grasp an ongoing process if the observer detects it in a context that does not involve it personally.

And here’s the point: I highlight your contradictions, your illogicality, your fanaticism and the expressions, sometimes comical, sometimes grotesque, sometimes tragic, that derive from them, and I expose them to third parties so that, observing them, they grasp the process of which you are the victim, and learn to recognize it, learn not to fall victim to it in turn.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think you are “inferior” to me or anyone else, more than a person with measles is “inferior”: you are simply ill. You have a disease of the soul, even before that of the mind, a disease that has ancient origins, that religions have, for millennia, tried to contain, providing those same existential securities, those same “absolute” answers, those “undeniable truths” that you today desperately complain about, and desperately try to find in science, turning it without even knowing it into that monstrosity that is more correct to call “FakeScience”. I do not want to go so far as to say whether there is any fault in this, but it is undeniable that we are all sentient beings with a brain, with self-awareness. The fact that some, many unfortunately, do not have the courage to take responsibility for it, have such a desperate need to hire and sanctify dogmatic “truths” behind which to hide, is undoubtedly sad.

Nevertheless, there is also much tenderness in you. Your violating the same rules that you elect as the cornerstone of the universe, for example. Your enthusiasm in defending them against any “threat”, without even considering whether it is a threat or an opportunity for progress, improvement. Your obvious terror to the babau narratives: the “terrible epidemic of measles”, the fear that “the epidemics will return” at the fall of imaginary thresholds of vaccine immunization. Your race to fill your body with chemicals of which you know absolutely nothing, in the blind faith that they are absolutely necessary for your survival. And, more than anything else, your naive faith in every single word spoken by your FakeScience priests , echoed in the media, which you religiously repeat by heart in every dialogue as if it were the flour of your sack. Which is then the same identical blind faith in the “saving pill” – perfect if your child is too active, if you don’t have sleep or appetite or want to dance at the time when the social system decides you should have it, if your bird doesn’t “rise” threatening to break to your fragile eyes the advertising image you’ve built around your identity.

Yes, you certainly make me tender, and a lot of pain too. But I don’t want to lie to you: I’m using you here. I am using you scientifically, like a vaccine, to immunize as many people as possible from the disease that consumes you, which makes you a perfect slave for a system built on your blind obedience, on your suffering imaginary terrors, on your “produce, consume, fall ill” which are the new “believe, obey, fight” – something you do blindly, on command, every time the priests of your fanatical creed order it of you.

Stefano Re

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Autore dell'articolo: GG

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