“Fauxtastrophes” and the Power of Bureaucracy

The Imaginative Conservative ^ | September 11th, 2024| | By Joseph Woodard

[xoxox]

Tattooed Cockney podcaster Russell Brand said it best: “If science and progress are the solution to all our problems, then it’s important that pharmaceutical companies and science more generally can be presented as the solution to the problem of coronavirus. If science caused coronavirus by ‘gain of function’ experimentation—[singing] meddling in the Lord’s domain – then our whole cultural narrative of science and progress as the driving force for all human endeavour, that starts to collapse and fall apart.”*

With Big Pharma directors on the boards of mainstream media outlets and spending US$6 billion yearly on advertising, Brand continues, “If they’ve been lying to us about that, what else are they lying to us about?”

In fairness, what’s playing out today in the mass media, global bureaucracies and equities markets has little to do with real science—even if state-sponsored science started it all.

Western science was birthed in the 13th century by Oxford Franciscans Robert Grosseteste, Magister Experimentorum Peter of Maricourt, and their visionary student Roger Bacon. Bacon foresaw science as an independent, corporate enterprise—necessarily protected by the Church from rapacious princes. Real science continued to be nurtured into the 20th century by theists like Maxwell, Pasteur, Mendel, Kelvin, the Curies, the Big Bang’s Lemaitre, Gödel, Heisenberg, the list goes on. And despite its recent research scandals, real science keeps ticking along today, on a life-support commitment to transcendent truth.

[xoxox]

Worth the read.