Science, “Scientism” and “Study-ism”
Ideology and why “Our side” got it wrong on masks!
“Many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s (or group for that matter lol) power to survey. We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole” C.G. Jung
What a prescient and eloquent statement! Clearly modern scientists have a lot to learn from some of their intellectual predecessors. Not to mention Herr Sigmund who told them, even before Jung, that man was not essentially a rational being and never would be so. Any surprise there?!
But the scientists push blindly on-as if more data, more statistical analysis, more Cochrane database studies will eventually lead them to the truth. This article is about why that will never happen! Amongst other reasons, there is “The Law of Diminishing Returns” in data just as there is in economic investment. At some point, an excess of data leads to confusion rather than clarity! Ever noticed?!
I am reminded of a clinical case in which a young man was obsessed with where in Montreal he was going to live. He began studying the demographics of each neighbourhood in the Municipal library (this was before Google!) He visited each area and talked to the people. His investigation went on and on. In the end he was totally paralyzed and just decided to stay put. Probably the best decision anyways.
Another example. Imagine yourself trying to figure out where to go on vacation. Most people rely on a friend’s suggestion or their travel agent or an ad on T.V. Imagine if everyone, before going on vacation, decided to do data analysis on each site that was possible-and there are many of them! They would end up befuddled. And the travel industry would grind to a halt!If we liked ,we could call those people politicians lol.
Some of the decisions regarding major public health issues and economic issues suffer from this same impediment. An excess of data! Bet you never heard that one?! We are addicted and our leaders are even more addicted to data. And that has led them to many wrong decisions and at other times seriously delayed ones. Vice-president Cheney called out Obama on that one early on. He called him a “ditherer” in terms of Foreign Affairs and I am convinced there was a strong degree of Truth to that statement. We weren’t allowed to say it, however, or we would be called “racist”- but that is another matter.
Let us start with a definition of terms. ”Science” of course needs no such introduction- certainly not the definition from its founding father Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626).Bacon was thinking of a simple process-Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion. He must be turning over in his grave to see what his methodology has become! Contemporary science has become, with respect to the original ideas of Bacon, what the Democratic party has become to the original Jeffersonian idea of Democracy!. A huge swamp of complexity, manipulation and corruption-people pursuing their personal academic ambitions, control-mad bureaucrats like Fauci and felonious pharma companies keeping a watchful eye on profit -making and a blind eye to public health. What a mess?!
Once again, modern “science” needs no definition. It is better known than Barrabas in the Passion. It has more name-recognition than Trump or Madonna lol. It is a veritable God! Not to be challenged, not to be questioned. Certainly not to be criticized. Its scripture, at least in the medical field, is Pub Med-the listing of all officially published articles from the National Library of Medicine. And it’s Pope, the supreme authority on the interpretation of its scripture, is the Cochrane Data Base-the meta-analysis of as many scientific papers as possible- arranged according to the “quality of the study” whatever that may mean. One thing for sure is doesn’t mean is insight, accuracy and usefulness lol. But the dubiousness of this problematic Cochrane approach to truth is a subject for another time.
Then there is “scientism”. Webster’s defines it as “the principle that scientific methods can and should be applied in all fields of investigation”. H-m-m- “In all fields”? -like religion and love and spirituality? I don’t think so. I remember a discussion with a good friend of mine who later became a high-ranking academic Epidemiologist-head of a University department none the less!. Ugh! Aren’t they the ones who messed up the entire Covid intervention?! To be fair, there were a lot of other accomplices- like ambitious civil servant types like Fauci and pharma company representatives and dubious “gain-of function” researchers like Ralph Barik of North Carolina. But the Epidemiologists have given them all “scientific credibility”. After all, they trade in the holy grail of modernism-facts and statistics. What could possibly be more pure and righteous lol?
And what is Epidemiology? Webster’s says: “the branch of medicine that investigates all the elements that contribute to the occurrence or non-occurrence of a disease in a population”. Can you read the subtext?! It’s all about numbers and data and statistical correlations!
So my friend, so enamored with his new-found passion, said to me:” Can you tell me anything we cannot investigate with this approach?” Another inspiration from the heavens came! ”How about whether the music of Mozart is beautiful or not” That was a very short discussion, indeed, lol.
One of my first real encounters with “scientism” and its inevitable catechisms, occurred during the preparation of my first book: ”Snakes and Ladders: Aphorisms for Modern Living”. One of the more provocative Aphorisms in the book stated:”There is no Evidence for Evidence-Based Medicine”. I had researched this hypothesis in the medical scriptures of Pub Med(Remember that holy site lol?).And I could find no studies that tested out this theory. Surprising given how predominant the theory was in the medical world that loves studies so much. But since this was to be a published book, I wanted to be sure I hadn’t missed something. So I called around to people I knew in the academic world and was told I was in luck. McGill had a visiting professor who was a world-renowned expert in the field! So I called him up. No reply. Then I found his email. After the second request I finally got a reply (busy man I guess !) It sounded something like this: ”How could you possibly question “evidence-based medicine”?! That is outrageous (he actually meant heretical but that word was not in his lexicon lol).This is the basis of our entire medical practice. It is inexcusable to challenge it”. I had obviously touched a sensitive chord. It was like telling a devout Catholic that Jesus was not crucified really-as most Muslims believe btw. I had challenged his theological orthodoxy. How foolish of me to think I would get a “scientific” objective response.
He then went on and asked: “In any case, how could we possibly research this?” I responded: ”Well, I am not a researcher by trade but it seems like a relatively simple procedure-certainly compared to many of the complex research paradigms I have seen. In my field, psychiatry, for example, you take a group of patients diagnosed by DSM-4 criteria with Major Depression Divide the group in two and give one group of psychiatrists the directive to reference each of their decisions from the medical literature. And tell the control group to proceed as normal, use their knowledge and their experience and their clinical judgment to make decisions. Then compare the outcomes.” Easy-peasy. But they will never do that!! It challenges their theology. On top of that, there is a fair possibility that the control group would actually do better! What would that do to their theoretical edifice?! It would collapse-just like the Marxists I knew after they heard about the horrors of Stalinism. So they will take no chances. Beliefs are too important to be challenged by Reality!
In this article, we introduce, as well, a new term-“studyism’ .Since you will not find this anywhere else, despite its deep metaphysical significance, I will define it for you. It is: “the belief that in order to get to the root, the Reality of anything serious, you need a study.” You will hear that not only from medical researchers but also from politicians and economists and businessmen and even social scientists. Perhaps only mystics and true artists are exempt. And of course lovers lol. They need no study to tell them they are on the right track-even if they aren’t!
So we have Commissions of Inquiry, Royal Commissions, feasibility studies , climate change studies, etc. etc. Whenever a politician doesn’t know what to do he orders a study. For example, right now in the U.S.A. the head Republican in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. The evidence of Biden’s corruption is long-standing and overwhelming but first a study is needed. Of course.
Another episode from my relatively brief career in Academic psychiatry. I was heading a Community Clinic in a suburb of Montreal, attached to the Douglas Hospital-one of the teaching hospitals in the McGill University network. A new hot-shot, ambitious psychiatry researcher was being interviewed for a high position in the hospital executive. He spent a day and a half talking to various hospital personnel. On the second day, he made a report to the doctors. I saw that in that short period of time he had been able to identify most of the major problems in our institution and the outlines for future possible action.
But the hospital executive was not satisfied. They needed to have a more empirical, ”robust” ,M.B.A. style report .So they hired a consulting firm at considerable expense (? Approx. $100,000-maybe more). When the final report came out, I read it carefully. It was full of statistics and maps and figures. But I could not recognize my institution in the report ! Dr. Leichner’s brief report seemed to me much more relevant. But, in the end, both reports were tabled and the hospital went on-business as usual. I believe that is the most common outcome of studies. Funding for a large industry of consultation and generally ignoring the findings in the interests of the Realpolitik of the institution. Any wonder that we are in such a state lol?!
In Canada I entered the medical field just as National Health Care (we called it Medicare at the time) was being instituted. Each year our system has gotten worse-at least in terms of accessibility. When I entered the field you could be seen in the E.R. most often within the hour. Now you can easily wait 18 hours before you see a doctor. The last time I went to an E.R. (the place where I had studied!) I stayed 2 hours and had not even been screened let alone seen a doctor. I simply left and took an appointment with a cardiologist- an old friend- the next day. All was well fortunately. If it had been a heart attack (as it could have been by the symptoms) I may well have died in the waiting room!
As our system was deteriorating, there were more and more studies- Commissions of Inquiry- provincial and federal. There was even a Royal Commission (la crème de la crème). None of these studies changed anything significant. And now, unsurprisingly, we are having a revolt of the nursing staff- who find their working conditions untenable.
So bottom line, Studies don’t work! They are often, in fact, just designed to give politicians a clear conscience or worse still to cover up their incompetence. We don’t need more studies! We need leaders of vision and sincerity and courage. But they are hard to find. And even if we find them I believe our ‘democratic” system filters them out- in favour of people-pleasers and fast-talking salesman types.
Now, we can ask the question as to why studies don’t work. Here are a few explanations. I am referring mostly to medical studies but this schema can easily be applied to other areas like politics and the Economy.
1)The initial bias of the authors-whether ideological or financial. When I was teaching at McGill in the Faculty of Medicine, they asked me to do a course on Research in Psychiatry-which I gladly agreed to. As I was looking into the material (this was in the 1980’s) I came across a very interesting article (sorry I have not been able to relocate this article so you’ll have to trust me on this one. Not very scientific, I know lol).This brilliant author went over the most influential articles published in the preceding 10 years. But before reading any of the conclusions he back-checked the leading author’s previous publications and their academic trajectories to see what might be their biases. He came to an astounding conclusion (astounding only if you are naïve in this area of activity).Not one ,that’s right not one, of the studies came to a conclusion that was opposite to the lead authors antecedent bias! So much for objectivity in science!
2) The hidden and less than hidden agendas of the institutions financing these studies including the Public Health Institutions and the Universities that are all “captured” by their monetary dependence on government and pharmaceutical industry sponsorship.
3)The constant bugaboos in Statistical Analysis-Selection Bias and Confounding Variables-things that every student of science learns about in their Statistics 101 class. These items are still distorting factors in the most advanced statistical analysis published in the most prestigious medical journals.. The examples are legion. In my clinical experience it was most obvious in the campaign against benzodiazepines and the lack of serious equivalent studies of the alternatives-most often SSRI anti-depressants. So benzodiazepines always came out looking bad-even if in medical practice they were often enough a good alternative. If you read the literature they cause all kinds of horrible things like Alzheimer’s and terrible withdrawal .Except every study I could find contains a selection bias where the benzo group already had more serious illness to start with and some of the illness may actually have been the beginning of Dementia itself! The research did not fit my clinical experience either. That is always a tell-tale sign! But most of the profession goes along with the propaganda. After all, it’s “science” lol
4) The Law of Diminshing Returns on Data Collection(previously mentioned).More is not necessarily better!
5) The ”study” groups do not correspond well to the clinical application groups. We had this problem in psychiatry where some of the larger institutions had their set groups of Schizophrenics or Bipolar patients on which they tried every new medication. These were professional research patients! Plus, each study has exclusionary criteria-like you can’t have a co-morbidity or a substance problem. Except the Clinical Population we are treating has all of that. So the knowledge gained in one group is not necessarily applicable to the other.,
Most recently we saw this with the Covid vaccines. People with comorbidities were excluded as were pregnant women. But then the vaccine was rolled out and often mandated for those very groups that were excluded. How could the studies inform us of the risks in that context. They couldn’t and didn’t.
6) Sophisticated randomized , double-blind studies are very expensive to do. So are Commissions of Inquiry and Royal Commissions btw. There will never be enough resources in the entire universe to allow us to study all of the possible medical interventions in a normal doctor’s (is “normal doctor” an oxymoron lol?) daily practice.
7) The studies we are talking about are inevitably statistical . They generate probabilities rather than certainties . But clinical reality is about specific people at a specific time. The statistics may or may not apply! For example, if SSRIs are effective in 70% of cases of Major Depression (some would dispute that finding but that is not germane to our present discussion) then how do I know that my patient will be in that 70%. And what if his timeline of response is different from the others ?What if he chooses to stop the meds because of its side effects? What if he has ideological biases against taking meds, something we see more and more these days. None of the research will help us with these clinical realities!
Addendum to Studies
8) And perhaps most troubling of all, facts are not facts and data is not data. As Kellyanne Conway famously stated, there are alternative facts, for which she was loudly denounced. But actually she had a point!
“Facts” have to be understood in context. In order to fully assimilate their significance ,we have to understand who stated them, in what context, for what reason. We also have to understand what facts were not being stated, which facts were exaggereated and which were minimized. So data is not data! When politicians and jusrists say they are only “following the facts” they are most often lying. So data is not simply data. And that poses a deep metaphysical problem for the Empiricists!
Let me give you three examples to clarify what I mean:
2-During the Covid pandemic(and yes, O conspiracy theorists lol ,there was a pandemic! That was not a lie!) they began to report on “Covid Deaths”. We later learnt that this meant deaths with Covid, not necessarily deaths from Covid. We can add into the mix here that the PCR tests being used to confirm Covid were not particularly reliable and tended to highly exaggerate the Covid component. Now deaths themselves should be more or less reliable and undeniable but even those figures could be altered by people who had an axe to grind in scaring people into taking the vaccines. So the entire data point “Covid deaths” falls apart on closer inspection
2- The Republican investigation of the Bidens finds bank records of shell companies and Biden family members receiving money from corrupt foreign governments. There are videos of Joe (the big guy) being in on conversations about Hunter’s foreign business dealings and pictures of Joe meeting some of these partners in person. There are also business partners and foreign agents testifying about these “Pay for Play” (i.e. bribery schemes. So what do the Democrats say?! “There is no evidence!’; What?! So if the data doesn’t suit your purposes you deny it’s existence. Once again facts are not facts.
3-This one is more uncomfortable for me to report but if we are going to be people of Truth rather than people of echo chambers, it needs to be said. I have the deepest respect and admiration for Dr. James Thorp the OBGYN who began speaking out against the vaccine use in pregnancy. I agree with almost everything he says and believe he is sending a very important message about the dangers of the vaccine in pregnancy. However, there was something that didn’t sit well with me about his discourse. I believe part of the problem is that he too has drunk the Empiricist kool-aid. Let me explain.
Dr. Thorp has many statistics which indicate that the rate of damage to the fetus ,miscarriages and stillbirths are much higher in vaccinated pregnant women. The figures he usually sites are around 50 times higher! But if we look closer at his published article (I am referring here to the pre-print) we get another message! Now I understand that he was working with Vaers data which is hugely under-reported and problematic so he can be excused for his lack of accuracy. Trying to rely on Vaers data for a solid conclusion is like RFKjr. relying on the Democratic Party to be elected president lol.
Now the Vaers register was set up to pick up
“signals” as they call it in the trade. And signals there are! But hard data?!Let us examine the figures Dr. Thorp reports in his article:”Covid-19 vaccines: The impact on Pregnancy Outcomes and Menstrual Function.”
There are many variables to choose from but they all point to the same conclusion. Let us choose “fetal malformations” as we recently had an unfortunate case of this pathology in our Sufi family. Now if we compare the Covid vaccine to the flu vaccine, it causes 11 times the amount of fetal malformations. But the denominator is extremely low! The covid vaccine caused 3.3 cases from a billion shots?! That is one case in 300 million doses?! When you put into the mix the W.H.O. statistic that 3% of children (other palaces say 6%!) are born with fetal malformations, the clinical relevance4 of these Vaers facts simply unravels. So it is not surprising that the clinicians on the ground are not seeing this! It is too rare! Once again, the good guys have it wrong!
What does all of this mean? It means that the Empiricists are often misleading us! In fact, the subjective trumps the objective in reliability! Put that in your pipe and smoke it (don’t mix in too much pot with it lol) O people of the outer. What we really need are people on the front lines (doctors and nurses) who are keen observers. And we need professionals who are able to hear the patients (Seeing and hearing once again) Unfortunately even if these professionals began with these capacities their “intellectual” objective training has probably beat it out of them The fact that almost no pediatrician,s beside Dr. Paul Thomas, were seeing the link between vaccines and autism- over decades of use! is just more proof of the dulling of their senses! So we are in a serious conundrum at this point in medicine.
Bottom Line: Studies are only modestly useful- at best. They need to be complemented by front-line clinical experience , by anecdotes(yes, anecdotes-my favourite source of Reality! Much to be learnt there),by common sense, reflection and even inspiration.( See “Epistemology” in other articles on my blogsite(sufipilgrimsprogress.com).
I’m sure by now you are all wondering: ”So who is’our side’? Who are the good guys? And why did they get it wrong on the masking issue?!” So here goes.
The good guys are docs like Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Meryl Nass, Robert Malone and lawyers like RFKjr. And Mary Holland and many others. They are people of integrity ,insight and creativity. I respect and love them all! They have put everything on the line to denounce the corruption around us and to affirm the “scientific” Truth. But, they too, have “drunk the koolaid” lol Their koolaid is made of organic ingredients-no pesticides, no artificial flavours or colourings lol. Only natural sugar like honey. But it is koolaid nevertheless.
So what do I mean by kool-aid? It is the belief that science is the best and often the only way to truth. That we need these large-scale studies ultimately to discover the truth. That the current so-called “scientific method” is like motherhood and apple pie. No-one can be against it! They believe that the only problem here is that there are corrupting influences that are contaminating and capturing the pure and holy science. If we could only go back to objective science we would be back in the garden of Eden before the fall .Bottom Line: They have bought the Epistemology of Empiricism! Everything can be known from data-from the measurable, outer realities. And that is a serious metaphysical error.
Let me elaborate further on the Epistemology question. It first came up in the courts where I was representing people claiming their salary insurance from their employers and insurance companies.. Most of them were suffering either from C.F.S. ( Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) or Depression of various sorts. I noticed, after a few times, a curious phenomenon. The judges had understood better than the doctors what was really going on. How could that be? ! It was counter-intuitive.
And then it came to me. The judges were more open-minded. They considered various forms of input-from patients witnessing, from their relatives, from anecdotes (love those anecdotes lol). They also used their common sense. The doctors were operating from their medical science conditioning. And they weren’t getting it.
As I began to reflect more and more, I realized that there were many avenues to the truth-even the truth of medicine. ”More than one way to skin a cat” no? But the three principal inputs that can solve most problems or, at least see them for what they are, are “seeing” (with the inner eye) hearing” (with the Ear of Truth ) and feeling(intuition).That at least partly explained why the judges were more lucid. They were really listening. The docs were having their hearing occluded by their conceptual training. Seeing in docs? We won’t even go there for now lol! None of these modalities of perception are popular with the Empiricists! In fact, it is anathema to them.
Ok. Let’s go back to the mask issue as promised in the title. So the “good guys-our side “ scour Pub Med (remember-the holy scripture lol) and find no evidence that masks work in any credible scientific studies. So masks don’t work. Oops! Wrong! Aristotle has creeped in once again with his syllogistic logic. Good olde Aristotle. Can’t escape him anywhere-including in religion! Now if we step out of the idolatry of scientific studies for a moment, we will find a whole nother world And as Jessy Waters likes to say on Fox “And this is my world”! The world of subtlety and inwardness and mystery and contradictions. So much more free and user-friendly!
In that light, here is my evidence for masks In all fairness, I got a head start-well before Covid! Here it is!
1-I was on an airplane probably going to some medical conference in Boston. Yes, I too was a believer! Next to me was a businessman -perhaps an MBA-type (subject of another article at some point lol). He was wearing a mask .I asked him why and he said that everytime he got on an airplane( and he was travelling all around the country regularly), he was sick for a few days with some viral illness. Since he started wearing a mask on the suggestion of a fellow businessman , he had never been sick. A story to make Sir Francis Bacon proud for once! Observation-Hypothesis-Experiment-Conclusion. Beautiful in its simplicity! But no self-respecting modern scientist would accept such evidence. They would denounce it as anecdotal, a random occurrence, good luck or the best of all explanations “psychosomatic”-all in his head! Placebo effect, no doubt.
2- I got the Covid infection four times in each of its variants! Each time I got it I had forgotten or decided not to use the mask. Three of these times were from talking at close range with “asymptomatic carriers” another entity that the “good guys” would like to deny. The fourth time I got it from my grandchildren. The “good guys” don’t like the idea of spread from children either. I guess it is too close to lockdowns and child masking for them to swallow . But indeed there IS spread from children even if they, themselves don’t get very sick!That’s why the teachers wanted lockdowns. Saying that was simply from laziness is not fair akin to defamation.
3- Asians in Japan and China have been wearing masks for decades.. Have their nations simply gone mad-like we did during the pandemic!?
4-Alan Dershowitz is being interviewed on Fox three years into the pandemic. He shows his simple but tightly fitting mask and says. ”I have several medical co-morbities but I never got sick once from Covid.
5) During the heyday of the Delta variant almost all the Democrat politicians were wearing masks and distancing but the Republicans were cavorting around the front lawn of the White House. Very few Democrats seemed to be falling sick. But the Republicans including Trump, his assistants and his wife were falling like flies.
6- During the flu seasons of 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 there were almost no flu cases! People were masking and distancing. Now the scientific types will say either that the flu was diagnosed as Covid (I had no trouble seeing the difference) or that somehow the Covid virus dominated the flu one. That is possible. But I believe the masking and distancing were protective against the flu .In 2022/2023 we had an almost normal flu season. And yet ,the Covid virus was still very much present. So it wasn’t the competing virus that eliminated the flu. I believe it was the masking.
7- The doctors in the hospitals seemed to believe in the usefulness of their protective masks. They were clamoring for their N95 masks! Then again doctors are a gullible lot by definition- so perhaps their testimony should not be considered.
All of this evidence would be called “anecdotal” by the” pur et dur” scientists. And yet, just as the evidence of Biden-family corruption coming out in drips and drabs and now spurts is getting more and more credible, perhaps the positive effect of masking should be reconsidered.
So much more to say! A la prochaine, Sufi Ibrahim
P.S. The good guys are still good lol. They are just not complete!