Critical thinking about the nature of authority might induce us to wonder why those stories are invisible, or spun as dry policy questions for readers of the business pages, while so much bandwidth is occupied with making fun of a few vaccine loons. It might cause us to notice that treating people who feel genuine uncertainty about mainstream medicine as if they were low-achieving children only makes the problem worse, and that it’s absurd to assert that questioning the Catholic Church or the National Football League is good, but questioning the name-brand institutions of the scientific world is bad. (Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy")
Questioning the Catholic Church and the National Football League is done by society's more progressive people. They want to see a reduction in self-flaggelant philosophies and activities.
Questioning science is generally done by society's more regressive. Ongoing societal advancement -- which to them is a bad thing, since to them people who live healthily and enjoyable are being sinful ... i.e. are ignoring "God": their demanding, needy, love-starved parents -- means to them that more children need to be punished and hurt.
They displace their own "badness" onto children -- so well representing their own "guilty" growing, striving selves -- and encourage their death through disease, economic deprivation and war. This way, spurned, angry "parents in the sky" are felt to be somewhat ameliorated.
Questioning name-brand institutions of the scientific world, done by those who can be trusted, is of course being done by progressives who also question the Catholic Church and the National Football League. The more hippieish of them realize that institutions, degrees, professionals admonishing themselves within a "guild," is still about keeping the phantasm Chaos at bay ... it's better than magic, alchemy and a projection-full world, but it's not that evolved/projection-dilluted ... we can let these "authorities" go too.
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It has extended life and cured disease and improved agriculture, and it has brought us eugenics and the Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known but don’t look that great. (Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy")
The book Zuckerberg picked for discussion in his book club is Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature." The book is a reminder that the number of people who have died owing to murder/slaughter has been decreasing over time -- just previously our most progressive citizens rejoiced in them, but it is nevertheless true that primitive societies, our earliest historical origins, were a nightmare of slaughter, even compared to American Civil War/WW1 levels.
We let go magical thinking and went science in the first place because, owing to gradually improving childrearing, more children were growing up less demon-haunted: the landscape was less one where scary demons were all over the place, in every place/everything, and they could view things a bit more denatured. This meant more societal growth ... and our childrearing has not reached the level where this is something we can completely allow for ourselves.
Societies use such things as science initially to grow and better provide and then start feeling guilty for it, hopelessly abandoned. They begin to shuck their growth, grow provincial and turn against the progressive elements in their society, and bond into some kind of regressive group -- they could become suddenly more nationalistic, for example. They then project all their negative attributes into some "other" and prepare to slaughter them -- eugenics, Hiroshima. When enough people have died, people feel the skies are cleared again and such things as science progress, much less spared accompanying evil.
There are a good number of people alive whose childhoods were good enough that they would use science completely benevolently -- they are entirely divorced in emotional/psychic makeup from those who'd suddenly see some absolutely valid need to evaporate an enemy and cleanse ourselves of our "weakest." Earth wins when they're the majority.
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