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January 23, 2005

Notes from the Garden Journal: The Einstein’s and the Orthohydrocrats

 

-Martin Kite-Powell

 

 

 

 

Last week on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor there was a guest who was a science professor. The topic was whether Intelligent Design should be permissible even as an honorary mention just for the sake of encouraging students to always keep an open mind with the idea that as history has shown us, today’s convention is, much more often than the orthodoxy would like, tomorrow’s primitive myth. Take for example science-orthodoxy’s belief in spontaneous generation (the belief that events such as the spontaneous generation of maggots occurred in carcasses, which was later disproved once it was realized that flies laying eggs were the cause). Nevertheless, at the time the elite, effete and the most moded of the who’s who held contempt for the possibility of anything other than Spontaneous Generation as the cause of such things as maggots. Rather than the exception this type of behavior has always been the rule and continues today in the populist scientist group-think. Some other examples: the world is flat, if trains exceed 55 miles per hour something terrible would happen, anything attempting to exceed the speed of sound will automatically disintegrate, planets and the sun orbit around the earth, cats brought the Black Death, mercury is good for you, bread makes you fat, bread makes you thin, bread makes you fat, and I could go on.

 

Clearly there is a mindset which, rather than science, is the Greater Scientific Community’s longest legacy. It is rather in spite of them that we have achieved great things and made the greatest discoveries and it will always be. Failing to teach our children this lesson deprives them of a golden way to imagine outside the box of their contemporaries so that, even if Intelligent Design isn’t what they wind up proving as they grow up and become scientists themselves, something equally as radical might be.

 

One need only remember that history’s greatest scientist and the scientist most belittled and treated with the most contempt by academia and the scientific community from childhood well into adulthood was Albert Einstein – that was, until he wowed the world with his utter brilliance. After that, the orthocrats (or orthohydrocrats – since it bears an appropriate scientific reference) learned little other than to take on a new orthodoxy and become his sycophants instead of someone else’s.

 

Maybe this is because many of the types who go to university and study science are often insecure and emotionally needy people. They are naturally drawn to each other and what follows is a sycophantic culture that becomes pernicious to the very idea of anything revolutionary, where the two things they hold to (their rightness and their being part of and accepted by a group of “right” people) are shattered in an instant.

 

No one of course can say for sure, but Bill O’Reilly’s guest displayed this deficit in as pristine laboratory condition as possible when he stated that schools shouldn’t compromise science (i.e. the Orthodoxy) in order to show respect (or in Orthodoxic terms, “sensitivity”) for the deeply held religious beliefs of students or as an exercise to keep their minds open for future scientific epiphany- the matter mattering a great deal even if you don’t care a wit about the cultures of the families whence these children came.

 

Yet another absurdity from the group also ensconced in political and bureaucratic Orthodoxy: the academics. These of course are the self-same who by their academic decrees want to turn math class into a blubbering blueprint featuring a rancid pot of sensitivity and poor logic with stuff like 1+1 equals condom.

 

The paradox convinces me beyond any doubt that it is not that such orthodoxies can’t think outside the box, they simply won’t in order to protect the world as they wish to see it- a charge they often lay at the feet of their antagonists. While the scientists’ orthodoxy won’t open up to anything that threatens their ivory tower, the academic, or the “educrat” orthodoxy really has no problem with being hard-nosed about teaching a particular subject and making sure the kids learn, but again only as long as it doesn’t upset current conventions. To accomplish this they effectively seek to insure your child ends up as something akin to a drooling monosyllabic myopic nymphomaniac atheist*, the things which make great little sheep who never, ever rock the boat. Sure all Orthocrats may talk progress all day long, but these are only words – their deeds are something quite dissimilar.

 

The explanation for this is simple. Such orthodoxies and the orthocrats who follow them to the last jot and tittle exist simply to self-perpetuate. Just like slime mold that comes in many different flavors but is chiefly slime mold, so these orthocrats are just different versions of the same animal. Some wear scientist hats, others teacher hats, and others may wear government of France hats, but really they are just orthocrats playing dress-up and can wear absolutely any hat and fit right in.

 

So beware: when most people in your industry become orthocrats it is indeed a sad day for you, my friend (although it does afford some job-protection). The days of original and revolutionary thought will indeed become a rare bird. And if you simply intend to join it instead of beat it, also know that to be a part of it requires so much denial and aversion to reality that one can truly say after having one’s field institutionalized that most of your days were spent in an institution.

 

So it is in my opinion that the true thinkers, the true scientists and the true educators will always be the mavericks, the black sheep and the outsiders. But this nevertheless is not so bad really. It is in this upstream fight that any man or woman learns the true value of not only what they put forward, but of his or her very self. A knowledge not a single orthocrat in the world, no matter how “right” they feel, will ever have the fortune of owning.

 

 

 

 

  

Notes:

 

*An atheist because without the Higher appointment of the virtue of human life and human rights, there can be no claim to it. Nymphomaniac because it places a person into the kind of bondage which forces them to rely on the government to provide for all of the children they will have or the diseases they will find both physiological and emotional that force them into a certain dependency. And myopic because anyone who is an original thinker may wonder what life is outside the realm of small thinkers and may decide to assert his or her rights, personhood and revolutionary discoveries.

 

Orthohydrocrat: from –crat and orthohydrogen, or “diatomic molecules in which the nuclei have the same spin direction.”

 

Posted by Martin at January 23, 2005 09:35 PM

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