Prolegomenon to undermining the foundations/fundamentals of science

http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/wp-content/uploads/undermining-the-foundations-of-science.pdf

or

https://www.scribd.com/document/591616840/Prolegomenon-to-Undermining-the-Foundations-of-Science

The greatest scholar of our time Magister colin leslie dean

Magister colin leslie dean the only modern Renaissance man with 9 degrees including 4 masters: B,Sc, BA, B.Litt(Hons), MA, B.Litt(Hons), MA, MA (Psychoanalytic studies), Master of Psychoanalytic studies, Grad Cert (Literary studies)

"[Deans] philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man."

"[Dean] lay waste to everything in its path... [It is ] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.

(self censoring in an age of samizdat's on reddit)

Accelerating the digital transformation

In one form or another, social- and physical-distancing measures are likely to persist after the pandemic itself subsides, justifying the decision in many companies from different industries to accelerate automation. After a while, the enduring concerns about technological unemployment will recede as societies emphasize the need to restructure the workplace in a way that minimizes close human contact. Indeed, automation technologies are particularly well suited to a world in which human beings can’t get too close to each other or are willing to reduce their interactions. Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus (COVID-19 or another) will thus speed the relentless march of automation, particularly in the fields most susceptible to automation. In 2016, two academics from Oxford University came to the conclusion that up to 86% of jobs in restaurants, 75% of jobs in retail and 59% of jobs in entertainment could be automatized by 2035. These three industries are among those the hardest hit by the pandemic and in which automating for reasons of hygiene and cleanliness will be a necessity that in turn will further accelerate the transition towards more tech and more digital. There is an additional phenomenon set to support the expansion of automation: when “economic distancing” might follow social distancing. As countries turn inward and global companies shorten their super-efficient but highly fragile supply chains, automation and robots that enable more local production, while keeping costs down, will be in great demand.

Jean Baudrillard famously claimed that the mediation of war through television—its transformation into a media event—culminated in a new way of being in the world. Through the interposition of technology the real became hyper-real, took on an exaggerated, cartoonish , saturated presence. Through technological mediation, the space of negativity, of thinking, was overtaken by the monistic being of a virtualised reality, a pure simulacra of what was once reality. Not a second nature, but a nature that has become more representable and so more real than what was once taken for granted. The contours of the real now transcend their own own limits into hyperreality. The proxy is truer than the original.

A similar state of affairs has transpired during the current pandemic. Instead of having access to a scientific dialogue about symptoms and prophylactics, the citizenry of many western democracies have been overcome to the point of saturation by a rhetoric of fear. This has come laden with a whole panoply of scientific "facts," reams of unimpeachable data, and expert opinions. Yet, behind this rhetoric is a cleverly disguised attempt, however unconsciously, at social engineering on a massive scale that has largely passed unnoticed.

In the employ of governments have been social behaviourists and psychologists, on whose advice has hinged “the greater good.” This advice has certainly been made in good faith, with end of securing the best interests of the social body taken as a totality. Yet this cautionary thinking has instrumentalised not only the security of the state writ large—as sovereign politics has always been understood—but also the individual lives of its citizens. But so far the risk analysis has been made behind closed doors since the level of uncertainty regarding every parameter of this disease has been open to conflicting accounts. And the more such analysis has remained closed to alternative views, the more uncertainty it has created. The fear promulgated based on the mortal danger for some by this virus, has perpetuated fear in new ever new forms. It has mimetically escalated the creation of a social landscape marked by inhibition and passivity.

Now, to take a step back, the current climate of fear cannot be blamed on any one cause, even that of the virus. One cannot say that this pandemic would have led to the deaths of more than one half, or less, of a percent of the general populace were we to do absolutely nothing. That is the estimate of many statisticians at this point of the pandemic. And that would probably not have brought the whole world to its knees, even if it were deemed a tragedy of great proportions. Life would certianly have gone on as normal, with knowledge of casualyies and makeshift hospitals in new places. Perhaps the deployment of the army and training of temporary nurses, but something that was scaled according to the continuity of life as normal. But in our digital age, the level of hysteria was allowed to guide the narrative, and things quickly led to what can only be described as exaggerated measures for the danger that presented itself, and an effort to control the situation of hysteria through the creation of one single narrative of fear. In contrast to what took place in the wars of the 1990s—which created opinion through the medium of television—the current scale of the biosecurity state’s deployment of lock-downs through the police and army has only been possible because of the World Wide Web. And in contrast to pandemics of the past, the present pandemic has interrupted daily life to an unprecedented extent, even though its mortality is not quite as bad as past pandemics.

The internet is not only the medium but is clearly the message, since the closure of society at such a scale in the past is inconceivable. The internet is the new hyperreality in which opinion is formed through a hive mind of fear and security, one that is cleverly fed by neopositivist and scientistic accounts of “what is the case” according to immediately uninterpretable data. The current mandated state of emergency is based not only on caution, but on statistics of risk. But such statistics redound to opinion in the end. Not episteme but doxa rules the current narrative. One trusts a doctor’s opinion only because one has the option of a second or third opinion. Here we have a mono-narrative driven by consensus. And philosophers of science know that consensus is not how science operates, either in the sphere of discovery or in the long course of the historical emergence of knowledge. Weighing the options for an individual is surely different to weighing the options when a whole society’s functioning is at stake. It does not follow that just because we can lock-down to "save lives" we are therefore able to “control” the situation and save lives. This is a non sequitur, since no one, machine assisted or not, can possibly make such a judgement. And that is the problem. The data is still out on the effectiveness of lockdowns, even masks. It depends which source one gives credence to. And even with the emerging meta-studies, there is uncertainty about their trustworthiness. Confirmation bias riddles all data since the test of time is the only real arbiter of scientific truth (if truth is what one is willing to call it, since with medical facts one was always in murky waters to begin with, and interpretation is just as much a part of diagnosis and prognosis as it is in other "arts of healing"). And so one cannot be sure that the cure has not been worse than the disease, given the unquantifiable "collateral damage," from loss of jobs, destruction of small business, stress, suicides, deficits in education, further division and differentiation based on social class etc. And as always, it is the rich who benefit and the poor who suffer in a crisis.

Yet we are forced to accept the judgment of government based only on the fact that the government knows best, that in an emergency the only recourse is obedience to authority and the discpline to this authority that follows suit. And while this may be inevitable in the present historical conjuncture, it is leading to our complicity in a dark future, by emboldening and supporting the emergence of a new technocracy. The introduction of digital passports may be the nail in the coffin of our past taken for granted freedom to look a merchant in the eye and recognise his or her personhood in the transaction. If Marx's doctrine of alienation seemed passe by the 1980s, his doctrine of reification and objectification--of the capitalist reduction of a person to a thing and of a thing to a person--has returned with a vengeance in the totalised digital society of the 21st century. The only freedom after this offering up and sacrifice of our biological data to the greater good through the digitatisation of our personal medical information--which will be tied to knowledge of our whereabouts, perhaps our fingerprints and faces, and our status as citizens--is more than a little disturbing. Further, the fact that it contains our status as inoculated on not makes the historical parallels with totalitarianism not only resonate but jar us into recognition of how far we have gone in the direction of a "society of control." When one factors in the slow but steady taking online of all money exchange and transactions, the promotion of "digital wallets" and digital currencies, one can see that the "great transformation" of the present is a watershed stride toward global hegemony, perhaps a new technocratic feudalism, led by hip young billionaires dressed in casual attire whom the left were too lazy or stupid to resist.

Should one risk disordering the complex and fragile skein of daily life based on unsure judgements, or expert opinion alone, except perhaps in a real state of emergency like imminent war? And who is given to make such emergency decisions? Are government scientists really taking into account every secondary and tertiary effect of an action, in the over-determined totality of our complex social lives? Can experts really be sure that their opinions will not lead to “collateral damage” making the cure worse than the disease?

Individuals act from a great variety of motivations, and what makes citizens free is the fact that they will so act. Conformity is not a sign of democratic but of totalitarian government. In any society the risk of death is always there as a possibility. One cannot rule out every exigency. But such emergencies can be dealt with in a number of ways without involving centralised solutions. The wonder is why so many nations were copycats of China's draconian lock-downs.

Eroding daily life without knowing the consequences has never been the role of democratic government, even during times of war. There are precedents in the law for acting in such a way during a pandemic, but one would expect more public notice and discourse about such a drastic intervention, which was not forthcoming. We were dragged into this emergency like sheep to their slaughter. The legitimacy of the state has therefore moved from its foundation in the people to a coterie of experts, making a mockery of democracy. The ability to deploy advice at such a rapid pace, to spread information, close borders, and disrupt life as usual, is only possible because of the microchip. Our daily lives have been decided not only through the  considered and rational use of data—which requires the test of time and repetition--but its mediation and enforcement through the connected machine. This is an unprecedented situation. And even if it may be said to be an inevitable effect of living in a post-industrial age, it is nevertheless a fact that the current “state of emergency” and its technological mediation has not been subject to any public scrutiny.

The citizenry has not had the chance to voice its concerns. This may be part of the fact that the public sphere has been eroded by its digitisation, making the physical sphere and the public square antiquated by comparison. But nevertheless, such an erosion of the public sphere has also created what is commonly called a “silo effect” where opinions are internally rehashed by the same cohort leading to ingrained prejudice. In the case of the pandemic, it is not conspiracy theories that have held back the deployment of vaccines, but the fact that “experts” have sought to secure their standing as a new authority over and against the citizenry. This panel of experts pronounces from on high on the latest data, as though the best course of events, even such as disrupt daily life, is to follow advice without question. In fact, the populace is forced into accepting a single narrative as the only possible one, since it is putatively based on a consensus view of medical science. And it is clear that prophylactic measures based on alternative understandings of health were ignored or vilified in order to get everyone "on board" with the mono-narrative: vaccine=freedom. The larger picture may indeed require such a taking up of vaccines, but individuals are not abstractions in an equation of goods and evils but individual actors with autonomy who deserve to be treated with dignity: at the very least, offered a plethora of alternatives to their health both in the present and the future. A broad spectrum of advice on vitamins, existing drugs, and general health regimens has been not only thin on the ground but outright ignored by so-called "experts" as though only one solution exists for any one problem.

A further question raised by the populace and ignored by medical bioethicists, at least those who were vocal, is that a direct intervention into their very bodies is fraught with ethical issues that transcend science, and certainly transcend any notion of the “greater good”. The greater good can be used as a pretext for any end, and such trust is rarely given to political authorities under democratic regimes. Of course, one cannot conduct a referendum during a perceived state of emergency, but the parameters of what constitutes such an emergency can at least be questioned, and this so far has not been allowed, especially on the question of mass vaccination and vaccination passports. The hyperreal diktat of the government—omnipotent and omniscient—has not even allowed a conversation about the prospects that this medical "state of emergency" may be extended without due notice. Walter Benjamin defined fascism as a "permament state of emergency. That should give us pause. He also saw the dark potential of technology when conjoined with mass culture and tied to such an emergency. The question who decides is the fundamental question during exceptional times. For freedom to continue the people must be given a public space to express their concerns and grievances. Again, this has not been the case, and the state has crushed any sign of opposition to, even querying of, its omniscient knowledge about the best course forward.

The most worrying thing is not that this situation has so rapidly transpired and that the public sphere has so rapidly disintegrated—because this is to be expected in any declaration of a state of emergency. It is that not only has the government not been clear about the political franchise that is allowable during such times, breeding further uncertainty and fear, but that in the future the precedent has now been set to put in place the same measures with the same arrogation of all authority to scientific experts and social behaviourists. This brave new world of rule by technocrats was predicted by some philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century, from Orwell and Huxley, to Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Illich and Agamben. No one expected it to rear it hydra-head so quickly. With the internet the power of this technocratic and bureaucratized coterie and stratum of society has been blown out of all proportion to what is legitimate under a popular democracy. The frustration of the people in the face of such a new authority—whatever conspiracy-mongering accompanies it—is palpable, and is to be expected, in fact welcomed as a vital sign of political engagement. Experts do not always know what is best. 

History does not progress in straight lines precisely because humans can never predict, even with the best knowledge and the most sophisticated algorithms, what is going to happen in the future. Given that humans are endowed with free will, and that this sacred freedom must be upheld in any democratic society, to seek to control the psychology of the “masses” is a direct contravention of the foundations of democracy. To further deploy the strong arm of the state against the citizenry in order to enforce such measures is therefore a step in the direction of totalitarianism. If the precedent has now been set for the future—that every time a pandemic is announced, with however scanty data, the government can deploy the repressive state apparatuses to strike fear into the citizens until they comply with the advice of experts—then the road to a new technocratic serfdom in the future is near-complete. The biosecurity state and its monopoly over the bodies of its citizens—its reduction of their worth to their merely human survival in the face of an unseen enemy—and the denial of their free will, their spirit as political actors in concert in the public sphere, can only mean the total capitulation to science-based oligopoly and the end of democratic political franchise. The machine may be to blame for this novel scenario, since the centralisation of information has also led to the centralisation of control, but such a scenario, the transhumanist’s dream, is needless to say a step in the direction of barbarism. If the socialist states of the twentieth century proved to have constructed societies that tended towards complete control, late capitalism has also now proven to have followed in the same direction, and Adorno's fears of late capitalism as a society marked by "total domination" in the social and cultural sphere underplayed the extent to which this could turn into total domination in the sphere of the political.

https://ninapower.net/author/ninapower78/

I saw he discusses the whatever being in his literature as well and not sure what that is.