Thursday, June 21, 2012

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

   Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
   Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
   Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
    It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
    Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
   By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
   One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
   But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
   So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
  The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
   What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
   In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
   But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....

* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there  IS  intelligent life on Earth....

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