Why lockdowns

How scientific determinism brought us prolonged and excruciating lockdowns

Cultural memory is a powerful force that subconsciously changes what we believe about the past and shapes what we will do in the future. Cultural memory proposes that not all of our memories of the past are actually our own and what we believe about history is heavily influenced by others and our shared experiences.

Lockdowns were our most significant shared experience in generations that imprinted a historical decision making framework through hysteria and pain. Simultaneously, the entire world felt a COVID armageddon that impressed a government-forced shared memory that we all can relate to. Like a world war, lockdowns and COVID were a shared, simultaneously international experience.

This shared global pain will inform future decision-making patterns and we need to peel back the layers. Chief among those was a metaphysical presupposition utilized to justify lockdowns - scientific determinism. This supposition explained why we freely closed schools and businesses, violated human rights, ended freedom, diminished religious faith, and destroyed the First World. Driven by hysteria, governments and the media compelled us to look at our entire society through the lens of materialistic scientific determinism to enable the worst peacetime public policy decision in democratic history. We must remove what we were forced to believe to justify lockdowns and COVID law to rescue our future.

A Brief on Scientism

Scientism is a relatively modern philosophy that had its moment in the sun in the 1930s but was disregarded as hundreds of millions died to its societal consequences. Popularized by Hayek, Bacon, and Popper, scientism as a faith is an expression of over-exuberance and over-confidence in the reductive and materialistic conclusions of the scientific method. Gregory Peterson describes scientism as “a totalizing opinion of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true method to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things.” Scientism argues that believing anything that cannot be proven by “science” is irrational and a waste of time. Humanity should only “believe” what “the science says”.

Legend says that one of the forefathers of scientism once said,

To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God:

“Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.” - Pierre-Simon Laplace

The weakness of scientism is evident if you break down the actual philosophical process behind “science”. Simply put, science is a theory of knowledge and a view of how reality works. Science and the actual scientific method are not the same; they are linked but categorically different. To clarify the epistemological frameworks, the scientific process provides a way to analyze a subject but doesn’t provide specific answers. It results in numbers and data, not information and knowledge. Knowledge requires answers, and answers need agency. Processes don’t have agency, and numbers don’t have agency; humans have agency and can declare conclusions that correlate to reality. Data is drawn from the scientific process, but only an individual can balance competing assumptions, conflicting facts, and moral variances to provide actual answers we can apply in reality.

Scientism is an empty philosophy. It even fails its own tests. As an example,

1. Math and logic are presupposed in the scientific method and can’t be proved by the method itself

2. Confidence in an individual’s cognitive facilities and ability to reason is presupposed and paradoxically cannot be proven

3. Aesthetics cannot be established by the scientific process

4. Ethics and morality are outside the realm of scientific deduction

5. History is presupposed by science and cannot be proven by science

6. The scientific method itself cannot self-reference

The science we know today used to be called “natural sciences” or “hard sciences”. Science comes from the Latin word “knowledge” and “expertise”. Historically, science refered to a larger corpus of knowledge organized and studied beyond just natural sciences, like philosophy, religion, and economics. For example, the famous economist Adam Smith viewed himself as a scientist and philosopher because the term “economist” didn’t exist. Modern science today is unfairly biased and framed by materialism and reductionism. Science of the past had a wider compass and a more mature view of the world than science today.

During the height of scientific determinism’s popularity, communism and other destructive fascist ideologies rose in popularity. These political ideologies reduced humanity to deterministic and highly restrictive calculations, the logical end game and the consequence of science as the uber alles philosophy. The only thing that mattered was what could be weighed and measured, what could be controlled or be modeled. Eliminating humanity’s higher meaning, creativity, transcendence, and purpose is fundamental to modern scientific determinism’s success.

During our lifetime, the New Atheists unknowingly re-inserted scientism back into the public dialectic. They never specifically argued for scientism but instead focused on ridiculing reverence for traditional faith and religion based on “scientific rationalism”. The New Atheist movement popularized the suppositions of scientism in our culture today without using the phrase as a public deathwork for secularism and pragmatism.

Lockdowns are Scientism

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” - V for Vendetta