Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Crisis of Science

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, February 23, 2019

The Crisis of Science

Click here to access article by James Corbett from The Corbett Report.

I have followed Corbetts's political libertarian views (and others like him)--"the government is the cause of all problems"--for some time, and I found these people quite fascinating. Such people have been so thoroughly trained to eliminate the system that is at the root of nearly all things social and economic--capitalism--that they have problems rationalizing their understanding of such problems. Libertarians (in America) are like ostriches with their heads firmly in the sand. They simply cannot recognize the system of capitalism that underlies all things social and political (see this and this). Like gravity, capitalism in their view is simply a fact of nature.

In this Crisis of Science podcast which he goes into at length, he often cites commercial interests as being the root cause of the corruption of science. He does refer to government agencies that collude with private interest, but stops short there. Corbett doesn't offer solutions, and says that "this isn't simply a problem of money" that is at the root of the crisis. He refers to the crisis as "having social-political and structural roots". (If he only knew!) He promises to examine various proposals to solve this crisis in the next podcast. I can't wait.

(If you are scientist or academic, I recommend this article entitled "The Commercialization of Science and the Struggle Against It" by "Denys Bondar, a young Ukrainian scientist working in one of the famous North American universities" [Princeton] from LeftEast, a website based in Bulgaria.)