There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of U.S. colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to.
Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right-thinking”… a form of indoctrination that encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.
It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to not think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.
For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools today is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion, that scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.
I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public-school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”
Not once.
This is not analysis; this is a controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into an experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.
Educational programming like this is now a mainstay, while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of the actual scientific method, or science in general. Ask them what the equations for density or acceleration are and they’ll have no clue what you are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change,” and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.
In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality, they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe. And look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions or disagree with the teacher.
Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to COVID as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:
Why don’t people trust science and scientists anymore?
This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory; this is provable fact.
The usual false assertion is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that their scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science,” it’s our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.
I’m not sure where the notion came from that science is a purely unbiased affair, but it’s simply not true nor has it ever been. There have always been manipulated scientific pursuits with manipulated outcomes paid for by people with manipulative motives. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health, shall we?
GMO Crops and The Corporate Money Train
The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there are hundreds if not thousands of studies that readily confirm this conclusion. So, the case is closed, right?
Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the uninformed. Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data in GMOs?
Well, in the vast majority of cases, GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMOs.
Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The GMO industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists who have experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.
There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back-scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.
Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases, the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is conclusively proven to cause long-term health damage the government cannot be sued for liability without special circumstances.
I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which GMOs were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant-incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins that act as pesticides).
There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.
COVID Vaccines and The Death Of Science
I bring up the example of GMOs because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analyses. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the data is dictated by the people that create them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowledge is upheld as proof of safety. This is not scientific. Science would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.
The same dynamic exists in the world of COVID vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring no negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains technically approved by the FDA. Anyone that does question the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma.
There are also ideological agendas surrounding COVID science that have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the COVID pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the COVID science is also being rigged to support special interests.
Luckily, the COVID issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to hide every independent study. The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100 percent vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of COVID is only 0.27 percent. This means that on average 99.7 percent of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is a scientific fact confirmed by dozens of independent studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government paid scientists like Anthony Fauci?
I’ve never heard them talk about it, but how is it scientific to ignore data that doesn’t fit your political aims?
What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? Again, these are observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from government scientists like Fauci?
Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes he is the science.
And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium? I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I will have to write an entirely separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming scientists (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, and even that increase is questionable).
Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust science? If you don’t have questions and suspicions, perhaps you should consider the possibility that you have been groomed and conditioned not to.
Brandon Smith
