By Steven Yates
January 28, 2022
“You’re not exactly normal, are you?”
“It’s not exactly a normal world, is it?
—Vicky Vail and Batman, Batman (1989)
Every so often I get a hankering to write something personal. There’s now a reason for this. I have a few more Patrons, and I believe in transparency. New Patrons have a right to know who and what they are supporting. Besides, trying to distill what I’m doing into a single, concise message helps clarify and focus my own thinking and values.
Who Am I?
Although I live in a foreign country (Chile) I am American, born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. When JFK was assassinated I was six years old. I moved to Atlanta with my parents at age seven.
We were pro-education. One day my mom took me to a public library and checked out a book on the planets. I was hooked on science. In high school I was one of the college-track nerds. The plan was not just college but advanced degrees. No one discussed this. Everyone including me just assumed it. In those days, if you were in the middle class, you could afford college without going into debt. Money would not be an object.
I become a Christian at a summer retreat between ninth and tenth grade, and joined a group of peers who met and studied Scripture twice a week. In the early ‘70s, no one questioned this. We even had a teacher-moderator whose job wasn’t endangered by her direct and open involvement with us. There was far more tolerance then than exists today.
Eventually I left that group. Some were sure “the Rapture” would happen before the end of the 1970s. Others held out for the 1980s.To avoid putting too fine a point on it, this struck me as somewhat batty. I couldn’t get my brain around it. Did Scripture itself not say that no one knows the day or the hour? It would be years before I learned of John Darby and Cyrus Scofield — or ponderous terms like dispensationalism — but my nose told me something was wrong. I trusted my nose then, and still do, falling away to pursue my own inquiries. It wouldn’t be the last time.
How I Ended Up in Philosophy.
I struggled in college. By temperament I was a generalist. So I bounced from major to major: anthropology; then geology. History, at one point.
Or maybe journalism. I knew I wanted to be a writer. The contrast between the science orientation I’d had years before and the Christianity I embraced later made me aware of worldviews and how they shape our thought and lead to different social ideals and values. I’d grown fascinated by claims of phenomena that didn’t fit into prevailing scientific theories such as evolution. My interest in science evolved into curiosity about the criteria for calling a theory true, or verified. The textbooks were too simple.
Then I discovered The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn and felt immense relief that I wasn’t the first person to stumble across such quandaries.
So there I was, majoring in philosophy, where I discovered more thinkers pondering the nature of science and the idea of different conceptual frameworks.Another who stood out in my mind was Paul Feyerabend, author of the curious tract Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975).
While Kuhn had stressed paradigms as fundamental shapers of scientific activity, according to Feyerabend the most important advances had not followed any abstract or universal “scientific method.” Real cutting-edge science was opportunistic, involving psychology of persuasion and oftentimes propagandistic language. Sometimes it held onto theories that seemed refuted by facts as plain as the noses on scientists’ faces. Other times it hastily buried unwanted ideas.
Feyerabend’s point wasn’t that this was wrong. He saw it as necessary for progress, at least the way that term was defined! Science, moreover, always involved assumptions that couldn’t be tested empirically, in a laboratory. The choice was more sociological. A felt need to defy the presumed authority of the Church was a major motivator.
In short, science was not what it seemed — and still seems to many.It was a human, all-too-human enterprise like any other human, all-too-human enterprise. It depended on resources made available to it by those with money and power or influence — and belief (or unbelief)!
I could have become a postmodernist! Sometimes I wipe my brow at the close call I had! I think what saved me came from my earlier commitment to Christianity—which incorporates the idea that truth exists, our minds are capable of discovering it to some degree, and that dominant institutions sometimes get in the way. So although I came to question dominant narratives, I never went down the postmodern rabbit hole.
Politics.
I’d been a Watergate teenager. My father: a staunch Nixonite. His view was that Nixon was hated by the press (true), and that therefore we were safe in thinking he’d done nothing wrong (false, illogical inference). Back then we had no idea of Nixon’s worst act, which was “closing the gold window.”
What I’d figured out: you shouldn’t take authority for granted: political, familial, scientific,or ecclesiastical.
Especially if it demands absolute loyalty and refuses your questions.
I couldn’t have said this in the 1970s, of course, but I positioned myself well to study writers like Feyerabend. And a broad potpourri of others, including Charles Fort, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ervin Laszlo, more. I recall reading Beat Generation writers: from Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan to Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. And then another gamut, from “hard”science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein to horrific fantasists like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.
A theme seemed to run through this potpourri: a need for openness, for experimentation, for risk-taking. A sense that whatever we know, there are far more unknowns out there. Moreover, methods that work for one set of problems are useless for others; so we should resist one-size-fits-all solutions. We should never succumb to mental/intellectual authoritarianism of any kind. Nor should we fall into mental boxes filled with assumptions we’ve stopped examining.
After getting my doctorate and looking for university work, as a white male I ran headlong into affirmative action. With a single question in mind I dove into a new literature. The question: how it could be just to sacrifice the white men of my generation for sins committed by our ancestors? Both perpetrators and victims of the worst of those sins (chattel slavery) were long in their graves.
Upon looking closer I discovered badly thought-out policies that (1) were not benefitting most African-Americans whose status had begun to improve during the ‘60s and ‘70s but then started to slip, as authors like Charles Murray ably documented; (2) gave far more benefits to left-leaning white women because they were often superb networkers positioning themselves to take advantages; (3) concealed its quandaries behind every manner of rationalizations Thomas Sowell and others documented; (4) thus setting conditions for the political correctness pandemic, the invention of “systemic racism,” and major cleavages in the U.S. today. Back in the early 1990s I began asking if race and gender preferences were ever a good idea.
I’d received a few light scoldings from fellow academics for trying to present papers on some of Feyerabend’s ideas. That was nothing compared to what happened when I published on this. What ensued included personal attacks and even borderline threats.
This only supported a Feyerabendian theme: narratives do not dominate for “rational” reasons. They dominate because of the positioning of their advocates who can weaponize language, and of course because they have money which translates into power. My first book Civil Wrongs (1994) came out of that era. The next year I found myself unemployed. I’d committed a huge heresy, after all, openly criticizing the sacred writ of the academic left. Eventually I obtained fellowships to support specific projects, ghostwrote two books, did some copy writing, wrote obits for a city newspaper for a spell, then earned a master’s in public health education.
This last proved to be most valuable, as it included heavy doses of epidemiology, the science of the origin of diseases, their transmission and propagation through populations, control measures, and study designs. I am conscious now of what was omitted from those studies: the clash between two paradigms of disease and healing: the “germ” theory and the “miasmatic” one. The former led to allopathic medicine and to the idea that only drugs can prevent specific diseases by attacking specific microorganisms. The latter, leading to homeopathic medicine, emphasized health as systemic, spoke of treating entire systems including factors both internal (e.g., nutritional) and external (e.g., environmental toxins) that can strength or weaken one’s immune system.
The former had won out again because of its superior positioning and resources (e.g., Rockefeller money, which had led to the control of nearly all medical education and practice, including journal publication). I’d revisited the systems theory/thinking I’d learned years before from writers such as Laszlo and developed my own take on it — predictably different from that of others.
Consciousness of Globalism.
It had become clear how affirmative action politics in organizations was usually hidden from outsiders. As sociologist Frederick R. Lynch put it all the way back in 1988, “word comes down but does not go out.”
It dawned on me that this might not be an exception.It might be the norm.
I simply awakened one day—I think it was still the mid-1990s — with this thought: the great challenge for those who want free societies is how to control power. Howto place checks on that minority in our midst that is fascinated with power, whose values revolve around obtaining and maintaining power.
A friend handed me Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966). Another directed me to G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island (1994). I devoured both. This was before The Matrix!
As the Internet began bringing information into our front rooms, I came across many other references and all manner of evidence that much history of the past century was not what it seemed. Those positioned to know had issued warnings, such as President Eisenhower’s about “the military-industrial complex.”
I learned what a terrible thing it was to be a “conspiracy theorist.” This was balanced by my discovery that the CIA had weaponized that term back in the 1960s, quietly advising mainstream media to use it against criticisms of the lone-gunman view of the JFK assassination. It proved extremely useful, the reason we see it all the time today! What goes through my mind when I see it: this is a line of thought our would-be overlords don’t want pursued. Their shills are paid very well to report what they are told to report. So sit down and shut up, peasant. Believe what we “experts” tell you to believe and stop asking questions!
Soon, I realized how useful the ideas of “scientific” materialism and technocracy as modern and contemporary faiths were to globalists who wanted a single worldwide governance structure. The one led to the other. For if materialism were true and there was no Higher Power to answer to, those with money, power, and the capacity to organize and act behind the scenes were free to do as they pleased, to the extent they can get away with it.
Recent history shows they can get away with a lot!
Moving to Chile. Toward the Plan-demic.
I’d taught philosophy again, penned another book, Four Cardinal Errors, about the errors leading to the downfall of America (2011). Not just my corner of academia, but the enterprise generally, was suffering. We were moving inexorably further from Constitutionally limited government, moreover. Wise thought leaders such as Dr. Ron Paul were not being listened to. We were on our way to a major clash of perspectives: between those who wanted power and those who want to be left alone.
For a while, the latter had the Internet in their corner. It had initiated the biggest sea-change in consciousness since the Gutenberg Press. It had created an environment in which anyone could research anything, become his/her own “expert,” post his/her findings online for all to see!
Not all the results were beneficial, of course. Some were utter lunacy. “Sorcha Faal” was around, after all, long before “Q” came to call.
But there was plenty of other material of the highest quality. It often showed that the “experts” (materialists, globalization purveyors, Fauci-types) were either simply wrong or pursuing or in the grip of agendas. They often ignored what didn’t fit their narratives.
In 2008 (seeds planted years before, of course), we experienced the worst financial crisis I’d seen, and then watched as it was “conquered” not with reason and attention to fundamentals but papered over with propaganda and printed money (the worst legacy of the Nixon era).
Frankly, once the Obama years arrived, my then-associates and I wondered how long the U.S. financial system could survive the avalanche of printed money the Federal Reserve system created to prop up a tottering system, most of it going to Wall Street and driving up the stock market to new bubble-heights. We seemed to have learned nothing!
In 2012, I moved to Santiago, Chile, along with others equally convinced that the U.S. was in a cultural, educational, and financial tailspin that could only run its ruinous course. In the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal, shootings such as the one in Ferguson, Mo., and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness became magnitudes stronger!
None of us yet saw the rise of Donald Trump in the wake of the collapse in credibility of all the official narratives, as for the first time a substantial segment of the public turned away from the political class and chose a businessman who promised, “I can fix this!”
We should have seen the rise of the counterattacks: Russiagate, the emergency of Internet censorship courtesy of the Big Tech leviathans, the construction of media narratives about “white supremacy,” and when those had only limited success: Captain Covid came to call!
Truth. Health. Technology of Abundance.
We’ve come to the present. What do I stand for? Truth, to the extent we can find it and tell it. In an age of worsening censorship and cancellation, these are in jeopardy.
Health? Also in great jeopardy, and on a global scale!
Do I get everything right? Of course not! No one does. Have my views changed over time? Yes. For years I was a Libertarian. Gradually I realized that “the free market” is just another abstraction, or magic elixir, because (1) intelligent people will use markets intelligently while the stupid will use them stupidly; and (2) at least some of the former will use money and markets to gain power, meaning that “the market” (the economic space in which transactions take place) is as vulnerable to abuse as any other human, all-too-human arrangement.
Government remains worse! Having just finished Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s important book on Tony Fauci and his cronies, I am more distrustful than ever of institutions claiming to be devoted to medical science and public health. The plain truth is, real medical science stopped at least four decades ago! It will remain stopped until moneyed interests no longer dictate outcomes and approved narratives.
Money underwrites much present-day industrial civilization. This is a mixed bag. Money is morally neutral, of course. There is nothing inherently immoral in getting rich. Money could be used to do great things. Resources exist to build a world of abundance and prosperity never before seen! Do we answer to a Higher Power? I believe we do. But we live in a fallen world, and prevailing uses of money are bound to reflect this.
Thus money has been used for hideous things! Kennedy’s book shows how the pharma-industrial complex and sociopaths like Fauci and Gates have been the only real beneficiaries of covid-19(84), which could have been stopped in its tracks in a matter of months had real doctors been allowed to apply the cures they had discovered worked. Kennedy presents abundant evidence that the Fauci-directed crowd has always seen common people as lab rats! Allopathic medicine aligns well with a materialist worldview. We need a worldview in which human persons have intrinsic value— whatever their ethnicity, sex, age, nationality, economic standing, or health status.
There is also reason to believe moneyed interests have suppressed technologies able to create systems of abundance, maintaining scarcity because scarcity is profitable. Space limits preclude my being specific here, but I hope to do a future article on this, which has been going on for decades!
But take the time to look into what Nikola Tesla was doing when J.P. Morgan pulled his funding and his laboratory was raided by the feds. No one has the full story, because much of Tesla’s research remains classified. Why? Perhaps because investigations into alternative technologies for powering our homes might open doors to abundance for us peasants while closing them to those who want unlimited corporate profits in a fully centralized world.(I am not referring to solar power!)
Technologies of abundance would free peoples the world over from the serfdom globalists want. (Isn’t it suspicious that the Fauci-Gates axis was obsessed with bringing vaccines to Africa — not systems able to deliver clean water, proper sanitation, nutritious food, and clean energy?)
A sustained look at homeopathic/miasmatic approaches to medicine might contribute to such. These do not work under the assumption that the only keys to health and healing are violent interventions (e.g., vaccines). Rather, they look at systems and recognize that strengthening natural immunity through nutrition, exercise, sufficient sleep, and stress-reduction, in a primary-prevention context, are important to health.
These approaches are disliked in mainstream medicine not because no evidence supports them but because they do not funnel billions into the coffers of the pharma-industrial complex. Sensible primary prevention would make this complex obsolete!
Among our biggest challenges today is disseminating truthful information in an environment where dominant institutions — the WHO, the CDC, etc. — and nearly all major medical and public health schools, are partly or wholly owned subsidiaries of the pharma-industrial complex, and also the major source of advertising revenue in Regime Media. We need that Higher Power! And we need decentralization, a devolution of human power from corrupt centers. We needed these things yesterday!
Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.
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E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
