I.

Even casual movie-goers have encountered the soft launch. The soft launch film forces crisp air through the sagging lungs of a franchise with the one-two punch of old blood endorsing new blood. Disney, for example, is a prolific soft launcher. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law used Bruce Banner to soft launch Jennifer Walters. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny used Indy to launch his sarcastic granddaughter. Star Wars: The Force Awakens wheeled out Luke and Han for Rey Palpatine. Loki pitched audiences on Sylvie. Nick Fury chaperoned Captain Marvel. The list goes on. The Walt Disney Company has had their main men making way for their leading ladies for years now, passing the torch to a younger and more diverse generation.

But it’s hard to watch, say, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and not realise that this isn’t the film they wanted to make. Harrison Ford, bless his heart, is 81 as of the fifth Indy film’s release. The writers of Dial of Destiny did not write a story about an ageing Indy and then cast Harrison Ford in it. They already had an ageing Harrison Ford and then tried to wrap a new Indy adventure around him. From there they added in the new, thinly developed female lead, in the hope that she could take over the reigns in the future – and voilà – you have this decade’s new comic duo. The disoriented but charismatic geriatric and the stunningly capable but wholly unlikeable ‘new lady’.

Neither an iconic nor particularly profitable duo.

In this way, the soft launch introduces a new direction, but hedges its bet with the safe and familiar. Anyone hoping for a fresh injection of vitality will be disappointed to find the familiar old granddad lurking by the podium, and anyone looking for a throwback to the good old days won’t stomach the smirking, underdeveloped usurper. It turns out that hedging your bets only works if one is likely to pay off. She is there because he can’t sustain the franchise any longer, but he is there because she can’t sustain it either. Tie two sinking ships together, and they don’t both float. To do something new, you have to be bold. You have to trust in what can be, unburdened by what was.

To pass the torch, you have to actually let go of it.

II.

Keen readers will notice that, aside from in the title, the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, is yet to be mentioned. This is largely because Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fits so snugly as an analogy for the last four years of American politics, that it feels almost excessive to draw the comparison explicitly. The Biden-Harris ticket had all the hallmarks of a soft launch, even down to inheriting essentially the same media machine, one spring-loaded to deflect any criticism as simply the recently unearthed sexism of even their own supporters. And once again there’s Disney, never one to miss out on an opportunity to bankroll a misguided soft launch, flexing their political strength as a top contributor to the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign.

The film even predicted the fall of Joe ‘Dark Brandon’ Biden.

With the presidency being the Holy Grail for any US politician, Biden's grip on the chalice only strengthened this year with the onset of rigor mortis. The third act of Dial of Destiny however, ends with Indy’s granddaughter and intended franchise successor, Helena Shaw, literally punching Indy unconscious, before presumably dragging his limp body back to his apartment off screen, where he awakens just in time for the epilogue. How literally we take this analogy, in the wake of Biden’s recent withdrawal from the election, we’ll respectfully leave as an open question.

The Holy Grail of course features prominently in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but its promise of immortality is not portrayed as a fitting reward for a virtuous protagonist. Instead, the film’s climax shows the desperate clawing for the Grail as a craven act, that the need to perpetuate your own legacy above all else is a fundamentally ugly impulse. Where Indy and his father ultimately recognised that they had to abandon their pursuit of the Grail, Biden had to be pried from it. Despite tectonic levels of both inner party and public pressure, only when the money dried up and notable Democratic donors like Disney heiress Abigail Disney withheld their donations, did he step aside. It needn’t be said, but Sleepy Joe did not want to pass the torch.

If you can be convinced that you cannot defeat Donald Trump, will you stand down?

"Well, it depends, if the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me to do that, I might do that."

Interview with President Joe Biden
ABC News | July 6th, 2024

Newly presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, at least by comparison, is a profoundly more energetic candidate. She likely isn’t strong enough to carry the franchise by herself, but we can at least bank on her still being alive when the credits roll. After all, that’s the purpose of the soft launch – the launch. The Kamala Harris sequel is well into production with a massive budget and a rather tight shooting schedule. The American public is getting that female-led sequel that they were primed for, and only time will tell if the ticket sells. Which brings us to the final facet of this straining analogy.

The successful soft launch.

III.

If we are going to pretend that the Dial of Destiny is as prophetic as the title suggests, then we may as well do the full story justice. In 2020, the Democrats had plenty of energetic primary candidates to choose from, yet ultimately opted to choose the guy who was the same age then as ex-President Bill Clinton is today. Similarly, in 2019, Disney was handed one of the most successful soft launches in cinematic history when they purchased Fox for $73.1 billion dollars. Even with Fox having already done all the hard work for them, Disney execs still managed to snatch senility from the jaws of victory.

Consider the poetic irony of 2017’s Logan.

The story of Logan’s production is short but horrifyingly relevant, as we’ll soon see. Logan, for the unfamiliar, was a successful soft launch film produced by Fox. It stars an ageing Wolverine – and an ageing Hugh Jackman – alongside Hollywood newcomer Dafne Keen, a young Spanish actress stepping into the shoes of Laura. The film elegantly passed the torch from the Jackman to Keen, respectfully sending off Jackman’s seventeen-year stint as the character, while serving up an emotionally compelling introduction for Laura. It was both a critical and financial success, becoming the third-highest-grossing R-rated film at its release.

Director and co-writer, James Mangold, reportedly began writing a sequel to Logan, titled ‘Laura’. Once Disney’s purchase of Fox went through, however, the project stalled, and Disney put the sequel on ice. As for those involved, Jackman has gone on to ‘unretire’ Wolverine for Deadpool & Wolverine. Dafne Keen appears to have been absorbed into the Disney+ machine, joining the cast of the first and presumably final season of The Acolyte, a Star Wars product. And as for the director, James Mangold? He had no choice but to abandon ‘Laura’, and a year later, signed on to direct Disney’s next cynical soft launch failure. That film’s name?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Joe Biden's address on the subject of his withdrawal from the 2024 election reeked of someone utterly convinced that their legacy ought to be likened to Logan, of a man beaten but not bested, honourably sacrificing himself for the good of democracy. Joe Biden and the Dial of Disney, however, will ring far truer as his lasting legacy – rebooted one time too many, thoroughly craven in his grip on power, and knocked out in the final round by his hopeful successor. This isn’t the story he told, but it’s the one he showed the world. Perhaps Biden should have taken the advice Indy did, back in 1989, when his father told him,

“Indiana. Let it go.”

Follow @ThisUnreality

I.

We talk a lot about mental health. One can hardly pass by a waiting room television without copping the solemn admonishment of “we need to talk about mental health more” from the nodding heads of a midday discussion panel. We keep talking about it, and we keep saying we need to talk about it more, and we’re still not very well. The more we seem to talk about mental health, the worse it seems to get. Now, that may sound like incredibly regressive thinking. You may be hesitant to read on. Unfortunately for you, however, I’m in a vulnerable space right now and it is critical for my safety that you read on, or risk invalidating my existence.

That’s right, I’m setting boundaries.

You, the reader, are now trapped in a sarcophagus of unearned guilt. You hold my life in your hands, and therefore, as a consequence, I hold power over you. As long as we both choose to remain in this social realm, wherein my perspective of my needs is the default penultimate priority, your moral duty is to balance on the knife edge of my ultimately unpredictable condition. Think of my psychological wellness as a sort of social and political Sword of Damocles, ready to slice down upon your head, should my needs be insufficiently considered.

“But what about my mental health?”, I hear you meekly ask. Well, frankly, if your mental health was so important, you would have brought it up when you first started reading this article. The fact that you didn’t, the fact that it only seemed important enough for you to bring up your mental health, once I started setting my boundaries, indicates that you’re really quite a toxic person and probably a narcissistic personality type.

Okay, let’s stop here for a moment.

Let’s call that persona the ‘mental health crybully’. Once armed with therapy-speak and unleashed upon the world, the crybully invokes their own peril at will. However, the crybully isn’t usually a liar. They usually do indeed have fairly severe emotional problems. The modern politics of therapy, however, are not equipped to support them. Real therapy challenges the ways we view ourselves, the world and those around us. It empowers, by teaching us to recognise our own accountability, to change what we can and accept what we can't. It doesn’t reinforce our toxic beliefs, it identifies and exposes them. Instead, the crybully mentality has us retreat into a purely reactive stance, where our mental health is a static object which the world itself must warp around. We further insulate ourselves from help by declaring any challenge to our unhealthy worldview an ‘invalidation’ tantamount to goading us into suicide.

Put another way, there isn’t much wiggle room in ‘obey me or I’ll kill myself’. So, when even acknowledging an illness is a social faux pas, our only remaining option is to instead affirm it. The crybullies are told that they must be accepted just the way they are, and that their mental health hinges precariously on that acceptance. Whilst its unkind to tell an emotionally stable person that they’re one poorly-phrased comment away from triggering an onslaught of self-harm, its an even greater unkindness to tell an emotionally unstable person that their very will to exist hinges on the whim of public perception and progressive policy. In short, the crybullies really do need our support, but their political representation instead offers the placating blanket of affirmation.

And also death.

II.

Earlier this year, a Canadian hospital told a suicidal woman that the system is ‘broken’, warned her of long wait periods, and asked her if she had considered MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. Offering suicide to the suicidal is a fiercely pragmatic approach to mental health management, I must admit. However, marketing death as a ‘solution’ strays into the darkly unethical when we lose the will to first even try to help those coming to us in need. For a problem to have a medical solution, the implication is that it has a medical cause. We don’t offer heart surgery for heartbreak, nor lobotomy for stress headaches, and yet, we can be caught championing medically-induced death as an antidote for suicidal ideation and suggesting surgery as the ultimate solution for gender dysphoria. We are casting the definitional net of ‘a mental health problem’ wider than ever before, while simultaneously rebranding last century’s malpractice as this century’s empathy.

And Canada is leading the charge.

Prime Minister Trudeau claims to believe that, ‘trans kids need to feel safe’. But if transsexuals are as suicidal as the statistics indicate, why then, is his administration also widening the eligibility criteria for voluntary medical death to include mental illness? Is offering suicide to the suicidal an affirmation of their identity? Is that what it means to be ‘affirmed’? Are we so incapacitated with the guilt put forth by mentally ill crybullies that we can’t even stop them from committing suicide for fear of invalidating their lived experiences? The argument comes to mind, that perhaps lived experiences don’t count for much once a heart stops beating.

Of course, this isn’t just limited to the Canadian government’s death squad alumni. Right now, you can buy a t-shirt online that says ‘This Barbie Takes Lexapro’ for $17.95, presumably inspired by this viral thread, captioned ‘for all the medicated barbies out there’. It is at least slightly alarming that we’re imbuing coping mechanisms with pop culture stylings enough that companies are printing them on t-shirts for profit. The lasting identity of Gen Z girls resembles a stew of pharmacology and pink-or-goth-styled consumerism, and we owe it to them to figure out why. It seems that we’ve tied identity and mental health into a knot so tight that we can’t tell one from the other.

Western society can’t separate a disorder from an identity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the aforementioned affirmation. An affirmation doesn’t just soothe. Entrenched in an affirmation is a statement on reality, a reality where we hand the keys over to the patient and let them decide whether their disorder is a disorder or not, depending on whether it fits into their current identity. It begs the question – when exactly do we stop being something to be accepted, and instead become something to be reformed? When do our mental derivations cross the threshold from an endearing eccentricity to a psychiatric episode? There isn’t any objective answer, because this is a question of worldview. That’s why mental health is so political. The definition of our worldview is the culture war.

To define mental health, is to define reality.

III.

This goes beyond simply the lives of crybullies. While it’s clear that politics has corrupted mental health discussion, this warped version of mental health is in turn pathologising every other aspect of life. The fragile crybullies are just a symptom of this shift. From an individual, ‘obey me or I’ll kill myself’ is a cry for help. From a society, however, it signals the end of our shared reality. For debate to exist, for healthy disagreement to exist, we need a shared intellectual foundation. That can’t exist in the self-care society, where the whole world is filtered through a pathological lens. When the political becomes clinical, and the marketplace of ideas is converted into a psych ward, we put the foundations of reality in the hands of academic ideologues. Consider the pandemic, for example, and the various dissertations on ‘vaccine hesitancy’ – emphasis mine:

When we compared the early life histories of those who were vaccine resistant to those who were not, we found many vaccine-resistant adults had histories of adverse experiences during childhood, including abuse, maltreatment, deprivation or neglect, or having an alcoholic parent. These experiences would have made their childhood unpredictable and contributed to a lifelong legacy of mistrust in authorities, as well as seeding the belief that “when the proverbial hits the fan you’re on your own”. […] The resistant group also described themselves as non-conformists who valued personal freedom and self-reliance over following social norms.

Vaccine resistance has its roots in negative childhood experiences, a major study finds
The Conversation (2022)

Describing your political opponents as traumatised and maladjusted might sound like an exercise in compassion, but there is an immense power in this dismissal. The moment we can comfortably rule rational reactions to irregular situations as simply the behaviour of mental defectives, we’re then free to kindly dispose of those people in whatever way we consider most humane. Historically, this meant different things at different times, often institutionalising men and lobotomising ‘hysterical’ women in droves. While a preoccupation with the mental health of others certainly implies a moral footing, tragically, it far from ensures it. Our compassion for ourselves cannot come at the cost of our compassion for others, and our compassion for others cannot come at the expense of their freedom or dignity.

For this reason, the cybullies are never truly cared for. They must stay damaged, helpless and perpetually traumatised by the inane, because that state of vulnerability keeps them dependent on their ideologically-aligned structures of power. If the crybullies ever learned effective self-determination, they would collapse as a reliable constituency. If they ever adopted ‘personal freedom and self-reliance' as the pillars of their identity, they would swiftly switch from the constantly affirmed to the compassionately institutionalised. In the self-care society, only identities which disempower oneself are permitted to flourish.

Put simply, the mental health culture war is a fight over who gets to deny our agency and for what reason. No institutional power, whatever their rhetoric, will ever truly reject these tactics, for fear and dependency are the greatest recruitment tools available. Contrary to the claims of pundits and bureaucrats alike, our mental health is not in a ballot box.

Our sanity is ours to defend.

Follow @ThisUnreality

I.

Ever since first engaging with politics, I have been fascinated with how language shapes the tone of political conversation. Pro-life and pro-choice imply the existence of pro-death and anti-choice stances respectively, despite neither being a term with which anyone would willingly associate. Gun control on the other hand is far less divisive. With control being such an ambidextrous term, neither side of the debate objects, as it is somehow simultaneously less dictatorial than “gun ban”, yet more ominous than “gun laws”. The former fact pleasing to the political left, and the latter pleasing to the right. Author and essayist George Orwell observed these sorts of phenomenons in one of my favourite essays of all time..:

English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

Politics and the English Language
George Orwell

Fundamentally, the tone of political language exerts more force than its actual meaning. “Western” sounds more understanding than white, and “affirmative” comes across as cosier than discriminatory. “Peacekeepers” soothe where invaders aggravate, and we’d all rather live in a society that “de-platforms” rather than censors. At our most verbose, to “no longer stand by and do nothing” functions as the pundit’s longhand for war. Take, for example, problematic.

Like a Pokémon of rhetoric, problematic evolved from offensive.

Problematic once described that which constituted a problem to someone or something else. Aluminium is problematic for microwave ovens. Chastity is problematic for the French. In time, however, problematic adopted an informal, secondary definition. This other use translates to something like “transgressive to my ideology”, though none would admit this. Consider the following statements.

James Bond is offensive.
James Bond is problematic.

Today, these two declarations are functionally identical. Crucially, however, the term offensive has begun to sound a little too much like a “you problem”, whereas problematic provides the useful connotation of objectivity. When we gut a word of its original meaning, the word’s utility subsists only on the echoes of its final, fading vibrations. Therefore, it is never long before we must pluck another unsuspecting word from the vine to eviscerate. It happened to problematic.

And now it’s happening to dangerous.

II.

Let’s pause for just a moment and bring Chief Twit himself, Elon Musk, into the conversation. Elon Musk has graced the list of real-life Hollywood villains ever since he announced his plan to microchip the global population. In the running of most terrifying and dystopian film premises, neural interface with computers is up there with the resurrection of extinct animals for a prehistoric theme park. When this technology sees widespread adoption, I will happily live amongst the other savages.

All that said, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter – and the political language employed against him – serve as a topical example of the behaviour described above. Just type the word dangerous into Twitter itself to see how it is used. An example.

This gentleman, possibly unfamiliar with the mechanics of humour, assigns the dangerous label to “lies floated as jokes”. He also assigns it to “ad hominem attacks”, a six-syllable conglomerate used to say “insults”. Finally, he assigns the scarlet letter of dangerous to “blatant misinformation”, implying that somewhere there exists a purveyor of truth to which we can all commit ourselves unquestioningly.

Taken at face value, it all sounds rather awful. These remarks portray Twitter as a sort of fallen angel in the digital space, a pure and innocent creature defiled by one of the richest men in the world. It stands to reason that if the “this” referred to isn’t “freedom of speech”, but is instead “dangerous”, then whatever previously wasn’t “freedom of speech” was not “dangerous”. Fortunately, this theory is simple to test via a brief glance at Twitter’s own history, for it was the old Twitter that was sued for refusing to take down child sexual abuse material. It was the old Twitter that shortly afterwards got in trouble for playing paid advertisements next to such horrific media.

Was none of that “dangerous”?

A second and final example.

Once again, “dangerous” has been invoked, this time preceding “right-wing troll”. A curious choice. After all, if advertisers can stomach association with child sexual abuse material, they can probably stomach Pepe the Frog. This inexplicable hypocrisy calls to mind a debacle involving Reddit forums back in 2015. Under new leadership, Reddit made sweeping removals of uncouth forums, including the likes of “Fat People Hate”, a forum for the mockery of the obese. It was perhaps a needlessly censorious move, but not one that defied logic. Since content moderation has no logical or natural endpoint, subjectivity is inherent to the process. What was less logical, however, was not what they did ban, but what they did not.

Every parent has their favourites, after all.

In that infamous season of censorship, the administrators of Reddit chose not to eject the forum “Cute Female Corpses” from its midsts. That forum, a forum that needs no explanation beyond its title, was left to prosper for years afterwards. Only in the mind of the ideologically deranged does the physical exploitation of children and the eroticisation of the mutilated bodies of dead loved ones warrant lesser concern than fat jokes and crude drawings of a green, humanoid frog huffing from a helium tank labelled “memes”. Whatever far-reaching and sinister underbellies those things could be argued to represent, they pale in comparison to the real and present dangers implicitly condoned by these platforms every day.

But why dangerous?

III.

The term dangerous evades explanation through its own sense of urgency. In real life, when a friend warns us that something is dangerous, it’s not an invitation for a philosophical debate. When such language enters the political sphere, it reeks of the “follow the science” chant. Questions are not welcome. The nature of the threat is so existential that to explain it to the common folk would be a gross misuse of time. Dangerous, much like problematic, invites a sense of objectivity, then further imbues it with imminent peril.

Social media further enforces alarmist language. This is true of pundits from all political corners. Truth is useless. It is not about what we say, but how we say it. Social media demotes truth to hearsay and commodifies the reaction to it. This is as annoying as it is inevitable, but when we deploy this sleight-of-mouth for ideological reasons, that can truly be dangerous. When ideology trumps commonly agreed-upon morality, it sucks the oxygen out of the room for everything else. After all, how much time wasted debating whether the “OK” hand gesture qualified as a hate symbol, could have been better spent demanding the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? But alas, that would be a non-partisan assault, given the presence of both surnames like Trump as well as Clinton on said list. As they say, that which is political, bipartisan, and criminal to the naked eye, is that which seems to stupefy official scrutiny most easily.

So what comes after dangerous?

It could be that the sequel is out already and fast making its money back, but is yet to take hold as the dominant form of condemnation. With the trend firmly established at this point, we might already guess the successor – “violent”. The term violent carries the objectivity and immediacy of its predecessors, but adds in the impossibly visceral and unmistakably malevolent.

However, we only get here through the gentle but relentless erosion of meaning. Had we declared several decades ago that “words are violence”, we would have been called mad. The old sticks-and-stones adage would have refuted the thought automatically. In time however, we have collectively sleepwalked towards absurdity until we are so close, until it obscures our vision so completely, that we can no longer see it for the absurdity that it is. With our peripheral vision completely ensconced, any sense of perspective falls away.

The absurdity is the reality.

If politics is war, then words are not the weapons, words are the battlefield – a battlefield that shifts beneath the soldiers’ feet. This is not to endorse one side or the other, but to advocate for clarity itself. Neighbour must comprehend neighbour. Without the words with which to even determine the front line, when reality can no longer be commonly defined, we lose all capacity for constructive conversation. If we cannot resolve conflict with words, we regress to more primal instincts – and those sticks and stones will break our bones.

Follow @ThisUnreality

I.

When I was a boy, I would help my aunt with the shopping. Once home, her first task was to rescue any purchased food products from their plastic packaging. Only glass could be trusted. Even metal could betray you. We had argued, standing in the kitchen, about the ‘safety’ of canned goods. I, having not grown up in the time of rampant lead poisoning, viewed metal as a culinary ally. I had also viewed plastic as an ally, but I was not about to start that debate again. Regardless, my aunt had shown me a thin, semi-transparent film around the inside lid of an empty can. That, she claimed, was some kind of plastic or other unnatural compound that could contaminate the food. Naturally, out came the Mason jars.

Now, were the finer points of her aversion to plastic justified? Hard to say. However, this was decades before a study commissioned by the WWF revealed that we might be ingesting as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. My aunt had not had the research per se, but she had possessed the correct instinct. It was the same instinct that had seen her covering the laptop webcam with a thumb of Blu Tack, earning bewilderment from the rest of us. Just as with the plastic, however, years later, iOS14 exposed Instagram for accessing the user’s camera even when not in use. Once again, she was right. While perhaps hit-or-miss on the finer details, the instinct had proved itself as a North Star to orient around. This ‘instinct’ had seen both my aunt and uncle derided as crackpot tree-huggers three decades ago, and as neo-Nazi science deniers today.

They were folks just standing still, the Overton pendulum washing over.

This evolution of pejoratives, from tree-hugger to neo-Nazi, is crucial. If we don’t change the terms we use, we risk comparing the current day to history. In other words, we risk realising our own hypocrisy, for as we celebrate the rebels of yesterday, we condemn the rebels of today. We’re desperate to define today’s rebels as new and different to those we mistakenly ignored in the past. The anti-war folk of yesterday were unpatriotic, but the anti-war folk of today are unempathetic. What will they be tomorrow? Cowardly? Xenophobic? The actual political position will stay the same, true, but the adjective will change and therefore our perception too.

For it is not enough to dismiss the past, we must also tirelessly update our definition of today’s reality. This happens daily. Once quietly confessed to by the establishment, conspiracies become common sense. That which was obnoxious speculation yesterday is obvious today. We catch ourselves saying, of course our phones spy on us – duh! – forgetting how we had scorned a friend for claiming the same thing just a few years ago. Fiction becomes fact overnight. This is how we never learn. If we were never wrong in the past, why would we ever be wrong in the future?

Old arrogance is refreshed with new arrogance.

In this way, we relegate the mistakes of the past to the sole domain of our bigoted ancestors. Witch hunts, crusades, lobotomies, and electroshock therapy – how barbaric, how unthinkable. We in the modern age are beyond such things. Unless, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated in his infamous experiments on obedience to authority, a stoic gentleman in a white lab coat calmly assures us that in fact we must obey, and that all responsibility is theirs. Perhaps then, in that moment we will turn up the voltage on our fellow participant because, “in the interest of science… one goes through with it”.

The philosopher and essayist George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But let us offer an addendum. To resign the past to simply a time of bigotry, is to condemn yourself to repetition just the same – but with a self-satisfied twinkle.

Let us then take stock of our own pathology, as described above.

1. The people deemed ‘wrong’ today are unlike the people deemed ‘wrong’ yesterday.

2. Claims made by such ‘wrong’ people, once verified, were plainly obvious all along.

3. This whole business of being ‘wrong’ is a bit of an old-world problem anyway.

In short, to us, you’re either insane or annoying.

We therefore never grant kudos to those possessing a little more wisdom, a little better instinct, or a little more forethought than ourselves. They were insane yesterday, they’re annoying today, and they’ll be insane again tomorrow. All that said, seeing as we’ve safely relegated these folks to the sidelines, perhaps we can examine them at a safe distance. What exactly is the case for their abandonment of consensus, anyway? What is the case for science denial?

II.

In a world simultaneously post-truth and yet incessantly fact-checked, it can be tempting to entirely forgo any sense of definitive, knowable truth. Today, we’re all a few keystrokes away from validating any preconception we arrived at the keyboard with – be they via ‘official’ or ‘independent’ sources online. Forbes warned us against this sort of behaviour, declaring with a provocative headline, “You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science”. I would have preferred a more straightforward headline:

Accept The Current Consensus And Nothing Else.

The problem with this framing of course, is the term ‘current’, for it betrays a flaw with the original argument. We can look backwards with scorn, but never forward with skepticism. And just what horrors are we committing today that we will look back on and shiver? We can’t know for sure, of course, but God forbid we speculate. Trouble is, when we do indulge in a little of our ‘own research’, we’re met with a combination of the following: research supporting the current consensus, research that does not support said consensus, well-intended speculation, and the standard dose of old-fashioned, red-blooded misinformation. Somewhere in that stew of thought and documentation lies a truth that will only be retroactively known at an unspecified point in the future.

The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “truth”. And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Colonel & Rose,
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

At this point, we have a few options. We can shrug, stand up, and head to the local milk bar in apathy. Alternatively, we could accept the current consensus and download the next safe-for-consumption update from our nearest device. Alternatively, we could become reactionaries, dismissing all official reports solely due to their officialness, and consume the independent sources, the speculation, and the misinformation with indiscriminate gusto. We might even oscillate between all three. But I suspect there is a fourth option lurking about. Perhaps we forgo any hope of truly and definitively sorting the endless chaff and instead turn inwards. We can ask our own personal value structures what they are telling us.

How… scientific?

Admittedly, it is not scientific at all. However, we are not technically looking for science – we’re looking for the truth. Science can align with truth and with good, as it has with many great scientific discoveries. But it can also align with falsehood and with evil, as it has with a great many crimes against humanity. Science, in this way, exists in the same limbo of uncertainty as even sheer barstool speculation – time and chance happeneth to them all.

This is easy to forget of course, because science catches up, just as we do. Science once told us that mixed-race children were intellectually inferior, but it has since forgotten its own misgivings. The medical industry invoked the name of science as it hooked millions on OxyContin, but that too slips the mind. Truth, on the other hand, is more stoic. Yogic principles have held value for the human body many millennia before scientific studies verified them. Fundamental truths are true today, just as they were at the beginning of time.

Truth is eternal, science is evolving.

None of this is to say that all official reports need be condemned. We are not reactionaries and the Earth is not flat. Official reports and independent commentary alike must be reviewed critically, of course. They must also be reviewed philosophically, however, for objective fact requires a philosophical lens with which to have meaning. Let us demonstrate this with an example. Consider the following statement.

Human beings are profoundly complex organisms.

Assuming we agree semantically, this could be considered an objective fact. If so, what is its objective meaning? This depends on who is evaluating it and what their personal beliefs are. A creationist might say, “Human beings are in fact so profoundly complex, that only God could have made them.” Alternatively, an evolutionist might say, “Human beings are indeed so profoundly complex, that only four and a half billion years of evolution could have produced them.” The fact itself possesses no allegiance. Now, a more topical and political example.

Lockdowns slow pandemic spread.

Once again, this could easily be considered an objective fact, but does it mean that we must plunge our country into an economically catatonic state for somewhere between two weeks and eternity, while policemen enforce social distancing via pandemic-era quarterstaffs? Of course not. There is no direct line from statistical analysis to the suspension of civil liberties. More broadly, there is no direct line from reality to policy. It is our reality that thousands of people die swimming every year, yet it is not our policy to outlaw breaststroke. To draw such a line is to inject our own worldview into the equation.

This is only natural, mind you. Every day, we take what objective facts we can, inject what philosophical convictions we possess, and conclude what action we ought to take. This is normal behaviour. To outsource this process however, to let an appointed authority make this evaluation on our behalf, to let them decree that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” – that is to surrender our self-governance and unconsciously adopt the worldview of those who would proclaim themselves our betters.

Science™ is not science, any more than a picture is the vista. The institution of science is not itself science, just as a church is not itself belief. A person conflating the object with the ideal is a person worthy of our suspicion. In short, ‘follow the science’ reduces to just ‘follow me’.

III.

Is this really, ‘the case for science denial’, then?

In a word, yes. This is the case for science denial, in that it is the defence of those ridiculed as ‘science deniers'. Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were ‘science deniers’. To assert that the Earth revolves around the sun, they had to deny that the sun revolves around the Earth. At worst, ‘science denier’ is a slur, meaning, “one who, in time may or may not be vindicated, but whom we shall slander regardless”. And at best, science denial is itself a part of science, the necessary antagonist that drives our story forward.

Let us assume for now that we have put science in its place, neither irrationally sidelined nor ingested unquestioningly. What does it mean to interview our own personal value structures, and to use that process to interpret the world? Where do these value structures come from? It is likely different for many people – a philosophical stance, a spiritual orientation, a religious edict, or perhaps simply a sheer but definite sense of existential unease. This thing, this guiding light, is in some sense the truest, most fundamental expression of identity. Whether found in a book, in the stars, or simply even in your own decades of experience – a source of inner truth is inseparable from human nature. It cannot be wrenched away by the scorn of consensus, nor crushed underfoot by the boot of authority. Even in the gulags, the soul survives the barbed wire, to both borrow and butcher a phrase.

It cannot be re-educated into extinction.

The inclination we see to frame recent political debates as “science versus anti-science” is telling. That nervousness betrays not a firm grasp of science, but a slipping grasp on consensus. A more accurate diametric would be “consensus versus dissidence”. My aunt needed no citation when she declared plastics a pariah. You could have fact-checked her until the sun went down, and I tried, but it would not have put a single dent in her resolve. For it was not something perpetually updated and reshaped at the whim of a new Vice thinkpiece. It was rooted in something deeper.

We won’t always be right, far from it. In fact, worse than potentially being wrong is definitely being unpopular. But what is the shame in unpopularity? Martin Luther King, Jr. was unpopular even among the white moderates who claimed to be his allies. Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian scientist and physician, was so unpopular with his colleagues that they had him institutionalised. The belief that condemned him, in the context of the recent political landscape, is chillingly ironic.

Semmelweis advocated for hand-washing, to reduce patient mortality.

Unfortunately, he was unable to devise a theoretical explanation for his findings. As such, he was fact-checked into oblivion by his peers and by the scientific consensus of the time. He spent his final days in an insane asylum, where he was beaten nearly to death and shortly died of gangrene. To put a perhaps unnecessarily fine point on it, the adherents to consensus that saw Forbes lauding Semmelweis for his achievements two years ago, are the same adherents to consensus that would have condemned him to exile – had they been contemporaries.

If these are the people of history whom we honour in our dissidence, in our pursuit of truth, then unpopularity is the toll we pay. But the attempt to align yourself with that intangible and eternal truth is a far more practical and worthwhile endeavour than simply being ‘up-to-date’ with the consensus of our time. That might, finally, be something worth doing. Or trying to do.

For if truth is eternal, so is its pursuit.

Follow @ThisUnreality