Why Can't "Science" Be Corrupt?
Updated: Nov 18, 2020
We used to trust our institutions. All of them. Even corporations.
Go back 60 or more years, and the Corporation was a trusted pillar of society. Big names like Sears-Roebuck, Dow Chemical, Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and Phillip Morris - and a hundred others - commanded respect among the populace. If a big, famous company said something, we had faith that it was true.
We believed these were good institutions, filled with altruistic people who just wanted to serve humanity and make the world a better place (and if they happened to make some money whilst doing it, that was a well-earned perk, but not the main motivation for being in business).
And the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's, and 10's showed us how much bullcrap THAT was. No one believes THAT anymore.
We also trusted the military, and its leaders, and the civilian bureaucrats deciding where, when, and whom to fight. We believed they had only our safety and security in mind, and that if they said "Nation X is a threat to us", it was true, and we needed to fight Nation X. We didn't know what the Military Industrial Complex was. We didn't know what defense lobbyists were. Maybe somewhere in the backs of our minds we knew that bomb-makers and tank-builders and arms manufacturers did *technically* have a financial incentive to lead us into unnecessary wars... but no one thought they would actually *do* that. Our leaders were good, moral men. Starting wars just to sell weapons would have been... un-Christian. They wouldn't do it. They couldn't do it.
And the past 60 years showed us Oh Yes They Could.
We also used to believe our police departments were honest guardians of public order, and our court systems were fair arbiters of unbiased justice. Well... actually... "We" never included people of African descent, who experienced cops planting drugs on them just to arrest them, and courts dishing out multi-decade imprisonments for the herbal extracts the corrupt cops just planted. Dark-skinned people knew the system was corrupt from the start. And slowly, gradually, people of European descent came to realize the same truth.
We trusted banks, too. We saw the big, thick Greek pillars, both in the physical building and in the bank's logo, and it inspired a sense of stability and groundedness. We saw the bankers in their fancy, expensive suits, and it inspired respect and admiration. We wanted to be like them.
Then the crash of 2008 put that illusion to rest. Nobody believes THAT anymore. "Banker" is a dirty word now.
We trusted our governments. Political officeholders were figures of reverence. The halls of Congress were hallowed and sacred.
Today, Congress has a 5% approval rating.
We trusted our bureaucracies, and the civil servants who staffed them. But nowadays, the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" strikes immediate terror in anyone who hears it.
We trusted our big religious institutions. Then we watched as their hierarchies were exposed as grifters at best, and often downright pedophiles at worst.
We saw "men of god" driving around in fancy cars, and parking them in multi-million dollar mansions, which they bought with their poor congregation's money, willingly handed over in the name of heretical "prosperity gospels."
We trusted our media. We believed that the Big Four nightly news programs were the "gold standard" of information delivery.
Then we watched them lie to us about terrorism, Iraq, and "weapons of mass destruction." This instigated us to research the premises upon which past wars were started, and we found out that they lied to us about all of those as well. We realized that the big media companies are nothing more than propaganda outlets, which have been lying to us about everything under the Sun, since we were born, and are continuing to lie to us to keep the corrupt establishment in power.
And then we realized that they
One by one, the credibility of our institutions fell.
We learned that corporations are inherently corrupt and could not be trusted.
We eventually learned the same thing about politicians.
And banks.
And the media.
And churches.
And the entertainment industry.
And the oil industry
And the police.
And the judicial system.
And the acronym agencies, like the FBI and CIA and MI6.
And governments.
One by one, we gained awareness of the corruption in all of them.
But all the while, there's been one that we kept our trust in. One which we've singled out as eternally incorruptible.
And that is the institution of science and academia.
We believed this to be the one institution that is immune from corruption.
We gradually came to terms with the reality of corruption in every other major institution of society... but not this one. Many of us still think this one is beyond reproach.
In fact, in a strange irony, those of us who are the most aware of the corruption in the all the others, tend to be the least willing to confront the possibility of corruption in this one.
To some of us, especially those of us identifying with "The Left", the mere concept of Academia and Science becoming corrupted is an oxymoron, a paradox - a non-concept. Something so far outside of Reality that it cannot even be mentioned without perfunctory displays of virtue-signalling snark.
And therefore, if someone is so accomplished as to sport credentials from the Academy (via one of its authorized sub-institutions, like a college, university, or other scientific organization), then he or she is an Authority Figure.
These are basic facts about the Universe and its nature. To even question one of these is to reveal oneself as a backwards, ignorant, knuckledragging Neanderthal. A troglodyte. To question the Authority of the Academy or its authorized Representatives is to be anti-science and anti-intellectual. A deplorable.
Deference to Academia has become a religion.
But we have no reason to believe in it. Such a belief would indeed be unscientific. Because there is massive corruption within Academia, and within all of its sub-institutions, and within the venerable scientific community.
Money has infiltrated all of them.
They do the bidding of their financiers. Just like politicians. This is not a hard concept to grasp.
We understand that politicians serve those who fund them, even if it goes against their own constituents' best interests. So why is it impossible for the same thing to be happening in Academia?
Why?
Why can't academics, like professors and scientists and doctors, also be influenced to serve the interests of their financiers?
They obviously can be.
And who are their financiers? They're almost invariably corporations. If they're not corporations, they're "Foundations" funded by corporations. And billionaires. Or they're governments like those of the United States, Canada, England, Australia, France, the UN, and so forth, which are also bought-and-paid-for by corporations. The corporation's fund the governments and the government's fund the academic and scientific institutions. So either way, it's still corporate money funding all of this. The institution of Academia is captive to the corporate world.
And perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of medicine.
Big Pharma corporations control Academics in medicine. And they have been using that control to steer medicine onto a technocratic path, which has nothing to do with actual health, and everything to do with consolidating more and more power in the hands of the Pharma corporations and their associated elites. Just like the military-industrial complex used our fear of terrorism to launch wars in other countries to take their natural resources, so, too, is the medical industrial complex is exploiting our fear of germs, to enact a new stage of totalitarian control over the population.
Yes, it's a conspiracy theory. But why should that matter, if it's being proven true, more and more with each passing day?
Everything we believe now - all of the basic tenets of reality the world now accepts as self-evidently obivous - were at one point considered conspiracy theories. At one point, it was a "conspiracy theory" that the high-and-noble-and-unquestionably-pure-and-good Vatican was covering up evidence of the Earth revolving around the Sun.
"No way the Roman Catholic Church would be lying to us about the shape of the Earth. The Pope is infallible! If you question Him, you're a conspiracy theorist! Go put on your sheep-skin hat!"
But it didn't end there.
In the 1950s, probably up through the end of the twentieth century, the majority of people still thought that corporations were altruistic entities, run by good people, just because they want to do some good in the world - and if they make a little money from it? Well that's a nice perk, but it's not their main motivation for being in business. They just want to help people!
That's what most of us believed about corporations. But that myth collapsed. Almost nobody believes in that anymore.
And it took us a little longer to realize the same thing about governments. But we realized.
Eventually we did. We figured out that that governments were corrupt. We realized that if corporations control the government, and the corporations are corrupt, then it stands to reason that the government is corrupt as well.
Then we eventually realized that the civil service was corrupted as well. The Regulatory Agencies. We saw them getting captured by the very industries that they were supposed to be regulating.
If the mining industry can capture the mining Regulatory Agencies...
...and the meat packing industry can capture the meat-packing inspection agencies...
...and the oil companies can capture the air emissions regulators...
...if Big AG can capture the FDA...
...and so forth...
...then why is it such a stretch to imagine that the medical industry could capture medical agencies, like the CDC and the NIH and the WHO?
(Or that the telecom industry could capture the FCC... but that's a topic for another page).
They get their funding from the corporations - or from corrupt governments whose politicians are bought and paid for by corporations.
The medical industry controls Medical Regulatory Agencies and medical Academia - and they're not controlling it with your best interests.
We know that the oil companies don't have our best interests at heart.
We know that the weapons manufacturers who supply the wars don't have our best interest at heart.
We know that the logging and mining companies don't have our best interests. They're just doing it for the money.
They're all doing it for the money.
So why are medical corporations exempt from this rule? Why are vaccine manufacturers exempt from this rule?
Why is any of Academia exempt from this rule?
Why is "The Scientific Community" exempt from this rule?
Does anyone have an answer for this?
They all will do whatever it takes to make the most money, even if it hurts you.
Even if it hurts everyone. It doesn't matter how much it hurts society, as long as they can make money doing it. This is the same for all industries.. It's not an exception for Academia.