The Pandemic of False Knowledge
The disease eating away at our social-political order and threatening our freedom.
July 5, 2019
Bruce Thornton
When I wrote Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge twenty years ago, I focused on the bad ideas underlying many of our social, cultural, and political dysfunctions. I was particularly concerned with the universities, where most of these ideas had been born and nurtured. Though aware of the larger malign effects of the intellectual and political corruption of higher education, I never imagined that the “higher nonsense,†as one critic called it, produced in universities would so pervasively infect the larger culture and lead to policies, politics, and cultural mores so absurdly irrational.
At the heart of these bad ideas lay a strange hybrid of technocratic hubris and the therapeutic imperative. The former is a species of scientism founded on the category error of believing that human beings with minds, cultures, languages, and free will, can be understood and manipulated the way hard science understands and manipulates the material natural world.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274199/pandemic-false-knowledge-bruce-thornton
