Freedom of Science

“As most of you know, we pride ourselves here on being a top-down blog…. Our attitude is, we know what’s best for you, and we’re taking time from our busy schedules to provide it, and you’ll like it or learn to. At Cosmic Variance that’s just how we roll.”

Cosmic Variance

Big Media, Big Book and Big School are three branches of a giant organism collectively known as the Big Org.

Big School has been around for 2000 years, its true name is Scholasticism. What makes it big is not the number of practitioners or the number of its constituency but the method it has been using to keep its constituency ignorant in order to sell its products at inflated prices.

In order to sell their products Doctors must keep their constituency perpetually ignorant. This is why where there is teaching there is no learning. Doctors pass along to their constituency useless definitions they manufactured as true knowledge while forbidding access to the source of information to non-initiates.

This is also the reason why a colonized never gets civilized no matter how much of the civilizing products peddled by the colonizer he happens to buy.

In order to keep its customers ignorant the Big Org established a monopoly on the collection and distribution channels.

Big Book has been around for a long time too. For about a thousand years publishing industry was controlled by the Church. The Church as the Big Book had far more authority than the Big Book of today. Descartes flew to Holland in order to escape execution by the Big Book. Galileo was put into house arrest by the Big Book because Galileo published for the people in the vernacular Italian impinging on the monopoly of the Big Book. Every author had to apply for a license and get the approval of the Big Book or else face the consequences.

The Big Book industry has its roots in the foundation of the Church. Paul conducted history’s first and most successful book tour ever. His book is still in print.

The Big School is the branch of the Big Org which is still perpetuating “a separation they cling to, that no longer exists.” The quote is from Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Dave Winer is not referring to the Big School but to the Big Media such as Time magazine.

Time magazine chose You! the Web user as the person of the year. Time in a way conceded that they no longer have the absolute authority on the collection and dissemination of news.

Dan Gillmor calls the process of accessing human knowledge database directly without the services of the middlemen the “democratization of media.” The Big Media and the Big Book are acknowledging that there is a democratization movement and they are trying to deal with it. This realization has not yet happened in the Big School branch of the Big Org.

Take the Cosmic Variance blog. Scholastic Doctors of Philosophy who run the Cosmic Variance still believe in the absolute authority of Doctors of Philosophy over citizens. One of the Doctors of Philosophy who runs Cosmic Variance, Doctor Sean Carroll, posted the anachronistic quote which started this article.

Doctor Carroll still clings to the old scholastic scheme of the world where the flow of information is one way: Doctors control the flow of information and dole out little snippets for the good of their customers.

The distinction that Doctors are making is this: We, the Doctors of Philosophy, are the absolute authority of science and “our attitude is, we know what’s best for you, we provide it to you, and you’ll like it or learn to.” The distinction that Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Carroll is making is that Doctors and what he calls “crackpots” are two different species. Doctors possess the absolute true knowledge, the rest of the world does not.

Compare Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Carroll’s attitude with the Big Media’s attitude: Time’s choice of You! as the person of the year “was a vestige of the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking wherein they told us everything they thought we needed to know (and what to think about it.) Our role: We bought it or didn’t.” This is written by Dan Gillmor in Center for Citizen Media.

The role Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Carroll defines for himself is exactly the same as the Big Media’s definition of itself.

Dan Gillmor continues: “The world has changed … even more than [the Big Media] may want to concede deep down in their essentially top-down, corporate gut.”

Scholastic Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Carroll runs a blog but instead of using his blog as a democratizing medium, he is using it to assert his Doctoral authority on citizens. He is a scholastic Doctor 1.0 in Web 2.0.
Doctor Carroll cannot concede in his essentially top-down scholastic gut that the world has changed more than he may want to concede.

Dan Gillmor concludes: “I look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace us when it comes to the journalism. This is coming, and faster than anyone (including me) would have predicted just a year or two ago. It can’t come fast enough, because the time is short to make the transition.”

This is not the case with the Big School. Scholastic Doctors have moved faster than independent researchers and already doctored the Web and established their authority over the citizens in blogs such as the Cosmic Variance.

Bloggers in journalism sphere are aware of the ugly Big Media which profits from obstructing the free flow of the news between its source and the people. Citizens in the sphere of science has not yet become aware of the ugly Big School’s obstruction of the free flow of scientific information between its source and the people.

The customers of the Big School are still at a primitive stage where they argue about the inherent value of the products Doctors sell to them. They may question the quality of the product and question the symbolism in this or that equation but they don’t doubt the authority of Doctors. Eventually the customers of the Big School too will move up to the next level of awareness and question the authority of the Big Doctors.

Customers will realize that once the information flows freely they don’t need the gatekeepers and the middlemen and the Doctors will become redundant.

Today the readers of Cosmic Variance accept without question the authority of Doctors of Philosophy who run the blog. In fact, the readers expect a display of authority from the Doctors. That’s why Scholastic Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Carroll can declare arrogantly that he knows what is good for citizens and condescends to provide it to us. The mission of Doctor Carroll is to save the soul of his constituency. Saving souls is the product Doctors of all species have been selling to the people for a long time.

In the case of the Big School the people has not yet become aware of the controlling nature of the Big School and are not yet associating the Big School with the Big Org. In a way this is understandable. It is hard to perceive the Big School as a big ugly corporation. We too once believed that the Big Media was a good, impartial and authoritative source of information. People interested in science still believe that Doctors of Philosophy are the absolute authority on science.

This belief only shows how strong the traditional and inherited authority of Scholastic Doctors still is. Consider that the profession of Doctors of Philosophy is teaching. Doctors of Philosophy are people who are licensed to teach. Their license is issued to them to teach. They are not supposed to be an authority in anything else.

Doctors of Philosophy, who abhor philosophy and know nothing about it, have no legitimate authority on the manufacture of cosmogonic creation myths, or cosmogonic philosophical mythology such as String Theory. Doctors of Philosophy inherited these old Scholastic subjects from Doctors of Theology in the 18th century when Newton took over the industry and changed the official language of scholasticism from Latin to calculus.

Newton condemned his disciples the Doctors of Philosophy into philosophizing with calculus instead of Latin. This is what poor Newtonist Doctors have been doing for the last three centuries.

When you consider that String Theory’s sole authority comes from the best selling books and popular movies produced by famous Doctor of Philosophy Doctor Greene then the collusion of Big School, the Big Media and the Big Book will become obvious.

Today the Big School exists under the trade name of academic physics. Big School uses the same tactics as the Big Org to monopolize the collection and dissemination channels of information and then sell it to people as science and charge whatever price they want for it.

Doctors of Philosophy enjoy hereditary authority on science. Big School cannot be democratized simply by arguing with Doctors about what science is. You cannot argue with modern scholastic Doctors of Philosophy who defined science as “reading the mind of God.”

The scholastic Doctors of Philosophy have infiltrated old scientific institutions as well. Today, a scholastic Doctor of Philosophy whose fame derives from his dogmatic belief that “God wrote the language of Nature” is being employed by Harvard University physics department.

Only legal action against the scholastic Doctors of Philosophy and institutions who employ them as scientists can be effective to transfer the authority of Doctors to the people. The legal action is necessary in order to regulate the last unregulated professional industry in our society, the Big School.

This is a war for independence. We the people are fighting for our independence against the Big Unhuman Org that controls the knowledge base of humanity. Today humans must still beg and propitiate and pay the god called the Big Org in order to obtain the information which belongs to humanity.

Humans are poised to take their own business into their own hands for the first time in history. What exciting times!

But we are still subjects of the Big Org. We are now subjects who are conscious of being subjects. This is an important step forward toward independence. Just like the people who lived before the Revolution.

We have an advantage over the pre-revolutionary subjects though. Then, there was only one Tom Paine. Today there are millions of Paines writing their blogs. With apologies to Dave Winer I must declare Tom Paine the Pamphleteer to be the true proto-blogger.

Once humans will unite and agree upon a declaration of independence against the Big Org we will become free citizens once again. This war is fought not by traditional weapons but with something more lethal in the eyes of the Big Org: Software.

The advantage of the unhuman Org is that it is unhuman. The Org is not burdened with human body and senses. Even though it is free of human constraints the Org is a “person” which produces written word as well as humans.

The Org is disadvantaged because it is a bureaucratic behemoth without a delimiting boundary and as such it cannot adapt to the changing situations as easily as individuals can.

This is where the difference between the Big School and the Big Media comes into play. The Big Media controls the production hardware (printing press, TV and movie studios) and it controls the distribution channels (the network). These are too expensive to be owned by individuals. Since production costs are so high the Big Media established a total monopoly on the production and distribution and nurtured the myth that there cannot be any other way to access human knowledge database.

Today the Big Media was surprised to learn that it controlled the hardware but not the software of the knowledge business. The Big Media does not control the medium used in communications. This is the language. The language is what flows and the Big Media did not own it. This is why the Big Media is now having a little of a hard time adapting to the impingement into their monopoly by bloggers.

Professional Scholastic Doctors have controlled software business ever since they invented it 3000 years ago. The monopoly on human language is a hereditary right of Doctors of Philosophy. Doctors do not own the hardware, they don’t need to. They outsource the maintenance of hardware and their distribution network as necessary. Since they absolutely control the substance which feeds the hardware they don’t need to control anything else.

Similarly, any other branch of the Org which needs to program human behavior always contracts their project out to the Doctors of Philosophy. Since language is the software which controls the hardware called human.

The professional class known throughout history as scribes, priests, and now Doctors of Philosophy have enjoyed an absolute and protected monopoly on the language. Therefore, Doctors control the access to human knowledge base.

Cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Latin, calculus, mathematics and lately the String Theory are all proprietary languages invented by Doctors to protect their monopoly on human reason.

For thousands of years Doctors were able to keep human population illiterate. With the invention of the printing press the number of literate citizens increased and started to threaten Doctors’ monopoly. Since Doctors have absolute authority to define the language, they quickly redefined illiterate to mean ignorance of their new proprietary language, mathematics. By raising the bar of literacy Doctors are able to maintain a perpetual monopoly on the language used to access human knowledge database.

This is why Doctors of Philosophy such as Doctor Carroll could move swiftly and use the current democratic medium and appear to be modern while obstructing the free flow of knowledge. Doctors’ strength lies in  their hereditary and undisputed authority to define languages.

We are now in a position to dispute Doctors’ authority. Yes, it is difficult to perceive the Big Media, the Big Book and the Big School as part of the same entity. But it is better to unite against the Big Org instead of fighting each branch separately.

Now you see why the three branches of the Big Org are in perfect synergy. They all need each other: Doctors supply authoritative content to the Big Media and the Big Media rewards Doctors with fame, and fame allows Doctors to move up in the Scholastic hierarchy and gain more authority. This is a well-oiled and elegant machinery which has been used to manipulate human perception of the world since the beginning of history.

This machine may have stayed invisible to most humans simply because only recently we started to perceive that networks are real machinery. Today we have no problem perceiving Google as a giant computer.

Most famous Doctors of Philosophy Hawking and Greene are celebrities not because of any scientific discoveries they made but because of best selling books they have written. Why are these books best sellers?

Both Hawking and Greene have been selected by the Big Org to be celebrity Shamans. The Shaman is an old institution. A Shaman is someone who entertains while dispensing cosmogonic speculations by prominently displaying authority symbols which appear intimidatingly authoritative to his audience. This fits the job description of Hawking and Greene quite well.

There is another parallel with the original Independence war and the current independence war against the Big Org.

Our war against the Big School is a fight against a deity called Newton. Newton overthrew Aristotle as the head of the European Scholasticism and founded today’s academic physics. We are fighting for our scientific independence against the same colonizers, the British.

This time around the British has been colonizing human reason.

Free humans won their political independence against the British King-in-Parliament and now we will win our independence against the British King-in-School.
 

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