In our final discussion of the Changing Tides video series, Michael O’Fallon and James Lindsay discuss the alchemic properties of Hegel’s understanding of science. His view of science isn’t what most of us consider science. Hegel’s view of science is self-referential, more like a “theoretical lens” (or eisegesis) than a skeptical and empirical inquiry into the nature of reality. In other words, for Hegel and his ideological descendants, Theory comes first and evidence after.
Though it seems removed from the ideas of today, Hegel’s view of science inspired other “scientific” views down through the modern era, most importantly that of Karl Marx. Marx believed he had a Science of History in his Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus, “scientific socialism.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. Thinking that his model was truly scientific, however, had a great deal to do with Hegel’s notion of science in which his own speculative idealism, taken as a systematic philosophy, generates the one correct way to understand the world and ourselves within it.
As Dr. Lindsay states in an article from his site, New Discourses,
“If we think of the general madness of the world at the present in terms of the familiar biological taxonomical hierarchy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, while something like “Critical Whiteness Studies” might be a species within the Critical Race Theory genus, which is in turn classifiable in the neo-Marxian Family, Marxian Order, and Hegelian Class, the question arises: in what the Kingdom are all these interrelated insanities to be found? I assert that it is that ancient parasitic bugbear known as Gnosticism. In fact, the systematic Hegelian project and especially Marxism, which materialized it, would therefore define the Gnostic phylum of Scientific Gnosticism (though, by definition, “scientistic” would be better) that completes the taxonomy. Whatever might be said about other branches in Kingdom Gnosticism, Scientific Gnosticism is perhaps the most calamitous ideological phylum human beings have so far managed to contrive. Within that phylum, though taxonomically placed otherwise, we would find all of the failures of Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism, for example. We will also find our present plight, the so-called “public-private partnership,” which synthesizes Communism and Fascism into one new terror to be managed technocratically, in mockery of the science it will invoke to establish yet another unnecessary tyranny upon the world and its generally innocent people.”
Hegel’s scientism, or Scientific Gnosticism, could hardly be more relevant today. The world is being led through a number of rapid changes, allegedly on the authority of “The Science.” Technocratic “experts” take the roles of Gnostic mystics who can interpret The Science with almost no regard for the data at all, and we are to be led by little more than their credentialed authority in the overarching Theory that they use to interpret the world.
Join us for this short discussion in which Dr. Lindsay peels back Hegel’s metaphysical open door to technocracy through an alchemy derived form of “scientism,” which leaps past the process of falsification and focuses on a pre-envisioned form of operational success.
The audio version of this presentation is available on Soundcloud, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & Stitcher.
Previous episodes of Changing Tides may be viewed here.
Connect with James Lindsay at https://newdiscourses.com and https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames. Follow Michael O’Fallon at https://twitter.com/SovMichael.
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