The Public Has Ushered in The True Second Enlightenment: Science Must Now Contribute to Knowledge, and the Public Must Hold It to That Standard

The democratization of knowledge and know-how imbues a broad ability and responsibility to the public to hold the technocratic oligarchy to the standard of reality.

Not many people are recently aware of the factors that contributed to the emergence of The Enlightenment, the foundation of the emergence of the West as a cultural and technological leader among cultures on the planet.

Before The Enlightenment, the public relied heavily on religious authority for a worldview that allowed them to persist and thrive as well as they could in their lives. Public education was unheard of; children and women were seen as commodities for survival, and ways of knowing that were emerging were naturalistic - relying on individual descriptions of nature and how it relates to things humans could relate to.

The development of the scientific method and its application to the study of nature came with an increased interest in science, especially in the area of natural philosophy. When new scientific methodology and instrumentation (e.g. the invention of the barometer and the microscope) made making exact measurements and increasingly detailed observations possible, interest exploded. People tended to adopt a more secular outlook, in which the scientific method was seen as having the potential to answer many questions previously answered by religion.

At the same time, philosophers found an avid audience for questions related to the topic of “ways of knowing”, and as a result, rationalism had an increased influence as a way of thinking. Of course, the spread of knowledge through the printed word and the rise of the public library allowed the public to participate with far more intimacy than reading or hearing about scientific discoveries in the town square.

Finally, the emergence of improved technologies related to travel allowed an explosion of international trade and the consequent exposure to different cultures, ideas, and ways of thinking.

Politically, the idea of a distribution of power via democracy (learned in part from the structure and function of ancient Rome and the cultures present in North America before Columbus) led to the possibility of the imagination of new political processes. The American and French Revolutions brought about political changes and the expansion of liberty and republicanism.

The increased availability of books, periodicals, and other intellectual materials outside of consolidated collections fostered the spread of ideas (and, importantly competing ideas!) The thinking commentators of the time became philosophers, and the increasing popularity of the philosophical works of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other Enlightenment thinkers showed the people of the West that a civilization founded on reason could be envisioned that would eventually lead to the betterment of the situation for all (egalitarian ideals).

The progression from chaos to order and back was documented and co-expressed in art, and music, to express, reflect and provide commentary on their witnessing the communal self-awareness of a sophisticated, organized society.

Egalitarian realities, however, were always seen as being possible “one day” (no one ever projected when), and part of the diversity of thought included barbaric ideas about race, gender, and eugenics.

We Are Ushering in the Real Second Enlightenment

A few years ago, A Second Enlightenment was heralded. It was based on realizations on the limitations of knowledge due to fallacies and foibles of reasoning and was that being considered as evidence that, along with increases in the faults of human cognition due to how we are hard-wired. Here’s a good essay by a then-student at the time (From 2012: Skepticism And The Second Enlightenment, Nature.com).

However, the pathway toward knowledge via science was becoming increasingly obscured. Schools have begun teaching that science is a comparison of explanations of the data, which in philosophical terms is positivism, rather than Popperian falsification and hypothesis testing. Challenging cherished (i.e., most profitable) scientific or medical consensus - even with rigorous data - has become taboo.

This has occurred even as the issues with the reproducibility of studies have become well-known: the faults of science that lead researchers to find or at least upweight evidence that confirm their preconceived notions (confirmation bias), or to repeat analyses until they achieved their desired results (p-hacking). For some, however, the implications of the seemingly sincere skepticism over knowing anything led to a “crisis of meaning”, a type of socially shared cognitive disequilibrium increasingly looks like a shared mid-life intellectual crisis for baby boomer scientists, some of whom undertook the challenge of “sense-making”, all evidence of which of course was wiped into relative obscurity by the megaton bomb of COVID-19, which provided a street-facing storefront for all to watch the sausage-making of data cookery, denialism, and incessantly vacuous and harmful argument from authority (Faucism).

The Gift of COVID-19: Rejection of Authority-Based Reasoning

From where I sit, this philosopher of science is witnessing nothing less than the second enlightenment. I say this is as an active participant but also as an observer: the downfall of Fauci, the discrediting and downfall of the “public health authorities”, the public’s increasing awareness of the massive cost of entrusting elite “scientists” with their health and public safety is leading us inexorably to a new bright day in which citizen scientists contribute in a truly meaningful way toward understanding the fundamentals and the complexities of reality.

Not because they get to… but rather, because they must.

We do have Elon Musk to thank for the Twitter files: the sunshine they brought to the fraud in the cover-up of my lab leak theory - and I say ‘my’ because I was the first scientist I know to say (1/30/2020) that it was almost a certainty that the virus came from the WIV - has been truly sanitizing in the best possible way. This very week, the US DOE and the US FBI joined a Senate Panel in the assessment that I was most likely correct on January 30, 2020.

The reluctance of the public to trust centralized scientific authority is well-placed, appropriate, and long overdue, but it came at nearly an unacceptably high price. The factors are now in place for Enlightenment 2.0, which will end The Crisis of Meaning for many, and cause many to discover that they can engage in asking questions - and getting answers - previously only addressable by the scientific elite.

I see the following important contributing factors in place, and at play, right now, in our time:

1. Far less reliance on trust in authority as a basis for assessment of the value of an idea, thought, hypothesis, or line of evidence.

2. An increased emphasis on the value of generating knowledge or the sake of knowledge.

3. A hardline taboo against science conducted with direct or indirect conflicts of interest involving massive profits.

4. Far more decentralization of the funding and conduct of important research, especially research on the factors that are harming and killing people, animals, and productive activities like learning, healthy socialization, agriculture, and community dynamics.

5. Decentralization of higher learning.

6. Far more participation by the public in the consideration of, interpretation of, and evaluation of the contributions of specific scientific studies.

7. Realization of the value of the thoughts of an individual as a source of wealth and deference to a consensus as a stultifying act.

8. Intensive academic exercises in adult education (such as those we offer at IPAK-EDU).

9. Lowered expectation of immediate gratification and renewed mastery of the art of savoring the expectation that with sufficient open dialog, debate, dis, course, and discussion, conducted under the art of Rational Discourse - we usually be able to figure a few things out.

10. An appreciation for the creativity of the adversarial nature of Rational Discourse.

11. Visceral rejection of censorship and controls on speech.

12. A series of revolutionary reforms in how Science is funded and conducted in the US.

Number 4 is why I say the public MUST engage in the interpretation of science. Number 11 is the means by which this can be made eternally possible.

COVID-19 has taught us a major lesson: just as in a democracy, the public has a duty to be educated about the platforms and politicians being considered, in a technocracy, the public has a duty to understand science and technology lest they be forced to defer the state of their lives to “experts” and “authorities”.

I have had many ideas that could change the future for the better. Plan B, for example, would force US government-funded research to successfully identify factors that kill Americans and make us sick (such as the epidemic of iatrogenic illness and death; see Lyons-Weiler, 2020).

Of course, creating an online University goes a long way towards leveling the playing field.

I also will be publishing the Universal Declaration of Medical Rights - so patients can establish a new and 1:1 ethical contract, starting with a statement by the physician acknowledging the whole person in the patient in front of them.

Finally, I will be proposing a citizen oversight commission to be placed between POTUS and the HHS specifically empowered with hiring and firing powers to direct Directors in the agencies in HHS to act according to the law and charter of the HHS and the agency in question, or face dismissal. That means FDA, CDC, and NIH (including NIAID) will have to act as designed. The Commission would have a rotating membership with rules against ANY conflicts of interest. The members would oversee either the Revolutionary Reform of the regulatory agencies or, if they cannot be reformed, their dissolution altogether and replacement with decentralized infrastructure.

If you’re skeptical of this, or any plan, I have to applaud you. Skepticism is healthy; that’s a huge part of the process of rational discourse, and any path to a working future for all of us will see a maturation away from schoolyard antics and respect for the individual based on intrinsic merit, not based on whether they agree with our world views.

I am delighted to be contributing to the next phase of Western civilization. I am giddy at the thought of new knowledge being sought for the sake of knowing. I am hopeful that children might one day aspire to knowledge through bona fide, objective science - and that I might have a role in determining new rules for funding such studies.

The love of learning is contagious. I look forward to sharing experiences that bring about better comprehension of ourselves, the world, and the universe around us.

Part of making that happen is the realization of what is happening - and that we are the ones who get to engage in this new and exciting future.

In the spirit of democratization of knowledge and know-how, I’ve cut the cost of Summer 2023 and Fall 2023 courses at IPAK-EDU in half as a early bird discount. Prices go up in May!

-James Lyons-Weiler

IPAK/IPAK-EDU, PopularRationalism.substack.com

Citation

Lyons-Weiler, J. 2020. Plan B Public Health Infrastructure and Operations
Oversight Reform for America. Intl J Vacc Theor, Pract, Research 1(2):283-294.