Knowledge and Science hijacked by stakeholder interests: time for the many to put out research truths by Dr Shane Fudge
Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made a huge impact on the academic world and more generally on its release in 1962. Kuhn’s concept of what he termed ‘paradigm shift’ is the book’s central idea, proposing that ‘scientific progress is not a straightforward, cumulative process but rather a series of transformative changes. Scientific disciplines undergo phases of ‘normal science’, where the consensus exists around a paradigm. ‘Revolutionary science’ takes place where competing paradigms emerge in response to anomalies that challenge existing frameworks’. Kuhn defined a ‘paradigm’ as both a working framework for problem-solving and the shared constellation of ideas, values and beliefs that organise a scientific community.
Part of the motivation behind Kuhn’s ideas at this time was to challenge what he perceived to be the historically slanted view of science as linear, logical, and progressive. He took particular issue with the dominant philosophy of the Vienna Circle and their emphasis on ‘logical empiricism’ as the justification for objective, neutral, and value free science. Kuhn argued that this perspective was misleading because it failed to account for the social and cultural milieu in which scientists operate and which influence decision making. It is the scientists themselves, Kuhn argues, who define and delineate science and scientific knowledge through their own values, beliefs, and behaviours.
Fast forward to the beginning of this decade, and we have been exposed to many examples of how official science evolves. The apparently fabricated global pandemic for example was not about gathering detailed data and ‘following the science’ as politicians claimed. Indeed, by following something else - the money - an altogether different agenda becomes apparent, and one that is far from the realms of objective science and evidence-based research. Indeed, whilst Covid strategy was heavily reliant on public respect for science – echoing the best traditions of the Vienna Circle – this orthodoxy was very quickly pushed to the very limits of credibility. We were able to witness first hand:
· data which was cherrypicked and clearly manipulated to display worst case scenarios. Some of this ‘evidence’ was made up entirely
· huge conflicts of interest around vaccine shares/policy decisions and ‘preferred contracts’ in PPE
· openly falsified data on vaccine safety and efficacy – perhaps best illustrated in the Pfizer trial data which the company sought to bury for a a period of 70 years
· conflicting and often ridiculous advice given on the need to wear masks
· conflicting and misleading information as to why governments chose to go along with lockdowns when this was one of several options initially discussed
· open hostility towards /discrediting of alternative medical treatments to those advocated by governments and medical ‘experts’ · ridicule, discrediting, and cancellation of those who questioned any of the above.
Kuhn’s concept of a scientific paradigm has been enormously influential, particularly on the social sciences where it has provided a useful conceptualising device, for example: changes in energy and environmental regulation (Mitchell, 2007); governance and policy making (Fudge et al. 2011); and social policy and state welfare (Hall, 1993 All of these examples – and others – take as their starting point, the cultural and social dynamics of decision making as the central explanation of both societal transition and consolidation.
Rather than two separate narratives, it has been argued that Covid-19 and the climate crisis are in fact two faces of the same agenda; used in tandem and utilising different tactics to lever us into the elite’s great reset I have already alluded to the pseudo-science behind the pandemic, but the evolution of climate change governance also serves as an example of how official science has been used for political ends, enabling a small group of opportunists to gain power over time and to promote a somewhat different narrative than the one that they stand for officially. As Jacob Nordangard has pointed out, the original group of individuals who worked to establish climate change as a serious policy issue during the 1950s, either worked for, or were closely associated with, the Rockefeller Foundation. None of these individuals were scientists and all had ulterior motives which had nothing to do with the search for scientific truth.
Nordangard suggests that these individuals recognised an opportunity to capitalise politically on ‘the emerging interest in the theory of carbon dioxide’s impact on climate’ that was a hot topic in the scientific community at that time. During the same period, climate change research also drew interest – and funding – from the military, who looked to capitalise on potential opportunities which they thought might arise from modelling and understanding the forces of weather. The Rockefeller Foundation itself was more interested in whether climate change might be exploited as a long term political, economic, and social strategy which might be useful for the elite’s worries around overpopulation and the consumption of the earth’s resources https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60908223-rockefeller-controlling-the-game
The initial part of their approach to this was to offer massive funding in this area, use this to gain a foothold in the existing political machinery, and the build momentum around educating, restructuring and reforming society around the need to preserve the planet and its eco-systems. From the 1950s therefore, the agenda was characterised by a long period of political lobbying, cajoling the reluctant or sceptical, and providing agenda-dependent financing to the right people and institutions. The longer-term aim was to shift the emphasis away from the orthodox ‘business-as-usual’ capitalist model, in order to establish more environmental regulation, and greener perspectives in mainstream policy and government, and in corporations and academic institutions.
As part of this, the dangers of unfettered, free-market capitalism became a symbol of the growing influence and persuasive power of environmental lobby groups, green civil society organisations, and left wing think tanks. This was a successful confluence which gave a massive political push to sustainable development as the political powerbase that we know today.
As a way of getting a more informed understanding of the way in which science has been used to promote societal change over the last few decades, it is worth revisiting Kuhn’s argument that scientific claims come about from scientific evidence and changes in that evidence. As Kuhn argued, what we are seeing is a process whereby what is acknowledged as ‘science’ is in fact the direct result of values, norms, and beliefs promoted by influential groups of people and their own vested interests.
Thus in line with Kuhn’s beliefs, science becomes a recognisable body of knowledge when a sufficient number of scientists agree on the concepts and theories that define the laws of the natural world (including how they operate; the methods to be employed in scientific research) perhaps the category of ‘scientists’ but also when supporters of stakeholder capitalism lend their support to a new paradigm. In this way, the determination as to what constitutes agreed science is no longer the preserve of those with a scientific training, explaining the illogic in narratives concerning climate change and Covid, illogic that may not be apparent to the masses and that have arguably enabled stakeholders in these concepts unprecedented control over every aspect of people’s lives.
So, whilst the climate change narrative was used to transform society to a remarkable extent over time, Covid-19 was used to even more powerful effect, providing the pretext for lockdown measures, social distancing, mask wearing, and then eventually large-scale vaccination programmes. All necessitated a radical transformation in attitudes, behaviours and social norms and an unprecedented level of change in public behaviour, barring wartime.
In recent times, we have even seen the interweaving of these two pseudo-scientific narratives. Thus, the International Energy Agency in 2021 declared that the global lockdowns since 2020 had seen ‘an unprecedented 6% reduction in carbon emissions as global energy demand was slashed during this period’. The media in the UK highlighted the ‘clear blue skies’ resulting from ten weeks of lockdown, hinting at the implications of a society run by the threat of these dual crises over the longer term. It was even suggested in the journal Science of the Total Environment that climate change was a causal factor in the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization itself has made numerous references to this, where the role of changing environmental conditions had occurred because of rising greenhouse gas emissions and the increasing frequency of infectious diseases.
Then there are the underlying consequences of policy decisions made in 2020. Carol Roth (2023) has argued that governments were fully aware that their economies would crash when they introduced lockdown measures and that this was always the intention, rather than to protect people from a dangerous virus . Wolff (2023) asserts that the global balance of power concerning ongoing financialization and digitalization of the world economy was nowhere better illustrated than in March 2020, when national governments enacted almost identical measures, which would result in the largest wealth and asset transfer in history. As he argues: ‘whether lockdowns, quarantines, home schooling, home offices, the introduction of QR codes or the rollback of cash – the beneficiaries of all restrictions were always the digital corporations and the asset managers behind them’.
Interestingly, Klaus Schwab himself proposed at the time that the coronavirus outbreak provided the ideal conditions for a global financial reset. The often-repeated mantra ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ suggests prior intent to literally eradicate property rights and ownership from the vast majority of the global population and, with this, the means to create wealth and social mobility, the prerequisites of freedom. Roth also points to the timing of Event 201 – modelling a pandemic a month before the pandemic actually began – and the fact that the G7 also ran several CBDC pilot programmes prior to 2020, as signalling both prior knowledge and deliberate intent around the unfolding of events in 2020.
Without an understanding or concern around the many vested interests involved in framing official science, and the possibility that there may be counterfactual and dubious motives on the part of dominant stakeholders, science cannot remains an objective, neutral and unquestionable form of knowledge. More than at any other time in our history perhaps the emergence of a post-truth world has now forced us to question everything, including the most relied upon narrative of our time, official science.
The status and role of science and those who work within it, has never been more under scrutiny than today. Look beyond the official rhetoric of a ‘public health issue’ and ‘a climate crisis’ and you will perhaps perceive the unravelling of scientific truth, and its unveiling as a more human matter, one of in-house ‘negotiation’ between powerful individuals and groups. Many of these appear to be motivated by financial gain, the egoistic demonstration of their own ideas of social and economic change, and even to causing harm rather than by devotion to any scientific truths.
In fact, at a recent Davos event, the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, even pointed out that there was an erosion of trust in global elites and in ‘disconnected’ institutions such as the World Economic Forum Is it any wonder? As world populations are increasingly prey to an elite-engineered great reset, presented as being in people’s interests, there is now a greater awareness of the influence that what is presented as ‘truth’ is often no more than an in-house dialogue between the corporate realm, mainstream politics realm, the pharmaceutical industry, and all manner of other undemocratic organisations. Viewed in these terms, science has simply been the lightning rod for a political power grab, negotiated exclusively between an unelected group of individuals, groups, and organisations.
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