Follow the Science or Elitist Delusion?

“We know precisely and scientifically what the effects of pollution, waste of natural resources, the population explosion, the armaments race, etc., are going to be. We are told so every day by countless critics citing irrefutable arguments. But neither national leaders nor society as a whole seems to be able to do anything about it.”

When was this written?

Ludwig von Bertalanffy in 1926

The Austrian biologist and system thinker Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote this in his excellent book General Systems Theory from 1969 (highlights by me). This was common thinking in the first half of the 20th century where many intellectuals believed in scientific management and politics. For instance the very influential intellectual Alfred Korzybski wrote in Manhood of Humanity (1921):

“it will give a scientific foundation to Political Economy and transform so-called “scientific shop management” into genuine “scientific world management.”

It turns out that the precise and irrefutable arguments tend to hold relatively little water in the long term in complex global systems. Most predictions of that type, which were based on irrefutable arguments, turn out to be wrong indeed.

There is no need though to repeat such mistakes 60 years later over and over again. For instance, in believing predictions of economist or eXtinction rebellion or even worse, Last Generation, who all refer to irrefutable arguments, that are not to be discussed any longer by anyone else than them, the high priests of knowledge.

If anyone claims things are alternativlos, or not to be questioned, we do good to question these ideas especially hard and remove such leaders from power as quickly as possible. They are the most dangerous ones.

To be fair to Bertalanffy though, he also writes in this book the following, very powerful quotation:

“We have a fair idea what a scientifically controlled world would look like. In the best case, it would be like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in the worst, like Orwell’s 1984.”