TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to explore the subject of why, in this modern world, I am often so skeptical about science, about scientific articles, scientific conclusions, scientific research, what the media calls science, and also how sad that is.
I spent four years of college studying science. I have a degree in biology, and fundamentally, I love the scientific method. I love the scientific process. The scientific method is the quest for truth, to try to figure out what is truth, how close can we get to understanding truth, making sense of it to figure out what reality is and what reality isn’t.
The basic way of using science, the scientific method, to figure out what is reality is to be curious, to ask questions, and not to have a pre-formed idea. To ask questions in an open-minded way and to collect data, to have some method for collecting data that answers the question: is this true or is this not true? And also to collect a lot of data, enough data to really make sense of this question so that you can answer it in a way that says, are my conclusions accurate?
And also, most especially and most importantly, and most humbly, admitting when I’m wrong and actually loving it when I’m wrong. Because if I figure out that I am wrong, if I figure out that I’ve been, in a way, in denial or lying to myself or making mistakes in my perspective, what that means is that I’m actually coming closer to truth. Because if I’m wrong, if I’ve made mistakes, if I’m in denial, I can discard my old ways of thinking. And the only way to do that is to self-question, to self-reflect.
I think that may be the key of where the vitality of science is really in this modern world. It’s not questioning only the outside world. We’ve done so much of that; we’ve figured out so much of what reality is. But really, instead, questioning ourselves: who are we? Where are we in denial? Where are we on the inside disconnected from truth? Where are we false in the way? And we can use the scientific method to do that.
Incidentally, and I think this is really, really important, the more we know ourselves, the less we are in denial, the less we’re traumatized and blocked from the truth inside of us, the more we can actually be good scientists. Because we’re not, in a way, muddying the waters of our search for truth with our own confusions, with our own denial, with our own untruth.
I think fundamentally this is probably why I don’t trust scientists so, so much, and I don’t trust the science that’s out there. I think so many of the scientists I have seen and known, went to school with, spent a lot of time with, were close friends with, very troubled people, very confused people, people with a lot of denial, people with a lot of unconscious motivations. Meaning they’re not even aware of their motivations. How can you trust a scientist? How can you trust anyone who doesn’t really even fundamentally, in so many different ways, know what their motivations are?
So what are some of the confused motivations of scientists? Well, I go back to when I was in school. It happened so long ago, even before I was in college. Students in high school, in middle school, but certainly by the time they’re in college, learned the ones who succeed are the ones who give the right answers. So much of science is not about exploring, trying to figure out what truth is. Instead, it’s about memorization, about repeating answers, about giving the professors what they want. The professors have a pre-ordained idea about what truth is. They have set up a question; they know, or they think they know, what the answer is, and the students have to come up with that answer. And if the students come up with any different answer, they’re wrong.
And so what this does for so, so, so many students, the far majority, even in the fancy and intelligent, sophisticated college that I went to, so many of the students stopped thinking for themselves. Instead, they would think, what does the professor want? And that’s not scientific. So even though they were trained in science, they were also trained in the art of trying to figure out what someone else’s idea of the right answer is and giving that, feeding that into the test, feeding that into the experiment, feeding that into the laboratory.
And then there’s another thing. I saw this a lot with people in college, my fellow students. Some of the smartest students, some of the best students, were often some of the least ethical people. They would do whatever it took to get the right answer, and they learned that that was a way to succeed in our society, in a way to be a little bit sociopathic, as it were.
And there’s one other thing I’ve seen this again and again, most especially in the field that’s nearest and dear to my heart because it has been my profession for a long time: psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry. What I’ve seen is that the scientists, the so-called scientists, who create the so-called science of psychiatry, of the biology of mental illness, of the necessity of medications, what I’ve seen is there’s big money in it for them. There are big perks. This isn’t just about publish or perish; this is about millions and billions of dollars at stake.
And sometimes, just for the average Joe Blow, low on the totem pole, psychologist, social worker, psychiatrist, who’s just doing research for the drug companies, maybe not millions of dollars, but maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. This is their job; they get paid a lot of money. And if they don’t prove that these drugs are good, their studies don’t get published. The studies don’t make it into the hands, condensed, of doctors who believe it and then prescribe the meds. These drug companies go out of business.
So many of the drugs are so toxic; they have terrible side effects, long-term side effects. And yet these long-term side effects are ignored when the studies are done. They don’t even look for long-term side effects. How can they? It takes too long to study long-term side effects when you want to get a drug onto the market quickly. You want to sell it, make a lot of money. Oh, but what if it does have long-term side effects? Will the drug company say, “We’ll deal with the lawsuits later; right now we want to make the billions of dollars that we make in order to get this drug out there?”
And there’s billions of dollars at stake for these drug companies, for the shareholders, and they give a lot of money to politicians. But behind it are the scientists who create the drugs, who test the drugs, who ignore the bad results. And unfortunately, so hard to say, I have met some of these people. And if you look at them on the surface, they don’t look like sociopaths; they don’t look like liars and evil people who actually do harm to people. This is the most shocking thing of all: they’re actually normal people.
If you went back to college and looked at my classes of biology and chemistry and math, and you looked at my fellow students, you wouldn’t say these are creeps, these are losers, these are really dangerous people. They’re perfectly normal people. And that’s a big part of why I don’t trust science, the science of the world, because these scientists are just regular people. They’re people who think, you know, “Well, I’m not hurting people that bad,” or they think of themselves first. They’re selfish, and they think, “I can make good money twisting the data, lying, ignoring certain results that don’t fit what I need to get my study published, to make my supervisor happy, to ensure that I get a promotion, that I keep getting my two thousand dollar or three thousand or four thousand dollar a week salary.”
I like having a car, they say. I like having a nice house. I like sending my kids to a fancy school, in a fancy college. I like to be able to get my daughter nice ballet lessons, and I like being able to go out and have a two hundred dollar meal whenever I want. These are the perks you get by being a corrupt scientist, and a lot of people, it doesn’t trouble them. And why? Why does it not trouble one of these “quote” scientists to do garbage science that actually can really harm people, that actually takes people away from understanding truth?
Well, I think the fundamental idea does go back to the troubled family of…
Origin, when these scientists were children, and I’m going to take the liberty to analyze the people that I’ve known. So many of them, they come from families where trauma was the norm. Maybe just mild trauma, sometimes severe trauma. But they grew out of childhoods where they had to lie, they had to be in denial, they had to hide. When they were children, in order to survive, in order to get their parents to love them, they had to protect their parents. So even though their parents were invading them and harming them in all sorts of different ways, even traumatizing them, they couldn’t feel their feelings. They couldn’t be true. They couldn’t express the truth and be honest about it. They had to protect their parents in order to fundamentally survive in their own family.
And if they never healed from that, and what I saw in colleges, nobody was doing this healing work. They were instead focusing on getting better grades, furthering their careers, having a fancy life, having a fancy false self, a false exterior. Dealing with what was really going on in there was, we don’t want to do that. It wasn’t really even politically correct to do that. It certainly was not politically correct in the family system to talk about the horrors that parents were doing. People did not do that. So rarely do people do it now. Okay, it’s happening a little bit more, but parents really, in a way, are a protected species in our world. Our world of so many overlapping troubled family systems, cultures that come out of protecting the family system, religions that come out of protecting the troubled, even traumatizing family systems.
And so these scientists grew up, came out of these troubled families, and actually all they did in school, all they do in their careers, in their scientific work, is do exactly what they learned as children. Give the right answers, protect the norm, protect the power structures, protect the parents. Live in denial, speak with forked tongue, don’t be honest, don’t be true. Denial is a very powerful thing. Childhood trauma denial, in a way, to be in denial in the world as a modern adult, it’s a very advantageous quality.