Thursday, March 09, 2006

(133) Thought Police

Further to the previous example, I chatted more with Professor Lipton and mentioned how I found neo-Darwinism indefensible.
He seemed surprised, having assumed that it was well-founded. I said that one is simply not allowed to question it.

"Are you suggesting that there are Thought Police in operation?", he asked.
I had never thought of it like that before, but I had to affirm
"Yes!"

When I got home I found a copy of Richard Milton’s book Forbidden Science had arrived. It considers examples of suppressed or discredited scientific research. A couple of weeks earlier Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch had said that he would be posting it to me.

Chapter Five is entitled Guardians of the Gate and addresses the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment whom Milton portrays as quite unreasonable in their dogged defence of prevailing materialistic, reductionist thinking.
Orwell’s Thought Police are all too real... And their effects on the community are no less profound because these individuals are often self-appointed. It is not our political thoughts they police, but the current paradigm.

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