The Rise and Fall of Western Science
by Tomas Fürst at Brownstone Institute

Before you start reading, take a moment and look around you. There’s a good chance that everything you see is human creations—sophisticated products of human ingenuity and intelligence backed by hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how and why nature works. The prosperity of our civilization is based on the following virtuous circle:

Find out how and why nature works,
based on this understanding, develop technologies and innovations,
manufacture them…
…and sell them.

And if you sell these technologies and innovations – for example, microscopes or spectrometers – to researchers, they can even better investigate how and why nature works, and the virtuous circle rises to the dizzying heights of the immense wealth of our civilization.

However, the virtuous circle needs some important institutions to work properly: Science cannot thrive without freedom of speech and thought, the development of technology, and innovation requires a certain degree of capital accumulation, manufacturing requires stable and predictable property rights, and sales are best organized in a free market. But without Science, the virtuous circle breaks. Thus, we need to understand where and why this wonderful human activity started and where it is heading.

The Technological Sprint of the Late 19th Century

Before the Reformation, one monolithic religious Truth reigned in Europe and there was no room for other opinions. However, the Reformation split this truth into two – mutually exclusive ones. In the gap between the two religious truths, scientific truth began to sprout. Almost immediately, the virtuous circle described above kicked in, and miraculous technologies began to emerge.

For example, in 1742, Benjamin Robins noticed that by combining Newton’s law of motion and the equation of state of gases (discovered a few years earlier by Robert Boyle), the muzzle velocity of an artillery projectile could be calculated. This discovery made artillery much more precise. Frederick the Great of Prussia noticed the discovery and asked Leonhard Euler to translate and supplement Robins’ work. On this basis, Frederick completely rebuilt his army – he introduced fast and accurate horse-drawn artillery, which was an almost unbeatable force in Europe at the time. Napoleon later only copied and perfected this model.

European rulers noticed that the key to these military successes lay in Science. The constant rivalry among states accelerated the spread of innovation and created enormous pressure for further research. This sprint resulted in a technological whirlwind in the late 19th century, the scale and scope of which was incomparable to anything that happened before (and afterward). In 1859, Edmund Drake drilled the first successful oil well in Pennsylvania, starting a revolution in lighting, as burning animal fat could be replaced by kerosene lamps. This was very useful, especially in the sweatshops of the North, where it was always dark.

In 1876 Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz invented the four-stroke engine, creating a demand for oil that exceeded the need for lighting by orders of magnitude. Just in time, because Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb two years later, effectively ending the era of kerosene lighting. A year later, Benz came up with the two-stroke engine, and Rudolf Diesel patented the diesel engine in 1892, which allowed internal combustion engines to be scaled up to power trucks, ships, and submarines. At the same time, Werner von Siemens constructed the first electric locomotive.

Ten years later, the Wright brothers introduced the first steerable aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine. This technological whirlwind was brought to a close in 1909 by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who mastered a method of nitrogen-fixing that enabled the mass production of industrial fertilizers, without which the planet could barely support a billion people.

Each of the above technologies alone changed the world more than anything that had emerged since the birth of Jesus Christ. Together, they revolutionized the world in ways few can imagine today. It is worth noting that this fascinating transformation took place at a time when governments did not interfere much with Science. Scientists were often inventors and entrepreneurs at the same time. They were mostly white men with a beard or mustache who believed in God, were certain that European civilization was superior to all others, and agreed that it was the white man’s moral obligation to wisely govern and administer the rest of the world.

Collectivist Ideologies of the 20th Century

But then, quite unexpectedly, the world came to an end. Before European nations could reap the fruits of all these fascinating technologies, World War I broke out. The European nations used all the miraculous new technologies and all their scientific potential to kill their fellow humans as efficiently as possible. The generals planned the war on horseback with bayonets. In the end, the war was fought with planes, tanks, battleships, submarines, trucks, and machine guns. It is unbelievable that almost no one today can explain anymore why that war happened.

The war brought a radical change in the position of Science. The main casualty of the war was the belief in the good old Christian God and in the White Man’s Burden. This loss of faith in God – and themselves – left a hole in the souls of Europeans which various false prophets immediately started filling with nationalism, socialism, communism, or fascism. These modern secular religions were quick to understand that Science was too important to be left unchecked. Moreover, each of these ideologies needed an appearance of legitimacy.

After the war, the source of legitimacy was no longer religion, but Science. And so the “nationalization” of science gradually began to take place, with various totalitarian regimes supporting Science in exchange for results that served the ideological needs of the regimes. This disease of the 20th century bore its first poisonous fruits in the form of Nazi biology, eugenics, or Soviet Lysenkoism. In the Communist bloc, it continued long past World War II in almost all scientific fields, as some readers may still remember. The current “scientific consensus” on man-made CO2-driven climate change is just another offshoot of state-funded “nationalized” Science, the purpose of which is not to understand the world but to legitimize various collectivist ideologies and their perverse goals.

The interwar collectivist ideologies quickly led the world to another war, which repeated the apocalypse of the previous one – once more and for good. All the murderous technologies of WWI were used again, but perfected, mass-produced and used on a scale that defied all imagination. Cryptography, radar, and the nuclear bomb were added, symbolically confirming the total dominance of Science: The power to destroy the world no longer belonged to God, but to the Scientist. Europe, the cradle of Science, lay in ruins and the center of gravity of the world moved to the United States and the Soviet Union.

Big State and Big Business

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the two superpowers disagreed on everything, apart from one thing: Everything must be based on Science. The East continued with “nationalized” Science. Under this system, the areas of research that thrived in the Soviet bloc were mainly those that were not asked to “scientifically” underpin communist ideology but rather to “catch up and overtake” the capitalist bloc. Technical sciences and mathematics more or less kept pace with the West, while social sciences and humanities languished and perished in the suffocating embrace of communist ideologues.

In the West, the original “Naturwissenschaft” was gradually replaced by the victorious Anglo-Saxon Science. At first, it went well. The post-war American conjuncture was supplemented by the open atmosphere of American (mostly private) universities, where a generation of (often Jewish) emigrants with rigorous German interwar education blossomed. After half a century-long orgy of murder and destruction, the world seemed to be returning to the technological whirlwind of the late 19th century. Semiconductors, computers, nuclear power, and satellites appeared, and man walked on the moon.

But then, things started going downhill in the West as well. Science increasingly fell victim to two cancers of the 20th century: Big State and Big Business. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson announced the “Great Society” program, and American society embarked on a path that had long since destroyed the social sciences in the East. The federal government declared war on poverty, war on racism, and war on illiteracy, and in all these campaigns, it needed social science to legitimize its political goals.

The amount of public funding increased sharply and more and more research areas started to appear, where it was clear which results were politically desirable and which were not. It mostly concerned social sciences, which willingly metastasized under state funding into various branches of Gender Studies, Puppet Arts, and EcoGastronomy, but in the end, Natural Science was not spared either. Historically, the first post-war victim of “nationalized science” was climatology, which today serves exclusively to legitimize the political goals of the deindustrialization of the West.

Moreover, the second deadly threat to Science – corruption by Big Business – started to creep in. The history of this tragedy can be traced back to 1912, when a German medical doctor named Isaac Adler first hypothesized that smoking might cause lung cancer. It took more than 50 years – and 20 million deaths – for this hypothesis to be confirmed. This absurdly long time is explained, among other things, by the fact that the greatest figure in statistics of the 20th century, the avid smoker Ronald Fischer, devoted a large part of his mind and influence to vehemently and very inventively denying any causal link between smoking and lung cancer.

He didn’t do it for free – it was later discovered that he was paid by the tobacco industry. Yet, after half a century, the tobacco concerns finally lost the battle, and in 1964 the Surgeon General issued an authoritative report confirming the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Business learned a lesson: Next time, they needed to bribe not only the scientists but the regulatory authorities, too.

Going Downhill

More and more disasters followed, in which rigged research overseen by corrupt regulators led to damage on a staggering scale.

For example, pharmaceutical companies managed to convince American doctors that “chronic pain” is a problem that tens of millions of people suffer from. Through a combination of aggressive marketing and manipulated scientific studies, they created an addiction in millions of people to opioids (sold under the names OxyContin or Fentanyl), which they falsely claimed were “safe and effective,” and – above all – non-addictive. This tragedy continues to unfold in the United States, and to this day, over half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses and millions more have fallen into addiction to harder drugs. The economic and social damage is almost incalculable. In the United States, about one painkiller per person per day is consumed.

This tragedy is based on science corrupted by the pharmaceutical business and dysfunctional drug market regulation. In Europe, pharmaceutical regulation is not as broken as in the US, but deliberately falsified or manipulated research poisons the global publication record. Science is therefore equally affected all over the world, because in the field of biomedical research today no one knows which published results are true and which are not. When John Ioannidis published the article titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in 2005, it became an instant scientific bestseller.

The opioid story is perhaps the most visible but by no means the only one. Tobacco companies – having lost the battle for lung cancer – used the accumulated capital to buy several food giants (for example, Kraft or General Foods). Their armies of scientists immediately went after the same goal as before, only in a different area: Over the following years, they developed hundreds of addictive substances that the companies started to add en masse to industrially processed food. Instead of a tobacco addiction, they plunged America into a “junk food” addiction.

Much of “food science” has been manipulated by the food corporations to make it appear that the main problem is natural fats, not industrially processed sugars and other crap. The corruption of science gradually reached such absurd proportions that, for example, the American Pediatric Society was sponsored by the Coca-Cola company. What do you think the Society’s “expert opinion” on sugary drinks was?

Accompanied by almost complete disinterest of the public, more and more scientific fields gradually became victims of the Big State or Big Business. The results came soon – more and more money was poured into Science, but those miraculous technologies and innovations have not appeared. I bet you to name at least three technologies that appeared since 2000 and changed the world as the invention of the internal combustion engine. I personally witnessed billions of Euros from European structural funds being poured into provincial East European universities. Dozens of laboratories were built, expensive equipment was bought, speeches by the university presidents were made, newspaper articles were written…and nothing useful ever came out of it.

The West Goes out of Its Mind

But the real catastrophe for Western Science has come with the Covid epidemic, when the West went completely out of its mind. At that moment, the two scientific curses of the 20th century met in terrible synergy. Big Business quickly understood that the epidemic represented an opportunity that may not be repeated. If opioids were worth a few lies, the possibility of selling billions of “vaccines” to panicked governments all over the world was worth many lies. Moreover, the American left has just experienced the enormous shock of Trump’s election victory and readily jumped at every opportunity to derail his presidency.

So, when Donald Trump initially (very rationally) refused to panic, refused to introduce drastic mass-scale measures, and encouraged experimentation with available drugs (especially Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine), the American left launched a hysterical campaign to panic as much as possible, implement as drastic across-the-board measures as possible, and attack any attempts to use repurposed drugs to treat Covid. Academic and scientific circles, which have always sided with the left and hated Trump fiercely, began to spew out a flood of falsified, manipulated, and completely meaningless “studies” whose sole aim was to promote the Covid madness. Moreover, it has become fully apparent that the regulatory bodies (CDC and FDA) are completely controlled by Big Pharma, and rather than protecting the public from corporate greed, they acted like their sales departments.

The election of Joe Biden finished the disaster. The interests of Big Pharma suddenly became aligned with the interests of the federal government and the entire monstrous power apparatus of the government threw itself into a battle against its own citizens. The military (vaccine distribution), the secret services (censorship of social networks), the police (surveillance of lockdowns), and many other repressive branches of the state became involved in this appalling project. Later generations will remember this as the era of Covid fascism.

In a matter of months, the entire building of Western Science, carefully assembled over several hundred years, collapsed. Every aspect of the Covid disaster has been linked to some scientific failure. It is almost certain that the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself originated from the Wuhan laboratory, where – at the expense of Western taxpayers – extremely problematic gain-of-function research was carried out. Throughout the epidemic, doctors and scientists lied about the ineffectiveness of early treatment because they knew that was exactly what the establishment wanted to hear from them.

As soon as the end of 2021, however, it was clear that Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D (and many other drugs) represented a cheap, safe, and effective treatment and prevention that could have saved millions of lives. Despite that, the entire scientific establishment completely denied the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine and repeated the CDC’s political “You’re not a horse” propaganda.

The experimental gene technology masqueraded as a “vaccine” was the final nail in the coffin of Western Science. The hysterical push for “vaccine” mandates under the Safe and Effective mantra violated almost all professional, legal, and ethical principles of Science. The next few years will reveal the full extent of the catastrophe, but already today it can be said that mRNA “vaccines” prevented few cases of Covid (if any) but harmed millions. Right now, this terrible arithmetic gradually creeps into public space. Once the public realizes the extent of this disaster, it is safe to assume that their anger will turn not only against the political establishment but also against the institutionalized Western Science that caused every aspect of the Covid disaster.

The End of Science

European Science has not fared any better than American Science, as they have been connected vessels for decades. Both the diseases of American Science have been present in Europe, too. Moreover, the big publishing houses that decide what can and cannot become part of the “published record” have long been multinationals and don’t care about national borders. If the European Union surpasses America in anything, it is the aggressiveness of promoting the “climate change” agenda. At present, climate change ideology seems to be the only thing holding the European Union together.

After 300 years, the Enlightenment project of Western Science has reached an important crossroads. At the end of the 19th century, Science brought fascinating progress to mankind. During the 20th century, Science gained so much prestige that it replaced religion and became the central ideology of the world. Gradually, however, like Christianity before the Reformation, it became a victim of its own success: Instead of seeking the Truth about how and why the world works, it began to abuse its prestige and serve the powerful and rich.

By the end of the 20th century, Science had already been damaged beyond repair either by Big Governments to legitimize their ideological goals or by Big Business to legitimize the distribution of their (often toxic) products. The rotten edifice of Western Science finally collapsed in 2020 during the Covid crisis.

We have to wait now before enough people realize that Science – the central ideology of our civilization – is in ruins. Then we can start thinking about what to do. Christianity was saved by the strict separation of Church and State. To save Science, an equally daring step will be needed. But that is a topic for further essays.

The Rise and Fall of Western Science
by Tomas Fürst at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society