Honestly, I’ve never hoped to be listed among Nobel prize winners—just not my caliber, for many reasons. Nonetheless, I have recently been. You may be surprised, but that was no cause for joy. You won’t be surprised that it was unwarranted, in more than one respect. Let me dispense with the suspense. The events occurred in an online discussion of a statement by the leadership of the National Prevention Science Coalition, of which I had been a member. Along with the audience of over 500 coalition members, I was informed by an authoritative scientist that he had heard “such rhetoric” as mine from “some very smart people like James Watson and William Shockley, and frankly, it scares the shit out of [him].”
So, as you can see, although the discussion was among scientists (you could be misled by my opponent's coprolalic lexicon), my joining the Nobelist ranks had nothing to do with science. As you likely know, the gentlemen I was made to share company with are known not only for their discoveries, but also for their prejudice against the intellectual abilities of people of African descent, which those Nobel laureates viewed as not only inferior but genetically so. You’d think that Watson should have known better, considering that there is no surefire way currently to know if the IQ differences between the poorly defined racial groups have anything to do with genetics. You may also ask how I, knowing that and having a history of public objections to those views among scientists, could be such a troglodyte as to share those very views—not only in my mind but in my public rhetoric, in our times—and before securing a Nobel prize. You’d think I must be hopelessly deranged.
You’d be mistaken. I have never said anything that could be considered “such rhetoric.” What I did say is that I had not seen any evidence that Officer Chauvin killed George Floyd because of racism, to use as a pretext for the ongoing social disorder, and that “implicit bias,” a current buzzword, is an Orwellian thoughtcrime, which requires telepathy to be proven. That is, even if the studies that have produced that concept register the objective phenomenon of different expectations associated with different population groups, some real, some false, those statistical data, i.e., population sample-derived, cannot be applied to any particular individual—or to all, to summarily accuse them of prejudice. That accusation would be as wrong and prejudicial itself as accusing all “black” males of inclination to murder because the frequency of murder in that vaguely defined population is higher than that in some other groups.
One does not need to be a scientist to understand that, but scientists, who are supposed to understand that perfectly, are guilty of despicable dishonesty when they pretend they don’t, drawing wrong conclusions from questionably designed statistical studies, translated into imaginary dystopian concepts. There is, however, nothing uncommon in creating those concepts among scientists or in their insisting on falsehoods even when proven otherwise: science has often been remarkably dogmatic. That has always been the case when scientists followed a totalitarian ideology. Under the Party’s protection, they have even outlawed whole branches of science, getting rid of scientific competitors, be it genetics under Stalin or relativity physics under Hitler. Totalitarian ideology, displacing morality with virtuous phraseology, is capable of permitting not just lies, but murder—be it for the sake of class struggle for communists or race struggle for Nazis.
In fact, where a totalitarian ideology, which is what the current progressive social-justice-structural-racism set of cliches strives to be, controls a scientist’s mind to convert scientific opponents into enemies, when the opponents’ views are perceived as opposing that ideology, nothing coming from that scientist can be trusted. The enemies’ theories and results will be at best ignored. Discussions are verboten, and that precludes scientific process.
That is what has happened with the prevention scientists I communicated with. The NPSC director quickly “turned off the spigot,” as she put it. Her self-contradicting explanation: “I’m not making a unilateral decision to dismiss your perspective simply due to the points you are arguing. However, they are inconsistent with the values of NPSC and so, as director, it is at my discretion to determine when to step in.” Understandably, she did not object to my being accused of racism, a calumny that in our times is akin to a Soviet citizen’s being publicly denounced as a Zionist lackey of capitalism.
The last time my perspective has been officially inconsistent with any values was back in the USSR I fled from. People accused of that thoughtcrime and attendant invented sins (they had to be invented, just like my racism) were blacklisted at various levels. It may be a small consolation that a recent editorial in one of the top scientific journals, Nature, nightmarishly declares the entire “enterprise of science” racist—even though I am not sure that white(black)washes my individual crime. Just as back in the USSR, I am happy about my inconsistency with those "values," even though that has forced me to leave—this time, the NPSC. I only wonder what kind of blacklisting I should expect.
